YEAR
6 NO 8
SPRING
2014
Une Revue de Photo
Shoshana Rothaizer I Monica Barnes I Nancy Sirkis I Shelley Seccombe I Diane Hardy Waller I Birgit Pohl I Joan Katz
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Editor: Vicente Revilla Special Editor: Monica Barnes Peru Bureau Editor: Mario Guevara Assistant Editor: Angel Amy Moreno Assistant Editor: Eric Metcalf French Bureau Chief: Carlos Henderson Editor-at-Large: Jean-Jacques Decoster Photo Editor: Leo Theinert
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Web Editor: Michael Smith Magazine Consultant: David Duckworth Contributor: Sarah Rubio
On women: fry Monica Barnes Inspiration came from "Blowup." Watching this old flick, I fell under the spell of 60s "Swinging London." Nevertheless, the hero's disdain for his models bothered me. There was no acknowledgment of the subjects' contribution to the photographer's success. In the 1960s the majority of professional photographers were men. Women had to surmount major barriers.
As women scaled these barriers (or walked around them), it became possible to think about differing sensibilities. What if the usual positions of women as subjects and men as artists were flipped, and women photographed men? By 1977 enough reversals had occurred for Dannielle B. Hayes to publish Women Photograph Men, with work by seventy female photographers. This theme continues to fascinate. In 2011, Juliana Halpert posted ''The Gaze Reversed: Women Photograph Men" on The New Yorker website. Were the men experiencing "the burden of sexual objectification" as the post implies? I moved beyond the female-male dyad and wondered if there were commonalities in the ways that women portray other women. In this issue ofMoment woman share their pictures of female subjects. We feature the late Shoshana Rothaizer, who documented the LandDyke movement Aesthetic approaches and techniques differ, but one commonality emerges. Many female photographers prefer to dispense with the clothes that made 60s glamour shots so striking. Here we publish Noel E. Jefferson's 'Julie Seduces" as well as Shoshana's arresting cover image. Jefferson photographed Julie in the same Paris apartment she used for her male nudes in Moment 3. We also include Birgit Pohl's abstract nude, and Vanessa Cilneo's study in which the figure emerges from primeval rock. Adriana Peralta demonstrates the matriarchal properties of stone in her self portraits among Inca shrines. Reiko Takamatsu takes us to the urban environments of}apan. Jane Klein, Emma Strugatz, and Marfa Cobb contribute intimate portraits. Diane Hardy serves as her own model The vendors at the Cam Cao market in Viet Nam by Nancy Sirkis and an Ecuadorian woman and child in Sarah Rubio's "Mercado 1" follow their own ethnic fashions. Older women appear in contributions by Joan Katz and Shelley Seccombe and in my own head shots. It is perilous to make generalizations about the way women portray women. Without context I could not have divined the genders of the photographers in this issue. We include female portraits by two men. Juan Bravo Vizcarra presents Cusquefia nudes photographed in the 1960s. Leo Theinert combines women and outdoor sculpture. Vision, talent, rapport, and technical skill matter far more than the sexes ofthe bodies in which our minds dwell.
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Copyrigh t© 2014 Moment Printed in Cusco, Peru Mail: Angel Amy Moreno P.O. Box 300883, Boston, MA 02130 Email:
[email protected] Website: http://momentunerevuedephoto.commons.gc.cuny.edu ISSN: 1938 - 8349 I Deposito Legal: 2007 - 06746
Opinions expressed in writing and by the photographs published do not necessarily represent the views ofM oment: Une Revue de Photo, but are the sole provenance ef the writers and artists published within.
