On Jan. 29, 1984, an eager public was welcomed inside the limestone-clad fortress designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. The DMA has continued evolving ever since.
Looking back — and ahead — as the Dallas Museum of Art turns 40
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A larger-than-life exhibit by contemporary artist Nathan Sawaya is coming to Miami for a limited time
Native artist selected to create UM logo for N7 program
MISSOULA, Mont. — Native artist Lyle Omeasoo was selected to create a Native American logo for the University of Montana’s participation in Nike’s 7 program, N7.
Omeasoo is from Browning and is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation (Piikani) and Cree tribes.
His logo will appear on the basketball team’s shooting shirts at UM’s N7 games.
For Montana’s N7 games, the Lady Griz take on Sacramento State at 2 p.m. Saturday, and the Grizzlies play Eastern Washington at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3.
The University of Montana released the following:
Ever since he was a kid, Lyle Omeasoo has been a doodler. Mostly pencil on paper, and always during class.
Omeasoo, from Browning and an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation (Piikani) and Cree tribes, now has his artwork on sweatshirts and T-shirts.
That’s because the Blackfoot artist was selected to create a Native American logo for the University of Montana’s participation in Nike’s 7 program, or N7.
The Nike retail initiative encourages Indigenous youth to participate in sports and recreational activities.
Omeasoo’s logo also will appear on the basketball teams’ shooting shirts at UM’s N7 games in the Adams Center. The Griz and Lady Griz uniforms are custom turquoise, a color of great meaning and significance for many Indigenous cultures.
When asked what it feels like to see his art represent Native culture and basketball in Montana, Omeasoo said, “It feels like a dream. To see young people wearing the design with pride means something.”
Omeasoo, a decedent of artists and medicine people, said that art and culture go hand-in-hand when it comes to the roots of Indian culture. That’s why he said his art has been nurtured over the years by teachers and family members, who spotted his talent early on.
“I had great teachers at every grade level that showed me things,” he said, recounting his teachers by name, like Bill Hannah, Omeasoo’s high school art teacher, who taught him how to work with charcoal, acrylic and oil paints and silk screen printing. Later on, friends like renowned Native artist David Dragonfly mentored Omeasoo in ways to present at Native art shows.
“At the time, I didn’t even have a blanket or a chair for these art shows,” he said.
Omeasoo, now a staple in the Native art market, represents the Blackfeet tribe in acrylic works depicting landscapes and portraits. He has connections to regional museums, including current work like a life-sized acrylic of the late Earl Old Person on display in the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls.
When asked to be the N7 artist this year, Omeasoo did what came naturally: doodling.
“I thought about it for a long time,” he said. “It took awhile and I kind of got stuck there, so I kept thinking about it, jotted things on paper and little doodles here and there.”
The result is a circular design that Omeasoo said represents the circle of life. The circle includes four distinct sections, representing the four directions and seasons. The design also resembles a medicine wheel, used in many traditional ceremonies.
The four feathers are significant, too.
“No matter what kind of Indian you are, you’re always going to understand the representation of a feather,” he said. “Feathers were given out after war parties. If you were successful, the elders would honor you with a feather.”
Omeasoo said the porcupine quill in the center of the feather, evident in the logo, is unique to most Plains Indian tribes.
“Many tribes dye them different colors, and they were always present in our bundles and pipes,” he said.
Omeasoo’s reverence for tribal ceremony inspires all of his artwork. His mother was full blood and decedent of the Kickingwoman family, who are medicine people.
“My parents, Molly and George, were our community’s bundle holders for ceremony, so I’ve been around them my whole life,” he said.
His connection to UM might even go deeper. After all, three of his children are UM graduates, the most recent being Mariah Omeasoo, Omeasoo’s daughter. Marcus and Brandon are UM alumni and son Vince received his bachelor’s degree and MBA from UM, too. His youngest son, LeBron, is in his first year at UM.
“The University has been good to us,” he said. “We’re very proud of our children.”
Omeasoo also understands the deep tradition of basketball across Indian Country – which is at the heart of the N7 mission.
“Basketball on the reservation is crazy,” Omeasoo said. “Everybody looks forward to games in these communities. It doesn’t even matter if teams win, the community is always going to support their youth.”
Every one of Omeasoo’s sons played high school basketball, and he lists a long line of cousins and family members who ran cross-country and played basketball, many of them setting state high school records and earning championships.
