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Sally Mann’s Photographs of Girls on the Cusp of Adulthood

First published by Aperture in 1988, Sally Mann’s At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women is an intimate exploration of the complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann made portraits that capture the excitement and social possibilities of a tender age—while not shying away from alluding to experiences of abuse, poverty, or young pregnancy—and the girls in her photographs return the camera’s gaze with equanimity. On the occasion of Aperture’s reissue of the long sought-after volume, the writer Rebecca Bengal looks at At Twelve through a dozen reflections. 

1.

Twelve. Auspicious and unrealized all at once. In English—on the heels of the sprinty lilt of eleven with its lucky seven-heaven rhyme—the sound of it is an awkward, monosyllabic clunk. It’s the last stop on the wheel of the clock, the year. Twelve, slant rhyming with elf, with wolf, a world of fairy tales. At twelve, still a girl, yet already preyed on by men. At twelve, split into a dozen selves.

2.

A cowgirl. A beauty queen in braces. The only girl on the softball team. Bathing suit, backyard, intransigent stare, one bare foot hooked protectively around the other. A sheath of dark bangs staring out from a painted Confederate battlefield. Businesslike in a blazer and skirt, a Persephone against a tree curiously bound with rope. In ribbons and lace, a belle perched on a patterned lounge, uncanny, unblinking, child and woman at once.

3.

Mann began making the At Twelve photographs in the early 1980s “in the odd hours … between jobs and diapers,” as she once put it (Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, 2018). The making of the series, first published in 1988, spans the Reagan presidency. Now the pictures speak back and forth across thirty-seven years. Three times twelve, and one to grow on.

A reissue of a decades-old work, the surfacing of images from decades before prompts reexamination, rediscovery, primes us to look for what they reveal about the era of their making, what they augur about the world we live in now.

Details of the era creep in, markers and emblems of the ’80s: hairstyles, a digital wristwatch, Calvin Klein sweatshirt on a corduroy sofa, the early-generation Nike swoosh, checkerboard Vans flung on the sidewalk, a glass liter-size bottle of Tab. But what Mann sought to make is not documentary, not a work about its time. Nor is it about these girls as individuals, though particularities of their lives enter the frame. The true subject of At Twelve is time itself, perceptions of time and youth, about being a girl, versus a woman, about the chasm between those two phases, and what it means to cross them, and what selves are lost and what selves are inhabited in that process.

I grew up four hours’ south of the place of their making, several years after, now of course long past the age her photographs have crystallized the girls in them. But when I go back to these images, I instinctively inhabit twelve again.

4.

Consider the subtitle. Portraits of Young Women. Twelve, not yet a teenager, but already a young woman? At twelve, as a girl, that is what you do, project yourself years ahead. Novels and films you don’t understand fully yet, but also do. Eavesdropping. Watching. Project yourself, because the world is already projecting, seeing you as it chooses if you let it. Portraits of Young Women, because the pictures try on other, possible selves.

For instance: Draped over the hood of a car, DOOM drawn in the dirty finish. Arms flung around her mother, eight months along in the summer heat. Arms flung around herself, a shield against the make-out scene behind her. Among the clotheslines neatly hung with the jeans of eleven other siblings. Camouflaged in flowers. Caught in a spray of light, languid and also precarious on a swinging footbridge, water rushing below. Showing how her mom’s boyfriend once pretended to hang himself from a tire swing. Only the dog (the consciousness of the picture) shows his eyes.

Sally Mann: At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women 50.00 A long sought-after reissue of an American classic, with all-new tritone reproductions.

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Sally Mann: At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women

Photographs by Sally Mann. Commentaries by Sally Mann. Introduction by Ann Beattie.

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First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a groundbreaking classic by one of photography’s most renowned artists. 

At Twelve is Sally Mann’s illuminating, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls, taken in the artist’s native Rockbridge County, Virginia. The age of twelve brings tremendous excitement and social possibilities; it is a trying time as well, caught between childhood and adulthood, when the difference is not entirely understood. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive introduction maintained from the 1988 original publication, “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” The consequences of this misunderstanding can be real: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. Within this book of portraits, many of which are accompanied by writings of the artist, the young women in Mann’s unflinching large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer’s gaze with a disturbing equanimity.

This reissue of At Twelve has been printed using new scans and separations from Mann’s prints, which were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a quality true to the original edition.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 56
Number of images: 36
Publication date: 2024-12-01
Measurements: 9.38 x 10.88 x 0.53 inches
ISBN: 9781597114585

Contributors

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Her many books include At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), The Flesh and the Spirit (2010), Remembered Light (2016), and Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (2018). In 2001 Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine. A 1994 documentary about her work, Blood Ties, was nominated for an Academy Award and the feature film, What Remains, was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. Her best-selling memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), received universal critical acclaim, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Mann is represented by Gagosian, New York. She lives in Virginia.

Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Prize collections. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and she was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently lives in Maine, Virginia, and Florida.

Related Content Featured 15 Inspiring Photobooks by Women Photographers

5.

Once, as Mann recounts in her memoir Hold Still (2015), her teenage daughter Jessie gently schooled a person who worried unnecessarily how she’d feel at her mother’s art opening, out in public with a picture showing her naked body on the wall: “But that’s not me. That’s a photograph.” 

The projected self is murky, a fiction. It’s a merger of the actual girl/woman, of the idea the actual presents for the photographer, of the interaction of the light and chemistry and invisible matter that transpires.

Consciously or not, the photographer seeks the twelves she might have become, those that might still exist within her. At Twelve is Mann’s second monograph, after the surreal The Lewis Law Portfolio (1977). Here she comes into her own as an artist, absorbing the influence of her mentor and friend Emmet Gowin (embracing the intimacy of the familiar) and her contemporary Nancy Rexroth (picturing the mythic in the familiar), and from numerous other masters of black-and-white photography, a stunning clarity, or what the novelist Reynolds Price described as Mann’s “serene technical brilliance.” Think of the book as a map, forking into divergent artistic paths, foreshadowing the work that would follow, the family pictures, the landscapes, the photographs of the human body altered by age and disease, decomposing and merging with the land.

6.

In the prologue to At Twelve, Mann writes that the portraits are equally about place. Lexington, Virginia, is itself an in-between; on the divide of North and South, mountains and ocean. It’s dominated by the mythic beauty of the Natural Bridge, a 215-foot geologic arch, the remains of an ancient cave, and it is soaked in Civil War bloodletting and the ruptures of colonialism and enslavement. The place where Mann had been a young girl, feral and country and clothing-averse, running down the road to chase after her family’s pack of dogs, pausing to pull hot tar from the asphalt to chew like gum. The place where she and her husband raised their three children. Twelve a natural bridge of its own. A crossing.

7.

This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her . . . This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

—Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

Mann precedes the book with a picture of herself at twelve, and a quote from Anne Frank: “Who would ever think that so much can go on in the soul of a teenage girl?” But I think of Mick, thirteen in the Georgia of McCullers’s novel, “at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl,” besotted with the music of a composer she knows as “Motsart,” overwhelmed by desire. “I want—I want—I want—but what this want was she did not know.”

Carson McCullers was just twenty-three when her debut novel was published to success that overwhelmed the author as much as her character; not long after, McCullers was spending time in Lexington where, as Mann recalls in Hold Still, “she was once hauled out of a bathtub at a mutual friend’s house by my mother, drunk, drenched, and fully clothed.”

Throughout At Twelve, affixed to the photographs are Mann’s short texts, alluding to stories outside the frame: the girl who made paper flowers to line the walk to the family outhouse, who in a couple short years would’ve “gone and gotten herself a baby,” but at twelve just liked to ride around listening to the radio. Setting words to whatever music played in the heads of these girls.

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8.

In Hold Still, published nearly forty years after she began the At Twelve photographs, Mann seeks to posthumously get to know her father, a deeply private, death-obsessed Texan who’d harbored his own secret artistic desires, yet opened a medical practice and passed his camera on to his daughter. But she launched that investigation in these pictures, drawing on the connections her father made within the rural community, families whose babies he delivered. Her own drives to make her large format portraits echo a doctor’s rounds. Here are lives just a few miles from her own. Theresa, pregnant at eleven, a mother at twelve, protectively watching her baby daughter who rests outstretched on her blanket, a newborn amid a bedroom full of raggedy, well-loved baby dolls. She has, Mann’s caption tells us, “already begun to shoulder the weight of adult reality.”

9.

They pose with images of other girls and young women. On the cover of At Twelve: Torso and cocked hip in the 1980s present, a hand gestures toward an inevitably decaying photograph of another girl, late-nineteenth century maybe, a long-gone relative maybe, a crack running through her hair ribbon, down the side of her face, through the puffed sleeve of her white dress. Because the photograph shows only the midsection of the ’80s girl, we see the face of history as her own.

In the book’s interior: Two sisters posed against a portrait of their doppelgänger ancestors. Window reflections in the portrait, so much light the faces in it begin to dissolve as by time itself. The gaze of the sisters in the shadowy present. The portrait-within-a-portrait both a past and a future.

10.

Mann writes in Hold Still that photographs destroy memory. Some truth to that. Regardless, her At Twelve photographs also show how the camera (and time) still have the power to reveal things unperceived in the moment. It’s a testament to the strength of these pictures that, looking at them now, you can’t help but wonder how Mann didn’t consciously apprehend what lay below their surfaces. And yet, as most artists can attest, at some point the act of making work produces its own fugue state; it is not possible to see it in totality, or near totality, until later, sometimes much later. For a photographer, lost in the black vacuum under the hood of the camera, the world turned upside down and backwards in the ground glass, so many details flickering in the span of a shutter, the full picture clear only via photography’s more useful metaphors: being developed and processed.

11.

On the page laid bare: The stiffened posture, the distance a twelve-year-old refused to bridge to pose with her mother’s boyfriend. Mann’s text tells us the girl’s mother later shot him in the face; the picture, which in retrospect the photographer sees with “a jaggy chill of realization,” suggests why. On the porch of a life-size playhouse, the dark shadow of a father looms behind his daughter as he exacts an awkward and menacing grip on her arm. Unsettling, the way they both dwarf the little-girl tea-party furniture, Alice in Wonderland proportions. Mann affixes a reference from Lewis Carroll, whose own relationship with young girls was dubious. But the imprint of darkness bears out here too.

All photographs Sally Mann, from the series At Twelve, 1983–1985
© the artist

12.

In At Twelve, the eyes are the punctum. Mann dwells on the “knowing watchfulness” of the gazes of the twelve-year-olds in her frame, the way they disarm; how, for the photographer studying her own prints, the eyes are “sibylline, foreboding,” possessing a “direct, even provocative approach to the camera.” The eyes meet the lens, an acknowledgment: that the picture they are participating in is not-them, but also, that they have permitted something of their own selves to be seen.

In the parting frame, slouched on (her father’s?) lap around an outdoor table of adults and drinks, relaxed, faces blurred or obscured. Only hers sees and is seen fully by the camera. Her brows raised, her eyes unflinching, questioning the photographer’s stare, our own. In her eyes—in all their eyes—is the assertion of the self, the power of the self.

Looking again at these pictures we intuit how much change lies ahead for each of them, on the cusp of becoming women. And yet, also clear: how very precious little change has occurred in the eyes of men.

This is not a sociological body of work. But we are in the midst of a deeply darkening age of politics for freedom of speech, and for women, for girls, for whomever the women and girls in these portraits might identify as, and it is difficult not to view it now without also drawing a line between the repression of our own era, and theirs, to all time. The young women in these pictures understand this too.

A Portrait of Ming Smith as an Artist in the Making

Ming Smith’s parents gave her a camera at a young age, and she fell in love with taking photographs. After college, she moved to New York to pursue a career as a photographer. In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased several of Smith’s photographs, making her the first African American female photographer with that distinction.

Smith’s career twisted and turned in the following decades. In 2017, a retrospective at Steven Kasher Gallery helped start a renaissance, and over the next few years, interest grew in the US and around the world, including her inclusion in Arthur Jafa’s exhibition A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at the Serpentine Galleries in London. In 2020, Aperture and Documentary Arts published Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. Since then, Smith has had a plethora of solo and group exhibitions, including the fall 2024 extravaganza that could be called “Ming-a-palooza”—four glorious presentations that took place in Ohio, where Ming grew up.

Over three days, two exhibitions opened at the Columbus Museum of Art: Ming Smith: Transcendence and Ming Smith: August Moon. Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts presented Ming Smith: Wind Chime while Ming Smith: Jazz Requiem – Notations in Blue was on view at the Gund at Kenyon College. Other highlights from recent years include the solo shows Projects: Ming Smith at MoMA and Ming Smith: Feeling the Future at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and numerous group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-colonial Resistance, 1950–2000 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In this interview, originally published in Smith’s Aperture monograph, we learn about the many ways in which Smith was a pioneer in photography, including being both the first female to join the Kamoinge Workshop, the Black photography collective, founded by Roy DeCarava and Louis Draper, and the first African American woman to have photos purchased by MoMA. Perhaps, most importantly, Ming talks about chasing the light—something she has done her whole career, and continues to do all over the globe, stealing away in free moments or rolling down a back-seat car window and taking photographs on the way to an opening. What fuels Smith is her unquenchable desire to chase the light until she has seemingly defied time, making it stand still, taking the shot that she sees in her mind’s eye, the shot that’s ready to share with the world. 

Ming Smith, West Indian Parade, Brooklyn, 1973 Ming Smith, Jump, Harlem, New York, 1976

Janet Hill Talbert: When did you first start taking photos?

Ming Smith: My dad earned a living as a pharmacist, but he really was an artist. He did watercolors, linoleum cuts; he carved wood sculptures. He made home movies, and he was also an amateur photographer. And, of course, my mother would join in and share his world. He bought my mother a camera, a Brownie, but she didn’t use it much. It just hung in the closet. So, on my first day of kindergarten, I asked her if I could take it with me to school, and she let me. I took photos that day and I carried them around with me for years, but I lost them somewhere in my move to LA.

Talbert: You were born in Detroit and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Tell me about your childhood.

Smith: I grew up in a culturally rich environment. My grandparents met at college. My grandmother was a teacher, but in Columbus she wasn’t allowed to teach—Black or white students—I’m not sure if that’s because she was African American or because she was married. Although he went to college, my grandfather worked as a postman—which was one of the few good jobs Black men could have back then. He and my dad each owned their own homes, and there was great pride in the fact that the homes had garages, gardens, and vegetable gardens, all lovingly maintained. Every fall my parents would plant a hundred tulip bulbs in our yard; and every spring a riot of red tulips would bloom. My grandparents grew all kinds of things—pastel pink peonies, fragrant lilacs, fascinating morning glories, and green bushes called Juniperus x pfitzeriana. I remember crickets chirping, fireflies, train whistles, and my grandmother sitting on the front-porch swing reciting poetry—Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”— along with my grandfather and other seniors, who would recite their favorite Paul Laurence Dunbar poem. My father also recited Shakespeare, “To be, or not to be . . .”—signifying nothing.

I was a quiet child, a loner—always in my own world. When everyone else was watching TV, I would be upstairs in my room alone, reading, drawing, coloring, making dolls, or outside jumping rope until the bats came out. But my grandfather was a breath of fresh air to me. He was the one who taught me about color. He was a postman, but he also painted the exterior of houses, and he had a thing about color. The colors he would paint on a house, on the trim, would delight him, and he would say to me, “Look at that color, really look at the color. Look at the whole house and then each part, each color.” I started to become aware of color, and color combinations. I became aware of different hues of color. I used to ask my relatives, “What’s your favorite color?” My father’s was blue. My grandfather and mother both liked red. My grandmother’s favorite color was yellow, and her favorite fabric was yellow dotted swiss, and that’s the name of one my photos. And when I married David Murray, a jazz musician, the fabric of my dress was yellow dotted swiss.

I loved my grandfather, and he’d always chuckle and say, “You’re my first grandbaby!” When I was about eleven, he took me on my first trip to New York, along with his youngest grandchild, a boy, as well as a daughter, who still lived at home. On another trip, he took us to the Paul Laurence Dunbar House in Dayton, Ohio. My grandparents weren’t wealthy, but they were aristocratic in nature. Education and culture were important to them, and that’s why I was going to be a doctor, because that was my grandfather’s dream for me.

Ming Smith, Self-Portrait, ca. 1988

Talbert: You mentioned your early photos and drawings—do you still have any of them?

