A Global Becoming

John Haber
in New York City

New Photography 2023: Lagos

An-My Lê, Tracey Rose, and Aliza Nisenbaum

Amanda Iheme speaks of photographs as Memories, from a series called The Way of Life. So which is it, the past or the way we live now, and what will we choose to remember? It is a pressing issue for "New Photography 2023" at the Museum of Modern Art and for Africa.

Only three of its artists now live in Lagos, the port city in Nigeria, but all seven take it as their subject. All are at home, too, but laden with memories. Some things are just hard to forget. When photography goes global, one had better remember, like An-My Lê. Her retrospective, also at MoMA, opens with a photograph of a schoolgirl. Could it be her?

I doubt it, but with Lê you never know. What looks later like ground action in the Vietnam War is only a recreation in North Carolina or Virginia—or a training exercise in California for wars closer to today. Wall text speaks only of her return to Vietnam in 1994, nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, and what she set out to see. Still, she is not saying, and she herself had barely entered her teens when she left for America. But then she is never saying, in photos that speak for all sides, apart perhaps from her own. She is forever "Between Two Rivers."

That serious schoolgirl says little as well. She takes care with everything, right down to a proper hat, and her glance gives nothing away. Nor does that first series in Vietnam. Boys playing soccer dissolve in a blur, while adults mill about. A tiger cage and a vast interior with a single desk are devoid of life. Yet Lê is determined to see it all and to listen.

Tracey Rose loves a pose. Her work at the Queens Museum, across from Aliza Nisenbaum, takes no end of pleasure in putting on a show, but the actors and their roles are not so easy to pin down. Women put on makeup and snarl for the camera—one, a title explains, on behalf of the KKK. Others dress up a bit much for propriety or not at all. The camera may close in a standing figure or step back, to reveal a stage set or forest landscape as welcoming and puzzling as they. Just do not expect this notably political artist to score much in the way of political points.

Thick as a brick

Amanda Iheme closes in on single objects all but impossible to set aside. They are as stubborn as a summons to court and as thick as a brick. In a larger series, the brick gives way to entire buildings—emblems of British rule that barely took on a second life before facing abandonment or demolition. She documents the stages as Preservation, Stagnation, and Restoration. It sounds like a hopeful ending to a sad story, but is it? Is it more important to set the past behind us or never to forget?

Americans face much the same choices with regard to their own history, and the dispute can be bitter. Could it be any less so in Nigeria? Yagazie Emezi photographs a protest against death squads and police violence, where the future does not sound promising. As a protest sign has it, We Are Tired of Being Oppressed. Still, a man kneels in prayer—and, apart the sign and a bullhorn, this could just as well be the crowd killing time at a music festival. And indeed Marilyn Nance, a Brooklyn photographer, traveled to Lagos for a festival back in 1977, and her work hangs outside the show's entrance.

Not that the post-colonial present is free of constraints. That "tired" protester stands just past a sign calling for exact fare, and Logo Oluwamuyiwa has more than his medium in mind in calling a series Monochrome Lagos. It celebrates public spaces, with bicycles and pedestrians, but beneath utility towers cutting them off from the sky and along a highway cutting them off from the sea. Swimmers enjoy waters with the shine of oil spills. Beach-goers on Victoria Island for Akinbode Akinbiyi had better remember still another warning: Don't Defecate.

Still, people make their accommodations. Akinbiyi's subjects seem to enjoy the occasion—if only milling about and, by Western standards, not always dressed for the beach. As the series title has it, this is a Sea Never Dry. The photographers take things warmly and personally as well. A letterpress case for Kelani Abass holds snapshots, mostly of children, as a family history. He sees himself as "casing history."

Past and present collide in media, too, as with the dated technology of a letterpress. A cassette tape for Iheme serves, no doubt, for serious memories, if she can still play it. Abraham Oghobase overlays vintage text on colonial portraits, while Karl Ohiri preserves portrait studio discards, deteriorated and discolored. Photos are not above the occasional selfie or image manipulation either. Oluwamuyiwa's Oil Wonders has its swimmers above, but also feet below somehow upside-down. Who knows what it might take to walk on sand or water?

MoMA returns with a greater focus after a pandemic break from "New Photography 2013," "New Photography 2015," and "New Photography 2018," just as the Morgan Library prepares to display recent acquisitions in photography. It gives more space now to each artist and to a single place. The curators, Oluremi C. Onabanjo with Kaitlin Booher, see it as questioning old truths, including the truth of documentary photography, but it works well enough as a document for me. It does have the blur and heightened sheen of memory. Those discolorations in studio portraits run to far brighter hues than in life. But then the entire show is an "Archive of Becoming."

A war with many sides

An-My Lê is caught up in it all as well. That first series took her to the former South Vietnam, where she had lived, and to the north, which held childhood memories as well, but of her mother's childhood. It also includes shots of Louisiana, where she had fled. The Vietnam War reenactment did not just allow her to participate, but demanded it in exchange for letting her observe. Naturally she fought on both sides. And could that be her playing pool with sailors?