“Running and basketball come naturally to the Blackfeet,” Omeasoo said. “So, it’s kind of full circle to me to get to the be the artist for the N7.”
More than 300 prospective students will attend UM’s N7 games, and UM is busing attendees and students from Missoula County Public Schools, Browning, Pablo, Polson and Arlee.
The officially licensed Nike Griz gear featuring Omeasoo’s logo is already for sale. The gear can be found online and in UM’s Go Griz Store (formally the Bookstore), The M Store, Scheels, Universal Athletics and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Licensing proceeds from this year’s Nike N7 products benefit the Chief Earl Old Person Kyiyo Pow Wow fund, which supports the historic Kyiyo Pow Wow Celebration.
UM will host N7 basketball games over the next two years. Upcoming games will be an opportunity for the University to celebrate the contributions of its Native American students, employees and student athletes. The games will feature a display of Montana’s tribal flags and a halftime Indigenous dance performance.
Montana’s N7 games will see the Lady Griz take on Sacramento State at 2 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 27, and the men’s team will play Eastern Washington at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3.
Edward Burtynsky interview: ‘Just Stop Oil protests in museums disrespect our culture’
“I use a digital camera in a helicopter or aeroplane,” says Edward Burtynsky. “It’s moving fast and it’s bouncy and shaky, and I’m taking hundreds of pictures, because if something comes your way and you don’t get it, you’ll never get back to it no matter how good the pilot is. You need to be ready to make that picture when it happens. If you miss it, that’s it.”
The 68-year-old Canadian photographer, the great chronicler of how heavy industry is transforming our planet, is at home in The Blue Mountains, Ontario, explaining how he went from setting up painstaking shots on a tripod with a large format camera like early pioneers such as Ansel Adams, to embracing new technology. “All of a sudden, it was eureka,” he says. Yet the precision he learned as a young man still informs every image, and it’s something that a generation that has grown up with camera phones wouldn’t understand. “In the late ’80s, it cost me about $60 to take one picture. I would walk around with an eight-by-ten camera, sometimes for two or three days, and not take a picture, if the light wasn’t right. But I would make notes: ‘OK, come back here at six o’clock’.”
The hard part – the fun part – he says, was finding a photograph worth taking; the rest was a puzzle to be solved about the best conditions in which to capture it. “It’s impossible to imagine why anybody would even care to have that discipline today. It’s so easy to make pictures and there’s no cost to it. I used to catch myself doing that – then I’d say, ‘Stop. You know better than that. Wait for the right moment’.”
This goes some way to explaining something that will become obvious when the largest ever show of Burtynsky’s work – Extraction/Abstraction – opens at London’s Saatchi Gallery next month. The images on display are some of the most “painterly” artworks one is likely to see anywhere this year. A river in Ontario is turned fauvist orange by iron oxide, salt pans in Gujarat dissolve into geometric patterns, and compressed oil drums recreate the density of the abstract expressionists.
They’re beautiful – and Burtynsky has sometimes been criticised for that beauty, because they are a document of how earth is being poisoned by industry, from the snow swirl of phosphates in a pond in Florida to the psychedelic toxic spillage that is destroying the Niger Delta.
Oil Bunkering #9, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016
Credit: Edward Burtynsky/Flowers Gallery, London
For more than 40 years, Burtynsky has been homing in on humanity’s environmental impact, beginning in the early 1980s, when on the back of a Canadian government grant of about £10,000, he spent four months travelling North America, “just me, my car and my camera and my thoughts”, photographing rock faces blasted for rail lines to cut through them. From the beginning, he recognised it was a “big enough idea” for a life’s work. Now he is one of the foremost artists to have captured the effects of the “Anthropocene” – the age of man’s dominance over the planet.
He understands the anger of radical climate activists who go so far as to advocate sabotage against the infrastructure of the oil industry. “It’s a well-placed anger,” he says. “We can’t let a small group of very wealthy people, who have an interest in maintaining that wealth, control the outcome of all life on the planet.” But nor, Burtynsky insists, should we be naively thinking “we can in one short period of time transition from fossil fuel dependency to alternative energy: it’s impossible.” Such a shift must avoid “destroying the fabric of society. If we destroy economies, and people can’t put a roof over their heads, then the environment doesn’t exist. It’s like, who cares? It’s my survival. If that’s the last pigeon and I can eat it, shoot the pigeon. Cease and desist is the naive position.”
