Aperture's Blog, page 18

A Photographer Deconstructs Masculinity and Colonialism

Greek theater is famous for its masks. There are several, each with its own purpose, such as the neutral, the comedic, or the tragic. Actors would use them to portray different roles on stage. The photographer and artist Ibrahim Ahmed isn’t so convinced these masks are removed once the performance ends.

Born in Kuwait and raised across Egypt and the United States, Ahmed’s identity is convoluted, and that’s exactly how he thinks it should be. “I’m an amalgamation of all these things,” he tells me. His work explores the complexities of identity, history, and the performance of masculinity and citizenship—both in Egypt and globally. Central to his artistic ethos is the rejection of imposed identity categories and an inquiry into what life for men could look like beyond the confines of the status quo. He’s taken these themes to several solo exhibitions—including at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; Tintera Gallery, Cairo; and Primary, Nottingham—and has also participated in group shows, including at the Sharjah Art Museum and biennials in Dakar and Havana. 

Ibrahim Ahmed, Figure #6, 2020 Ibrahim Ahmed, Figure #4, 2020

His series, I Never Revealed Myself to Them (2016–2021), is concerned with both the politics and the nature of visibility. What does it mean to be seen as a man, as an Arab man, as a colonial subject, as an Egyptian, as none or all of those things at once? “When we center the nation-state, we have to pick a side,” he tells me. “That in itself is still centering a colonial legacy. The idea of the annihilation of the self is very important to me because, in a world full of representation and hypervisibility, to be invisible is powerful.” Absence as presence has been a motif throughout his career, which also includes a well-established textile and sculpture practice, with work that meditates on the American dream and inherited codes of masculinity.  

In the first installment of the series, You Can’t Recognize What You Don’t Know, Ahmed deliberately obfuscates his face in his self-portraits. “The idea is not about me as an individual,” he says. “It’s about the individual as representative of this performance of masculinity.” Understanding notions of “Arab masculinity” as inextricable from global patriarchy, Ahmed explains that his work invests in breaking down entrenched mythologies surrounding manhood: “the psychological aspect of it, the grotesque nature of it, and how that is deeply rooted not just in Arab culture, but in cultures around the world.” His images reimagine idealized masculinity, drawing on documentary and studio photography from across Africa and the Middle East; Greco-Roman and Pharaonic poses; and advertising aesthetics associated with men’s clothing. 

Ibrahim Ahmed, Figure #29, 2020Ibrahim Ahmed, Figure #26, 2020

Ahmed primarily works with collage, using photographs as a material to “collapse our immediate affiliations” and construct something new “from the rubble.” He calls it an experiment. In Figure #26 (2020), Ahmed pulls a rock with rope, his muscles tensed and an enlarged shadow behind him. With a bare stone background, the composition alludes to iconic classical sculptures such as Myron’s The Discobolus, Rodin’s The Thinker, and, of course, Michelangelo’s David.

In Some Parts Seem Forgotten, the second installment, Ahmed uses archival photographs, predominantly those his father made over a fifty-year span as he was building a successful career as a businessman in the US. He situates these alongside black-and-white studio images from the previous installment to highlight a repetitive history of masculine performance within his family nucleus, as seen in Figure #2 and Figure #5 (both 2020), which show almost caricatured power stances and flexed biceps in Greek statuesque poses. Ahmed appropriates his father’s lens on the world and his belief in such constructs in order to critique the pattern manifesting within himself.

Ibrahim Ahmed, Figure #5, 2020Ibrahim Ahmed, Figure #3, 2020

The third installment, Quickly but Carefully Cross to the Other Side, follows a nonlinear timeline where family album images from the ’50s are spliced with those from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. These include photos of a young Ahmed standing by his father in Figure #4 (2020), the scene adorned with a US flag and a classic Western car, allusions to the “self-made American dream” that his father pursued. The work encapsulates a broader discourse on identity, colonial legacies, and the complexities of cultural affiliations. In Figure #3 (2020) we see an American flag behind a lineup of navy men on a warship alongside a classic American car, with the photographer and his father posing together in traditional Gulf attire. Through his references, Ahmed builds on the work of visual artists throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa—including M’hammed Kilito, Filwa Nazer, Huda Lutfi, and Mahmoud Talaat—as well as curators and writers Farida Youssef and Nadine Nour el Din. 

When Egypt was reimagining itself into a strong, Arab nation-state, new ideas of masculinity were adopted from British colonizers, who occupied the country from 1882 to 1965. Egyptian men were disciplined away from traits considered “feminine, lazy” and instead turned into enforcers. “You are a regulator of the system,” Ahmed tells me. For him, living in an Egypt that has gone through multiple revolutions—from Nasser’s reforms to the Arab Spring—shrugging off colonial ideas of masculinity starts from deep within. “It’s not that you’re going to break free from these things because of some academic writing. That is where my spirituality comes in,” he adds.

Ibrahim Ahmed, Figure #11, 2020. All works from the multipart series I Never Revealed Myself to Them, 2016–2021
© the artist and courtesy Tintera Gallery

Ahmed’s spiritual compass guides his work and centers the idea of universality, where the philosophy of an “annihilation of the self” comes into play. He strives for accessibility, emphasizing everyday experiences in his work and deconstructing ideas of the individual. To achieve this, he attempts to democratize his art to reach beyond academic realms; hence the familiar touchstones of the family photo album and the location of his studio in Ard El Lewa, a working-class neighborhood of Cairo. 

Through his collages, Ahmed dismantles the masks of societal expectations, inviting viewers to confront the intricacies of selfhood as they pertain to hypermasculinity and class, and the legacy of colonialism in enforcing them. In Figure #11 (2020), from the third installment of his series, a mosque towers above men only to be topped by a US flag, beckoning us to confront our understanding the hierarchies of power in self and in society.

12 Essential Photobooks by Women Photographers

Diane Arbus, Child in a nightgown, Wellfleet, Mass., 1957
© The Estate of Diane Arbus Diane Arbus, Inadvertent double exposure of a self-portrait and images from Times Square, N.Y.C., 1957

Diane Arbus Revelations (2022)

One of the best-known image makers of her generation, Diane Arbus was already a legend in the photography community when she died at the age of forty-eight, in 1971. Despite her significant influence, only a relatively small number of her pictures were widely known at the time. Diane Arbus Revelations was released on the fiftieth anniversary of Arbus’s posthumous 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the simultaneous publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph.

Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have resulted in photographs that are often shocking in their purity and steadfast celebration of things as they are. Revelations explores the origins, scope, and aspirations of Arbus’s wholly original vision. Featuring two hundred full-page duotones of Arbus’s photographs spanning her entire career, the volume presents many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images—revealing a subtle yet persistent view of the world.

Myriam Boulos, Untitled, 2017–20
Courtesy the artist

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours (2023)

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

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

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

Kelli Connell, Doorway II, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024)

In Pictures for Charis, Kelli Connell takes inspiration from the life of Charis Wilson and her collaborations with Edward Weston through the contemporary lens of a queer woman artist. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Wilson 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 latter couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. In chasing Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, finding a new kinship with the collaborative duo as she navigates a cultural landscape that has changed, yet remains mired in the same mythologies about nature, the artist, desire, and inspiration. Bringing together photographs and writing by Connell alongside Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes, Pictures for Charis raises vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.