Lê gives the show's title in English, Vietnamese, and French, not just because Vietnam was once a French colony, but also because she spent much of her childhood in Paris. The two rivers are primarily the Mekong and the Mississippi, but also the Seine, the Rio Grande were she traveled to observe the border, and the Hudson, where she taught upriver from New York City. She also finds affinities. The Mekong and the Mississippi both have storied deltas and storied poverty, and the bayou has a parallel in Vietnam;s tall grass, swampy pools, and flat, parched land. It, too, might make a miserable place for a war. It also helps drive a lifelong conviction that landscape means as much as people.

How much do they mean? They are still not letting on. One might never know one side from the other in the reenactments without a photo's title. Maybe that is what was so wrong with the war. For ever so many, as another title has it, it was Someone Else's War at that. Events Ashore shows the U.S. Navy engaged in scientific research, earthquake relief, and flood prevention, but Lê knows that all these, a navy included, may descend on countries like a show of force.

Her latest series, a shift to color, takes her across the United States, looking for clues to its controversies and turmoil, and she herself may wonder whether she finds them. Students protest against guns, but half the time in the background. Migrant labor blends easily into a cattle drive, and the White House briefing room is breaking down or still setting up. Here Confederate statues are neither going up nor coming down. Her very artlessness can seem an evasion. The closest her reenactors come to war's drama and fear is lightning descending on night ops.

The curators, Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan, take one series at a time. Think of them less as finished work than as personal projects, to which Lê can devote herself completely. She does arrange one series in an open circle, like an old-fashioned diorama. Its fourteen landscapes cover a lot of ground. Does that add up to common ground or telling contrasts? Once again, she is not saying.

Lê's photos can seem all but artless, and well-meaning critics may praise her more for her history than for her art. The Navy removes unexploded ordinance, but with none of the poignancy of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for whom Vietnam's past is a minefield, or of boat people for Danh Vo. That diorama might be more immersive if its components meant more. Still, silence speaks to her own sense of helplessness or displacement. When she returned to her last childhood home, "I felt that I didn't recognize anything," but she kept looking. For her, a refusal to take sides is taking sides, but in a different war than either side ever knew.

Taking part

Tracey Rose plays her part in a costume drama that is itself hard to pin down. One may not even guess correctly where it begins or ends. She gets the central open area for an enclosure that might be left over from Xaviera Simmons the season before, give or take a fresh, seriously bright paint job. She shines brighter still on surrounding walls. So which belong to Ciao Bella, which sounds like a love song, and which to Lucie's Fur, which puns on Lucifer? No matter, with so content an all-woman cast.

Naturally the woman from the KKK, in whiteface but with a black eye or two and badly smeared black on her lips, belongs to neither one. Naturally, too, one cannot exactly enter the enclosure for a place to call home. Could that leave one in the forest, along with a woman on horseback with a preposterous top hat and another woman gesturing toward nothing that one can see? Could either be Lucie, which also puns on Lucy, the prototypical human being? One dare not call them primitive or in need of fur. They generate their own warmth, for those willing to play along.

One of two side galleries has room for work from twenty-five years, enough for a midcareer retrospective. Rose calls it "Shooting Down Babylon," a bit odd, perhaps, for a show that cultivates voices. There the South African artist turns down the poses just a notch and admits men. There, too, the story coheres even less, except when it is too obvious for words. The white train of a bridal dress stands tall, but for what ceremony? A loose knit in the colors of the African National Coalition covers what might be black tomato with text that she alone can read.

In the show's earliest photo, a man in performance etches his words into the wall of an arts institution that long barred blacks. Here the text is more cryptic still, and he might be sentenced to write it out like a schoolchild in need of a lesson. But then a biracial couple enacts The Kiss, after the sculpture by Auguste Rodin. There the lesson is clear—all the more so because the couple departs from Rodin's pose to become intimate but relaxed. Is Rose too politically correct or not nearly enough for a modicum of coherence? Either way, these could be fragments of a story waiting for her to find an ending.

Either way, too, this is one politically correct museum, which has its uses. It devotes its other gallery to Aliza Nisenbaum, who has had a residency at the museum and a commitment to teaching art to the Mexican American community in Corona. Indeed, the show's hanging and bright colors can suggest a schoolroom. (It adapts its title, "Queens, Lindo y Querido," from a pop song in which the beautiful and beloved is Mexico, not Queens.) It also depicts members of the community, including workers at a food pantry and LaGuardia airport—a taxi driver and security guard included, along with pilots and flight attendants. A couple shares the Sunday New York Times.

The large paintings run to a loose perspective that enhances its diversity and color. Like poses for Rose, that has its pleasures. Both are well-intentioned, and their intentions can still get in the way. Rose speaks of her art as about the body, performativity, post-colonialism, healing, and rituality. Have I left anything out, and has she? Maybe it would work better as a photograph.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"New Photography 2023" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through September 16, 2023, Tracey Rose and Aliza Nisenbaum at the Queens Museum through September 10. An-My Lê ran at MoMA through March 16, 2024.