Aperture's Blog, page 13

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, 1986

Such 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, 1986

Goldchain 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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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, 1986
All 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.

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, 1980
Courtesy 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, 1995

Courtesy 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, 1978
Courtesy 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, 2019
Courtesy the artistGrace Ekpu, Protesters at the Lekki-Ikoyi tollgate calling for an end to the rogue police unit, Special Anti-robbery Squad, Lagos, Nigeria, October 2020
Courtesy 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, 2003–4
Courtesy the artist Shoichi Aoki, from the series FRUiTS, 1998
Courtesy 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, 2017
Courtesy Farnaz Damnabi and 29 Arts In Progress galleryAnthony Hernandez, Screened Pictures X #90, 2018–19
Courtesy 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, 2016
Courtesy 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.

Aperture Celebrates 2024 Gala

On Thursday, October 17, Aperture celebrated its 2024 Gala at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in New York City. Raising over $1 million in vital funds that help build upon Aperture’s established history of supporting artists, incubating ideas through its quarterly magazine, and creating landmark publications, the annual benefit honored Nicole R. Fleetwood, Richard Misrach, and… This post is only available to members.

How Emmet Gowin Defines Intimacy in Photography

Since the 1960s, Gowin has made portraits of stunning openness, recorded scenes of environmental devastation, and explored the marvels of biodiversity. His concern, he says, is about showing how we belong to the earth. This post is only available to members.

Behind the Scenes of Aperture Magazine’s Design Refresh

This summer, Aperture enjoyed a subtle transformation. Working closely with the magazine’s editors, the London-based studio A2/SW/HK—Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel—drew inspiration from Aperture’s rich seven-decade design history to devise a format that better reflects what readers want in a photography magazine today. We unveiled the results in June with an issue titled—what else?—“The Design Issue,” which explores photography’s relationship to design, from fashion to architecture to the printed page. Our fall issue—released in September and titled “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra”—finds guest editor Deana Lawson reimagining the magazine’s format in her own way. Here, Williams talks to designer Rob Giampietro about the details that went into perfecting Aperture’s new look. —The Editors

Details of Aperture, Summer 2024, “The Design Issue”

Rob Giampietro: How did this project begin? What was the brief? 

Scott Williams: Early last year, Aperture asked how we felt about working on a design refresh of the magazine. It had been so long since we were brought on to redesign the magazine, in 2012, and it felt like time for a review. Typically, our process is to start every project afresh and to work from the ground up, exploring everything from formats to grids to printing techniques to designing typefaces. But the challenge here was to design with assets we’ve already created, with renewed criteria. 

The key elements of the brief were to explore a new, smaller format, to develop a new approach to the front cover design, to explore a more prominent Aperture nameplate on the cover, and to rethink the table of contents. That said, a small change such as adjusting the format will have a knock-on effect on almost every part of the magazine. 

Another early suggestion from Aperture, a brilliant one, I think, was the idea of using a single weight of the Aperture Serif font family as the primary typeface for the entire magazine. The ramifications of this are quite dramatic—previously, we were working with a palette of twenty to thirty fonts from the Aperture Sans and Serif type families. Suddenly, it’s one font with a supporting typeface. 

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Giampietro: It’s rare for a print redesign to have a strong focus on usability, but that seems to have been an important element of this one—and it’s a welcome change. I certainly feel the difference of the smaller trim size in handling the magazine. 

Williams: Usability is absolutely key in all design. Yes, a new design should be bold, ingenious, playful, inspiring, or be able to pique a user’s curiosity, but surely not at the expense of functionality. The refresh was largely prompted by Aperture’s desire to explore a new format, one that felt more comfortable in the hand and more convenient to carry and read on the go. Ever since the original redesign, we had been very conscious of the size and proportion of the art that features in the magazine, so we decided to build around the proportions based on the traditional 8-by-10 photograph format. The rationale behind adhering to the ratio of 8-by-10 is that full-bleed images will sit perfectly within the format with minimal cropping. Interestingly, even though we’re in a fluid, digital age when it comes to image-making, many contemporary photographers featured in Aperture are using traditional formats. 

The new format has an aesthetic quality, yet it was born out of very practical considerations, which I like. It’s based on a photographic format, and there’s minimal waste on the printed sheet. It’s also more economical and responsible from a sustainability point of view. 

Covers of Aperture: Summer 1952, Fall 1957, and Summer 1967

Giampietro: Everywhere in this design, I feel typography from the past—the column lines, the historical serif, the justified text, gestures like “No. 255.” How do you think about these details in the context of the present? How do they set a different stage for us to view and learn about photography? 

Williams: Some of the gestures you refer to were established for the magazine when we redesigned it in 2012. We’re certainly not trying to replicate layouts from magazines past but reacting to what a reader wants from a photography magazine today. We’re using design cues from Aperture’s rich history to help identify a design DNA, if you will, from which we can build upon. 

Luckily, Aperture had recently digitized their entire archive—stretching all the way back to the first issue, in 1952. I spent a few days reviewing every issue published over their seven-decade history. It does sound a little overwhelming, but it was a fascinating journey through Aperture’s rich history and print design more generally. For example, early issues of the magazine are clearly put together by hand using primitive paste-up techniques, and then there is the transition from black-and-white to color printing, then the advent of early desktop publishing, then, finally, the era we are familiar with today. 

Covers of Aperture: Spring 2013, “Hello, Photography;” Spring 2015, “Queer;” and Winter 2015, “Performance”

A key design element that’s been present since the launch of Aperture is the use of a modernist sans serif in a bold weight, variations of which have been used for the magazine’s logotype and as a magazine text font at various times. In 2012, we created a bold sans serif font, one we now use for captions, running footers, and page numbers—all the supporting architecture of the page. 

Ultimately, magazines should evolve and react to the present. I do hope the refresh feels modern and contemporary and not too reminiscent of a bygone era. 

Interior spreads from Aperture, Summer 2024, “The Design Issue”

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Giampietro: Some of these gestures also feel quite “newsy,” and I know it’s been an ambition of yours to do a newspaper. Did some of that desire creep in here, in the more journal-like format of the new design?

Williams: The “newsy” feel you mention is not something we intentionally set out to achieve—though I would love to design a newspaper!—but, I think, more of a byproduct of using a classical serif-style font, set in neat justified columns. This is a common device favored by most newspapers and many magazines too. We were very aware that making the magazine smaller would have a big impact on word counts, and a simple way to mitigate this is to use a justified setting for body copy.

Giampietro: You have to be quite intentional about building the grid in these projects, since the images and type are so closely interlocked. Does that start with your own typefaces in this case? 

Williams: It’s been very much an iterative process of refinement with the team at Aperture. And as we started to review early sketches and to assess how the Aperture fonts performed at the smaller trim size, we had a discussion in the studio about the font weights in the Aperture Serif font family. More specifically, we felt the Light weight was too light, and the Regular weight was slightly too heavy, so we created a new cut of the serif to work on this new scale. 

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Luigi Ghirri, from the series Ferrari, 1985–90, in “The Design Issue”

Giampietro: One of the things I enjoy about all your work is the way that typographic gestures really have space to be seen and felt. And yet when they get the limelight, they often bring a kind of quiet confidence and understated elegance that I feel particularly in this format. 

Williams: That’s very kind of you to say. I do believe those attributes you mention, including the quiet confidence, come with experience and with the time we’ve dedicated to our craft. Typography and typographic design have been a linchpin of our design approach since we founded our studio almost twenty-five years ago. Typography is a seamless and truly integrated aspect of how we work, from creating unique fonts for clients to working with type on a daily basis. It’s an aspect of design we continue to feel passionate about—so much so that we developed this strand of our practice and launched our type foundry in 2010 to include the full library of fonts. 

Giampietro: Do you feel any particular connection to one of the features in this issue?

Williams: I’m immediately drawn to Luigi Ghirri’s photographs taken at the Ferrari factory. At first glance, it’s Ghirri’s unique eye and its rich visual vocabulary that appeals to me, but it is also the subject matter I find inspiring—a celebration of craftspeople working apart and together in the pursuit of excellence and with an incredible attention to detail. A true labor of love. 

Cover and interior of Aperture, Fall 2024, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra”

Giampietro: What was issue one of the design refresh like versus issue two? How does having an artist like Deana Lawson as guest editor start to stretch and refine the design gestures from the initial redesign issue on a more applied level? Are there aspects of the initial redesign that have come more fully into focus from this collaboration? 

Williams: In typical fashion, having just established a set of rules for the new-look issue No. 255, we immediately set about dismantling it with issue No. 256. 

Going from the rather slow-paced first issue to the fast-paced second issue, guest edited by Deana Lawson and titled “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” was definitely a bit of a gear shift. Also, structurally, the issues are notably different. The customary arrangement of long- and short-form reads, including articles, interviews, and artist portfolios, was, unexpectedly, replaced with a striking series of works selected by Deana, along with a few shorter texts and poems. 

Again, returning to your point about usability, poetry is unlikely to sit very well, or read or scan as it should, set justified in a narrow column. As a result, several of the original design guidelines were swiftly abandoned in service to the art.   As with each issue of Aperture, some of the key design considerations are to do with flow, rhythm, use of white space, juxtaposition of images, and sequencing—this is very much front and center with “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra.”

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Wendy Red Star on the Power of Indigenous Art

In her dynamic photographs, the influential artist Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in October 2024, centers Native American life and material culture through her imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. In the following interview with Josh T. Franco from her book Delegation (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2022), Red Star speaks about her family history, what it was like to collaborate with her daughter, and how her multifaceted practice gleans from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world.

Wendy Red Star, To Have Good Vision, from the series Picture Day, 2021

Josh T. Franco: When and where were you born?

Wendy Red Star: I was born in 1981 in Billings, Montana.

Franco: What were your parents doing at the time?

Red Star: My mom is of Irish descent, and she grew up in Colorado. She went into nursing through the army and that took her to Korea, and she was stationed there for a while. She adopted my sister there, and then came back to the States and continued her nursing career, and decided that she wanted to work on a Native American reservation. She looked into the Crow Reservation and Pine Ridge, a Lakota reservation in South Dakota, and I think one other one, and she chose to go to the Indian Health Service in Crow Agency, which is where my reservation is.

Franco: She adopted your sister before she met your father?

Red Star: Yes. She was young. I would describe my mom as being really adventurous. I could not imagine myself at that age being in a foreign country and deciding to adopt a child. Also, her decision to work on a Native American reservation and at the Indian Health Service was very progressive.

My father is from the Crow Indian Reservation, and at that time he was working for the tribe as a game warden. And they met just because everybody ends up going to the Indian Health Service at some point. I think one of his cousins was working with my mom and then introduced them.

Franco: So was it love at first sight?

Red Star: I have no idea [laughs]. My parents never got married. And I have four half-siblings from my father—he was forty when I was born, and my mom, I think, was twenty-nine.

I have a very special bond with my father. He was able to get my grandfather’s land out of a non-Indian lease. It was leased by this white family for over fifty years. I would go with him on the weekends, all summer, while he ranched that land.

Wendy Red Star, Indian Woman Standing, from the series Indian Woman, 2005 Wendy Red Star, Amnía (Echo), 2021

Franco: What does it mean to be a Red Star?

Red Star: There’s a lot of pride in it. My sister and a lot of my cousins have Red Star tattoos. The name itself has a very interesting history, and it ties into all the Crows on the reservation. Red Star is my great-grandfather. When they were allotting the land, he was of that generation where he was a head of household. All his family members in his household were then given his name as a last name. That’s how I got my last name. There’s a lot of beautiful Apsáalooke names—and it can all be traced to one individual around the allotment of the Crow reservation.

Franco: Do you have memories of making art in childhood?

Red Star: I daydreamed and I had a very vivid imagination. I was able to entertain and occupy myself, and spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I was having to fill that space with creation, or creative ideas, or fantasies. And so, now, it’s really important for me to walk out in the woods. That’s where all my ideas either come to me or, if I’m stuck, I find solutions, and it’s just so important to have that time and headspace. And when I think about it, I’ve just been doing that since I was a little kid.

I went to school in Hardin, Montana, which is just off the reservation. The reason why the white folks wanted to remove Hardin from the reservation and incorporate the town is because they wanted to sell alcohol to Crows, and that was a big profit for them. I found that to be fascinating, because my dad remembers going to Hardin. Hardin is super racist. And there would be “No Indians allowed” or “No Indians allowed in the bar” or whatever signage, and actual segregated places for them to use the bathroom and stuff. It’s just crazy to talk to somebody, you know, actually talk to my dad, who has had that experience.

Franco: Did your high school give you space for making art?

My high school art teacher focused on realistic drawing, and I just didn’t excel in that at all. This is when in the art dynamic—which you continue to see—the people who are able to realistic-draw in the art class are the art stars. I was like, I’m not a good artist. I think I took one semester, and then I was out. I never took an art class after that in high school.

Franco: What did you do the rest of high school?