Smith: My mother was constantly throwing things out because my dad was a “collector,” so when I went to college, she threw away my drawings, and even some awards I’d won. I thought she’d thrown away everything, but after she died, we were going through her things and I found a box that said “Ming”; it was an old Kodak photo box, and it had a few of my early photos. Inside, I found a photo I’d taken of some girls who were my classmates. I was about ten, and we were in Columbus, Ohio. My mother also saved some photos that I’d taken while I was in college at Howard. One weekend, a friend and I had driven to New York and I took some photos in Washington Square Park. I would have completely forgotten that excursion if my mother hadn’t saved the photos. One’s pretty good, so I’m glad she saved them.

Talbert: You went to Howard University in Washington, DC, and you were pre-med and graduated with a BS in microbiology. At the time, Howard only had one photography class, and you took it.

Smith: I was always taking photos, so I took Howard’s only photography class. One day, I asked the instructor if I could earn a living doing photography, and he said that I could be a medical photographer, or I could photograph machinery. That was it. Those were the two options, and neither of those things appealed to me. So I was kind of lost, but I was still passionately taking photographs. At one point, I met the campus photographer, who said he would process my film for me. I gave him about a hundred rolls of two-and-a-quarter film, but I never saw the film again.

Talbert: After Howard, you moved to New York and became a model to support yourself. There are lots of misperceptions about you and your career, and I think it’s important to establish the fact that you weren’t a model who became a photographer, but a photographer who supported herself as a model.

Smith: I didn’t call myself a photographer, but I was constantly shooting. I was also dancing and modeling, but I didn’t define myself as a dancer or a model. I was just a young person in New York trying to find my way, and I had to support myself, so I took a job as a model. August Wilson worked as a dishwasher, and many other people take jobs to support themselves while they’re pursuing their art.

Ming Smith, Brown-Skinned Model and Steeple, New York, 1971 Ming Smith, Instant Model, Brooklyn, 1976, from the series Coney Island

Talbert: Nevertheless, because you were a model, and a beautiful woman, it seems that society assigned labels to you. In 1973, you joined the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York–based group of photographers. You were the only woman in the group. In the 1973 Black Photographers Annual, the first publication in which your photographs appeared, a text noted that you had started taking photos the year before, when in reality, you had been shooting since you were five. Can you talk about how you got into Kamoinge?

Smith: I was on a modeling job and I was sent to Anthony Barboza’s studio. As I was waiting in the foyer, I overheard some men talking—or rather, debating—about photography: was it an art form, or was it just nostalgia? I was fascinated. Every time I went to Barboza’s studio, I learned a bit more. Barboza was a commercial photographer, and people used his darkroom, so there were people coming in and out all the time. It was a meeting place, a hub of creativity. And that’s how I met Lou Draper and Joe Crawford. Lou was the one who invited me to join Kamoinge, and Kamoinge was my introduction to photography as an art form. That was a major awakening.

Talbert: Kamoinge gave you a framework?

Smith: Yeah, it let me know that there were fine-art photographers out there. There was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know about Roy DeCarava, one of the pioneers who got together and started Kamoinge in 1963. When I joined in the early ’70s, I did some research, and it seemed logical that these men, this group of Black male photographers, wanted to take control of their own images—their humanity—and not see stereotypes, or someone else’s propaganda about them. That was radical.

Talbert: It was also radical that you were the first woman to join Kamoinge.

Smith: People ask me, “How did it feel to be the first woman in Kamoinge?” But I never dealt with that at all. I just never dealt with it. I was just an artist, a photographer. And I think that within any profession, the way you carry yourself has a lot to do with everything. Everything.

Talbert: So what did you learn from Kamoinge?

Smith: Kamoinge was about the critique, but I also learned about lighting. I learned about W. Eugene Smith, even though I had seen a few of his images before. Lou worked for him; he used to print for Eugene Smith. So Kamoinge opened up the entire world of photography for me.

Ming Smith, Oopdeedoo, Brooklyn, 1976, from the series Coney Island Ming Smith, Coney Island Detailed, Brooklyn, 1976, from the series Coney Island

Talbert: Kamoinge was about both critique and technique?

Smith: Yes, and a few other things, like setting up group shows. But the main thing was, you would bring your work and put it up on the wall and everyone would critique it. And they could be really cold—cold-blooded. I remember the first time I showed one of my photographs, someone said, “I don’t see that there’s anything to that photo—it’s just a photograph of a baby.” That was my first critique. But Lou Draper was the one who said that I was a really good photographer; in fact, he’s the reason why I had a show at Kasher (Steven Kasher Gallery retrospective, 2017). The first time I went to Kasher Gallery was to hear Lou Draper’s sister. She was giving a talk connected to Lou’s posthumous 2016 exhibition. I got very emotional while she was talking, because I loved Lou. He was a humble, kind, and nurturing man.

At Kamoinge, I also learned about printing, and what type of paper to use. I printed in college, but I didn’t know a lot about print quality. So I developed my sense of what I wanted the print quality to be. Technique is important, you have to have tools to build a craft, just like with acting or dance. It’s really about the artist and what they do with their tools. Because there are some folks who are fine technicians, fine photographers, but I’m not moved by their work.

Talbert: Did Kamoinge give you a sense of community?

Smith: It was a community, but eventually I didn’t really hang out with them. I was too much of a loner. I didn’t live in Harlem. I lived in the West Village. I had another life because I was modeling, so my friends were mainly in that industry—fashion designers, other models. But I wasn’t really deep into either of those lifestyles. When I was living in the Village, I became friends with photographer Lisette Model and her husband, Evsa. Lisette taught Diane Arbus. I learned about Katherine Dunham, and I started to dance. I learned about ballet mistress Syvilla Fort. So I was in a lot of different worlds. I liked to poke my head in and poke my head out—kind of like what I do with my lens.

Ming Smith, The Window Overlooking Wheatland Street Was My First Dreaming Place, Columbus, Ohio, 1979 Ming Smith, Aunt Ruth, Columbus, Ohio, 1979

Talbert: Many of your photographs have a lyrical, dreamy quality. One of your early images is called The Window Overlooking Wheatland Street Was My First Dreaming Place (1979). What were you dreaming about back then?

Smith: When I was a kid, I was a good student, but my teachers would frequently say on my report card, “She’s always daydreaming,” or “She daydreams too much.” But I loved school. I loved being away from home.

Talbert: Why?

Smith: My father was really strict, critical, and he had high expectations. He was a very disciplined kind of person. I wasn’t relaxed around my parents. At a very young age, I saw a lot of pain in people—in my father, in my mother, in my family.

Talbert: Do you think that taking photographs was a way of escaping that pain, or releasing it, or processing it?

Smith: I guess it was just a way of . . . surviving. My aunt suffered from depression. In one of my photos, Aunt Ruth (1979), she’s in bed but you can’t see her; you only see her form under a sheet. But just seeing her in bed with the covers pulled over her head, that could represent all kinds of feelings of depression, oppression, fear, and the doubts in myself—things I’ve experienced. But because I can look at the photo, I am reminded of the pain, acknowledge it, but also keep moving.

A lot of women in my family were very strong. They were rebellious, they were definitely feminist in their own way, and many didn’t ever fit in. They were on the outside. So there was a lot of pain. And I was aware of that, because not only did some not fit in, some didn’t survive, and it seemed to me that their lives were tragically wasted. One committed suicide. Another was in and out of a mental institution. And others suffered nervous breakdowns. A lot of the women were very, very smart, and they weren’t just going for the “okeydoke”—meaning what was expected of them or acceptable at the time. Yet they didn’t survive.

Dakar Roadside with Figures, Senegal, 1972 3000.00 Collect this iconic limited-edition print by Ming Smith, known for her lyricism, blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes.

$3,000.0011Add to cart

[image error] [image error]

In stock

Dakar Roadside with Figures, Senegal, 1972

$ 3000.00 –1+

$3,000.0011Add to cart

View cart Description Aperture is pleased to present an exclusive limited-edition print by Ming Smith, which is featured in Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020). The monograph is the first to bring together four decades of the artist’s work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, dynamic street scenes, and deep devotion to theater, music, poetry, and dance. This iconic image of a man seen from a distance captures the essence of Smith’s artistic vision, exuding momentum and spiritual energy. The edition is limited to thirty signed and numbered copies and five artist’s proofs. Proceeds from this print sale directly support the artist as well as Aperture’s publishing, educational, and public programs. Details

Dakar Roadside with Figures, Senegal, 1972
Edition of 30 and 5 artist’s proofs
Archival pigment print
11 x 14 in.
Signed and numbered by the artist
Price to increase as edition sells

*Please allow two weeks for orders to ship

About the Artist

Ming Smith was born in Detroit and raised in Columbus, Ohio. A self-taught artist and former model, in the 1970s, she published her early work in The Black Photographers Annual. Smith’s work has been collected by and presented in major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Brooklyn Museum; National Museum of African American History and Culture, and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Serpentine Galleries, and Tate Modern, London. Beginning in 2017, her work was included in the celebrated traveling exhibitions We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, as well as in Arthur Jafa’s exhibition A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, which traveled from London to Berlin, Prague, Stockholm, and Porto, Portugal. In 2019, Smith’s solo exhibition with Jenkins Johnson Gallery was awarded the Frieze Stand Prize at Frieze New York. Smith lives and works in New York.

Talbert: That’s powerful. You’ve talked about survival before. In your conversation with Arthur Jafa connected with his 2017 exhibition A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, which featured your work almost like a solo show, you mentioned the importance of thriving, and not just surviving. Some of your female relatives didn’t survive, but you survived through photography.

Smith: Part of getting through life is riding the tides. It takes effort, and I’m glad I kept going. When I was premed, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I was constantly taking photographs, but I never told anyone I had dreams of becoming an artist or a photographer, even when I came to New York.

Talbert: When did you finally declare yourself an artist?

Smith: When I started getting my first paycheck! [Laughs]

Ming Smith, David Murray in the Wings, Padua, Italy, 1978 Ming Smith, Christmas Constellation, Brussels, 1978

Talbert: What was your first paid job as a photographer?

Smith: Well, it wasn’t really a paycheck, but in 1979, when the Museum of Modern Art purchased two of my photographs (David Murray in the Wings, 1978; and Christmas Constellation, 1978), that was a validation. I thought my work was good—this wasn’t egotistical, because the conversation was between me and my work, no one else. But it was great to be validated by having your work purchased by a major institution.

Talbert: You were the first African American woman to have your photographs acquired by MoMA. How did that happen?

Smith: One day I was passing MoMA and I remember saying to myself, “I’m going to be in there one day.” I didn’t dare say it to anyone. Sometime later, I heard that they had an open call and you could drop off your portfolio on a certain day of the week. On the day I arrived, the receptionist thought I was a messenger—and she treated me like one. When I went to pick up my portfolio a few days later, the same receptionist told me to have seat, because the head photography curator, John Szarkowski, wanted to meet with me. The curator Susan Kismaric escorted me into a room where eight of my photographs were placed on a tabletop. Kismaric said that John loved my work, but they could only purchase two for their collection, and she made me an offer. It wasn’t even enough to cover my expenses—and I told her that. She said, “What! People try to give us work!” She couldn’t believe I wasn’t happy and was hesitant to accept the offer, but she gave me the weekend to reconsider. When I told my husband, he said take the money.

Talbert: Let’s talk about your technique.

Smith: Dealing with light is the main focus and attraction. I do a lot of night shooting, and even in the dark, I look for the light—the way light comes in. In all my work I improvise with light, with what’s there. I feel my way through things, and I let the spirit guide me. When I’m shooting, I usually have a sense: “This is the photograph that I’m going to print. This is the moment.” I kind of always sense that, but I continue to shoot anyway, because a lot of times you’re just shooting and grabbing moments—so you don’t really have time to do any editing in your mind, but sometimes you just know, “This is the shot.”

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Talbert: It’s a feeling that you have?

Smith: Yes, a feeling, and that’s the turn-on for me—photography is about the discovery. After the photo is printed and I look at it, I can define or refine the image in an artistic way. But basically, when I shoot there’s a moment that is the moment, and you kind of know that you have a good shot, at least I do.

I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out. Because you can be focusing on an object and you know you have to hurry up, because a cloud may be coming. You know how the sun comes in and out because of the clouds? The image could be lost in a split second. I go with my intuition.

Talbert: Who are some of your influences?

Smith: Katherine Dunham, of course, and Zora Neale Hurston. Romare Bearden is my all-time favorite. But I would also say Monet, Chagall, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Matisse, Roy DeCarava, Lou Draper, Gordon Parks, Lisette Model and Diane Arbus, Brassaï, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Frank, Deborah Turbeville, Sarah Moon, and on and on and on. And, of course, some of the Kamoinge members.

Talbert: Cartier-Bresson said, and I’m paraphrasing, that photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing.

Smith: It’s just being in that moment. You can’t be so much in your head. That’s why I like dance too. You have to be in the moment, you have to be right there—it’s like a form of meditation.

Talbert: What’s the relationship for you between dance and photography?

Smith: It’s about always looking at lines and the quality of the movement. It’s about seeking energy, breath, and light. The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.

Ming Smith, America Seen through Stars and Stripes (Painted), New York, 1976

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Talbert: You use many prost-production techniques, like tinting, painting, and collage. Why did you start painting your photographs?

Smith: Visually, I just wanted more. The quality of the image is the utmost important thing to me. So if I saw an imbalance in some way, I would apply paint. I didn’t want to throw away a print, but instead I wondered, “How can I make this better?”

The jumping-off point for a painter is the blank canvas. For me, the print became the blank canvas, and I wanted to explore. I wanted to see what I could do with that. I first started tinting my photos in the ’70s, but I didn’t know why. And then I remembered that my mother had had a job hand-tinting photographs. My father was furious, because I chose to go to Howard University instead of Ohio State—he would not give me a nickel, even though I was on a full scholarship. So my mother—who did beautiful embroidery—learned to tint photos from a neighbor and would slip money by mail to me to help me out while I was in college.

Some people like my photographs better with paint, some don’t. I like them both. Usually if I show a photograph, then it means I like it. Like America Seen through Stars and Stripes (1976), with the blood-red paint. That’s a good photo, but the paint adds more to our story—Deborah Willis uses the word “enhanced” when talking about my painted photos, meaning that the paint adds to the original image. The red paint in America Seen through Stars and Stripes emphasizes even more the violence that was done and is still being done to Black people. My Aunt Stella had an expression that she would use from time to time, and I remember her sitting in a chair and saying, “The things I’ve seen America do. The violence that I’ve seen them do to us . . .” She was referring to Emmett Till and moments like that. She never really said specifically, but when she said that statement, I felt it. So America Seen through Stars and Stripes comes from the feeling that I had when she said that.

Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space II, New York, 1978 Ming Smith, Grace Jones, Studio 54, New York, 1970s

Talbert: You frequently use double exposure in your work.

Smith: I had a photo of James Baldwin. I didn’t want a mediocre photograph of him, because he’s grand. He’s huge. Genius. He’s one of our most beloved icons. The same with James Van Der Zee. So I thought, Why not put them in the skies of Harlem? Because Baldwin and Van Der Zee are a part of who we are as a people. They are part of us, part of Harlem, part of our ethos.

Talbert: You were married to jazz musician David Murray, and music is important to you and your work. You’ve made photographs of musicians and entertainers. What was your introduction to jazz?

Smith: I had an older cousin, Eugenia, who I was very close to. She was brilliant. She had a pharmacy degree and a doctorate of psychology. She was so good to me. Eugenia’s style reminded me of Lorraine Hansberry. One day when I was about twelve, we were riding in her car from Detroit up to Ann Arbor, where she lived, and a song came on the radio. When I asked her, “What’s that?” she said, “That’s jazz.” And later another song came on and I said, “What’s that?” and she said, “The blues.” Then she asked me, “Which do you like better, jazz or blues?” And I said, “The bluuues!” drawing out the word. And she just laughed, but it was also a way of affirming me, like, “This girl is smart, she’s hip, she knows! She knows what’s going on.” But it was true! I really love the blues.

I think photography is mystical, spiritual, magical. It really is.

Talbert: How would you say the blues informs your work?

Smith: If people could feel what I feel when I hear a Billie Holiday song—that’s what I would want them to feel when they look at my work.

Talbert: You’re largely self taught; how did you learn?