Collect Kelli Connell’s limited-edition print Doorway II, 2015 from Pictures for Charis.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme, 2008
Courtesy the artist

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family (2014)

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s award-winning first photobook, The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacies of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Examining this impact throughout the community and her own family, Frazier intervenes in the histories and narratives of the region. Setting the story across three generations—her grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—Frazier’s statement becomes both personal and political.

In The Notion of Family Frazier acknowledges and expands on the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, enlisting the participation of her family, her mother in particular. In creating these collaborative works, Frazier reinforces the idea of art and image making as transformative, and a means of resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives—both those of her family and of the community at large.

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983
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, The 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.”

Pao Houa Her, Untitled (opium flower with pink fabric), 2019, from the series The Imaginative Landscape
Courtesy the artist Pao Houa Her, Untitled (portrait of a woman in gray by a waterfall), 2019, from the series The Imaginative Landscape

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

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

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

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from Illuminance, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance (2021 Edition)

In her images of keenly observed gestures and details, Rinko Kawauchi reveals the mysterious and beautiful realm at the edge of the everyday world. For Kawauchi, the act of photographing is less a way of referring to the appearance of everyday reality than it is about evoking the luminous openness that exists when the boundaries between things become blurred. As Kawauchi describes, “I want imagination in the photographs—a photograph is like a prologue. You wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ You feel something is going to happen.”

In 2021, ten years after its original publication, Aperture published a new edition of Kawauchi’s beloved photobook, retaining the artist’s original sequence alongside new texts by David Chandler, Masatake Shinohara, and Lesley A. Martin that contribute new context to and perspective on Kawauchi’s influential work.

Justine Kurland, Daisy Chain, 2000

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (2020)

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

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

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

Deana Lawson, Binky & Tony Forever, 2009
Courtesy the artist

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

Deana Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models throughout the US, Caribbean, and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes. Signature to Lawson’s work is an exquisite range of color and attention to detail—from the bedding and furniture in her domestic interiors to the lush plants and Edenic gardens that serve as dramatic backdrops.

Aperture published the artist’s first book, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, in 2018. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in an essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print.

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

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain (2020)

Throughout her thirty-year career, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the structures and legacies of US military power. Lê was born in Saigon in 1960 and evacuated with her family to the United States in 1975. Part of a lineage of artists who have adapted the conventions of landscape photography to explore how conflict has long informed American history and identity, Lê’s work has brought her to photograph former battlefields—spaces reserved for training for or reenacting war—and the noncombatant roles of active service members.

On Contested Terrain is the first comprehensive survey of Lê’s career, featuring her well-known series Small Wars, 29 Palms, and Events Ashore, alongside and the artist’s most recent photographs from the US-Mexico border. “Lê’s photographs are balanced, quiet, and nuanced works of art that offer the viewer an opportunity for contemplation,” Dan Leers writes. “She invites us to examine our own perception of, and involvement in, war as something that is not straightforward or clear-cut.”

Kristine Potter, Knoxville Girl, 2016
Courtesy the artist Kristine Potter, Breakneck, 2016

Kristine Potter: Dark Waters (2023)

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

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

Collect Kristine Potter’s limited-edition print Pearl, 2019, from Dark Waters.

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

Wendy Red Star: Delegation (2022)

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow) centers Native American life and material culture through her imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. The artist’s first major monograph, Delegation, is a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, gleaning from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring.

See here to browse the full collection of featured titles

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A Mother’s Relentless Quest to Find her Missing Son

The mother’s quest began on August 24, 2000. Her name was Yu Lai Wai-ling, a housewife who lived in a public-housing estate with her husband, a civil servant, and her son, an autistic teenager. Outside the walls of their small flat, a typhoon breached Hong Kong and calmed into a storm. The unsettling weather disturbed her son, so her husband suggested a diversion: lunch. After leaving a dim sum restaurant, the three huddled through the Yau Ma Tei underground station—and this was when the boy let go of her hand, sprinted into the crowd, and disappeared.

Ms. Yu was frantic. Her son, named Yu Man-hon, was a two-year-old in a fifteen-year-old’s lanky body. He couldn’t speak. How could he manage the packed underground station alone? She went to the police, whose website still displays a missing person photograph of her son: a thin boy, his eyes set slightly apart, his mouth drooping. Man-hon began a journey whose mysterious sequence we can reconstruct from a Hong Kong Immigration Department report released after his disappearance. After somehow traveling twelve miles north, he inexplicably appeared behind the Chinese border at 1:47 PM, despite lacking the permit needed to cross. At the Lo Wu border checkpoint in Shenzhen, Chinese immigration officials found the boy answered to Cantonese, not Mandarin, and returned him to Hong Kong.

Billy H.C. Kwok, A statue of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy and compassion in Chinese mythology, atop Ms. Yu’s living room cabinet, 2022 Billy H.C. Kwok, Five roosters in Ms. Yu’s living room, 2022

Immigration officials there noted the boy’s disheveled state. He wore shoes from a Chinese brand. He didn’t respond when they asked him about Andy Lau, one of Hong Kong’s most famous celebrities. Panicking, the boy flailed his arms and spat at the officers, who handcuffed him to a chair. To them, he was clearly an “illegal” migrant. His poverty, the officers inferred, suggested a Chinese, rather than Hong Kong, origin, so they dragged him back into Shenzhen. That fateful last act separated Ms. Yu from her son.

In the coming days, Ms. Yu’s tearful, inconsolable cries circulated across the newspapers and TV news. A massive force of Hong Kong police officers flooded the city. Search teams scoured Shenzhen and Guangdong. Was Man-hon still alive? Had gangsters captured him? Did he become another unhoused migrant in China? The boy came to represent Hong Kong itself—a phantom languishing inside the foreign motherland that had absorbed the former British colony only three years prior.

Billy H.C. Kwok heard about Ms. Yu and her son when he was a secondary-school student in Hong Kong. Be careful at the border, his mother had told him. Now a boy not much older than him had vanished into China. Living today between Hong Kong and Taiwan, Kwok works as a photojournalist; his images for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal depict the contentious new Sinophone century: a Hong Kong protestor raises a flaming stick at riot police, steelworkers protest in Guangzhou, and a man fixes a flagpole outside a Taiwanese temple he’s taken over with Chinese flags. In the National Archives of Taiwan, Kwok uncovered letters written by those captured and later executed during the White Terror, the authoritarian wave of oppression that began in 1947. The letters were never delivered, until Kwok intervened to complete the correspondence. For his project Last Letters (2017–ongoing), he approached their authors’ families and photographed those who agreed to read them. The most fascinating part, Kwok told me, was observing the children of these victims kowtowing before statues of Chiang Kai-shek, the right-wing leader who presided over the persecution, only to gradually realize he had authored their own family tragedies. Kwok appreciated how these statues, whose removal he also documents, constituted both objects and manifestations of political ideology. Having made this archival interrogation into one alternative China, a project oriented less around visuality than the failure and persistence of ideological narratives within objects, Kwok wondered how he could investigate the story of Hong Kong.