Red Star: I found this other teacher who was totally wacky. She ran the computer class, and the thing she focused on was video editing. I was having a blast. And she called this whole process “graphic design.” I was like, That’s what I’m doing. I’m going to be a graphic designer. I graduated in 2000, and I ended up going to Montana State University in Bozeman, which is about a three-hour drive from the reservation, and enrolled in graphic design as my major. And that was a very rude awakening [laughs].

Wendy Red Star, iilaalée = car (goes by itself) + ii = by means of which + dáanniili = we parade, 2016 Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1949.73, 2019

Franco: Was that more like poster design?

Red Star: Exactly. And working with different fonts and kerning. I was like, What the hell is this? I soon realized that my high school teacher was totally misusing the term graphic design.

Franco: While you were still in school in Hardin, you spent your summers in Pryor with your dad ranching?

Red Star: Yes. My dad would get me on the weekends. What bonded me and my dad was horses. I was going out to the land, and I would just ride horses all day long while my dad would be on a tractor for like eight to ten hours. I was alone, but I didn’t care, because I had my imagination, and I had my horses and bologna sandwiches. Our horses roamed free like wild horses. I would do everything that they did, and I knew when they took their nap, and I knew when they went and got their water, and then they would follow me and I would take them and say, “We’re going to eat over here.” I learned the language of the horse.

Franco: When you went to college, what did you major in?

Red Star: Well, I started out in graphic design, and then I went into a minor in Native American studies. That was super important, sort of a revelation, to take Native studies classes. At first, I thought it was a joke. It’s kind of like when somebody takes a language course and they already know how to speak the language.

Franco: You thought you were going to get an A.

Red Star: Yeah. What I soon found out was I knew nothing. I didn’t even question why there was a reservation. It was just where I grew up. You know? Then I started learning, and it just blew my mind, because that was not taught at all in my history classes. We never touched on anything near what I was learning in Native studies classes.

Wendy Red Star, Interference, 2004

Franco: Do you remember any things you made then?

Red Star: An important series I made then is called Interference [2004]. It’s a piece that is foundational for the way that I work today, in that I learned about an important chief of ours called Sits In The Middle Of The Land. He’s the one who told the US government where our territory was, basically, and he’s the one that said we had over thirty million acres. But he used this beautiful metaphor of the foundational way that we set up our tipis, which is with the four poles. And he said, “My home is where my tipi sits” and then he placed each of those four poles on the major seasonal migration stops that we would camp at. To me, that was kind of the first time of really thinking about a Crow perspective, and how beautiful that was, and how much that takes me out of Western thinking. Like, the home is where the tipi sits, and the tipi actually is a woman. The interior is the womb, and you’re being hugged by your mother, and to think the Earth is your mother.

So it’s really interesting to have him illustrate that in this way, and then to have the US government be like, Okay, let’s draw a line around thirty million acres. You know, reduce it down. That inspired me, because when I looked within that land base, Bozeman was actually Crow territory. I was shocked. My reservation was about 2.25 million acres, three hours away. I harvested lodge poles, and my dad and mom came and helped me set up tipis around campus. This research project was inspired by a photo—I saw a photo of him, and I was like, Who’s this guy? Then from that, I found out about his speeches and from there, produced a work.

Franco: How was it received on campus?

Red Star: The tipis didn’t have the canvas on them. A lot of them were just the four-pole structure. I would scout pieces of prime real estate that students used to cut across, and see if they would go through it or go around it. But what ended up happening was the tipis were being knocked down. I thought, Well, maybe it was the wind. Then I realized that somebody was knocking them down. Which then prompted me to put them on the fifty-yard line in the football field, and that was the end of the project. They’re all documented through photo. But to me, it was very much a sculpture in addition to a performance and a photo. But I was really minimizing photo. That’s just the documentation of it.

There was a visiting professor teaching sculpture at the time, and he said, “Wow, you really like to make political work.” That was our home. There was nothing political about it. It’s the truth. People tend to think a lot of my work is political, and I’m not offended by that. But really, it’s just a fact. And if that fact is political to you, then that’s interesting.

Franco: You went to UCLA for grad school and studied with Nancy Rubins. What did you learn from Nancy?

Red Star: Nancy had this solid belief in me. I was really a fish out of water because, in my undergrad, we didn’t learn anything about contemporary art. Contemporary art was Salvador Dalí [laughs]. Some of my grad peers had full-on art-monograph libraries. And I was like, I don’t know any of these artists. I was severely lacking. And going to UCLA was a very steep learning curve. One of the professors I took a seminar with was Ron Athey, and I did not know who he was or about his work. The first day of class, he said, “I’m going to show you my work.” I went from Salvador Dalí to pearls coming out of an anus with the sun tattooed around it.

After Nancy left, she invited me to be in a group show at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, France, which invited their past exhibiting artists to select a young artist who they had mentored to show in a group exhibition. The summer after my first year of grad school, I ended up flying to Paris with the photos of the tipi series. All these young students were so excited to be showing in this amazing institution. The opening was a big party, and I remember Takashi Murakami was there, and he had this entourage of young people. Nan Goldin was there. And we got to go up on the roof of the Cartier, and the Eiffel Tower was sparkling.

Franco: Magic.

Red Star: I remember sitting there with my friends, who came to support me from UCLA. Like, this is part of being an artist. You can do shit like this. I thought, I will never attain this level ever again. This is it for me. This is so incredible.

Wendy Red Star, Hawate (One), from the series A Float for the Future, 2021

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Franco: Did your time at UCLA give you any names or bodies of work that became touch-points?

Red Star: The thing that really turned me on were people doing identity-based artwork, like Fred Wilson and Adrian Piper and Kara Walker. Because there were maybe two other artists in the program focused on identity-based work. I was the only Native student. There were other artists of color there, which was awesome. But we were the only ones that were doing work based on identity. And we were, I felt, very ridiculed for it and always told that we need to just get over it, like we were being didactic. And especially the work that I made and the content I made, I think, intimidated people. Now, what I realize is that the work just made people uncomfortable, because it pointed to the missing spaces in their knowledge. I talk to other Native students who are in art programs now, and they’re still feeling the same feelings that I felt. It would be really hard to hear, you know, a studio visit in the next studio going so well with somebody who is doing abstract painting—a white student—and then to have that same professor come in and say, “Uh . . . can you, like, fill me in, give me a little history lesson?”

Franco: Was feminism part of the conversation in grad school?

Red Star: Not at all. It was even about being genderless, more like not being a woman, was kind of the goal. I had a professor, a visiting professor, who was Korean. And she said that was her goal—that when people looked at her work, they would not know her gender or her identity. So that’s kind of where I was at. Me doing work about my culture and being a Crow woman was so not the deal.

Wendy Red Star, Indian Summer, from the series Four Seasons, 2006 Wendy Red Star, Fall, from the series Four Seasons, 2006

Franco: Are things different now?

Red Star: Early this year, I got to be a visiting artist and do a lecture and studio visits virtually with UCLA grad students. They’re having such a different experience than I did.

I made one of the most important works of my career, Four Seasons [2006] in graduate school. And that was everything. I had a studio visit with Cathy Opie and Robert Gober, which was a dream. They talked about Four Seasons, and that’s the first time I heard the word tableau.

Franco: Is it fair to say that Four Seasons is a little tongue-in-cheek?

Red Star: Oh, yeah. I was watching a lot of John Waters’s movies.

Wendy Red Star: Delegation 65.00 Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective.

 

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Wendy Red Star: Delegation

Artworks by Wendy Red Star. Contributions by Jordan Amirkhani, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Josh T. Franco, Annika K. Johnson, Layli Long Soldier, and Tiffany Midge.

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View cart Description Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective.

Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision.

Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 272
Number of images: 280
Publication date: 2022-06-14
Measurements: 8 x 10.25 x 1.13 inches
ISBN: 9781597115193

Contributors

Wendy Red Star (born in Billings, Montana, 1981) is an Apsáalooke artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Saint Louis Art Museum; and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe. Red Star guest edited Aperture magazine’s Fall 2020 issue, “Native America.”
Jordan Amirkhani is an art historian, educator, and critic based in Washington, DC.
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017).
Josh T. Franco is an artist and art historian from West Texas. He is national collector at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Annika K. Johnson is associate curator of Native American art at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha.
Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, artist, and activist. She is author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the poetry collection Whereas (2017), which won a National Book Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards.
Tiffany Midge is a poet, writer, and editor. She is author of several books, including the poetry collection The Woman Who Married a Bear (2016) and the memoir Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (2019). She is a Hunkpapa Lakota enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux.

Franco: That makes total sense.

Red Star: I was interested in sets, and I found out that I could rent objects—that’s the way that it worked for movie sets. And then there was the influence of other grad students, especially one who had these seventies photomural backdrops, and he showed me where you get them. I was actually told by the sculpture tech, “If you can’t make it, someone in LA can.”

Franco: Did you go to Skowhegan immediately after grad school?

Red Star: I went to Skowhegan in the summer of 2006. And it was like an oasis in the sense that it was the first time that I’d been around so many artists of color who were working on identity-based artwork. And that gave me real faith that there were other artists like me out there. There was a community from all different backgrounds and cultures. And I met my ex-husband at Skowhegan. An extremely important and amazing thing is that my daughter came from that union.

I found out I was pregnant when I was at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, so I didn’t get to do the full round. I came to Portland because he is a professor at Portland State University. And that was the very first time that I’d ever been to Portland, spent time in Oregon. I had no clue what a weird little town this is. At first, I just really did not know what to make of Portland, but I’ve grown to love it for the access to quick hiking and amazing food, of being able to do a waterfall hike and eat fancy donuts. The textile community here is super strong. I love to sew. I started sewing here.

Wendy Red Star, Alaxchiiaahush / Many War, from the series 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, 2014 Wendy Red Star, Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven), from the series 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, 2014

Franco: What were the significant bodies of work you made during this period?

Red Star: In 2014, I made 1880 Crow Peace Delegation [2014], and I also made a series called White Squaw [2014]. 1880 Crow Peace Delegation is a set of ten portraits that were taken of Crow chiefs in 1880 by Charles Milton Bell. They are delegation portraits from a trip that they took to Washington, DC, to meet with the president, and they went there because the US government was going to put a train through a large tract of our hunting territory. That was the first time that I investigated this very popular image of this one chief, Medicine Crow. Because his image had been used commercially a lot, like on Honest Tea. It was the first time that I actually was like, What is going on with this photo? And that body of work introduced me to archives and to museum collections, and actually looking at the Portland Art Museum’s collection of Crow objects, which then got me into the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship program.

Franco: What did you do to the photograph?

Red Star: I was just asking that question: What’s going on in this photo? What happened that day when he sat down to take that photo? I did a quick Google search, and information came pouring out. And then, I would follow the leads. They would take me to different archives, like at Montana State University in Billings—they have all these amazing drawings of circus animals that Medicine Crow drew in relation to that trip.

When I looked into who took the photo, then all the other Crow chiefs that went on that same trip and sat down during that same photo session popped up. I had no idea that they went and were photographed and had the same experience. So I started researching each of those chiefs. And through that, I was like, I want people, when they look at this photo, to actually have a sense of what is trying to be conveyed from my culture in this image. And so, I started outlining their outfits. Partly for myself to really look at all the tiny details. I started to realize that they all wore brass rings on their fingers. I started to notice the details, like the conch shells, and that one of them has an eagle-claw bracelet. And all of that was just stuff that I wasn’t picking up from looking.

I’m also marking on history. And red—I always think about school and failing papers and getting that red mark on your paper. I wanted that red mark on history.

Franco: Literally outlining in red ink on the image.

Red Star: In red ink. And then through that, I would start telling people, “Oh, this is ermine” and “This is an eagle feather that is part of a coup that he had to acquire chief status.” I would look into census records and learn more about them and try to pinpoint their age. Then, if I could find their name written in the Crow language, I would write that on there. And if they had any descendants, I would try to include interesting facts about them and, more importantly, gossip that I heard about them as well from the community. it’s the kind of document that results from an art history student studying in their textbook and writing on it. there’s something spectacular about seeing that very intimate act of study elevated to the scale and status of artwork on the wall.

That’s so great to hear. I really want to humanize, and part of that is getting to see my terrible handwriting [laughs] and my spelling errors, and relating physically to these people in the portraits. It was important to me. But I’m also marking on history. And red—I always think about school and failing papers and getting that red mark on your paper. I wanted that red mark on history.

Wendy Red Star, from the series White Squaw, 2014. From left to right: Bareback Beauty #20, Twin Peaks—Or Bust #9, Horn of Plenty #8, Virgin Territory #3

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Franco: Did you make White Squaw around the same time?

