Mona Schubert is an art historian and freelance curator. She is currently completing her PhD on photography at documenta at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School in Cologne. She was previously a research associate for the FWF project “Bildtechniken der Ko-Produktion” (Co-Operative Art Techniques) at the University of Graz and assistant curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur. Her research interests include photography at the interface between the history of art, technology, and media, photographic exhibitions as well as (post-)digital image practices.
Scholarship 2024 - Mona Schubert, Queering Visions? Sigmar Polke's photo series São Paulo (1975)
Mona Schubert, Queering Visions? Sigmar Polke's photo series São Paulo (1975)
During the 13th Bienal de São Paulo (1975), Sigmar Polke accompanied the artist Blinky Palermo and Evelyn Weiss, who curated the West German contributions to the exhibition, on a walk through the city. During this stroll, he produced the photo series São Paulo, which focuses on visitors to a gay bar in the Brazilian metropolis. A closer look at these spontaneous snapshots raises the question of whether photographing this queer community in a foreign cultural context could be interpreted as being an act of resistance, voyeurism, or even as having colonial undertones. After all, the LGBTQIA+ scene in the country, which was under a military dictatorship at the time, was unable to present itself so freely in public and needed these safe spaces.[1] While Athanor, Polke’s photographic contribution to the Venice Biennale (1986), has been much discussed,[2] this photo series created on the sidelines of the São Paulo Biennial has yet to be analyzed. My research project addresses this shortcoming by not only situating this ambivalent series in a (photo-)historical context, but also by examining it from various theoretical perspectives.
Applying an intersectional approach, it should first be noted that photographing queer people from the Global South through the lense of a heterosexual, cis male, Western gaze carries the danger of objectifying this community by portraying it as “other”. Susanne Huber moves away from this essentialist perspective and argues that a queer art work does not necessarily require a queer authorship, and that queer artists can also perpetuate hegemonic social systems.[3]The aim, therefore, is to clarify Polke’s position within the West German photography scene of the 1970s, which was increasingly concerned with gender identities, binary gender roles and sexual orientation.[4]
My analysis also draws on approaches from postcolonial photographic theory in order to reflect on Polke’s position as a highly successful European artist, unaffected by censorship, who is infiltrating a non-Western culture, documenting it and marketing it as a work of art. Nicholas Mirzoeff’s volume The Right to Look (2012), which reflects on the subversive potential of visual relationships, offers a different perspective:
„The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other, or it fails. As such, it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity.“
The project will also draw comparisons with other photographic works by Polke, such as those taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which echo the historical Orientalist photography of the nineteenth century.[6] While they illustrate an intercultural debate that goes beyond sexual orientation, the problematic Western exoticization of the “Orient” or the “other” depicted in these photographs also allows connections to be established with Brazil. Ethical issues relating to street photography will also be discussed, such as the balancing act between artistic freedom and the right to privacy of those being photographed,[7] which is also raised by Polke’s photographs of homeless people sleeping in New York City.
The historical and theoretical discourses on photography outlined here will be combined with a material-based approach that, as Franziska Kunze argues, closely scrutinizes the opacity of the photographs as an artistic strategy.[8] What is the significance of Polke’s subsequent chemical manipulations of the delicate photographic material? Are they to be understood as part of the content, as an intersecting or even protective image layer? Or are they a product of the debates surrounding the medium in the 1970s, which broke away from Greenberg’s doctrine[9] that a photographic image should be as faithful and undistorted as possible? In order to answer these questions, I will compare the negatives with the material composition of the finished works, thus revealing the shift from snapshot to artistic intervention.[10]
This preliminary contextualization of the photo series São Paulo illustrates the potential pitfalls of photographing queer communities in foreign cultures. However, an analysis grounded in queer feminist and postcolonial approaches allows us to better grasp the complexity and reception of the series. A site-specific and material-based analysis of the photographic images opens up a further dimension of this analysis by placing Polke’s artistic strategies and technical decisions in the context of his time while simultaneously setting them apart from it.
[1] For more information see James N. Green, “‘Who Is the Macho Who Wants to Kill Me?’ Male Homosexuality, Revolutionary Masculinity, and the Brazilian Armed Struggle of the 1960s and 1970s,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 92, no. 3, pp. 437–469.
[2] See, among others, Franziska Kunze, “Sigmar Polkes Materialisierungsstrategien von Vergangenheitsphantasmen,” in Reader: Produktive Bildstörung; Sigmar Polke und aktuelle Perspektiven, ed. Anna Polke-Stiftung (Berlin: Distanz Verlag, 2023), pp. 163–172; Max Wechsler, “Sigmar Polke: West German Pavilion, Biennale,” Artforum, vol. 25, no. 2 (October 1986), p. 142.
[3] Susanne Huber, “Act and Position,” Snaps from a Queer Angle, Still Searching…, Fotomuseum Winterthur blog, August 21, 2020, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/de/2020/08/21/act-and-position/, all links were last accessed on June 6, 2024.
[4] The recent group exhibition Stereo_Typen at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 2019 took a closer look at this topic and also featured Polke’s photo series Weihnachten bei Polke (1973).
See Peter Backof, “Die Ausstellung ‘Stereo_Typen’: Überwindung des Geschlechts,” Deutschlandfunk, March 25, 2019, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/die-ausstellung-stereo-typen-ueberwindung-des-geschlechts-100.html.
[5] Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look, or, How to Think With and Against Visuality,” in The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality(London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 1–34: 1.
[6] For more information see Silke Lemmes and Nina Weimer, eds., Sigmar Polke: Road trip through the Middle East; Pictorial Photography from Afghanistan and Pakistan, exh. cat. Sies + Höke (Düsseldorf, 2020).
[7] Lorenz Müller-Tamm, Street Photography und Persönlichkeitsrecht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2023) [= Bild und Recht—Studien zur Regulierung des Visuellen, vol. 12].
[8] Franziska Kunze, Opake Fotografien: Das Sichtbarmachen fotografischer Materialität als künstlerische Strategie (Reimer: Berlin, 2019).
[9] Clement Greenberg, “Das Glasauge der Kamera” [“The Camera’s Glass Eye,” 1946], and “Vier Fotografen” [“Four Photographs,” 1964], in Essenz der Moderne: Ausgewählte Essays und Kritiken, ed. Greenberg (Amsterdam and Dresden: Verlag der Kunst G+B Fine Arts, 1997), pp. 107–113, 336–343.
[10] For more information see Lilian Haberer, “Re-Produktion, Sigmar Polkes Materialinterventionen als ästhetische, gesellschaftliche Praktiken,” in Reader: Produktive Bildstörung; Sigmar Polke und aktuelle Perspektiven, ed.Anna Polke-Stiftung (Berlin: Distanz Verlag, 2023), pp. 13–20. Haberer refers to Polke‘s deconstruction of “social assertions and representations” on a material or procedural level.