Aperture's Blog, page 11
November 21, 2024
32 Photobooks for Everyone on Your Holiday Gift List
Looking for the perfect holiday gift? From a gift subscription to Aperture magazine, classic photobooks for every collection, monographs by today’s leading artists, inspiring photography reads, and so much more, we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.
Must-Haves for Photo Lovers
Aperture Magazine Subscription
The source for photography since 1952, Aperture features immersive portfolios, in-depth writing, and must-read interviews with today’s leading artists. This summer, Aperture introduced a new look for the magazine with “The Design Issue.” Numerous luminaries have guest edited issues—including the most recent, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” guest edited by Deana Lawson—among them Wolfgang Tillmans, Tilda Swinton, Alec Soth, Sarah Lewis, Nicole R. Fleetwood, and Wendy Red Star, making the magazine essential reading for anyone interested in photography and contemporary culture.
In the nearly seven decades since its publication in the 1950s, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption, injustice, and the stark reality of the American dream. This year, to mark the centennial of Frank’s birth, Aperture has reissued The Americans, alongside a special centennial edition with a slipcase and featuring a booklet showcasing Frank’s early films.
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now
I’m So Happy You Are Here presents 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 a range of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians.
Danny Lyon’s riveting book about a Chicago motorcycle club is one of the definitive accounts of American counterculture. First published in 1968, The Bikeriders offers an immersive look into the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, bringing together photographs and transcribed interviews by Lyon from 1963 to 1967. The volume was also the inspiration for the 2023 film of the same name starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Tom Hardy.
Pioneering Voices
Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía
Best known for his intimate portrayals of barrio communities of the Southwest United States, Louis Carlos Bernal made photographs in the 1970s and 1980s that draw upon the resonance of Catholicism, Indigenous beliefs, and popular practices tied to the land. For Bernal, photography was a potent tool in affirming the value of individuals and communities who lacked visibility and agency. The first major scholarly account of Bernal’s life and work, Monografía is a landmark survey of one of the most significant American photographers of the twentieth century.
Featuring over 260 unpublished photographs, The True America is the first publication of Ernest Cole’s images depicting Black lives in the US during the turbulent and eventful late 1960s and early 1970s. After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book, House of Bondage, in 1967 (reissued by Aperture in 2022) on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Cole photographed throughout New York City’s streets and the rural South. These photographs reflect both the newfound freedom Cole experienced in the US and the photographer’s incisive eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed.
In her searing, diaristic portrait 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 over a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with 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.”
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. First published by Aperture in 1986, The Ballad continues to exert a major influence on photography and other aesthetic realms, its status as a contemporary classic firmly established.
Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful
Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been underrecognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.
For the Reader
Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images
Race Stories brings together a collection of award-winning short essays by the late cultural historian Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories features seventy-one essays paired with 120 photographs, examining the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combatting racial stereotypes. This volume marks the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis—which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.
Josef Koudelka: Next is an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists. Drawing from extensive interviews conducted over nearly a decade with the artist and his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators from around the globe, author Melissa Harris offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and world of this notoriously private photographer. Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, this visual biography includes personal and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, alongside iconic images from his extensive body of work spanning the 1950s to the present.
Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists by Rebecca Bengal
In Strange Hours, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Whether reflecting on her exchanges with William Eggleston or her travels with Alec Soth, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and the vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.
Contemporary Classics
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II
In their evocative self-portraits, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon notions of Blackness and the myriad possibilities of the self. Drawing on different materials or found objects referencing their environment, a specific event, or lived experience, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
One of the most compelling photographers working today, Deana Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful through her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. Lawson’s Aperture Monograph is the first photobook by the visionary artist. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in her essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”
Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-in C-print.
In Family Ties, Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with a sense of spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common. In the late 1970s, Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class, of 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. Released upon the occasion of Barney’s first retrospective in Europe, Family Ties brings together sixty large-format portraits from three decades that have defined Barney’s career.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s award-winning first photobook, The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacies of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Frazier, whose first major museum survey ran at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, earlier this year, examines the effects of that decline on the community, her own family, and the narratives of the region. Setting the story across three generations—her Grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—Frazier creates a statement that’s both personal and political.
From hip-hop to Nefertiti, Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to span this rising artist’s career. Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reinterprets Western art, often by casting Black subjects in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination,” Erizku states. “When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.” Blending Erizku’s studio practice with his work as an editorial photographer, the volume is accompanied by essays from acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Félix, alongside conversations with Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent.
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For the Style- and Design-Inspired
Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive
Arielle Bobb-Willis’s first book, Keep the Kid Alive, 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 tableaus, 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.”
The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion
In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in art and fashion today through the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers who are rethinking the possibilities of representation. Whether on the role of the Black figure in media; cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture; or the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers, The New Black Vanguard opens up critical conversations while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.
Reproduction is the first monograph to collect the photographs of internationally acclaimed multimedia artist Barry McGee. Throughout his career, McGee has recorded the conspiratorial energy and daring acts of street art, a practice fundamental to his work in painting, drawing, zines, and installation. Reproduction provides unique insight into the process of a major American artist and is a testament to the immense amount of visual information McGee has absorbed throughout his career.
David Benjamin Sherry: Pink Genesis
With his mesmerizing analog photograms, David Benjamin Sherry melds queer history, abstraction, and darkroom magic. Born out of what Sherry has called the “transformative potential of the darkroom,” each of his large-scale, cameraless color photograms is laboriously made by hand in the darkroom. Using cardboard masks to create geometric forms and incorporating his own body into the images, Sherry actively references histories of photography—while also thinking through the intersections of identity, form, and the hypnotic power of extreme color. Pink Genesis collects twenty-nine one-of-a-kind works that delight in the pleasures of form and color.
Give the Gift of Inspiration
The Photography Workshop Book Series
In our Photography Workshop Series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography, offering the workshop experience in a book. Whether showcasing Richard Misrach on landscape photography and meaning; Graciela Iturbide on how to employ a deeply personal vision while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds; or Dawoud Bey on photographing people and communities, these books offer inspiration to photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.
Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph
What is a “photo no-no”? Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, or sometimes even arbitrary. Edited by Jason Fulford, this volume brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility—offering a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.
Inspire young readers with three special books that explore the magic of photography. Eyes Open, compiled by Susan Meiselas, is a sourcebook of photography ideas and prompts for children to engage with the world through the camera. Seeing Things serves as a wonderful introduction to photography, with narration by Joel Meyerowitz on how photographers can transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography.
For the Armchair Traveler
In Wires Crossed, Ed Templeton offers an insider’s look at the skateboarding community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond. Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding, the book reflects on a subculture in the making and the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world he helped create. “This book is a culmination of literally my first idea as a photographer, ” Templeton reflects in an interview from the book. “which was to document this culture that I’m part of.”
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
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. 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. 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.
Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures
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.
Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light
Since the 1970s, Alex Webb has distilled gesture, light, and color into layered compositions. First published by Aperture in 2011 and newly reprinted, The Suffering of Light touches on multiple genres across Webb’s work, charting the expansive career of the acclaimed photographer. “Not a typical documentary photographer or photojournalist, I’ve worked essentially as a street photographer, exploring the world with the camera, allowing the rhythm and the life of the street to guide and inform the work,” Webb writes in the introduction to the volume. “For me, everything comes, first and foremost, from the street.”
For the Collector
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z, Limited-Edition Book and Print Set
In Dark Room A–Z, Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflects on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind a single, expansive body of work at a pivotal moment in his career. Sepuya’s photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture. Dark Room A–Z offers a deep dive into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has interwoven throughout the images. This unique, signed edition of the volume features a clamshell box and limited-edition print by the artist.
Diana Markosian: Father, Limited-Edition Book and Print Set
Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together a mix of 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 Markosian’s first book, Santa Barbara, in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement.
As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic (LP)
Aperture’s first record release is a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the Diaspora, featuring artists such as Jamaican dancehall musician Tenor Saw, North American guitarist Jeff Parker, British funk band Cymande, and South African artist-singer-activist Miriam Makeba. The LP expands upon the ethos of the book As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.
