Aperture's Blog, page 17

The Uncanny Worlds of Nhu Xuan Hua

Nhu Xuan Hua’s photographs defy easy interpretation. A woman sings karaoke in a shining, armored gown. An archival wedding photograph is beguilingly redacted, dress and suit visible but the bodies of husband and wife absent contours. A black dog gazes out the entrance of a temple—whom, or what, is it guarding? Even the simplest image is limned with story; we sense it the way we remember our dreams upon waking. Hua’s powerful narrative vision shines through in the clarity of her photographs, which unfold like time passing in slow motion.

Born in Paris to Vietnamese immigrant parents, Hua grew up within a French culture that prized assimilation as a mode of survival. It wasn’t until after finishing her studies in photography at the Lycée Auguste Renoir Paris in 2011 and moving to London that Hua was confronted with the question of her origins. “Not enough answers were given by my family,” she tells me. “Because when you start asking questions, they say, ‘Why, why are you asking, the past belongs to the past.’” In 2016, Hua traveled to Vietnam, beginning an ongoing process of reconnection that has shaped her body of work.

Nhu Xuan Hua, Gardienne du Temple, 2020 Nhu Xuan Hua, The Wedding – Archive from 1985, 2016–21

These personal interests seamlessly flow into Hua’s commissioned photography. Though she’s shot for clients as diverse as Maison Margiela, Time, and British Vogue, when asked about balancing expectations from brands and publications with her own perspective, she declares: “I take them on board with my vision, along the way with me.” Hua’s aesthetic propels every assignment, her exhaustive preparation and detailed mood boards merging art and design in the process. For Hua, an editorial campaign can function in two ways: as a stylized fashion shoot and as an exploration of her own references—the femmes fatales of Taiwanese cinema, her relationship with her deaf father, or her mother’s loneliness, for example.

In these shoots, Hua often constructs sets made of paper, a medium to which she was originally drawn for its accessibility; now she uses its inherent fragility to explore the constructed nature of memory. Truth, Hua knows, is only ever approximated: we create narratives in its stead. “Designing an object or a landscape as an extension of reality always comes with a story,” she says. Her use of construction as metaphor rhymes with her interest in Vietnamese modernist architecture, particularly as described in the architect Phu Vinh Pham’s 2021 book Poetic Significance, which argues that the style makes use of available modes and materials, blending rationalist function with spirituality and imagination.

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Hua sees photography as a means to represent emotional truth without relying on the belief in the camera as sole witness. For her series Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory (2016–21), Hua began by gathering archival photographs from her family’s time in Vietnam and their early years in France. Using a simple algorithmic tool that fills a shape with the information around it, she then digitally manipulated these images, working without a plan, allowing the process and the feelings it evoked to guide her. “It was a sensation you can hardly materialize—so I had to find it by working on the pictures,” Hua says.

Reworking the surface of the images, which Hua likens to the act of painting, mirrored her experience of filling the lacunae in her understanding of her family and Vietnamese identity. “Nothing is random,” she says. “Each image is a statement that took me a while to reflect on. When the image is done, it’s a way of saying that my reflection is done.”

Nhu Xuan Hua, Singer: “How much love can be repeated?,” 2022

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Nhu Xuan Hua, We walked in the forest at night, 2018 Nhu Xuan Hua, Sharp Tongue, Round Fingers, 2017
All photographs courtesy the artist Nhu Xuan Hua, Feeding, 2018

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 255, “The Design Issue.”

Akihiko Okamura’s Outsider View of Northern Ireland

Early in the BBC documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (2023), a powerful collection of personal testimonies on the Troubles, one speaker recalls his childhood excitement during the first waves of civil unrest. “It was mad . . . it was like a movie,” he reminisces, thinking back on the innocent elation he experienced as mass protests, running street battles, and military patrols became regular features of everyday life. Inevitably, as the daily drama intensified, with bombings, shootings, and funerals dominating the headlines, the desperate gravity of the situation became clear. Even to kids playing with pretend guns on the backstreets of Derry and Belfast, as the BBC interviewee remembers, “this was serious . . . it wasn’t like a movie anymore.”

The Japanese photographer Akihiko Okamura first visited Northern Ireland during this formative phase of the thirty-year conflict, and his images capture, with understated eloquence, a sense of reality as shifting and unstable, both not quite real and all too real. In 1968, Okamura moved to Dublin with his family, prompted by a plan to explore the Irish roots of President John F. Kennedy. From there he made numerous trips north of the border, documenting occasions of historic significance, such as landmark civil rights marches, while also attending to people and places on the margins of the era’s main events.

Akihiko Okamura, Women crossing through British Army barricade, Derry city, Northern Ireland, ca. 1969

Okamura was unfamiliar with the specific circumstances of Northern Ireland’s political divisions but no stranger to societies upturned by warfare, struggle, and suffering. Before settling in Ireland, he had photographed the chaos and cruelty of the Vietnam War, gaining extraordinary access to Viet Cong camps, and traveled to Cambodia, Malaysia, and Korea, documenting life in nations coping with the corrosive, long-term effects of colonialism. (Later, he also reported on the Nigerian Civil War and journeyed through Ethiopia, photographing victims of famine.) Tracking political developments and, more routinely, everyday existence in Ireland during the late 1960s and early ’70s, Okamura brought a worldly outsider’s capacity to find surprising new angles and the patience and sensitivity of someone willing to stick around, to look beyond the breaking news.

Okamura singles out low-key moments, discovering worlds within worlds.

The pictures selected for Atelier EXB’s publication Akihiko Okamura: Les Souvenirs des autres (The Memories of Others, 2024) and an associated exhibition at the Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin, showcase Okamura’s subtly modulating stylistic range, combining moments of big-picture photojournalistic storytelling, gently surrealistic black comedy, and hazily dreamlike glimpses of communities or individuals in states of fearful transition or uneasy stasis. Some images have orthodox historical value. There are, for instance, valuable shots of key characters in early episodes of the Troubles. Okamura catches the stern vanity of the firebrand sectarian preacher Ian Paisley as he lays a wreath at the culmination of an Ulster Loyalist parade, his hair slicked and quiffed like a ’50s rock-and-roll star. The civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin, Paisley’s left-wing, nonsectarian rival for the most dynamic public speaker of the era, is memorably pictured in a typical pose: megaphone in hand, leading the action from a barricade during Derry’s Battle of the Bogside in 1969. The most resonant of the photographs, however, are those with more unassuming, antiheroic attributes. They stir feelings of unusual intimacy with characters living through the strange convulsions of their times.

Akihiko Okamura, Street memorial on Lecky Road, Derry city, Northern Ireland, ca. 1971

Okamura singles out low-key moments, discovering worlds within worlds. He seems to be, as W. G. Sebald once said of his fellow writer Robert Walser, a “clairvoyant of the small,” looking for what we might learn of desire, sadness, loneliness, or dreaming among the dispersed, matter-of-fact materials of daily life. Two women clamber through a makeshift army barricade; one wears a bright red coat, its cheerful design an incidental affront to the surrounding gloom. Two little girls, prim and dainty in their Sunday best, pay their respects at an improvised memorial to a shooting victim on a Derry street. Behind the shadowy presence of an armed soldier in heavy fatigues, a pair of pristine white wedding dresses appear in the window of a bridal shop. Another lone figure, a young man in a slim-fitting suit, leans against a lamppost reading a newspaper; above him, street and shop signs declare “No Entry” and “Eclipse.”

Akihiko Okamura, Preparations for the Twelfth of July celebrations in the Fountain area, Derry city, Northern Ireland, ca. 1969
All photographs © Estate of Akihiko Okamura/Junko Sato

There are quite a few signs in Okamura’s Irish oeuvre: street names, traffic directions, advertising posters. Here and there, the texts hint at hope of stable meaning—such as in one picture of a grieving woman carrying a protest banner, appealing for justice—or unbending allegiance to a political position: in another shot, showing residents gaily decorating a terraced street for the Unionist community’s Twelfth of July celebrations, we see the intransigent slogan “No Surrender” emblazoned on a wall mural. Often, words produce moments of mischievous irony: a helmeted soldier, bearing a shield and a baton, framed partially by a sign saying “caterers”; or the words “Police Enquiries” posted outside a fortified Royal Ulster Constabulary station, barely visible on the ludicrously forbidding sheet metal facade. If with such teasing image-text contradictions Okamura gestured toward satire, he did so without becoming direct or dogmatic. However dark their humor, however bleak their mood, his photographs create space to see ordinary life at the time of the Troubles a little differently: one unexpected scene, one small detail, after another.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 255, “The Design Issue,” under the column Viewfinder.

Akihiko Okamura: The Memories of Others is on view at the Photo Museum Ireland through July 6, 2024.

Danny Lyon on the Making of “The Bikeriders”

Danny Lyon has a story to tell—many stories, in fact. The photographer who captured a young John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other moments of the early civil rights era is known for embedding himself in communities and documenting scenes with historic import and cultural specificity, including a 1960s Texas prison, a downtown New York demolition, and the Vietnam War protests. Perhaps most famously of all, Lyon photographed the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, joining the group to document it from the inside. But to say this was simply the strategic move of an artist is to elide the complex ways in which Lyon has always tended to live his work.

On the eve of his forthcoming memoir, This is My Life I’m Talking About (2024), where he tells all the best stories of his eighty years, Lyon spoke about his landmark work The Bikeriders, first published in 1968 and reissued by Aperture in 2014, and inspiration behind a new Jeff Nichols film starring Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Jodie Comer—and Mike Faist as Lyon—releasing this month.

“I met Andy at the bar across the street, leaning on the juke box,” Lyon writes in the memoir. “He looked a little like a short James Dean, his hair as curly as mine. Wearing a sleeveless shirt, Andy was lame, and staggered badly with each step he took. He limped over and grabbed a man that Jack had posed with, pressed his cheek against his face, and wanted me to make a picture of that as his buddy held out the bottle of beer. By my second exposure, Andy had completely embraced his friend, his body wrapped around him, without disturbing the beer, which everyone insisted be in the picture. We went outside to stand in the doorway where Andy posed with a pretty dark-haired girl wearing a leather vest. Sometime that same night, somebody said to me, ‘Why don’t you join the club?’ I had found my subject.”

Here, Lyon speaks about his first race, why he doesn’t like the term photobook, and the desire to drive off into the sunset. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Danny Lyon, Frank Jenner, La Porte, Indiana, 1963–67 Danny Lyon, Club house during the Columbus run, Dayton, Ohio, 1965

Lucy McKeon: Tell me a little about your introduction to this world that would become your work titled The Bikeriders.

Danny Lyon: Some of the first pictures I ever made are of motorcycles. This is years ago. I’m young. I have my first good camera, which is this East German–made single-lens reflex called an Exa. I’m a student in Chicago, and I have friends who are riding motorcycles. The very first picture on the first page of The Bikeriders is a portrait of a very handsome guy. He was from upstate New York, a University of Chicago student. His name was Frank Jenner. He had entered school, and he had been a motorcycle racer—this was as an eighteen-year-old. He’s part of our crowd, and we all look up to him, and we all want to get motorcycles. That’s the first picture in the book because it’s really through Frank that I enter this world. BSAs were popular, which I think are British, and I rode a Triumph, which is also British. Nobody rode Harley-Davidsons. I was looking at the Chicago Outlaw website, and it’s a requirement today, if you’re a member of the Chicago Outlaws, to ride a Harley-Davidson. None of us did.