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He recalled that lost boy he’d heard about growing up, whose story hinted at a surreptitious way to interrogate Hong Kong’s vexed status without triggering Chinese censorship. In June 2022, Kwok cold-called Ms. Yu, whose number he found in one of the many classified advertisements she’d placed looking for her son decades earlier. When he introduced himself as someone researching Man-hon, Ms. Yu told him to read the internet and the newspapers. I’ve read all the newspapers and the internet, he told her. You’re the only source. He plied Ms. Yu to meet him at a restaurant, where he encountered a woman he described as deeply saddened and driven by love and discipline. By their third meeting, she invited him to her apartment.

Kwok lived only two stations away, and he visited her every week for nine months, each time carrying his camera to acclimate her to the idea of perhaps one day being photographed. However, the photographs they focused on were not his, but hers. For one astonishing consequence of Ms. Yu’s son’s disappearance is how her search led her to deploy many of the techniques of art practice, such as object making, photography, and performance. Kwok’s ongoing project has been to curate and present her archive related to her son’s disappearance, and his initial instantiation, For So Many Years When I Close My Eyes (2022–23), combines elements of her images and records with his own maps and photographs created in locations related to her story.

Few forces in the universe are as powerful as a mother’s grief. Supported by donations from people who’d heard about her loss, Ms. Yu began creating notices asking if anyone had seen Man-hon. This media project included newspaper classified ads, text-based spots aired on TV and Hong Kong trains, and, remarkably, playing cards featuring Man-hon’s portrait. This collision of public memory and a simple deck of cards reminded Kwok of how the US military trained the soldiers invading Iraq to identify Saddam Hussein’s leadership circle by printing their faces on playing cards. Ms. Yu also posted missing person flyers in Shenzhen and elsewhere in southern China. A few of the flyers resemble zines or print art. Monochromatic enigmas, they show her son’s missing person photograph, an embellished image of him with long hair, and only the Chinese words missing person.

Playing cards and a transparent wallet made by Ms. Yu featuring Man-hon’s portrait, ca. 2000–2003 Polaroid images taken by Ms. Yu in southern Chinese cities, ca. 2000–2005

During these visits, she searched for Man-hon among the transient and disabled men she encountered. As Kwok explained to me, she would see an unhoused man, approach him, and, like some early Christian saint, brush the hair from his face. After verifying the man wasn’t Han’er (her son Han, in Chinese), she would take his portrait. The resulting Polaroids include, in her handwriting, the man’s name, the location, and the date. Your eyes fall upon the men’s shoulders, shrunken from hunger. Their necks seem too slender, their heads and often matted, overgrown hair loom over their torsos, grown tiny from want. Another man, smiling, looks comparatively nourished. His shirt and trousers are blemished with stains. His toes jut from his right boot.

“By photographing individuals who were not Man-hon, she was able to indirectly prove his existence through some method of elimination,” Kwok writes. However, these portraits did not prove he was living. They transferred his identity onto a substitute object, another man who might temporarily have contained the possibility of being Man-hon. Each portrait depicts someone not there, a vicarious memento mori. Her portraiture resembles few others because of her almost random relationship to those she photographed. Unlike a social reformer such as Jacob Riis, Ms. Yu had no investment in uplifting their plight. Their identities were almost incidental to her project, yet she documented them compulsively. Her unstudied repetition, obsessive seriality, and endless male subjects all recall efforts to index a specific population, but her portraits are not mug shots, ID cards, or a form of surveillance. She does not seek to exercise power over the “long hairs,” as Kwok called these men. Her figures look the viewer in the eye without any sense of shame, but also lack the inverted grandeur that suffuses, say, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936). Her Polaroids sometimes present young men roaming the nocturnal city, a genre whose closest Western correlative might be bohemian nightlife photographs, though the men here seem trapped in far more destitute straits.

The boy came to represent Hong Kong—a phantom languishing inside the foreign motherland.

Having systematically “cleared” one area, as Kwok put it, Ms. Yu went to the next. She began in Shenzhen with her husband, then gradually traveled alone through the provinces of Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, and Hunan, miles inland. One Polaroid isolates Mao’s famous slogan on a public building: “Serve the people.” The phrase can’t help but come off as charged, but Kwok describes Ms. Yu as “not really into political things.” Her portraits of the poor are only a by-product of her quest—but they hint at the underbelly of the Chinese economic paradox. No other country has lifted more people from poverty, yet China’s manufacturing boom relied on rural workers’ moving to urban factories and forfeiting their “iron rice bowl” of social benefits for a precarious life of contract labor. Tens of millions lost their jobs when state-owned enterprises in places such as Shenzhen conducted mass layoffs so that China could enter the World Trade Organization in 2001. Left behind was a generation of lost men—the Chinese lumpenproletariat profiled in Ms. Yu’s accidental visual ethnography. While unmotivated by anything as idealistic as transnational solidarity, she bridged the two Chinas—the declining former British financial center from which she ventured and the rising superpower that absorbed it—and created a point of contact between the lower classes of both.

Studio photographs sent to Ms. Yu by strangers claiming the young men pictured were Man-hon, ca. 2000–2010

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From either side of this border came grifters, hustlers, and con men. Fortune tellers claimed they could reveal her son’s location, for a price. As Ms. Yu posted more flyers, she started receiving letters from mainland Chinese people who claimed they had found her son. “Seeing is believing,” as one of them wrote, so her correspondents often sent a picture—a studio portrait of someone they claimed was Man-hon. None resemble him at all. The men possess too much reality, their setting too little. In one portrait, a man wearing a camouflage jacket, his hair unkempt, his feet filthy, sits inside a brightly ersatz setting: a pot of plastic flowers beside him, a painted backdrop of an enormous cartoon candle. Does he exist in reality or in a cartoon universe of exuberant kitsch? His mouth hangs open, as if he doesn’t know.

In another portrait (featured on the cover of this issue), a man wears a three-piece suit and black loafers, an immaculate part in his hair. He crosses his legs next to a statue of a panting dog. Behind him stands a green Bob Ross–like painting of a European hamlet. While these portraits served as “evidence” of her son’s existence, they look aggressively, haphazardly constructed, as if someone condensed the elaborate staging and dramatized backgrounds of the photographer Wang Qingsong into a tacky prom photograph starring the poorest of the poor. Man-hon’s face, taken from that original missing person photo, sometimes appears photoshopped onto the male figure, creating a portrait of a half-fictional person and a “loop,” Kwok called it, back in time.

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The letters asked for money. Others offered something else: speculative biographies of Man-hon’s future life. “I am doing well in Northeast China, and these two kind people brought me to a doctor specializing in neurology in Harbin City, who cured my mental illness,” writes one faux Man-hon in a 2005 letter. Ms. Yu tore up at least one letter. Then her innate sense of organization took over, and she taped it back together. “You never know who is in the photos,” Kwok told me, but he had a guess. He noticed certain figures reappeared despite the letters’ coming from different addresses, and concluded Ms. Yu’s pen pals were human traffickers.