Red Star: Yes. That was an important body of work. I have so many complicated feelings around it, and I think those feelings still linger today. It came about because I was wanting to understand the origin of the word squaw, because I had heard that it was an Indigenous word that then was turned into a derogatory word. I was hunting that down on Google, and then all of a sudden, “white squaw” popped up, and I was like, What’s a white squaw? It was a movie that was made in 1950. The posters for that movie are incredible. They’re completely stereotypical and racist. The premise is a Native woman, who’s half-white and half-Native, sort of works with the cowboys to get the Native people in line. As I was looking into that movie, I found a book series called White Squaw. They are these trashy 1980s romance, pulp fiction–style books, and there were twenty-four of them. They have outrageous subtitles and taglines (“Buckskin Bombshell” or “Virgin Territory”) and salacious illustrations that combine a portrait of Rebecca—the heroine—with over-the-top narrative scenes. I just could not look away. I thought, I cannot not do something. So I ended up purchasing all the books on eBay. Then I scanned the covers, and I went to Target and got an “Indian Princess” costume. I wore the costume. There’s a choker in there, but I put the choker on as a headband. I bought fake turkey feathers that were different colors. Then I acted out the title. And I replaced her character with my image. I remember I shared one on Facebook, and this Native guy was like, “You know, that’s a choker, and it belongs on your neck.” I was like, “That’s what you’re picking up?”

Franco: Around this time, you also began to collaborate with your daughter, Beatrice.

Red Star: Yes. That happened during my solo show at the Portland Art Museum in 2014. I had all these photocopies of the delegation portraits, and she made a body of work where she colored over the top of them, and I included those in the exhibition. When we went to the opening, on the way there, she asked if she could talk about her work. She was seven at the time.

Franco: Amazing.

Red Star: Beatrice really surprised me, because she can speak publicly very well. I realized with that exhibition that we could work together, and I could learn a lot from her. We collaborated up until 2018. We did some incredible works where we went to museums and gave tours of their collections that started with me saying, “Hey, I’m going to collaborate with my child, you have to be okay with it” to institutions contacting me to come and do a project with them.

Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke Feminist #4, 2016 Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke Roses, 2016

Franco: What did it change for your audiences? And did your daughter end up building her own audience?

Red Star: I think what it was really important for, more so, was the institution, and the institutions recognizing that a collaboration of this nature can work. And not only can it work, it can be powerful and successful. Beatrice can take the public aspect very well. She has no problem gathering people to come and do activities. At the Denver Art Museum, she gave three tours to children of the Native galleries and the Western art galleries, and they were blown away. Because they had never seen little children pay so much attention to a tour. I think they were like, This is how we connect with the future generations, it would have to be through that generation’s perspective. That was something that was really important for an institution to be open to, and to see the power and the potential.

Franco: You sewed her outfit for that, right?

Red Star: I did. She really got into the whole tour-guide aspect and persona, and she would draw up outfits that I would sew. We even did a lecture outfit, so when we did dual lectures together, she would have one.

There’s one other thing that Beatrice and I made together, which is Apsáalooke Feminist [2016], self-portraits of us in our living room on our IKEA couch, in our elk-tooth dresses, that we did with a self-timer, jumping back and forth. That’s an important work for us. Beatrice will be getting the artist proofs for all of my work, whether she likes it or not.

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Franco: And then she retired?

Red Star: Yeah, she retired at age eleven. Like I said, we were on a roll, and then she said she wanted to have the tours at the Pulitzer Art Foundation to be her last thing. And I was okay with it, because it was intense for me as well. Not only did we have to do a project and have it be successful, but I also had to shelter her from the business side of things so that she could be a child, which she is, and just enjoy the moment and the time together.

Franco: The Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship invites artists to spend one or two months researching in collections across the Smithsonian. it’s kind of a byzantine process to apply and select an adviser. Do you recall?

Red Star: I do. I remember Shan Goshorn. She was dying of cancer. And I saw her in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had this sense of urgency. She was like, “I want you to apply.” It’s so important what she did—when artists show up for other artists. Anyway, I got in. And wow. It’s so monumental, every aspect of the Smithsonian. It’s not at all what I was expecting. I thought I was going to be at the National Museum of the American Indian [NMAI], on the Mall, not realizing that all the material objects and photographs that I wanted to see are in a suburb in what looks like a Costco warehouse.

Wendy Red Star, Medicine Rock Child, from the series Thunder Up Above, 2011 Wendy Red Star, The Indian Congress (detail), 2021

Franco: Who was your adviser?

Red Star: Emily Moazami. I worked with the photo archive. I worked with the American Museum of Natural History, and I worked with the National Anthropological Archives, with the archivists there. You have to state in the application what you’re focusing on, and it was going to be about Crow delegations. But when I got there, I was like, “Actually, I just need to see every single thing you have.” [laughs] I had this amazing experience in the natural history museum of looking at Crow objects, just having a really great time looking through everything. Seeing things that were in the photos, things that I thought would be a certain way, I found in reality were totally different.

Something so important that’s come out of that is that I connected with ancestors I never knew I had. I found out that my fourth great-grandfather’s name is Green Skin, and that NMAI has eight of his medicine bundles, and one of those bundles happens to be a horse-getting bundle. I got to hold my great-great-grandfather Bear Tail’s necklace. I got to hold my fourth great-grandfather Green Skin’s deer-ear charms that he would wear into battle. I mean, how crazy is that? Oftentimes, we’ll go to these museum collections that have Crow things, and I’m like, Maybe I’m related to somebody in here, I don’t know. But to actually go to a collection and have ancestors … and touch something that was so important to them, was beyond.

Franco: Do you have any Apsáalooke figures you identify with?

Red Star: I do. I really identify with Alexander Upshaw. He was the interpreter for Edward S. Curtis when he came and photographed the Crow community in the early 1900s. The reason why I relate to him is he was in the first generation of Crow children who left the reservation and got an education. Granted, he had no choice. He went to the Carlisle Indian School. I just read some of his letters to the Carlisle newspaper. There’s a ton of self- hatred in his letters about his identity during his time away from the reservation. And then he went through this transformation, where he came back to his culture and the reservation, and the local newspaper wrote about him—like, he went back to the blanket, which is what they would say about Native people who went back to their culture, back to being Apsáalooke. They went back to the blanket. That would be a great show title.

Franco: You could sew a lot for a show like that.

Red Star: Yeah, exactly, sewing and textiles are so much part of my practice. But, with Alexander Upshaw and the idea of going “back,” I feel like I know what he felt. He married a white woman and got a lot of ridicule for that. I just feel like, Wow, to be that first generation, being educated, coming back, being ridiculed by the Crow community for “you’re not Apsáalooke anymore,” and being told by the white people that you’re going back to the blanket. A lot of the historical chronology wouldn’t have happened or been documented in the way that it was if it wasn’t for him. He just resonates with me, as this nerdy archivist. I don’t even think he was a nerd [laughs]. If I met him, I would probably not even like him. But right now, I think he’s a kindred spirit. I think he was murdered. He ended up dying in a jail cell, because he had a hemorrhage. They found him in a jail cell, dead, with blood everywhere. And he died in his thirties, like young thirties. But he had such an accomplished life. Actually, the way that my ears are pierced is the way that his father’s ears were pierced. His dad’s name was Crazy Pend d’Oreille, which means in French, like, an ear pendant. So, yeah, I felt a connection with Alexander.

Wendy Red Star, The Maniacs, 2011
All photographs courtesy the artist

Franco: You’re pointing at your right ear, and there are four studs, evenly spaced.

Red Star: It’s basically these three studs up here that are pierced like his dad’s. I’d say I really resonate with him, and then I resonate with my great-great-grandma, Julia Bad Boy, her Apsáalooke name. The literal translation of it is Her Dreams Are True. I found her in the archives at NMAI. I was just like, This name is the best name ever. She is the mom of William Dust, who’s my great-grandpa—and he would be my grandma’s dad. Bill Dust. His Crow name was Sings In The Camp. Then he gave my dad his Crow name, which is Kind To Everybody. I love him for that, because my dad is very kind to everybody, and everybody in the community knows they can come to him, and he will do what he can for you. So “Báakoosh Kawiiléete” is how you say “kind to everybody.” And Bill’s son is named Clive Dust, and I have his Crow name. I asked to have his Crow name, which is Always Creative.

Franco: What does that mean, to ask for a name, and when did you do that?

Red Star: Usually you’re given a name when you’re a kid. Your parents go and ask someone that they respect in the community to come up with a name. And that name usually comes from a variety of places. So my first name is Shiny Shell, which means basically “abalone necklace shell.” The woman who gave it to me, her name is Emma Coffey Smells, and she wore abalone necklaces when she would do the ceremony called a Sun Dance, which is a super intense, three-day thing where you don’t eat or drink water, and you dance all day long. She did, I don’t know, over twenty different Sun Dances. So that is a very powerful name.

But when I got older, I wanted to have a second name. Sometimes men would get a different name if they did something super badass, or if they did something that was notorious. The women or girls didn’t really get a second name. I said to my dad, “I want Clive’s name. How can we do this?” He said, “Well, we’ll ask his son, Clive Junior.” In Crow culture, when you do something ceremonial, you give four items to the person: a blanket; a piece of material big enough to make a shirt, like two or three yards; money; and tobacco. We gave that to him, and then I said, “Can I please have Clive’s name?” We were in the parking lot, in Crow Agency. And Clive Junior replied, “Yeah.” So, now I have his name, Baahinnaachísh, and I’m happy about that. The literal translation is Does Things Well—or “does things in a good way.”

This interview originally appeared in Wendy Red Star: Delegation (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2022), and was adapted from an oral history conducted for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Announcing the 2024 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—an annual celebration of the photobook’s enduring role within the evolving narrative of photography. Now in its twelfth year, the awards recognize excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year.

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 2024 shortlist jury met in New York for three concentrated days of review and deliberation by an 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.

The shortlist represents more than just the most highly produced, classically beautiful books—it is also an expression of the possibilities of bookmaking across a broad spectrum of resources, intentions, and storytelling techniques. As jury member Michael Famighetti stated, “It was exciting to see such a range of ideas, topics, processes, and forms explored through the photobook. I’m grateful to the jury for dedicating so much time and care to reviewing the submissions, and to our community of dedicated bookmakers, photographers, and scholars for producing and submitting such a powerful selection of work.”

“Serving on the jury offered an intensive and rewarding view into the past year’s publications,” juror Jacqueline Bates observed. “Reviewing books from fifty-nine countries was an extraordinary task. Even among shared themes, each project took a different approach. Of the 940 entries, every single book was unique.”

Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo, and Florence Bourgeois, director of Paris Photo, commented: “The presentation of the shortlisted books at Paris Photo is one of the highlights of the event. The selections chosen for the PhotoBook Awards share an international vision of the production of photography books, and with the pulse of contemporary creativity, they embody the vitality of publishing today.”

A final jury will meet at Paris Photo this November to select the winners for all three prizes, which will be revealed on Friday, November 8. From there, the shortlisted books will be exhibited in Paris, followed by an international tour, including New York at Printed Matter, in January 2025, among other venues to be announced.

Below, see the thirty-five selected titles for the 2024 PhotoBook Awards shortlist.

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First PhotoBook

Hady Barry, i am (not) your mother, Self-published, Penumbra Foundation, New York, Design by Hady Barry

Ciro Battiloro, Silence Is a Gift, Chose Commune, Marseille, France, Design by Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Perrine Serre

Angeniet Berkers, Lebensborn: Birth Politics in the Third Reich, The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands, Design by Rob van Hoesel

Claire Cocano, Rue Désiré Chevalier, Self-published, Paris, Design by Claire Cocano

Barbara Debeuckelaere, ’Om (Mother), The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands, Design by Carel Fransen

Simone Engelen, 27 Drafts, Fw:Books, Amsterdam, Design by Hans Gremmen

Janick Entremont, If Time Does Not End, Self-published, Berlin, Design by Janick Entremont

Ismail Ferdous, Sea Beach, Imageless, Shanghai, Design by RELATED DEPARTMENT

Toma Gerzha, Control Refresh, The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands, Design by Rob van Hoesel

Virginia Hanusik, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, New York, Design by New Information, Dave Yun, and Inyeong Cho

Abdulhamid Kircher, Rotting from Within, Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London, Design by Loose Joints Studio

Hassan Kurbanbaev, One Head and Thousand Years, Art Paper Editions, Ghent, Belgium, Design by Jurgen Maelfeyt

Srinivas Kuruganti, Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble, Self-published / Marigold Books, Delhi, India, Design by Srinivas Kuruganti

Nicola Moscelli, Dead End, Penisola Edizioni and Antiga Edizioni, Crocetta del Montello, Italy, Design by Roberto Vito D’Amico

RaMell Ross, Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, MACK, London, Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown

Melissa Shook, Daily Self-Portraits 1972–1973, TBW Books, Oakland, California, Design by Paul Schiek

Ngadi Smart, Wata Na Life, Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London, Design by Loose Joints Studio

Tsai Ting Bang, Born from the Same Root, Self-published, Taipei, Design by Tsai Ting Bang

Rawsht Twana, Twana’s Box: The Photographic Life of Twana Abdullah, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, 1974–1992, Fraglich Publishing, Bregenz, Austria, Design by Stefano Carini and Lukas Birk

Róisín White, Lay Her Down Upon Her Back, Witty Books, Turin, Italy, Landskrona Foto, Sweden, and Breadfield Press, Malmö, Sweden, Design by Tommaso Tanini

