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November 13, 2013

Donna DeCesare’s “Unsettled”

  • 01Unsettled.JPGJocotenango, Guatemala, 2001. A Holy Week procession passes walls marked with local gang graffiti.
  • 02Unsettled.JPGGuatemala, Guatemala, 2003. The body of an alleged gang member at the City Morgue.
  • 03Unsettled.JPGKoreatown, Los Angeles, 1994. Baby Bugsy throws his gang sign.
  • 04Unsettled.JPGSan Salvador, El Salvador, 1994. Sonia Diaz, in a commemorative T-shirt from her brother’s gang funeral in Los Angeles, stands beside a local youth who works as a coffin maker.
  • 05Unsettled.JPGSan Bartolo, El Salvador, 1996. When La Loquita, Cashy, and Shy Boy began associating with gangs in Los Angeles, their families thought sending them back to El Salvador was the best way to keep them safe. But rival gangs were spreading from the United States to El Salvador, and the one bond they trusted was the gang they identified with.
  • 06Unsettled.jpgSonsonate, El Salvador, 1997. Edgar irons his clothes in preparation for a visit to Santa Ana prison, where his older brother is serving a sentence.
  • 07Unsettled.JPGPico Union, Los Angeles, 1994. Ivonne reads a letter from her gang-involved boyfriend after his deportation to El Salvador.
  • 08Unsettled.JPGOntario, California, 1993. An El Salvadoran gang member holds up a picture frame he made to give his mother on Mothers’ Day. He says he sees incarceration by the California Youth Authority as a rite of passage and a proof of manhood.
  • 09Unsettled.jpgLos Angeles, 1997. A Salvadoran-American homegirl displays a tattoo with her dad’s name. She joined the gang her father belonged to after he was murdered.
  • 10Unsettled.JPGSan Salvador, El Salvador, 1997. Gang members often face serious addiction problems.
  • 11Unsettled.JPGUnited States, 1994. Target practice.
  • 12Unsettled.JPGSan Salvador, El Salvador, 1996. Gang members make a revenge pact over the grave of a slain leader.

“Central America in the nineteen-eighties was my journalism school,” Donna DeCesare told me. DeCesare, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, travelled through El Salvador in 1987, in the midst of the country’s violent civil war, during which many El Salvadorans fled to the United States. Those who left often traded, as DeCesare put it, “one kind of violence for another” as they fell in with local gangs, like La Mara Salvatrucha, in Los Angeles. During the following two decades, DeCesare tracked the back-and-forth of gang violence between Central-American and U.S. communities, and the toll it took on the lives and families of the gang members.

“When I began, I was curious about why Central-American refugee youth were joining gangs in the U.S. I discovered toxic environments in which immigrant and American-born young people alike were being robbed of their childhood innocence through social neglect, intolerance, and stigmatizing stereotypes,” said DeCesare. “When I returned to Central America to document the ways that gang deportees from the U.S. were changing the region, I found that they were also being changed by the impunity and repression they faced.”

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November 12, 2013

Sophie Calle and the Integrity of Loss

  • SC001.jpgDetail from “Absence,” at Paula Cooper Gallery.
  • SC002.jpgInstallation detail of “North Pole / Pôle nord” (2009), as installed at Paula Cooper Gallery.
  • SC003.jpgInstallation detail of “North Pole / Pôle nord” (2009), as installed at Paula Cooper Gallery. Below is the text that hangs above the three images on the left.

    “I buried my mother’s portrait and jewels on the shore of the Northern Glacier. We were lucky: had the boat dropped me a few meters south, they would have ended up on Starvation Glacier. My mother always dreamed of going to the North Pole. She died two years ago without fulfilling that dream. Perhaps she wanted to keep it alive. Last year I was invited to the arctic, and I went for her. To take her there. In my suitcase: her portrait, her Chanel necklace, her ring.”

    “During the war my grandfather, who was hiding out in the mountains of Grenoble, was afraid a building he owned in the city would be seized. He swapped it for a diamond ring. Not a good deal. My grandmother did not talk to him for a year but she kept the ring. I waited to reach the northernmost point on the trip in order to go ashore and bury my mother’s jewels. L., my cabin mate on the boat, suggested that if the weather was not permitting, I could still flush the ring down the toilet. The prospect would have made my mother laugh. But on Thursday October 2, 2008, the weather was fine.”

