Littal Melnik: Your recent publication, Solidarity Must Be Defended, co-edited with Ezter Szakacs, is an anthology showcasing the visual arts within acts of transnational solidarity. Some of the events in the book surround the Non-Alignment Movement (founded in 1961 to advance the interests of developing countries independent of a Cold War position) while others navigate the Vietnam war, the movement for Pan-African arts, and the Algerian war against French rule.  Artistic and political alignments in liberation movements throughout the Cold War era are revisited through the lens that only hindsight can provide. How did this undertaking begin?  

Naeem Mohaiemen: It came out of a new reading group, expanding a completed film. In 2017, I had premiered Two Meetings And A Funeral, a three channel film about the pivot from the Non-Aligned Movement to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Once the project had premiered at Documenta 14 (Kassel, the Adam Szymczyk edition), I encountered curators, some from constituent parts of former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, who were looking into this archive as a political moment outside the primary duo-polar, dialectic dynamic of the cold war arms race. It is often challenging to find optimism about the Soviet project of communism, as it was actually experienced; and it is certainly difficult to decipher any left project within the contemporary Chinese state. The history of Non-Alignment emerges for these curators as a possible third way, a place of “could have been.” Although, I have to add that I have disagreements with the attempt to recuperate a uniformly positive reading of Non-Alignment; my film is, at times, quite critical of the foibles and blind spots that allowed the Venn diagram capture of member states by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.  

One of the Two Meetings screenings was in Budapest, and the curator, Eszter Szakacs, put together a reading group around the film. There were works people assumed I had read, but in fact there were case studies I had not encountered at the time of shooting. As I spent time with this reading list, Eszter and I started having conversations that exceeded the possibility of a single film screening or installation. We finally met at the March Meeting in Sharjah, and one question was, how could we make such a  reading list circulate in a way similar to the way an object moves within a museum network? Our answer was that much older form of a book, an edited anthology whose design (by Zalán Péter Salát) also echoed the three channels of the film. It was a long four-year process, twice the length of the film’s shooting, with many interruptions and digressions–the final one being a disruption to the Hungarian printing press’ supply network after the Ukraine war began. 

LM: The book is geographically far reaching, spanning movements in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, each with a seemingly endless number of invested and affected parties. How do calls for solidarity across borders balance those needs? 

NM: Transnational solidarity is a very productive, and also contradictory, field of organizing work. Entering this space allows for someone external to a geography (if we stay with just that one vector for now, although there are many others) to organize events, and speak out, at a time of crisis when it may be difficult for someone internal to that region to do the same. Local activists working under repressive governments may find they have to depend on allies outside their borders to keep a campaign going.

The movement for justice for Salvador Allende after 1973 is an example–artists such as Cecilia Vicuna (featured in our book) had to work within exile conditions in London, alongside British artists; the Pinochet junta made it difficult to do that work inside Chile. Vicuna’s forced exile from Chile after 1973 meant that a community of British artists became her fellow travelers in the movement for justice and democracy in Chile These new neighbors, produced by the conditions of exile, may learn about movements in Myanmar, Iran, or Palestine, but may not always learn about the nuances and contradictions within these geographies and movements.  In the moment of the event, the possibility of error in judgment is also there. Foucault’s experience with this dynamic, which is also the root of the book title and the narrative device in our introduction, is one where he reads the fervor within the Iranian revolution as a new alternative (another third way?) to industrial capitalism and totalitarian communism. He begins to develop a theory of the unified collective will, but he does not allow for the clashing realities spoken of by Iranian feminists, Islamic scholars, or French leftists.    

Eszter and I have tried to work through these contradictions in the arguments we make in the book. This is an area of divergence for us with other projects in the contemporary arts about “solidarity”–which we have found at times to be too reverential in their approach to these past histories. We have at times felt that within transnational work, the space for allies to debate tactics is limited. Your gesture of solidarity may be welcomed but your dissenting opinions will not find space.  That is the complicating and confounding aspect of solidarity across borders in what we call, “messy practice.”. 