It extends to industry, too. “The whole greening of the economy means we’re gonna be mining more than ever,” he says. “Lithium mining, cobalt mining, and then copper, nickel, iron ore, all of those things are key – I just went to photograph a rare earth mine – because we need the material to build the batteries and the cars and motors and all the things that are going to electrify our world.”
Edward Burtynsky
Credit: Seth Fluker
He’s chatting over video call from his house in one of Canada’s top skiing destinations, where almost for the first time this winter, there has been snow. Up to now, “it’s just rained,” he says, “an insane amount of rain.” The blizzard, though, has put his plans for the day on ice. “I was supposed to go see my mom,” he says, but instead, “I’m just gonna stay home and eat what’s left in the fridge.”
Burtynsky’s mother Mary turns 100 in July. She is a survivor of the Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine, one of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century, in which millions died of famine under Stalin. Grain from the region was used to feed the rest of the Soviet Union, but not distributed locally. “My mother talked about going to bed hungry,” he says, “and eking out [food] day after day.” She watched people starve to death. During the Second World War, her village was occupied by the Nazis and she was sent to Germany as slave labour, ending up in a displacement camp in Canada after the war. She later became a committed voice for Ukraine’s independence from Russia.
It was Burtynsky’s father, Peter – also a Ukrainian immigrant – who gave his son his first camera and later set up a darkroom at home that ignited the teenager’s passion for photography. By day, he worked on the welding line at the General Motors car plant in Toronto. It would lead to his death, when Burtynsky was just 15. His father developed cancer, the photographer believes, from working with PCBs – electrical insulating oils that are carcinogenic and can be absorbed through the skin. “Almost all of the men who worked on that line died,” he says. “He got cancer when he was 40 and then had a kidney removed, but by the time he was 43, it came back again and he died when he was 45.”
Burtynsky later got a summer job removing the PCBs from the factory to earn money to study photography. Throughout his father’s illness, Burtynsky had taken work alongside school to help support the family. “When my father was dying, he said, ‘you’re the oldest male in the family, this is your family now’. By the time I was 20, I had probably done 20 different jobs.”
Detail from Rock of Ages # 15, Active Granite Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1992
Credit: Edward Burtynsky/Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Burtynsky gained early success, winning gallery representation in New York when he was still in his 20s. But he soon realised that even artists he admired had to take other work to earn a living. He opened a photographic laboratory in Toronto that is still going strong today – but for several years, it sucked up all his energy, until a collector finally asked when he was going to produce more photographs. Burtynsky had an idea of shooting stone quarries but couldn’t spare the time. “And he just said, ‘I’ll pre-buy whatever you do.’” It restarted his career.
It’s important to be able to sell your work, he stresses. “I didn’t want to rely on grants. I didn’t want to rely on individuals.” But does the commercialism of the art world limit his capacity to be radical? “There is a class of art – call it the Jeff Koons or the [Damien] Hirst [class], where the game of the billionaires is creating a store of value in art, and somebody’s telling them, you need 10 per cent of your assets in art because it’s got a great return.” That’s not him, he insists. “I’ve always kept my work at a very accessible point in terms of dollars. Some galleries say, ‘We’re gonna really restrict the work you’re making, release five or six images a year, that’s it, but we want six figures or more to sell the work.’ I’ve always eschewed that. I’ve always put the pressure on myself to stay true to the way I want to work.”
In the early 1990s, larger prints of Burtynsky’s work could be snapped up for around £1,500; these days the smaller prints sell for roughly ten times that. But larger prints and what are regarded as iconic works can reach high prices, up to $100,000 (around £80,000) at auction. The market for his pictures helps him to travel the world, to rent a helicopter if he needs to, or hire assistants in environments where he doesn’t speak the language. Burtynsky’s “pretty persistent” when it comes to getting access, though some projects still elude him. He’s never been able to get into the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, for instance, where gold is extracted at an altitude of 10,000ft. And years of trying to get permission to shoot the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia led to the Ministry of Industry expressing concern that his work is not very positive towards the industry.
Salinas #2, Cádiz, Spain, 2013
Credit: Edward Burtynsky/Flowers Gallery, London
It’s “hard to be positive” about climate change, he says. “We were slow to respond to the scale of the problem. Time is not our friend any more.” What does he make of Just Stop Oil protesters targeting galleries? “Museums are repositories of things from the past that we find valuable and want to preserve, and things in the present that we feel are important and want to preserve. To use that space for protests is damaging to the cultural fabric. It’s strictly for headlines, and, you know, here’s something that society finds valuable – and I’m going to disrespect that value. I don’t agree with it.”