    “I ventured onto the glacier, chose a beautiful stone and buried the portrait, the necklace, and the diamond. Now my mother has gone to the arctic north. Will climate change carry her out to sea as far as the Pole? Will she stay on that shore, a marker of the Northern Glacier’s existence in the Holocene period? Maybe in the thousands of years, glaciologists will find her ring and endlessly discuss this flash of diamond in Inuit culture. Or perhaps a beachcomber will discover it and swap it for a house in Grenoble.”
  • SC004.jpgExhibition view of “Absence,” at Paula Cooper Gallery.
  • SC005.jpgDetail from “I Died in a Good Mood” (2013), and “My Mother Died” (2013), from the series “Autobiographies” as installed Paula Cooper Gallery.
  • SC006.jpgExhibition view of “Absence,” at Paula Cooper Gallery.

Sophie Calle’s new exhibition, “Absence,” is an examination of loss, which she explores through the death of her mother and the infamous burglary of thirteen art works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in 1990. The section of the show called “Rachel, Monique,” after her mother, is a clear, methodical depiction of a grieving daughter’s psychological unravelling. Each wall depicts a role that Calle’s mother played in her life—namesake, caretaker, mourner, and conscience. “Rachel, Monique,” demonstrates Calle’s dexterity at incorporating autobiographical photos, stories, and iconographic paraphernalia into her work.

The works in “Absence” range from 2006 through the present, and the exhibition includes the new series “Purlioned,” which investigates the pieces stolen from the Gardner Museum.

A portion of “Absence” will also be exhibited until November 16th at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, and the entire exhibition is on view through November 16th at Paula Cooper Gallery.

November 11, 2013

Photographs from Cairo: Amid the Chaos

  • laura-01.jpgA room with a view at the Giza Pyramids.
  • laura-02.jpgThe middle of Tala’at Harb Square.
  • laura-03*.jpg“Uncle Mohamed,” a flower seller.
  • laura-04.jpgA man amid the Giza Pyramids.
  • laura-05.jpgA woman cutting flowers to give to her friend, which is illegal in Al-Azhar Park.
  • laura-06.jpgA pond in Al-Azhar Park
  • laura-07.jpgEl-Tantawy’s dirty windows and a neighbor’s hanging laundry.
  • laura-08.jpgA young Egyptian hitching a ride on the back of a truck filled with cattle.
  • laura-09.jpgGaber, twenty-two years old, a member of the military.
  • laura-10.jpgA window of the Cairo Tower.
  • laura-11.jpgMinarets in Cairo, which is nicknamed ” the City of a Thousand Minarets.”
  • laura-12.jpgA couple on a nighttime stroll across the Kasr al-Nil Bridge.

As Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected President of Egypt, entered the courtroom in Cairo last Monday, the streets were filled with the now familiar sounds of protest. Even inside the courtroom, as Peter Hessler wrote in his dispatch from the first day of the trail, “when Morsi finally arrived … the room erupted. He waved to his supporters. They erupted in a soccer-style chant that had been common during the days of his campaign: ‘Morsi-i-i-i-i-i! Morsi, Morsi!’ … A number of journalists responded by chanting: ‘E’adam, e’adam! Death penalty, death penalty!’ ”

Morsi, along with fourteen other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, face charges for the death, last December, of ten Egyptian citizens. And last week, on The New Yorkers Instagram feed, the photographer Laura El-Tantawy provided a different view of Cairo, away from the riotous scenes in and outside of the courtroom; as she wrote, a glimpse of “the beauty amid the chaos.”

The daughter of two Egyptians, El-Tantawy, who now splits her time between England and Cairo, is no stranger to the violence in Egypt. And yet she remains undiscouraged: “It is important for me to rediscover Cairo outside the circle of blood and violence I saw while covering the events of the past months  …. This is a tough city, by all means, which makes it challenging to find beauty in the middle of the noise, pollution, and aggression on the streets. But I believe that we see what we are looking for,” she said.