McKeon: So you didn’t grow up with this culture in Queens, I’m imagining. 

Lyon: I couldn’t even drive a car in Queens. 

In 1963, I had a good friend named Skip Richheimer, who is a graduate student at that point. But by then, I’m close to my junior or senior year. We’re both bikeriders, and we get in his Volkswagen to go to a race. He was also a photographer, and he’s still alive. We drive off to Wisconsin to a rally. Many years later, I met Bob Dylan, who also rode a motorcycle, apparently almost got killed on one. He had seen the book, and he used to go to the same track. It was McHenry . . . or where the hell was it? I think I got it right. Let’s call it McHenry.

But I was in Wisconsin when these motorcycles pass us—I see them behind us, and Skip’s driving, and I start yelling, “Keep up with them!” I’m shooting through the front window with a 105mm lens, and I make this picture called Route 12, Wisconsin, which I think the British Museum later declared as a masterpiece of photography. I was twenty years old. It’s a pretty good picture. It’s perfectly arranged. It’s done through the front window of a moving car, and it’s very geometrical. That’s the cover of The Bikeriders.

Kathy, Chicago, from The Bikeriders, 1967–69 250.00 To celebrate the premiere of The Bikeriders, the new film inspired by Danny Lyon’s iconic book, Aperture is offering a new signed print by the artist. Available through July 4, 2024.

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Kathy, Chicago, from The Bikeriders, 1967–69

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View cart Description Aperture is pleased to release a second print from The Bikeriders by the renowned photographer Danny Lyon. The seminal publication of photographs and interviews that documents the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the 1960s, when Lyon was a member, is the inspiration behind the new film of the same title. To celebrate its premiere and the release of I’m Talking About My Life Here (2024), Lyon’s recent memoir, Lyon chose the photograph Kathy, Chicago, for his second collaboration with Aperture, in homage to Jodie Comer, whose performance as Kathy in the film has garnered critical acclaim.

Lyon’s groundbreaking approach to storytelling—adapting audio recordings from interviews to form texts featured in The Bikeriders—underscores the authenticity and depth of his work. Lyon’s picture of Kathy, the girlfriend and future wife of Chicago Outlaws club member Benny (played by Austin Butler in the film), intimately captures her vulnerability and defiance, embodying the spirit of counterculture and freedom that characterized Lyon’s work from that era.


Each 8-by-10-inch pigment print is signed by Danny Lyon as an open edition and is available at this accessible price now through July 4, 2024, with proceeds supporting Aperture’s nonprofit publishing, public programs, and limited-edition prints. As a special offering, Lyon’s iconic Route 12, Wisconsin, the cover photograph of The Bikeriders , is available once again—perfect for those who missed it the first time. This signed 8-by-10-inch pigment print is available as part of a unique collector’s set that includes the newly released print of Kathy, Chicago, for a limited time only, now through July 4, 2024.


The Bikeriders, starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist (as Danny Lyon), and Norman Reedus, is in theaters now. Original audio recordings of Kathy Bauer can be heard on Lyon’s blog, Bleak Beauty. Follow Danny Lyon @dannylyonphotos2. Details

Signed archival pigment print
Image Size: 5 x 7 in.
Paper Size: 8 x 10 in.

Printed by Picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom, New York, under the artist’s supervision
Open edition (as many acquired are produced)
International flat-rate shipping available. Email prints@aperture.org for all inquiries

This print is also available as part of a set that includes Route 12, Wisconsin for a limited timed only.

About the Artist

Danny Lyon (born in New York, 1942), regarded as one of the most influential documentary photographers, is also a filmmaker and writer. His many books include The Movement (1964), The Bikeriders (1968, reissued by Aperture, 2014), Conversations with the Dead (1971), Knave of Hearts (1999), Like a Thief ’s Dream (2007), and Deep Sea Diver (2011), and most recently his memoir Danny Lyon: This Is My Life I’m Talking About (2024). Lyon’s work is widely exhibited and collected, and he has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, numerous National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a 2011 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism. You can follow him on Instagram @dannylyonphotos2.

McKeon: Can you remember your impression of that race with Skip? Was there a sort of epiphany you had about bikeriders and photography?

Lyon: Epiphany. I love this. I’m going to try to invent one for you. It wasn’t really like that. The day was great. But did I end the day saying, I want to do bike rides? No. The light was apparently perfect, meaning it was a bright, overcast day. But I think it was being around and seeing these guys.

I shot a bunch of film, and I was all excited, and I showed them to Hugh Edwards at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hugh had the epiphany. He said this stuff’s incredible. He told me I should make a book about it. He wrote me a letter about it. I got the letter in May 1963. The letter was a result of looking at the pictures I made that bright, overcast day, and he mentioned the idea of a book, suggested all these crazy people who could write the text. I think he mentioned John Dos Passos, James Jones, and somebody else [Burroughs]. And he told me it should be in gravure. He had it all worked out.

Then, I got caught up with the civil rights movement. But I never forgot my time taking pictures of motorcycles, so I returned to Chicago, two years later. 

Danny Lyon, Riders’ Meeting, Elkhorn, Wisconsin, 1963 Danny Lyon, Field meet, Long Island, New York, 1965

McKeon: Two years later. So in 1965?

Lyon: 1965, I return. At that point in my life, I’m already a photographer. I’ve also gotten better because I’ve been trying to get better. I was a street photographer in New Orleans, and once in Chicago, I go to Uptown, and I start doing better work. But I was still looking for a subject. I think I knew I wanted to do a book, and the model for me was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is mostly text. I read the whole thing, and James Agee’s writing really spoke to me. The Americans had been a big flop, but it showed anyone paying attention that the way to be recognized as a photographer was to make a book. So to make a book was my big dream—and I did. 

But the book was a total failure. Not only was it a failure but the printing was also horrific: Seven pictures were out of register; there was no ink on it. There weren’t any typos, but as for reproductions, they were awful. It broke my heart when I saw it. And in addition, it was a total flop. That’s the first edition. It came out in 1968.

Cover of The Bikeriders (Aperture, 2014)

Twenty years later, Jack Woody, who’s a wonderful publisher, wants to do it in gravure, and he makes it a little bigger. There are no additional pictures, but the format’s a little different, and I write a second introduction. So that’s the second edition. That’s really gorgeous. 

But The Bikeriders was meant to be a popular book. It was originally in softback. You could fold it in half. You could fit it in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. It cost $2.95. In other words, it wasn’t meant to be an art book. It was meant to be a book that was based on photographs and had text and was affordable. So, with the second edition, it lost the feel, so that upset me.

Then, in another ten years, Chronicle Books offered me money to publish it again if I added pictures. This is the worst version of The Bikeriders. I added color pictures in the back, because I had made color pictures. I wrote a third introduction. And I really hated that book.

Life went on, then the people at Aperture, including Lesley A. Martin, asked if they could give it try. And this time, they did it right. It’s great. I love the new edition.

Danny Lyon, Ronnie and Cheri, La Porte, Indiana, 1962 Danny Lyon, Cal, Elkhorn, Wisconsin, 1966

McKeon: A success story. Tell me more about the text in the book. You used a tape recorder when you were making it.

Lyon: So I’m making these photos. I found my subject. It’s a fabulous subject, and it’s perfect for photography and I know it. I’m cranking out all these pictures. I joined the Outlaws club. I have access to all these other guys, and I’m also protected by them, meaning I can wander in bars or at rallies, and I’m wearing a patch, so no one’s going to fuck with me. I’m one of the guys, and I make the pictures.

I go to New York, trying to publish it. Everybody was saying no to me. I go to Aaron Asher. He was at Viking and did these arty photography books. I remember sitting in an office with him. I had these boxes of pictures, and he told me this is just a box of pictures and that it’s not a book. He said I needed a text. I go back to Chicago. I got help from Lucy Montgomery, who had been a big supporter of SNCC. She was a white Southerner of wealth. I said, “Lucy, I need a tape recorder.” I needed a portable one because I rode around on my motorcycle. She gave me eight hundred dollars, and I bought a small Uher five-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder. I recorded everyone, and I made my text.

It turns out, when I got it published, The Bikeriders was the second book in the English language to use a tape recorder as a source of the text. I had the recordings typed out by a woman who worked for Studs Terkel. I picked parts of the text. I did very little editing. I simply cherrypicked the great speeches, made that the text—and then no one would publish it. In fact, I went to Michael Hoffman at Aperture. But they wouldn’t pay me any money, and I was determined to live off my work. So I said no. Then, I ran into Alan Rinzler, who I knew from the civil rights movement. We had had a big fight, and I ran into him by accident. He was at MacMillan, and he did, like, fifty books a year—trade books. He slipped the contract for my book into his pile, and it came back approved.

It’s amazing to sit in a movie theater and watch Tom Hardy and Austin Butler and Jodie Comer speak the lines that I recorded in 1966.

McKeon: There’s a wonderful scene in your forthcoming memoir about a 1966 gallery show, speaking of Hugh Edwards, who put it up at the Art Institute of Chicago. You talk about inviting the bikeriders and their families to come see the photos displayed. 

Lyon: Hugh was the curator. He’s really an enormous figure in photography, really the greatest figure in the museum and curatorial worlds of the late twentieth century. I believe John Szarkowski said so when he visited the Art Institute. Hugh was a self-educated guy from Paducah, Kentucky, who loved The Bikeriders. He gave me my first show (I was twenty-five), and he showed The Bikeriders, and I think he showed prints of Uptown, Chicago (1965). I was in the Outlaws club at the time, and the whole gang came down. I have pictures of them. They got dressed up. I have one frame of them in the room: their children are in it, the women dressed up. Most of these guys never went downtown. Some of them were truck drivers. They were blue-collar people. About twenty-five of them came, and I took pictures of them in the gallery.

But the club changed. I left and then it changed. In the third edition of the book, I wrote about the change. The change happened when Vietnam vets, who were into drugs and were violent, took over the club. This didn’t happen when I was present. So the Outlaws morphed, got indicted in a RICO charge. They got into a fight with the Hells Angels. It got really grim. This is public knowledge. And to this day, the Outlaws still exist. I was talking recently to a club member. They have thousands of members. This fellow, who’s a nice guy and retired from the club, said that some people joined the club because of my photographs. Which is funny. But I created this romantic vision of being a motorcycle rider. And then there were the people I knew—one of them was an electrician; the head of the club was a long-haul truck driver; Cal was a house painter who didn’t do anything; Funny Sonny played blues.

Mike Faist as Danny and Jodie Comer as Kathy in director Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders, 2024
Courtesy Kyle Kaplan/Focus Features Emory Cohen as Cockroach, Jodie Comer as Kathy, and Austin Butler as Benny in director Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders, 2024

McKeon: What do you think of the movie version of The Bikeriders? 

