Through technological interventions such as databending, photogrammetry and virtual reality, Ascencio alters the meaning of an image. The familiar becomes new again, tangled in a web of fresh associations. In a letter composed before he died, Ascencio’s father wrote: “Forgive me and communicate with me.” The photographer wanted to fulfil his father’s wish, and began creating work that was in direct conversation with him. “Whenever I want to feel close to my dad, I go to the countryside or the forest,” says Ascencio, explaining that his father was a gardener. 

The images – hazy and distorted – reveal who his father was. For example, Ascencio includes a picture of his father’s membership card to an organisation that fought for agricultural rights in Mexico’s countryside. “I think that his spirit… and the values that he passed along to me and my family are in this picture,” he reflects.

Ascencio was nominated for Ones to Watch by Bolivian artist and Ones to Watch 2020 nominee, River Claure. “Traditionally, the practice of using software in art leaves the viewer with an artificial taste,” Claure says. “This does not happen for me with Cristobal’s images. By rearranging the pixels of his family archive and then generating a digital garden, he brings us closer to a touching story and invites us to think about the continuity or discontinuity of memory in different times.” 

Even without his father’s physical presence, Ascencio’s memory has been rearranged, and his approach to image-making materialises the inherent fluidity of memory. Through digital intervention, he shows us the potential that these emerging technologies have in creating new poetics in an old medium. 

cristobalascencio.com

Petrocchi often re-photographs objects and museum displays and then populates these places with surreal artefacts of her own making. The roots of Sculptural Entities began in early 2020, and it became clear to Petrocchi early on that the book format was the perfect presentation for it, because she wanted to create a fictional catalogue. The artist wanted to create a publication of images that appear to be repetitive at first sight, but which inspire viewers to notice the nuances in shape and form between objects and symbols.

Meanwhile, she adds, “a small orange symbol at the bottom right of each composition identify the page’s numbers of this fictional catalogue and are, in fact, petroglyphs cut-outs from the imagery of prehistoric rocks collected from the internet”. 

Petrocchi has always been interested in the realm of museology, mainly fascinated by the contradictions and controversies that lie within the concept of it. “The purpose of museums nowadays is to educate and ‘civilise’ the general public, but they still are one of the main symbols of colonial power,” she says. “And it is amazing being able to look at statues, objects, tools from different cultures all in the same room in your own city, but is it still fair? And what can be done now to give voices back to the people (and objects!) that have been silenced thus far?” Ultimately, she hopes that her work will inspire viewers to question the role of museums in societies today, especially on where their artefacts come from and how their histories are contextualised.

Sculptural Entities by Giovanna Petrocchi is published by A Corner With Editions.

The project addresses themes running through Shwe’s practice more broadly: identity, relationships, feminism and mental health. Born and raised in Yangon – the former capital of Myanmar – Shwe began pursuing photography as a career four years ago. For the decade prior, she worked as a researcher for UN agencies and NGOs. “I grew up under a repressive military regime, in a society that is historically closed and conservative,” she says. “Life inside Myanmar is much worse than the outside world can imagine, with unbearable human rights violations and atrocities.”

Emmeline Yong, co-founder and director of Objectifs, a visual arts space in Singapore, nominated Shwe. “[Her] work is deeply personal. She is uncomfortable with the uneven power dynamics of a photographer-subject relationship, and this has led to a collaborative and emphatic approach,” says Yong. “Despite the political climate and lockdowns in Myanmar, Shwe has continued to use photography to tackle physical, emotional and mental issues.”

Photography and politics were ever-present in Shwe’s childhood; both her parents worked as civil servants, and her father was the head of photography at the Ministry of Agriculture. “I never directly learned photography from him, but when I reflect on my childhood, I have vivid memories of my father’s lab,” says Shwe. During her childhood, the photographer spent a lot of time with her grandfather, a junior officer to General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi. “I learned many stories about the Burmese independence movement from him, and I guess that’s one of the reasons I became a development worker,” she reflects.