Previous Next

Hady Barry
i am (not) your mother
Self-published, Penumbra Foundation, New York
Design by Hady Barry

Ciro Battiloro
Silence Is a Gift
Chose Commune, Marseille, France
Design by Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Perrine Serre

Angeniet Berkers
Lebensborn: Birth Politics in the Third Reich
The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands
Design by Rob van Hoesel

Claire Cocano
Rue Désiré Chevalier
Self-published, Paris
Design by Claire Cocano

Barbara Debeuckelaere
’Om (Mother)
The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands
Design by Carel Fransen

Simone Engelen
27 Drafts
Fw:Books, Amsterdam
Design by Hans Gremmen

Janick Entremont
If Time Does Not End
Self-published, Berlin
Design by Janick Entremont

Ismail Ferdous
Sea Beach
Imageless, Shanghai
Design by RELATED DEPARTMENT

Toma Gerzha
Control Refresh
The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands
Design by Rob van Hoesel

Virginia Hanusik
Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, New York
Design by New Information, Dave Yun, and Inyeong Cho

Abdulhamid Kircher
Rotting from Within
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London
Design by Loose Joints Studio

Hassan Kurbanbaev
One Head and Thousand Years
Art Paper Editions, Ghent, Belgium
Design by Jurgen Maelfeyt

Srinivas Kuruganti
Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble
Self-published / Marigold Books, Delhi, India
Design by Srinivas Kuruganti

Nicola Moscelli
Dead End
Penisola Edizioni and Antiga Edizioni, Crocetta del Montello, Italy
Design by Roberto Vito D’Amico

RaMell Ross
Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body
MACK, London
Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown

Melissa Shook
Daily Self-Portraits 1972–1973
TBW Books, Oakland, California
Design by Paul Schiek

Ngadi Smart
Wata Na Life
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London
Design by Loose Joints Studio

Tsai Ting Bang
Born from the Same Root
Self-published, Taipei
Design by Tsai Ting Bang

Rawsht Twana
Twana’s Box: The Photographic Life of Twana Abdullah, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, 1974–1992
Fraglich Publishing, Bregenz, Austria
Design by Stefano Carini and Lukas Birk

Róisín White
Lay Her Down Upon Her Back
Witty Books, Turin, Italy, Landskrona Foto, Sweden, and Breadfield Press, Malmö, Sweden
Design by Tommaso Tanini

PhotoBook of the Year

Taysir Batniji, Disruptions, Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London, Design by Loose Joints Studio

Cai Dongdong, Passing By Beijing, Cai Dongdong Studio, Beijing, Design by Wang Lisha

Lia Darjes, Plates I–XXXI, Chose Commune, Marseille, France, Design by Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Perrine Serre

Jessica Ingram, We Are Carver, Self-published, Dallenwil, Switzerland, Design by Michael Schmelling / 40 Worth

Akihiko Okamura, Les souvenirs des autres (The Memories of Others), Atelier EXB, Paris, Design by François Dezafit

César Rodríguez, Hoja Dorada, KWY, Lima, Peru, Design by Vera Lucía Jiménez

Rosalind Fox Solomon, A Woman I Once Knew, MACK, London, Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown

Peter van Agtmael, Look at the U.S.A.: A Diary of War and Home, Thames & Hudson, London, Design by Bonnie Briant Design

Awoiska van der Molen, The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves, Fw:Books, Amsterdam, Design by Hans Gremmen

Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion, SPBH Editions, London, Design by Brian Paul Lamotte

Previous Next

Taysir Batniji
Disruptions
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London
Design by Loose Joints Studio

Cai Dongdong
Passing By Beijing
Cai Dongdong Studio, Beijing
Design by Wang Lisha

Lia Darjes
Plates I–XXXI
Chose Commune, Marseille, France
Design by Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Perrine Serre

Jessica Ingram
We Are Carver
Self-published, Dallenwil, Switzerland
Design by Michael Schmelling / 40 Worth

Akihiko Okamura
Les souvenirs des autres (The Memories of Others)
Atelier EXB, Paris
Design by François Dezafit

César Rodríguez
Hoja Dorada
KWY, Lima, Peru
Design by Vera Lucía Jiménez

Rosalind Fox Solomon
A Woman I Once Knew
MACK, London
Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown

Peter van Agtmael
Look at the U.S.A.: A Diary of War and Home
Thames & Hudson, London
Design by Bonnie Briant Design

Awoiska van der Molen
The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves
Fw:Books, Amsterdam
Design by Hans Gremmen

Carmen Winant
The Last Safe Abortion
SPBH Editions, London
Design by Brian Paul Lamotte

Photography Catalog of the Year

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering, Katia Reich, Spector Books, Leipzig, Germany, Design by Helmut Völter

Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950–Present, Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, 10×10 Photobooks, New York, Design by Huber / Sterzinger and Miloš Gavrić

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, Grace Wales Bonner, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Design by Peter Miles

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

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Lines and Bodies, Diane Dufour and Mei Asakura, Atelier EXB and LE BAL, Paris, Design by Coline Aguettaz

Previous Next

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering
Katia Reich
Spector Books, Leipzig, Germany
Design by Helmut Völter

Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950–Present
Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich
10×10 Photobooks, New York
Design by Huber / Sterzinger and Miloš Gavrić

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection
Grace Wales Bonner
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Design by Peter Miles

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

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Lines and Bodies
Diane Dufour and Mei Asakura
Atelier EXB and LE BAL, Paris
Design by Coline Aguettaz

The 2024 PhotoBook Award winners will be announced during Paris Photo on Friday, November 8, at 3:00 p.m. (CET).

How Arielle Bobb-Willis Keeps Her Inner 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. “I love the idea of seeing Black people represented in an abstract way,” Bobb-Willis says. “It’s important to me to continue to reject the notion that Black expression is limited—or limiting.”

Here, Nicole Acheampong speaks with Bobb-Willis about her entry into photography, her unconventional approaches to styling, and how she keeps her inner kid alive.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2022 Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey, 2019

Nicole Acheampong: To start, can you tell me about your family?

Arielle Bobb-Willis: I grew up the youngest, with two older brothers. Me being the only girl and the youngest, I definitely kept to myself.

My mom and my dad divorced when I was five years old, so I’ve always been in between houses. I grew up in downtown Manhattan and then also in Suffern, in upstate New York. I’ve always been traveling back and forth in cars, with a night or weekend bag. I recently figured out that I love being in transit—on a train or in cars, there’s so much I can see out the window. If you’re in a car with me, I’m going to take a picture of something that we’re driving by.

After my parents divorced, my dad and stepmom had a girl named Ava, and my mom and stepdad had a girl and a boy, Dakota and Cameron. Becoming an older sibling at age fourteen was one of the biggest blessings in my life, creatively and emotionally. To have younger siblings who were so confident in their expression and were just silly, running around and dancing, made me get into that zone as well. It was such a lighthearted time. It kept me grounded in what actually mattered to me. And when I was fourteen, I found photography, and I started taking pictures of my siblings.

Acheampong: What would you photograph them doing in those days? Would you capture them candidly playing, or would you pose them for the camera?

Bobb-Willis: It was a bit of everything. We would do fashion shoots. I’d also just document them throughout the day. I would take pictures of them running, in motion. I would take pictures of them at night, with flash. I was very scared at the time to ask other people to do a photoshoot. So my siblings were my first subjects. They just let me do my thing. They always knew me as a photographer, since they were born, so they never questioned it.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2021 Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey, 2018

Acheampong: Did the fear and shyness you felt when you were younger push you into creating your own world in your art, or was it something you had to overcome in order to really feel confident in yourself as an artist?

Bobb-Willis: It was definitely something I had to overcome, but the shyness still shows up in my work. It’s a part of who I am. I still pretty much keep to myself. When I’m shooting, I can either show parts of myself that are loud or I can hide in my work. When I first started photographing, I asked myself, How can I take a picture of myself without being in the photo? And also: How can I show all the parts of myself? That was the premise. Photography showed up in my life at the right time, for sure.

Acheampong: How were you first introduced to photography?

Bobb-Willis: I moved to South Carolina when I was fourteen. My mom got remarried, and I was just thrown off course. I didn’t have the right resources at the time to go through a big change like that. And I didn’t feel very comfortable in the school I was in. It was a private college-prep school. I’m exaggerating, but I was one of four Black kids, if you know what I mean.

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive 60.00 The first monograph by the New Black Vanguard’s Arielle Bobb-Willis is a vivid statement about color, gesture, and style.

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Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive

Photographs by Arielle Bobb-Willis. Text by Tiana Reid. Interviewer Nicole Acheampong. Contributions by Micaiah Carter, Esther Faciane, Phyllis Galembo, Kezia Harrell, Howardena Pindell, Alex Webb, Aweng Chuol, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, Isabella Lalonde, Leonardo Scotti, Tschabalala Self, Synchrodogs, Hannah Traore, and Spencer Tunick. Designed by Rush Jackson.

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View cart Description The first monograph by the New Black Vanguard’s Arielle Bobb-Willis is a vivid statement about color, gesture, and style.

Keep the Kid Alive, Arielle Bobb-Willis’s first book, 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. “I love the idea of seeing Black people represented in an abstract way,” Bobb-Willis says. “It’s important to me to continue to reject the notion that Black expression is limited—or limiting.” With a conversation between Bobb-Willis and a dynamic range of artists, stylists, and creatives who speak about keeping their “inner kid” alive, this book captures a definitive young artist’s unconventional worldbuilding. Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 172
Number of images: 90
Publication date: 2024-10-08
Measurements: 8.25 x 10.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597115704

Press

“Bobb-Willis’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive, makes a statement about beauty, exuberance and cathartic expression—while not taking itself too seriously—with vibrant colour and conceptual image building.”—Guardian

Contributors

Arielle Bobb-Willis (born in New York, 1994) has published her photography in the New Yorker, I-D, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, L’uomo Vogue, New York magazine’s The Cut, and the New York Times Magazine. Her work is featured in The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019) and an accompanying exhibition, which traveled to the Museum of the African Diaspora, Rencontres d’Arles, Fotografiska Sweden, and other venues. She is currently based in Los Angeles.

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor of English at York University. Her research and teaching interests include black literature, gender, and labor. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Art in America, Bookforum, Frieze, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, among other places. She is a former editor at The New Inquiry and Pinko. In 2021, she received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Nicole Acheampong is the digital editor at T Magazine. A former editor at Aperture and the Atlantic, her writing has appeared in Art in America and the New York Review of Books.

Acheampong: I believe it.

Bobb-Willis:  I lived in Aiken, South Carolina, which is a horse town and a retirement community. There’s not a lot going on. I felt really isolated from a New York experience that I could have had. I developed anxiety and a really deep depression, and it lasted for about five years until I got professional help.

During the first week of school, I had to enroll in an elective, and I was a new kid, so they just threw me into this digital-imaging course. I had a little black point-and-shoot, one of the square ones, nothing with a lens or anything. I learned about the basics of photography in that elective and was introduced to Photoshop. I became obsessed. I loved that class because for that part of the day, it was like I was in a trance. We got to restore old photographs. If you’ve ever used Photoshop, you know that editing can sometimes be a slow process, and that kept me very present with what I was doing and what was in front of me, and not thinking about what I did in first period or what
I had to do next week. I think depression robs you of being present and seeing the beauty around you.

I was working with a digital camera for the course, but my history teacher said his wife didn’t want her camera anymore and gave it to me. It was a film camera, a Nikon N80. I went home, and I took my first roll of film.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Portland, Oregon, 2023

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Acheampong: What did you photograph?

Bobb-Willis: It was at sunset, so my bedroom had a golden-hour vibe. I lifted one of my shoes up in the air, and I took a picture of it. I had a mannequin in my room, and I took a picture of that too. I remember going to CVS and being really excited to get the developed film back.

There had been an orange tint in my room. The orange became more orangey with film. I had black shoes on, and on the film, the edges around my black shoe were soft and melted into the orange. That was the moment where I was like, Oh my God, oh my God. This is so cool. This is so sick. This is what I want to do forever.

At the time, I was always in my room, and there was usually a very gray, dreary kind of feeling in my room. But seeing those photos of these bright oranges and reds and yellows and blacks made my room into something better. I realized that photography can make a whole world—your own world. It turned my room into something that it wasn’t, and it looked like a place of peace, brighter and better than what I was feeling at that time.

Acheampong: That feels so connected to your current work: it’s not easy to geographically place a lot of your images, because the subjects almost seem like they could be existing in a fantasy world that you’ve created for yourself. How do you choose locations for these shoots?

Bobb-Willis:  I told you about how I’ve been traveling in cars from my mom to my dad my whole life, and how I’m always looking out of car windows, and just observing all the time.