Smith: I took photos. I photographed. If a writer wants to write, they’ve got to write. If someone wants to paint, they’ve got to paint, right? It’s in the doing of it, the repetition of it. Then the conversation is between your work and you. It’s not about anybody else. It’s just you and your work. That’s the way to develop as an artist. The answers are not on the outside. Part of me sticking with photography is that I could look at my work and see if it was good or not. I didn’t care what anyone else said. In modeling and dance, there was always someone scrutinizing me, but with my photography, I held myself to the highest scrutiny. I decided if my work was good or not.

Toni Morrison was a mother, and full-time editor, and she would get up early in the morning before she went to work—three or four hours early—so she could just write. She had commitment, discipline. She was discovering herself as a writer. It’s the discovery, the exploration of being an artist and doing the work. That’s the essence of it: your voice or your vision must come from you. It’s in the doing of it. It’s the trip along the way. That’s where the real work is. That’s when the talent comes through.

Ming Smith, Goghing with Darkness and Light, Sunflowers, Singen, West Germany, 1989

Talbert: There’s a tendency to pigeonhole African American artists into particular locales, but you’ve traveled extensively and taken photos around the world. In a sense, you’ve chased light in many places on the globe. Can you talk about your photo Goghing with Darkness and Light, Sunflowers (1989), about the light on that particular day?

Smith: In 1989, I was in Germany traveling in a van [with the David Murray Octet] and my sons, Kahil and Mingus. We were passing fields and fields of sunflowers and I said, “Excuse me, we’ve got to stop! I just need to take this shot! Give me two minutes. I just need to stop and take this photograph.” And they did stop, because we’d been traveling for twelve to fifteen hours, and for me to ask one time to stop didn’t seem too much to ask. I was used to doing my work on the side, or in between. But when I saw that field I thought, “Of course, van Gogh is going to paint sunflowers because that field of sunflowers was the most beautiful scene.”

Talbert: How long did you stop?

Smith: I jumped off the bus and quickly took some shots, and that’s why it’s called Goghing with Darkness and Light, because we were on the go, and the sky was heavy with clouds, just like van Gogh’s light.

Talbert: Do you have any other moments like that that you remember vividly? Moments that you absolutely had to capture?

Smith: Years ago I was in Japan, again traveling with David, and I saw dewdrops on a tree and a full moon. It had been a full day. My husband and I had taken our son Mingus to the Japanese Disneyland. We had been in the studio with David. And now it was early evening and it was starting to rain. We’d been out since about seven o’clock in the morning, plus we had jet lag. I said, “I want to shoot this tree.” And David said, “O, no, do we have to stop?” And Mingus said, “O, Mommm! Do we have to?” [Laughs] We were very close to where we were staying, maybe a half a block, and I said, “Just go; go home.” So I stopped and took the photograph. I was tired, I didn’t feel like dealing with them saying, “O, come on, what are you doing? Do we have to wait for you?” [Laughs] I’d spent all day long doing everything that David wanted to do, and after that, everything Mingus wanted to do, and they didn’t want to wait a few minutes while I took a few shots. But I’m glad I asserted myself, because the images are still alive and treasured after thirty years.

Ming Smith, What’s It All About?, Harlem, New York, 1976 Ming Smith, Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York, 1976

Talbert: Your career started in the 1970s, and then you had a show in 2000, twenty-five years later, in LA [at Watts Towers Arts Center] that was written up in the LA Times. Many other things happened in between, and recently there’s been a new appreciation—a resurgence of interest in your work. You’ve had a retrospective at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, and your work appeared in 2017 in Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum. You’ve also shown at Frieze and Frieze Masters; and institutions including the Whitney, Getty, and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, as well as MoMA, have all acquired your work—and that’s just in the last few years. In the quieter times of your career, how did you keep going when your work wasn’t getting as much attention as it deserved? Were you still shooting? When did you start painting?

Smith: Going through a divorce in the early ’90s, I moved to LA. The first time I started painting, as opposed to color tinting, was on Easter 2000. Mingus was away at a basketball tournament, and I didn’t feel like going anywhere and socializing, so I had quiet time. But almost everything that I’ve ever created came from my quiet time. Even when I was married and on the road with David, I would leave the family in bed and I would go out and shoot, and by the time I returned, they were getting up.

Talbert: When it’s quiet.

Smith: Quiet. No distractions—versus distractions, like I’m painting and all of a sudden someone says, “Will you fix me a sandwich, or spaghetti?” just when I was in the middle of my thought. [Laughs]

Talbert: When you look back at your career thus far, what were the highlights? Do you have any regrets?

Smith: Well, of course, being in MoMA was the highlight, and being in We Wanted a Revolution. I was really happy to be included. Those were the two main highlights. But actually, it’s being acknowledged for my work.

In 1981, I was in a show called Artists Who Do Other Art Forms at Linda Goode Bryant’s gallery, Just Above Midtown (JAM). I wasn’t really part of that scene, but I remember when Linda called and asked me to be in the show, I just said, “Sure.” She had heard I was a dancer too. In front of my installation, I danced and David played the saxophone, and my photographs were projected onto the wall, flashing in the background. Someone videotaped it, but I never received a copy. Someone somewhere has that tape . . . Because I was dancing, I wasn’t able to photograph, but I recently found a slide from that night. For the most part back then, I was shooting without getting any compensation or acknowledgment. So I was lucky to be a part of JAM, along with other artists, like David Hammons, Dawoud Bey, and Howardena Pindell.

Talbert: It goes back to your belief about doing the work. Being in that show was just part of doing the work.

Smith: And I was in complete support of Linda! A Black woman? Starting her own gallery? Linda Bryant had a dream.

Ming Smith, Two Pool Players, Pittsburgh, 1991, from the series August Moon for August Wilson Ming Smith, Mother and Child Deciding, Pittsburgh, 1991, from the series August Moon for August Wilson

Talbert: You have about fifty to sixty photos that make up your series August Moon for August Wilson (1991), and you’ve talked about turning them into a book similar to The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), which had photographs by Roy DeCarava and text by Langston Hughes.

I just love that book. It was my inspiration. After I saw August Wilson’s play Two Trains Running (1990), I wanted to go to Pittsburgh and shoot. His characters were characters I knew and loved. In Pittsburgh, the people were light to me. They were light within all the violence and all of the pain. They were folkloric.

Talbert: Some of your photos have appeared on album covers.

Smith: I did some album covers for David, but also for the World Saxophone Quartet (WSQ). So along with the album covers, I took these beautiful photographs of the quartet and I had them framed—and framing was expensive. They were having a meeting and we took the framed photos to the meeting, and what did the guys do? They said to David, “You just want to promote your wife!” They didn’t want to look at the photos! Male egos! I hurried out of there and I was so furious, I threw them down on the sidewalk, breaking the glass.

Talbert: But the photos did make it onto the album, right?

Smith: Yes, but guess what? A year later, those same guys asked me, “Do you have a free PR photo we can use?” And for about ten years after that, those photos were still being used for promotion, including in DownBeat magazine.

Arthur Jafa first discovered my work on the album covers of David and WSQ. We’d never met, but he called me after he finished the cinematography for the film Daughters of the Dust (1991) and told me how much he loved my work and was inspired by my images. We didn’t meet face to face until years later.

Ming Smith, Pharoah Sanders at the Bottom Line, New York, 1977 Ming Smith, “Transcendence, Turiya and Ramakrishna,” for Alice Coltrane, 2006, from the series Transcendence
All photographs courtesy the artist

Talbert: Your Transcendence series (2006) was shot in Columbus, and many of the photographs have been enhanced with paint. Some have a little paint added to them, others are awash in paint. They are exquisite.

Smith: The title Transcendence comes from the music of Alice Coltrane. Transcendence was part of her spiritual journey, her musical journey, her life journey with her husband, John Coltrane. When I was growing up in Columbus, there was Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, violence, and all kinds of injustices. Columbus, Ohio, could be very racist.

Talbert: So the Transcendence series is about elevating contemporary Columbus?

Smith: Elevating my experience of Columbus, because when I left Columbus to go to college, I said I would never go back. I didn’t have any help choosing a college. I just figured things out on my own. My high-school counselor kept saying to me, “Why do you want to go to college? You’re only going to be a domestic and scrub floors.” So I had to deal with that type of attitude. He didn’t understand. No one really understood. I used to be attacked by a little white girl almost every day on my way to school when I was in first grade. I had to pass by her house, and every day she called me the N-word. It was because the neighborhood that had been all white was becoming Black. So the Transcendence series was a way of transcending all of that, creating art out of that pain.

Talbert: Transcendence seems to be one of your long-running themes, maybe even your philosophy about photography.

Smith: I think photography is mystical, spiritual, magical. It really is. That’s what it is.

This interview originally appeared in Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2020).

Vija Celmins Isn’t Interested in Photography

A star-streaked sky, the undulant surface of the sea, a gooseneck lamp, a glowing electric heater, the delicate architecture of a spiderweb, a Porsche cruising along a California freeway—these are some of the subjects that have captured the vivid attention of Vija Celmins. For more than half a century, the Latvian-born, US-raised artist has produced absorbing paintings and drawings that are often inspired by—and mistaken for—photographs. “The image is just a sort of armature on which I hang my marks and make my art,” she has said of her work, which is born of hallucinatory concentration and, in her view, never truly complete. Pieces are worked on and reworked, again and again, becoming less about depiction and more a record of mark making that describes the passage of time.

For Aperture’s spring issue, Celmins spoke with the photographer and her friend Richard Learoyd, who is, likewise, known for a decelerated, highly technical approach that gleans meaning from the limits of representation, in his case by using a camera obscura to create crisp, hyperreal portraits and still lifes haunted by the history of painting. The two artists discuss Celmins’s philosophy as an artist, falling in love with gray, and the rewards of slowness.

Vija Celmins with Comb (1969–70), 1970
Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Richard Learoyd: I’ve looked at quite a bit of your pictures over the years, and it seems that photography is useful to you in some way. Do you think that’s true?

Vija Celmins: Well, you know, I am not really that interested in photography.

Learoyd: We know that!

Celmins: When I was really young and in school, I wanted to be an abstract painter, of course, because that was a going thing. I think that I agreed that the painting was about itself. But I was unable to really make the marks that were just marks, to build a space that I thought was the proper space. I couldn’t incorporate that two-dimensional plane, which is very important as a reality; it is not just a support, it is what keeps you out of the work and invites you in at the same time, because of the convention of hanging these two-dimensional things on the wall.

Learoyd: It’s a pictorial gravity, isn’t it? It’s something that draws you toward it and pushes and repels at the same time.

Celmins: Right. First of all, as you can probably tell, I’m not a big colorist. But I did try to make de Kooning paintings the best I could when I was in school because that was heroic art for me. I think I liked the fact that he was a European, that he came here, that he was sort of lost, then started all over again, and that he also had some skill in drawing. I had been drawing since I had come to the United States, not being able to speak English, and was put in school. I drew, and they left me alone because I couldn’t speak.

Learoyd: Where did you first arrive?

Celmins: We were brought by the Church World Service to the United States and put in a hotel until somebody who wanted to take in refugees after World War II signed up for us. And somebody did—unfortunately, in Indianapolis. I was nine when I came. I taught myself to speak. I used to go to the library and get first-grade books, although I could read a total book in Latvian. I was kind of a loner, which I still probably am.

Somehow, I got fascinated with art, but in a primitive way, let me tell you. I drew all the things that girls drew, like horses, movie stars. Somehow, it made a kind of life. When I was in high school, I happened to be the person that drew. If anybody needed anything, they pointed to me. I got into that mode like it was my life. So, I started getting a little more sophisticated and looking at paintings, and then I went to art school.

Learoyd: At that point, were your parents taking you to museums or galleries?

Celmins: No, no. Never been to a museum till I was in high school. I think they had a class in a museum, but I didn’t even realize what that was.

We sang all the time at home, with other people, and in the church. See, I never really understood the church. I’m not a religious person. But somehow, I stumbled into this world. I didn’t yet realize the complication of making something that you cannot explain.

Learoyd: Well, it’s the enigma, isn’t it?

Celmins: Right.

Learoyd: Which is the problem.

Celmins: Which is what we’re dealing with right here. It’s like making something that is full and meaningful but not accessible with words. You have to experience it.

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Source Materials), 1999. Iris print on paper Vija Celmins, Snowfall (coat), 2021–23. Oil on canvas

Learoyd: My personal experience is very different, but also similar in the fact that I was never dragged around museums and galleries and things as a kid. I was aware that those things existed, because television existed. You went to art school when you were how old?

Celmins: I got out of high school, and I got these scholarships for art school. My parents were both working and poor. I went. I found my set of people. My people who all ended up in art school because of something that attracted them, or because they were already good, or whatever. At that time, women weren’t supposed to be smart. I don’t know what the problem was in the ’50s, you know? I really liked science a lot, but it never occurred to me that I could also learn things that were very valuable, about how life turns . . . I used to catch bugs myself, and sometimes cut them apart to look at them, but I never really had that training, which is too bad. So, I was sort of funneled into the two-dimensional plane. Ha ha.

Learoyd: What I felt was that my life began when I started making photographs, because it was the only thing I was good at. I wasn’t even good at it at the time, but I was interested. And then what I found was that other adults, besides my parents, became interested in me.

Celmins: Yes. That happened, of course, to me too. My parents totally ignored me. I had to make my own relationships and so forth. When you started, did somebody give you a camera? You see, I never had a camera.

Learoyd: I used to look at magazines with pictures of cameras, and I thought they looked sort of cool.

Celmins: I like that. That’s great, thinking, What is that? You can make pictures out of this thing.

Learoyd: Yeah, they looked cool. I didn’t have a clue what to do, because I was terrible at everything. You eventually moved to LA, right?

Celmins: I moved to LA because I got a scholarship. Before that, I got a scholarship to Yale, at that summer school, where I met probably my favorite artist my own age, who was Brice Marden. He was so good right off the bat.

Then I went back to Indiana, and I tried to paint these big abstract paintings. Now they look very thin, because I never really saw the relationship of that plane. I know it sounds kind of old-fashioned, nobody thinks like this anymore.

Learoyd: What do you mean, thin?

Celmins: They were abstract blobs and lines and trying to make a structure that stayed on the canvas. Then when I went to LA, I kept that up. But I got to where I needed some other kind . . . I think I started doing landscapes.

Learoyd: What sort of landscapes?

Celmins: Oh, from California. I didn’t have enough money to buy canvas. Then I bought these big sheets of paper, and I made these drawings of LA, but they looked . . . What did they look like?

Vija Celmins, Bikini, 1968. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY Vija Celmins, Porsche, 1966–67. Oil on canvas

Learoyd: I saw a painting of yours. It was a painting looking out of the window of a car. I think it’s a Porsche driving down a highway.

Celmins: No, no. That was later. So anyway, in California, I veered away from doing totally abstract work because I didn’t think I could make it somehow strong enough. See, when you’re making a painting, it has to have some density. It’s a little more physical than just the photograph, I hate to tell you. The surface has so much art to play. Is it going to be a slick, dopey surface? Or is it going to be a thick, blobby surface? It has a visceral quality. I began to realize also that there was me that was not in the work— and I sort of started putting me in the work, my experiences. I started painting objects. Food. Everything.

Learoyd: The ham hock?

Celmins: I painted all the food I ate.

Learoyd: So, this is where the photographic thing comes in. Let me tell you . . .

Celmins: Wait. Let me tell you. I didn’t look at the photographs. But then, with Soup (1964), I had this bowl of soup. That actually came out of a little photograph from a housekeeping magazine.

Learoyd: But tonally, those paintings—the lamps, the ham hock—they have a relationship to photography because you’ve chosen not to overemphasize the color.

Celmins: I had this very gray studio, a long gray concrete studio. I was going to see what I could do with what I could see. But whatever you do is sort of whatever is inside you, I guess.

Learoyd: Things are gray. A lot of things are gray.

Celmins: Okay, so this is how I moved into sometimes using a photograph. I went looking for war books so I could understand what we went through, and there were very few war books at the time. This was in the early ’60s. I found a few things, which I tore out of books, and I painted some airplanes, because I used to love hearing the American bombers coming. ZzzzZZZZ. I went through this period where I tried to find a relationship to the work that was not so borrowed from what was out there. That’s when I fell in love with the grays, because the photographs were all gray for World War II. I got to painting the airplanes, seeing if I could make them fit like a painting, but still be like an object.

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Learoyd: You look at a picture on the wall, and it’s either an object or a window, I guess.