Finding fault with how museums support themselves, too, has to be considered carefully, he believes. “Cultural institutions often live off the graces of individual donations, government support, corporate donations,” he says. “Culture has never been able to sustain itself.” At a certain level – such as having a loan with a particular bank, or an insurer with links to fossil fuels – “they are all implicated”, and indeed, so is each one of us. “The choice is hard. At a certain point, if every artist and arts organisation worldwide turns down hugely valuable funding, there’s an undeniable risk of them being starved out of existence.” He suggests that protesters’ energies “be shifted to the doorsteps of the most egregious”.
What of those who believe that global warming is overhyped or not even happening? “The problem, I find, is that it got politicised,” he says, and “the political system is, whatever the Left says, the political Right just has an allergic reaction to it and says the opposite. I’ve always said, Left or Right, it doesn’t matter, when a hurricane comes, everybody gets flattened.”
Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction is at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3 (saatchigallery.com) from Feb 14 to May 6. Edward Burtynsky — New Works is at Flowers Gallery, London W1, from Feb 28 to Apr 6
In New York City, centuries worth of Indigenous history is being uncovered through art, stories and community
Unreserved53:59Unmapped: NYC
In a square block of New York City’s Chinatown is Collect Pond Park — home to a small reflecting pool and centuries of Indigenous history.
The park was once the site of a sprawling body of water that served as a gathering place for the Lenape. Manhattan, which comes from the Lenape word Manahatta for the place where we get the wood to make the bows, is their homeland.
“The area would be completely different from today,” Alan Michelson, a Manhattan-based Mohawk artist and a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, told Unreserved. “So you might get, you know, a mixture of different kinds of fish and different kinds of animals.”
“And then there was singing and drumming, and it was probably a really nice, sheltered place to feast on oysters.”
New York City has one of the largest urban populations of Indigenous people in the United States, but that history has been largely hidden — and artists, researchers and community leaders are working to shed light on it.
Michelson is among them.
The Indigenous history at Collect Pond Park has long been covered by pavement. But in 1990, Michelson introduced his temporary installation, Earth’s Eye, at the park, which traced the contours of the once vibrant and important pond.
“When we go down there, we’re just basically walking on what used to be a pond. It’s sort of a grave, you know?”
‘It still is our homeland’
Walking through the city, alongside its concrete skyscrapers, Brent Michael Davids, a Munsee-Lenape and Mohican composer, says he feels a deep connection to New York’s Lenape roots.
“I see it all as, you know, Lenapehoking. It never stopped being Lenapehoking.”
Lenapehoking translates to “Lenape homeland,” which encompasses all of present-day Manhattan and part of Long Island, and stretches into Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut.
The Lenape were violently displaced from the area over the course of 400 years. Today, the Lenape diaspora includes five federally recognized nations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario.
Davids was inspired by his colleagues at Lenape Center, an advocacy group based in Manhattan, to write Lenapehoking, a song about Lenape presence in New York City.
“We were thinking, you know, what would it be like for a Lenape person to come back to the city?” said Davids, who is a co-director of Lenape Center.
“Most people, I’m not even sure they’re aware Lenape are still around.”
Mohawk ironworkers help build NYC
Though colonization forced many Lenape out of Manhattan in the 1600s, there’s a misconception that Indigenous people didn’t exist in the city as it developed, says researcher Allan Downey.
“American popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries held that these spaces, like New York City and other urban environments, were antithetical to Indigenous existence and largely void of Indigenous presence,” said Downey, a member of Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nation and an associate professor of history at McMaster University.
“But we know that’s not true.”
Indigenous people have had an indelible impact on the skyline of New York City, helping to build it into the metropolis it is today.
Mohawk ironworkers, for example, were instrumental in the construction of landmarks like the Empire State Building, United Nations headquarters and World Trade Centers.
“When we look at the New York City skyline, I think it could be a kind of a triggering device to recognize the contribution and presence of not only Indigenous peoples, but the ways in which they articulate their identities, their self-determination, their nationhood and their sovereignty,” he said.
Part of that contemporary history of Indigenous presence includes Little Caughnawaga (the anglicization of Kahnawake), a community formed by the Mohawk ironworkers in the borough of Brooklyn throughout the 20th century.