August Sander: People of the 20th Century
A landmark in the history of modern art, People of the 20th Century presents the fullest expression of August Sander’s lifelong work: a monumental endeavor to amass an archive of twentieth-century humanity through a cross-section of German culture. In the 1920s, Sander began to photograph subjects from all walks of life, documenting bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families. Sander’s photographs, remarkable for their unflinching realism, provide a powerful social mirror of Germany between the world wars. People of the 20th Century brings together this long out-of-print compendium in an all-in-one volume featuring over six hundred photographs—the most comprehensive iteration of Sander’s still-essential vision.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.
November 15, 2024
6 Photographers Reflect on Robert Frank’s “The Americans”
In the nearly seven decades since its publication in France in 1958, then in the US in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption, injustice, and the stark reality of the American dream. Frank’s point of view—at once startling and tenacious—is imbued with humanity and lyricism, painting a poignant and incomparable portrait of the nation at a turning point in history.
This year, to mark the centennial of Frank’s birth, Aperture has reissued The Americans more than a half century after the 1968 Aperture and Museum of Modern Art edition. This year’s publication coincides with the major exhibition Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Now extolled as one of the most groundbreaking photobooks of all time, The Americans remains as powerful and provocative as it was upon publication and continues to resonate with audiences today. Frank’s exacting vision, distinct style, and poetic insight changed the course of twentieth-century photography—and influenced generations of photographers. Here, six artists choose a photograph from The Americans and reflect on its lasting impact.
Robert Frank, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1955/56Dawoud Bey
Through his now famous journey of absolution across the US that he undertook beginning in 1955, Robert Frank sought to take the pulse of America visually. In the induced optimism of the postwar Eisenhower era, Frank saw, with the unvarnished X-ray vision of an attentive newcomer, beneath the veneer of that era’s optimism to see an America beset by social tensions. For one thing, the troubled relations that the country had with its Black citizens—a continuing legacy of slavery—still rested heavily on the landscape. But then, so did those occasional moments of celebratory release, leisure, and self-celebration, such as one he found as a Black woman ended her day one evening in an open field. The sun was beginning to set, and this lone Black woman was reveling in her moment of release from her labors and cares. She found herself a moment of sheer reverie and was witnessed in this moment by a meandering stranger of a decidedly different race and circumstance, who nevertheless in that instant made an image that imbued her presence with an internal lightness and gestural elegance that spoke—and still speaks—to her deeper sense of self.
Robert Frank, Drug store — Detroit, 1955/56Tommy Kha
This is the first Robert Frank picture I saw in a lecture (Ellen Daugherty’s “History of Photography”). Drug Store—Detroit depicts different kinds of divisions: race, class, but also photographic composition. Every element in this picture is occupied. The eye is redirected constantly—from the multiple, semi-deconstructed orange advertisements suspended in the air to the stark contrast between the waitresses and the row of patrons sitting at the counter. The picture’s only breathing space, next to the women of color behind the counter, is quickly disappearing.
Viewing this image, I want to recall my fondness for the late Wiles-Smith Drug Store in Memphis. This drug store had a lunch counter serving the best tuna melts and shakes and was an echo of bygone days. While I would prefer to idealize these communal spaces and the shared experiences around food, I can’t help but be haunted by the uglier moments the past can evoke and its divisions that persist today in plain sight. Frank’s photograph remains a cautionary tale.
Robert Frank, Assembly line — Detroit, 1955/56Ari Marcopoulos
This is a view of life where a worker’s productivity is all that matters. Working in twenty-four-hour-a-day shifts till your body simply can’t do it anymore. The modern serfs living under kings. The American dream disassembled in one image. The American dream is, in fact, a nightmare.
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Robert Frank, Rodeo — New York City, 1955/56Katy Grannan
I remember where I was standing and the quality of the light the day I first picked up the book that changed everything. There was a before and after, and all the revelations in between its pages were so powerful that I walked away from a career in medicine and chose photography instead. I had never seen anything like The Americans—the poetry, the formal intelligence, the unrelenting critique, and the humanity of Robert Frank’s work were so beautiful and messy and unafraid. Words are a poor approximation, but since Aperture asked, I’ll say this photograph of a cowboy leaning against a trash can is something else. Its meaning only starts within the frame—the cowboy’s tight-fitting jeans are carefully tucked into hand-tooled boots, his long legs extended and crossed casually as though anticipating an audience. It seems the Marlboro Man has lost his way, his horse replaced by a trash can. Never mind the concrete backdrop, this wayward mythic figure is a Believer, attending to every sartorial detail, gesture, and pose.
Kristine Potter
There’s much to admire in The Americans, but I’ve always particularly loved the portrait of the cowboy in Rodeo — New York City. Frank captures a moment of dislocation—a man dressed in the rugged attire of the American West, standing alone on a city street. His cowboy hat, boots, and belt buckle evoke the myth of the fearless, independent figure, yet here, he seems out of place. His head is bowed, hands adjusting his shirt in a small, vulnerable gesture that contrasts sharply with the boldness we associate with this iconic role. The urban environment surrounds him, indifferent to his presence, while he remains isolated from it, leaning against a wire trash can as though caught between worlds. I’m particularly drawn to the tension between myth and reality, which runs throughout Frank’s work. He reveals how twentieth-century symbols like the cowboy, the car, and the drive-in unravel—whether through shifts in context, changing cultural landscapes, or because the myths were always fragile. Yet, in stripping away the layers of these American ideals, Frank was not only exposing their complexities but also deconstructing them. Frank was perceptive enough to recognize these symbols even as they were being formed.
Robert Frank, View from hotel window — Butte, Montana, 1955/56Alec Soth
Like countless photographers inspired by Robert Frank, I’ve visited Butte, Montana, and been seduced by its faded western grandeur. I’ve even made the devotional pilgrimage to the room where he took his picture at the Finlen Hotel and Motor Inn. Needless to say, the picture I took wasn’t memorable. What makes Frank’s image special is less what’s described than the aura of its author. The somber hotel view has depth because we step into the shoes of the road-weary traveler.
See more in Robert Frank: The Americans (Aperture, 2024).
Hervé Guibert’s Seductive Photo-Novel About Two Sisters in Reclusion
Hervé Guibert is best known for autobiographical novels, such as To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), published the year before he died from AIDS-related complications at the age of thirty-six. But Guibert was also passionate about another means of turning life into art: photography. This is evidenced not only by the many recent exhibitions of his work and his essential book Ghost Image (1982)—a carnal response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida—but equally by the photo-novel Suzanne and Louise, first published in 1980 and finally now appearing in an English translation by Christine Pichini. As Moyra Davey notes in her introduction to the new edition, the book is “a prized rarity” in that it is Guibert’s “only monograph where his full gifts as an image maker and as a writer combine.” The nature of that combination is at turns seductive, touching, and clever—but it is never straightforward.
Suzanne and Louise is a story of devotion and desire. Almost all its images are domestic portraits of the titular sisters, the author’s great-aunts, who live together in a hôtel particulier in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement. Guibert tells the tale of these women and offers glimpses of their lives, defying their idea that “old age isn’t presentable.” The pictures are posed but devoid of any great artifice; they possess a candor that is telegraphed above all by how often the pair is seen with their long gray hair—“the most intimate thing,” Guibert writes—set free to flow down backs that stoop with the weight of years. Ingenuous disclosure, one might think. While this would not be entirely wrong, the book’s first image points in a different direction. It depicts not Suzanne and Louise but studio portraits of each woman at a younger age, both of which are partially obscured by other images tucked into their frames. Likenesses multiply; any direct access to the pharmacist’s widow and the ex-Carmelite nun splinters into a field of competing depictions. This initial photograph of photographs is a clue that, rather than an immodest divulgence, Suzanne and Louise will be an intricate choreography of privacy, revelation, and performance, keenly testing the possibilities of its hybrid medium.
Guibert is known for telling all, for dragging all his life into the frame without shame, in ways tender and brutal. In La pudeur et l’impudeur (1992), his sole moving-image work, he subjects his emaciated body to the camera’s stare. Suzanne and Louise, intermittent protagonists in their grandnephew’s oeuvre since the photo-novel twelve years before, also appear in the video, fielding questions from him such as “Do you want to live or do you want to die?” (Suzanne’s answer: “It depends on the moment.”) This refusal to accept normative prescriptions of what deserves a place within representation—and what does not—sits at the heart of Guibert’s AIDS autofictions, and is no less present in Suzanne and Louise, despite its radically different subject matter. The book likewise plunges into an everyday that might otherwise be invisible, into lives lived at a distance from the heterosexual family and in palpable proximity to death. The intergenerational bond between the queer twentysomething and his great-aunts short-circuits patriarchal authority.