Lyon: Well, Jeff Nichols made the movie. Years ago, he told me he wanted to make a movie out of my book. I’m thinking, Wow, movies are a big deal. The analog recordings I made survive. You can hear them on my blog, Bleak Beauty. You can click on them, and you can hear their voices. They’re on quarter-inch tapes. About thirty or forty tapes survive, most of which I never even used. So I gave all of it over to Jeff.

Jodie Comer, the actress who plays Kathy, and Boyd Holbrook, the actor who plays Cal, could sit down with earphones and listen to these recordings, and so as actors, they do perfect imitations of Kathy’s and Cal’s voices. While not an Outlaw, Kathy’s a woman with three children who’s married to this kind of young lunatic and who also narrates a number of stories in the book. And Cal, who is a Hells Angel, narrates another four. Zipco was an amazing guy and tells an amazing story in the book about the draft board. He’s incredibly funny, like Falstaff. I mean, he’s a drunk. He’s a fuckup. He has a Latvian accent. He’s very, very, very funny, this guy. When I interviewed him, he’d gotten drunk, crashed his bike, broke his leg, and Cal and I visited him in the hospital—and that was one of the recordings.

Anyway, these are the stories that drive the film, and it’s amazing to sit in a movie theater and watch Tom Hardy and Austin Butler and Jodie Comer speak the lines that I, as a twenty-five-year-old kid, recorded with an analog tape recorder in 1966. They’re the exact same words.

Danny Lyon, Benny, Grand Division, Chicago, 1965 Danny Lyon, Benny at the Stoplight, Cicero, Illinois, 1965

McKeon: You consulted for the movie, right? Did you visit set?

Lyon: They were filming in a small town outside of Cincinnati, a place that hasn’t changed much since the ’50s. On a street corner was a bar, and when I stepped inside, it looked exactly like my pictures of the bar sixty years ago, only it was in color. I was transported back to my youth. Outside, parked all around the bar were vintage motorcycles, mostly Harleys along with one BSA and on the corner, a Triumph. It was the very same bike I had first ridden, the 440-pound single carburetor TR6, with a worn banana seat. I went over and sat on it. Mine had a black gas tank, and this was dark brown, but otherwise it was exactly the same. And as I looked down next to the flat oil tank, I saw the key, a very small key stuck into the bike, and I reached down and turned it on. Then, I jumped up in the air and came down as best I could with my right foot on the kick-starter, and the motor sort of coughed. I jumped down again, and the bike roared to life. It was like the start of war, considering the amount of noise made from the straight pipes.   

A hundred people were wandering around the set, setting up lights, and talking on radios, and every one of them turned to look at me. How badly I wanted to ride off on that bike. I was twisting the throttle in my right hand, making the engine roar, and all I had to do was push down with my foot and put it into gear, lean forward to knock it off the kickstand, and I would be riding that bike—my old bike—off into the night. I just didn’t have the guts to do it. 

Danny Lyon, Crossing the Ohio, Louisville, 1966

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McKeon: Plenty of rides to recall in your past. You’ve gone and written a memoir. Tell me about that process. What has it meant to you, and what you were trying to do with it?

Lyon: I’ve been writing for years. The memoir has been a struggle, and I’m so happy to get it out there. Like The Bikeriders, it had no one wanting to publish it. I couldn’t get an agent for it. But Damiani, an Italian publisher, who’s doing a lot of picture books—I think they’re doing something by Susan Meiselas—said they’d do it. I’m thrilled. It’s on press now.

This kind of writing began for two reasons. One, I was in New Zealand fishing. I mean, this was fifteen years ago. I thought what I did was so extraordinary. I was just trying to go fishing. But fishermen are really crazy. I mean, they really can be psychotic. I was going through the jungle, climbing trees and falling off cliffs, then crossing rivers, hoping to catch a two- or three-pound fish—which, of course, I don’t do. But later I thought, This is so crazy I should write about it. And I did. I wrote a long manuscript called “The Fisherman,” and it was really terrible. Then later, I had health problems. I started from scratch. And then, people like you helped me edit it, and now it’s done.

There’s a lot of adventure in being a photographer. When Nancy told our son Noah that I was writing a memoir, Noah said, “Again?” This is because Knave of Hearts (1999) is in fact an illustrated manuscript with a memoir within, but it’s much shorter. This new one has more writing, more words.

McKeon: Did this feel like a chance to tell a different story than you had before?

Lyon: To get even, you mean? I wish I had done that, but I didn’t. I’m eighty years old. The civil rights movement for me was sixty years ago. There are so many adventures involved in the kind of work I did. 

Looking back on my life, I don’t know, maybe I did do a lot of it for the adventure. I get bored. I love doing exciting stuff. I seem to like danger involved. I even managed to make fishing dangerous.

I’m doing stuff now, and basically, I got to drive six hundred miles to do it. I love it.

McKeon: This is in New Mexico?

Lyon: Arizona. So far, I’ve done the Oklahoma Panhandle, Nebraska, and Arizona. We’re about to head to the California border. I don’t want to talk about it too much. I want to do it. 

Danny Lyon, Big Barbara, Chicago, 1965 Danny Lyon, From Lindsey’s room, Louisville, 1966

McKeon: Do you have a favorite picture from the book or a favorite speech?

Lyon: Well, I’m glad you asked. Because of this conversation, I decided to pick up the book. I looked through the Aperture edition of The Bikeriders, which is just beautifully reproduced. There are forty-nine pictures. When you’re a young photographer, you just want to make a great photograph. That’s all you want to do. I don’t know what painters do . . . they make sketches and they make a painting. But photography isn’t like that. You can go out and make twenty pictures in a day. You can make fifty pictures in a day. But you just want to make one good picture—one really good picture. That’s what you’re trying to do. 

There are only six great pictures in The Bikeriders. Which is great for me. That’s what I was trying to do. The rest is filler. It’s about making a book and showing it to people. In the prison book, that was also my objective. The objective has always been to make great photographs and then construct a book around it using texts. 

I wish photography books were more respected, you know, as literature. There’s something I call “Photo Literature,” which sounds pretentious, I know. But Nan Goldin does it. Larry Clark did it. Jim Goldberg does it. Susan Meiselas does it. They use words. They are photographers, but they make books, and they use words. It’s a really kind of a separate category of books, I think.

Danny Lyon, Sparky and Cowboy (Gary Rogues), Schererville, Indiana, 1965 Danny Lyon, Outlaw camp, Elkhorn, Wisconsin, 1965
All photographs from The Bikeriders (Aperture, 2014). Courtesy the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery

McKeon: You don’t like the term photobook.

Lyon: I don’t even like the word photography. I call photographs “pictures.” I did a book with Michael Hoffman, who was the head of Aperture, and he wanted to do a collection, which I resisted because it wasn’t really a book. It was a collection that’s called Pictures from the New World. Michael told me that Aperture spent thirty years trying to educate people about photographs, and now I want to call them “pictures.”

Photography was not considered an art. Stieglitz spent a lot of time saying photography is really an art form. Robert and Mary Frank were a couple, and Mary was an artist, and Robert comes to America in the late ’40s, makes his pictures in the ’50s, and he knows all these artists. He said he wasn’t considered an artist. His wife was considered an artist because she did sculpture. But Robert wasn’t. Hugh Edwards said there were only three types of photographs—landscapes, portraits, and interiors. Think about that.

McKeon: Before we close, I just want to return to your early experiences riding a motorcycle. I would love it if you would describe the memory of a ride, what that feeling gave you.

Lyon: When I was in Lower Manhattan, I would ride around on a red Triumph. People would come to New York, I’d put them on the back of my Triumph, and then I’d get on the East Side Drive, which skirts the East River, and going south, you go under all three bridges—you go under the Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and Manhattan Bridges on a motorcycle. There’s nothing but you, the air, and the water, and you can go around the bottom, come up the other side. It’s really a thrilling ride. There was less traffic then. No more. I got old. I like boating, and I had a tractor for a few years. All that goes. But I can still make pictures.

The Bikeriders was reissued by Aperture in 2014.

In Kyoto, a Family Portrait by Two Japanese Photographers

In the late 1970s Tokuko Ushioda lived in a modest fifteen-tatami-mat apartment with her husband and their newborn daughter. They lived sparingly. A couch doubled as a guest bed; the kitchen consisted of a table in the corner; they shared a downstairs bathroom with the building’s other residents. One day, her husband arrived home with an old Swedish refrigerator that Ushioda described to be as large as a polar bear. The hulking appliance, much too big for their space, malfunctioned from the beginning. It froze vegetables solid and at night rattled like a poltergeist, stirring anxiety and fear about the future in Ushioda’s mind.

She found peace with the appliance by making it her subject. Using a six-by-six camera mounted on a tripod, she began a ritual of photographing her home invader straight on, with its door open and closed, and over time created a Becher-like typology. Closed, the appliance is an imposing, utilitarian tower, a sleek but vintage example of industrial design. With its heavy door agape, it is less imposing, even vulnerable. Anyone who has had a house guest rummage inside their fridge knows how this appliance is the kitchen’s underwear drawer, revealing a diary of culinary tastes, habits, and degrees of cleanliness. Intrigued by the process of studying her own fridge, Ushioda began to photograph those belonging to her landlord and family members, working according to the same set of formal rules.

Tokuko Ushioda, Setagaya, Tokyo, 1983, from the series Reizōko (Ice Box)Tokuko Ushioda, Untitled, 1981, from the series My Husband
Courtesy the artist

For Ushioda, a mother who was often at home, the domestic realm has functioned as a site of curiosity and creative possibility. She works in a tradition of photographers who candidly observed the details of their own existence, long before social media normalized, monetized—and exhausted—doing so. A related series, My Husband, portrays ordinary scenes at home with her spouse (also a photographer) and their then newborn daughter. This is a family album that is loving without being saccharine or sanitized; the messiness of life is left intact and on display.

Both projects were recently exhibited at the Kyocera Museum of Art, Kyoto, as part of Kyotographie, the annual international photography festival that presents exhibitions across the city, often in notable architectural venues. “There is a certain quietness to the space with the ordinary scenes of the mundane being framed and displayed,” Ushioda says of the exhibition. She is an astute observer of small, everyday moments, accumulating detail upon detail, which, assembled together, decades on, unsentimentally describe the passage of time.

Installation view of Tokuko Ushioda, Ice Box + My Husband, Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, 2024
Courtesy Takeshi Asano and KyotographieInstallation view of Tokuko Ushioda, Ice Box + My Husband, Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, 2024
Courtesy Takeshi Asano and Kyotographie

Her desire to archive her own life extends beyond photography. The exhibition also included vitrines filled with personal belongings, toys, children’s shoes, mannequin hands, a film canister, jewelry, among other sundry items—relics of her past. “I have a habit of keeping ridiculous things, like the umbilical cord and fingernail clippings from when my child was born, or their baby teeth,” Ushioda says. “We cherish the things that we have, things including my husband,” she laughed—her response knowingly pointing to how photography is always partly an act of objectification and preservation.