Cover: Shoshana Rothaizer
TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 22 23
Monica Barnes: On women Diane Hardy Waller Joan Katz Sarah Rubio: Par la Panamericana Jane Klein Maria Cobb Monica Barnes Emma Strugatz Vanessa Cuneo: Naturaleza femenina Nancy Sirkis Shoshana Rothaizer Shelley Seccombe Leo Theinert Noel E. Jefferson Adriana Peralta: Sacsayhuaman: Viaje a traves de la dimension petrea Reiko Takamatsu Birgit Pohl Monica Barnes: Shoshana Rothaizer Juan Bravo Vizcarra List of Contributors
Diane and Camel
Diane Hardv Waller MO\
Tattoo
High School Friends
Jan 4
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Double Dutch Final
Joan Katz
Por la Panamericana
Mercado I
Los viajes
Sarah Rubio MOMENT
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Jane Klein 6
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Maria Cobb MOMENT
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Beata Hayton
Alyce Boyd
Meredith Smoke
Monica Barnes 8
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Negra Untitled
Molly in Bed
Emma Strugatz MOMENT
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Naturaleza Femenina
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Vanessa Clineo
Cam Cao Market Viet Nam II
Nancv Sirkis MOMENT
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Face Painting, Taos 1977
Rest Stop in the Desert,Arizona 1977
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Skuld on her Birthday, Kvindelandet 1979
Shoshana Rothaize MOMENr
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Claudia at City Hall
On the Stretcher
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Shellev Seccombe
Leo Theinert I
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Lady in repose
Julie Seduces
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Multiplies
Noel E. Jenerson
Sacsayhuaman: Viaje a traves de la dimension petrea
Adriana Peralta MOMENT
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Kioto
Tokio I Shibuya
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Reiko Takamatsu
Flamenco dancer
Nude
Birgit Pohl MOMENT
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Shoshana Rothaizer lry Monica Barnes In the beginning she was Susan, one of the many Susans in Queens, New York. She was born on March 25, 1952. In spite of her plain vanilla name, there was always something special about her. Maybe it was her upbringing as a "red diaper" baby. Her parents were dedicated Progressives and they reared her to be one, too. Some of her treasured childhood memories centered on a mobile summer camp oflefust persuasion. As she described the program to me, a group of young people from New York City traveled across the country on a bus, acquiring traditional skills like camping and political organizing. For the rest of her life she seemed to remember everything in Carl Sandburg's American Songbag, music and lyrics she learned on the trail. She sang, and played both the piano and the guitar. Her early road experiences made her comfonable criss-crossing continents, oceans, and sexual boundaries. She loved women, and sometimes men, too. From 1975, until her death, she was an international member of the Land.Dyke movement, a loose association of Lesbians who live communally in rural areas. Typically, LandDykes dedicate themselves to earth-based spirituality, consensus, natural healing, organic gardening, permaculture, eco-forestry, and earth-friendly building. These practices suited her perfectly. Somehow she managed to balance a mystical, pagan spirituality and her Jewish heritage without contradictions. She had Keats' "negative capability" in abundance. She was simultaneously a member of the Free Synagogue of Flushing and a pagan camping group, Lake Circle. She practiced Yoga at the Kripalu Center in the Berkshires and at the Himalayan Institute in the Poconos. For the last fourteen years ofher life she shared a chalet and an interest in Wicca with a male friend. Land.Dykes often take names that better reflect their personalities than the conventional feminine ones many are assigned at birth. Susan became Woodnymph for a while, and she continued to use that moniker as part of her email address even after she accepted her final name, Shoshana, the Hebrew version ofSusan. This fitted her so well that some ofher acquaintances never learned her family name. At the beginning of her Land.Dyke experiences Shoshana lived with her first great love, Acorn (previously called Sue and later called Flame), at Bedspring Acres, a hippie commune in southern Oregon. At a farmer's market in Grants Pass the couple met Lesbians from Cabbage Lane, one of the first Lesbian lands. Shoshana and Acorn became part of that community. They also made coast-to-coast trips together. Shoshana treasured her memories of these journeys in her beloved 1972 blue Plymouth Valiant, called Val. Val outlived Shoshana and was given to friends shortly before she died. One ofShoshana's formative political experiences occurred in 1974. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and became involved in the Inez Garcia Defense Committee. This group worked to publicize and defend Inez Garcia, a Hispanic woman who was charged with murder for killing the man she said had raped her. Her case had been badly handled by the criminal justice system. For example, physical evidence of rape was never collected. Her situation became a major feminist issue. Although Garcia received a life sentence, on appeal she was exonerated on the basis ofself-defense. Even decades later, Shoshana spoke of Garcia with fervor.