All photographs by Hervé Guibert from Suzanne and Louise (Magic Hour Press, 2024)The book’s texts have a diaristic quality that is heightened in the French edition, where they appear in Guibert’s own handwriting, tethering word to body. Yet alongside Suzanne and Louise’s many inscriptions of presence is a predilection for absence, dream, and fantasy—in other words, for fiction. The German shepherds Whysky and Amok are central to the text but remain unseen, with their only visible trace coming in two anomalous pictures in which Louise poses with their muzzle over her face. In an echo of Ghost Image, there are descriptions of nonexistent photographs, missing images that haunt through words. And as the book progresses, a complicated account unfolds of Guibert’s shifting attempts to represent his great-aunts across media, from an unrealized film and a play never publicly performed, to an exhibition that ultimately sparks the creation of a photo-novel that concludes with fragments of a script for a new movie. Plans change in response to myriad factors, not least of which is the women’s reticence to have the details of their cloistered existence made known. By the end, it is clear that the entire enterprise has been one of tremendous complicity, a conspiracy of three more than an unobtrusive picturing of two.
“I am afraid of spiders, but not afraid of the presence of the dead,” Guibert writes. That presence is everywhere throughout Suzanne and Louise, and not only because the women are getting on in age. Guibert describes images never taken of a euthanized Whysky; he offers multiple evocations of Suzanne’s death, whether in a dream, a series of staged photographs, a film script, or the idea of one day photographing her corpse. He clings to representation as a talisman that will ward off the inevitable—but to vanquish finitude, he must invite it in. The fourth protagonist of this singular work, a book caught between conceptualism and confession, is death itself.
Herve Guibert’s Suzanne and Louise was published by Magic Hour Press in 2024.
November 14, 2024
In the Mythic Mediterranean, a Labyrinth of Female Creativity
Cinephiles might recognize the pristine beaches of Porquerolles from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le fou. The small island just off France’s southern coast is a national park with little development—no cars, few houses—but abundant natural splendor, and in our age of far-flung destination art locations, there is also an arts foundation with a compelling program and collection. The Fondation Carmignac is the vision of Édouard Carmignac, who in 2018 adapted an old villa into an exhibition space, which sits serenely amid the sea, forest, and vineyards.
Sandro Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranate, 1445–1510Courtesy Collection Carmignac
This past summer, the foundation opened The Infinite Woman, a sprawling exhibition organized by curator Alona Pardo, assembling work by sixty-six artists (mostly women) working in all manner of media. This eclectic, multigenerational selection engaged with a multiplicity of ways of considering representations of women, the feminine, and the mythological. As Pardo explains, “The exhibition seeks to disrupt and question the archetypal representation of womanhood by proposing woman as a creative force, a sexual being, a pleasure-seeker, while dismantling accepted standards of beauty and rethinking the concept of woman altogether.” An ambitious endeavor, for sure, and the island location offered an appropriate stage. Porquerolles’s origin story is steeped in dramatic and gendered mythology (as with much maritime lore): A woman fleeing a male predator transformed into the island, giving form to the land. Across the show, figures of women appear as creators, world-builders, life-givers, and shapeshifters across centuries of art making, from a fifteenth-century Botticelli painting of the Madonna and Child greeting visitors at the gallery’s entrance, to the recent hypnotic, anthropomorphic relief paintings by Loie Hollowell and the otherworldly watercolors of Chioma Ebinama.
Frida Orupabo, Untitled (Spider II), 2022Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg. Photograph by Nicolas Brasseur/Fondation Carmignac
Still from Sin Wai Kin, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts, 2021Courtesy the artist; Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei; and Soft Opening, London
Structured around six categories—“Of Myths and Monsters” and “Disobedient Bodies” to name two—painting and sculpture dominated, with some notable photography sprinkled throughout. Spider II, 2022, a photo-collage by Nigerian Norwegian artist Frida Orupabo, foreshadowed a towering arachnid sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, and features the head of a Black woman montaged onto a chalky white spider’s body. Orupabo finds and collects her source imagery on the internet, using keywords such as “colonial vintage images,” to invent chimeras from charged historical material.
Much of the photographic work arrived later in the exhibition, in the thematic sections around desire and queer representation, attesting to both the camera’s role in objectification and the production of desire, as in the distorted pornographic images by Thomas Ruff, and its role in asserting or rescripting identity, as in Zanele Muholi’s crisp black-and-white portraits of trans women, or by exploding gender categories altogether, as in Martine Gutierrez’s stately “anti-icon” self-portraits that reimagine storied historical figures. Here, the artist appears in a retelling of Joan of Arc, with sword, breasts, and penis. A Dream of Wholeness in Parts, a 2021 film by Sin Wai Kin, plays with references to drag, traditional Chinese dramaturgy, and the image of the goddess Venus.
Kiana Hayeri, Kabul, Afghanistan, February 3, 2024Courtesy Fondation Carmignac
Kiana Hayeri, Kabul, Afghanistan, February 23, 2024 The broader work of Fondation Carmignac is, perhaps surprisingly, at least in formal contrast, dedicated to documentary. The recently announced fourteenth edition of their prestigious photojournalism prize was awarded to Canadian Iranian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri and French researcher Mélissa Cornet, who recently investigated the lives of women and girls across seven provinces in Afghanistan, following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Predictably, the project, No Woman’s Land, addressed the rollbacks on education and other freedoms for women, after twenty years of feckless US-led intervention. The extended captions for the project describe a bleak reality of child marriage, surveillance, and control, but the images also reveal quiet resilience in fleeting moments: dancing in the privacy of home, a torn poster instructing women to cover their faces, girls playing in a snowstorm. If the show at the Fondation was a celebration of the infinite possibilities of womanhood, Hayeri’s images offer a stark reminder of the infinite ways in which patriarchy has projected stifling control.
The Infinite Woman was on view at Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles Island, Hyères, France, April 26–November 2, 2024. No Woman’s Land is presented as part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival and on view at Réfectoire des Cordeliers, Paris, through November 18, 2024.
A Historic Archive’s Nightmarish Portrait of America
In April 1941, Russell Lee traveled to Chicago with fellow photographer Edwin Rosskam to document life in the “Black Belt,” an area of predominantly Black neighborhoods on the city’s South Side. The photographers were on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency that sought to combat rural poverty, and became famous for its project to photograph the struggles of impoverished Americans. Escorted by Richard Wright—whose landmark novel Native Son had been published a year prior—the pair spent three weeks visiting sites throughout the South Side, including public housing, schools, grocery stores, hospitals, nightclubs, and churches.
Left: Russell Lee, One of the leaders of the Pentecostal church testifying, Chicago, Illinois, 1941; right: Dorothea Lange, One of a row of tents, home of a pea picker, Near Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California, 1939At the historic Langley Avenue All Nations Pentecostal Church, Lee took one of the most captivating images of his career. A church leader, a Black woman, stands at the pulpit dressed in white robes, testifying before the congregation. She is animated, eyes closed, head thrown back, mouth open mid-speech, right arm hovering as if steadying herself against some unseen force. The photograph radiates a sense of spiritual surrender. It tells a different story than the images most often associated with the FSA: Dorothea Lange’s portrait of Florence Owens Thompson (the “Migrant Mother”), for instance, or Walker Evans’s photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs, iconic portraits of the twentieth century that elide as much as they illustrate what it looked like to be poor in America during the Great Depression.
By the time Lee arrived in Chicago, the FSA, under the aegis of program administrator Roy Stryker, had begun to document poverty in urban centers. A master propagandist, Stryker understood that the hard-luck, Dust Bowl imagery the agency had been producing since the mid-1930s was sidelining other narratives. What was the experience of the millions of Black Americans who had moved to northern and midwestern cities from the rural South during the First Great Migration? To fulfill the FSA’s goal of introducing “Americans to America,” the scope of the images expanded.
