Jordanna Kalman - Index 2014-2024

Know yourself not your role, it’s hellishly hard. – Shere Hite

When feminist scholar Shere Hite applied for a doctoral program at Columbia University, she wanted to study with acclaimed scholar Jacques Barzun. She was inspired by the elder scholar’s approach to history and was eager to learn from him. Unfortunately, he was very dismissive of her and told Hite her master’s thesis must be a fake, there was no way a woman living in Florida could write something of that caliber – an overt expression of class and gender bias. Hite nevertheless enrolled in the PhD program and did some modelling on the side to support herself during these years. Throughout her doctoral studies, she faced the same gender discrimination Barzun demonstrated early on, constantly having the value of work and ideas questioned. While modelling, Hite experienced something similar while witnessing the best and worst of the industry. A beautiful woman, she had success as a model and at times she even found it empowering as an act of self-expression. She also got a deeper understanding of gender power and hierarchies, as every day she was asked to embody stereotypes and fantasies reflecting male sexuality and desire. Despite this, she saw modelling as the best alternative; Hite understood her time and knew the only other career options available to her were secretary, prostitute, or wife, and in all of these she saw only bondage.

Index is a unique book, an intervention really, that attempts to undermine and rewrite photographic history.

Photographer Jordanna Kalman recently sparked my interest in Shere Hite when she recommended the documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite (2023). Of course, I had a basic understanding of Hite – the best-selling author that wrote about gender and sexuality from a woman’s perspective and was an instrumental voice of the 1970s feminist movement. Her defining work, The Hite Report, was first published in 1976 and documented the results of a survey the author shared with close to 100,000 women. Hite asked her subjects to anonymously share their experiences with orgasm, marriage, fidelity, and masturbation. The book was a first, truly exploring female sexuality in a way nothing had before, and proving to be a worldwide sensation with over 50 million sales. The Disappearance of Shere Hite was revelatory to me, as I had no idea about the depth of her accomplishments and accompanying controversies. She was a true revolutionary. The movie starts by recounting Hite’s first experience with Jacques Barzun, identifying this as a defining moment for her. It suggests that his immediate dismal served as an incentive, a rejection that made her want to work harder to prove him wrong. Indeed, Hite went on to explore history and sociology in ways that were much more challenging and innovative than the elder academic.

Kalman recommended the documentary on Shere Hite around the same time she sent me a copy of her newest artist’s book, Index 2014-2024, which I understood as a message for something she wanted me to understand about her work as a photographer. Index is a unique book, an intervention really, that attempts to undermine and rewrite photographic history. To compose her book, Kalman collected copies of Beaumont Newhall’s seminal text A History of Photography and pasted her own pictures on top of those used to illustrate the text. Most of her pictures are self-portraits, so in placing her pictures in Newhall’s text, she is staking her claim in photographic history. Kalman also renamed the chapters (each representing a different body of work) to further undermine Newhall’s vision of photography.

Kalman has made it her primary mission to make us really understand the white, male vision that defines/d photography.

Originally published in 1937 – about a hundred years after photography first materialized – while Newhall worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the book made an enormous, immediate impact and defined critical and historical approaches to photography for most of the 20^th century. Kalman makes Index (this is an ongoing piece, in effort to sustain it economically she makes them to order) using the 4^th edition of Newhall’s book (which itself had 7 printings). After watching The Disappearance of Shere Hite, I feel Kalman wanted me to understand Newhall like Barzun, as a dominating patriarch that controlled the levers of a system designed to keep ambitious women on the peripheries, to keep them from fully participating in conversations about art and culture that they felt are best left to men. Newhall helped shape the medium of photography as much as any other figure in 20^th century America. His approach to photographic curatorial practice and scholarship shaped the visions of other powerful figures, including his successors at MoMA – John Szarkowski, Edward Steichen, and Peter Galassi. Kalman has made it her primary mission to make us really understand the white, male vision that defines/d photography. From the beginning, Newhall made his work for a specific audience, by and for well-educated men of leisure, to document and preserve their erudite vision of photographic history (of course emphasizing the ever-favorite genre of female nudes).