I think that constantly observing is just in my DNA in a way, and it shapes the way I pick locations. I’m not really looking to shoot in front of the Empire State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or other landmarks that show that I’m in a specific place. Instead I might say, Oh, the light is shining on this pink wall at 2 p.m. I’m going to go shoot there at 2 p.m. Or, There’s a shadow from a tree right here on this red building. The paint is being chipped off and has an interesting texture. Oh, I’ll shoot there.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Austin, 2020 Arielle Bobb-Willis, London, 2018

Acheampong: The fact that you spend much of your time looking out of car windows makes sense, because I feel like so many of the background details are ones that you would see when you’re passing through a place—like a nondescript alleyway that you would glance down, and then briefly wonder what it might hold. And in the same way that your locations are fairly nondescript, the clothes that your models wear tend to look unbranded and anonymous, or not quite like something you would find in a store.

I love styling but not styling in the sense of “I need designer clothes to do this shoot.” I’ve changed shirts into skirts and cut out holes into the shirt. Or I’ll stretch a shirt out so that I can put two people in it. I put a lot of people in shirts backward and inside out. A skirt doesn’t have to be a skirt just because it’s presented that way. It could be whatever you want it to be. I love styling in that sense, where it’s play, it’s fun, it’s exploration.

Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.

Acheampong: That definitely stood out to me about your work—you’re not precious about the clothes. As you said, sometimes you’ll stretch a fabric to its limits, or the fabrics will be wrinkled or bunched up. Or, simply, a bra strap will hang off a model’s shoulder. At the same time though, the bright colors and flamboyance of the outfits seem to contradict the casualness with which they’re being worn. Could you speak to how you see luxury and fashion coexisting in your photography? Is the malleability of a piece of clothing what you find most luxurious about it?

Bobb-Willis: Oh, that’s a good question. The luxury for me is to be able to create the clothing myself, create the clothing that I want to see or need in the moment. It started out with me having twenty dollars and being like, Okay. What can I do with twenty dollars? I think that as an artist, having limitations can make you more creative. With designer things, I feel like sometimes I can’t do as much. It comes already finished in a sense, you know?

Acheampong: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Which is fun. It’s fun to work with people and to shoot beautiful things that someone else has created and took the time to cut into. But it’s also fun and luxurious to create things that I want on the spot and improvise.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Los Angeles, 2020 Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2023

Acheampong: After New York and Aiken, where did you live next?

Bobb-Willis: From eighteen to twenty-three, I was in New Orleans. I was still heavily depressed at that time, but New Orleans was the place where I found community. And I felt like I was in a place where I could create things. It was where I got my depression under control, actually.

I had a freedom there that I didn’t have when I was in South Carolina. I was free to be with my own thoughts and not the thoughts of my peers, or my family, or anything like that. I was mostly by myself, which felt really nice and different than in South Carolina. It was isolating, I guess. But being alone can feel good in certain places, you know? It helps you see clearly about what you need for yourself and what kind of people you want to be around.

Acheampong:  New Orleans, I think, is a city where even when you are alone, you’re surrounded by so much vibrancy and life on the streets. I imagine you were always in a community with others even if you were in your own thoughts?

Bobb-Willis: Yeah. Totally. I love the duality of New Orleans. There’s a duality to the entire city: The houses are very colorful, but they’re also kind of falling apart. There’s a tension in the air, and the air is very heavy.

I was working at a retail store and just shooting for retail here and there. Then, I found a group of people who I started to create zines and other things with. Then, one day, on my way home from my retail job, I got hit by a car. This was in 2016. I was riding my bike on St. Charles Avenue, and . . . the car just came. It was a hit-and-run. I tore their side-view mirror off with my left shoulder and left arm. Moments before the impact, I thought to myself, Oh, I get twenty-one years. I was like, Okay. That’s fine . . . I’m okay with that—and then I got hit. There was nothing I could do at that point, and I felt this calming acceptance come over me.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Chicago, 2017 Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2017

Acheampong: I’m amazed that your thoughts even cohered in that moment.

Bobb-Willis: Me too. I didn’t know that happened. You know, in movies, how they say that things slow down a bit? It’s weird, but they actually did slow down. Then I got hit, and when I opened my eyes, I thought, Oh, I’m still here. Okay.

Acheampong: How long did it take you to recover from that?

Bobb-Willis: I tore a ligament in my shoulder, and it’s still a problem. The left side of my body is still a problem in some ways.

A couple months before getting hit, the first love of my life had suddenly broken up with me, which was also debilitating to me. I was also bedridden for six weeks, and I couldn’t work my retail job. I was just able to really sit with myself during that time. I started to think, You don’t have a job. You don’t have a boyfriend. You don’t have any responsibilities, really. So, what do you want? And I saw her—older Arielle—very clearly, and I thought, I’m going to take pictures, and I’m not going to hold back. Once I got a little bit better, I quit my job, and then I started to shoot the things that are in the book.

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Acheampong: So the origin story for this work began on the heels of a near-death experience.

Bobb-Willis: Yes. The car accident, the breakup . . . It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

Acheampong: Wow. After that series of events, what differences did you notice in the type of work you most wanted to make?

Bobb-Willis:  It made me more of a brave person. I feel like I create like a child because I do not give a fuck. I mean, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me while I’m creating. I do it in the streets and outside, and people are honking and pointing or screaming out of their cars.

New Orleans is a city that’s dense with culture, and so, living there as I recovered, there was so much for me to work with. And I told myself, I’m just going to do what I want to do because it can all be gone tomorrow.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2016 Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey, 2021

Acheampong: You spoke earlier about New Orleans being a place that juxtaposes its colors and brightness and all of the partying with a darker tinge that can be found in a lot of corners of the city. And you yourself had a very contradictory experience in which your worst, near-death moments were paired with a real moment of joyful discovery. I want to talk about how a similar tension appears in your photos. I think that one of the hallmarks of your images is the fact that there’s a playfulness in some of your subjects’ poses and clothing, but there is definitely also a cloudiness. I noticed that, in almost every image, people’s faces are somehow obscured—either covered in shadow or covered in paint or a mask or just turned away, to the side. Could you say a little bit about that gesture and why it recurs in so much of your work?

Bobb-Willis: My reasons for that change over time. But I think it’s partially inspired by the paintings that I love. Like in Milton Avery’s work: I feel like that world is where I want to live. I wish we all looked like that. I wish we all didn’t have to have our faces determine if we’re valuable or not. Like why are some people considered more “photographable” than others? In the grand scheme of the photo/fashion industry, who gets to determine that?

I’m more inspired by painters than artists of any other medium, and I think about the painters whose work surrounded me growing up: Jacob Lawrence, Basquiat, and William H. Johnson, and, from New Orleans, Sister Gertrude Morgan. When you’re painting, you can make someone’s head a foot. You can have someone’s leg go around their body, like, six times. Do you know what I mean?

Acheampong: Mm-hmm.

Bobb-Willis: You could have someone floating in midair in a painting. There are unlimited things you could do with the body in paintings, and I love that freedom. I’m trying to put that freedom into my photos, and I’m trying to gently push my subjects to do things that are maybe a little bit out of their comfort zone. I don’t want to do it too far, but just gently push people to maybe try things that are not a pose you would do on the regular day-to-day.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey, 2018 Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey, 2019
All photographs courtesy the artist

Acheampong: I think that relates to the playfulness that is so core to your work in general as well as to your first foray into making photographs: with your very first subjects, your younger siblings, you began by capturing them at play. And I’d like to ask you the same question that you’ve been asking the other artists who have contributed to this book: How do you keep your inner child alive—in your photography and in your day-to-day life?

Bobb-Willis: Photography is how I keep my inner child alive. Photography has taught me to fall in love with life. I love finding unexpected rainbows, and sunshine and a beautiful green park and kids’ chalk drawings on the sidewalk and melted ice cream and butterflies and flowers and Black girls with bright-blue braids and sweet graffiti poetry! I keep my inner child alive by taking pictures of my every day. I’m always finding things that I’m so in love with. Some you’ll see collected in the booklet in this book. I’m so grateful that photography has given me that. It’s given me that gift to always see beauty wherever I go. It’s made me a lighter, brighter individual.

Since I was a child, and even when I was in my teens, I never really spoke up. Photography has taught me how to communicate what I need from the people around me. It’s taught me that there’s so much power in my imagination. It taught me how to trust in my taste, my opinions, and myself. It’s given me true self-love, and that I can stand firm in who I am. My journey with photography has been a very emotional, world-expanding experience. There’s just so much all the time to see, and take pictures of, and fall in love with. Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.

This interview originally appeared in Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (Aperture, 2024).

A Collective Portrait of Contemporary Ukraine

On a three-week trip to Ukraine last spring, I experienced the innovative and engrossing exhibition Essential Goods, which felt like a labyrinthine voyage of discovery. It featured 166 photographs by twenty-four younger Ukrainians, the “next generation,” according to curators Isabella van Marle and Sonya Kvasha, of photographers and lens-based artists. This was a relatively rare and extremely welcome exhibition in Ukraine, where the art world has long skewed toward painting and sculpture. 

All of the photographs in Essential Goods, which was on view briefly in late May through early June, were made during wartime, many since Russia’s full-scale invasion, on February 24, 2022, and others before. The earliest images dated from 2014, when Russia and its proxies “temporarily occupied” (a term employed all the time in Ukraine) Crimea and parts of both Luhansk and Donetsk in the East. There was an expansive range of subjects, themes, and sites: a bullet-pocked wall in Kyiv, partially demolished buildings, and sandbags in a pile; vibrant nature and a fresh cemetery; youth culture and family life; alienation and memory, loss and connection; among numerous others. Flat-out talent abounded and deep feeling was palpable in this collective, multipart portrait of contemporary Ukraine.

Installation view of Essential Goods, Pavilion of Culture, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2024. Photograph by Sergei Illin

The exhibition’s setting was the glass-walled Pavilion of Culture, in a massive and imposing Soviet-era complex. In 1967, the Pavilion was constructed as an exhibition space, also to celebrate the coal mining industry in the Ukrainian SSR. Soon after the full-scale invasion, it was repurposed as a warehouse for humanitarian aid, while still presenting exhibitions. That a building so emblematic of Russian domination and oppression is now being utilized to assist Ukrainians suffering from renewed Russian aggression is striking. Novel architecture by the Ukrainian firm FORMA allowed for photographs to be displayed alongside boxes of aid supplies. 

The exhibition showcased the vitality, intensity, and vision of Ukrainian photographers. (Russia has been suppressing, imprisoning, and murdering Ukrainian cultural figures for centuries.) Near the end of the final class in his Yale University course “The Making of Modern Ukraine” (which is available online), Professor Timothy Snyder quotes the contemporary Ukrainian poet Yuliya Musakovska: “I thank all of the Ukrainians who are continuing to create in times of war.” Essential Goods was full of such creators. 

Installation views of Essential Goods, Pavilion of Culture, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2024. Photographs by Sergei Illin

Back in New York, where I live, I met with three of the participating artists—Vladyslav Andrievsky, George Ivanchenko, and Daria Svertilova—on Zoom or WhatsApp. Ivanchenko photographed Izium’s residents; the city was brutally occupied by Russians and later liberated by Ukrainian forces, who discovered a mass grave full of civilians in a forest. Svertilova made distinctive images of scenes especially significant for her in post-invasion Kyiv and Hostomel, the site of the first major battle between Ukrainian and Russian forces. Andrievsky’s pre-invasion photos of gray and alienating Soviet-style, high-rise apartment buildings on the outskirts of Kyiv show the young adults (his peers) living in that environment. In our conversations, which have been condensed and edited for clarity, they each spoke about how the war has changed their lives and work, and how Ukrainian identity itself has been transformed by the conflict.

Daria Svertilova, Artist Sana Shahmuradova in her studio, Kyiv, December 2022

Gregory Volk: Could you speak about your work that’s in that exhibition, where it came from, what your concerns and motivations were?

Vladyslav Andrievsky: I was showing my main series at this moment, it’s called District (2017–22). This is a series about the outskirts of a big city. Most of the buildings here are constructions from the Soviet era. So, they are buildings of economic changes, of new ideas, but they are not really comfortable. They are concrete, and they became even more raw and dull after the Soviet Union collapsed. And now, this place feels quite depressing. But despite that, many young people were born there, grew up there, and still live there, and I feel a certain tension between these faceless buildings of the outskirts, and the young generation growing up in the internet reality. We are scrolling Instagram, we see a lot of beautiful places, we see that we are the same as our peers in England or the US, but we have a different environment. That is why I was interested in outskirts and in the young generation, and how we can dream about something different. So, it is about a tension between this depressive, concrete, and gray environment and a young generation with bright minds and hearts.

Vladyslav Andrievsky, District view III (Rain), Kyiv, 2020, from the series District Vladyslav Andrievsky, Prince of his own pattern I, Kyiv, 2021, from the series District

Daria Svertilova: The series that was partially presented in Essential Goods was my reflection on the first year of the full-scale invasion. I was working on a long-term project before the full-scale invasion started, and then, all of a sudden, nothing was making sense to me. I was abroad at the time. For seven years, I have been partially living in Paris. Now, I can say that I’m based between two countries, because I have been returning to Ukraine constantly. I spend half of my time here and half of my time in France.