As they gained work in New York City, they invited their friends and family to join them, Downey said.
“From the late 1920s into the 1950s, what we see is approximately 700 Indigenous, Kahnawake individuals specifically, end up moving into this community,” he said.
WATCH | Indigenous history in an iconic photograph:
Allan Downey reveals the hidden Indigenous story behind one of the most famous photos in American history — one that helps us understand the NYC skyline. Downey is a member of Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nation and a professor of history at McMaster University.
They weren’t only ironworkers. Indigenous women, who moved there on their own accord, were employed in factories, hospitals and on Wall Street.
A Presbyterian Church, where Sunday school was taught in Mohawk, and several taverns became hubs for the community, helping them find jobs and connect with their family by phone outside the city.
While gentrification largely pushed the community’s blue collar workers out, Mohawk ironworkers continued shaping the city’s skyline for decades to come.
“It’s this incredible story about how nationhood kind of moved and became redefined in a new area, a new space,” Downey said.
Indigenous advocacy
Near Times Square, the American Indian Community House (AICH) aims to be a hub for Indigenous people in the city today.
“It’s an exciting time. You know, we’re trying to be more visible in [the] United States in general, and to have a space in Midtown … it’s helpful for us and our people to know that there’s a place to go to, that they can be around the community.”
Tarrant grew up at AICH, or H as she calls it. The organization was founded in 1969 and today serves over 70 tribes. Programming hosted by AICH teaches Native American history and culture — things Tarrant says weren’t taught in school — and the events are open to all, not just Indigenous people.
“We do a lot of advocacy and awareness of Native Americans,” she said, noting the large population of Indigenous people in New York City.
“So, you know, we are here, but it’s hard to be seen when you’re less than one per cent of people here.”
They’re also working with school districts in New York City to gather data about Indigenous students during enrolment. “That way we know who these Native students are,” said Tarrant, who hopes to support them through AICH.
Ultimately, she hopes to bring a public kitchen and performance programs back to AICH, while also creating new programs to help young people develop technology skills.
“My hope for the community house … is to have a space that is centrally located, that is a drop-in centre basically, that people can just come by and use the space how they need it.”
‘We’ve managed to hang on’
In the decades since Earth’s Eye at Collect Pond Park, Michelson’s work has been exhibited in galleries like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art PS1.
Through his art, Michelson continues to uncover the city’s Indigenous history.
“I really love New York as it is, but I can’t help but think of it as it was,” he said.
“An Indigenous presence has been attempted to be completely erased. But, you know, we’ve managed to hang on.”
This story is part of a travel series from Unreserved called Unmapped. The series invites us to look for the Indigenous presence in some of the most iconic travel destinations around the world. Meet the people who are nurturing community and raising the visibility of Indigenous pasts, presents and futures.
Chillida Leku: Basque artist Eduardo Chillida’s sculpture haven in Spain
They are visible in numerous public spaces globally, such as UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the German Chancellor’s Office in Berlin, the Plaça del…
7 ways we can help protect and conserve Indigenous art forms in India | The Times of India
Indigenous art forms come in many forms. Crafts, music, dance, rituals, and whatnot. Unfortunately, overtime, these artforms lose their special place in the hearts of people. The artforms that are important for preserving traditions and connecting communities to their roots, are facing setbacks in the face and competition of mass-produced goods. Protecting these expressions is important to maintain cultural identity, share knowledge and resist cultural erosion.
Here we list 7 simple ways everyone can contribute towards protecting our indigenous and authentic crafts.
Black Country photographer celebrated at exhibition
A celebration of everyday life, from people going about their shopping or going to a football match, is going on display in a new photographic exhibtion.
A personal collection from Phil Loach, originally from Dudley and a professional photographer for newspapers in the Black Country, has been put together with an associated book.
The photographer passed away suddenly last year, his family said.
His work had been accepted for the book but he died before it was published, they said.
“He was a photographer through and through, and even around the house there was always a camera within easy reach,” said his wife Dot Byrne.
Starting at the Dudley Herald in 1969 he later worked at the County Express in Stourbridge rising to become chief photographer.
He also worked at Newsquest’s Stourbridge, Halesowen and Dudley News titles, and later for the Kidderminster Shuttle and Bromsgrove and Redditch Advertiser newspapers.