“I won’t beat around the bush. I just want to help you find a brand-new son,” begins another. “His name is Tang Xiaolong, born on April 13, 1986. . . . He will make you love him like an object.” If Ms. Yu wanted to be introduced to her replacement son, another correspondent told her, she could meet him on October 20, 2003, beneath the dragon statue at Longcheng Plaza in Shenzhen, which was the first Chinese Special Economic Zone designed to attract foreign investment. When Man-hon disappeared, the city’s GDP was dwarfed by its Hong Kong neighbor ($22 billion versus $171 billion), but as Shenzhen became the so-called Silicon Valley of China, the two cities swapped places economically. Ms. Yu did not show up for the meeting. Kwok himself trekked to Longcheng Plaza recently, and his gleaming but somber photograph of the dragon statue seems to evoke the city’s intense gentrification and China’s own triumphant self-image—a perhaps too-glossy counterpoint to Ms. Yu’s raw, street-level eye. This photograph appeared in his 2023 installation at Hong Kong’s Para Site art center, accompanied by his deployment of geolocation to pin down Ms. Yu’s portraits of unhoused men and the studio portraits. His mapping suggested that she and her correspondents worked not far from each other, each photographing Chinese men who were not her son.

Billy H.C. Kwok, Longcheng Plaza, 2023 Billy H.C. Kwok, Installation view of For So Many Years When I Close My Eyes at Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Hong Kong, 2023
Courtesy the artist

Ms. Yu created more than three hundred Polaroids and received around one hundred letters, but later made more portraits, using other cameras and her phone, not included in Kwok’s project. She also says that four-fifths of the total material was stolen by a Chinese businessman who claimed he wanted to make a documentary about her. Kwok sees himself as a “researcher” or “investigator” behind a photographic practice “mostly driven by her intentions.” As he told me in his Cantonese-inflected English, “She really think what photography is.” Inverting the usual gendered division of art, she captured men living on the streets, while he photographed the domestic space of her apartment, her five rooster figurines peering out her window, their cries meant to scare off ominous spirits during Chinese funerals.

One day, Ms. Yu asked Kwok if he would create her portrait. She told him where to set up the camera and where she would sit. Just before Kwok clicked the shutter, she closed her eyes. When he asked why, Ms. Yu responded, “Photography is capturing a happiness moment.” Every day, she explained, she closes her eyes and dreams of her son. After he made a print, Kwok asked her to inscribe a message for Man-hon in the negative space of the background. To his surprise, she wrote out her statement immediately, as if it was some text she already knew. These are the words I say every morning, she told him, when I gaze out the window and look for my son. The first sentence reads, “Han’er, whom I miss day and night, are you still safe?”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 254, “Counter Histories.”

Picturing Warmth and Belonging in Muslim Communities

The first night he arrived at his new apartment in Baltimore, last year, Mahtab Hussain—in town for a residency at the Maryland Institute College of Art—noticed the sound of the azan, the traditional Muslim call to prayer. “I stood on the desk and opened the window to hear where it was coming from. That was the only time I heard it from my apartment,” he told me recently. “It felt like a sign.”

Hussain, a portrait photographer who has been documenting how Islam is lived in his native Britain for the last fifteen years, didn’t expect to be confronted with a Muslim presence in his temporary hometown so soon. “It cemented the idea that I had to make work in Baltimore,” he says. Immediately, Hussain started to map out the local mosques. Five were a bike ride away, among them Masjid Ul Haqq, first established in 1946 under Elijah Muhammad, at the time the leader of the Nation of Islam. (Its congregation has since shifted to a Sunni practice of Islam.) Hussain visited Ul Haqq the next day.

Mahtab Hussain, Linda Ahmed, New York, 2022Mahtab Hussain, Creekboyz, Baltimore, 2023

A prayer call had incidentally set in motion the latest installment of Hussain’s ongoing project to bring visibility to a community that is habitually underrepresented in the arts and misrepresented in the public imagination. “I want to visually articulate what the American Muslim experience is,” he says, “and make people look at Muslims in a different way.” His series Muslims in America (2021–ongoing) has already generated segments in Los Angeles, Toronto, and New York, distinct portfolios reflective of the diversity of what it can mean to be an American Muslim today. Muslims in the United States aren’t monolithic, the series proclaims; they resonate, instead, with idiosyncrasies from one town to another, like the living communities they are. If the images’ subjects in New York are strikingly queer and Toronto’s are predominantly Middle Eastern, Hussain “quickly realized Baltimore was going to be a Black experience.”

Even though African Americans account for more than a fifth of the US Muslim population (a number that is growing), the validity of their faith and the role it plays in strengthening the social fabric of vulnerable neighborhoods across major cities is rarely acknowledged. For Hussain, Baltimore’s Black Muslim minority—routinely ignored by the city’s other Muslim communities, not to mention by society and culture in general—stood out as an ideal subject.

Mahtab Hussain, Masood Ahmed, Los Angeles, 2022

Hussain found the vitality of his Baltimore sitters’ religious practice and their networks compellingly at odds with the grim reality of where they lived: marginalized neighborhoods with names such as Cherry Hill and Upton/Druid Heights. “The poverty and the violence is right there for you to see,” Hussain observed, adding that while in the United Kingdom the aggressive stance of the male youths he portrayed tended to be performative, “in Baltimore, you actually feel your life is on the line.” At the same time, Hussain was struck by the warmth, sense of belonging, and empowerment he encountered in Maryland: “Islam really connects with these young men and women, giving them a grounding and peace they badly need.” The religion derived hope Hussain found among individuals who regularly lose friends to drug abuse and gang violence affected him personally.

It’s no wonder that a sense of pride emanates naturally from the people in Hussain’s photographs, who are, for once, being seen rather than vilified.

While Baltimore’s Muslim fellowship embraced the forty-two-year-old photographer from Birmingham, England, he, in turn, fell in love with its fluid, accepting, inquisitive version of a religion he thought he was familiar with. “The conversations taking place in these communities are about home, love for those around us, meaning, and, above all, about finding brotherhood and sisterhood,” he explains. Hussain, the son of Pakistani immigrants, grew up in a practicing Muslim household but always questioned if he was devout enough. He says that the Muslims in America project has made him reassess his faith: “I had no idea that making new friends through my work in mosques in American cities would bring me closer to my faith. These beautiful people are teaching me to see Islam in another way. It always felt to me like either you were in or you were out. But the Muslims I am meeting approach their faith as a journey, less focused on right or wrong.”

Mahtab Hussain, Sameen Brown, Baltimore, 2023Mahtab Hussain, Manal Syed, New York, 2021

The fact that most of the men and women in Hussain’s portraits appear attractive isn’t by accident; the photographer uses formal compositions strategically and seductively. “I want people to walk out of a museum or gallery space having seen these faces thinking, Wow, they are gorgeous! That’s enough for me, because it means they are questioning their preconceived ideas of what a Muslim looks like,” he tells me. To this end, Hussain cannily deploys aesthetic devices used in classical portraiture. Whether male or female, young or old, his subjects pose with a preternaturally noble dignity and self-possession that belie the turmoil of their daily lives.

It’s no wonder that a sense of pride emanates naturally from the people in Hussain’s photographs, who are, for once, being seen rather than vilified. Hussain emphasizes the importance of this approach. “These are men and women who appreciate being celebrated rather than patronized or labeled as threatening. My intention is to let them own their identity and experience. If I show them as the vibrant individuals they are, and people walk away in awe, I’ve done my job, because a space for a different conversation is now open.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire,” under the column Viewfinder.