Her work from this period, 1978 to 1985, was discovered by chance. Five years ago, while cleaning a room, she came across a box of prints in the back of a wardrobe that held a time capsule of her life. My Husband was collected in a celebrated volume published by Torch Press in 2022. For the exhibition in Kyoto, she was selected by Rinko Kawauchi, a photographer of a younger generation who is also renowned for her close studies of the almost invisible phenomena animating the everyday, picturing what might be deemed mundane with absorbing reverence and attention.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitiled, 2020, from the series as it isRinko Kawauchi, Untitiled, 2020, from the series as it is
Courtesy the artist

In an adjacent gallery in the museum, Kawauchi presented a project titled Cui Cui (2005), after a French onomatopoeia describing a sparrow’s twitter: a metaphor, in Kawauchi’s mind, for how the accumulation of minutiae forms the fabric of family life. Through her gaze, the cycle of life unfolds, image by image, charting events both large and small. Details of hands reveal the softness of youth or the leathering of age. Her young daughter, arms outstretched, reaches forward to register the novelty of a breeze. Sunshine, air, texture—everything is available for the senses. Here, in contrast to Ushioda’s more documentary, black-and-white images, life manifests within a dreamy atmosphere awash in soft pastels and diffuse, angular light. The death of Kawauchi’s grandfather, the marriage of her brother, the birth of her own daughter; time passes, cycles of life carry on. “Looking through the camera’s viewfinder feels like peering into a window,” Kawauchi notes of the commonalities of her work and Ushioda’s. “We share the world we are peering into.”

Kyotographie 2024 was on view at multiple locations in Kyoto, Japan, from April 13 to May 12, 2024.

A Brazilian Artist Finds Beauty in Hidden Revelations

It was during the last Carnival, where Tadáskía said she had truly abandoned herself to the revelry for the first time, that she was bitten on her leg by a lacraia—what certain Brazilian regions call a centipede with a long body, a flat back, and numerous pairs of legs. They may or may not be poisonous. 

I wasn’t familiar with the word lacraia before hearing this story, but I was struck by how it had become key to helping me describe Tadáskía’s practice. Tadáskía is an artist based between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the southeast of Brazil. I have been engaged in a number of extended conversations with her, especially after the inclusion of her work Ave preta mística (Mystical black bird) in the 35th São Paulo Biennial in 2023, a large-scale installation currently featured in Tadáskía’s solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During one of our encounters, Tadáskía used the centipede episode to explain what she describes as “apparition”: a moment of revelation in which one of its principles is believing that “something is going to arise; it is already arising, it already exists,” even if the moment of creation is an inoffensive centipede. 

Installation view of Projects: Tadáskía, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2024. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado

Tadáskía—who uses drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance to express the enigmatic capacity of finding beauty from her experiences as a Black trans woman—has an ability to process an event as a “hidden revelation” by reading ordinary situations beyond their obvious meanings. In the case of the centipede, for example, between its most diminutive and extreme degrees of significance, the artist launched herself into a chromatic approximation of the chilopod with the figure of Exú—a deity in Afro Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda. Due to Tadáskía’s long relationship with the Pentecostal church, she had not been intimate with his figure nor experienced his festival par excellence, Carnival.

Listening to Tadáskía and reflecting deeply both on my commitment to written history and her commitment to things created to be impermanent, I thought about the French writer Annie Ernaux, whom I had read on the eve of Carnival, and Saidiya Hartman, who writes about Black women’s ordinary lives and the monumental nature of their everyday experiences. Together, the two led me to consider the overlaps in the relationships between photography and performance, and between events, permanence, and disappearance. When I ask Tadáskía about how her photographs happen, she answers, “Things show up. And what I don’t know, maybe is in the notebooks.”

Tadáskía, to show to hide Trepadeiras em nossa casa (to show to hide Trepadeiras in our house), 2020

Lacraia (Centipede) is the title with which she baptized her 2024 notebook. At the time I began writing this essay, that notebook didn’t exist yet, but it was nonetheless happening, and ultimately appeared within another entitled Traveler’s Tote Bag—as Tadáskía would tell me. Tadáskía has often asserted that her work is grounded in composing with her eyes closed and in the relationships between doing and not knowing, showing and hiding, drawing and not seeing. The ideas and forms appear and reappear. They arrive through different channels. And just like the many images, orientations, instructions, sketches, and observations that have already begun to take shape in Lacraia, her works to show to hide (2020), Corda dourada (Golden rope, 2019), and Hálito (Breath, 2019) sprang to life through a similar procedure performed through notebooks.

In to show to hide, the mystery of apparition tells us about facing the issue of representation. “I believe that not everything can be revealed, not everything can be delivered,” Tadáskía says. “When you think about photography of Black and low-income people, there is always something to try to represent, to document, to bring an identity, an identification.” Certainly, that’s not what the artist is aiming for. With these photographs, if on one hand she feels the need to show the reality she came from—which on its face looks like a tremendously precarious context—then on the other the photographic language provides the chance to show what it itself is hiding. “It’s the moment when you are going to find a treasure, a certain spirituality of life as well as all of the conflicts that still haven’t been resolved,” she says.

Tadáskía, to show to hide Zumbidas e Rastejantes com minha vó Maria da Graça, minha mãe Elenice Guarani e minha irmã Hellen Morais (to show to hide Zumbidas e Rastejantes with my sister Hellen Morais, my grandmother Maria da Graça, my mother Elenice Guarani), 2020

Made with a Yashica 35mm camera that her father used during many childhood outings, to show to hide displays Tadáskía’s interest in the idea that something can appear in a photograph based on this belief in apparition. Because she stops looking at her notebooks after she creates them, the photographs arise from the pages of her imagination, almost like a prophecy. The apparitions aren’t rehearsed or literal. Her performative writing, which is often poetic and fantastical, plays a central role, coexisting in a syncretic way to allow the manifestation of expression to appear in different languages and converge in the construction of the apparition’s meaning. We can get even closer to this making-abstraction procedure in the work Ave preta mística (Mystical black bird), originally a book-length poem-drawing in pastel whose mystical words give wings to a multisensory world. As an installation, this world is animated with floor-to-ceiling charcoal drawings that embrace sculptures of cattails, where citric fruits, golden eggshells, sticks of bamboo, and colored powder gravitate.

Between notebooks and family albums, there is a golden thread that ties, connects, sews, stitches together and, as Tadáskía says, “redistributes the center” in many of her works.

As she performs with and against the camera, Tadáskía often invites the presence and participation of members of her family. The epistemologies of escape and the affective ancestral repertoire fill her cognitive framework. In to show to hide (2020), Tadáskía creates a family of sculptural objects that are worn and performed by her mother, Elenice Guarani, and her father, Aguinaldo Morais. Their names are Zumbidas (Buzzings), Rastejantes (Crawlers), Rabos (Tails), Trepadeiras (Creepers), and Gruda-gruda (Sticky-Sticky). These wearable sculptures end up camouflaging or masking the expected image of everyday Black life. The play and the dialogue between two families—human and sculptural—show and hide the ordinary and the alien in an interaction in which the family appears not only as a theme within the work, but also as the protagonist of a broader artistic project of redistributing abundance. 

Tadáskía, to show to hide Rabos com Minha mãe Elenice Guarani (to show to hide Rabos with my mother Elenice Guarani), 2020

Between notebooks and family albums, there is a golden thread that ties, connects, sews, stitches together and, as Tadáskía says, “redistributes the center” in many of her works. This redistribution of resources as an aesthetic methodology and ethical procedure (a perspective recurrent in the practices of many other Black and Indigenous artists) recalls Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s affirmation, in “Fade of the Black Family Photography,” an essay in the 2023 book What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life (2023), that “of all the art forms photography is the one most susceptible to a discourse of rights, for good reason. And the right it most invokes is the right to ownership.” Harney and Moten’s positioning of photography in relation to property resonates with the compulsory but generative state of dispossession, the expropriation of Black life, and the relationships between the subject and object “that resists the ends of gaze and image,” they write.

The fundamental ethics of Tadáskía’s photographic project include sharing any earnings with the family members present in the images, as well as undertaking a range of economic reparations projects. As such, the photographs seem to confirm a family pact that ironically says, “We can have some ownership, even being owned.” The artist herself has said, “On January 10, I invited my family and friends to appear at 1 p.m. to eat a golden meat and a black juice . . . I served the golden meat and the black juice into the hands of each person using a wooden spoon. After eating, we put away the towel and the objects for our second apparition. On the same day, at 4 p.m., we appeared in front of the door of Cavalariças. And so, we heard people saying olha o passarinho [watch the birdie] as they photographed us and we rolled our eyes. Each person in their own time.”

Tadáskía, Corda dourada com meus primos Lucas Moraes, Breno Moraes e Gabriel Moraes (Golden rope with my cousins Lucas Moraes, breno Moraes and Gabriel Moraes), 2020

Family pictures can fade or be abandoned—or they might not exist at all. In one group of photographs from 2020 called Corda Dourada (Golden rope), Tadáskía considers the economy of visual ownership and the relationship between owning and being owned. Here, the rope in the title is seen connecting various figures. For Tadáskía, the past is the present as well as the history of Black existence. The rope revealed itself as an apparition, she tells me; fortune can’t simply be summed up in material measurements. The performance, then, arises as a gesture that expands reality’s objective need: to realize an act in which gold is ritualized and is prophesied as an image for the future. Even if framed by the bricks of an unplastered home or by an architecture that structures poverty, family is a commodity that resists its own photographic objecthood and competes with history’s own reproducibility. Tadáskía’s photographs promote the creation of a prolific visual vocabulary in which the relationship to memory and property is remade under her own terms. 

Tadáskía, Corda dourada com minha mãe Elenice Guarani, minha tia Marilúcia Moraes, minha vó Maria da Graça e minha tia Gracilene Guarani (Golden rope with my mother Elenice Guarani, my aunt Marilúcia Morais, my Grandmother Maria da Graça and my aunt Gracilene Guarani), 2020

Perhaps this change in perception and scratches of humor and irony are among the difficult gifts that Moten and Harney speak of in relation to the image of the Black family. “Existence insists upon this blur of wound and blessing,” they write. “It’s the aspiration of our dying breath, the substance of being unseen in always being seen, which, secretly, selflessly, we see with ourselves, not seeing our selves but seeing something more in seeing with, as if seeing with were all, as if all were just that practice, just how we do on Sunday evening, evidently.”

It’s also with a sigh and a breath that Tadáskía meditates on the brutal event that lit up the news in 2018: the murder of Matheusa Passarelli, a twenty-one-year-old student, artist, and LGTBQ activist, in Rio de Janeiro. After days without explanation of her disappearance, at 10 a.m. on May 30, Tadáskía built a small fortress to hide in. “I am wearing a red dress in homage to Matheusa Passareli,” the artist recalls. In her performance Atrás do muro (homenagem à Matheusa Passareli) (Behind the wall [homage to Maltheusa Passareli], 2018), Tadáskía passes a plastic bag through a hole in a wall of cement blocks that she built;  she fills, empties, and breathes into the bag as it is wedged into the wall. Passareli is family, and this breath of life appears in different scenes. Tadáskía’s work becomes a photograph of a family that was destroyed, dispossessed of its self-image. Or could it be another kind, our kind, the kind considered possible for a Black family album? 