LM: The 1960 protests, Anpo, were photographed by Hamaya Hiroshi, in solidarity with the Japanese students protesting their government’s treaty with the United States. How is this alliance with a familiar subject different? What was the impact of his work? Hiroshi goes on to focus on landscape photography. Do you think this reflects a level of completion or dismay?

NM: Hiroshi was motivated by a repressive rollback by the Japanese state in support of deepening ties with the United States, on the eve of a globally reviled war in Vietnam. He took photographs with the intention of both documenting and giving energy to the protests. Those images show the amount of energy and determination within the population. The US-Japan Security Treaty does take effect but the Kisha Cabinet is forced to resign. People make the argument that the government would have taken more repressive action without the protests– bolstered by his photographs as well as those of other artists. 

A turn towards landscape theory in his images may not mean becoming dismayed by politics. In 1969, Masao Adachi, strongly aligned with the radical movements in Japan, directed AKA Serial Killer, the story of a convicted murderer, through a lens turned to landscape. I saw this as the continuation of a political project without the documentary lens of some of his other films in this period. Later, Eric Baudelaire made Aka Jihadi, a homage to Adachi, which follows Arab-French men who set out in doomed journeys of cross-border alignments; that film also uses an unmoving landscape as the canvas for a complex story of failed projects.

LM: There are book chapters focused on the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Can you speak to the experience of the participating artist-activists in the moment and how this fits into the larger picture?

NM: The FESTAC photographs (in the chapter by Marilyn Nance, and another by Cedric Vincent and late Dominique Malaquais) show the official records of this gathering of African and African American artists in celebrating Pan-Africanism. In 1977, these images were inspired by a moment aiming toward solidarity between indigenous people and diasporas of African ancestry.  We now know that particular strand of Pan-Africanism did not endure; there was, in my opinion, a turning away and turning inward in the American experience from the 1980s onward. In the 1960s, Ebony published features on “Africa” as a possible utopia alternative, in the face of the ongoing fight for Civil Rights in America. By the 1970s there were African American artists turning to Africa, many of whom traveled to FESTAC. Although some of that energy endures and evolves, there is also a turning away, for complex set of factors which need a longer discussion.

FESTAC came at a specific time, a conjuncture. Jimmy Carter was in the White House as the anti-Nixon executive in an era marked by American contrition over Vietnam and Watergate appointed Andrew Young as the first US Ambassador to the UN of African American heritage.  Young championed having a big “American” delegation to FESTAC in Nigeria. He may have projected that if the African American community went under government support, possibilities of a radical alignment path (e.g., akin to the Panthers in Algeria in the 1960s) would become defused by an integrative approach. Marilyn Nance, as a photographer and an official delegate to FESTAC considers this a very beautiful moment that she was part of. We may look at her images with a different, forensic view because we are not witnesses of that moment. What happened to that energy that she recalls, and that we may be trying to reconstruct? The photographs may illustrate some of this, but they may also obscure other elements. I wonder about what was happening off-stage. Marilyn has an amazing image of Fela Kuti performing. Later she shared that this was a dissident concert, because Fela refused to participate in FESTAC as it was a government-sponsored event. So her memories, accompanying her images, already point to the other side of the story.

Littal Melnik: In 2020’s Elephants and Whales - The Photobook Genome, you experiment with randomly pairing photos. A new connection is born with each assortment. How viable are these connections compared to the ones of your extended continuous projects? 

Kevin Kunstadt: I make projects over time. An initial idea will be propelled and then put aside for another project or because the next step hasn’t yet been settled upon. In doing the random pairing project, in writing the essay–. I was opening new ways to think about photographs in a literary way. By changing a partner or an order I can reconceptualize narratives and create new meanings. I create space to be creative within the work.   

Continuing with the genetics analogy, not every assortment is something that can survive. For the essay I cherry picked three out of thousands. But only by doing the experiment did I find new connections. It’s a fun activity to get beyond the initial conceptions of the work.    

LM: Your ongoing work, Wet / Dry, features screen-printed and Risograph images. They appear to be purposely constructed with form, color, and texture. What were your initial intentions with this work and how have they evolved?