Aperture Elects Zackary Drucker to the Board of Trustees

Aperture announces the appointment of Zackary Drucker to the Board of Trustees. An influential artist, activist, and producer of award-winning television series and documentaries, Drucker has collaborated extensively with Aperture, serving as guest editor for Aperture magazine’s bestselling “Future Gender” issue, which considers trans lives in photography from the nineteenth century to the present—a publication that continues to have a resounding impact in the field. Drucker contributed an original commission to Aperture’s “Orlando” issue, guest edited by Tilda Swinton, and participated in the accompanying exhibition, which traveled internationally. Named an honoree at the 65th Anniversary Aperture gala in October 2017, Drucker has actively supported Aperture’s range of arts programming, shining a spotlight on photography’s instrumental role in shaping cultural imagination.

“Zackary has been our friend, our colleague, and our partner, and now we are honored to have her join Aperture as a Trustee,” says Cathy M. Kaplan, Chair of the Board of Trustees for Aperture. “Sharing insight from her own art practice and advocacy, along with a deep understanding of Aperture’s longstanding dedication to creating community around the medium of photography, Zackary is a most welcome addition to our Board.”

“From my engagement with Aperture on the creation of ‘Future Gender’ and on a range of events and programs, I can attest to the immediacy and vitality of the work of this organization,” Drucker says. “I’m excited to take on the role of Trustee and continue to contribute to Aperture, especially at this time of growth towards a new public space that promises even greater visibility and potential.”  

Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, director, and producer who has dedicated her work to telling stories that expand our cultural understanding of difference. Her photography and multimedia art has been featured in exhibitions internationally, and she is a cocurator of the film and performance program for the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Her television and film credits include directing the Hulu Original documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl (2023); codirecting the Sundance award-winning HBO original documentary film The Stroll (2023) andthe HBO documentary series The Lady and the Dale (2021); and producing the Amazon series Transparent (2014–19). Drucker has performed and exhibited her work in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others, and serves on the Board of Directors for Outfest and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

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Ed Templeton’s Delirious Skater Chronicle

Ed Templeton occupies the rare position of having been a professional skateboarder and two-time World Skateboarding champion, as well as a photographer and artist working within the skateboard community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond.

The artist’s recent monograph, Wires Crossed (Aperture, 2023), offers an insider’s look at a subculture in the making and reflects the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world Templeton helped create. Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused skateboarding community, the volume is illustrated with photographs, collages, texts, maps, and other ephemera from Templeton’s journals. This work, much of it previously unpublished and unseen, explores Templeton’s own journey as an image-maker, as well as the lives of professional skateboarders as they spent long hours crisscrossing the world on tour, reveling in their newfound status as rock star–like figures and the eternal search for new terrain to skate.

Here, the editor Lesley A. Martin speaks with Templeton about his entry into photography, being part of the coming of age of skateboarding in the 1990s and early 2000s, and condensing twenty-plus years of image-making into his monograph.

Ed Templeton, Elissa Steamer, New Haven, Connecticut, 2001 Ed Templeton, Mike Maldonado, Iowa, 1998

Lesley A. Martin: So, Ed—let’s start with a little bit of exposition for those who know you primarily through your photography: what is a Toy Machine? What is a skate demo? Who are these people in the book? What is going on?

Ed Templeton: Toy Machine is the name of a skateboard brand. I started it in 1993. We make, market, and sell skateboard decks for the most part, along with videos, wheels, t-shirts, and accessories, but mainly skateboard decks. Since the beginning we have sponsored a team of skateboarders, both amateurs and professionals. We discover skaters we think are great and sponsor them with free product. And then they move up the ladder, becoming a paid amateur, and then go pro.

Going pro means you have your name on a skateboard deck. It’s like Lebron James having his name on a pair of Nikes, but on a way smaller scale. When you go pro for skating you get paid more, both a monthly stipend and a royalty from the sales of your signature board. Many of these pros also have shoe sponsors and clothing sponsors that pay them. The top guys with a lot of sponsors and endorsement deals can earn into the high-six figures, and a rare few into seven figures. But in reality the bulk of pros earn in the mid-five figures.

To have a shoe and a deck with your name means you, to put it crassly, have become a marketable commodity, a celebrity in the skate microcosm. And the way you become that is through skateboard videos and having a presence in skateboard magazines.

Martin: It seems like being a pro skater also means being really good at crafting a cool personal image—about creating the perfect avatar, even in the days before social media?

Templeton: Video clips are our primary cultural currency. As a skateboard company our main interface with the public comes from our ads in skateboard magazines and our videos. The skaters we sponsor, their main job is to go out and skate, and bring back video clips and photographs. We use these photos and video clips in our promotional materials—print ads and Instagram posts, etc.

A time-honored tradition in skateboarding is for a company to make a branded skateboard video. A team will travel the world filming in different locations, collecting video foot- age, and then we edit it all together, each pro having their own part with their own music. This is a way for the personality and style of each individual skater to shine through. And these parts are what make a skater known to the world. Skate celebrities are born out of these videos. The people in the photo- graphs in this book are pro and amateur skateboarders, many of them were sponsored by Toy Machine, or some other company I was associated with, and that means we would travel together on demo tours.

A skateboard demo tour is exactly the same as a band going on tour. There’s the talent, the equipment, the support crew, and the media all piled into a van and holding live performances hosted by various skate shops. Sometimes we skate on a crappy asphalt parking lot at a strip mall with makeshift wooden ramps, and other times we get a shiny new cement skatepark. The shops pay us for the appearance, we skate for the crowd that shows up, and then we usually hang around skating with the locals and signing autographs. The tours last anywhere from two weeks to a month, usually during summer months.

Ed Templeton, Portrait of Tom Rowe, Boulder, Colorado, 2004 Ed Templeton, Matt Bennett, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 2005

Martin: I’m interested in what was happening in 1993 that made it a good time for you to start something like Toy Machine, and how the scene around skate culture has changed since then.

Templeton: It was a terrible time, really. From 1990 to 1991 I had a great sponsor called New Deal Skateboards. That first year they sent me to Europe to compete in the contest circuit and I ended up winning all of the key contests. One of them was the World Championships in Münster, Germany. So I became world champion at age eighteen, my first year being a pro. I had a little cultural capital in the skateboard world, and that’s probably why I thought I might be able to strike out on my own. I had a friend on the team, Mike Vallely who had always wanted to start his own company. He talked me into leaving New Deal to start something with him. Our company was called “TV.” I don’t think we fully knew what we were doing. Skateboarding as a whole had shrunk; it was really a low point in skateboarding. Money was tight, and it caused a lot of strife. We dissolved the whole thing rather quickly. The year 1992 was hard for me. I had no job and no prospects. I was calling everybody in the industry trying to find a place to start my own company. The fallback would be to just get sponsored by another company as a pro skater. But for me, once I got the taste of doing it myself, I wanted to do my own brand. I liked the idea of calling the shots. But I didn’t have any money. I’m just a guy with an idea and a name in skateboarding trying to pitch company ideas to people who had companies already. Finally, that worked. The guy who had done Vision Skateboards, Brad Dorfman, listened to my pitch and said, “Okay, let’s do it.” So I started Toy Machine, and he was the financial backer. After a year, I was approached by Tod Swank, a former pro skater and owner of Foundation Skateboards. He wanted Toy Machine to join his skateboard distribution hub. We made a hand- shake deal. That was nearly thirty years ago now. Our main thing is making skateboards. And traditionally it was videos, too, although that aspect has changed now with Instagram, YouTube, and everything like that. In the early days, videos were a big part of our yearly sales. We would make a video and sell that video. Now everybody expects it all for free.