During the first month of the invasion, I was overwhelmed with journalistic images, and I was questioning my practice, my place as a photographer in that context, whether I was ready to do journalistic photography, or if I needed some more time to reflect and create other imagery. When I came back to Ukraine after the invasion, it was August 2022, so I started to take pictures that were kind of like what everybody was taking. I wanted to go to liberated towns around Kyiv. I wanted to photograph the remains of the destruction.

Daria Svertilova, Invisible museum, Kyiv, 2023

And then, throughout the first year, between 2022 and 2023, I was focusing on things that I found different every time I came back. I called the series Irreversibly Altered because everything was kind of altered to me. I constructed it around a notion of a dream, because since the full-scale invasion started, I was dreaming a lot about the war.

It doesn’t have the classic narration of a documentary series. It’s really like a puzzle of impressions of some parts of the reality that I would find every time I would come back. For example, in December ’22, there were blackouts. In summer, there were still ruins in the Kyiv Oblast, but then they were quite quickly cleaned away. I also photographed some women members of the military. My series, it was really like reactive photography. It was some kind of sublimation of the things that I was living through.

George Ivanchenko: I’m not an art photographer. I work with reportage. But for this exhibition, I sent the pictures of people who were living together, in a building, during the occupation of Izium. I just love these people; we speak a lot. I lived there in a flat because I was working with volunteers. I started to make pictures about these people. I see the simple soul of the East of Ukraine and in Izium it’s special, it’s not like in Donbas, it’s not like in Kharkiv.

George Ivanchenko, from the series 13IUM, Izium, Donbas region, Ukraine, 2024

Volk: How did you come to photography? Did you first explore other mediums, or have you long known that photography is your calling in art?

Andrievsky: First I wanted to be an artist. I used to draw, but then I discovered photography when my mother gave me a camera and a few rolls of film. From that point, I started to document my life during summer camp. That’s how I got involved in photography. I started to buy some photography magazines, to watch some documentaries. Later, I met Viktor Marushchenko, a Ukrainian master of photography and a great teacher. I was studying in his photography school for about three or four months, and that experience changed me forever. That was a very, very big influence on me as a person and as a photographer. Unfortunately, Viktor died in 2020, and I think this was a huge loss for the future of Ukrainian photography.

Svertilova: I took painting classes as a kid. I was a teenager when I started trying to do photography, and it was a kind of hobby. My grandfather gave me this old Soviet film camera, and I was also experimenting with just taking pictures on film. Basically, it all started at school, and at some moment, I was taking pictures of my classmates and they were encouraging me to continue. And progressively, I started to take photography more seriously. I met some people older than me who would advise me about books, some photographers to look at, and that’s how it developed.

When I was 21, I entered an art school in France, and basically, since then, I had access. I feel quite privileged to have access to photography events, to exhibitions, to bookstores. And it’s true that in Ukraine, we are quite limited with all this photography market, let’s say, because photography is not really taken seriously here. It is starting to be taken more seriously, but we’re not very supported by institutions like it is in Europe, or in the US.

Ivanchenko: I had been studying journalism for one year in Lviv when the big invasion came. The first day I understood, I can do this now or never.

George Ivanchenko, from the series 13IUM, Izium, Donbas region, Ukraine, 2024

Volk: How has the war affected you personally and as lens-based artists? Have your work or motivations substantially changed? I’m guessing that none of you ever imagined you would be wartime artists.

Svertilova: It’s a big, big question. We have been speaking about it with a lot of friends and we’re still speaking about it. We are Ukrainians, we were born here, raised here, and even if some of us are working abroad, partially, we still identify ourselves as Ukrainian artists. So, basically, all the work we’ll do, it’ll be war-related in some point.

The full-scale invasion, it stole a lot of things from us, but it also stole our ability to speak about other non-war-related subjects. The war has been taking place since 2014, but still, we had more freedom to speak about some things that were, maybe, less tragic, let’s say. Now, it’s so overwhelming.

I believe that art is political, and I believe that the work we do is political, because we witness something, we work with the medium of art photography or documentary photography. We’re not making collages, or completely abstract things, so we work with the reality, and the reality is tragic. I believe that my personal work changed. I don’t see now a possibility to do work that is completely un-related to the invasion, or to politics somehow. That can be tough, sometimes, because I don’t feel like I’m able to do the work that is purely aesthetic.

George Ivanchenko, from the series 13IUM, Izium, Donbas region, Ukraine, 2024

Andrievsky: It is also quite tough for me as well, because I have not been practicing photography since February. I don’t understand how to react to this reality today, as I see that a lot of works that artists are doing now in Ukraine, they are more documentary reflection of reality. And I’m not really sure that I want to be a documentary photographer.

At some point, I decided just to live through this experience, and maybe, in the future, I will try to say something, with distance. But, of course, I take photographs on my phone and I somehow experiment with Xerox, because I like this filter that Xerox does. It is like broken images. It is not smooth, it is not perfect, and it somehow reflects and shows this current time.

Ivanchenko: Gregory, I can’t say I’m an artist.

Volk: Just wartime photographer?

Ivanchenko: Yes, it’s like that. The war makes faster all the processes in your life and all relationships with people. You change many times during these three years. You want to find something, you learn, you do stupid things, you study, in your way. In the first week, I went to Kyiv from Lviv, and for one and a half years, I didn’t have a room, a house, someplace where I stay and keep all my things. I have everything in a bag, my camera, and then it’s another city, it’s the front line. It’s south, it’s east. You just live somewhere, sometimes without money. You don’t know exactly what you do, but you just feel it and you understand. It’s a lot of experience, a lot of really important moments with this big pain.

Daria Svertilova, Archangel Michael—protector of Kyiv, Kyiv, 2023 Daria Svertilova, August in Hostomel, Kyiv Oblast, 2022

Volk: The first night I arrived in Kyiv, Russia sent fifty-three Iranian-made Shahed drones and five missiles, including at Kyiv, and there was a big explosion not far away from me. And then, the next morning, I went to your innovative show, in which humanitarian aid was exhibited alongside your works. And I understand that the Pavilion of Culture, since the start of the full-scale invasion, has been used to store and distribute humanitarian aid. How did you feel, as artists, as photographers, showing in that context?

Svertilova: I knew Isabella van Marle, the curator, from a Pictures for Purpose fundraiser, and she contacted me to ask if I was willing to participate. Initially, she planned to organize a show in Paris. And then, she said that the show would be in Kyiv. There are not lot of photography exhibitions taking place in Kyiv right now. The exhibitions that are there are mostly photojournalistic ones, and art photography is very underrepresented, in my opinion. It was right to use this space, because it’s like an old Soviet pavilion. The humanitarian aid was part of the context, because we were speaking about war-related subjects, even if they’re non-explicit. I think I wouldn’t like to see these pictures in a white cube gallery space. For me, the choice was right for the time we showed this work.

Andrievsky: I agree with Daria, because it is how everything is now, it couldn’t be separated. We live in this time where everything is all together—war, life, death, and so on. It is a reflection of today.

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Volk: I’m wondering about the role of artists in Ukraine. One thing I know is that artists, poets, and writers have long been essential for Ukraine and Ukrainian culture, and have often suffered greatly at the hands of Russia. But right now, there is resurgent interest in Ukraine, in contemporary art and literature, and I hope this extends to photography. Can you talk a little bit about your audience, or what you want your works to do in the world in terms of connecting with other people?

Svertilova: For me, personally, it’s horrible to say, but the only positive thing of what’s happening is that all foreign countries, finally, started to distinguish who are Ukrainians and who are Russians. What is happening now is very brutal process of decolonization. Basically, we had the same cultural context with Russia for a long time. I remember, when I was a teenager, we would watch Russian TV series because we had Russian TV channels.

It’s crazy how tricky it was that so many people were identifying themselves with a Russian context. And now, we realize that it’s totally different, and it was artificially-implemented during Soviet times. And also, there is this complex of inferiority, that we were growing up with the idea that Russian language is better. It’s equivalent to you being educated that Russian culture is better, that everything is better.

What’s happening now, it’s very complex. The war is not just about life and death. It’s also about moral choices and a lot of cultural processes taking place at very accelerated speed. In a very, very short amount of time, like in three years, we are completely changing our mind, and understanding who we are.

Vladyslav Andrievsky, Corner, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2021, from the series District

Volk: And art is an important part of that.

Svertilova: Absolutely. In this context, I would like to bring attention to some things that matter to me through my own prism, because I’m not a war photographer. I don’t see myself going to trenches with soldiers and taking journalistic pictures. I don’t feel that’s my place, because there are so many people who are doing it much better than I would do.

I’m more in slow documentary photography, processing things and speaking to people and also living through all this experience. For me, photography is always about this double-sided, let’s say, position, like you are supposed to be a bit insider to understand the context and to treat the subject in the right way. But also, you are supposed to have this distance. I’m trying to balance between these two because I’m trying to reflect on things which I’m a part of, but at the same time, I try a bit to take a step away to understand what’s it all about. And sometimes, it’s overwhelming.

Andrievsky: I also think that it is good for us that we investigate a lot of Ukrainian culture now. There are not many exhibitions of photography, but we have a lot of art exhibitions of the masters of earlier times. It is really important to be an artist, and I think we should not just be artists, but be Ukrainian artists.

We need to be supported by the institutions. We need education programs for the young generation. Unfortunately, our universities are very Soviet. They have a very strict vision of what is beautiful, what is not beautiful, what is right, what is not right. We need new programs, new visions, new names. It’s very important to talk about Ukraine abroad and about culture, but it’s even more important to do exhibitions and programs here to raise and educate a new generation who will know what it means to be Ukrainian and what Ukraine is.

George Ivanchenko, from the series 13IUM, Izium, Donbas region, Ukraine, 2024
All photographs courtesy the artists

Volk: George, what is your role as a photographer in Ukraine now? You took photographs in Izium when it was occupied. The Russians left a mass grave, you’re photographing people who lived there, who lived under occupation and now are liberated, so your photographs are important.

Ivanchenko: It’s important because you can give information via your pictures, and they’re also part of history. People really see this and they will think about it.

Essential Goods: Ukrainian Photography Now was on view at the Pavilion of Culture, Kyiv, Ukraine, May 23–June 6, 2024.

Announcing the Winners of the 2024 Creator Labs Photo Fund

Google’s Creator Labs and Aperture are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2024 Creator Labs Photo Fund—an initiative providing financial support and visibility to encourage artists at formative moments in their careers. Inaugurated in 2021, the Creator Labs Photo Fund is now in its third season, continuing its mission of supporting image makers. In partnership with Aperture, Creator Labs Photo Fund provides one-time $6,000 grants and a Google Pixel device to thirty artists working in photography and lens-based practices. 

The winning artists of this year’s Creator Labs Photo Fund are:

Farah Al Qasimi, Luke Austin, Bruce Bennett, Morganne Boulden, Harlan Bozeman, Oyè Diran, Brayan Enriquez, Camille Farrah Lenain, Naima Green, Pia Paulina Guilmoth, Shravya Kag, Mary Kang, Brian Van Lau, Spandita Malik,  Dom Marker, Ana Rosa Marx, Will Matsuda, Steven Molina Contreras, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Mathilde Mujanayi, Anh Nguyen, Nathan Olsen, Obinna Onyeka, Andina Marie Osorio, Tanner Pendleton, Chris Perez, Mateo Ruiz González, Jennifer Sakai, Rachel Elise Thomas, and Jaclyn Wright.

“Aperture is excited to recognize the depth and rigor of these thirty selected artists,” notes Brendan Embser, senior editor at Aperture. “Our partnership with Google on the Creator Labs Photo Fund remains central to our mission to support artists and shape critical dialogues about photography today.”


Below, read more about this year’s winning artists.

Farah Al Qasimi, Marwa Braiding Marah’s Hair, 2020, from the series Brotherville

Farah Al Qasimi

Dearborn, Michigan, is home to the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Middle East. Its first immigrants were workers for the Ford Motor Company, and successive generations arrived from Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen, many fleeing conflicts fueled by US intervention. Farah Al Qasimi first visited the city in 2019. There she met people wrestling with an ever-growing presence of anti-Arab sentiment. “Since then, I have tried to find excuses to return,” she says. Brotherville is a product of this sustained engagement. Al Qasimi grew up between the UAE and the US, and her photographs investigate the anxieties of immigration and diaspora in a post-oil world. In one image that slips between the metaphorical and documentary, a woman looks out at the Marathon oil refinery, a major pollutant in the area, framed between its signage and two McDonalds cups. “I have embodied that duality for all of my life,” says Al Qasimi, on balancing US assimilation with preserving her own identity, “and this is what draws me to this place again and again.”

Luke Austin, Untitled, 2020, from the series A Dislocation of Time

Luke Austin

Near the end of 2020, stuck at home, Luke Austin experimented in the studio. Gathering self-portraits from men he followed on Instagram, Austin printed the images on paper, cut out the figures, and began a process of rephotographing the photo-sculptures he created. The two-dimensional became three-dimensional, then two-dimensional again. “There is something hollow yet rich about the silhouette cast from a cutout image of a person,” Austin says. “This work explores that, encouraging the viewer to look beneath the surface.” The series title, A Dislocation of Time, comes from a David Wojnarowicz journal entry; years later, it feels apt to the situation in which Austin made these images, as he reflected on a time-consuming process of photo-making, collaborating with men he met online while quarantining during a global pandemic. “I’ve spent the last few years thinking about the people who aren’t in my life anymore,” he says, “and I think subconsciously that showed up in the ghostly figured shapes and shadows in the works.”