November 8, 2013

Framing Roberto Bolaño

In 2008, New Directions approached the photographer Allen Frame, hoping to use one of his photographs on the cover of their new translation of “Last Evenings on Earth,” by the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. That year, a fated match was made. Frame, who draws inspiration from literary fiction and film noir, has an archive of images that evoke menace, intrigue, and sensuality—quintessential themes in Bolaño’s mystery novels. Although they have different backgrounds, Frame and Bolaño were born in early fifties and travelled to many of the same cities to photograph and write, from Acapulco, Mexico, to Barcelona, Spain.

“Allen Frame: Dialogue with Bolaño,” now on view at Gitterman Gallery, features nine of Frame’s photographs used for Bolaño covers and additional work in a similar vein. Frame continues to read Bolaño’s novels as they are posthumously published. “Having been able to find a kind of voice that I identify with in my generation is so satisfying,” he said in an interview with American Suburb X last month.

“Allen Frame: Dialogue with Bolaño” is on view through January 11, 2014.

  • frame-001.jpg“Mariachis, Mexico City” (2000).
  • frame-002.jpg“Policemen, Florence” (1996).
  • frame-003.jpg“View of Rio de Janeiro” (2006).
  • frame-004.jpg“Ariadna, Barcelona” (1997).
  • frame-005.jpg“Billie Madley, New York” (1996).
  • frame-006.jpg“Florence” (1996).
  • frame-007.jpg“Billboard, Sao Paulo” (2000).
  • frame-008.jpg“Alfredo and Misael, Cuernavaca” (2000).
  • frame-009.jpg“Acapulco Cliffs” (2010).
  • frame-010.jpg“Self-Portrait, Mexico City” (2013).

All photographs courtesy Allen Frame/Gitterman Gallery.

Read Daniel Zalewski’s 2007 piece on Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives.”

November 7, 2013

In Search of Chechen Identity

  • 01Spasibo.jpgFireworks in the main square of Grozny to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Constitution Day.
  • 02Spasibo.jpgRada, a fourteen-year-old, is trying a wedding dress, designed by her sister, during the rehearsal for a movie about Chechen deportation.
  • 03Spasibo.jpgSecurity forces attending the celebration for the tenth-anniversary of the Constitution Day, in Grozny.
  • 04Spasibo.jpgA new central market in Grozny.
  • 05Spasibo.jpgThe area around what is known as Microrayon, the populated section of Grozny.
  • 06Spasibo.jpgLake Kezenoy-am.
  • 07Spasibo.jpgA meeting of elderly Chechens in the mountains around Shatoy.
  • 08Spasibo.jpgA group of activists in the main square of Grozny.
  • 09Spasibo.jpgA group of men leaving the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque, in Grozny.
  • 10Spasibo.jpgOutside a new ski resort in Veduchi.
  • 11Spasibo.jpgInside an apartment in Grozny.
  • 12Spasibo.jpgThe village of Shalaji.

“Grozny is a city of phantoms. Phantoms of those who died or disappeared in the war—every family has brothers, sons, or a father who left the house and never returned,” writes the Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen, in the opening text of “Spasibo,” a monograph and exhibition by the Italian photojournalist Davide Monteleone, which examines Chechen identity after centuries of violence and conflict between Chechen separatists and Moscow.

Monteleone first travelled to the Caucasus in 2001, as part of a wider investigation of Russia and its citizens’ relationship to power. He returned most recently in January, 2013, well over a decade after the official end of the second Chechen war, which resulted in Chechnya losing its hard-won independence when Vladmir Putin installed the Kremlin-friendly leader Akhmad Kadyrov to power. Akhmad’s son Ramzan, the current leader—whom Monteleone describes as a young, uneducated megalomaniac—rebuilt Grozny and attained relative peace, although sporadic attacks by separatists continued. Though Chechens now speak their once-banned language, practice Islam openly, are permitted to practice Chechen traditions, and enjoy relative freedom from Russia, Chechnya is still a republic within the Russian Federation. As Monteleone says, “Everything is controlled by the authorities that give to the people as they please. A state of comforting stagnation …. The physical violence that was so much part of the post-conflict years … seems to have decreased. The Chechens are so frightened that these acts of violence are almost no longer necessary. The violence is now psychological, a form of brainwashing that starts with the youngest generations.”

“Spasibo” (which means “thank you” in Russian), won the 2012 Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award. The exhibition will be on view at Chapelle de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, from November 8th through December 4th.

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