In 2017, Shwe began to feel frustrated with her profession. She enrolled in the Angkor Photo Festival workshop, where she was mentored by Antoine d’Agata and Sohrab Hura. “I never went back to my full-time job,” she says. “It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.” That same year, she joined the Thuma Collective, an all-female group of photographers who organise workshops and artist talks. Thuma means ‘she’ in Burmese, and the group aims to nurture a safe and supportive space for female photographers in Myanmar.

Four years on, Shwe’s work is recognised by initiatives such as Photo Kathmandu’s South Asia Incubator and World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass. She continues to collaborate with NGOs as a photographer and educator. But, having worked in the sector for so long, her personal practice naturally leans towards exploring social and political stories too.

shwewutthmon.com

“Sequencing photographs is very much like creating poetry. You’re trying to find structure, you’re rhyming pictures, you’re creating these lines of continuity and establishing a flow.”

In Promise Land, Jones further counters these utopian ideals through his references to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. “[The poem] is a bottomless well,” says Jones, who has read and listened to it “dozens of times” since he began making the work three years ago. The artist felt a kinship with the poem, which was written in 1922 near the end of the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic. “Europe was in ruins [after the First World War]…. Out of that rubble, I feel like the poem is a search for meaning,” he explains. “It speaks to the world that we’re living through [today], where things don’t seem to make any sense, and defy any kind of reasonable rationale.”

Jones’ book is due to be published in this autumn, 100 years after Eliot wrote The Waste Land. It borrows elements from its structure – five sections with distinct sequencing and rhythms – and fragmented form, through the use of collage. And, in the same way that Eliot alludes to mythology and the work of other writers, Jones pulls elements from different sources. “The process of binding them into a singular language gave me a lot of latitude to mix-and-match images and create different narratives,” he says. “Sequencing photographs is very much like creating poetry. You’re trying to find structure, you’re rhyming pictures, you’re creating these lines of continuity and establishing a flow.”

Although Jones’ process is rooted in photographic techniques, the image-maker has not used a camera creatively in around eight years. “I learned a long time ago that the camera wasn’t the right tool for the pictures that I wanted to make,” he says. His 2014 series, Another Twenty-Six Gas Stations, pays homage to Edward Ruscha’s 1968 publication Twentysix Gasoline Stations through screen-grabs from surveillance footage captured at gas stations and uploaded to YouTube. Two years later, in 2016, Jones created a series of digital collages ahead of Trump’s inauguration. These were inspired by the Dada movement and its tradition of borrowing images from mass media to create political commentary. “The common thread is that I like to look back to these old artistic traditions or conversations and try to renew them,” says Jones. “The projects are all rooted in appropriations. I’m interested in using common cultural images and trying to decode them, or look for the politics inside of them.”

In the case of Promise Land, these common images are stock photographs. “Stock photographs themselves are fascinating to me… There’s a relationship between stock photography and mythology, because they both present common stories of human experience,” he says. “As much as people in our community like to snicker and make fun of how basic they are… I feel like they play a vital role in culture and society.” Ultimately, it circles back to Jones’ idea of photography and the pursuit of paradise. Stock photographs are democratic, existing almost as a mirror of our common cultural experiences. In reframing these and drawing on Eliot’s poetry, Jones channels the mood of our post-truth world, and in turn challenges the utopian ideals inherent in the medium.

Gregory Eddi Jones is currently raising funds to publish Promise Land, with SPBH editions. Access the kickstarter here.

As a multidisciplinary artist working in installation and collage strategies, Winant uses found imagery to create a setting that asks the question, ‘What does a free body look like?’ Her practice, one that is messy, alive and impeccably thorough, interrogates this idea with an intense and energetic curiosity. Her work exists as a continuum, with each project profoundly interrelated. “It’s an informative flow that amounts to a larger practice,” she reflects. “Notes on Fundamental Joy very much arrived through My Birth [2018], in that I was thinking about [the questions] – What does it mean and look like to build a family? What are women and feminist-centred worlds? What are women’s possibilities for representations therein?” 

“Their joy disarms me. They live without the threat of sexual violence and harassment. Occupying a body that is neither a weapon or a target.”