Celmins: I never see a window. It’s a flat piece of paper, and it’s got a relationship in the real world in front of you. It’s a very subtle feeling that, somehow, is dimensional or flat at the same time. Then also, you try to figure out how you’re going to paint it, whether you’re going to paint it really smooth, whether you’re going to jazz it up, how are you going to handle the thing. You’ve got to remember that paint is like cheese. It’s just totally malleable.

Learoyd: All the possible permutations of what can happen with that bit of goo.

Celmins: Basically, you can’t really say too much about it without sounding a little stupid. But you’re actually making an experience for somebody. You’re not only experiencing an image, you’re experiencing the reality of the room and the flatness. I can’t stand it when things jump out of the painting.

Learoyd: We’re sitting here. We’re looking at a drawing. Could that drawing have existed without the photograph?

Celmins: I don’t know. I guess because it’s just graphite and paper that maybe it feels more like a photograph. I don’t think I could have done that kind of precise drawing without a photograph.

Learoyd: I think that people look at your drawings and paintings and think they look photographic sometimes. And when people look at my photographs, sometimes they say they look painterly, but they couldn’t be more photographic.

Celmins: You have a barrier, which is really the paper that you print on. My work can be very soft and dimensional.

Learoyd: The enormous problem with photography is its surface.

Celmins: People now look at art as if it is photography, which is also totally wrong. You have to let yourself experience how the edges are, how the thing sits.

Learoyd: There’s a weight to your work that’s often quite small. I know you’re painting bigger now. But a lot of the things were quite small. And there seems to be this sort of density of the object. Were the star drawings done from scientific photographs?

Celmins: I began to fall in love with the lead of a pencil. I have this whole thing where I got involved in space because I liked all that stuff coming back, all those images. And I used the images, and then I found these things of the outer stars and galaxies. They are not really stars. They’re galaxies. But it’s a way of pushing the pencil to the utmost degree, the very last things.

Vija Celmins, Web No. 1, 1999. Charcoal on paper Richard Learoyd, Looking away from Lacock, 2013
© and courtesy the artist

Learoyd: And what about the spider webs?

Celmins: Oh, the spider webs? Well, I thought that I was sort of like a spider myself. I found these little books of spiders, and I thought, I’m like the spider myself, taking all the things. These were also all drawings. Then, did I do a painting of the spider web? I think I tried one. I liked the pencil.

Learoyd: Well, you can just pick it up.

Celmins: I probably liked it because I didn’t like sloshing around. And then finally, I said to myself, I have to start painting. By this time, I moved to New York, thank goodness, because the audience was more sophisticated here, and there were more museums, and there was more of a supporting group. I finally had to let go of the pencil and say, I’m going to pick up the brush, because it’s capable of doing a much more dimensional thing. When you’re looking at something, you’re actually looking at an object. You can’t run to the illusion. That’s what photography did, which was bad—you run to the image, because the image is so exquisite.

Learoyd: It’s perfect. It’s a perfect thing.

Celmins: But the experience is total. You actually made your photographs more interesting by making them so bit by bit by bit. But still, it’s not painting.

Learoyd: What photographers have to do is, they have to try to find excitement in the exterior world to make the object resonant enough to hold that illusion.

Celmins: Yeah, but you made some boring things, too, like the trees, which I love.

Learoyd: They’re very boring.

Celmins: I like the really boring thing. Yeah, that’s one thing that the photographer can do, which is very difficult to do in the painting, because somehow it kills the way that you’ve constructed the paint to act. And making the paint act in different ways is a big part of painting.

My tools are like hours, and it becomes a real part of the work. Whereas in photography, it’s instantaneous, and then you pick which image.

Learoyd: I was never interested in that side of photography, because my life isn’t very exciting. I just go home. I go to the studio.

Celmins: Well, we’re not talking about your life, we’re talking about the object you’re making.

Learoyd: The object. Exactly. But I think a lot of photographic people, they have to sort of go into the world and seek this subject.

Celmins: Yes, they get very interested in the subject matter. Your method involves that slow way of building the image and making it so precise that it hurts you to look at the thing. It’s really very shocking, in a way.

Learoyd: Yeah. But I think that my problem, going back to the idea of the surface, is that I use a paper that is incredibly shiny, because it means it has no surface. I hate photographic surfaces.

Celmins: I think people now look at all art as if it’s a photograph, which is really upsetting. And they also paint it as if it’s going to be a photograph, and it’s very graphic and sort of stays on the surface. I just saw a Francesca Woodman show, which is totally different. Really upsetting to look at the photographs, because it looks like the devil is after her.

Learoyd: It’s very raw, isn’t it? A very raw sort of expressionism.

Celmins: Right. You have a very different quality. With your work, your eyes think, Oh, my God, I can’t look at any more. It’s so incredibly precise. But hers is emotionally upsetting in a way. Like, I’m running through my short life with this instrument in my hand. See the corners of rooms and places to hide.

Learoyd: Pretty horrible. But so powerful. I didn’t get to see your show last year at Matthew Marks Gallery, but there were some quite big paintings, right?

Celmins: Yeah, I started letting, maybe, some of the paint be a little bit more. Sometimes, I sort of hide the painting, but I let it have a little bit more of an expression. You realize—finally, in my old age —that the paint has its own life, that it can be thin and fat, and it makes it very dimensional. And then sometimes, some of the work that was really small was very drawing related, but drawing with the paint.

Vija Celmins, T.V., 1964. Oil on canvas Vija Celmins, Envelope, 1964. Oil on canvas
All works © the artist and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Learoyd: If somebody sees something that relates to how they see it with their eyes, they think that’s photographic, right? So they go, “Oh, that’s a sort of photographic reference.” Because it’s an interpretation that they understand.

Celmins: I really resent that too.

Learoyd: Because the nuance of painting is the ability to do that, or not do that, but it’s a choice. Whereas in photography, there’s no choice.

Celmins: But the painting itself has a life that’s connected to the artist. The best photography has some relation to seeing something that relates more to life-experience seeing, and the way it’s made is much more hidden than in a painting, which is really made out of dust with your hands and brushes and stuff. Sometimes, I hide that, and sometimes, I show more of it.

Learoyd: I think it’s interesting that in photography now, there are more people interested in photography than ever, and yet, there’s so much terrible photography.

Celmins: Every single person is a photographer. And the subject is interesting without the experience of the room. Painting itself is more restrictive. The image is made out of other material, and it has a relation to your body, and how big it is, and how small it is, and how smooth it is, and how rough it is. It’s just got a little bit more experience.

Learoyd: The sort of success or failure as an artwork is whether it contains enigma in some way.

Celmins: Maybe enigma.

Learoyd: I think your relationship to photography is that it’s been of value to you.

Celmins: Well, sometimes there’s the image in my head, and I walk along, and I see a book that’s open in a bookstore, and there’s an image that I may have done myself. I see the grays that I’ve been looking for in the photograph, and I sometimes say, Oh, wow, I’ll follow this and see what I can do with it.

Learoyd: But the things themselves, the objects that you’re making, the paintings, they’re just very much of themselves. They have their own gravity.

Celmins: They don’t really mean the things that people think they mean.

Learoyd: One last topic that we can go into, which is about the sort of generation of a personality in artwork. The problem with photography is that everyone has the same tools. I decided I didn’t want to play with the tools that everybody else had. So, I made cameras, and I used materials in a different way. And you rejected abstract painting, asking instead, Well, what am I surrounded by?

Celmins: Abstraction actually is more complicated than that. But I don’t know what to think about the photograph. The photograph has its own life that I don’t know that much about. We have them everywhere. And for you to make such an unusual-looking experience is pretty extraordinary.

Learoyd: And you leave so much space for the person looking at your paintings and drawings. So much room for interpretation.

Celmins: But you’ve got to realize that it’s material. You see, it’s not an illusion, the painting.

Learoyd: It’s a thing.

Celmins: It’s real. There’s dust on it. It’s the pencil being pushed. It’s the material.

Learoyd: It’s not telling. It’s an invitation, isn’t it?

Celmins: Well, it’s an invitation to figure out . . . I don’t know what it is. But we’re all doing it, aren’t we? I mean, the question is how to be able to experience somebody else’s work in more than just a snap, and to be able to see aspects of it that are really unsayable and have to be in the area of experience.

Learoyd: They have to be experienced.

Celmins: They cannot be said. If you use an image, you realize that the image is an interpretation of something that is not in front of you, that is made by somebody, and how it’s made. It’s like all these instantaneous things that occur.

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Learoyd: In a painting, there’re a million decisions.

Celmins: Yeah. Making a work of art, there’re a million decisions. And sometimes, the decisions are harder for people to see, and sometimes, they’re more obvious. I don’t know whether one is better than another. It’s a complicated thing that people do.

Learoyd: I know that in photography now, the way that people take photographs, they’re going to take a picture of this glass. They take fifty pictures of this glass, and then decide which is the one that they like. So, there’s no decision-making. It’s editing rather than making decisions.

Celmins: My tools are like hours, and it becomes a real part of the work. Whereas in photography, it’s instantaneous, and then you pick which image. It’s hard to do either one, it seems to me.

Learoyd: It’s all pretty difficult.

Celmins: It’s all pretty hard for you. You made your own camera and everything. I was going to . . . never mind.

Learoyd: Go on. Tell me. I want to know.

Celmins: I sometimes think that people have lost some ability to experience things in a more complicated way because life is so full of stuff now, and the imagery is everywhere. Remember how rare painting used to be? And how rare art making? Actually, it was the only thing before photography took over and there were images everywhere—but not images like you’re making.

Learoyd: Photography can be incredibly moving. You come across a picture of an old girlfriend or a lover. It’s not even sentimental or mawkish. It’s just an evocation of this other experience, and you’re taken back. And all those sensations.

Celmins: And how about seeing those early photographs of the Chinese emperors? And the Pyramids? I love to see all those early photographs. How about all the animals you get to see that you will never see?

Learoyd: That are extinct.

Celmins: You see? Painting does not work that way. And you have made your work sort of like that, but also more like art. Most photographs are not art. They’re information. But there are thousands and thousands of painters now.

Learoyd: With the advent of digital photography, I’ve taken less pictures in the last twenty years than a normal photographer will take on a fashion shoot in one day.

Celmins: Well, you’re a slow photographer.

Learoyd: Yeah.

Celmins: And you have a slow camera.

Learoyd: I have everything slow. I’m slow. The whole thing is slow.

Celmins: I like that.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting.”

Why Are So Many Contemporary Painters Remaking Famous Images?

About eight years ago at an after-party in Chelsea, I noticed another guy that sort of looked like me: a white guy with a shaved head and beard, a Brooklyn fag archetype. When we were finally face-to-face, I said, “I guess we could do a kind of Persona thing,” referring to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 art film, though I’m not sure I spelled that out. Kevin said, “Yeah, I love that movie.” So I handed my Polaroid camera to a friend, and we set about re-creating some of the extreme twinning close-ups. The resulting pictures were nerdy, sexy, and kind of spooky, rematerializing images that lived privately in our heads, becoming a psychic scrim over us in real time.

Between my sophomore and junior years of high school, in 2004, I saw Persona projected in a classroom at a do-gooder publicly funded summer school in North Carolina—god bless. I had consumed a mainstream diet of television throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and this was the first time I ever saw a movie that I realized was an artwork. The revelation, even if I didn’t have the language for it, was the way it made me conscious of its visual form, the incandescent force of images in and of themselves.

Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966
© AB Svensk Filmindustri (1966). Photograph by Sven Nykvist

Persona was released on DVD that year, so I ordered a copy off eBay and set about trying to understand its impact on me. In an early scene, a skinny boy approaches a hazy abstract screen switching between rear-projected images of two women’s faces. He holds out his hands, rubbing them across the surface, but whatever he touches, it isn’t the women or the pictures, which evanesce and recede. These morphing scenes mirror our psychic position as viewers of the film we’re about to watch, in which two women blur into and out of each other. Playing it over and over at night—I never was chill—I started pausing the DVD and drawing every frame.

When I told all this to my hot doppelgänger, also a painter, he said he’d made Persona drawings too, studies of a famous scene: a roughly minute-long static close-up of Liv Ullmann, stone still as the screen slowly dims to darkness, at which point she finally shifts into profile, pressing her hands over her face. At first, you wonder if it’s a photograph, but the Bach chamber music keeps playing, and then the light changes unevenly, and you realize she’s making herself into a still image in real time. He envisioned drawing a long row of them, a gradient fading to black.

Judith Eisler, Isabelle (side eye), 2022. Oil on canvas
© and courtesy the artist Sam McKinniss, Britney Spears, 2021. Oil on linen
Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

I recognized a shared impulse—an intense connection with these film images, and the attempt to come to terms with their power by remaking them—while looking at Judith Eisler’s exhibition Dreams, Jokes, Mistakes at Casey Kaplan, in New York, last fall. Her canvases present an ambiguously recognizable pantheon of art-film goddesses (Isabelle Huppert, Anna Karina, Romy Schneider) as well as a mixture of pop heroines (Debbie Harry, Grace Jones, Britney Spears). Throughout the 1990s, she’d set her camera on a tripod facing a television, taking pictures from paused VHS tapes at moments of maximum psychological potency and visual uncertainty. As technology evolved, her source material eventually came to include imagery photographed from computer screens and internet screenshots, incorporating pixilation, moiré patterns, and colder tones.

Painted lush and shiny though very flat, when encountered as objects in person Eisler’s canvases are almost abstract, slowing the act of looking in ways that work against the image as it exists as either a photograph or film. Eisler, born in 1962, on the cusp between baby boomers and Gen Xers, uses an approach that is decidedly post–Pictures Generation, a small but influential photography-driven movement of the late 1970s and ’80s whose artists appropriated mass-media and art-historical images to upend notions of authenticity, and who saw the seductions of painting as suspect. The critical tide shifted in the 1990s and early 2000s with the international success of the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, whose ghostly, aggressively spare paintings dissociate historical photographs, textbook diagrams, and film stills, mounting a sustained philosophical interrogation of the political and psychological utility of images. However, for all its similar coldness and flatness, there is a uniquely devotional aspect to Eisler’s work, verging on fandom. In her returning over and over to the same actresses, there is a sense that Eisler is charting her own personal identifications—that they are images she wants to live with for hours on end, making painting an indefinitely attenuated space of self-reflection.

Cynthia Daignault, God Bless You, 2024. Oil on linen. Installation view, Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

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Eisler’s art prefigures a kind of image-driven painting, using references to film and pop culture, that has lately become ubiquitous. Take Cynthia Daignault’s God Bless You (2024), a series of twenty-four black-and-white oil paintings, each 12 by 16 inches, which collectively represent one second of projected celluloid depicting the famous shot of Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca (1942). In close-up against an almost blank background, her face lit like a sculpture held in perfect stillness, staring at Humphrey Bogart off-screen, she delivers her final line: “God bless you.” Bergman does not quiver or blink, moving only her lips, almost whispering the phrase in a single breath. It’s the understated culmination of the high-drama plot, where the actress’s face processes a number of overlaid emotional switchbacks, her realization mirroring that of the audience, all looking for the last time.

In being split into twenty-four individual paintings, the single filmed second is not only extended indefinitely but expanded into a matrix. To produce an exact likeness of one of the most famous images in the world—repeatedly, so the differences can be compared—is a virtuoso feat that serves to underscore the vitality of painting as a medium today. Rendered with an almost impressionistic hand, the broad luscious strokes emphasize how the work is not the result of a photomechanical process but handmade, an act that aggregates and condenses time. This approach opens up an entirely different way of relating to images, a step back from their flow and a meditation on that astonishing affective weight.

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Born in 1978, at the transition between Gen Xers and millennials, Daignault represents a broader generational attitude that is now coming fully into view. While film as subject matter seems to be about another era, these artworks effect a sleight of hand because in our present moment of social media all categories of pictures are placed on an equal horizon: the simultaneous and contextless expanse of the internet. As such, the supposed anachronism of these references as well as painting itself combine into an unexpectedly agile device for addressing our present image world.