KK: The initial project is intensely descriptive photographic work. It’s a series of images utilizing every piece of the frame. Made in New Brunswick, Canada, these are images of shoreline, rock, and seaweed. 

What you are referring to was temporarily titled “Wet/Dry part II.” It’s a project that has been an exploration of printing; looking at moments that are hidden, or that we try to hide: halftone, dot pattern, or color separation. It celebrates what isn’t usually meant to be seen, through a new kind of image. Those rocks and seaweed became the initial fodder for this whole new project as well. 

LM: All For The Best, the 2020 Risograph, uses gold ink on black paper. There is a qualitative richness to this combination that I experience as a viewer. Can you speak to how this work came together; did you play with other color combinations?

KK: This began in 2015 as a response to a Murakami short story, Samsa in Love, which was inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In the story, Murakami described the outside world with an ambiguous sort of darkness. That’s the space I worked from in making the initial photos.

The images gestated for a while, as I sought a way to make them the most legible to other human beings. I played with various maquettes before hitting upon the gold ink on black paper. But the minute I saw it in that form I knew it was the right match.

Technically the photos have so much pure black that prior methods of printing had often buckled the paper. Aesthetically, it feels like an elegant solution to this. The gold shimmers, reflecting light over the solid blocks of shadow, which are now the paper itself. It’s a dark book but one with the promise of possibility.

Littal Melnik: In The Last Things, 2020- present, you transform messages originally communicated on urban streets. Through the photographic process, new color, context, and finish is given. How is the past alive in this work? What is the space for the original intentions, as well as the personal experience which brought you to make this work?

John Lehr: All of the decisions I have made in the creation of this work have been driven by a desire to have each piece exist in a vivid continuous present. I want to honor these fleeting gestures, underline their significance, and make space for a meaning that is untethered from context . I think all photographs are made in collaboration. In my case there is a collaboration between a thing in the world, my subjective perception, and the problems and potentials of photography. The goal is to place these dualities in suspension, and leave the resolution up to the viewer.

LM: Works in 2018-2020 The Island Position all begin with merchants’ similar objectives, the need to communicate. As a consumer, to be “sold” evokes a range of negative and positive feelings. Looking through these images, the beauty of them supplants the negative. When you experience the finished work, how does it compare to the original experience of finding the scene?

JL: The photographs in the series describe commercial facades from across the country that advertise not only what is for sale, but more importantly the idiosyncratic decisions of the people who own them. I think of these facades as being covered in the accidental signatures of people who are participating in a system that will never deliver on its promises. These personalized pleas for attention mingle with corporate signage, generic architectural forms, and the quasi-public space of the sidewalk. All of this gets compressed into a single form: the photograph itself. The way this compression happens is through a method of depiction that attempts to represent everything within the frame as an emotive, beckoning presence. Everything in the picture is pulled into the graphic space of advertising. The final framed works are mounted to individual plinths that present the works at eye-level, off the walls of a gallery space. All of this leads to a kind of frenetic isolation where both the subject and the spectator—or viewer—confront one another individually. One has to consider a single place, and the myriad of decisions that led to its creation. On another level this hyper-singular kind of picture places the viewer back into a cycle of discovery, observation, desire, and judgement that is central to the model of capitalism I am depicting. Viewing the picture completes this cycle, activates those material decisions, and implicates our own bodies and minds as part of the model.

LM: The technologies and potentials of photography continue to grow, the mores change. What, if any, connection do you feel to earlier street photographers, the Lee Friedlander and Walker Evans of the world?

JL: I feel very connected to a genre of photography that seeks to locate meaning in the quotidian spaces of public life. The tradition of Evans and Friedlander is one I deeply respect, but I am also conscious of the difference between my time and theirs, between their intentions and my own. What has become increasingly interesting to me are the ways in which our public spaces reflect a transition from a physical culture to a virtual one. This transition strikes me as one of the most important aspects of our time, and I have tried to develop a process that represents it’s physical and psychic impact.