Tadáskía, Hálito com minha mãe Elenice Guarani (Breath with my mother Elenice Guarani), 2019

Hálito (Breath, 2019), which includes a photograph of Tadáskía puffing into plastic bags melted by fire, unfolds in the kitchen of the artist’s home with her mother, her father, her grandmother, aunts, and cousins. It is the duration of a life that creates this portrait. The framing of the photograph, Harney and Moten write, “is commissioned against but also under the terms of a contract of civil butchery. Held out, held back, shard, shielded—the chemistry of stolen moments is our true and terrible and beautiful black share.” Hálito may be what the artist calls “an elementary exercise in vitality” or “a temporary meeting that wilts.” Harney and Moten continue: “This chain of viewing (looking, looking like, seeing with, seeming, unseaming) is a chain of handing. There’s violence in being held on the verge of being hidden. Being treasured is all but being lost. Nothing found in being sought. Common breath is gone and we can’t reconstruct it. And, anyway, what’s this presumption of family, and its rights and its brokenness, all of which are confirmed in the snapshot’s uncanny, untimely career? Can there be such a thing as a Black family photograph? Should there be?”

Tadáskía, com o Hálito (with the Breath), 2019
All photographs courtesy the artist and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel

The breath of life of Tadáskía’s photography, as a whole itself a sweaty and hot photography, stems from her insistence on the animating power of transformation and resistance, and through her awareness that this is the language of perception that we possess in order to be possessed. Between what Harney and Moten call “the interminable flash, the undefinable moment of being stolen,” and the fact that “we are disappearing,” the Exú-like centipede renews the artist’s commitment to believing that “not all dangers are lethal,” and in our own belief that apparition is an act of faith. We need to take stock of shallow and banal images. I return to the prophecy of the artist’s notebooks: “We belong to the family of the Mystical Black Birds. We are also known as the Enchanted Chickens. Inspired by Sankofa. Friends of Magic.” 

“All the images will disappear,” Ernaux writes. Will there be someone who recognizes us? 

This essay was originally commissioned by ZUM magazine, published by the Moreira Salles Institute in São Paulo. Translated from the Portuguese by Zoe Sullivan.

One of Photography’s Most Enigmatic Love Triangles Finally Gets Its Due

Nick Mauss and Angela Miller’s book Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (2023) brings new critical discourse to representations of queerness in American modernism. Part of a series called “Defining Moments in Photography,” the book contains two richly illustrated essays with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee. Mauss appraises the wide-ranging practice of George Platt Lynes, a photographer who is known (if at all) primarily for his male nudes from the 1930s and ’40s. Miller writes about the collaborative photographs of Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French, who worked contemporaneously to Lynes under the moniker PaJaMa, a combination of their first names. Both essays explore the social roles these images played when circulated among a coterie of queer artists as well as their relationship to mass media, and how they not only informed other artworks made by their participants but also reflected a network of queer culture in America between the two world wars.

Angela Miller’s essay, “PaJaMa Drama,” is the first published piece of in-depth scholarly writing about the work of this landmark queer photography collaborative. PaJaMa made highly staged figurative photographs on the beach in queer havens such as Fire Island and Provincetown, Massachusetts; in the apartments of friends in New York’s Greenwich Village; and later on the shores of Nantucket. Their collaboration started in 1937, and they produced thousands of negatives of staged tableaux, working as a formal collective through 1955, though they informally photographed each other for the rest of their lives, into the 1980s. The pictures were not created for exhibition but were instead “gift images” circulated among friends, sent in letters, and handed out at dinner parties. They were also used as reference images for paintings. Significantly, the label PaJaMa was applied only to the collaborative images by Cadmus, the most famous artist of the trio, when the pictures were first exhibited in the 1970s. Both Margaret and Jared hated the name.

Jared, Margaret, and Paul (in shadow, taking photograph), Nantucket, 1946
Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York

The pictures dramatize the complex dynamics between the collaborators. Paul Cadmus and Jared French had been deeply involved romantically for eight years before Jared married Margaret French in 1937, and they remained so afterward. Margaret came from a moneyed New Jersey family; she was devoted to Jared and supported him financially. Margaret and Paul had a “loving if guarded” friendship, Miller writes, because they were both in love with Jared. Today, we might describe this as polyamory, but within PaJaMa’s network of friends and lovers, a kind of freedom existed in the lack of labels and sexual categories, in the unnamed nature of things.

For Miller, the photographs, which are often foreboding in their sense of light and always statuesque in composition, provided still points of mooring amid their tempestuous and fluid personal lives. She attributes the recurring motif of a doubled, shadowed self in the photographs to Jared French’s interest in Jungian archetypes and the dual sides of anima and animus. Miller also argues that the members of PaJaMa were influenced by the aesthetics of 1940s Hollywood film noir and, in particular, melodrama. Reading Miller’s list of citations shows the new ground she is tilling. She cites auction catalogs, newspaper reviews of the relatively small number of exhibitions of PaJaMa’s work, and websites, in addition to the extensive correspondence and personal papers that Cadmus and the Frenches left to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

George Platt Lynes, Untitled self-portrait collage, ca. 1935
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © Estate of George Platt Lynes

Nick Mauss is a visual artist and writer whose 2018 exhibition Transmissions at the Whitney Museum in New York featured photographs by Lynes and PaJaMa. In his essay, “The Uses of Photographs,” he discusses the multiple ways that George Platt Lynes’s photographs circulated, both publicly and privately. He maps the intertwined nature of Lynes’s practices as a portraitist, a photographer of fashion and dance, and an enthusiastic proponent of the male nude. Mauss’s research provides a counterpoint to the publications released by Twelvetrees Press between 1981 and 1994 that introduced Lynes’s work to a broad audience, but which silo his artistic production into three separate artistic genres. But Mauss’s research goes beyond these sources, examining the staggering wealth of archival material Lynes left behind in the form of correspondence, personal scrapbooks, and printed ephemera, making connections that are unique to a visual artist’s sensibility. To connect the dots, he also includes the work Lynes did not want to leave behind—his fashion photographs, which he begrudgingly made for a living and tried to destroy by burning the negatives before his death. Thankfully for Mauss, they had circulated widely in print and could not be erased.

Within PaJaMa’s network of friends and lovers, a kind of freedom existed in the lack of labels and sexual categories, in the unnamed nature of things.

Mauss tracked down objects and models across different genres of Lynes’s artistic output, showing not only their interconnectedness but also how they fed into and fueled one other. In one example, he shows the evolution of a photograph within Lynes’s world. For a swimsuit advertisement shot in 1937, Lynes built a set that looks like a cabana, with a mural-size photograph of a beachscape as backdrop. The image captures a stiff composition of three men staring at a woman in a bathing suit. It has long been suspected that Lynes reused commercial sets after-hours for his erotic work, and Mauss provides evidence in the form of one of Lynes’s better-known photographs titled Demus, also from 1937, in which a dejected-looking nude man cradles his head in the same cabana against the same seascape. Here, Mauss writes, the setting has been transformed to evoke a well-known 1836 painting by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, whose figure of another “sad young man” became “an archetypal cipher for the homosexual’s isolation from society.”

George Platt Lynes, Nicholas Magallanes and Tanaquil Le Clerq in Jones Beach, 1950
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library © Estate of George Platt LynesGeorge Platt Lynes, Swimsuit advertisement with notes for retouching, ca. 1937
Courtesy Keith de Lellis Gallery © Estate of George Platt Lynes

Building on this revelation, Mauss identifies one of the male models in the fashion advertisement as the American ballet dancer Nicholas Magallanes, one of Lynes’s frequent subjects and a charter member of the New York City Ballet. A 1950 photograph Lynes made for George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins’s ballet Jones Beach uses a similar otherworldly set of a beach and features Magallanes cradling the dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq, whose pose is strikingly akin to that of the model in Demus. Finally, Mauss links this dance image to a spectacular male nude that Lynes photographed on the same set as the Jones Beach image, perhaps on the same day, in which a male model strikes this same pose but is turned upside down and rotated toward the camera in what Mauss describes as “a flagrant consecration of the rectum.”

Earlier in his text, Mauss asks: “Could Lynes’s work be seen as a new form that fused commercial imaging with vanguard aesthetics, and opened up the performative potential of the photographer’s studio? Would it not be more accurate to call Lynes an artist who used a camera rather than labeling him a studio photographer?” Though photographers may bristle at the second question, it identifies Lynes’s work as an important antecedent to the conceptual photography that prevailed at a much later period in the 1980s. As Miller writes in her essay on PaJaMa, the staging of scenes for the camera “anticipated the postmodern turn toward artists who used photography as an instrument of self-performance and role-playing.” In the staged photographs of PaJaMa, one begins to see a precursor to the far-off stares of motionless figures in Gregory Crewdson’s tableaux or, as Miller notes, artists of the Pictures Generation, including Cindy Sherman.

James Ogle, Portrait of George Platt Lynes in his studio, ca. 1940
Princeton University Art Museum

Body Language is part of a resurgence of interest in these mid-twentieth-century queer photographers, beginning in 2019 with two concurrent shows about queer modernism in New York: Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Young and Evil, curated by Jarrett Earnest at David Zwirner Gallery. Since then, the gay photography historian Allen Ellenzweig has published an extensive biography of Lynes, The Daring Eye (2021), and the art director Sam Shahid has released a documentary about Lynes titled Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes (2024). Artists have also depicted similar themes of love and desire, particularly through staged photography. These projects include Ian Lewandowski’s intricate and luminous contact prints of queer communities in conversation with vintage prints by PaJaMa and Lynes and the recent exhibition Communion at Brick Aux Gallery in Brooklyn of photographs by the self-taught photographer Kris Mendoza, who describes sharing a “spiritual connection” with PaJaMa.

The concept of a “gift image”—an artwork that has no immediate purpose other than to act as an expression of friendship or shared queerness—is particularly important to consider now, in a time when art and arts education have become over-professionalized. Mauss considers the function of gift images to be “not unlike love letters, or the circulation of painted portrait miniatures among friends, lovers, and family members in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the United States, or the exchange of painted fans inscribed with verse between nineteenth-century painters, poets, and their muses.” Artists should be trading more inscribed fans; as something to be shared among artists, this book shows the potential of such an exchange. Lynes, the authors of Body Language note, was devoted to creating a “future history of art”—a line that is also used as the book’s epigraph. In a sense a gift image itself, Body Language provides a fascinating, deeply researched background for the enigmatic works these queer artists left behind, helping to illuminate their contributions for generations to come.

Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes was published by the University of California Press in 2023.

How Images Make the Objects We Desire Seem Irresistible

Imagine having lost a loved one in the New England of the 1870s. Then, a knock at your door: a salesman in a suit. He pulls out a bound catalog of albumen-silver prints, with as many photographs in it as you’ve maybe seen in a lifetime, each showing a tombstone ready to memorialize your loss. The trade catalog for the Vermont Marble Companies offers a purchase for your grief, documentation that something exists in the here and now to honor those in the here-after. This is an example of what the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s research assistant Virginia McBride calls “the truth claim of photography,” a way companies used the supposed veracity of photographic images to convince customers they would deliver what they promised.