Martin: So, you’re a media company too.

Templeton: Essentially, Toy Machine is a marketing company. Because for the most part all skateboards are exactly the same. They’re all seven-ply hard rock Canadian maple decks with different marketing applied to them. What makes Toy Machine different is our style, graphics, team, and brand identity. That’s what I do. I do the graphics, and set the tone, language, and ethos for the company. That style is reflected in our videos and advertisements. The kind of skaters we sponsor, the music, the visuals, all that is what makes people want to buy something from Toy Machine.

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Martin: How would you describe a Toy Machine skater, or the Toy Machine ethos?

Templeton: I came to the realization that I’m responsible for marketing and selling the very thing I love, skateboarding, which gave me some cognitive dissonance. I hate the concept of advertising and the psychological gymnastics that go into selling and advertising something. My solution to this was that everything should be a joke and that I should dial up the crass commercialism to eleven. I asked myself, “What would the marketers at Nike or Big Pharma wish they could say or do to sell their product but can’t?” The central concept for me has always been mind control, brainwashing, and indoctrination. Toy Machine has a thing called the Consumer Control Center—our full name for it is Toy Machine: A Bloodsucking Skateboard Company. It’s something right out of Orwell’s 1984. We call the fans of Toy Machine our Loyal Pawns. Even using the word “Bloodsucking” was never meant to invoke vampires but a kind of money-grubbing corporation. And so all of our marketing language has always been stuff like, “We control your minds and your credit card, purchasing Toy Machine is not a choice, it’s mandatory.” And our fans get the joke, they know it’s all tongue in cheek. Every time I sit down to design an ad, I know I’m talking directly to a fifteen-year-old reading their skateboard magazine in detention. I was that kid once too, so I wonder what would make them chuckle. I’ll say something like, “Get addicted to the most powerful drug on the planet, skateboarding.” Stuff Nike could never get away with because it’s just too caustic. We are not taking ourselves too seriously.

Another part of Toy Machine’s identity is that skateboarding always comes first. So all the stuff I just talked about is just the window dressing, the decoration. The central principle is great skateboarding. Our ads and videos are filled with really great skaters. But we never sponsored skaters just because they were great, that would be like having a team of robots. For us talent is number one, but a close number two is personality and style.

Ed Templeton, Portrait of Erik Ellington, Paris 2003 Polaroids by Ed Templeton, 1998–2005

Martin: I’m thinking about your association in the mid- to late-’90s with the Beautiful Losers movement, which really was one of the first to forefront graffiti and skate artists with subcultural roots. Can you tell me a little bit about how you thought of yourself as an artist when you were first starting out? Because on one hand you’re a skater, but on the other hand you’re talking about this image making, and image creation, and creative life too.

Templeton: The minute I found skateboarding, I was immersed in a world of creative people—even as far back as middle school. Having a skateboard was the ticket into a new world. There were these two punk guys I had always steered clear of. I thought these guys wanted to kick my ass. But once I had a skateboard under my arm they were like, “Hey, come hang out with us.” They gave me a cassette tape with Dead Kennedys and other bands. My mind was blown. The Beautiful Losers cluster—I think we are all loathe to call it a “movement”— was the same. I mean Thomas Campbell, who was also in the Beautiful Losers exhibition, is someone who I met because he was shooting photos for skateboard magazines. He was shooting me for my interview in Transworld Skateboarding magazine. Aaron Rose, who was the visionary mastermind behind it all, was running Alleged Gallery in New York. It was on Ludlow Street. And he was giving skateboarders the chance to show their artwork. In 1994 I did my first show there called Waiting for the Earth to Explode. I’d been aware of the art world from early on. In 1990, the same year I turned pro for skating, I started painting. On that first trip to Europe, I went to see museums when I wasn’t skating because I really thought this might be my only chance to see Europe. I wanted to squeeze as much out of it as I could. I came back from that trip declaring, naively, “I’m gonna be a painter!” So my art life and my skateboard life have been on a parallel track from the beginning. Most people know me from skateboarding, but a lot of people from the art world were unaware that I was a skateboarder. Photography came four years later. And this book is a culmination of literally my first idea as a photographer, which was to document this culture that I’m part of.

This book is a culmination of literally my first idea as a photographer, which was to document this culture that I’m part of.

Martin: What was it that prompted your embrace of photography?

Templeton: I think it was two things really. Thomas Campbell was going on a surf trip to Morocco for several months and he asked me to take care of his art books while he was gone. Among the stack of books were Teenage Lust by Larry Clark and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin. Up to that point I had a naive view of what capital-P Photography could be. I thought it was more like National Geographic–style documentary or going out on assignment to cover something, like war or famine.

Seeing the photographs in those two books had a big impact on me—they changed my understanding of photography. These artists were not going out and shooting something happening in the outside world, they were shooting their own world, giving us all a glimpse into their slice of life and time and the particular way in which they saw it. So here I am traveling the world with these amazing people who get paid to skateboard for a living. They’re celebrities in their world. They skate hard every day and party hard every night, acting like rockstars with a “live fast, die young” sort of mentality, and I’m one of them. I came to the realization that I should be documenting this incredible life I get to live. I felt dismayed that I wasted four years.

Image collage by Ed Templeton, 1998–2010

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Martin: But you kept sketchbooks full of notes, drawings, and ephemera from the beginning of your life on the road, correct?

Templeton: Yeah. I did keep a spotty diary. I wasn’t as diligent as I should have been, but I do have notes from over the years. I always kept a sketchbook with me because I like to draw. It was mostly crappy sketches and little notes about what happened that day and where we were—nothing profound, no deep thoughts about life. But as time went on, these books got more elaborate and I started really keeping more of a diary. Now the diary part has almost squished out the drawings and a lot of the pages are all text. They were really helpful in making this book.

Martin: How did you draw on those journals for this book—what’s the relationship of what we’re seeing in Wires Crossed to those original sketchbooks?

Templeton: It started as just a reference. Looking at the sketchbooks was just a way to figure out what year or place a photograph was from since I’m kind of spotty about writing dates on proof sheets. But I soon realized that certain diary entries could be a great way to illuminate and contextualize some of the photographs. In many cases I have texts that speak about the photographs themselves or the circumstances leading up to them. I ended up scanning hand-written entries directly out of the book. So you’re seeing what I wrote and what I was thinking at the time.

Ed Templeton, Austin Stephens with hurt hands, Paris, 2003 Ed Templeton, Austin Stephens, Nate Broussard, and Josh Harmony, Massacre Rocks State Park, Idaho, 2003

Martin: I’m curious if you could describe a little bit about what it has meant to you to look back over this time span of twenty-odd years. What has it meant for you personally? And what do you hope is of interest or value to others?