No painter embodies this change more fully than Sam McKinniss, born in 1985, who paints a seemingly arbitrary assortment of highly charged pop culture, often related to movies but spilling into music, TV, paparazzi shots, and viral celebrities, including Michelle Pfeiffer licking her spandex suit as Catwoman, Britney Spears dancing with a yellow python named Banana, and that little boy with boots and a bow tie yodeling in the Walmart, whatever his name was. These images, which have little in common, are equalized by McKinniss’s trademark performative brushwork and fevered chroma. Physically transformed, they function differently as paintings in a gallery space from their life online; when reintroduced to Instagram, they signify their role as paintings of famous pictures, so much that these recursive circuits are closer to their real content. McKinniss’s project feels diagnostic, pointing to the broader desire of the viewer to consume these images rather than to his own fandom. McKinniss invests each of his canvases with attention and seriousness that only partially redeem them from being a commentary on the vulgar tastes of contemporary audiences.

Lucien Smith, Untitled 14 (Timothy), 2024. Acrylic airbrush on canvas
Courtesy the artist

Lucien Smith’s exhibition People Are Strange, held at Will Shott gallery last autumn, offers a counterpoint. Born in 1989, Smith was a star right out of art school, surfing the spectacular market boom-and-bust of process-based abstraction famously dubbed “zombie formalism.” For his first New York exhibition in a decade, he presented grids of eighty small portraits of celebrities, closely cropped faces pulled from pictures online. The canvases are around the size of an iPhone and painted in airbrush by a robot. The results have the kind of submerged softness that recalls photographs transferred onto the tops of frosted cakes. These are clearly not made by a human hand, which intensifies their aura of degraded fetishism.

On close inspection, the images seem to dissolve in a way that mirrors the digital photograph on a screen, but held in suspension. It’s hard to shake a feeling of aggression toward the art world, with its own predatory system of publicity, and the show astutely identifies the current version of collector bait as being not decorative allover abstract paintings but figurative paintings of images culled from the internet. From the mosaic of seemingly generic celebrity, we are asked to choose our favorite. Nested within that invitation is the question, What does it say about me that I want this shitty little icon of Lana Del Rey? Or Billie Eilish? Or Timothée Chalamet? What is at stake in this fantasy of identification, commodification, and cultural consumption?

Lady Diana on board the Jonikal, 1997
API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Witt Fetter, Diana, 2022. Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Derosia, New York

These are dynamics taken up with perverse intelligence in the large paintings by Witt Fetter, an artist born in 1994. A 72-by-48-inch example titled Diana (2022), and its pendant, Jonikal (2023), shows a golden figure balancing on the end of a passerelle over a blue sea, instantly evoking the famous telephoto snaps of Princess Diana on Mohamed al-Fayed’s yacht in 1997, photographs that became emblematic of her hounded isolation and inability to escape the public’s insatiable desire for her, culminating in her tragic death the following month.

The artist was three years old when the paparazzo took this snap, which continues to live in the cultural unconscious (resurfacing most recently through its dramatization in The Crown). The recognition is immediate, cemented by the titles, so much so that it takes a moment to realize that it is not Diana we see. This blond has hair trailing to mid-back and is bare breasted, wearing only a bikini bottom. Realizing that it is, in fact, a self-portrait illustrates the strange substitutions and exchanges that characterize our attempts to see ourselves in and out of pictures today. Images are the chimeric surface of our psychic lives.

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Around the same time I was drawing Persona as a gay teen in my bedroom, Britney Spears started rebelling against her good-girl image, partying with the socialite Paris Hilton and the actress Lindsay Lohan. They were terrorized by paparazzi, and pictures of them crushed into the front seat of a McLaren sports car appeared in 2006 on the front page of the New York Post with the headline “Bimbo Summit,” a title that stuck. In Fetter’s 2024 painting titled Bimbo Summit, she repeats the image, only this time it is painted as though folded, printed on a screen, and laid at an angle inside the windshield of a car. The painted car doubles the car they’re photographed inside and acts as both a cage and a means of escape. The picture is treated as a literal shield blocking another view, a site of displacement, something to hide behind, but also something we might shape and change for our own purposes.

The summit’s trio have all undergone their separate cycles of scorn and redemption and, indeed, are still present in the pop-cultural landscape, looking very much the same, almost two decades later. Following suit, our collective attitude toward this image has changed from the ridiculing of seemingly wayward young women to an acknowledgment of its being a symbol of the impossible and contradictory demands our culture makes on stars. One imagines how this photograph functioned as a complex site of self when Fetter was a young trans girl, twelve years old at the time, in which a certain kind of aspirational womanhood was inseparable from spectacular visuality, a knot of punishment and possibility. By using painting to explore these images within her synthetic scenarios, Fetter allows them to be highly conflicted, ambivalent, edged, offering a tantalizing glimpse of the future of painting as a conceptual tool of reconciliation and transformation.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting.”

A Beautiful Friendship, Deepened by Artistic Intensity

Mark Armijo McKnight has become known for his black-and-white photographs of nude bodies and the landscape in the American West. His solo exhibition Decreation, organized by Drew Sawyer and presented last fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, featured large-scale gelatin-silver prints along with the artist’s first film and sculptural work. Armijo McKnight was also the winner of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize. When his work appeared in Aperture, the writer Garth Greenwell contributed an article about the erotic intimacy and “extravagant tenderness” of Armijo McKnight’s images. In January 2020, they participated in a public talk at the Aperture gallery in Chelsea, marking both Armijo McKnight’s Portfolio Prize exhibition and the publication of Greenwell’s critically-acclaimed book Cleanness (2020). The two have since become close friends and artistic compatriots. Armijo McKnight provided a cover image for the paperback edition of Cleanness and Greenwell wrote an essay for Armijo McKnight’s first photobook Heaven Is a Prison (2020). When Decreation was on view, they reunited on stage at the Whitney, once again celebrating an exhibition and a novel, Greenwell’s Small Rain (2024). In this conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, they discuss sex, poetry, and how friendship can be an “agent of expansiveness.”

Installation view of Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Drew Sawyer: When we were brainstorming about a program in conjunction with the show, we immediately knew we wanted to invite Garth Greenwell to be in conversation with Armijo McKnight. McKnight’s first monograph, Heaven Is a Prison, was published in 2020, by Loose Joints Press, to great acclaim, and it features a text by Greenwell. Greenwell is an accomplished critic contributing to numerous publications, including the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review.

You guys have had an ongoing dialogue. Garth, you ’ve written about Mark ’s work. So, I ’m just curious when you first became aware of each other ’s work?

Mark Armijo McKnight: I would be curious to know your version, also, Garth. So, in 2019, I got the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and I think the Aperture editor Brendan Embser connected us and thought of you for me. I think he wrote to me and said there’s this author. And to be honest, at that point, no one had ever written about me, so, I would have taken just about anybody. [laughs]

But, when it ended up being you, we made a plan to chat a bit. The only novel that you had published at that time was What Belongs to You (2016). I was in Tucson at the time, and I know I’ve said this to you before, I was in my bed in Tucson, I got through the book in 24 or 36 hours. I could not put it down. I was holding my breath between pages because I thought the writing was so beautiful. That’s still my experience of Garth’s writing.

We ended up connecting again in New York around the time you were finishing Cleanness (2020). I was at the beginning of working on Heaven Is a Prison. And I remember taking a walk and having a really wonderful conversation about sex in art and its value. I think, at a certain point, we just became friends—it stopped being like a professional thing and you just became like, a person I texted all day, every day. [laughs]

Mark Armijo McKnight, Ez Ozel (or: Father Figure), 2023

Garth Greenwell: Yeah, that maps pretty much onto my memory of things. You know, Brendan, who is very kind, had written me several times after the publication of What Belongs to You asking me to write for Aperture magazine. And I always said, “Why would I write for Aperture? I don’t know anything about photography. Why do you keep writing me about this?” But when he asked about Mark, he was smart enough to include the images. So I opened the email and I saw these images, and I remember responding to him right away. I said, “Look, I don’t know anything about photography, but I actually do feel like I have a lot to say about these images.”

I just felt this immediate kinship with the work. I actually never feel that in literature, or almost never. Very seldom do I think in response to any contemporary art, “Oh, this person is chasing something I recognize,” where it feels like an endeavor that’s just immediately in conversation with my own endeavor. But that happened with Mark, and the friendship has become really central to me and to my aesthetic life. Mark’s work has become a big part of my life. I actually have two prints of Mark’s that I can see from my desk. Writing Small Rain (2024), my most recent book, there was one particularly difficult scene that I’m not sure I could have written without the example of Mark’s work. I remember literally texting him as I wrote—I would say things like, “I’m writing something that is really terrifying to me.” It was helpful to have him on the other side of that exchange. It was really important.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Bodyfold, 2019

Sawyer: I brought in the cover of Cleanness because you used one of Mark ’s earlier images. I ’m curious to hear you talk about why you selected this one in particular.

Greenwell: Almost always the first draft covers I get, especially for foreign editions, have the image of some adolescent nubile torso on a beach. And I’m always like, “What is this?” Like, you know, I don’t write André Aciman novels. No shade to those novels! But those bodies are not the bodies I write about. One of the things I love about Mark’s work is that Mark makes beautiful images about the kinds of bodies that I write about. This image in particular is so fascinating to me. The way that Mark typically obscures faces, how in this series of images, he’s very explicitly and very obviously, intentionally, obscuring faces—that immediately resonated with my fictional practice, in which characters typically don’t have names. Cleanness, especially, is a book that is full of people, sometimes strangers, confessing things to each other. Mark’s work captures that sense of both intimacy and anonymity. An image like this captures both a kind of giving, a kind of offering, and also a withholding. It just felt absolutely perfect to me.

Sawyer: That is beautiful. Mark, I’m curious, you mentioned that you had met when you were just embarking on this book project which came out in 2020, Heaven Is a Prison. So, I’m curious how you feel like those conversations shaped what the book became? Like, had you already been planning on this book before even reading Garth’s writing or was it all coming together at once?

Armijo McKnight: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t remember the timing. I feel like Cleanness has more explicit moments. It was surprising to me when that book came out that it felt like we were on these parallel paths. And I would say the same thing about this show and Small Rain in that there’s some different approaches to long-held ideas in our respective practices. That’s really interesting to see. Maybe it just speaks to the ways in which we’re similar and why our friendship makes a lot of sense. But in terms of this walk we took, back when we first met, I had just had a studio visit with a really good friend and she looked at the new photographs I was making and she said something like, “What makes this not pornography?” I was a little bit taken aback and I was maybe frustrated in the moment, but also grateful, in some ways for the question because it allowed me to ask other questions. And I think you and I spoke about those questions on that walk, which is like, “What constitutes ‘art’ or ‘pornography’? Why do we collectively privilege an intellectual response over a somatic one, for instance, arousal?” I’m also remembering right now that we talked about Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) on that walk, which is so funny because now, we’ve been talking about Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) more recently. It was a really important conversation to have with someone I trusted and respected. And it helped give me a license to proceed with the production of the work and to trust my impulses, even if they weren’t initially being received well.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Him, Shadow, 2020

Sawyer: Both of you became known for your projects that revolved around the explicit representation of gay sex and S&M. You already hinted at the kind of resistance to that content. Was your motivation to write about that kind of material its transgressiveness, or challenging the kind of expectations or genres that are acceptable—or was it something else that compelled both of you?

Greenwell: I mean, for me, it was not transgressiveness. Something that I feel really strongly is that I don’t want anything to dictate what my art is going to be. I remember the first question I was asked in my first big interview for What Belongs to You, when it came out in the UK. It was a BBC interview. And the woman began by saying, “You know, after decades in which gay men’s lives have been reduced to sex, why would you begin your novel in a cruising bathroom?” I remember being just repelled by the question, by the idea that my work should have to, in any way, respond to a homophobic narrative that suggests that men cruising in a bathroom reduces their humanity. The idea that my work would be in response to that, that homophobia would frame my aesthetic process, is repulsive to me. And in the same way, the idea that I would sort of say, “Oh, I see some trend and I want to write against that”—that is just not how I work.

I am interested in embodiedness. I’m interested in the embodied experience of extremity. I’m interested in sex as a phenomenon—as a form of communication, as a form of meaning-making. In What Belongs to You, even though the response to the book overwhelmingly talked about sex, actually the sex in that book is quite demure. I was already working on Cleanness when What Belongs to You came out, and I knew there was so much more I wanted to do in the representation of sex. But it didn’t really feel transgressive to me, in part because my background was not in prose. In American prose, after an amazing efflorescence of especially queer writing in the 1970s, there was a kind of conservative backlash. Writers like Edmund White and Alexander Chee have talked about this—Alex has talked about being told in MFA programs in the 1990s that he shouldn’t write about sex explicitly. Queer writers were told that if they centered their books on queer experience, they would be writing into a gay ghetto—which is a repulsive idea and a repulsive metaphor. I just escaped all of that because my background was in poetry. The twin founts of American poetry are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, who both wrote the queer sexual body in ways that opened paths for later writers. And also, my great mentor, from whom Mark took the title for his show Hunger for the Absolute, was Frank Bidart, who is among the most courageous writers of the queer sexual body. So, it just never occurred to me that writing sex, writing gay sex in this way, would be transgressive. It was obvious to me from the beginning that it was within the realm of art.

Armijo McKnight: The Bidart connection allowed me to get that poem for the introduction of my first monograph. It is Bidart, at the beginning, a poem titled “Hunger for the Absolute.” Please everyone find it and read it. He does in probably twelve lines what I take the entirety of a photographic book to try and do. He’s a genius. And then, Garth’s essay is at the end, which is equally brilliant.

To say more about the impact this friendship has had on my practice: There is a film in the exhibition here at the Whitney and it’s heavily influenced by György Ligeti’s 1962 composition “Symphonic Poem.” I only became aware of that work because just like on a whim, I accompanied you to Lincoln Center to see Ligeti’s Études. They began the evening with “Symphonic Poem” and it just destroyed me. And immediately knew I had to do something with it. So [to the audience] get a friend who takes you to stuff you wouldn’t do on your own.

Installation view of Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024. Front: Duet, 2024; Projection: Without a Song, 2024. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Greenwell: But that has also been a really crucial part of our friendship, that each of us has been an agent of expansiveness for the other, has expanded the other’s horizons. Which, I mean, that’s just what friendship is, you know. My first experience of Mark’s art was that it was operatic and it turned out Mark had never been to an opera. So, over the past two years Mark has been my opera buddy, and we’ve gone to the opera twice a month.

Armijo McKnight: More than that sometimes.

Greenwell: Yeah, sometimes more than that. We basically saw every production that the Met put on over the past two years. But the friendship has been an education for me, too. I mentioned that when Brendan first wrote me, I would said say, “I know nothing about photography.” Well now, I know quite a bit about the traditions of art photography, the tradition of modernist art photography in particular, which is important for Mark and also an important point of resistance for Mark. And that has all been really crucial to my work as well.

Armijo McKnight: I remember having this thought that Garth refers to often, this idea about “the irreparable.” I don’t think I had language for it really until Garth. But these notions around how queer life should be depicted in an artwork, I sometimes feel like there is a contemporary prescription around what that should look like and that all representations should be positive representations. Ultimately, that is incredibly reductive and sucks us of our humanity and the complexity of our lived experiences. That was just another thing we’ve talked a lot about in relation to queerness. I think I say that because you were talking about cruising. Garth also has said this thing—I’ve quoted you multiple times, probably in print, talking about sex as a crucible of humanness. As a venue in which we can simultaneously be our most selfish, our most generous. That language was really important for Heaven Is a Prison. [To the audience] Everybody get yourself a friend who can give you language for things that you’ve only ever known intuitively.

Sawyer: Could we also talk a little bit about this body of work ?

Armijo McKnight: Sure. It’s two subjects, two friends of mine having sex in a landscape not very far from where I grew up. It’s broken up into sections sort of stanzaically. In the book, I was really interested in using blank pages, open space, as a way of breaking the work into sections. Slash small poems. There are these little vignettes. Thinking about the work right now, there is a kind of cinematic quality to that book. It’s sequenced in a particular way. I think it has a relationship both to poetry and to film. And the way the work manifests in exhibition format—to steal some language from the photographer Paul Graham—is like a kind of filmic haiku. I was really interested in scale and repetition and trying to emulate the cadence, repetition, and rhyme that are so essential to a lot of poetry.

Mark Armijo McKnight Untitled (Tree Void), 2020

Greenwell: Something that I found endlessly fascinating in this work is that there are images of these two men having sex that have a kind of “pornographic explicitness.” There’s one image in the book that shows penetration. That image, which is, I guess, if you base this on subject matter, the most “pornographic” image—and yet in my experience it’s an image of absolute chastity. And then I look at this fallen down tree and gaping tree trunk and it’s just the filthiest photo I have ever seen. That tree is filthier than Mapplethorpe’s fisting photos. That is fascinating to me. How erotic charge is distributed in the photographs in surprising ways.