Left: Russell Lee, The hands of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, wife of a homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa, 1936; right: Russell Lee, Fruit trees in the late fall, Placer County, California 1940Lee’s photograph of the Pentecostal leader appears in the opening pages of Omen: Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive, 1935–1944, which reimagines the project of the FSA through a study in radical contrasts. Edited by Mexican designer León Muñoz Santini and Colombian photographer Jorge Panchoaga, the book draws on images from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs of the New York Public Library to feature work by eight of the FSA’s twelve full-time photographers: Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, and Jack Delano.
A phantasmagoria is a succession of real or imaginary images, as in a dream. Omen fully embraces this concept, both through its sequencing, which creates a loose, unsettling narrative, and through particular pairings that suggest oneiric fictions, possession as much as dispossession. Lee’s aforementioned photograph, for instance, is juxtaposed with the solitary tent of a pea picker, photographed by Dorothea Lange two years earlier in California’s Imperial Valley. Taken nearly two thousand miles apart, the pictures collapse time and distance, together conjuring evangelical tent revivals and faith healings.
Walker Evans, Negroes in the lineup for food at meal time in the camp for flood refugees, Forrest City, Arkansas, 1937Another spread pairs two photographs taken in 1935 by Carl Mydans. The first, shot at the Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland, depicts several blindfolded men and women—all white—taste-testing meat while seated around a kitchen table. Opposite is an image taken in Forrest City, Arkansas, which shows a Black man and woman waiting in line for food at a camp for flood refugees. The photograph is cropped to show only their torsos and left arms, empty plates in hand. The striking, ominous racialized contrast illustrates the chasm between blind abundance and true need.
Cropped, blown up, refocused, and uncaptioned, these pictures lose their old propagandist veneer, revealing a stranger, more vulnerable America. A man and woman roller skating in shadow are brought to light. Young boys at a Halloween party are cropped and centered as a man with demon eyes gazes from beyond. A dead eagle, the right wing clipped from the frame, hangs totem-like against a razor-wire fence. A field of burning wheat stubble is magnified into a firestorm.
Left: Carl Mydans, Testing meats at the Department of Agriculture. Beltsville, Maryland, 1935; right: Carl Mydans, Negroes in the lineup for food at mealtime in the camp for flood refugees, Forrest City, Arkansas, 1935Muñoz Santini and Panchoaga—who met in 2019 after being invited by the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo to lead an editing workshop at EN CMYK—characterize their work as “excavations,” which is apt, given how deeply they have mined the New York Public Library’s archive of forty thousand FSA photographs. That the book includes 124 images is a reminder that national histories are always incomplete. Looking through the library’s archive, the editors would have encountered few if any images of the protests, riots, and strikes that convulsed 1930s America, when New Deal programs sought to stave off socialist revolution and resurrect capitalism following the 1929 crash.
Omen belongs to a growing canon of creative work reinterpreting the FSA’s archive. For Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), William E. Jones assembled a selection of 157 negatives destroyed by Stryker—whose editing process involved punching holes in faces, bodies, buildings, and landscapes—and hypothesized about what motivated the bureaucrat’s choices. Day Sleeper (2020), a book by Sam Contis, distills the iconic work of Dorothea Lange to a dreamlike narrative about the waking world, her portraits of people asleep in public balanced by many previously unpublished images by her, both professional and private. Earlier this year, the exhibition Color Photographs from the New Deal (1939–1943), was presented at Carriage Trade, New York. Its shockingly vivid, rarely reproduced Kodachrome images presented pioneering artistic achievements of the FSA photographers in a new light.
Left: Dorothea Lange, This man was a tenant on the same farm for eighteen years. He has six children. This year he was forced into status of day laborer on the same farm. The farm owner employed twenty-three tenant families last year. This year, the same acreage, using tractors, requires seven families, Ellis County, Texas, 1937; right: Walker Evans, Vicksburg battlefield monument, Mississippi, 1936Photographs from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the New York Public Library
In a coda to Omen, American novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives stresses how tenuous the connections are between fact and fiction when looking at documentary photographs; how our eyes can deceive us. In her view, Muñoz Santini and Panchoaga have created “something powerfully nonnarrative” with their image selections. “What I mean is that Muñoz Santini and Panchoaga make the photographs more difficult to see—and therefore more visible—because in Omen these famous photographs are no longer the photographs that we remember,” Ives writes. “They are not photographs that were taken in 1936 or in 1941. Instead, they were, in a manner of speaking, taken last week.”
Unmoored from time, the images are presented in a way that confounds their original purpose to “introduce Americans to America.” The photographs map a country of strangers and ghosts, while holding a mirror up to ourselves, daring us to open our eyes.
Omen: Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive, 1935–1944 was published by RM and Gato Negro Ediciones in 2024.
November 12, 2024
Why Sohrab Hura Considered Himself an “Anti-photographer”
For a period of about three years during his mid-twenties, Sohrab Hura strived to be what he called an anti-photographer. Doubt had begun seeping into his work. In particular, he felt conflicted about the ways in which documentary photography generates images from other people’s oppression. Regarding his own role, he quotes Arundhati Roy, who writes: “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
In his first-ever US survey, Sohrab Hura: Mother, at MoMA PS1, the artist, who was born in Chinsurah, India, in 1981, reconsiders the possibilities of images. His body of work, spanning two decades, includes photography and film as well as drawing, painting, and writing—an astonishing range for someone who is self-taught. While the exhibition features experimentations with different media, Hura insists all of his work remains image driven.
Sohrab Hura, Self-portrait, 2024“The moment when I think of it as a survey show, suddenly I become the center of it, and then it becomes about my journey,” he told me recently. “But for me, really, it’s about the multiple lives of images, and that also allows me to look at any of these older works as being no different, in terms of there not being any kind of hierarchy compared to some of the new works.”
The curator Ruba Katrib had been following Hura’s career when he began shifting from a primarily lens-based practice to other forms of art making. She sees a continuity to his approach, saying, “For him, it’s all about what an image can do and the stories it can tell.”
When Hura first picked up a camera as a teenager, like so many aspiring photographers before him, he saw the power in making something seen. “I’d been feeling invisible,” Hura, now forty-three, recalled of his younger self. “And so, photography became a way to feel visible, to feel like I could touch someone, which I felt I wasn’t able to for a long time.”
Sohrab Hura, Details from the series Land of a Thousand Struggles, 2005–6Initially, photography promised immediate transmission of the stories he felt were most urgent. “I started photography at a time when I believed that photography could change the world,” he said. Youthful idealism combined with a desire to travel led him to document what he was witnessing for local press. One of his earliest series, Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–6), exposes the grim reality of impoverished rural communities in central India. Black-and-white photographs capture women, children, and older people swinging pickaxes, breaking rocks, and engaging in other physical labor. Candid and wide shots show workers gathering at a rally. The portrait of an injured man lying down, a wound healing into a scar on his bare left hip, reveals the brutal aftermath of police violence that targeted protestors. These encounters provided Hura, then a recent graduate student with a master’s degree in economics, his first introduction to grassroots politics.
Hura’s handwritten captions contextualize the images in the series, as if to acknowledge the link between the lives of the people he was recording and his own. It was an entanglement he understood from the beginning. “Right from the start,” he said, “I felt a bit of a dichotomy where, on the one hand, I wanted to do photography that would nourish my heart, and at the same time there was a voice in my head that would tell me that I had the responsibility to carry people’s stories forward.”
Sohrab Hura, Still from Bittersweet, 2019. Video, color, sound, 13 minutes, 48 secondsTurning to video allowed Hura to expand upon the realist mode of storytelling. In Pati (2010/20), he narrates his experience revisiting the region he had photographed years earlier over still images from his previous series. Near the end of the eleven-plus-minute film, he keeps the camera rolling on a figure standing in front of a stark, barren landscape. There’s no sound except for the wind. A boy gradually comes into focus. The fifteen seconds of footage offers a glimpse of something more truthful, perhaps.
“This question of honesty was really important to me,” Hura said about what was troubling his work. As he became more technically skilled, he found himself growing increasingly cynical. “I knew exactly what photograph to make, to make someone feel what way, you know? So it started to feel performative,” he said.