Templeton: It’s been a very rewarding experience. It’s really unbelievable what our life was like and even though I wish I had done an even better job documenting it, it’s pretty trippy looking back and having this rich visual document and being a character in it. I feel like this book has two audiences. At its core it’s a photography book. I started this project to answer the question, “What is it like to be a pro skateboarder?” I wanted to give people an inside glimpse into our world. And I think it works on that level as a photographic document. Fans of photography can see it and enjoy the photographs, the time period, the moments portrayed, and the bigger story being woven together. It’s a time capsule.

But then there’s another audience in the skateboard world who will see in these people the celebrities they grew up watching in skateboard videos and looking at in skateboard magazines. For a skateboarder it’s a behind-the-scenes look at a world they may be familiar with, but I hope this book will give them a deeper insight.

Martin: I’m curious what you’ve learned about your photographic work during the process of looking back. Have you noted an evolution?

Templeton: I had been organizing the photographs for decades. Since skateboarding and photography have been so entwined for me, the work I needed for this book was scattered throughout my archive like a complex root system. It’s hard to extract it all out. I had to systematically look at every photo I had ever shot to determine if it could potentially be in this book, which in itself was a re-education. That first edit was around five thousand photos. Then I set to cutting that in half. Then I would set it aside for a spell before returning to cut it in half again, and so on over many years until I had about two or three hundred photos that could conceivably fit into a book. I have definitely noticed a change in my work from that time to now. It’s hard to quantify. There are things I notice I was doing then that I don’t do now, but also vice-versa. I think overall the longer you look through a camera, the better you get.

One of the things I look back on with regret is how much I missed. I was a participant and an observer. So I was often driving the tour van, which means I couldn’t shoot photos. When we arrived in town for a demo, my job was to skateboard for the kids, sign autographs for two hours, and only then could I can grab my camera and shoot photos. All that time I’m skating and signing autographs there’s all this stuff happening that I’m missing. So I wasn’t as present as a photographer as I could have been. There was a constant struggle deciding what hat to wear.

Ed Templeton, Lance Dawes skates an empty pool, Malibu, California, Greg Hunt in foreground, 2001 Ed Templeton, Self-portrait, Texas, 1998

Martin: Did being behind the camera as an observer put a distance between you and your subjects?

Templeton: Yeah, for sure, but I feel really fortunate that the people who I was on tour with had a real trust in me. They never seemed to care that I was shooting photos. Maybe I had the camera out so often that they just forgot that I had it and didn’t really care. But I mean it wasn’t as intrusive as you might think.

Martin: I think that’s the secret of somebody like Jim Goldberg for example, who I know is another influence of yours. Part of the skill set is learning to be a fly on the wall. Being both there and not there. You’ve published more than twenty books of your photographs. Is all that work a byproduct of being on the road? Or are those projects that you developed conscientiously? Because it seems all intertwined. What makes Wires Crossed stand out or different from the work that you’ve published before?

Templeton: Everything I’ve ever photographed, for the most part, has been something I saw going from point A to point B while doing something else. If I’m on a skate tour, I’m shooting photos of the skaters, but I’m also shooting street photos while I’m walking around, and then that work might end up in other projects. For books of mine like Wayward Cognitions or Tangentially Parenthetical, a lot of that work was probably shot while on a skate tour, but it has nothing to do with skate- boarding. So in that way the work is really tied together on that level. One of my books, The Golden Age of Neglect, has many photos that overlap with Wires Crossed, which has caused me a lot of worry, because I ideally would rather not publish photos more than once. Although that book has a number of photos that fall into Wires Crossed territory, it’s not the whole picture. This book is whole picture.

Wires Crossed Limited Edition book and print set 1200.00 This limited-edition box set features a unique hand-painted print, enclosed in a specially-designed slipcase, accompanied by a signed copy of Wires Crossed.

$1,200.00Add to cart

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Wires Crossed Limited Edition book and print set

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Gelatin Silver Print with acrylic ink on Ilford fiber based paper with painting writing on recto
Printed by artist in his home darkroom
Paper Size: 8 x 10 inches
Edition 30 prints with unique painting and 5 Artist Proof prints
Signed, Stamped and numbered on the verso by the artist
Presented in specially designed Slipcase with red metallic foil lettering, accompanied by a signed copy of Wires Crossed

Book:
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 264
Number of images: 278
Publication date: 2023-05-23
Measurements: 8.6 x 11 x 1.25 inches
ISBN: 9781683952541

Aperture is pleased to offer this very special limited-edition book and print set at a special pre-publication price.

This limited-edition box set of Ed Templeton’s Wires Crossed features a unique hand painted print, Mike Maldonado, Davenport, Iowa, 1998, printed by the artist in his home darkroom and enclosed in a specially designed slipcase for the accompanying publication Wires Crossed. Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding as it came of age, Ed Templeton’s Wires Crossed pulses with the raw, combustive energy of Templeton’s image-making from the last twenty-plus years. Illustrated by photographs, collages, texts, maps, and other ephemera from Templeton’s journals, Wires Crossed offers an insider’s look at a subculture in the making and reflects the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world he helped create.

Occupying the rare position of having been a professional skateboarder, a two-time World Skateboarding champion, as well as a photographer and artist working within the skateboard community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond, Templeton’s work first gained recognition as part of the Beautiful Losers collective loosely gathered around Aaron Rose’s Alleged Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This work, much of it previously unpublished and unseen, explores Templeton’s own journey as an image maker, as well as the lives of professional skateboarders as they spent long hours crisscrossing the world on tour, reveling in their newfound status as rock star–like figures and the eternal search for new terrain to skate. Interviews between Templeton and fellow pro-skaters and friends add compelling detail about the pressures and pleasures of life on the road, and what it’s like to obsessively pursue an art form—whether on their decks or behind the camera.

Each print, printed by the artist in his home darkroom, has unique handwriting and painted detail on the front, and is signed, stamped and numbered on the back. A perfect collectible for photography, art and skate enthusiasts alike.
Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed exhibition is currently on view at the Bonnefanten, Maastricht, Netherlands through September 17, 2023.

Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed was made possible, in part, with generous support from RVCA / Artist Network Program.

The proceeds of the sale of this work benefit the artist and support Aperture’s not-for-profit publishing and public programs. About the Artist

Ed Templeton (born in Los Angeles, 1972) is a star skateboarder, entrepreneur, painter, and street photographer. He has published over twenty books of his photographs, not including the volumes of zines he has self-produced over the years. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including at Alleged Gallery, New York; Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles; Modern Art, London; and Aki-X Gallery, Tokyo, and in solo museum exhibitions at Museum Het Domein, Netherlands, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He is considered part of the Beautiful Losers, a group of artists who, in the 1990s, defined the high-brow/low-brow mix of graffiti, skate culture, and art.
Brian Anderson is a Queens-based professional skateboarder. Anderson was named Thrasher magazine’s “Skater of the Year” in 1999, the same year he won the World Cup of Skateboarding title.
Erik Ellington is a professional skateboarder, designer, and entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. He is the founder of Human Recreational Services, a luxury footwear company.
Justin Regan is head of global brand and product marketing at Vans Skateboarding.
Elissa Steamer, one of the first women to become a professional skateboarder, is a four-time X Games gold medalist.
Deanna Templeton is a photographer based in Southern California. She has exhibited widely and published multiple books, including What She Said (2021).