Bruce Bennett, 4, 2021, from the series Love II

Bruce Bennett

The relationship between the photographic gaze and Black love is central to Love II, a series by Chicago-born and New York­–based artist Bruce Bennett. Through black-and-white portraits and self-portraits with his partner, Bennett brings his imagined viewer into an intimate, egalitarian conversation. In a careful subversion, the subjects of this invited gaze—who almost always look back—reclaim agency. They become coconspirators in a style of representation that demands their presence. “I’ve always dreamed of seeing myself in the third-person perspective,” says Bennet. In one image, Bennett sits with his partner in their bathtub, her hands wrapped around his forehead as he points his lens to a mirror that reflects the scene. While Bennet’s head cranes lovingly toward her, casting a shadow on the bathroom wall, her eyes remain fixed on us. This charged exchange, between them and us, is a fulcrum of Bennet’s work. “We want you to feel the contact and energy,” he says. 

Morganne Boulden, Butterfly, 2021, from the series When Flies Sit Still

Morganne Boulden

From Robert Frank to Ryan McGinley, the allure of the open road permeates American photographic history. Morganne Boulden’s When Flies Sit Still contributes to this rich lineage with the eerie solitude of the post-pandemic era. Since 2020, Boulden has made multiple cross-country road trips, intuitively capturing various scenes and friends along the way, in North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, and more. The result is a photographic map of disillusioned young America, though Boulden thinks of each photograph as the conversation surrounding it rather than a singular moment in time. “Times have been changing very rapidly,” she says. “Being able to have that conversation, and to capture a moment when that conversation is happening, is something that helps me deal with everything.” In Michigan, she photographed a young woman at a shooting range, a butterfly perched on her finger as a man aims and fires in the background, a beautiful moment of quiet amid the noise.

Harlan Bozeman, Wilt, 2021, from the series Out The E

Harlan Bozeman

The Elaine Massacre is often overlooked in US history. In 1919, a gathering of formerly enslaved Black sharecroppers organizing for fair payment was disrupted by several white men, one of whom was killed. The ensuing racist hysteria led to a white mob, including federal troops, indiscriminately killing hundreds of Black farmers and their families. “As someone who was raised in Arkansas, I was upset that I had never learned about what took place there so long ago,” says Harlan Bozeman. His series Out the E captures how this history continues to shape the lives of contemporary residents of Elaine, where the school district closed in 2005. Bozeman’s role exceeds photography; he is also a facilitator and collaborator. For the past two summers, he has been working with youth at the Elaine Legacy Center, the former elementary school, where he uses photography as a tool for education and self-expression. “I’m helping to ensure that the legacy of Elaine is preserved and carried forward,” says Bozeman. “There is now more to this project than making images.”

Oyè Diran, Shadow Embrace, 2024, from the series Rêve Bleu

Oyè Diran

“To me, the color blue represents the emotional and spiritual experiences I’ve had in my life,” says Oyè Diran, whose series Rêve Bleu unfolds like a visual poem, capturing the dimensions of the color. Born in Lagos and based in New York, Diran cut his teeth in the worlds of portraiture and fashion, publishing with several international brands, including Vogue Italia, CNN Africa, Kenya Airlines, and Afropunk. However, he thinks of his work against a much broader canvas of conceptual photography. Diran’s expansive blue tones endow his subjects—mostly people of color—with a regal grace. Poppy pods, silhouettes, shadow play, and geometric postures all elevate the emotional register of his images. These arrangements come from “an exploration that has required deep introspection,” says Diran. “In essence, I am exploring the human experience.”

Brayan Enriquez, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 2023, from the series And Taste the Dirt Below

Brayan Enriquez

Born in the United States to undocumented parents who had emigrated from Mexico only a few years earlier, Brayan Enriquez grew up knowing only pieces of their story. “Sometimes that history can go unsaid—can get lost in time,” he says. And Taste the Dirt Below documents Enriquez’s process of uncovering his parents’ odyssey through portraiture and video collaborations with his immediate family. Enriquez obscures some of his sitters, either by blurring them, covering their faces, or photographing them facing away from his camera. “The familiarity I had with my parents hindered me in picture making,” he says. “I needed to create some distance to approach this subject matter constructively.” Distanced as they are, the photographs are unmistakably intimate views into the domestic life Enriquez’s parents made in Atlanta. Shoes sit idle in an entryway, keychain photos hang next to a printout of an ultrasound. Set within his childhood home, And Taste the Dirt Below creates a refuge for Enriquez to tell his own story.

Camille Farrah Lenain, Uncle Farid and the Mediterranean Sea, 2020, from the series Made Of Smokeless Fire

Camille Farrah Lenain

How to represent those who have been made invisible? How can portraiture address the endangerment visibility also creates? Made Of Smokeless Fire, by the French Algerian photographer Camille Farrah Lenain, represents the experience of queer Muslims in France against photography’s historically troubled dynamic of visibility and invisibility, power and consent. For Farrah Lenain, who now lives between Paris and New Orleans, what we don’t see is as important as what we do. Her sitters are often anonymous, while their presence and testimony takes center stage. “My approach to portraiture has a double function,” she says. “It hides the identity of the participants for their own safety and comfort, but also sheds light on the experience of invisibility in society and religion.” The project has a personal origin. It began as an homage to her beloved uncle, who lived with diabetes and AIDS and died in 2013; amid her portraiture, Farrah Lenain interjects archival imagery of him, drawing a broader connection. In a refusal to categorize what it means to be queer and Muslim in France, she instead asks: “What does silencing an identity look like?”

Naima Green, Untitled (Riis), 2023, from the series I Keep Missing My Water

Naima Green

“The beach and being near the water have always been a site of freedom, a safe space, especially during the height of the pandemic,” says Naima Green. Photographing friends and collaborators within her community, Green navigates the symbolism of water, finding and pushing its boundaries in order to better understand queer life in the contemporary world. Her series I Keep Missing My Water spans locations, from the ocean at Jacob Riis Park to a constructed studio set. “I started at the edge of large bodies of water and moved into smaller vessels: faucets, carafes, boiling pots of salty water, a bowl on the altar, a glass,” says Green, “places around domestic spaces that are mobile through different homes and thresholds.” Green’s camera often catches an embrace, on the studio floor or on the beach, waist deep in the tide, one woman’s hand resting on another’s pregnant figure. Throughout, a sense of community prevails—fluid in the spaces Green inhabits, but preserved in each moment of her photographs.

Pia Paulina Guilmoth, we built a flower, 2022, from the series flowers drink the river

Pia Paulina Guilmoth 

Maine-based photographer Pia Paulina Guilmoth’s series flowers drink the river reflects on her deep, evolving, and complex relationship to her surrounding landscape and community. “I live in a rural, predominantly right-wing town,” says Guilmoth. “When I started (medically) transitioning last year my relationship to this place, this landscape, changed drastically.” Her compositions present a transfixing, dreamy utopia, where the cover of night allows phenomena that teeter on the knife-edge of reality—moths circle the waxy drip of a lone candle, five hands stretch out a glimmering spiderweb, luminous figures of dust emerge on a dirt road. Photography is meditative for Guilmoth, who uses a large-format camera and often needs several rounds of trial and error to get each living element to remain in frame and focus. Her photographs have evolved with her. “I started this series before I started my transition,” says Guilmoth. “This work was a release of emotions and compassion for life and for living my truth.”

Shravya Kag, there, there, 2024, from the series వెళ్ళొస్తా (vellostha)

Shravya Kag

Shravya Kag navigates two worlds: her adopted home in Brooklyn and Vijayawada, her hometown in southern India. “It takes 24 hours, door-to-door, to travel from the current version of myself to an old, familiar one in my hometown,” she adds. Kag’s evolving genderqueer identity and its expressions stretch across this iterative journey, and form the focus of her series వెళ్ళొస్తా , which translates, in her native Telugu, to “I will go and come back.” Over the last four years, and several trips, Kag has attempted to observe—with great care and strength—how a place can form a person, and then question how a person might exert agency over that formation. In negotiating the internal and geographical split between her current gender nonconforming self and a nostalgic, traditionally gendered self, Kag uses photography to construct a space for reflection. We see her trying on a chudidar for a friend’s wedding, her father hidden behind the morning paper, her mother in the middle of prayer. Each photograph contributes to a larger picture, where the goal is not just reconciliation, but understanding, and more importantly, compassion. 

Mary Kang, Korean Sword Dance, 2024, from the series Norigae

Mary Kang

Growing up in Austin, Texas, Mary Kang and her mother would make frequent grocery trips to the neighboring city of Killeen, which had a significant Korean community. Years later, in college, Kang studied the history of the women who immigrated to the United States—including to Killeen—after the Korean War, and their experiences of racial stereotyping and oppression. These women were pejoratively called “military wives,” and presented as vulnerable and dependent, obfuscating their role as resilient community builders. On seeing a tongue-in-cheek resurgence of the term among TikTok fans of the Korean boy band BTS, Kang became curious about the power of existing media narratives and the role of historical amnesia. In Norigae, Kang documents the personal stories of a group of military wives practicing and performing traditional Korean dances in Killeen and across Texas. “In mainstream journalism, we are often consumed with depictions of marginalized communities suffering,” say Kang. “My goal is to share their stories in a way that honors them beyond the stereotypes and limitations imposed by society.”

Brian Van Lau, Family Portrait, 2024, from the series We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys

Brian Van Lau

When his father was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2019, Brian Van Lau traveled from the US to Vietnam to see him. Their relationship had been fractured since Lau was young, and the trip began a years-long visual investigation of a complicated family history. We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys comprises photographs from their time in Vietnam with images of Lau’s family in the Pacific Northwest and his birthplace, Hawaii, and documents from the family archive. A distinctly coherent mosaic of black-and-white photographs collapses decades of history into one ongoing narrative. (Lau’s father began treatment, but he died in 2020.) “I had always framed the project as both a moment of catharsis and as a moment of condemnation,” says Lau. Finding parallel images across time to illustrate his father’s return into his life, Lau interrogates what this relationship means to him.

Spandita Malik, Noshad Bee, 2023, from the series Jāḷī

Spandita Malik

Spandita Malik’s collaborative series of embroidered photographs, Jāḷī, gives a voice to women in India who have survived gendered violence. For the past five years, Malik has worked within women’s shelters across the country to make portraits, which are then printed onto local homespun muslin and embroidered by the women in the images. The results are distinctly personal works of art—Malik’s portraits become a canvas for each woman to express an individuality that is often stripped away in discussions of domestic abuse survivors. Malik was in graduate school when she made the images, and realized that her photographic education leaned strongly on a Western perspective. “I started being very conscious of that when I started photographing the women,” she says. “I might never be able to get rid of the bias that I have in photographing my own country. What I can do is start sharing power in creating a narrative.”

Dom Marker, Fynn + Maksym + Stas, 2023, from the series Borderlander

Dom Marker

Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Dom Marker returned to the country his family left when he was just three years old, primarily to volunteer with frontline humanitarian organizations. Over time, with a patient eye and an instant Polaroid SX-70 camera, Marker began to make portraits and photographs of the scenes around him. “There was no shortage of journalists in the region,” he says. “The idea was that maybe we could still make our own family album, for me and my friends, as defiance against the void.” Marker’s images challenge traditional conflict photography. The photographs in Borderlander and their subjects—Fynn, Maksym, and Stas holding flares against the night sky; Alex and Georgie leaning against one another, shirtless torsos smeared with ink—each capture an authentic human relationship. Pointing to various influences, from Boris Mikhailov’s Polaroid photographs, to the Kharkiv School of Photography and Susan Sontag’s writing on conflict photography, Marker understands the context of these photographs within this historical moment. “Witnessing is no longer enough; participation is necessary,” he says.

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Ana Rosa Marx, Unspeakable, Unknown, 2024, from the series The Aphrodite

Ana Rosa Marx

Ana Rosa Marx is drawn to the role of the trickster. “The trickster in mythology is someone who uses their knowledge to disrupt, to challenge and disobey normative structures of hierarchy and power,” says Marx, who grew up between Chicago and Havana. Her series The Aphrodite presents a speculative, mixed-media account of the cruising scene at a fictional lesbian porn cinema in 1980s Times Square, reconstructing an imagined history where an actual one was erased. Marx draws from real locations, such as the Fair Theater in Queens, the last porn cinema house in New York. Her cast of characters is people from her own life, and her restagings take on “a kind of performance documentation,” featuring photography and ephemera that ask what vision a ritual of reimagining might offer for more inclusive futures. Marx’s portrayal engages with a tradition of thinkers and artists who came before her, including Samuel R. Delaney, David Wojnarowicz, Saidiya Hartman, Walid Raad (another trickster), Isaac Julien, Janet Cardiff, Zoe Leonard, and more. “I want my work to stoke that inner-child desire to believe,” says Marx, “for fantasy to be a place of rapture.”