Sohrab Hura, Untitled, from the series Snow, 2015–ongoingA series he made later in his career, Snow (2015–ongoing), pushes the visual language of documentary photography even further. The photographs allude to the conflict in Kashmir without showing explicit violence or trauma. Only a distant shot of uniformed soldiers hints at the heavy military presence. Instead, Hura observes the region through its phases of winter, directing the viewer’s gaze to the back of a person in a frayed coat holding a snowball, bright orange fruit floating in a thawing puddle, a pair of hands uprooting dandelions from the grass. These details subvert the exploitation and voyeurism often associated with photojournalists who parachute into places of conflict.
Paired with Snow, a four-channel video plays television footage from the 1980s and ’90s that includes news clips representing Kashmir as a place of “terrorism” and Bollywood movies romanticizing it as a backdrop—stereotypes Hura would have been exposed to while growing up in India. The work speaks not only to problems of representation, but also to the artist’s feelings of complicity.
Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013–19 
Hura has long wrestled with his role as a photographer and confessed to becoming “a bit jaded” about what he was doing. “People would be really generous to me,” he said. “They would open up their lives, their stories. They would have this expectation that I would change their life by taking the stories back, and every time I had to tell them that that wasn’t the case.” Eventually, he concluded, “photography had its limitations.”
His project The Coast (2013–19), a collection of pigment prints, a single-channel video, and an artist’s book, arose as a critique of image-making. Hura describes the images as “a little intrusive, a little violent” in feeling. Indeed, an ominous mood pervades the scenes from a religious festival taking place along India’s southernmost coast. Accompanying the photographs, the seventeen-and-a-half-minute film slows down footage of people running and jumping into the surf at night, which plays over tense, droning audio that radiates into the other galleries of the exhibition. The images also appear in the book, interspersed among twelve fictional short stories by the artist. On a practical level, the photobook serves as a method for easily transporting and presenting the work. Its curation also manifests as a kind of logic. In The Coast, the photographs sometimes repeat, or “glitch”—a term Hura applies to resisting the so-called perfect image.
Sohrab Hura, Still from The Coast, 2020. Video, color, sound, 17 minutes, 27 secondsThe Lost Head and the Bird (2019) rescrambles many of the same images in a ten-minute-long split-screen video. Katrib characterizes Hura’s practice as being “quite iterative,” whereby images will reappear in different bodies of work. “It’s a practice that builds upon itself,” she said. Additionally, the film, which was previously screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021, incorporates “appropriated material” from pop culture, current events, and media circulating on WhatsApp. The sequencing mirrors how people in India—and globally—are inundated with manipulated images and propaganda disguised as news. In conversation, Hura said he isn’t afraid of technology such as AI. He’s more concerned with structures of power and how they influence our perceptions of reality. He frequently compares the image to a “mask.”
If image-making itself is a kind of obfuscation, then Hura realized he needed to confront his truth. When he was seventeen years old, his mother was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia. As he was taking pictures of other people in their most vulnerable states, a thought stayed with him: that it was “easy for me to photograph someone else’s mother.” He continued, “But somehow I wasn’t able to photograph my own mother.” He worried that made him a hypocrite. And so, as difficult as it was, he decided to photograph his mother.
Sohrab Hura, Untitled, from the series The Songs of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer, 2013–ongoingAll works courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai
She smokes a cigarette in bed in a black-and-white photograph published in the book Life Is Elsewhere (2015), one of three that Hura made about her. In Bittersweet (2019), a video that rotates through images like a slideshow, she’s kissing her dog Elsa. Again, she’s shown smoking in a pastel drawing from the book Things Felt but Not Quite Expressed (2022–24). Along the gallery wall, dozens of drawings hang like family portraits. Hura, who began drawing and painting only recently, said he was searching for “softness” within the image.
In the installation Timelines (Delhi, Mother, Sheila, The Bus, The School, The Olive Tree, Bees, Protest, and Mail) (2024–ongoing), he asks, Where do our stories begin? Painting with acrylics on cardboard boxes, he illustrates various memories of his mother’s life, including her sleeping in bed with Elsa, as well as moments from history. “Depending on how the box is folded, you see a different combination of stories, a different combination of points of time,” he said. “In this timeline we see many different points of time, and we make our stories based on that.”
Sohrab Hura: Mother is on view at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, through February 17, 2025.
For Sohrab Hura, Photography Is a Way of Feeling Visible
For a period of about three years during his mid-twenties, Sohrab Hura strived to be what he called an anti-photographer. Doubt had begun seeping into his work. In particular, he felt conflicted about the ways in which documentary photography generates images from other people’s oppression. Regarding his own role, he quotes Arundhati Roy, who writes: “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
In his first-ever US survey, Sohrab Hura: Mother, at MoMA PS1, the artist, who was born in Chinsurah, India, in 1981, reconsiders the possibilities of images. His body of work, spanning two decades, includes photography and film as well as drawing, painting, and writing—an astonishing range for someone who is self-taught. While the exhibition features experimentations with different media, Hura insists all of his work remains image driven.
Sohrab Hura, Self-portrait, 2024“The moment when I think of it as a survey show, suddenly I become the center of it, and then it becomes about my journey,” he told me recently. “But for me, really, it’s about the multiple lives of images, and that also allows me to look at any of these older works as being no different, in terms of there not being any kind of hierarchy compared to some of the new works.”
The curator Ruba Katrib had been following Hura’s career when he began shifting from a primarily lens-based practice to other forms of art making. She sees a continuity to his approach, saying, “For him, it’s all about what an image can do and the stories it can tell.”
When Hura first picked up a camera as a teenager, like so many aspiring photographers before him, he saw the power in making something seen. “I’d been feeling invisible,” Hura, now forty-three, recalled of his younger self. “And so, photography became a way to feel visible, to feel like I could touch someone, which I felt I wasn’t able to for a long time.”
Sohrab Hura, Details from the series Land of a Thousand Struggles, 2005–6Initially, photography promised immediate transmission of the stories he felt were most urgent. “I started photography at a time when I believed that photography could change the world,” he said. Youthful idealism combined with a desire to travel led him to document what he was witnessing for local press. One of his earliest series, Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–6), exposes the grim reality of impoverished rural communities in central India. Black-and-white photographs capture women, children, and older people swinging pickaxes, breaking rocks, and engaging in other physical labor. Candid and wide shots show workers gathering at a rally. The portrait of an injured man lying down, a wound healing into a scar on his bare left hip, reveals the brutal aftermath of police violence that targeted protestors. These encounters provided Hura, then a recent graduate student with a master’s degree in economics, his first introduction to grassroots politics.
Hura’s handwritten captions contextualize the images in the series, as if to acknowledge the link between the lives of the people he was recording and his own. It was an entanglement he understood from the beginning. “Right from the start,” he said, “I felt a bit of a dichotomy where, on the one hand, I wanted to do photography that would nourish my heart, and at the same time there was a voice in my head that would tell me that I had the responsibility to carry people’s stories forward.”
Sohrab Hura, Still from Bittersweet, 2019. Video, color, sound, 13 minutes, 48 secondsTurning to video allowed Hura to expand upon the realist mode of storytelling. In Pati (2010/20), he narrates his experience revisiting the region he had photographed years earlier over still images from his previous series. Near the end of the eleven-plus-minute film, he keeps the camera rolling on a figure standing in front of a stark, barren landscape. There’s no sound except for the wind. A boy gradually comes into focus. The fifteen seconds of footage offers a glimpse of something more truthful, perhaps.
“This question of honesty was really important to me,” Hura said about what was troubling his work. As he became more technically skilled, he found himself growing increasingly cynical. “I knew exactly what photograph to make, to make someone feel what way, you know? So it started to feel performative,” he said.
Sohrab Hura, Untitled, from the series Snow, 2015–ongoingA series he made later in his career, Snow (2015–ongoing), pushes the visual language of documentary photography even further. The photographs allude to the conflict in Kashmir without showing explicit violence or trauma. Only a distant shot of uniformed soldiers hints at the heavy military presence. Instead, Hura observes the region through its phases of winter, directing the viewer’s gaze to the back of a person in a frayed coat holding a snowball, bright orange fruit floating in a thawing puddle, a pair of hands uprooting dandelions from the grass. These details subvert the exploitation and voyeurism often associated with photojournalists who parachute into places of conflict.