When I talk about sex being a crucible of humanness, I mean that sex is, I think, almost unique in human experience in putting under immense pressure what seem to me a series of interlocked contradictions that make up humanness. Like sex is something that reveals our generosity and selfishness, or sex is an experience where we are at our most animal, and also the human experience that is most culturally mediated. Sex thrusts us into our bodies, into bodily experience, and also is maybe our least mediated experience of something that we feel exceeds our bodies. Sex is the source of all of our metaphysics. Mark’s photographs themselves embody that for me. And these photographs do feel so deeply embodied to me, I don’t mean their subject matter, but the photographs themselves.

Peter Hujar would talk about wanting his photographs to have a taste and a smell. I feel that about the tree photo—I feel like I can taste that photo. But other photos, as I say, feel so stark, so almost scoured. Something that I love in all of Mark’s work is the way that the work is extremely austere and also lush. The photos feel at once, sometimes cool to the touch and very hot. They’re just saturated with emotion in a way that makes me experience them as operatic. I mean, when I look at these photos, what I see is something that I want to write. I see values that I want to put on the page. And that’s what’s so rare. I’m not sure that I can think of another living artist who makes me feel that so strongly.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Somnia, 2023

Sawyer: Thinking both about the show and the body of the work that ’s in it, the film in particular, being kind of a move away from this previous body of work, which brought you a certain amount of recognition. And thinking about Small Rain, as Garth mentioned, is also a kind of move away from your previous two novels. I ’m kind of curious about that movement away from graphic sex, which brought you both such recognition.

Armijo McKnight: I did have this impulse to do things in the show that were not what people would have expected. I wanted to do something big. And I wanted to do something that opens up what people think the work is doing, or complicates that in some meaningful ways. The film, I think, was first and foremost what we talked about, and then we built out from there. But I knew the photographs needed to do something a little bit different. There’s more landscape in this show than anything. That felt really important to me. In part because I put out that book, and of course, there are images of explicit sex and gay men, but that book is also full of clouds and landscapes, and that seemed to go totally unacknowledged, at least to my satisfaction. So I felt like, “Okay. If people are not understanding that I’m deeply motivated by the landscape, then maybe I need to really drive it home.”

Greenwell: In some ways, my new book does feel quite different, but in others it feels like a kind of continuation. I’ve always been interested in the body in crisis. Sex is one kind of crisis. In Small Rain, there is a medical crisis. But it’s also true that when I finished Cleanness, I felt like I had gone as far as I could go in that kind of writing about sex. I don’t feel that anymore; there are other things I want to do in writing very explicit sex. But having written a lot about forms of sexual sociality like cruising, and a kind of sexual adventure that has been, you know, central to my life, it felt like a challenge to write a different kind of eroticism, to write domesticity and the long project of trying to know another person over years. It felt like a challenge to try to write that a way that makes clear that that, too, is an adventure. For me, that’s the arc of the book, the narrator fully coming to understand that domestic life and that project of long-knowing of another person is as accommodating of surprise and revelation and discovery as those earlier, more obvious adventures that had structured his life.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Clouds (Decreation), 2024

Armijo McKnight: There are moments in Small Rain, these really beautiful things that you do that you haven’t done before, these moments where the narrator is going back in time through memory, and it’s like, almost—I’m wanting to choose my language wisely. But it’s sort of Dada or stream of conscious, the language keeps moving. As a reader, I am on the precipice of losing the thread, but then you bring us back into reality very firmly in these ways that are masterful.

Greenwell: Thank you for saying that. That was really interesting to me as I worked on it. What Belongs to You and Cleanness are both very focused, very tight books. I wanted to write something that was more wandering and that explored a different kind of thinking. I did feel that, at times, I was spooling things out as far as I could. And that was formally exciting to me, to have that shape on the page.

Greenwell: I’m interested to hear Mark talk about photography in this sense. Lyric poetry divorces the idea of value from duration. If you have spots of time, as Wordsworth talks about, that then light up an entire life with value. Or Louise Glück, who says, in one of the poems in Meadowlands, “We see the world once in childhood, the rest is memory.” This idea that a single moment might have a value that is infinite and that can illuminate an entire life. Mark, how do you feel about photography in that sense, and the relationship photography has to time versus duration, or a suspended lyric moment versus—I don’t know if duration is the right word, but you know, a narrative response to time?

Armijo McKnight: I think so much more slowly than the pictures would suggest. You know, holding a very simple position for thirty minutes while I awkwardly fumble around with the 4-by-5 under the hood, trying to figure out, okay, if I move this limb here, the shadow does this. I mean, that’s mission accomplished if the pictures feel believable. They are very much based on lyric moments or things that have passed that I’m re-staging. For example, the photographs in the book, some of those were made on-site. I brought them into this landscape and said, “Okay. Have sex now.” [Laughs] And I had a handheld camera and made some of those pictures without stopping them. And there were other moments where it was like, “No. This picture needs to have the capacity to be eighty inches wide and rival an old master painting in scale and be just exquisite in its print. And so, I’m going to have to break out the 4-by-5 and you’re going to have to keep him hard for however long it takes to make this picture.”

Greenwell: That is so sexy. Wow. Great. [Laughs]

Mark Armijo McKnight Tear, 2021

Armijo McKnight: Yeah, it was. But I think filmmaking feels like it has more potential to offer me something in terms of duration that I’m really excited about. And I think that is why I will never not be making photographs, but I’m excited to be exploring film right now.

Greenwell: Something that I am fascinated about in Mark’s work is how there is such a strong pull toward abstraction. One of Mark’s photos that I have in my studio is a photo called Bodyfold, which is an image of a man’s lap. But I experience it as almost pure geometry. That’s something I love. I mean, in some sense, there is a creation/decreation dialectic happening there, too. A sense that, you know, there is a cherishable subject, but then there is also this kind of austere form. I think that tension energizes a lot of the work. And to me, that’s part of what makes it feel so moving, to feel those impulses at once. Creation and decreation feel like they are in a meaningful dialogue, not just opposed to one another—or they are wrestling, maybe, but neither of them is winning.

Mark Armijo McKnight, The Black Place (ii), 2019
Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Sawyer: I was going to add, Mark, of course, you are doing some of this in camera and throughout printing. I realize not maybe everyone in the audience is aware of some of the analog techniques that you are using that heighten some of the formal elements.

Armijo McKnight: All of the photographs at the Whitney, and my photographs generally, are made on a 4-by-5 view camera, with the exception of some pictures in that book we’ve discussed. It’s an old way of working. I’m shooting by putting a hood over my head, the camera is on a tripod, the image is upside down—which means I’m seeing it almost as pure form, somewhat abstracted, divorced from the subject matter. But in addition to that, you know, I’m often underexposing my photographs. I’m really interested in the psychological charge of shadows and darkness and I like printing for the midtones. When we look at photographs, we often think about the shadow as a kind of “nothing” thing. As a byproduct of light. I’m really interested in the shadow as a form unto itself. It’s an essential part of the picture and I’m actively seeking certain types of shadows and negotiating with the subject in the arrangement of a photo in order to achieve that. The shadow is perhaps a reminder of the medium’s limitations. Not everything can be made visible. In this way, the darkened spaces in my photographs, the shadows, the voids, might suggest what I firmly believe—and something Garth and I have often discussed: Art can chase or gesture in the direction of beauty, but it’s ultimately a kind of veil. You can never apprehend it.

Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, August 24, 2024–January 12, 2025.

A Biennial Carries the Weight of a World in Crisis

The best biennials produce an artistic moment that everyone’s talking about. Often, it’s video that wins the day. Stephanie Comilang makes a convincing case with Search for Life II (2025), a centerpiece of the sixteenth Sharjah Biennial, which opened in February and features two hundred artists in exhibitions sprawling across the city and surrounding areas of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. Comilang’s buoyantly paced video considers the long history of, and present tensions around, pearling, an industry integral to economic life in the Gulf before the advent of oil. The biennial, called To Carry, is about how artists have the endurance to stay underwater, like pearl divers holding their breath, and what happens when they come up for air. They seek beauty, but they also dive for sustenance.

Stephanie Comilang, Still from Search for Life II, 2025. Video, color, sound, 18 minutes, 22 seconds
Courtesy the artist; Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto; and ChertLüdde, Berlin

To Carry is organized by Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell, curators working in geographies from Turkey to New Zealand whose interests skew towards language, the environment, and cultural heritage. During the opening, Tamati-Quennell amusingly referred to the group as the “Spice Girls,” but little fanfare was made about the fact that a major biennial in the Middle East was directed by five women, and no emphasis placed on who was representing whose territory. Feminism and Indigenous activism are inflection points throughout, but strangely, for an otherwise open-minded exhibition, the word queer doesn’t appear once in the accompanying catalog. Compare this absence to the ludic and sensitive—and openly queer—presentations by the artists Sabelo Mlangeni, Salman Toor, and Louis Fratino, and the pro-trans murals of Aravani Art Project, in the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

Yet in Sharjah, the politics of the moment are front and center. When Hoor Al Qasimi, the director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, ended her remarks at the preview, she called for solidarity with the people of Palestine, Lebanon, Armenia, Syria, Congo, and Sudan. Only hours before the official opening, President Donald Trump proposed for the US to “take over” the Gaza Strip, an imperial development scheme tantamount to ethnic cleansing. The idea of solidarity, between regions and across generations, was therefore no mere art-world watchword, but an urgent political stance. The Sharjah Biennial, as Khalaf put it, is “a lament, an offering, a divination ritual” in response to “dispossession and loss.” In other words, survival mode.

Mónica de Miranda, Above the Line, 2024
Courtesy the artist

Artists working with lens-based media deliver some of the show’s most compelling statements. M’hammed Kilito portrays Morocco’s fragile oases and communal baths, adding a soundtrack of field recordings. The duo Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser) used the AI image generator Midjourney to make gold-toned, nineteenth-century-style salt prints that envision a four-thousand-kilometer hedge built by the British in India to evade a salt tax. Mónica de Miranda stages dramatic scenes amid abandoned buildings in the Namib desert in Angola, where solitary figures emerge as surveyors of a postcolonial utopia or witnesses to an end-times scenario. It’s a vision that’s materialized in another dispensation by the sculptor Hugh Hayden, who places Brier Patch (2022), a collection of wooden school desks sprouting tree trunks, in an abandoned desert village that doubles as a biennial site. 

In Search for Life II, Comilang deftly blends the styles of the nature documentary and the music video, using several cameras to tell a story about commerce and migration. Golden-hour cityscapes of Dubai, shot from the Burj Khalifa, complement lush underwater visuals. A cameo by Fatima Khalid, also known as Pats, a Filipina Emirati who performs with a K-pop cover group called the Pixies, provides a charismatic counterpoint to scenes of an open-air pearl market in Zhuji City, China. Comilang projects one channel of the video onto an enormous screen made from strings of acrylic pearls sourced from a factory near Shanghai. She built a pier from which visitors could view the video on multiple levels. 

Stephanie Comilang, Search for Life II, 2025. Installation view in the Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah, 2025. Photograph by Danko Stjepanovic
Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

A second channel, on an LED screen, shows dancers from the Pixies and TikTok videos of jewelry designers. “Pearls,” a text message reads, “are the new diamonds.” Filipinos constitute one of the major migrant groups to the United Arab Emirates, yet children born there to foreigners are rarely seen as fully Emirati. Pats speaks with uncommon candor about her mixed-race identity, appearing as an avatar of a hybrid Emeriti future. Elsewhere in Comliang’s film, the family of a Filipino diver who was paralyzed after coming up for air too quickly returns a pearl to the ocean in a ritual offering. The pearl will have more value in the spirit world than the open market.

Search for Life II is presented in Al Mureujah Square in Sharjah City, a labyrinthine collection of galleries that forms the principal venue of the Sharjah Art Foundation. In a sleek white cube, Kapulani Landgraf shows selections from Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui, a series of black-and-white photographs of sacred sites in Hawaii. The pristine quality of her prints, and the long exposure times that render the movement of water like ripples of satin, are comparable to mid-twentieth-century landscapes by Ansel Adams, who also photographed in Hawaii. But Landgraf, who is native Kānaka Maoli, includes texts below each image denoting place-names related to Indigenous Hawaiian genealogy. For Landgraf, the sublime is not about manifest destiny, but instead the continuity of cultural knowledge. 

Kapulani Landgraf, Nā Wahi Kapu O Maui, 1997–2003. Installation view in the Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah, 2025. Photograph by Ivan Erofeev
Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

In the Bait Habib Al Yousef, an historic courtyard house renovated by the foundation, a group of photographs by Akinbode Akinbiyi contemplates the choreography of spectatorship. His images of street life, photo studios, and everyday rituals in a variety of African cities contain the subtlest vibrations of forward motion. “He listens with his camera,” the curator Natasha Ginwala said. Akinbiyi’s prints are organized in elegant grids or set at various heights within concrete recesses, spot-lit and self-possessed. One image shows two men pointing handheld video cameras toward a couple in the middle of an outdoor wedding ceremony. Like the pair of documentarians he portrays, Akinbiyi himself is a photographer-participant, close enough for an intimate encounter yet standing at the slightest remove to sense a moment of visual poetry.

Akinbode Akinbiyi, Bamako, 2007
Courtesy the artist

Among other sites repurposed by the Sharjah Art Foundation is the Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, a gently curving arcade that serves as a stage set for Aziz Hazara’s ingenious, multifaceted project I Love Bagram (ILB) (2025). Bagram was an American military base and prison until the summer of 2021, when the US withdrew its troops, switched off the electricity, and essentially vacated overnight. Hazara began to collect garbage left at the base, photographing ghostly bottles of mouthwash, lotion, and conditioner and installing his pictures in typologies set against the brightly patterned wallpaper of former fruit and vegetable stalls, a post-occupation bazaar within a post-commodity market. He added videos of Afghan men handling electronic waste, allowing power cords for projectors to pile up unconcealed, as if to say that even these exhibition devices will end up in some other market someday.

Aziz Hazara, I Love Bagram (ILB), 2025. Installation views in the Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah, 2025. Photographs by Shanavas Jamaluddin. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

The afterlife of an ancestor, or the afterimage of a photograph, is the subject of several of the biennial’s projects about art as a container for history. Like Hazara, Alia Farid delves into the recent record of US military intervention abroad. She researched objects taken from Iraq after the American-led invasion in 2003, and became fascinated by blue faience, a ceramic material used in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. For her series Talismans, she embedded photographs, enlarged on a copier, of her mother and her grandmothers, who were from Puerto Rico and Kuwait, within polyurethane panels. Glazed with blue faience, the panels are suspended from the ceiling, inviting a continual movement around the gallery to glimpse the images in their various layers, like peering through a window. 

Alia Farid, Kupol LR 3303 Talisman 01, 02 and 03, 2025. Installation view in the Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah, 2025. Photograph by Danko Stjepanovic
Courtesy Sharjah Art FoundationFiona Pardington, Āhua: a beautiful hesitation, 2010. Installation view in the Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah, 2025. Photograph by Ivan Erofeev
Courtesy the artist and Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland

Fiona Pardington photographed life casts made in the late 1830s by a French phrenologist in New Zealand. Depicting Maori leaders who are also ancestors of Pardington and the curator Megan Tamati-Quennell, the casts are what Pardington calls a “pre-photographic form of portraiture.” She printed her arresting, evenly lit images at a large scale, pointing up the monumentality of the figures and their uncanny lifelike presence. They appear neither as exemplars of nineteenth-century pseudoscience nor as idealized heroes, but instead as individuals hovering between life and death. “We have our family with us once again,” Tamati-Quennell said.

Kegham Djeghalian Sr and Kegham Djeghalian Jr, Photo Kegham of Gaza: Unboxing (detail). Original photographs, 1944–ca. 1979
Collection of Kegham Djeghalian Jr. and courtesy the artist

In 1944, Kegham Djeghalian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, opened the first professional photo studio in Gaza. Decades later, his grandson, Kegham Djeghalian Jr, an artist based in Cairo, began to investigate the studio’s legacy: three red boxes of prints and negatives showing the rhythms of daily life—weddings, parties, street scenes, family portraits—that also amount to a community’s proof of existence. In a gallery at the Sharjah Art Museum, Djeghalian Jr presents hundreds of black-and-white reproductions from the studio’s archive, withholding individual dates or locations, a gesture that suspends the images in the present tense. He recreated the Photo Kegham storefront in a Sharjah souk, and he screens a video interview from 2021 with Marwan Al-Tarazi, who inherited the studio. Together they discuss the photographs in detail, but the video would be a final encounter. Al-Tarazi was killed during an Israeli bombing in Gaza in October 2023.

