ADAM SZYMCZYK

The Carnival of Scarcity

AS How did it feel when you moved to Bratislava after more than ten years of living in Moscow, in 1991?
AD I was really down at some point, because I was used to a very different lifestyle. For people in Czechoslovakia, it was suspicious to be interested in life in the USSR, and I might have looked like a pro-regime careerist. And for people in Moscow, I looked strange, too. I was not a member of the party, but chose to live in the Soviet Union and become a Soviet citizen. Plus, I adapted well and soon became one of them, just for my private reasons. And there was a life and there were people; my circle was utterly wonderful and I would do it again, okay?
AS How would you describe this life?
AD It was like a constant emergency situation, in the sense of everyday struggle for basic things for living. And in my case, additionally I was followed by the police and the KGB—and luckily perestroika came and we did not end up in a very bad situation, because for homosexuality there were five to eight years in a “lager” or camp, and I was living in a homosexual relationship. I call it homosexuality, because back then we did not use another word for it. For my friends and me, it was not connoted with illness or abnormality, and given that in the USSR people could be easily forced to undergo treatment in psychiatry (in fact, a jail) for showing any kind of freedom, starting with a simple criticism or disagreement with the regime, we all knew it is absolutely normal.
AS Completely undercover?
AD It was completely clandestine. I was playing straight, a hetero-
sexual identity for the Union of Artists, for the official world. I would never disclose anything of my real life. I was living in a relationship with a heterosexual woman and in our circle of people there was absolutely no problem. Generally people were not concerned with the life of the others; the main task was to get food, daily urgencies which were taking all your energy. Plus, we were in the huge city. So you could hold hands with a woman on the street and it was not a problem, but in Bratislava at that time or in Prague I wouldn’t even try to do it, because you would highly probably be exposed to a hostile reaction.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 148/2019, pp. 9–18.

DUNCAN FORBES

The Last Street Photographer

In May 1983, the Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima (b. 1954) traveled from Tokyo to West Berlin where he was based for eighteen months, working across Europe, both East and West, as a peripatetic street photographer. He had just won Japan’s Kimura Ihei Award, a major prize for a young photographer; and since his brief training seven years earlier at Tokyo’s WORKSHOP Photography School, he had already created incendiary series taken on the streets of Okinawa, Tokyo, and New York. Kitajima’s interest in the communist bloc in particular was nothing if not ambitious as he countered numerous obstacles to pursuing his craft. But the transition also proved revelatory, exposing what he came to recognize as the “perceptual system” that had hitherto governed his practice.¹ Indeed, for Kitajima, as he wandered the cities of Europe, street photography became impossible.

How did Kitajima reach this impasse? What peculiar twists and turns through the most vibrant of postwar photography genres brought him to this point? Did his hesitancy also somehow express the fate of street photography as a whole? This is too large of a question to address here, but I am struck by the conjunction of Kitajima’s work in Europe and the incipient demise of the Cold War. Maybe the photographer’s journeying out from Berlin was a diagnostic maneuver, an effort to expose photography’s most individualistic mode through confrontation with its collectivist other? Or might we read this series as yet another Japanese farewell to the medium—bye-bye street photography, if you like? In short, was Keizo Kitajima the last great modernist street photographer?

Kitajima came to street photography through Daido Moriyama, his teacher and close collaborator. Having abandoned his legal studies, he joined Moriyama’s WORKSHOP Photography School class in 1975, by all accounts the best of education. Conceived to produce the next wave of Japanese photographers, the school was also a means of catching breath, a way of forging continuities through the social and (in Moriyama’s case) creative slump of the mid-1970s.

¹ Kitajima Keizo 1975–1991: Koza, Tokyo, New York, Eastern Europe, U. S. S. R. (Tokyo: Sankei Shinbunsha, 2009), p. 206.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 148/2019, pp. 19–28.

FRANZISKA SCHMIDT

Body Self

Crumbling Fortresses¹ – Lifelines
“I am a woman from a country / that no longer exists / and I pass through countries / that never existed for me.”² To this day, one of Gabriele Stötzer’s3 greatest strengths is her ability to assert herself against obstacles and not be deterred, but to overcome them in order to be able to encounter new things openly and in a concerted way. Since the early 1980s, her forms of artistic self-expression and discovery have kept her locked in an ongoing struggle with herself as woman, writer, and visual artist. Like living tissue, Stötzer’s multi-layered oeuvre has grown into a highly individual and powerful body whose “parallel diversity”4 of drawing, painting, sculpture, textile art, ceramics, and fashion—as well as performance, film, photography, artist’s books, prose, poems, and texts—is both impressive and overwhelming. Permeated by her own existence and identity, by her physical and emotional presence in image and text, Stötzer’s work finds its expression in a wide range of artistic codes and sign systems. It is directed not only against traditional role models, but also against the elimination of individual personality as practiced by the former system GDR.