Paired with Snow, a four-channel video plays television footage from the 1980s and ’90s that includes news clips representing Kashmir as a place of “terrorism” and Bollywood movies romanticizing it as a backdrop—stereotypes Hura would have been exposed to while growing up in India. The work speaks not only to problems of representation, but also to the artist’s feelings of complicity.
Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013–19 Hura has long wrestled with his role as a photographer and confessed to becoming “a bit jaded” about what he was doing. “People would be really generous to me,” he said. “They would open up their lives, their stories. They would have this expectation that I would change their life by taking the stories back, and every time I had to tell them that that wasn’t the case.” Eventually, he concluded, “photography had its limitations.”
His project The Coast (2013–19), a collection of pigment prints, a single-channel video, and an artist’s book, arose as a critique of image-making. Hura describes the images as “a little intrusive, a little violent” in feeling. Indeed, an ominous mood pervades the scenes from a religious festival taking place along India’s southernmost coast. Accompanying the photographs, the seventeen-and-a-half-minute film slows down footage of people running and jumping into the surf at night, which plays over tense, droning audio that radiates into the other galleries of the exhibition. The images also appear in the book, interspersed among twelve fictional short stories by the artist. On a practical level, the photobook serves as a method for easily transporting and presenting the work. Its curation also manifests as a kind of logic. In The Coast, the photographs sometimes repeat, or “glitch”—a term Hura applies to resisting the so-called perfect image.
Sohrab Hura, Still from The Coast, 2020. Video, color, sound, 17 minutes, 27 secondsThe Lost Head and the Bird (2019) rescrambles many of the same images in a ten-minute-long split-screen video. Katrib characterizes Hura’s practice as being “quite iterative,” whereby images will reappear in different bodies of work. “It’s a practice that builds upon itself,” she said. Additionally, the film, which was previously screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021, incorporates “appropriated material” from pop culture, current events, and media circulating on WhatsApp. The sequencing mirrors how people in India—and globally—are inundated with manipulated images and propaganda disguised as news. In conversation, Hura said he isn’t afraid of technology such as AI. He’s more concerned with structures of power and how they influence our perceptions of reality. He frequently compares the image to a “mask.”
If image-making itself is a kind of obfuscation, then Hura realized he needed to confront his truth. When he was seventeen years old, his mother was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia. As he was taking pictures of other people in their most vulnerable states, a thought stayed with him: that it was “easy for me to photograph someone else’s mother.” He continued, “But somehow I wasn’t able to photograph my own mother.” He worried that made him a hypocrite. And so, as difficult as it was, he decided to photograph his mother.
Sohrab Hura, Untitled, from the series The Songs of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer, 2013–ongoingAll works courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai
She smokes a cigarette in bed in a black-and-white photograph published in the book Life Is Elsewhere (2015), one of three that Hura made about her. In Bittersweet (2019), a video that rotates through images like a slideshow, she’s kissing her dog Elsa. Again, she’s shown smoking in a pastel drawing from the book Things Felt but Not Quite Expressed (2022–24). Along the gallery wall, dozens of drawings hang like family portraits. Hura, who began drawing and painting only recently, said he was searching for “softness” within the image.
In the installation Timelines (Delhi, Mother, Sheila, The Bus, The School, The Olive Tree, Bees, Protest, and Mail) (2024–ongoing), he asks, Where do our stories begin? Painting with acrylics on cardboard boxes, he illustrates various memories of his mother’s life, including her sleeping in bed with Elsa, as well as moments from history. “Depending on how the box is folded, you see a different combination of stories, a different combination of points of time,” he said. “In this timeline we see many different points of time, and we make our stories based on that.”
Sohrab Hura: Mother is on view at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, through February 17, 2025.
November 8, 2024
Announcing the Winners of the 2024 PhotoBook Awards
Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—an annual celebration of the photobook’s enduring role within the narrative of photography. The awards recognize excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year. A final jury met in Paris on November 7, 2024, to select this year’s winners. The jury included Kim Bourus, founder and director, Higher Pictures; Azu Nwagbogu, curator; Lisa Sutcliffe, curator, Department of Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Jean-Baptiste Talbourdet-Napoleone, creative director, M le magazine du Monde; and Mame-Diarra Niang, artist.
This year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards received 940 books from fifty-nine countries around the world, including standout entries from Argentina, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. On September 18–20, the shortlist jury met in New York for three concentrated days of review and deliberation, narrowing the entries down to a shortlist of thirty-five titles. The shortlist jury consisted of the following international team: Negar Azimi, editor in chief, Bidoun; Jacqueline Bates, photography director, Opinion, New York Times; Michael Famighetti, editor in chief, Aperture; Nontsikelelo Mutiti, director of graduate studies in graphic design, Yale School of Art; and Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo.
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PhotoBook Awards A Look Inside the Titles Shortlisted for the 2024 PhotoBook Awards A presentation of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2024 PhotoBook Awards is currently on view at Paris Photo through November 10 and will be on view at Printed Matter in New York, January through February 2025, and then to the Leipzig Photobook Festival, in Germany, in March, with additional venues to be announced.
Below, read about this year’s winning titles.
Photography Catalog of the Year
Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain
Joy Gregory, editor, and Taous Dahmani, associate editor
Autograph and MACK, London, Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown
Shining Lights, edited by artist Joy Gregory and Taous Dahmani, is a restorative anthology that charts Black women’s essential but often overlooked contributions to Britain’s photography scene in the late twentieth century. Extensively researched and vividly illustrated, the book showcases a tremendous range of visual materials, including photographs from over fifty artists, archival images, documents, and more. This constellation of visual resources is carefully organized by theme—self-portraiture, family, and community activism—and includes scholarly essays, personal reflection, a roundtable discussion, and a detailed timeline. “I love the use of the materials; there’s a friendliness to the cardstock cover, and beautiful neon spine that carries through in how certain elements get highlighted within the running text,” remarks juror Nontsikelelo Mutiti. “For a project so comprehensive, it feels very generous and inviting. I’m so glad that this project exists.”
Maxine Walker, from the series Untitled, 1987Courtesy the artist
Joy Gregory, Autoportrait, 1990Commissioned by Autograph. Courtesy the artist
First PhotoBook Award
Born from the Same Root by Tsai Ting Bang
Self-published, Taipei, Design by Tsai Ting Bang and Shū Hé Zhì
Tsai Ting Bang’s Born from the Same Root forms a moving portrait of the artist’s older brother Hsien and reflects upon their shared family trauma. The boys grew up in separate homes, and as a young adult, Hsien began suffering from mental health issues and cut contact with the family for three years. Tsai uses the book to explore the estrangement, misrecognitions, and mystery at the heart of their bond, interweaving archival family photographs and his own tender portraits of Hsien and his day-to-day life. “The book tells a simple but powerful story and is full of lovely, unguarded moments,” says juror Anna Planas. The intimately sized volume involves a clever bipartite structure, forcing the reader to turn the pages of the book in opposition, as one might open a gatefold. Per Planas, “we loved how the design thoughtfully reflects both the distance and closeness of the brothers’ relationship.”
Tsai Ting Bang, from Born from the Same Root, 2024 
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PhotoBook of the Year
Disruptions by Taysir Batniji
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London, Design by Loose Joints Studio
Opaque, yet frighteningly urgent, Taysir Batniji’s Disruptions compiles pixelated screenshots from WhatsApp video calls to his family in Gaza, taken between April 2015 and June 2017. The fragmentary aesthetic of fragile phone connections offers a metaphor for the breakdown of the psyche in the midst of daily life compromised by conflict. This compact softcover houses about seventy images, which are accompanied by a poignant text from photo-historian Taous R. Dahmani. Amid warped portraits and pixelated landscapes, the viewer is confronted with bursts of vibrant color signaling failed communication, broken only by solid pages of green that display the date of each call. Disruptions is an oblique but essential reflection on life under occupation. “As Gaza is obliterated in real time, Batniji’s Disruptions is a timely reminder of the precarious nature of human life,” remarks juror Negar Azimi.