Notes on Fundamental Joy is her most recent book, published by Printed Matter in 2019. Seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us, Winant curates a visual manifesto using photographs from the Separatist archive, and explores notions of equivalence and safety, crucially examining how those experiences can be represented. Indeed, for these feminist, separatist communes, picture-making was at the centre of their liberation. The groups held workshops, known as Ovulars – a playful take on the etymological meaning of seminar, to spread seed, with ocular, connected to the eye – led by artist members including Tee Corinne, Joan E Biren, Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, a poet and photographer respectfully, Clytia Fuller and Carol Newhouse. Together, they orientated women on how to use the 4Å~5 camera, how to develop film in their makeshift darkrooms, and how to publish their work. The camera became a tool for living. A visual strategy not just to reclaim how they were pictured and represented, but as an agent of radical optimism.

In these works, a camera often meets a camera, as tenderness plays out within the frame. Nude women photograph each other, together and in community; an astute reclamation of the inherent and problematic power dynamic of the medium. What is radical about these images is the ease with which their bodies move through space. Soft, untethered from shame and expectation, existing purely in each other’s loving gaze. “Their joy disarms me,” says Winant. “They live without the threat of sexual violence and harassment. Occupying a body that is neither a weapon or a target.” This potent redefinition of photography as a tool for collective rather than individual recognition feels dynamic in our current vernacular. As an artist who uses photography for all of its feminist potential, these photographs create a map for a world Winant was searching for but never knew existed.

In continuation of the exploration of these found families, Winant turns to physical closeness in her new body of work, Togethering. ‘Togethering’ is a word invented by the residents of womyn’s lands to describe the practice of living united. “The idea of being together as a political act founded in tenderness was really moving to me,” explains the photographer. “This was the genesis for the way I collected images, really thinking about bodies coming into contact with other bodies.” The resulting work is an immersive experience that seeks to translate the sensation of touch, with multiple lines of enquiry and concurrent impacts. Found images depicting bodies in protest, bodies making love, and bodies enveloped in paternal embrace; each experience bleeding into each other. “I’m trying to process pleasure,” says Winant. “How we account for, and represent the most ineffable thing. This deep internal state, and how it is teased up through being together and in the process of consuming each other, becoming one body.”

“The idea of being together as a political act founded in tenderness was really moving to me.”

Winant’s source material is vast. In this work alone, she gathered images from books and magazines on consciousness-raising, feminist healing practices, nudist colonies, the women explorers of Mesopotamia, civil rights liberation struggle and protracted lovemaking, to name a few. Many of the photographs are imperfect, scratched, stained and some scribbled over, which makes them all the more precious in Winant’s eyes. These are mounted together, with the shape and framing based on a mandala, a diagrammatic form that represents the cosmos. Each one unique, yet together building a constellation of touch, an open-ended potential of ‘togethering’. 

There are so rarely hero images in Winant’s work; she favours multiple frames on a single plane informed by the work of Joan E Biren. JEB, as she prefers to be known, spoke out about decolonising patriarchal seeing, a reimagining of compositional strategies as feminist. “In her work, there is a unanimous tenderness but also no privileging of one or the other,” says Winant. “It does feel like composition and design strategies can be politically salient, meaningful and informative as much as the aboutness of the images themselves.”

In the context of a global pandemic, the axis of ‘togetherness’ was further galvanised. The lack of intimacy and community affected us all in some way, and Winant’s project metamorphosed to validate those vital human experiences. “We all feel it in different ways, depending on our geo global contexts, but the ground is moving beneath us,” she says. “I’m interested by this in my work, but also my life and my consciousness. The power and efficacy of political movements are what happens when we see 100,000 people from above, taking to the streets and looking like a single ocean. It’s powerful in action and in its visual potential.” The world impresses itself upon us, and like many of us in this moment, Winant is reckoning with the impact of her output. “I see people who are so brave, putting their bodies on the fucking line,” she says. “As I look at the women who left everything behind to live on the land, I think, ‘Would I do that?’ I don’t think so. There is a romance with the prospect of demonstrative bravery, to use your body as a political instrument in service of progressive values. Bravery, when paired with imagination, is explosive. That’s at the heart of it all. I’m always driving towards that in my work.”