In the summer of 1976 Shoshana and Acorn joined the Lesbian Aurora Family at Mama Mountain on the South Fork of California's Eel River. In the fall, when the large group dispersed to Owl Farm in southern Oregon and Lirnesaddle near Oroville, California, Shoshana based herself at Limesaddle, taking pictures all the while. In between West Coast moves Shoshana joined the Nozama (Amazon spelled backwards) Caravan of traveling wild women and children. Their aim was to get to D.C. for the Bi-centennial, but stops at a Rainbow Family Gathering in Colorado, in New Mexico, in Oklahoma, and at the second Michigan Womyns Music Festival thwarted their goal. "Rest Stop in the Desert, Arizona 1977" conveys the mood of this group. Shoshana loved performance about as much as she loved photography. She continued as an active participant in the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Shoshana attended seasonal celebrations at We'Moon Land in Oregon, and volunteered for Pete Seeger's Clearwater Festival on the Hudson River. In 1979 and 1980 Shoshana was a member ofKvindelandet, a women's communal farm in Denmark. There she built her own one-room home which she called the Octagon, worked the land, and made friends with cats. She also took some of her most striking photos, revealing the beauty of her world and documenting a very specific time and place. "Skuld on her Birthday" was made at Kvindelandet. Our cover image also dates from that period. When Shoshana first returned from Europe she lived at a mixed commune in San Francisco, but in 1982 she moved back to New York City to care for her mother who was dying of cancer. She compared her tiny, one-room apartment on 14th Street to the little cabins built
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on Lesbian rural lands in the l 970's, calling it her Lesbian land cabin in the city. After her mother's death, Shoshana moved into the family home in Queens but still kept her pied-a-terre. Shoshana said that her photography " ... embraces many categories, including: evocative, lyrical images of women; landscapes, abstract landscapes and nature details. I look for the rhythms of Mother Nature in city and country. Preferring natural light without posing, I like to capture unique, unusual and humorous images." She worked with basic, but very good equipment. For the photos in this issue ofMoment she used a second hand Canon model Vt de luxe rangefinder made some time in the 1950s. She had two lenses that fit the body, a British-made Cooke Amoral Anastigmat two inch f2 ELC normal lens and a German-made Ernst Leitz Werzlar 9 centimeter f4 telephoto lens, both of high quality, but old designs. She didn't own a tripod and her camera had no light meter. Neither did she. She started out following the exposure charts that came in packers of film, with recommended apertures and shutter speeds for sunny or cloudy conditions. Eventually she learned to judge exposures with her eyes and brain alone and she was seldom off, even with the restricted exposure latitudes of the films available in the 1970s. Shoshana didn't own a flash, either. She prided herself on her ability to hold her mirror-free camera steady at low shutter speeds. "Skuld on her Birthday'' is a perfect example of what Shoshana was able to accomplish within these limitations. I know her equipment well because I inherited it and still use it when I want an old fashioned result. Shoshana did her own black and white development and she emphasized careful printing in the traditional wet darkroom. Shoshana's photos and writing have been published in both mainstream and alternative books and periodicals including Care for a Small Planet, Bernice E. Lott's Becoming a WO man: The Socialization ofGender (1981), American WOmen Artists: A History ofWomen WOrking in Three Dimensions, The New Our Right to Love: A Lesbian Resource Book (1996), and Joyce Cheney's Lesbian Land (198 5) which used one of her photos as its cover image. The Lesbian Polyamory Reader: Open Relationships, Non-Monogamy and Casual Sex (1999) featured Shoshana's photographs both within the book and on its cover. An issue of the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly included writing by Shoshana, a portfolio of her images of painted women, and one of her photographs on the cover. Other periodicals that published Shoshana's work include The Advocate, offour backs, The Himalayan Institute's Yoga International The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Blatant Image, a magazine of feminist photography, Pagan Place, WOmanspirit, and Iris: A journal for WOmen. Her images were on the cover of Lesbian Connection three times. She contributed the cover photo for a demo CD, "Lenape Farewell", featuring the music and poetry of Native Americans from the Hudson Valley. Another of her photographs is in the booklet which accompanies the double-CD by Holly Near, "And Still We Sing: The Outspoken Collection." Shoshana frequently exhibited her work, even (with the help of her friends) after her death. In addition to her participation in numerous group shows she had a solo exhibition "Lyrical Photographs ofWomen" on display in the lounge of a Greenwich Village theater for over a year. Towards the end of her life time was beginning to confer historical dimensions upon her oeuvre. In October 2010 she made a presentation on her experiences as a LandDyke at a conference "In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 1970s" held at New York's Hunter College. She took great pride in converting her old negatives into vibrant digital images. Shoshana was a generous person, never envious of the accomplishments of others. In fact, she was proud of them, especially the successes of other women. Once established back in New York City she joined Professional Women Photographers, founded in 1975. She originated and assembled "Kudos", a monthly column announcing all of the members' triumphs. At first this was passed out in the form of duplicated sheets, and later it was posted on-line. Although radical in her beliefs and lifestyle, Shoshana could be surprisingly traditional, too. She was good at sewing, carpentry, and other old-fashioned crafts. She could probably have written a book of household hints from memory. She was a proud 1969 graduate of John Bowne High School, a public school in Queens. She organized her class's first reunion that year and continued thereafter until her death on January 31, 2011, in the home where she grew up. She had suffered first from colitis, then from colon cancer, for many years. She never gave up until the very last weeks of her life, a life recorded not only in images, but in the diary she faithfully kept for many years. Shoshana made lasting contributions to Herstory. She found great satisfaction in her images and words. However, her greatest distinction is that she lived her life as she wanted to live it. II
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Desnudo I, 1964
Desnudo 2, 1991
Desnudo 3, 1965
Desnudo 4, 1964
Juan Bravo Vizcarra I
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Diane Hardy Waller started as an engineer, association executive, and real estate broker, then came to her senses and became a photographer, painter, ceramic artist, writer, and full time entrepreneur in the arts. She has illustrated four children's books, as well as calendars, and has created signage at the Bronx Zoo. Joan Katz found her passion for photographing people when she left corporate life for consulting work, and discovered free time. Her images appear in print and online, and have been exhibited in NYC and beyond. She also shoots for her favorite non-profit organizations; her several minutes with famous people can be found at www.bafta.org/ newyork. Sarah Rubio: Born in Madrid and now resides in New York. Her interest in photography explores the notion of identity and its ambiguity, exploring the contradictions inherent in the duality of our existence. http:// www.sarahrubio.com Jane Klein lives in New York City and is not a professional photographer. Her love of the arts comes from having been raised in a community of artists, where she still resides. Jane uses photography to express her own emotion, and with the hopes that a viewer might feel compelled to give a moment of contemplation and empathy to individuals and lifestyles which a frequently avoided and ignored in today's society. Maria Cobb is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BA in Photography & Imaging from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Maria has freelanced as a studio manager and digital tech for some of the industry's top photographers. She originally hails from Rhode Island. Monica Barnes combines her interests in archaeology, history, Latin America, and photography. She is an editor of the peer-reviewed journa!Andean Past. She is also an associate of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where she is studying the photographs and field notes of Andean anthropologist John Victor Murra. Emma Strugatz, born 1990, is from Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Tisch School of the Arts in 2012. Her work has something to do with trying to locate one's self in relationships, time, place, light, form, structures.
