We would like to congratulate this year’s scholarship holders Gökcan Demirkazık (University of California, Los Angeles), Joanna Nencek (Artist, Essen), and Mona Schubert (a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School, Cologne).
As part of her PhD “(Re-)Construction of a Medium: Photography at documenta,” Mona Schubert is researching photographic practices of the 1970s and will analyze Sigmar Polke’s photo series São Paulo. We are already looking forward to her research findings and would like to share an excerpt from her report here.
Polke Post 26 - This year's scholarship projects: Queering Visions? Sigmar Polke’s Photo Series São Paulo (1975), et al
POLKE POST 26
Gökcan Demirkazık, Joanna Nencek, and Mona Schubert are the scholars of 2024
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] Although homosexuality was decriminalized in Brazil back in 1823, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was only made illegal in São Paulo in 2003, around thirty years after Polke’s photographic series. At the same time, the Brazilian art scene, especially the Bienal de São Paulo, also faced strict censorship in the 1970s—an issue that local artists were only able to counter very subtly, as Isobel Whitelegg recently explained. [2] (…)
My analysis will initially draw on queer theoretical approaches related to photography. From an intersectional standpoint, it should be noted that photographing queer people from the Global South from the perspective of a heterosexual, cis male, Western gaze carries the danger of objectifying and reducing this community by portraying it as other. On the other hand, this reduction of Polke’s perspective fails to engage thoroughly with the subversive potential of his photographs. Susanne Huber moves away from this essentialist approach, arguing in the blog series Snaps from a Queer Angle that a queer work of art does not necessarily require a queer author, and that even queer artists can perpetuate hegemonic social systems. [3] As Huber emphasizes, the term “queer” refers to both actions and attitudes that attempt to destabilize conventional notions of gender and sexuality. This is why it is important to clarify Polke’s position within the West German photography scene, which, especially in the 1970s, was becoming increasingly concerned with gender identities, binary gender roles and sexual orientation. The recent group exhibition Stereo_Typen at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 2019 took a closer look at this topic and included Polke’s photo series Weihnachten bei Polke (Christmas at Polke’s House) from 1973. [4] Created two years after this, Polke’s São Paulo photo series should therefore be understood as less of an isolated phenomenon and more as part of the artistic debates that were taking place within Germany and in the context of his previous, individual projects. (…)
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. [5] 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, [6] 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. [7] 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 [8] that a photographic image should be as faithful and undistorted as possible?
Mona Schubert
[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] Isobel Whitelegg, “How to Talk About Biennials That Don’t Exist: Reassembling the Twelfth São Paulo Biennial (1973),” Tate Papers, vol. 34, 2021–2022, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/34/biennials- that-dont-exist-reassembling-twelfth-sao-paulo-biennial-1973 (accessed April 15, 2024).
[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/ (accessed April 15, 2024).
[4] 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 (accessed April 15, 2024).
[5] 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).
[6] Lorenz Müller-Tamm, Street Photography und Persönlichkeitsrecht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2023) [= Bild und Recht—Studien zur Regulierung des Visuellen, vol. 12].
[7] Franziska Kunze, Opake Fotografien: Das Sichtbarmachen fotografischer Materialität als künstlerische Strategie (Reimer: Berlin, 2019).
[8] 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.