Photographer unknown, Trade Catalogue for Producers’ Marble and Vermont Marble Companies (detail), 1870s–80s
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It’s an early highlight of a Met show on view this summer that McBride has curated, The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography, which tracks how pictures made people familiar with objects for consumption and then, with the arrival of modernism, rendered such objects radiantly unfamiliar. The show, which features work from the nineteenth century to the late 1940s, arrives at a moment when many artists have been drawing inspiration from the long history of how photography has been used to sell all manner of commodities. It’s a moment marked by a turn from the object for sale to the meaning of the sale itself.

H. Raymond Ball, Pocket Comb, ca. 1930s
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward J. Steichen, “Sugar Lumps” Pattern Design for Stehli Silks, ca. 1920s
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

But first you had to make the sale, and the best way to do that was to catch someone’s eye. A commercial photographer in Providence, Rhode Island, named H. Raymond Ball photographed a comb from an unknown manufacturer balancing mysteriously on its edge; in his Pocket Comb (ca. 1930s), the expanse of the object’s shadow somehow echoes both the architect Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the bob hairstyle favored by flappers. “It’s an object lesson in what the camera can do with the right light and the right shadow and any object at all,” McBride explained.

Corporate resources funded adventurous photographers to push things even further. Edward J. Steichen was commissioned by a Swiss textile manufacturer to lend their products a touch of the new. His “Sugar Lumps” Pattern Design for Stehli Silks, from the 1920s, staggers rows of the treat to cleverly arrange their shadows into a fresh take on a checkerboard; in 1927, Stehli made a textile with Steichen’s photograph printed upon it, and the advertisement itself became the product.

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August Sander went even further. For Osram Light Bulbs (ca. 1930) he composed a spiral of lightbulbs, creating a gelatin-silver print that seems lit vertiginously from within. If the bulbs could do that on a magazine page, what wonders they might lend to your house! In such advertisements, photography transcends its lifelike authority to become life itself, abuzz with a kind of optimism some Americans in the 1930s and ’40s might’ve found lacking in their daily lives, as they flicked through Depression-era fashion magazines and war-stricken newspapers.

Ralph Bartholomew Jr.’s carbo print Soap Packaging (1936) erects a cityscape of candy-colored packaged soap on newsprint in a bubbly anticipation of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie six years later. An unknown image maker gassed up a car ad with the latest editing techniques for Montage for Packard Super Eight (ca. 1940), which you can imagine zipping around that soap package city, even if that many people couldn’t possibly fit in a Packard that size. Modernism, with its emerging formal concerns of experimentation and abstraction, was an irresistible tool kit for a sales pitch.

August Sander, Osram Light Bulbs, ca. 1930
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Photographer unknown, Montage for Packard Super Eight, ca. 1940
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This fizzy blend of commercial seduction and fine-art methodology reached a peak in the pages of Vogue, which commissioned Irving Penn’s Theatre Accident, New York (1947). “It’s not usually talked about as a product photograph, but rather sort of the be-all and end-all of photographic still lifes of the twentieth century,” McBride said. And yet, every object spilled from that purse is available for purchase—and has been purchased by the sophisticated kind of woman Vogue suggests you should be. “The idea that these amalgamated objects can really create an entire personhood is very explicitly spelled out,” she added. “Even with these inanimate objects, [Penn] could conjure a living, breathing woman.” In the eighty or so years between the tombstone catalog and the Vogue masterpiece, photography moved from the lifelike, to larger-than-life, to having the ability to conjure up life itself.

Modernism, with its emerging formal concerns of experimentation and abstraction, was a tool kit for a sales pitch.

And what happened in the many decades after the photographers shown in The Real Thing? Contemporary image makers—who are outside the focus of the museum’s presentation and the heirs to its heroes—grew up in thrall of the earlier history it explores. They now live and work in a world of hyperconsumerism, advertising, and targeted marketing that those photographs, and the related capitalist machinery, helped to build. The exhibition’s checklist offers a prompt to consider how they made sense of the tug and pull of art and commerce within a picture frame or, increasingly, the social-media grid.

Irving Penn, Theatre Accident, New York, 1947
Courtesy the Irving Penn Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, NewYork Bobby Doherty, Oronamin C, 2022, from Dream About Nothing, 2023
Courtesy Loose Joints

“Sometimes it feels like all I’m really looking at is this strange reflection of what happens when a person is fed advertising their entire life and, weirdly, fetishizes it,” the photographer Bobby Doherty told me. His images—from eye-popping sweets and consumer goods of clients including Balenciaga and Apple to the still lifes filling his recent photobook, Dream About Nothing (2023)—draw on the legacy established by giants such as Penn but bring a sense of irony and intentional awkwardness. Doherty’s color palette is often hyperreal and exaggerated, but it can be muted to recall another era. “I just sometimes feel like there isn’t a new way to do it,” he said with a sigh. “The rules were really clearly laid out, and deviating from them just takes it to a place that isn’t advertising anymore.” His image Oronamin C (2022) features soda bottles and what appears to be a cheeseburger on a mirrored surface, and was inspired by 1960s food advertisements. The goal of his book, he added, was to create an experience of “subliminal advertising in a dream.”

For the conceptual artist Christopher Williams, histories of technology, production, and modernization are told through almost absurdist pile-ups of information, with captions elongated into campuses of text. His images re-create the aesthetics of a product photograph and the mechanics of image making, but often nod to political and colonial histories. His recent image of an IKEA kitchen treats a mass-produced interior model with a cartographical rigor you sense he might not quite think it deserves. Who would want to live in a world like this, with its banal perfection, the photograph seems to ask, while at the same time marshaling every resource of advertising. It’s less a swoon than a wink. Williams’s occasional photographs of models, seen in his work referencing a Kodak reflection guide from the 1960s, present them smiling broadly—a real no-no in the images used by fashion e-commerce sites, such as SSENSE, that feature both product and editorial. How could anyone in this world possibly be this happy?

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The impact, emotional or otherwise, of accumulation seems to fuel Sara Cwynar’s work as she plumbs e-commerce spaces for evidence of what, or maybe how, companies think people want now. Which might just be more: yesterday’s brand catalog is today’s social-media feed, with endless scrolls of SSENSE or Shein items presented by similar models in similar poses. These posts could be purses spilling out glamorous contents, but there’s little personality on display.

Cwynar’s series Marilyn (2020) included photographs she took of SSENSE models in the company’s signature trio of poses, re-created on larger scales and with harsher lighting, as if trying to blow out the halo effect. “You can’t figure out what’s real, or what something actually looks like, or whether you’re looking at the same person or just the same image with different outfits photoshopped on,” she said. “I like the confusion of different styles of commercial photography in one thing. That kind of digital plenitude, there being too much to contend with, so everything starts to feel kind of valueless.” And yet value is in the eye of the beholder: Dior invited Cwynar to collaborate on a handbag.

Christopher Williams, Blocking Template: IKEA Kitchen (Overhead Nr. 2) Studio Thomas Borho, Oberkasseler Str. 39, Düsseldorf, Germany September 7, 2022, 2023
© the artist and courtesy David Zwirner, New York Sara Cwynar, Ali from SSENSE.com (How to Marry a Millionaire), from the series Marilyn, 2020
Courtesy the artist and the Approach, London

In the 1990s, such a collaboration might have been decried as “selling out.” At that moment—when international corporations were consolidating media into the hands of a very few, and the techniques of modernism had become all-too-familiar, even sinister—artists’ efforts to resist the collapse between art and product often felt noble. Even if, as the Met show makes clear, photographers were always working across contexts. Roe Ethridge came up in the ’90s moment when selling out might be taboo; today, with fewer markets for photography, he thinks that notion is passé. Instead, he trades on the notion of value, working for high-end fashion brands and showing the same images in high-end galleries. Confusion might be the point— or, perhaps, a tactic to wrangle with the challenges he sees in commercial photography. “How do I depict a handbag in a way that’s not untruthful to me?” he asked. “Which is a weird thing to think about. Why would I like or not like a handbag?” As Penn’s handbag does, Ethridge hopes his work “could live without the caption.”

These days, images live without all kinds of context, unmoored from their origins and floating freely across our screens. The photographers who made the images in The Real Thing proved you could sell anything; today’s artists work in a world where you have to sell everything. In the end, we’re left with the same question as that salesman at the door: What makes you pay attention? Product photography works—today, when we see too much, it lingers in our minds—because it tells us something about ourselves. It’s not about the product itself but what the picture produces inside you. It’s not a proof, but a mirror.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 255, “The Design Issue.”

Summer Party Celebrating “The Design Issue”

On Wednesday, June 12, Aperture hosted the Summer Party to celebrate “The Design Issue,” which introduces a new look for Aperture magazine. Aperture members, artists, writers, and friends, as well as cohosts Thessaly La Force, Camilla Molo, Jamie Savren, and Coreen Simpson, gathered at the Times Square EDITION, enjoying lively conversation, cocktails, and a shimmering sunset amid the energy of Midtown. The photographer Stefan Ruiz, profiled in the issue, provided music, sharing a fun set of selections from his collection of vintage records.

Coreen Simpson, Deborah Willis, Sarah Meister, Hank Thomas

Camilla Molo, Terry Greenberg, Esther McGowan, Andrew Lewin

Sophie Nitkin, Cathy M. Kaplan, Jamie Savren

Philip Montgomery, Dean Majd, Brandon Harris, Jarod Lew

Nadia Frye Leinhos, Jenn Hyland, Coreen Simpson, AnnaLiisa Benston

Lovia Gyarkye, Michael Famighetti, Nicole Acheampong, Sarah Meister

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In celebratory remarks, Michael Famighetti, Aperture’s editor in chief, expressed the importance of the evolution of the magazine’s design, as well as the intention to honor the editorial spirit driving the publication since 1952, as it upholds a mission to create community through photography. He gave a toast  to several of the issue’s contributors and featured artists present, including David Hartt, whose work is featured on one of the issue’s three covers.

Brendan Embser and David HarttAvion Pearce, Sarah Meister, guest, Dana Triwush, and Chris CoulthrustGuest, Naomieh Jovin, and Steven M. ContrerasEden Tesfamariam and Milena TekesteCrowd listening to remarksColette Veasey-Cullors and David HarttIsabelle McTwigan, Ava Donaldson, and Steven ChaikenMichael Londres and Suleman Sheikh AnayaAperture magazineLaetitia Adam, Áwet Woldegebriel, and Liz HorowitzNicole R. Fleetwood and Sarah MeisterQiana Mestrich, Accra Shepp, and Nona FaustineSelwyn Bach and Gabrielle StanfieldSaleen Saleh

To preview the issue visit aperture.org/magazines.

Venue and drinks generously sponsored by The Edition.