worked as a photojournalist during the last glory days of the big magazines and, for twenty-eight years, she was on the teaching staff of the International Center of Photography. Shoshana Rothaizer died on January 31, 2011 at age 59. She grew up in Queens, New York and embraced the political activism of her family. From the 1970s, until her death, she was an international member of the LandDykes movement, a loose association of Lesbians who live communally in rural areas. Shoshana was a long-time participant in the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, celebrations at We'Moon Land in Oregon, and Pete Seeger's Clearwater Festival. She was a member of Kvindelandet, a women's communal farm in Denmark. Shoshana documented her life through her photographs and a diary she kept faithfully. Shelley Seccombe is a New York photographer whose work consists largely of long-term series. The woman shown in "On the Stretcher" has been a subject since the 1960s. Shelley's images of the Hudson River piers in the 1970's and '80s were collected in the book, Lost Waterfront (2008). Although she now uses digital cameras, her black and white photography with Tri-X film and medium format cameras produced some of her most evocative work including "Claudia at City Hall" published here. Leo Theinert has been a photographer since 1970. Leo is from Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1965 - 1973. Adriana Peralta (Cusco 1970). Fotoperiodista independiente, ha dedicado su carrera a la realizacion de ensayos documentales, la mayoria relacionados a la vida y costumbres de Ia gente de su ciudad, su trabajo se ha publicado en diversos medios de! Cusco. Reiko Takamatsu was born in Tokio in 1990, She's currently a senior student majoring in Spanish and Latin-American Studies at Nanzan University. Noel E.Jefferson began shooting nudes as an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts where she understudied for a year with Hugh Heffner's foreign photographer, Jerry Ulesman. Since then, Noel's work has taken her to Paris, France where she met and photographed, "Men at Work" and, a decade later, upon special request, she photographed "Un ]our avec Julie".
Vanessa Cuneo es fotografa y profesora de! taller de fotografia. Lleva trabajando cinco afios en Pasa la Vaz en Ia ciudad de! Cusco. http://www.pasalavozcusco.org
Birgit Pohl is an award-winning location photographer, shooting events, portraits, architecture and nature. Her images have been published in newspapers, magazines, calendars and on book covers worldwide, including in the United States, Germany, and Japan. She is represented by Getty Images.
Nancy Sirkis has been photographing people and places for more than fifty years. She has published five books, Newport: Pleasures and Palaces (1963), Boston (1966), One Family (1970), Reflections ef1776: The Colonies Revisited ( 1974), and Massachusetts: From the Berkshires to the Cape (1977). She
Juan Bravo (Cusco, 1922). Pintor Muralista, Escultor y Fotografo. En 1963, represent6 al Peru en el Concurso Mundial de Fotografia "El mundo y sus gentes" realizado en EE.UU., y que fue patrocinado por la empresa Kodak, donde se hizo merecedor a uno de Ios premios.
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SI SES SENSATIONS
A LA CHALEUR DU DESIRE S'ALLUMAIENT
lronique debout /,a taille cambree I Davantage d'angoisse pour ton corps: I Un etat de fa.its inconnus I Sourd en lui: Comment serait-ce I Sises sensations a /,a chaleur du desire s 'allumaient. II Mais si son regard repousse les avances I Tu ne pourras comprendre quelles humeurs I Se>-construisent dans ton corps. Paolo de Lima, de Mundo arcana, 2002 Traduit par Rocio Ferreyra
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