Taysir Batniji, from Disruptions, 2024 
Jurors’ Special Mention
i am (not) your mother by Hady Barry
Self-published, Penumbra Foundation, New York, Design by Hady Barry
In 2002, amid a civil war, Hady Barry and her family fled Côte d’Ivoire to resettle in Senegal. As her mother left for the United States to seek asylum, and her father was mostly absent, traveling for work, Barry, age thirteen, found herself taking care of three younger siblings. Her self-published photobook i am (not) your mother interlaces portraits and documentary photographs, archival imagery, journal entries, and transcribed conversations, unpacking the trauma of an adolescence cut short by the tremendous responsibilities of parenting. The book’s imagery alternates between the vivid, nostalgic palette of rediscovered family photographs and the black-and-white of Barry’s own austere pictures of nature, people, and interiors. “There’s this parallel with her personal story and the personal way she made the publication,” says juror Anna Planas. The book’s smaller 6 ½-by-9 inch format and use of one-of-a-kind Risograph printing, befit the intimacy and rawness of Barry’s painful subject matter.
Hady Barry, from i am (not) your mother, 2024 
An exhibition of 2024 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo through November 10, and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City in January 2025.
October 31, 2024
Rafael Goldchain’s Portraits of Grief and Piety in Latin America
Over the last decade, the Art Gallery of Ontario embarked on an initiative to incorporate twentieth-century photography detailing life in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico into its collections. Beyond poetic images created by Graciela Iturbide and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the Toronto museum also houses photographs of protests and coups. Such grim subjects might be expected in a Latin American collection: during the latter half of the century, the region was convulsed by civil wars, a genocide, dictatorship, and murderous US intervention.
One recent acquisition provides an unexpected twist: lushly colored images by Rafael Goldchain, a Chilean-born photographer of Polish Jewish heritage, who settled in Toronto in the 1970s and in the mid-1980s traveled on a grant to Mexico and Central America. There, he took pictures of residents who struggled on the sidelines of the Guatemalan civil war, CIA interference in Honduras, and Nicaragua’s revolution. Yet instead of focusing on conflict’s “decisive moments,” Goldchain showed lyrical glimpses of people’s desire, grief, repose, and piety.
Rafael Goldchain, A Young Man’s Grave, Nicaragua, 1986Such is the case in A Young Man’s Grave, Nicaragua (1986), which reveals a collage adorning a final resting place. The artwork frames a studio portrait of the deceased, a wide-eyed, thinly mustachioed stripling surrounded by dried flowers, clouds, and angels. The offering is saturated with intense blues. “I was in a cemetery in Matagalpa,” Goldchain told me recently, mentioning the city in west-central Nicaragua involved in the Iran–Contra conflict. “Had this young man fallen as part of that? I didn’t know. I had heard that there was a tradition where children who pass away automatically become angels. This boy was of the age that he could be both, a soldier and an angel.”
Goldchain’s ability to freeze tender, ambiguous moments against the backdrop of political violence constitutes a distinct kind of conflict photography. The 1980s “were the era of Susan Sontag and the whole Goya perception of pain,” AGO curator Marina Dumont-Gauthier explained. She referenced Sontag’s On Photography (1977), which inveighs against the power of war images to anesthetize viewers to suffering. “What Rafael is offering is so different,” she said. According to Dumont-Gauthier, back when Goldchain photographed his images, people were not ready to view complex and polysemous images of war “because it somehow felt disingenuous.” She thinks the time is now ripe for Goldchain’s approach. “The pain is still there. Once the war is over, these stories continue.”
Rafael Goldchain, Easter Procession, Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, 1986Goldchain presents the continuing story in works such as Easter Procession, Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala (1986). Depicting ten men carrying a tinseled casket that appears to contain a statue of Jesus Christ in the tradition of Santa Semana, the picture achieves a forward propulsion amplified by the undulating line created by the heads and shoulders of the pallbearers. The image’s mingling of beauty and mourning is complicated by the fact that four years after it was taken, army soldiers would open fire on an unarmed crowd of Tz’utujil Mayans in Santiago Atitlán as part of the atrocities that punctuated the country’s civil war.
“I wasn’t a war photographer,” Goldchain told me. “I sometimes took photos of bullets in walls, semi-destroyed ruins, but those pictures didn’t have any of the complexity that I was after. And I didn’t want a bullet in the heart either. My work is more elliptical.”
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Shop Now[image error]Goldchain’s allusive impulses led to Nocturnal Encounter, Comayagua, Honduras (1987), which initially reads like a snapshot of carefree lovers. A man wearing a striped blue shirt smiles down at a dark-haired woman who sways her hips. The innocent-looking assignation takes place in a turquoise-and-cerulean alleyway. But knowledge of the political context introduces menacing undertones of male dominance to the photograph. “During the Iran–Contra affair, there was a very large air base in Honduras called Palmerola. There were a lot of bars where American soldiers met lovely Honduran girls. This is a red-light district, a meat market.”
“Rafael’s work allows people to engage with photography that tells a fuller story,” Dumont-Gauthier said, an affirmation of Goldchain’s Mexican and Central American images that resonates with the recent institutional validation of Latinx photographers, such as Louis Carlos Bernal and Paz Errázuriz, who breathed new life into the documentary tradition in the 1970s and 1980s. The curator also noted Goldchain’s deliberate use of color, suggesting that “Blue is associated with nostalgia. The colors help us process our own emotions. If the photo were against a red backdrop, it would have a completely different meaning.”
Rafael Goldchain, A Tehuantepec Maiden, Juchitán, Oaxaca, México, 1986All images courtesy the artist
Goldchain’s associative palette perhaps finds its deepest expression in A Tehuantepec Maiden, Juchitán, Oaxaca, México (1986), where a girl wearing a huipil stitched with crimson-and-pink florals stands against a mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As in A Young Man’s Grave, Nicaragua, a painted sky forms the backdrop. The jaunty artificial flowers in the girl’s hair contrast with her stoic expression. Does her steadfast look telegraph the larger struggle of armed forces disappearing and murdering Oaxacan dissidents during this era? The girl’s gaze seems almost unnervingly grave in light of that history.
“She was fifteen years old,” Goldchain recalled, nodding his head contemplatively. “When I first showed these photos, people said I was noncommittal and too artistic and aesthetic. But I could only be who I could be.”
This article originally appeared in Aperture no. 256, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” guest edited by Deana Lawson.
October 26, 2024
What Is Street Photography Today?
The street and the camera were destined to collide. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the first photographs that managed to freeze objects in motion would be taken on the bustling streets of newly industrialized nineteenth-century cities. That era belonged to the crowd, and to the savvy navigators of the endlessly renewable theater of sidewalks and boulevards the world over, those flaneurs whom the poet Charles Baudelaire, in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” pegged as one of the nineteenth century’s most fertile archetypes. Baudelaire called for an art that would dive headfirst into the bracing water of the everyday. Impressionism followed, with its gauzy tableaux of bourgeois life, but in time it became clear that it was not the likes of Baudelaire’s titular, now-forgotten painter who were best suited to document the upheavals of the modern era. The pace of everything was quickening, and the newfangled camera was the perfect tool to slow things down, trapping the chaos in amber. Photographers became the ultimate flaneurs, shaping our collective vision as they wandered through the world.
Jamel Shabazz, Man & Dog on the Lower East Side, 1980Courtesy the artist
Street pictures soon became practically synonymous with serious photography. The introduction of the fast, handheld 35mm Leica, in 1925, disencumbered roving shutterbugs from their bulky gear, allowing artists like Alexander Rodchenko to make a new kind of image that was as dynamic and spontaneous as the streets themselves. After that, it was off to the races. In 1952, inspired by the Surrealists’ obsession with chance encounters and striking juxtapositions, Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the indelible phrase “the decisive moment.” There followed Robert Frank’s Beatnik-era, dirge-like book The Americans; the epochal exhibition New Documents, featuring Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, at MoMA, in 1967; the Pop art–adjacent work of William Eggelston carved out space for previously déclassé color photography in hallowed museum halls; and, finally, the postmodern turn in the late 1970s, which laid the groundwork for the innovative scenes by Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall, deploying what were by then well-worn street photography tropes in the service of creating cinematic images that blended fact and fiction or were wholly fabricated for the camera.