11 Photobooks that Reimagine Queer History and Visibility

Kelli Connell, Betsy, Provincetown Woods, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024)

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

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

Nan Goldin, Twisting at my birthday party, New York City, 1980
Courtesy the artist

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (2021 Edition)

Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis.

First published by Aperture in 1986, Ballad continues to exert a major influence on photography and other aesthetic realms, its status as a contemporary classic firmly established. As Goldin reflects in an updated afterword from Aperture’s 2021 edition: “I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise.”

Ethan James Green, Maria and Massima, 2017
Courtesy the artist Ethan James Green, Dara, 2017

Ethan James Green: Young New York (2019)

Young New York presents striking portraits of New York’s millennial scene-makers. Through his diverse cast of models, artists, nightlife icons, and queer communities, Ethan James Green redefines beauty and identity for a new generation.

Under the mentorship of the late David Armstrong, Green developed a sensitive yet confident style. For three years, he photographed his close friends and community, often in Corlears Hook Park on the Lower East Side. Reflecting the intense connections he formed with his subjects, Green’s black-and-white photographs display an inherently humanist approach—calling to mind Diane Arbus’s midcentury studies of gender nonconformists. “Green’s subjects are often in states of transition, whether the transition from youth to adulthood or a gender transition, visible in top-surgery scars or budding breasts,” writes Michael Schulman for the New Yorker. “Transitions render people vulnerable, but Green’s subjects are confidently beautiful, masters of style and attitude.”

Lyle Ashton Harris, M. Lamar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 1993
Courtesy the artist

Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs (2017)

Throughout the late 1980s and ’90s, a radical cultural scene emerged in cities across the globe, finding expression in the galleries, nightclubs, and bedrooms of New York, London, Los Angeles, and Rome. As a young artist experimenting with different artistic mediums at the time, Lyle Ashton Harris began obsessively photographing his friends, lovers, and individuals who were, or would become, figures of influence, including Nan Goldin, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Catherine Opie, and Marlon Riggs. Harris’s photographs offer a raw, authentic portrait of the cultural and political communities that defined an era and continue to resonate to this day.

In the 2017 volume Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs, the artist’s archive of 35 mm Ektachrome images is presented alongside personal journal entries and recollections from artistic and cultural figures. It offers a unique document of what Harris has described as “ephemeral moments and emblematic figures shot in the ’80s and ’90s, against a backdrop of seismic shifts in the art world, the emergence of multiculturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and incipient globalization.” Together, Harris’s photographs and journals not only sketch his personal history and journey as an artist, but also provide an intimate look into this groundbreaking period of art and culture.

Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975
Courtesy the Peter Hujar Library, LLC; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (2017)

Peter Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. A leading figure in the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s, Hujar was admired for his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes.

Beginning his career in the ’50s as a commercial photographer, Hujar soon decided to abandon this field and pursue a more personal artistic practice. Most well known for his portraiture, he created iconic images of some of New York’s renowned artists and writers, including Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, David Wojnarowicz, and Andy Warhol. As Antonio Huertas Mejías writes in an introduction to Speed of Life: “Hujar’s black-and-white photographs, in their signature simple style, make his works at once deeply evocative and moving.”

Despite being closely associated with those who crossed into the mainstream, Hujar lived on the fringes of contemporary fame, maintaining a status of an underground legend. Now he is a revered icon of the lost downtown art scene. Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (2017) gathers photographs from his archive, alongside texts by Philip Gefter, Steve Turtell, and Joel Smith, to create a thorough history of Hujar’s life and artistic practice.

Zanele Muholi, Buciko I, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024)

South African artist Zanele Muholi is one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases that documents the LGBTIA+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. From there, Muholi began to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024), is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.

In their evocative self-portraits, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon new personas and poetic interpretations of queerness, Blackness, and the possibilities of self. Drawing on material props found in their immediate environment, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” Muholi states in an interview from the 2018 volume. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study for Joe (_2010980), 2017
Courtesy the artist, DOCUMENT, Chicago; team (gallery, inc.), New York; and Vielmetter Los Angeles Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (_2070386), 2017

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (2020)

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s studio portraits challenge and deconstruct traditional portraiture through the perspective of a Black, queer gaze. Through collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, Sepuya encourages multivalent narrative readings of each image.

In 2020, Aperture and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis co-published the first widely released publication of Sepuya’s work, and later this year Aperture will release a second volume with the artist in Dark Room A–Z (Fall 2024). For Sepuya, photography is a tactile and communal experience. His multilayered scenes come together through collaborations in his studio with groups of friends, fellow artists, and himself. Moving away from the slick artifice of contemporary portraiture, Sepuya’s frames are filled with the human elements of picture-taking, from fingerprints and smudges to dust on mirrored surfaces. Sepuya pushes this even further by directly inviting us to look inside the studio setting—while also considering the construction of subjectivity.

Shikeith, The Adoration (Never Knew Love Like This Before), 2020
Courtesy the artist

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (2022)

A visceral and haunting exploration of Black male vulnerability, joy, and spirituality, Notes towards Becoming a Spill is the first monograph by the acclaimed multimedia artist Shikeith. Following the lyrical artistic expressions of contemporary portraitists such as Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mickalene Thomas, Shikeith envisions his subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.

In work he describes as “leaning into the uncanny,” the faces and bodies of Shikeith’s subjects glisten with sweat (and tears) in a manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as “an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” Notes towards Becoming a Spill redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy.

Ryan McGinley, Liberation Not Deportation, October 2020
Courtesy the artist

Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation (2022)

In June 2020, activists Qween Jean and Joela Rivera returned to the historic Stonewall Inn—site of the 1969 riots that launched the modern gay rights movement—where they initiated weekly actions known thereafter as the Stonewall Protests. Over the following year, brought together by the urgent need to center Black trans and queer lives within the Black Lives Matter movement, thousands of people across communities and social movements gathered in solidarity, resistance, and communion.

Gathering work by twenty‑four photographers from within the movement, Revolution Is Love is the potent and celebratory visual record of a contemporary activist movement in New York City—and a moving testament to the enduring power of photography in activism, advocacy, and community. As Qween Jean reflects in an interview from the volume: “We have been at every moment of history, we’ve been at every fight, at every social-justice movement. We’ve existed.”

Mickalene Thomas, Remember Me, 2006
Courtesy the artist

Mickalene Thomas: Muse (2015)

Mickalene Thomas’s large-scale, multitextured tableaux of domestic interiors and portraits subvert the male gaze and assert new definitions of beauty. Thomas first began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut—which became a pivotal experience in her creative expression as an artist.

Since then, throughout her practice, Thomas’s images have functioned as personal acts of deconstruction and reappropriation. Many of her photographs draw from a wide range of cultural icons, from 1970s “Black Is Beautiful” images of women to Édouard Manet’s odalisque figures, to the mise-en-scène studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, is that Thomas’s collection of portraits and staged scenes reflect a very personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes herself, her mother, her friends and lovers—emphasizing the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (face in dirt), 1990
Courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 2015)

“History is made by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternative history,” David Wojnarowicz wrote in 1991. Throughout his career, Wojnarowicz’s use of photography was extraordinary, as was his unprecedented ways of addressing the AIDS crisis, homophobia, and relentless fight against censorship. Before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992, Aperture began collaborating with the artist on his landmark volume Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, which was published in 1994.

Brush Fires engaged with what Wojnarowicz referred to as his “tribe” or community, featuring contributions from artist and writer friends such as Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Vince Aletti, and Davide Cole (the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association in 1990). Twenty years after its original publication, Aperture released an expanded, redesigned edition of Brush Fires, offering a new perspective on Wojnarowicz’s profound influence, courage, and legacy. “His responses were unique, thoroughly felt, and driven by an urgent necessity. In his time, his work was extraordinarily moving—it stunned,” writes Lynne Tillman in an essay from the expanded edition. “It will never be experienced again as it was then, in that very dark moment.”

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How Photography Influenced Duro Olowu’s Life in Fashion

The former lawyer turned designer Duro Olowu creates fashion moments on a resolutely human scale. Born in Lagos into a Nigerian Jamaican family, Olowu had a cosmopolitan upbringing, traveling to Europe and absorbing cultural influences ranging from album covers to Yves Saint Laurent. His tenacious curiosity, like his patternmaking, seems limitless—and his deep knowledge of photography has informed his fashion line.

Instead of flashy runway shows, Olowu prefers private viewings that allow him to discuss his patchwork dresses and jacquard coats with the coterie of cultural figures who wear his richly patterned designs. Like him, they appreciate clothes in a context that celebrates collecting antiques, paintings, and handicrafts over any proximity to trends or celebrity endorsements. Olowu has also curated exhibitions in New York, London, and Chicago. On each occasion, he staged a vibrant dialogue, juxtaposing photography and painting, or West African heritage textiles and the innovative fabric creations of contemporary sculptors.

The editor Dan Thawley recently spoke with Olowu from his studio in Mason’s Yard, in London. Olowu claims to have been a reluctant curator at first. Soon, however, he sensed a freedom in making exhibitions, the freedom to think about photography and fashion across genres and decades. The results offer a new way of seeing.

Installation view of Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, MCA Chicago, 2020
Photograph by Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago Yto Barrada, Fille en rouge jouant aux osselets (Girl in Red – Playing Jacks), 1999
Courtesy the artist

Dan Thawley: Duro, there are some things I am curious to ask you about your relationship with photography. I wanted to start with collecting.

Duro Olowu: I always shy away from the word collect. But I have quite a lot of photography, just because it was always a lot more accessible. In the 1990s and even up until the mid-2000s you could come across something one had always wanted, like an early Samuel Fosso or a Luigi Ghirri. Back then a lot of photography was just not recognized or put in the same category as fine art.

Thawley: What is your relationship to photography as a fashion designer? The image of clothing is something you need to continue to produce, but it’s also something that I can imagine is a powerful tool to inspire your creativity as well.

Olowu: There are two aspects to that. There’s a side of fashion photography which is very commercial, and then, of course, there’s contemporary art and photography in that realm. There’s overlap. The rela­tionship between design and fashion and other kinds of creativity has always been there since the 1920s and ’30s, and in the work of a lot of photographers that I look at now—Peter Hujar, Kwame Brathwaite, Cindy Sherman, Anthony Barboza—people whose work I find as important as, say, Man Ray. I think it’s a subcon­scious thing. 

For designers, you can only tell if you have succeeded when you look at a photograph of someone dressed in your clothes, and they look very comfortable and confident—almost as though the clothes have become their armor, their shield. With great photographers, I always found that this was what they were able to do. Claude Cahun used clothing, ob­jects, jewelry, and costume to empower herself as a very early pioneer of self-portraiture in photography and queer art. When you look at Malick Sidibé or Seydou Keïta or Carrie Mae Weems, you realize that they are using clothes as a language. So, as a designer, that is the language that I try to write with.

Clothing to me is not about fashion or trends. I’m designing for people who are interested in the culture of style, and people who want to use what I design to place themselves in the world in a cer­tain way. For something to look modern and for something not to date or age, it has to ref lect the times. I think great photography always reflects the present as much as the past. And in designing, that’s what I try to do with clothing—not to replicate. It’s my point of view. It’s not an attempt to replicate what’s in photographs. It’s more an attempt to emulate the power of the gesture of photographs.