When it’s time to “travel, flee or move on,” the biennial’s curators ask, what do we carry for survival? For the Palestinian artists Mohammed Al-Hawajri and Dina Mattar, who are part of Eltiqa, an artist collective in Gaza City, endurance is about cultural protection. Al-Hawajri and Mattar were living with their family in a Rafah camp when they decided to flee Gaza, carrying with them as many artworks as possible. In a former classroom at the Al Qasimiyah School, a 1970s-era building that serves as another of the biennial’s sites, they present political paintings that channel Diego Rivera and Faith Ringgold, together with artworks by their children, including a video by their eldest son, Ahmad, who follows the path of a kite flying over a refugee camp in Gaza. Al-Hawajri and Mattar’s work is also featured in a concurrent exhibition about Eltiqa at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, in which a timeline of photographs tracks the activities of the collective from its founding in 1988 to the ceasefire in January. Like the portraits from Photo Kegham, the images of joyful exhibition openings at Eltiqa’s gallery in Gaza are an intimate form of evidence.

Eltiqa members (from right) Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Mohamed Dabous, Sohail Salem, and Raed Issa installing the Liqa’ (Meeting) exhibition at the Eltiqa Gallery, Gaza, 2011
Courtesy Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai Opening of Marwan Kassab-Bachi’s exhibition Ila Atfal Filastin (To the Children of Palestine) at the Eltiqa Gallery, Gaza, 2010

At the biennial preview, the curator Alia Swastika introduced Al-Hawajri, Mattar, and their four children in the courtyard of the Al Qasimiyah School, just outside the gallery where their artworks were on display—artworks they had risked their lives to salvage and bring to the Emirates, or have made since arriving. They lined themselves up in order of height and the children listened as Al-Hawajri spoke about the exhibition. The moment was like any other artist talk at the biennial, but the family’s presence was overwhelming. They had survived.

To Carry, the Sharjah Biennial 16, is on view in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, through June 15, 2025.

15 Inspiring Photobooks by Women Photographers

Tina Barney, Family Commission with Snake, 2007
Courtesy the artist

Tina Barney: Family Ties (2024)

In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class to which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Developing her portraiture further in the 1980s, she began directing her subjects, giving an intimate scale to her large-format photographs.

In 2024, Aperture published Family Ties, which collects sixty large-format portraits from the three decades that defined Barney’s career. These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie—a landscape of hidden tension found in microexpressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux.

Myriam Boulos, Untitled, 2017–20
Courtesy the artist

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours (2023)

In her searing, diaristic account of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together more than a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity through to the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020.

Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay. “They know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Los Angeles, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (2024)

Born in 1994 in New York, Arielle Bobb-Willis first started to experiment with photography at the age of fourteen, when she was gifted an old Nikon N80 film camera by her high school history teacher after her family relocated to South Carolina. Since then, Bobb-Willis has become a rising photographer, having shot commissions for a range of magazines and fashion brands including Vogue, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Nike, Hermès, and more. In 2024, Aperture published the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Previously, Aperture had featured Bobb-Willis’s work in The New Black Vanguard (2017), which highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

In Keep the Kid Alive, Bobb-Willis invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaux, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”

Collect a limited-edition print by Arielle-Bobb Willis from Keep the Kid Alive.

Kelli Connell, Doorway II, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024)

In Pictures for Charis, Kelli Connell takes inspiration from the life of Charis Wilson and her collaborations with Edward Weston through the contemporary lens of a queer woman artist. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Wilson worked with Weston as his partner and model, collaborating on some of his most iconic images. 

Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locations in the western United States where the earlier couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. In chasing Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, finding a new kinship with the collaborative duo as she navigates a cultural landscape that has changed, yet remains mired in the same mythologies about nature, the artist, desire, and inspiration. Bringing together photographs and writing by Connell alongside Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes, Pictures for Charis raises vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.

Collect a limited-edition print from Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis.

An-My Lê, Rescue, 1999–2002, from the series Small Wars
Courtesy the artist

An-My Lê: Small Wars (2025)

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. Lê was born in Saigon in 1960 and evacuated with her family from Vietnam to the United States in 1975. With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work.

First published by Aperture in 2005 and now reissued on its twentieth anniversary, Small Wars brings together three of Lê’s interconnected series—Viêt Nam, where Lê reconciles the memories of her childhood with the contemporary landscape; Small Wars, which explores a community of Vietnam War reenactors; and 29 Palms, which documents marines training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan—alongside a new afterward by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate two decades later.

Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. “What are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture? How does it become enmeshed with romance and myth over time?” Lê asks in an interview from the book with Hilton Als. “My concern is to make photographs that are provocative in response to the reality of war while challenging its context.”

Narahashi Asako, Kawaguchiko, 2003, from the series half awake and half asleep in the water
Courtesy the artist

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (2024)

I’m So Happy You Are Here is a critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences of women in Japanese society.

The volume showcases the work of twenty-five artists whose voices and practices have shaped the medium’s landscape across seven decades. Alongside the more than five-hundred images in the book is an illustrated bibliography and a selection of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians—many of which have been translated in English for the first time. While I’m So Happy You Are Here does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, the book offers a deep dive into the significant contributions of women to the history of Japanese photography.

Collect a range of prints from artists featured in I’m So Happy You Are Here.

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Pao Houa Her, Three bachelors at the Elder Center, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions (2024)

Pao Houa Her’s first monograph presents a deeply personal exploration of the fundamental concepts of home and belonging. A recipient of the 2023–24 Next Step Award, Her creates compelling and personal narratives grounded in the traditions and contemporary metaphors of the Hmong diasporic community. Throughout her images, the artist draws from myriad sources: apocryphal family lore, portraits of herself and her community, and reimagined landscapes in Minnesota and Northern California that stand in for Laos.

My grandfather turned into a tiger brings together four of the artist’s major series, reflecting her keen perspective on the boundary between authenticity and imitation. As Her has stated, photography is “a truth if you want it to be a truth.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions.

Justine Kurland, One Red, One Blue, 2000
Courtesy the artist

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (2020)

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth: cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland, known for her idyllic images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series Girl Pictures. Made between 1997 and 2002, Kurland’s photographs stage scenes of teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism.

Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce. They hunt and explore, braid one another’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes. Kurland imagines a world at once lawless and utopian—an Eden in the wild. “I wanted to make the communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experiences as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls,” writes Kurland. “Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it—one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures.

Sally Mann, from the series At Twelve, 1983–85
© Sally Mann 2024

Sally Mann: At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women (2025)

First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve is an intimate yet unflinching portrayal of the interior complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann creates a collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls, from the trying times of that age to its excitement and social possibilities.

This long sought-after reissue by one of photography’s most renowned artists retains the spirit of the original, highlighting both Mann’s large-format photographs alongside a series of her writings. As Ann Beattie wrote in 1988 for the book’s introduction: “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” Mann’s portraits do not shy away from the real consequences of this misunderstanding, documenting experiences of destitution, abuse, and unwanted pregnancy, and the girls in her photographs return the viewer’s gaze with equanimity.

Susan Meiselas, Sandinistas at the walls of the Estelí National Guard headquarters, 1978–79
Courtesy the artist

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua (2025)

Susan Meiselas first traveled to Nicaragua in June 1978. Three years prior, she had joined Magnum Photos, and this trip marked her first experience working in conflict photography. She went on to spend just over a year in Nicaragua, documenting an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize and extend her photographs, using QR codes in this new edition to link to excerpts from films by the artist. “I’m asking the reader to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book,” says Meiselas in an interview from the volume with Kristen Lubben, “but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”

Diana Markosian, Morning with You, from the book Father (Aperture, 2024)
Courtesy the artist

Diana Markosian: Father (2024)

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera, Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger: her long-lost father.

The volume is a follow-up to her first book, Santa Barbara (2020), in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. In Father, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?” 

Collect a limited-edition, signed print-and-book set of Diana Markosian: Father.

Kristine Potter, Dark Water, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Kristine Potter: Dark Waters (2023)

Kristine Potter’s dark and brooding photographs reflect on the Southern Gothic landscape of the American South as evoked in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the American murder ballad (which has developed a cult appeal and continues to be rerecorded today), the riverscape frequently doubles as a crime scene. Places like Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadman’s Pond are haunted by both the victor and the violence in the world Potter conjures.

The artist’s seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs—capturing the landscape and creating evocative portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of these stories. The resulting volume, Dark Waters, reflects the casual popular glamorization of violence against women that remains prevalent in today’s cultural landscape. As Potter notes, “I see a through line of violent exhibitionism from those early murder ballads, to the Wild West shows, to the contemporary landscape of cinema and television. Culturally, we seem to require it.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Kristine Potter: Dark Waters.

Ming Smith, Dakar Roadside with Figures, Senegal, 1972
Courtesy the artist

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century Black American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Collect the limited-edition print Dakar Roadside with Figures (1972) from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph.

Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke Feminist #4, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Wendy Red Star: Delegation (2022)

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star, who was recently awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, centers Native American life and material culture through her imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations.

In 2022, Aperture published Red Star’s first major monograph, Delegation, a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, which gleans from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. “I’m also marking on history,” says Red Star in an interview from the volume. “And red—I always think about school and failing papers and getting that red mark on your paper. I wanted that red mark on history.”

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror), 1990, from the Kitchen Table Series
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (2025)

Carrie Mae Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. Releasing this April alongside a related exhibition with Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, The Heart of the Matter is a comprehensive monograph that gathers together Weems’s landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1981–82) to her most recent series on the Black church.

Throughout the book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the influential artist’s mind and eye. Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, the volume puts Weems—as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys—at the center of the discourse, underscoring the singular value of her vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

See here to browse the full collection of featured titles.

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Kunié Sugiura’s Genre-Blending Vision

In the United States, photography has long struggled for the respect afforded to the more established mediums of painting and sculpture. From the 1930s onward, a prevailing consensus held that photography would only be seen as painting’s equal if its practitioners took advantage of the inherent qualities of the medium—what set it apart from other art forms—namely, its sharp focus and ability to render minute detail. Ansel Adams and his friends in Group f/64 deemed the popular style of Pictorialism, with its soft-focus attempts at mimicking the effects of painting, to be hackneyed and gimmicky and warned that photographic imitations of paintings would always be considered second-class.

There were notable exceptions, of course. Man Ray, for example, saw photography as one of many tools he might deploy to realize his creative vision and often made composite artworks. László Moholy-Nagy, coming from the radical Bauhaus in Germany, brought a similarly catholic approach to the Chicago Institute of Design, where he taught Harry Callahan. Kunié Sugiura’s practice, which melds photography and painting, emerged, in part, from this heritage. A student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) from 1963 to 1967, Sugiura studied under Kenneth Josephson and Frank Barsotti, who had been students of Callahan. But while her work bears hallmarks of Moholy-Nagy’s legacy, Sugiura’s approach to photography also reflects her fierce independence of mind and the influence of Japanese aesthetics.

Kunié Sugiura, Sea Shell 2, 1969. Photographic emulsion and graphite on canvas Kunié Sugiura, 1972

When Sugiura first began creating pieces in the late 1960s that combined photography and painting, their hybridity made them difficult to categorize, effectively precluding her from market success at a time when US galleries, collectors, and photography-focused curators were less receptive to work that blurred the lines between mediums. From today’s perspective, however, her early defiance of traditional boundaries demonstrates her prescience as an artist. Her oeuvre is perhaps best understood in relation to the explosion of photography into the realm of contemporary painting in the 1960s that started with artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, who were early influences.

Sugiura moved to New York in 1967, mere days after graduating from the SAIC. Without access to a color darkroom, she was forced to pivot and find a new mode of producing photographs. Eventually, she began printing on canvas that she coated by hand with photo-emulsion, using a substance evocatively called Liquid Light. This was a radical departure from her previous efforts as it was a black-and-white process that required far less precision and fewer hours in the darkroom to get satisfying results. Sugiura rejected mainstream photographic trends in favor of trying something unique and unexpected.

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Mounting a 45-degree mirror to her enlarger, Sugiura projected her negatives onto treated canvas hung on the wall of her darkroom, washing the results in her bathroom. By using hand-coated canvases, she could create works of a scale nearly impossible at the time with commercially available photographic paper. Her first experiments were on the smaller side, but she eventually made examples that were as large as approximately six by eight feet. “I was really interested in Andy Warhol’s canvases,” she has stated. “So, I started making things I had taken nearby [the studio] and enlarged them. Then, I gradually made them bigger.”

It was a strenuously physical and messy business to wrangle thick sheets of wet fabric of such enormous dimensions by herself in the darkroom. She often wore a bathing suit while printing to avoid soaking her clothes. A portrait of the artist posing in front of her work in a 1972 exhibition gives a sense of the scale of one of these oversized pieces in proportion to her body.

Kunié Sugiura, Christie Street, 1976. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas Kunié Sugiura, Sidewalk Palms, 1980. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood

The subjects of the largest in the Photocanvas (1968–72) series are mostly natural details: close-ups of sand, pebbles, an ivy-covered wall, the pattern of bark on a tree. Some are so closely cropped as to become almost abstract. As one reviewer wrote in 1972 of the experience of viewing these blown-up details, “The extreme change of scale is a visual shock. Thrown out of focus by the enlargement and simultaneously deprived of recognizability, the final image seems almost topographical.”

Even before she took up a brush, Sugiura was gesturing toward painting. At first glance, one might not recognize these works as photographs, especially because the artist enhanced many of the compositions with graphite and daubs of acrylic paint to accentuate certain details or increase the contrast, which was lost in the enlargement process. Printed on a rough canvas surface, they have a dreamlike quality and often dissolve at the edges, evoking a faded memory. In their drowsy softness, they are reminiscent of the Pictorialist compositions Ansel Adams and his “straight photography” contingent railed against. They are impressionistic, offering more feeling than detail.

Even before she took up a brush, Sugiura was gesturing toward painting.

Eventually, Sugiura would do more than just reference painting; she merged painted and photographic elements together into hybrid objects. It did not happen immediately, however. For a time in the early 1970s, she abandoned photography altogether. As Sugiura later recalled, “There was a period when I only did painting. But it turns out that painting is incredibly difficult. I struggled with it. That lasted for two or three years.” Serendipitously, she one day showed a friend some of her photographs printed on canvas next to paintings in the studio, and he remarked that they looked interesting together. Thus began her experiments with conjoining the two. The timing was fortuitous, as she was feeling stymied in her practice and in need of a breakthrough.

Kunié Sugiura, Oneway, 1979. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood Kunié Sugiura, Promontory, 1980. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood

The Photopainting (1975–81) series was influenced by the work of Warhol and Rauschenberg, who also printed photographs on canvas, but Sugiura was doing something markedly different. Warhol and Rauschenberg generally screen-printed images culled from the media, often of famous people or momentous current events. Sugiura, by contrast, took her own photographs and printed them on canvas in the darkroom, cropping, enlarging, or pairing details with painted components. In time, she also incorporated wooden elements, which frame the canvas parts and connect them to one another, giving the pieces a sculptural quality. Where Warhol and Rauschenberg were referring to popular culture and history, Sugiura was responding to the natural and urban worlds around her.

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While the subjects of the Photocanvas series are generally organic forms, many of the examples in the Photopainting series depict urban scenes, both in New York and in places she visited, notably Los Angeles. The painted portions of these composite pieces are simply executed, but the choice of their size and color in relation to the photographic elements is nuanced and visually sophisticated, resulting in unexpected and dynamic pairings. Sugiura does not shy away from beauty, but she also often revels in the grimy glory of New York, which has a visual appeal of its own, especially when lit up at night.

In the Photopainting series, Sugiura often deploys empty space to profound effect, as in her monumental Deadend Street (1978). The two photographs that comprise the work were made at the same location near the South Street Seaport in New York on different days: the one on the right after rain and the one on the left on a dry day. The surfaces of the painted panels directly correlate with the content of the photographs, the glossy surface on the right-hand panel evoking the rain-soaked pavement and the matte texture on the left suggesting dryness. The void at the center of the piece serves as a break, or a breath, connecting the two sides, a gap inspired by the Japanese concept of ma, which, in its simplest translation, refers to a pause in space and time.