Janette Beckman, Jean and Chris, East Village, New York City, 1995Courtesy the artist
Alexey Titarenko, White Dresses, St. Petersburg, 1995© the artist and courtesy Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York
Daidō Moriyama, Pretty Woman, 2017© Daidō Moriyama Photo Foundation
Or anyway, that’s the usual history of street photography, made up of mostly white male Westerners. While I could have mentioned the work of photographic giants like Helen Levitt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Vivian Maier, Gordon Parks, Daidō Moriyama, Mohamed Bourouissa, or others who have a rightful place in the street photography canon, this was pretty much how the story was relayed to me, as I studied photography in college. Clearly, that blinkered history needed to make room for some heterodox voices.
A sprawling new exhibition, We Are Here: Scenes from the Streets, currently on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP), in New York, has this aim. The show, curated by Isolde Brielmaier, with the assistance of Noa Wynn, features thirty-four artists working in twenty-two different countries. Some of the work stretches back as far as the 1970s (in a show-within-a-show that the curators have dubbed “On the Shoulders of Giants,” which focuses on New York street photography), but the lion’s share of the pictures on view are from the last ten years or so. Arranged in four broad categories—street style, neighborhood and community, protest and advocacy, and urban landscapes—We Are Here strives to provide a picture of the state of street photography now(ish), and to tell us something about the state of our world as a result.
Martha Cooper, Kids climbing a fence in an abandoned lot, Lower East Side, NYC, from the series Street Play, 1978Courtesy the artist
We Are Here is admirably diverse, and many of the pictures are great. Highlights include the lush, wacky, fashion-forward work that Feng Li has been making on the streets of Chengdu, China; Romuald Hazoumè’s cheeky sculptural typologies of laden bike riders in Benin; the oneiric pictures of 1990s Saint Petersburg by Alexey Titarenko; a collection of era-defining 1990s Japanese street-style pictures that Shoichi Aoki shot for his magazine FRUiTS; and exuberant pictures of children’s play in gritty 1970s New York by graffiti documentarian Martha Cooper, which elaborate on earlier projects by Helen Levitt and Arthur Leipzig. Yet the exhibition is also dogged by a nagging question: Is twenty-first-century street photography hopelessly outmoded?
Street photographers fall into essentially three sometimes overlapping camps. First are the descendants of Cartier-Bresson, who stalk the sidewalks in the hope of catching some serendipitous urban gestalt, which is either compositionally gorgeous, weirdly poignant, funny, freighted with sociopolitical import, or some combination thereof. Second are those engaged in a long-term project of social stock-taking, like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, who use the street to a weave semi-personal narrative about the character of a time and place. (This place, historically, has been America, though there are notable exceptions to be found in projects like Paul Graham’s New Europe.) Third are those photographers who inflect their street photographs with their personal presence, whether formal or emotional, such that the line between the inner and outer world becomes hopelessly blurry: the photographic equivalent of New Journalism, with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander at the helm rather than Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe.
Lam Yik Fei, Riot police officers fire teargas during clash with protestors outside Shum Shui Po police station in Hong Kong on 11 August, 2019Courtesy the artist
Grace Ekpu, Protesters at the Lekki-Ikoyi tollgate calling for an end to the rogue police unit, Special Anti-robbery Squad, Lagos, Nigeria, October 2020Courtesy the artist
Aside from the work in We Are Here that is best described as reportage—namely the pictures of protest movements grouped together under the “protest and advocacy” subheading—much of the exhibition consists of pictures that rehash previously extant styles of street photography, but in an era that can no longer be called modern. I’ll leave it to others to tell what our era could be rightly called—“postmodern” is entirely too retro—but we can be certain that the space that most exemplifies it is no longer the street. Perhaps, as the anthropologist Marc Augé argued in his 1995 book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, it is instead one of the featureless spatial products of globalization—airports, supermarkets, shopping malls, chain hotels—that form a fractured, yet uncannily contiguous purgatory, scattered across the earth. More likely it is the space right under your nose, where you are reading this text: cyberspace.
Given the pull that the Internet has over our daily lives, it is almost shocking how little technology shows up in the pictures on view at ICP. By my count, there are only five pictures in which smartphones even appear, and just two of these show people gazing into them, perhaps the most commonplace sight in any city anywhere. Beyond that, almost none of the images contain technological tells that they were taken anytime this century. On the production end, only Michael Wolf, who made a collection of found street photographs using Google Maps, has utilized technology that would be unfamiliar to the modernists. A feeling of anachronism prevails.
Nontsikelelo Veleko, Nonkululeko, 2003–4Courtesy the artist
Shoichi Aoki, from the series FRUiTS, 1998Courtesy the artist
Even people’s manner of dress, which Baudelaire insisted was key to taking the temperature of any age, looks temporally fuzzy in the exhibition. Save for some bold, funky takes on traditional African garb captured by Trevor Stuurman in Dakar, Senegal, a few cutting-edge looks found in Feng Li’s pictures, and the presciently chic fashions captured in South African cities by Nontsikelelo Veleko twenty years ago, the clothes people wear are mostly a drab parade of generic causal wear, the fast fashion and sportswear slop that sloshes out of the globalized garment industry trough. The most futuristic looks in the bunch hail, paradoxically, from the past—Aoki’s pictures of Japanese youth taken nearly thirty years ago.
Perhaps the former sense of technological anachronism is an indication that contemporary street photographers are averse to depicting the banalizing aspects of our technological society, which have steadily made the world uglier, and the public sphere less vibrant. (Even back in the 1990s, an aging Helen Levitt lamented: “Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something.”) Maybe, similarly, street photographers avoid photographing excessively trendy fashionistas because they fear their pictures will be defined by the clothes they capture. Or the feeling that time is out of joint in this exhibition is a telling sign of the kind of cultural stagnation that Mark Fisher, citing the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, called the “slow cancellation of the future.” Likely all of the above. But it is also the case that as we exited the modern age and migrated the dynamos of capital and social life online, the world has begun to mostly transform off stage, becoming governed not by the life of the street, but through subtle shifts in the digital pleroma.
Farnaz Damnabi, Untitled, Birjand, Iran, 2017Courtesy Farnaz Damnabi and 29 Arts In Progress gallery
Anthony Hernandez, Screened Pictures X #90, 2018–19Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson
In some ways, this is an extension of an old problem. Walter Benjamin, in his 1931 text “A Little History of Photography,” complained that the photograph “can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.” To elaborate on this, he quotes Bertolt Brecht, who observed that “less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions. . . . The reification of human relations—the factory, say—means that they are no longer explicit.” But, in ways that Benjamin and Brecht could scarcely have imagined, our situation has become even more abstract. If a photograph could reveal “next to nothing” about a world run by the factory system, consider how much less it must reveal about a world run by algorithms.
Youcef Krache, Climat de France, Algiers, 2016Courtesy the artist and Collective 220
We now live in the era of the so-called black box, ruled by systems whose internal workings are opaque even to their creators. Our sociopolitical world is increasingly governed by social media algorithms which have sowed division and ignited civil unrest, either as the result of an unhappy accident of their flawed designs or through the malicious machinations of state actors and shady billionaires. (Even street protest movements, which We Are Here puts forward as triumphant engines of social change, have become social media–engineered phenomena, which rarely achieve their stated goals, and, conversely, give political ammunition to forces that oppose them. As the filmmaker Adam Curtis, in his BBC documentary Hypernormalisation, and the journalist Vincent Bevins, in his book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, have both pointed out, the Internet age makes it easy to get people to the streets, but has not made it easier to figure out what to do after they get there, which is the tricky part). The strings of our economy are pulled by supercomputers running high-frequency trading algorithms like BlackRock’s Aladdin, which now manages in excess of twenty-one trillion dollars in assets, likely more than the GDP of any country on earth. The truth value of images themselves, and their impact, have never been more questionable, as we are fed a constant slurry of algorithmically optimized and increasingly artificially generated “content,” managed by vast server farms that are quietly sucking our aquifers dry and rudely shoving aside the pesky carbon emissions targets that stand in the way of promised progress. Soon, it seems, the whole of our reality might be shaped by our encounter with a fundamentally alien, super powerful AI. How can we possibly hope to capture this world from street level, using as blunt and as literal a tool as a camera? Perhaps we must return to Baudelaire’s plea for the creation of a contemporary vision of contemporary times, and try to chart a new way forward.
We Are Here: Scenes from the Street is on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, through January 6, 2025.
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