Before I got into Kalman’s Index, I decided to revisit Newhall’s classic book. I made some quick counts of pictures in the book : 162 illustrations, 27 of which are pictures of women (and 4 of these are nudes), and only 7 by women. Those included are pretty predictable – Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käebier, Dorthea Lange, Bernice Abbot, Barbara Morgan, Tina Modotti, and Marion Post Wolcott. This is precisely where Kalman starts her work (and why she chose Newhall’s book) with an acknowledgement of the incredible exclusion of women from the discourse on photography. Ultimately, she wants us all to question what Newhall defined as aesthetic and intellectual accomplishment in photography by emphasizing that women should be regarded much more as meaningful and important agents of art, not just its subjects.

I’ve been interested in Kalman’s photography for years and think of her as one of the most clever and industrious photographers working today. She once told me her studio is her dining room table, so it is safe to assume that her tool set is modest, remarkable when you see her depth of experimentation and innovation throughout Index. Repeatedly, she finds new ways to challenge our understanding of the medium’s histories, technologies, and theories. In reading Index, I love seeing a broad cross-section of her work – perhaps understood as a mid-career retrospective – which clearly shows the evolution of her ideas and methodologies. Her pictures appear at once as playful, funny, thoughtful, angry, relentless, and beautiful. Part of what I admire about these pictures is how much, at heart, Kalman feels like a photographer’s photographer, by which I mean that while pursuing such a conceptually rigorous approach, she still relishes in the fundamental joys of making pictures – the remarkable simplicity of seeing ordinary things through a lens, her pictures built with a lovely feel for colour and tonality.

Part of what I admire about these pictures is how much, at heart, Kalman feels like a photographer’s photographer, by which I mean that while pursuing such a conceptually rigorous approach, she still relishes in the fundamental joys of making pictures – the remarkable simplicity of seeing ordinary things through a lens, her pictures built with a lovely feel for color and tonality.

There are some questions I have about Index, or at least some ideas I would like Kalman to address more fully. When she first made the pictures, I am not sure she thought of them as being elements of collage, which undoubtedly happens once you paste them on top of other photographs. Sometimes Kalman’s juxtapositions and designs for the page spreads works beautifully (the cover, for instance, is brilliant), at other times it just feels like she is pasting her pictures on top of others. To better explain what I mean, think of really good graffiti art versus random street tags; at times it feels Kalman is just tagging Newhall (not necessarily a bad idea, but I do prefer when her results look more sophisticated). I would also like to challenge her to think of new ways for her interventions. The book reappropriation is lovely, but it also makes for a clumsy and bloated object in the end (this is both a flaw and a charm). I think there are other ways she could create the discourse she wants between her photographs and Newhall’s text – I think of Emi Anrakuji’s (a photographer I often think of as similar to Kalman) early photographs made by printing her pictures directly onto postcards and other photographic ephemera.

I had a pretty amazing mom, and as a teen she encouraged me to read her books by Shere Hite, Nancy Friday, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lourde. I like to think this paved the way to my understanding of and appreciation for Jordanna Kalman and Index 2014-2024. From an early age I came to appreciate free-spirited women, those willing to break the rules and assume full ownership of their desire, sexuality, and art. Ultimately, it’s this free spirit that I admire most about Kalman. In Index, she can rage against the machine, say fuck you to generations of photographic thinking, while still making playful, creative, and beautiful photographs. She can be funny and tender, abstract and ruthless, or sophisticated and child-like – or in a word, free – and I think this is really what all of us are looking for with art. This is certainly what I love most about spending time with Kalman’s photographs, seeing such a beautiful struggle for self-definition using photography – and it’s hellishly hard.