If the feminist imperative is to believe that a radically different world is possible, Winant’s work exists as its evidence, while also teasing out the contradictions that remain unresolved. Though utopic in aspiration, these communities were often exclusionary in premise, mirroring the lack of intersectionality still rife in feminist movements today. The work asserts that there is no single way to read a narrative into the project, it is both joyful and contradictory. It is continuous ongoing dialogue emboldened by imagining as a primary life force. Winant asserts, “Art is not here, in this project or across my life, a tool for resistance, but rather a method of documenting an idea.”

carmenwinant.com

“I didn’t see it coming,” says JR of the work that would dominate his time up until lockdown. “And that’s always been the case with my strongest projects.” 

JR’s studio is set up to allow him “to do something from one day to the next”, he says. He actively practises impulsiveness, “to do something on instinct”. The day after attending the Brooklyn Museum opening, he got a flight to LA, and set to work.

But JR needed a place where he could paste. He started looking for a prison that could become “a playground”. Using Google Earth, JR and his team looked at 35 jails in the state, before happening upon California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, a supermax state prison two hours from Los Angeles. The prison’s roof doubled as a concrete yard, and it looked “very graphic”, says JR. He immediately travelled there, gave his name at the gate, and was led straight in by the guards. Inside, he was confronted by “cages of men, men with swastikas on their face”, but also “men who were teenagers when they were incarcerated, many for three strikes, or who had been dragged into gangs, and now they are facing life sentences.”

Aesthetically, the Tehachapi project is similar to the way JR handled his commission for the Louvre – a physical commandeering of an architectural institution by the people who populate it. And yet it is difficult to imagine two more contrasting cultural buildings anywhere in the world.

The mural that spread across the prison’s roof, visible from planes flying above, was installed by the serving inmates, former inmates who returned to the prison for the first time since their release, and prison staff working with JR’s team. The portraits consisted of 338 separate strips of paper, and yet the pasting process took only a few hours.

The Saatchi exhibition is the first time JR’s work has been shown in a gallery setting in the UK. The show also displays work from JR’s first-ever series, Portrait of a Generation: photographs of JR’s friends from Paris’ banlieues, created in the years leading up to the riots in Clichy-sous-Bois in 2004, when JR was 21. JR’s friends were often young, Black and hooded; a popular figure of hysterical fear for the Parisian chattering classes. The exhibition shows how JR upended these classist and racist stereotypes by secretly pasting the portraits in some of the city’s most upmarket arrondissements.

In 15 years since these first presentations, JR has pasted his portraits amidst some of the world’s iconic cityscapes – not just Paris, but New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Alongside the late nouvelle vague filmmaker Agnès Varda, he was nominated for an Oscar for his feature documentary Faces Places, in 2018. After gaining representation by the Parisian contemporary art gallery Perrotin, JR has managed to bag increasingly glitzy commissions, including a 2018 Time cover story exploring America’s continuing attempts to find a middle ground on gun control.

All of this work is on show at Saatchi. And yet Tehachapi stands out, for it encapsulates this semi-anonymous artist’s remarkable ability, even in the Foucaultian institutional depths of an American high-security prison; the shared humanity that photography can singularly provide, and then turn monumental.

JR: Chronicles is organised by the Brooklyn Museum, and will be displayed from 04 June to 03 October 2021 at Saatchi Gallery, London, with major support by Art Explora

Politics & Power

Experience the full exhibition here.

Oobanken by Jerome Ming

Jerome Ming has travelled the world. He was born in London and grew up in Zambia and Malawi, before returning to the UK to study photography. This was followed by a 20-year-career of covering stories all over Asia, as well as living in Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar and China. His most recent photobook, Oobanken, draws on this experience of constant relocation. But despite being based on his lifetime of jet-setting, the series was made entirely within a compound in Yangon, Myanmar, where the photographer lived in 2014.