While studying art education and German studies at the Pädagogische Hochschule Erfurt, Stötzer signed a petition protesting the exmatriculation of a critical classmate; in doing so, she overstepped the limits imposed by the state, which led to her expulsion from the university and a period of “probation” in production. Her signature against Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in August 1976 led to her arrest; she was sentenced to one year for “defamation of state.” Ultimately, Stötzer’s artistic strength and intensity are grounded in the psychological and physical experiences she endured during her incarceration in Hoheneck Women’s Prison.

After her release and a three-year “reintegration measure” in a shoe factory, her life as an artist—independent and in the so-called underground—began with the purchase of a loom. Not only did she make her living working with textiles, weaving, spinning, and sewing; at the same time, this harkening back to traditional women’s handicraft was a purification process that channeled trauma and other experiences into new cognitive realms and disciplined the inner chaos. Art and writing were a matter of survival, while photography became a visual document of inner transformation.

KAELEN WILSON-GOLDIE

A Loose and Elliptical Dialogue

When the artist and filmmaker Katia Kameli began working on her experimental, documentary-style, and now multipart film “Le Roman Algérien” (The Algerian Novel, 2016, 2017, 2019), she had no idea that her close study of a curious kiosk selling old, nostalgic photographs on a picturesque street in central Algiers would continue for several chapters. Nor that her work on the unfinished business of the past—the legacies of colonization and decolonization in Algeria—would become swept up in a contemporary protest movement and in the temptation to speculate that a better future may be possible, just beyond the horizon of the present. When “Le Roman Algérien (Chapitre un)” (2016) was first commissioned by the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem) in Marseille, all Kameli was really thinking about was how to get enough good material to make a passable edit from a shoot on location that was going very, very badly.

When she began working on the film, Kameli didn’t know that it would become the first part of a trilogy. “I knew it when I started to edit,” Kameli told me recently, “and a little bit when I started to shoot.” The ostensible subject of her film was a nomadic kiosk that was located on the ground-floor façade of a colonial-era building on Larbi Ben M’Hidi Street. A man named Farouk Azzoug ran the kiosk, along with his son, and together they sold old postcards and archival photographs with representations dating from the eighteenth century through the 1980s. The images were mainly reproductions: genre paintings, townscapes, art deco advertising imagery, or portraits of political figures. To make the film, Kameli lined up interviews with various people, where they would sit and talk for the camera. But for one reason or another, very little of the interview footage was usable in the end. And so Kameli had to find a formal solution, which accounts for the affecting rhythm of the film, which oscillates between still and moving images as her interview subjects speak in the voiceover. The result is a film where time and place seem to run on different tracks. Kameli knew she had only just touched on a bigger theme, namely, the circulation of images and the stories we tell ourselves about the past.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 148/2019, pp. 39–48.

VOLKER WEISS

Biography of Symbols – The “Zehner Jahre”

Eiko Grimberg’s set of pictures “Zehner Jahre” (2010–ongoing) confronts viewers with symbolic seizures of space and battles over interpretation, which can unfold both synchronically and diachronically. He is also interested in contemporary graffiti as well as the traces of the history of the construction of such symbols, with which Italian fascism strove to inscribe itself in the future appearance of cities in the country. The photographer moreover exposes a paradox with an archaeological gaze: the turning of a planned future into an unplanned past. The present-day adaptation of fascist symbols thus functions like a bridge between eras. The pictures provide information about the tense relationship between a desire for long-lasting symbolic dominance on the one hand and the upheavals triggered by historical-political transformation on the other. Both worlds of symbols, the historical and the contemporary, are thus themselves again and again passively and actively a subject of (trans-)formative intervention. The work deals with the biography of symbols, their migration, and the struggles by means of appropriations and subversions, as far as semantic and political attempts at resuscitation.

The pictures simultaneously document a decade in the conflict of complementary forces that are preparing themselves for the future, but draw their legitimation from the past. Neo-fascists and Islamists penetrate public space. Temporally, Grimberg’s photos were created almost parallel to his work “Future History” (2010–19), with which the photographer already posed the question of the fate of the avant-garde in a late look back. The majority of the pictures already show the Italian subject matter. Since it was there that fascism selected the architectural school of Razionalismo, an adaptation of modern building, as its political counterpart due to its revolutionary rhetoric and totalitarian aspirations. As already the preparatory movement of Futurism, Razionalismo also initially turned against the omnipresent past in the country, which had hitherto borrowed its architectural forms. . . .

The avant-garde aspiration was contradicted by these historical references. Grimberg’s pictures now continue to pose the question of what became of this vision of the future, which was already fractured at its time. What traces were left behind by a form of design that purported to focus on something radically new, but was itself unable to disengage with history? How is this futuristic past represented in the present; how does the contemporary era present this past and design it further? Can a sentry be positioned at the gate of meaning in the long term?

Text feature in Camera Austria International 148/2019, pp. 49–58.