Kunié Sugiura, Deadend Street, 1978. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood
All works courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Opposite: courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Sugiura was hospitalized in 1990 with a collapsed lung and had numerous X-rays taken during the recovery process. At that time, X-rays were made on heavy-duty film, and Sugiura was excited by their mysterious beauty and the way they rendered the human body fragmented and foreign. She took her X-rays home and printed from them in her darkroom, later persuading her doctor to give her the discarded films of other patients and eventually accumulating a large collection. Over several years, Sugiura made various types of playful compositions using these found negatives. More than twenty years later, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sugiura revisited her X-ray negatives, combining them with painted canvases. Vertebra (2021), featured on the cover of Aperture’s Spring issue, is Sugiura’s first large-scale grid, a piece that can be configured in various ways. Here, the images of spinal columns become totemic, their repetition rhythmic.

From the time she first began printing on canvas in the late 1960s, Sugiura has willfully breached boundaries between mediums, making genre-defying artworks that, as she has said, “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.” And yet, despite the inherent rebelliousness of the act, the gesture does not overwhelm the vision. Rather, Sugiura fluidly and gracefully combines techniques to make dynamic and original hybrid forms where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

This essay is adapted from the monograph Kunié Sugiura, forthcoming from MACK. An accompanying exhibition, Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting, will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, from April 26–September 14 2025.

See more in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting.”

How Can Image-Makers Open Up AI’s Mysterious “Black Box”?

Consider the below pair of images, both generated with the same prompt and the same basic generative AI model, Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), the state-of-the-art open-source image-generation model of mid-2024. The prompt: “a photograph of a mother and child on the back of a truck by Dorothea Lange.” Best known for her work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the rural poor during the Great Depression, Lange took many of the twentieth century’s most iconic photographs of destitution and perseverance, most famously Migrant Mother (1936). But the image on the left appears less like social documentary and more like a publicity still from a black-and-white Hollywood movie: airbrushed smooth skin, shiny white teeth peering out of a wide smile, and fresh, clean clothing. We can practically sense Clark Gable or Charlie Chaplin just out of frame. (For the moment, let’s ignore the telltale AI inconsistencies, most egregiously the woman’s misshapen hand, which mirrors that of the child, and the truck reduced to a doorframe.) Stylistically, this AI image bears no substantive resemblance to the work of Dorothea Lange.

Images generated with AI using the prompt “a photograph of a mother and child on the back of a truck by Dorothea Lange,” 2024

The image on the right, however, is a different beast. Fingers are still garbled. There are too many hands and not enough arms. Newer AI models have largely fixed anatomy problems, but they’ve exacerbated the stylistic issues that are the subject of this essay. Take the creations of DALL·E 3 (ChatGPT4o), Grok, and Flux, the leading AI image generators of now: The anatomy is nearly flawless, but the images hardly call to mind FSA photography, let alone the specific style of Lange.

Images generated with AI using the prompt “a photograph of a mother and child on the back of a truck by Dorothea Lange” (DALL·E 3, Grok, Flux1.1[Dev]), 2024

In the image on the right of the initial pair, although the anatomy is jumbled, the style feels like Lange’s to a degree that is wholly absent from the other images. As discussed in our article “Generative Style,” in the December 2024 issue of Aperture, we generated the image on the right by fine-tuning SDXL on a large corpus of Lange’s FSA photographs. The image of the left is blandly attractive and ready to be posted on a corporate Instagram account. The image on the right remains strikingly faithful to Lange’s photographic content and style, especially when we remember that it is nothing more than a data visualization. Visually, the difference between the two images is obvious. How do we account for that difference technically?

Latent Space

It is not possible to directly know how, where, or why each bit of meaning and data is stored in an AI model. The hidden layers that contain this information are known as the model’s latent space. This is the locus of the notorious “black box” of AI. When a prompt moves through an imaging model, the relevant data is retrieved from the latent space, transformed through various mathematical operations, and processed into a final visual form. The major generative AI models have purposely constructed their latent space to create blandly attractive images. The technical mechanism for this is called aesthetic scoring.

[image error]Images generated with AI using the prompt “a photograph of a schoolteacher with a student by Gordon Parks,” 2024

Aesthetic Scoring

Image generation, like all of AI, is a product. The companies behind the models have determined that their most viable output is an image that is fun, attractive, and likely to be shared on social media. To create the blandly attractive images most users like—or have been trained to like—AI models often rely on quantified and codified metrics of image qualities rated as desirable by the initial core user base, namely tech bros. Results that satisfy benchmarks for “beauty,” “composition”, and “coherence” are accentuated, and those which do not are suppressed. This automation has a homogenizing effect on many of the subjects of image generation. Broad white smiles, waxy smooth skin, piercing eyes, and soaring cheekbones are enforced across the board, even for destitute farmers. Our attempt to recreate the style of specific photographers—a pursuit we have termed latent specificity—requires the negation of aesthetic scoring and its homogenizing sheen.

Seeds and Seed-Locking

In order to study AI image generation, it is crucial to limit all settings available to us and test changes in a controlled manner. The most basic of these elements is that of the “seed.” The seed is nothing more than an arbitrary number that injects some randomness at the initial stage of image (and language) generation. If all other settings are held consistent but the seed is allowed to change, we will observe variation within a narrow range. For no reason other than randomness, some seeds produce better images than others—if the output is not quite satisfying, simply roll again.

Images generated with AI using the custom-trained model’s response to the prompt, “a photograph of a police officer by Gordon Parks,” 2024

Image generation is not a truly stochastic process. Midjourney, OpenAI, and Google do not expose the full suite of controls available to us with open-source solutions. If we lock our seed and all other settings, the AI will give us the exact same answer—in this case an image—again and again. This should disabuse us of any notions of a “ghost in the machine” or agency on the part of the model. Data in, data out.

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LoRAs

Prompting can take us only so far. Rather than spending hours writing ever-lengthening formalistic descriptions in the hopes of dredging from the model some semblance of an FSA image, we sought to bring some of the latent space itself under our control. Training a portion of an AI model is known as fine-tuning, and there are countless approaches to doing so. We elected to use the method known as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). The technical details of what a LoRA is and how it functions are well beyond the scope of this article. How one goes about training and implementing a LoRA is as much art as it is science (not unlike much of AI data science). In brief, LoRAs build on a model’s deep training and can nudge its style toward that of a particular set of images—a separate and smaller training dataset.

To train models capable of producing compelling simulations of photographs in the styles of Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks during their time with the FSA, we gathered roughly 1,000 public-domain photographs by Lange photographs and 1,400 by Parks from the Library of Congress. By contrast, SDXL was trained on billions of image-text pairs gathered in open-source training datasets like LAION-5B. We did not have the technical resources to fine-tune the entire latent space of SDXL. Instead, we trained each of our LoRAs to nudge the model toward the data that more closely aligned with the images in our smaller datasets. We introduced latent specificity into the model without changing its underlying architecture or data.

[image error]Images generated with AI using the prompt, “a photograph of a bus driver by Dorothea Lange,” 2024

Data, Compute, and Their Costs

Data scientists now recognize that data quality is as important as data quantity. The new mantra of model training is “garbage in, garbage out.” Accordingly, of the 175,000 black-and-white photographs available in the Library of Congress’s archives and the many thousands of photographs by Lange and Parks, we focused on the 1,000 to 1,400 photographs that best embodied the subjects and style we were after. Precision curation is impossible for a base model of billions of image-text pairs, but it is possible and necessary for fine-tuning.

Even as data scientists now place greater emphasis on data quality and curation, there is no question that AI models remain enormously hungry for seemingly endless amounts of data and computational power, or compute. To train our modest LoRA models, we ran a high-end computer outfitted with an Nvidia 3090 card continuously for several days. When we wrote our essay for Aperture in the middle of 2024, SDXL was the premier open-source model. In the ensuing months—an eternity in computing, let alone AI—it has been wholly eclipsed by larger and more proficient models. These models dwarf SDXL in capability and parameter counts. Yet their size is a double-edged sword: They can create stunning images, but their scale makes them exponentially more intensive to train. What took us a few dozen hours with SDXL would take several months of energy-intensive, nonstop computer processing on the current leading models. Our high-end computer and single Nvidia 3090 card would be woefully insufficient to experiment with these models. We would have to rent cloud-based equipment or purchase tens of thousands of dollars of hardware. Furthermore, the carbon footprint of the compute used to create the images in this article is not negligible. As an industry, AI is the fastest-growing carbon polluter on the planet.

Images generated with AI using the prompt “a portrait photograph of a doctor by Gordon Parks.” These images plot the epoch of the LoRA increased from 1 to 10 vertically. The percent at which it is applied is increased from 0 to 100 percent horizontally, 2024

Epochs

LoRA training is an incremental series of steps during which the model learns from our curated set of images. These steps can be grouped into discrete, functional units known as epochs. By creating plots of epochs where we lock the seed, we create AI’s version of a contact sheet. Here we can examine the influence of the LoRA in isolation. Using a LoRA is not an all-or-nothing proposition—we can determine the percentage at which it is applied to the model. This is often helpful to examine which elements of the image are altered and at what point.

There is no correct answer to be found when training an AI; it is “finished” when what we produce satisfies our goals. Not all epochs are created equal, and more is not necessarily better. In our research, we never judged the final epoch to be the best for our purposes. The latent space is not endlessly flexible, and overemphasizing our LoRA data seems to degrade not just the appearance of the style we are striving for, but the image as a whole.

In the following grid of images, we observe the tension between the style dictated by the LoRA and the predispositions of SDXL. The first two columns present images from early epochs we judge as successful; the third column includes images from the final epoch of the training, and they are riddled with problems. Instead of a girl studiously reading a book, the third image renders a figure with unclear anatomy obscured by a massive book. Instead of a boy wearing a shabby baseball cap, we find a strange mass of textures and shapes placed upon his head. Finally, rather than a wizened gentleman, we have a figure with limbs of unclear origin and number sprouting from the bench on which he sits. The LoRA can impose its style, but when it is applied too strongly, the battle against aesthetic scoring results in a Pyrrhic victory where the image has been pushed past cohesion.

Images generated with AI using the prompts (top to bottom): “a photograph of a child reading a book by Gordon Parks,” “a photograph of a child baseball player by Gordon Parks,” “a photograph of an old man sitting on a bench by Gordon Parks,” 2024
Epochs 2, 6, 10

The inherent variation in LoRAs often elicits questions that might not have been raised prior to training. Below are seed- and prompt-locked images. The three prompts are for portrait photographs of a banker, a doctor, and a lawyer by Dorothea Lange. Using any one of the LoRA’s epochs, the model will produce the exact same image every time. But the variations across epochs are striking. There is nothing in our process we can highlight to explain why the first epoch favors female-presenting subjects, the second male-presenting subjects, nor how the third has found a less strongly defined gender expression.

Images generated with AI using the prompts (top to bottom): “a portrait photograph of a banker by Dorothea Lange,” “a portrait photograph of a doctor by Dorothea Lange,” “a portrait photograph of a lawyer by Dorothea Lange,” 2024
Epochs 5,6,7

AI imaging enables endless variations, but within a painfully narrow range. The seeming uniqueness and fundamental similarity of these images speaks to the underlying truth of AI imaging. As Adorno and Horkheimer protested in the 1940s: “The conformism of the buyers and the effrontery of the producers who supply them prevail. The result is a constant reproduction of the same thing.” The clear and present dangers of AI wildly exceed the bland attractiveness that we have addressed with our LoRA and in this essay. But the homogenization of visual culture is no small matter either. The black box of AI need not become an iron cage of eternal sameness.

Noam M. Elcott is professor of modern art history at Columbia University. His next book is Photography, Identity, Status: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century.

Tim Trombley is senior educational technologist at the Media Center for Art History at Columbia University.

How Photography Memorializes Dance

During a recent visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, I noticed a woman in the gift shop open the catalog for Edges of Ailey—an exhibition devoted to the dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey—and point proudly to a portrait of herself among the dancers. That made sense. Dance is ephemeral, experiential, but photographs are enduring. Without photography, how would dance be memorialized? Some might argue that video offers a closer impression of a performance, but permissions and quality can make reviewing archival events difficult. Image-making is memento mori embodied, which feels appropriate for an artist with a death-defying legacy. The curator Adrienne Edwards describes the exhibition as the culmination of years of research, an “interdisciplinary extravaganza,” within which photography plays a formative role. But what is the connection between Ailey’s distinct art and the ephemeral image?

John Lindquist, Carmen de Lavallade and Alvin Ailey at Jacobs Pillow, 1961
© Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

For Edges of Ailey, the museum’s fifth floor was transformed into a den of crimson and shadows: the walls were Lynchian red. Opaque, rouge curtains covered the windows and tinted the New Jersey skyline and Hudson River the color of blood. Set near the ceiling, a long video montage of performance clips ran the length of the gallery, while existing and newly commissioned artworks by Black artists both living and dead occupied the center of the floor. Upon entry, visitors were almost violently confronted with the thesis: “THIS IS DANCE. THIS IS ART. THIS IS ALVIN AILEY.” Yet, as the exhibition title suggests, we only get an outline.

Lyle Ashton Harris, Billie #21, 2002
© the artist James Van Der Zee, Dancer, 1925
© Estate of James Van Der Zee

Photography was positioned most prominently in the exhibition’s first section, which focuses on music and Ailey’s notion that dance is a conduit for sound, rather than response. This is illustrated effectively, if slightly predictably, by the selection of images. Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava bear the weight of such visualizations, by turns moody and romantic in their depictions of John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and a couple lost in emotion in a string duet. Lyle Ashton Harris’s Billie #21 (2002), a self-portrait of the artist in costume as Billie Holiday, is the most recent work, but it makes an obvious connection, amplified by the other selected photographs. Works by James Van Der Zee, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and even Carrie Mae Weems, for example, seem like a greatest hits compilation dispatched to highlight Ailey’s connection to civil rights and labor movements, spirituality, and the history of enslavement in the United States.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Every Moment Counts (Ecstatic Antibodies), 1989
© the artist and courtesy Autograph, London

Other sections of the show touch on Ailey’s collaborators and influences, but the aforementioned artists aren’t included. The works of the photographers (and most of the artists in the exhibition) connect to the themes in Ailey’s work, but not to Ailey himself. This does not detract from the beauty of the photographs, nor the sense that Ailey would commune deeply with them, but too frequently they are wielded as illustrations of concepts and fail to illustrate a specific relationship to Ailey as a person, as an artist, rather than the notion of his legacy.

Edges of Ailey exists in a climate of institutions playing catch-up—recognizing the contributions Black artists have made to their respective fields—to the point where I feel if you’ve seen one Van Der Zee you’ve seen them all, especially for visitors to any major New York survey in the last few years, such as The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Met, which seemed to have a Van Der Zee every two paces, or Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now at the Guggenheim, which positioned Fani-Kayode’s work in conversation with Robert Mapplethorpe’s.

Carl Van Vechten, Alvin Ailey, 1955
© Van Vechten Trust Carl Van Vechten, Alvin Ailey, 1955
© Van Vechten Trust

On the literal edges of the exhibition were portraits of Ailey by Carl Van Vechten. These offer more direct evidence of Ailey’s relationship to photography, and to visual art in general. Van Vechten was a white writer known for inserting himself into the Harlem Renaissance via his controversial novel N***** Heaven (1926). He later pivoted to photography, and became famous for his portraits of prominent artists and intellectuals. The intimate images here hold many of the visual cues referenced in Ailey’s work, including early twentieth-century studio work (for instance, Van Der Zee’s The Actor) and iconography from African spiritual practices, rendered in lush, sensuous color akin that of Fani-Kayode.

Fred Fehl, Hidden Rites, 1973
© The Harry Ransom Center

Throughout the show, glimpses of Ailey appear in the form of ephemera, such as show documentation, or newly commissioned works by artists such as Jennifer Packer, but the portraits offer the most direct view. His expressions are coy, his gestures controlled. The backgrounds are rich in hue and pattern, with shadowy vignetting that holds much visual weight. There is something about this set of images that implies Ailey was aware of the power of being seen, especially by the white gaze. Perhaps he could intuit that, like his pieces, he could not be seen nor preserved in totality. But, like the woman in the lobby, he knew there was still something worth sharing, worth being proud of, something worth dancing for.

Edges of Ailey was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from September 25, 2024 through February 9, 2025.