As if confined in an enclave, Ming’s images combine fragments of personal history, of memory and imagination, building a narrative out of construction and performances. “I’m always living in a different environment, but the consistency is that I’m the one making the work, and I’m making it with a certain idea and central themes,” he says, in an interview with BJP. “Although my work might not look similar, I’m still feeding off the same premise in a way, which often tends to be a little about this dislocation.”

jeromeming.com

Cornelius de Bill Baboul: Thirsty, then boosted

What happens when you put a white flower in a vase of coloured water? It’s an experiment some of us might remember from our childhood, when we magically transformed a bunch of flowers with a dash of food colouring. But the results are a little more frightening in Cornelius de Bill Baboul’s experiment, in which flowers suck the colour out of sugary energy drinks. “I think they look a little bit like dancers,” he says, in an interview with BJP-online. “Like kids on ecstasy in a techno club celebrating the end of the world”.

When the French artist first encountered the brightly-coloured drinks he was equally attracted to and amused by them, because they reminded him of engine coolant. He’d buy a bottle, taste it, then display it on a windowsill in his studio, “it was just a funny object to have,” he says. Then one day the photographer was sent some flowers, and recalling his own childhood experiments, he put one of the stems in a drink. To his delight, the flower lapped up the sugary fuel, making the start of his series — Thirsty, then boosted.

corneliusdebillbaboul.com

Stefanie Moshammer: because, Grandmother said it’s okay

The photographs that comprise Stefanie Moshammer’s dynamic project are not what one would expect. A series depicting a Grandma and Grandpa and their house in a sleepy Upper Austrian village evokes images of dated interiors, replete with trinkets and memorabilia. But, Moshammer does something different.

Working in her grandparent’s home, the photographer wanted to abstain from showing aging in a sad way. Assuming whimsical poses and sporting colourful costumes, it is clear that the project is not just about the lives of her Grandma and Grandpa. “It is a mix of different subjects and layers, which come together to create my point of view,” she says.

Over the years, the photographer has observed her perception shift and change: “I have seen things that I did not see before.” In that respect, the work also exists as a reflection of Moshammer’s life. “This is a place that has never changed,” she reflects, “it is me who is changing and that is why I feel differently”.

stefaniemoshammer.com

April Dawn Alison’s private portraits

April Dawn Alison was the female persona of Alan Schaefer – a commercial photographer who lived his life as a man in Oakland, San Francisco. After his death in 2008, an estate liquidator was hired to sell the belongings left in Schaefer’s home. In the process, he discovered 9,200 Polaroids made by, and of, Alison.

Several years after Schaefer’s death, the images were sold to a local painter who donated the archive to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Over a decade after Alison’s death, a selection of the archive was published in a book by MACK, and exhibited in a solo show at SFMOMA.

Made over the course of around 30 years, the images range from moody black-and-white stills to dynamic, colourful and humorous self-portraits — a long-term exploration of a non-public self, made entirely in the artist’s private home. “It is a way of seeing yourself as you believe yourself to be, or as you may not be in the world yet,” reflects curator Erin O’Toole, in an interview with BJP-online.

Gideon Mendel: Freedom or Death

When Gideon Mendel left South Africa in 1990, three years before the official end of Apartheid, he left a huge archive of transparencies and negatives in his friend’s garage. In 2016, 25 years later, Mendel learned that the top inch of one of the boxes had been water-damaged. Thinking there could be something interesting in this forgotten work, he decided to revisit the memories, and what he found were “radioactively charged” images from his archive of a tumultuous time in recent South African history.

These images, many seen for the first time, were presented in Mendel’s latest photobook, Freedom or Death. Split into three parts, each section is categorised by a different form of “intervention”. The first section presents the series of water-damaged negatives, which speak about the fragility and malleability of memory. The second section is a collaboration with Argentinian artist Marcelo Brodsky, who writes and draws on Mendel’s photographs to enhance their historical narrative. The final section is derived from press prints made during Mendel’s time as a news photographer. Mendel digitally merged the front and reverse of the prints, creating a superimposed combination of image, text, and markings.

Through this attempt to re-engage with these documents of history, Mendel was also able to re-engage with his own memories. “I’ve come to realise that to some extent I was packing away those traumas within myself, like how I packed away the boxes,” he says, in an interview with BJP-online. “Unpacking it has been an important process for me.”

gideonmendel.com