During his almost 50-year career he photographed a wide range of people including royalty, politicians, sports stars, and showbiz personalities.
He also took thousands of personal photographs and created a large private collection of documentary images.
His work had been accepted for publication by Café Royal books – an award-winning publisher of documentary photography, Mrs Byrne said.
“It didn’t get published while he was still with us, which is a big regret because it meant so much to him to have his work accepted,” she said.
“After Phil passed I really wanted to make sure that the plans that were in place came to, to make sure that his work was seen, and what he’d wanted to do was done,” Mrs Byrne added.
“He was a people-watcher, he loved photographing people in everyday situations,” Mrs Byrne added.
“He was an observer, he saw things that other people wouldn’t see let alone have the nerve to photograph.”
The show will run from 13 to 24 February at the RBSA Gallery, St Paul’s Square, Birmingham.
The Black Country 1970s-1980s is published by Café Royal Books.
More of his work can be seen in the archive which he left behind on his website.
This is NONSENSE: underexposing to preserve highlights in photos
There’s a lot of accepted wisdom in photography that’s actually without merit, whether it’s information from outdated textbooks or experience passed on by people who misunderstood photographic principles (or, indeed, both of the above).
I recently came across this video on YouTube by Mads Peter Iversen, an award-winning fine art landscape photographer from Denmark. Taking aim at everything from “landscape lenses” to lens compression, Iversen’s video is titled “Stop This Photography Nonsense!” and sets out to correct some of the misinformation as he sees it.
“Within photography there are a lot of sayings that are often being presented as facts or a rule, and they’re just being repeated again and again and again – but in the end they are simply just nonsense, and we will be better off if we simply just stop saying it,” he says.
The video is embedded below, and is well worth a watch! I won’t spoil the other nonsense on his list, but I’d like to share some of his thoughts on the old “underexpose to preserve highlights” rule…
“The next nonsense I think we should stop saying is that you need to expose to the left, or you need to underexpose, because it’s easier to recover the shadows than it is recovering the highlights.
“Yes you can blow the highlights, but you can most certainly also blow the shadows, and there aren’t as much detail in those underexposed shadows as you would want to think there is. Yes, these days we do have amazing noise reduction software, but you still need to just make a proper exposure – it’s actually really that simple.
“So as I’ve explained in other videos, you need to expose to the right but you do not want to clip the highlights. Overexposing the photo and clipping the highlights are two different things. You can most certainly overexpose a photo and then bring down all that information in post-processing, so you actually do want to overexpose the photo but you do not want to clip the highlights.
“And it’s very important that we put those two things together in the same sentence: overexpose, but don’t clip the highlights. Because then you actually get more information onto your sensor you can then bring it down in post-processing and you then have a cleaner photo.
“To get a proper exposure is very very simple… there’s no right or wrong histogram, there’s just an optimal exposure. And right now as you can see as I decrease my shutter speed I get a darker and darker and darker photo. And obviously I don’t want to underexpose it – yes I can bring it up in Photoshop or Lightroom, but then I just get a noisy photo.
“I just want to make a proper exposure to begin with, which is about here, so underexposing a photo on purpose because it’s easier to bring out the shadows is just nonsense. Just get a proper exposure from the beginning, expose to the right, but don’t clip the highlights – it’s that simple.”
Check out my video that explains what is exposure in photography. And since Iversen doesn’t like calling them the best landscape lenses, take a look at the best wide-angle lenses that can also be used to shoot landscapes!
A Photographer of Startling Power – The Reformed Journal Blog
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Listen To Article |
For these Sunday posts in January, I want to listen to how people with immigration or refugee experiences find sustenance and purpose in difficult times.
The women in Rania Matar’s photographs are self-assured, reflective, and beautiful. Some appear downcast or mournful; others are slyly amused. Some gaze directly at the camera; others stare into the distance or look inward, eyes closed. Around them are signs that all is not right in the world – razor wire, broken glass, ocean trash, the moldering carpet of a once-glorious theater. In various poses, the women claim the spaces around them – climbing, reclining, floating, peering through archways, standing atop ruins, or simply posing with confidence. The one thing they are not is passive.
To back up a step, I’ve been fascinated recently with the artwork of Rania Matar a Lebanese-Palestinian-American photographer who splits her time between Boston, New York, and Beirut. I found her work through Sukoon, an excellent journal of Arab-themed art and literature founded by my friend Rewa Zeinati. Rania’s subjects are primarily Lebanese, Palestinian, and American women. I couldn’t help but view her work in light of the violence in Gaza and Lebanon, and I reached out to ask if she would talk about her portraits.