Will Matsuda, Myojo-in Temple, 2023, from the series Hibakujumoku

Will Matsuda

Will Matsuda’s grandmother never talked about Hiroshima. Recently, his family uncovered documents showing that members of her family had died in the bombing. Hiroshima carries its history in moments trapped in light—the photographer Kikuji Kawada began his seminal work Chizu documenting the permanent shadows left on walls by the bomb. In Hibakujumoku, Matsuda sets forth on a new path. The project’s title refers to the gingko trees that survived the bomb and still stand in the city. “There is a strong component of ecological life—trees, animals, rivers,” he says, “that to me speaks to something other than sadness.” In a poetic and abstracted depiction of his family history and the horror of the bombing, Matsuda photographs Hiroshima with a sense of wonder and hope amid the overwhelming context of history. “More than anything, I was thinking about finding a connection to this place for myself,” he says.

Steven Molina Contreras, Trinity, El Salvador, 2021, from the series Adelante

Steven Molina Contreras

In photographs made between El Salvador and New York, Steven Molina Contreras’s Adelante portrays a tender view of a family and culture caught between two places, enmeshed in the global story of immigration. Primarily told through softly toned portraits, the narrative of Adelante is its direct English translation: Forward. Born in El Salvador and raised on Long Island, away from much of his extended family, Molina Contreras does not shy away from emotion. His portraits are as familiar as family snapshots: two boys sprawled on a tile floor; an uncle leaning casually against a cabinet. “I’m moved by the intimacy and awkwardness that portraiture allows one to experience and process,” he says. In a self-portrait, he raises one hand slightly, his face covered by the camera and framed inside a mirror on a pink wall. On its own, each image does not attempt to speak to immigration, but as a whole, the series projects a sense of distance, contracted in the intimate space of the portraits. The only direction is forward.

Rachelle Mozman Solano, Im not going to tell you that Mexicans are the best people on the face of the earth, 2021, from the series Venas Abiertas

Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano

Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano’s Venas Abiertas transforms written text into staged photographs. Each image visually reinterprets literary or scholarly source material to depict the effects of policy on individual and collective bodies. In one, a woman’s body splits a cutout of a redwood tree, referencing the redwoods’ early conservators’ ties to eugenics movements in California. The project’s title comes from Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America (1971), which deals primarily with US imperialism across the continent. For Mozman, the work is both personal and political, stemming from anti-Latino sentiments that came into prominent view during the 2016 election. “I wanted to continue with using historical text in a journalistic way,” she says, “to address the history of anti-Latinx views in our nation and parallel this with a mirroring sentiment today.” Mozman arranges, repositions, and collages her collaborators and various props. The resulting photographs play with viewers’ expectations of studio portraiture, offering an expanded site of historical negotiation.

Mathilde Mujanayi, A Ma Mère Qui Me Regarde Avec Des Fleurs Dans Ses Yeux, 2023, from the series As Close As I Can Get To You

Mathilde Mujanayi

Bringing together self-portraits, still lifes, and staged scenes, the Congolese American photographer Mathilde Mujanayi navigates her identity as an immigrant and a woman living in America for the past twelve years. Her abstract images—a smashed Coke bottle, fabric half buried in sand—read as fleeting memories that Mujanayi searches for meaning, while others, such as a nude self-portrait under a large American flag, are more direct. “How can I close the distance between my land and I, my identity and I, my mother and I?” asks Mujanayi. “What acts can I perform to get me close to that?” As Close As I Can Get To You shows the artist using photography to reach back toward her mother and the culture she left behind. In one self-portrait, Mujanayi, wearing a Congolese fabric skirt, carries a water jug over her head as it drips down her back. “The Congo that I left is not the same Congo that exists now,” she says.

Anh Nguyen, Offering Table, 2024, from The Kitchen God Series

Anh Nguyen

All rituals involve performance. After nearly a decade away from her home in Vietnam, Brooklyn-based photographer Anh Nguyen began evaluating the role of tradition in her life. “Once you take a tradition outside of its original context, it becomes inherently open to interpretation,” she says. Through her staged photographs in The Kitchen God Series, Nguyen shows the performance of cultural traditions refracted in new contexts. The title refers to a popular Vietnamese myth of three figures often placed in the kitchen to watch over the family. Nguyen made the photographs in the homes of Vietnamese people across New York. The resulting images articulate how each subject interprets and adapts their shared cultural traditions in unique ways. In constructing these whimsical commentaries, Nguyen realized she too took on the role of a Kitchen God. “The myth became a playground for me to explore the confines of identity through the exchange of reality and fiction, of myth and personal history,” she says.

Nathan Olsen, 2023, from the series Touchstone

Nathan Olsen

Santa Maria del Oro is tucked into the western Mexican state of Jalisco. The Chicago-based photographer Nathan Olsen first visited his ancestral town to see family, and for the Catholic Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe celebration, but his exploration soon turned inward, prompting a deeper search. Olsen’s series Touchstone is an attempt to make meaning from the fragments of his mixed ancestry; the title refers to a black siliceous stone used to test the purity of metals, as well as the history of rich deposits of gold in the region. It also functions as a metaphor for his own mixed-race background. “Photographing and spending time in Santa Maria del Oro literally widens the idea of where I come from in a physical and spiritual sense,” says Olsen. His soft black-and-white images, captured with a view camera, give the impression of a place still crystalizing into memory—landscapes and tender domestic scenes where people are barely visible, or facing away. They are hands reaching both ways into time. As Olsen explains: “Exploring the land is an exploration of self.”

Obinna Onyeka, Untitled, 2024

Obinna Onyeka

Two distinct influences define Chicago-based Nigerian American photographer Obinna Onyeka’s visual language. “Fashion photography brings out a stylish boldness and a designer’s editorial sensibilities,” he says. “On the other hand, the family archive carries candid warmth, and a sense of nostalgic presence.” While Onyeka’s commercial portraits of athletes, artists, and broader cultural figures have been published by Nike, New Balance, Red Bull, and the New York Times, his latest project finds subjects closer to home. Interpersonal connection and the Nigerian immigrant experience inspire the title of his series Beyond Distance, and features family, friends, and community members of individual and cultural importance to Onyeka. Combining portraiture, photographs of traditional events, and personal testimonies, the ongoing series aims to present a mosaic of a rich and shared diasporic experience. “I want to make portraits of my friends and family that help us feel close, reflect on our diasporic culture, and deepen our bonds,” Onyeka says.

Andina Marie Osorio, Untitled (jahne in our home), 2023, from the series i’m so glad you’re here

Andina Marie Osorio

“My work is based on other people’s images, things that are deeply personal to me and to my family,” says Andina Marie Osorio. Her series i’m so glad you’re here explores two tangential archives: that of her family , and her own queer photographs made on her Contax T2. “What makes an image queer?” she asks. The sitter? The photographer? Something within the image itself? Drawing upon influences such as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans, Osorio’s photographs range from blurred and shadowy intimate moments to a still life of a just-removed IUD. When the work is viewed as an installation, these photographs mingle on the wall among their antecedents in the family archive, newly imbued with nostalgia. Metal sheets hang behind some of the images, which are all printed at different sizes to form a work of assemblage beyond each image alone, providing an alternate narrative—a queer family archive of her own.

Tanner Pendleton, Mik, 2023, from the series What Does Marble Think As It’s Being Sculpted?

Tanner Pendleton

“Photography, to me,” says Tanner Pendleton, “feels like a never-ending exercise in speculation.” In What Does Marble Think As It’s Being Sculpted?, Pendleton explores the limits of photography and science in strongly lit black-and-white images. One set of photographs documents both real and pseudo-science; Pendleton’s interests range from physics to hypnotherapy to new-age spiritualism, but he sums up his work as finding the convergence between the outward search for the cosmos and the inward search for the self. Through exercises in Kirlian photography, which uses high-voltage electricity on film rather than a traditional camera and lens, Pendleton leans into the murky reality of alternative processes, reveling in the loss of control. To him, Kirlian photography is “a spiritual intervention of sorts.” Together, his documentary and experimental work form a wide-reaching, nearly universal questioning of truth. “Blending different formal conventions,” he says, “feels like an opportunity to take things out of context and create a sense of confusion between artifice and reality.”

Chris Perez, Self-Portrait with Flower, Guardarraya, Dominican Republic, 2023, from the series Dominican

Chris Perez

“I began to take photos as an attempt to learn how to be Dominican,” says Chris Perez. In 2021, during a visit to his father’s birthplace in the northern Cibao region of the Caribbean nation, the New York–based photographer remembered feeling like a foreigner. It was Perez’s first overseas photography trip, and he quickly realized how the camera could serve as a cultural bridge between a familiar and unfamiliar home. Dominican is an ongoing body of work made through several visits since that first experience. Perez’s photographs are suffused with a delicate palette—we are drawn in by the aged pink wall of a small palm-wood shack, or the soft brown of a dirt mound that contrasts the green landscape behind it. Each detail feels colored with the gentle curiosity of a distant cousin returning, each face opens a new story in a widening network. “It is as if photography has given me a way to reclaim something about myself,” says Perez.

Mateo Ruiz González, Cameron (Pose Number One), 2023, from the series Humble

Mateo Ruiz González

Mateo Ruiz González read about Humble School of Martial Arts in Bedford-Stuyvesant in a local Brooklyn news publication. He was moved by the story of its founder, Master Sabu Lewis, who has been a teacher and community pillar for decades, through his school’s financial hardships, COVID-19, and a recent relocation. Ruiz González saw in Lewis a figure that has made Brooklyn what it is, and one who is also endangered by the growing pressures of urban development. “For me, it is a matter of choosing where you stand,” says Ruiz González, who was born in Bogotá and immigrated to Brooklyn eleven years ago. “It’s important to tell the stories of the people that build community.” Humble is a portrait of a school that represents something bigger in a fight against displacement. Ruiz González’s use of a field camera lends his images—specifically his portraits—a candid and personal touch. “I think there’s no better way to photograph than to first make the person in front of the camera understand that there will not be a photograph without their stories,” he says.

Jennifer Sakai, No.1, 2023, from the series When We Return Home

Jennifer Sakai

At first glance, the pairs of photographs that comprise Jennifer Sakai’s When We Return Home have an almost dreamlike connection. In each pair, the larger photograph of nature or quotidian domestic life dominates the space, yet offers an entry point to the postcard-sized archival family photograph alongside it. The calm quality of Sakai’s photographs belies the horrors within: a personal history of Japanese-American internment during World War II. After the war broke out, Sakai’s grandparents were removed from their homes in California and sent to a camp in Poston, Arizona. In fragments, Sakai shares a photograph of her uncles playing baseball in the camp, personal effects, and images from after the war, when the family relocated to the Midwest. The more recent photographs ground these moments in the present. (In one set, tree branches reach across the two images, tethering past to present.) The pairings make the process, in a sense, collaborative, says Sakai. “There was this unseen tether that was connecting their voice to my voice.”

Rachel Elise Thomas, All in the Family, 2022, from the series Crowded House

Rachel Elise Thomas

Michigan-based interdisciplinary artist Rachel Elise Thomas is driven by a deep desire to honor her past. “I am collaborating with memory, a spirit, and my environment,” she says about her series Crowded House, which engages with her relationship to her family home in the suburbs of Detroit, where she moved in 1993. Drawing from her experience with collage, Thomas uses photography and projection to produce palimpsests of image and memory. The approach is direct and powerful; Thomas projects 4-by-6-inch family photographs onto the rooms of her home, and then captures the result with a digital camera. These rooms serve as both a place and prompt for her memories—which include birthdays, holidays, and homecomings—and give her family archive a new, glowing physicality. In this way, the series enacts both a resurrection and a reexamination. “These memories perpetually overlap,” says Thomas, “and depending on the image’s placement, the composition changes, and so does its narrative.”

Jaclyn Wright, Archives, I, 2022, from the series High Visibility (Blaze Orange)

Jaclyn Wright

When Jaclyn Wright moved to Salt Lake City, in 2018, she says, “it was the first time that I could really visibly see the climate crisis playing out in real time.” In High Visibility (Blaze Orange), Wright photographs Western landscapes to explore the visual and material history of climate change, land expansion, and capitalism. Utah’s West Desert includes the rapidly drying Great Salt Lake, the Dugway Proving Ground, and various mineral extraction sites, but Wright focuses on the improvised gun ranges that dot the public land. “It’s this Hollywood Western mythology,” she says, “this idea of playing out that fantasy on this land that has been stolen, and is now public, is why those sites are so jarring.” Wright first collects objects and debris left behind at the gun ranges, makes photographs at each site, and then creates a collage in her studio, adding images from university and historical archives. Visually and conceptually dense, each piece forms a critical treatise on the built environment of the American West.

Artist statements by Eli Cohen and Varun Nayar.