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Thawley: Does the way that a photograph freezes a silhouette—perhaps a drape in movement—ever stimulate you to replicate that gesture?

Olowu: A great photograph—whether it’s a still life or a portrait or some other kind of composition—is never forced. A great artist knows not just when to click but when the subject and mise-en-scène is just right enough to capture. Clothed or nude, it’s incredibly emotional and pow­erful.

Fashion or clothing needs to emote, but it shouldn’t be nostalgic. What changes over time are emotions, how people express themselves. That’s what you see in great collections of clothing. If you looked at Madeleine Vionnet then, if you looked at certain things at a certain time, thirty years ago, for example, they probably didn’t seem so radical. Or Sonia Delaunay, or even Patrick Kelly. Today, they appear even more radical than one can imagine.

I think great photography is like that. Which is why, in looking at con­temporary photographers, whether it’s Ming Smith or Dawoud Bey, one needs to also be open to the incredible power, savoir faire, and freedom that the history of photography has made possible in the art world. Many great photographers either started as photojournalists or made commercial work, like Madame Yevonde or Eve Arnold. So, I think pho­tography is a very sinuous reference that is not bound by trends. I feel very lucky that I can look at Steven Meisel, who I consider to be one of the greatest fashion photographers ever, or Irving Penn or Clifford Coffin, in the same way I look at James Van Der Zee, Walker Evans, Mama Casset, or Tina Modotti.

Peter Hujar, Forbidden Fruit (David Wojnarowicz Eating an Apple in an Issey Miyake shirt), from the postcard set The Twelve Perfect Christmas Gifts from Dianne B, 1983
© the Peter Hujar Archive and Artists Rights Society, New York Eve Arnold, Charlotte Stribling waits backstage to model clothes designed in the Harlem community, Abyssinian Church, 1950
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Thawley: I’ve always appreciated how you spotlight portraiture on your social media. You post photographs of Black luminaries, amongst other fantastic images. How does that research estab­lish your frame of cultural references when designing? 

Olowu: There’s a kind of portraiture that involves a whole setup as a souvenir, and then there’s the kind of portraiture made by artists, which I find really powerful, particularly when it’s self-portraiture. Because there are two things at work. There’s the element of exposing oneself, but also that of not exposing too much of oneself, because you have many more years and a lot more ideas that you want to pursue. I approach design questions in the same way. 

Sometimes people can go through periods of their lives not being able to put a face to a writer or an artist. Look at Dawoud Bey’s portrait of David Ham­mons. When you look at these portraits, they are sort of an eye into the reasoning behind Hammons’s work. When one looks at the artist Lee Miller in Man Ray’s photographs, you are not looking at what you imagine to be the personality of the subject. You’re actually looking at what the person does in the real world, because that’s what emerges. The human body is restless. The human mind is laden. You never know what you’re going to get. When I see something that really emotes in that way, I’m always very conscious of how important it is in the context of contemporary art. Placed alongside portraiture in other mediums like painting or sculpture, it’s very important to have the element of the photographic print.

Joel Meyerowitz, Gold Corner, New York, 1974

© the artist and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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Thawley: You’ve curated some great shows, including Making & Unmaking at the Camden Art Centre in London in 2016 and Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago four years later. How do you go about manifest­ing your passion for photography in these projects? 

Olowu: I feel that what I do curatorially is a very important part of my whole oeuvre. I see it as an extension of what I do, and in the institutional shows I’ve done, the amount of photography is a testament to what we’re talking about. To have Henri Matisse and David Hammons and Brice Marden next to Dawoud Bey was some­thing that, even curatorially, I know a lot of the people, when I was putting the show together, couldn’t understand until they walked into the room. 

I consider photographers to be artists and artists to be photographers. I never think: Oh, do I have to create a special section for photography? I’m actually very anti that. I’m not saying museums shouldn’t have a Diane Arbus show, a Gordon Parks show, a Malick Sidibé show. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have their own rooms. But I’m always surprised when the institutional shows that are not solo shows hardly ever include photography. Because I think it’s such a natural thing to include. That’s obviously changing a lot. You see a lot more of that now. 

I think photography is a very sinuous reference that is not bound by trends.

In looking at a body of work, say, in the ’80s, how could I look at David Wojnarowicz and not see Peter Hujar? How could I look at artists like Carrie Mae Weems even, and not think of Kara Walker’s work? It’s very different work, but it’s just as emotive: powerful stories of women of color, emoting how they feel, not just about themselves but how they’ve been thought of for centuries. The same way I look at Eve Arnold’s pho­tographs. I feel that the way she captured the model in Harlem, the way she even captured Marilyn Monroe, came from who she was as a woman, being able to understand what the camera needed to pull out of that. I couldn’t look at that sort of work and think it had to be in a separate section. I could only think of that work in relation to or mixed up with other things. 

It’s not such a new idea. I mean, Surrealists did that. You had Man Ray and Claude Cahun mixed up with Jean Arp and Hannah Höch, and the other Dadaists. It wasn’t unusual up until I think the ’60s, when a different kind of mindset came in. That’s changing, or that’s practically changed now. And I always feel it’s important for any show I curate to reflect this deep conversation between all the mediums that continue to exist amongst artists in real life.

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Thawley: We all consume so many images on-screen now. But the object of the photograph is such a dynamic thing as well. What do you appreciate about the printed medium, and how it has changed over time?

Olowu: It’s very interesting you bring that up. The first real contact we have with anything that will later sort of place itself in our lives as art is with photo­graphs and prints. As a child, you look at a magazine or you look at a postcard or you’re handed a photograph. Even prac­tically as a baby, you are often first shown what you look like in a photograph of yourself. Later, as you go from child­hood into adulthood, magazines, books, and other visual materials are filled with photographs that define your identity. 

I have so much awe and respect for the use of a nondigital camera, the labor and development of film, preferably with no retouching. In looking at the photo­graph as an object, you’re almost doing so as you would look at a 1920s Paul Poiret dress, Yves Saint Laurent haute couture jacket from the ’70s, or an embroidered midcentury Yoruba agbada robe. You’re looking at how it was made in the same way you look at the fabrication and finish of beautiful garments. So that when you come across it in a museum or gallery, you recognize that it is also powerful, beautiful, and important because of how it was made. Making & Unmaking was all about that human effort. The hand in the work.

Lisetta Carmi, I Travestiti, Genoa, 1965–70
© Martini & Ronchetti and courtesy Archivio Lisetta Carmi Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Adebiyi, 1989
© the artist and courtesy Autograph, London

Thawley: We would never know much about certain art practices and movements from the twentieth century if it weren’t for people like Ugo Mulas taking photographs of Lucio Fontana, and all of the Arte Povera artists. Photography reveals relationships and communities. And records from previous generations are so incredibly precious for that very reason.

Olowu: Of course. Once again, the Dawoud Bey photographs of David Hammons with the snowballs. If that hadn’t been documented, how would we know that those snowballs melted—and the political and social commentary therein?

Thawley: How have your interactions with cultural institutions informed your interest in and knowledge about pho­tography? 

Olowu: Finding great photography in museums, by both known and unknown artists, is exhilarating and inspiring. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Studio Museum in Harlem have exceptional examples in their collections, as does the Art Institute of Chicago. When I’m in Paris, I always visit the Jeu de Paume. The Fondation Cartier presented the first really incredible museum-worthy show of an African artist in the photography world—that was Seydou Keïta’s show there in 1994. It was a beginning in many ways for how work by an artist from the continent was perceived and exhibited abroad.

I recently saw—and was blown away by—the artist Lisetta Carmi’s show at the Estorick Collection, a small muse­um in London for twentieth-century Ital­ian art. I have to also mention people like Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whom I love, whose work I’ve known for thirty years, and who only now is being recognized. Be­cause of the current possibilities for queer artists, photographers, painters, his work is being revisited and being shown in a very different way. But my favorite is the Photographers’ Gallery in London, a small but renowned museum that I’ve visited since my teens. It exposed me to the most amazing group of inspir­ing international artists working in this medium, many of whom have informed my fashion collections and curatorial projects.

A look from Olowu’s fall/winter 2014 collection
Photograph by Luis Monteiro. Courtesy Duro Olowu Duro Olowu’s boutique in Mason’s Yard, London, 2019
Courtesy Duro Olowu

Thawley: You touched upon the role of color earlier. Do you ever operate as a colorist, looking at photography when you put together your patterns and your different swatches and fabrics that you’ve created for your fashion line?

Olowu: Absolutely. I have to say that it’s photography and film, and photography is really important. It’s the Technicolor aspect of everything—a kind of faded Technicolor. It’s not jarring. When I design textiles, even if they’re monotone, even if they’re in very vivid colors, the whole idea is that it’s not jarring. It doesn’t make your eyes ache. Because it has to be easy on the eye—and on the heart. It’s a very emotional thing. So people like Joel Meyerowitz, I love. 

Like Gordon Parks, I love the way William Eggleston can transform a pain­ful photograph—a clear display of segre­gation or racism—into an empowering one for the person segregated against because they’re wearing the most beau­tiful, simple clothing in the most vivid color. It’s a very conscious effort, I think, on the part of the artist. It helps me see how color looks to other people, how color is represented. 

I learned very early that after I’ve designed a fabric and I’ve seen the first swatches, when I do the variations or we cut the outfits, I put the different looks together and shoot them. When I see the photographs, I have to say they look like what I designed, but the intensity of the color is a hundred times more. It’s a very empowering, exciting thing. Sometimes it’s black and red or yellow and blue. It’s not necessarily a whole cacophony of print. It could be solid colors, but when you see the luminosity, it reminds me of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs of a veranda, or an umbrella on the seaside, or of a curtain in the front of a mechanic’s shop. When you see your work photographed, you realize how the photograph has made it real to you. 

If you really look at a photograph by an artist, there’s something about the way they try to manipulate the color, even if it’s black and white. There’s Barkley L. Hendricks’s photographs. He’s one of the greatest painters ever. But he was also an incredible photographer. There’s a picture of the two women at the airport in mink coats, but also a man in Nigeria in 1978. Hendricks happened to go to FESTAC, the Nigerian arts fes­tival. He just stopped this guy in that fuchsia top and trousers and photo­graphed him. Now, if you look at that fuchsia, I don’t care whether you work with the best silk-dyeing mill, you never imagine that you can get that color. And then, when you look at it in the photo­graph, I think that is exactly the future that I want. It really helps me see fashion as more than just something flat.

Thawley: Do you take many photos your­self?

Olowu: Well, most of the pictures I put on Instagram that aren’t credited to some­one else, they’re my photos. It’s not something that I’ve ever thought I want to pursue as an art. I love taking photos because when I’m taking them, I’m not thinking. I’m just capturing that moment. All my photos on the streets of New York, Dakar, whatever, when I look at them later, I realize I wasn’t as familiar with certain things. That’s why I respect photographers. Because after a while, they somehow manage to sense what’s going on completely in that frame, before they take the picture. Nothing is really left to chance.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 255, “The Design Issue.”