She immediately explained that “portraits” doesn’t fully capture her collaborative approach. She and her subjects choose locations together, explore them together, and, in her recent work in Beirut, frequently find settings that reflect the impacts of decades of war.
“We always go somewhere and end up somewhere better than we expected,” she said in a phone call. “There’s an element of risk-taking, whether we’re climbing into places or getting in the water. I’m in awe of how much these women are willing to do.
“In Lebanon, there’s an element of danger that’s part of life, period. So, taking smaller risks during the shoot seems to connect with our relationship with the place.”
Rania was born in Lebanon and left when she was twenty, nine years after civil war broke out in 1975. She began her professional life as an architect, but grew serious about photography after 9/11, wanting to portray her daughters and other Arab women with more nuance and humanity than the “us vs. them” narratives she saw in the media. The work led to multiple exhibitions, a Guggenheim fellowship, and four books. Her most recent project, “50 Years Later – Where Do I Go?” explores the ongoing fallout of the Lebanese Civil War.
“It defined who I am,” she said. “I left the country because of it, and I feel like history keeps repeating itself. Now these women who are the age I was when I left are often scrambling to leave the country. Every person has a personal story in relating to their country, but it’s also part of a collective story. Even the women who don’t live in Lebanon anymore, they keep coming back, like I do.”
Her father was Palestinian, and I asked how the war in Gaza has affected her art. It’s too soon to tell, she said. But no violence is ever fully isolated. The destruction from decades of war, the devastating 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut, and her father’s death last year all find expression in her photographs, she said.
One of her most arresting photos, to me, shows a woman standing on the backs of seats in an ornate but decrepit theater. The woman, Rhea, is a performance artist, and the setting is the Piccadilly Theatre in Beirut, a prominent arts venue in the 1960s and 70s. Despite repeated plans and promises to restore the theatre, it continues to decay.
And yet, for all the loss the photo portrays, there’s something disruptive, even playful, in the way Rhea strides atop the seats in a flowing dress, her arms splayed as if considering taking flight.
“Too often we see women from the Arab world portrayed as oppressed or illiterate,” Rania told me. “To me, they’re goddesses. In this work I’m making, these women have nothing oppressed about them.”
Another young woman contacted Rania online, embodying contradictions she found fascinating. She wore a black head covering yet wanted to be portrayed to the world. Her Instagram profile read “Follow me, I’m toxic.” They met in a high-rise apartment overlooking the Mediterranean coast. The woman, Alae, holds a small mirror that captures her focused gaze while the cityscape lies beyond. Just to the right of her mirror is the grain silo damaged in the 2020 explosion, a site of horrific destruction bathed in warm sunlight and set against the tranquil sea.
I asked Rania the question that has animated this blog series: What gives you sustenance, artistically or personally, during difficult times? But I also realized the question was unnecessary. Like my Ukrainian friend Olesia Markovic, my Afghan neighbor Atiqullah Ayubi, and the exiled Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut, Rania answers not through ideas but through her life. Her work, and the trust she builds in creating it, shines light against dehumanization.
One last thought. My favorite work of Rania’s is not a photograph but a short video she posted at the new year. (Take a quick look–but then come back!) In it, a woman appears quivering in a mirror lying in shallow water on a sandy beach. A wave washes over, turning her reflection into a shimmering blur. Her likeness begins to reappear until another wave washes over.
It delighted me with all the possible metaphors at play: We’re united in an ocean of humanity. The only constant is change. Clarity may last for only an instant. And celebrating that flicker of clarity–that stunning flash of light in the water–is worthwhile.
But I’m also reminded that what you see depends on where you stand. So I wanted to know what Rania sees in the video.
“To me, it’s about the new year and things beginning and ending,” she said. “But it’s also about the Mediterranean and about erasure and erasing. I kept relating it back to what’s happening in Gaza. I felt like it works on different levels.
“I’m hoping that people can see that in a lot of these images. I don’t want them to be sad pictures of destruction. You see enough of that. For me, it’s also about creativity and being present in the moment and having agency over it. It’s about putting your imprint on the place.”
Photos courtesy Rania Matar. See more at raniamatar.com.
Rania’s photo by Helena Goessens.