Martin: There is definitely a sense of nostalgia throughout the book. And you talk a little bit about this with Erik Ellington, about how a lot of the work was made in a time before social media, before the post-9/11 hypervigilance about cameras. You said that you don’t think that you could get away with the same type of things now that you did then. I’m wondering how you’ve dealt with that idea of “boys will be boys” running throughout the book, and how that rings today.

Templeton: Yeah, there’s been a lot of personal and a wider cultural evolution that’s happened since this time period. And looking back, a lot of the stuff we did was embarrassing. I cringed reading some of my own journal entries. A lot of it was doing stupid things to entertain ourselves. Buying fireworks, airsoft guns, and squirt guns was a big part of having fun on tour. It’s summertime, you’re outside, and you’re just squirting each other, blasting each other in the face with a big Super Soaker kind of thing.

But then there’s a darker side—one night in Chicago the guys were like, “Let’s drive around and squirt people.” So here I am, a grown man, taking some slightly younger grown men out in a van. We’re driving around Chicago, and they’re opening the side door and blasting people waiting at a bus stop with a Super Soaker. It’s innocent, but it’s also a really lame thing to do to people. I look back and cringe being reminded of this stuff, thinking, “Oh god, we did this?” I was managing a team of young men who have all this energy and testosterone. Sometimes we’d check into a hotel room and they would start just breaking stuff. So I’d be like, “You guys wanna break stuff, let’s get in the van, we’ll go out and break some stuff.” So I would take ’em out and we’d find like an abandoned area or a warehouse district, where they could shoot some lights out, paintball some signs or whatever, just do dumb stuff.

Some of the stuff I was documenting would fall under the term “toxic masculinity” today. There was a lot of woman-chasing. I mean, I was happily married the whole time, so I had the remove of the camera and I had the remove of being married. Women fans at skate demos would come up to me and ask me to sign their breasts, and I would reply, “I’m sorry, my wife wouldn’t appreciate that, but my fellow pro Matt Bennett over here would love to sign your boobs!” And then I would step back and shoot a photo of that happening. Also, a lot of the language used was pretty harsh. We’d say, “That’s gay” or “That’s faggot shit” but never in a way that was literally about gay people. Now we can unpack how even that’s wrong—the roots of that term stem from misguided stereotypes about gay people or women. We have all evolved our language for the better since then.

Ed Templeton, Josh Harmony swims in Lake Shasta, California, 2003 Ed Templeton, Black skies over the High Plains, Kansas, 2004

Martin: I think there’s so much to unpack. I mean it’s about time, it’s about the changing perceptions of how you expressed yourself, who people are allowed to be. And it’s interesting how much that comes through in your conversations with them.

Templeton: Yeah, in talking with Brian Anderson, he doesn’t carry memories of that language as something that was a persecution. He knew that his teammates weren’t homophobic. I was so secure in my heterosexuality that it didn’t bother me to hug the guys or show affection. Many people in the skate world thought I was gay. For years, people thought my wife Deanna was a beard. Big Brother magazine had this monthly write-in column called the “He-Man Ed-Haters Club” based on this. Big Brother was owned by Steve Rocco and run by Jeff Tremaine and Sean Cliver, the guys who do Jackass movies now. The He-Man Ed-Haters Club started because I wrote an article poking fun at snowboard fashion. Some snowboarders took offense to it and they got a bunch of letters from people saying, “Fuck Ed Templeton.” And I think they got enough letters where it was like, “Let’s start a club.” So they invited people to send in Ed Templeton hate mail. It was fun for a while until of course it got out of control. There was lots of ugly homophobia, and then death threats, so we stopped it.

I had a list of messages that I printed out before the tour and taped them to the flip-down visor. They were responses to complaints I might get from the team while driving. Stuff like, “stop whining,” “save it,” etc. So whenever someone would complain, like, “it’s too hot in here,” or “the music is too loud” I would flip down the visor and point to one of the messages, then violently flip it back up. But one of the messages was, “do I need to stop for tampons?” It was all in good fun, but in today’s culture it’s maybe not so funny. You can get cancelled for that. You can’t criticize a guy for complaining by saying he needs a tampon, ’cause then you’re implying that he’s a girl, and that girls are weak.

Ed Templeton, Tom Rowe plays guitar, Illinois, 2004 Ed Templeton, Cyril Lance Mountain Jr., California, 2001
All photographs courtesy the artist

Martin: Yes. I think that’s what’s fascinating about having this time capsule portraying this condensed essence of a certain experience of young male adulthood that doesn’t exist now.

Templeton: Being young is about testing the boundaries. In retrospect, many of our interactions with the police were really fraught. We would be caught with these airsoft guns that looked like real guns, out in the streets, shooting cans and stuff in inappropriate areas, like in a Walmart parking lot with people everywhere. Inevitably a cop would roll up and be like, “What are you guys doing? You can’t shoot these guns here.” These days we might be shot right off the bat.

Martin: Well, speaking of terms that did not exist in the same way then—toxic masculinity being one of them, white privilege being another one.

Templeton: Total white privilege, for sure. We had no fear of the cops. As a team of mostly white skaters crisscrossing the country, we felt bound by no laws. I write about that at the end. We felt like outlaws in the Wild West, like we really could do whatever we wanted.

Martin: Do you think that’s the same these days?

Templeton: I don’t think it’s changed that much. I think going on a skate tour right now would almost be the same. It wouldn’t be a good idea to be making firework bombs, and brandishing air-soft guns around. Aside from those two things, I think a team of white skaters could pretty much get away with whatever they want still in these United States. Now, there’s something to unpack.

This interview originally appeared in Wires Crossed (Aperture, 2023).

A Harrowing Meditation on Documenting Life in Gaza

Taysir Batniji’s gift as an artist may well be his restlessness. He paints, he draws, he takes photographs and does performances. He has never settled on one mode of art-making or another. Some of his most memorable projects involve, for example, mounds of sand piled like seaside dunes on either side of an opened suitcase (Untitled, 1998–2021); bars of olive-oil soap engraved with an Arabic proverb and stacked onto a wooden palette (No Condition Is Permanent, 2014); a set of keys on a key ring, all rendered in delicate glass (Untitled, 2014); and molded pieces of Swiss chocolate, neatly arranged on a tabletop, that spell out article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country” (Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone, 2007). 

Batniji’s images and object-based installations often depend on the presence of documents, texts, and symbols whose meanings are immediately clear. His best works, however, delve into more complicated material, where the arguments, by necessity, head into the unknown and take unexpected twists and turns. In those works, Batniji asks serious, often difficult questions (usually philosophical, ethical ones), and he leaves them wide open. Among them: Can documentary images expose events occurring in the world—namely, acts of violence, destruction, and dispossession happening in places where power is brutally contested—and call them facts? Or is it possible that abstract forms can be more effective in channeling the terrible consequences of such events, in part because they sidestep the issue of accepting images as truth and make viewers feel, or at least approximate, what it means to be suddenly thrown into confusion, disconnection, and horror? 

Batniji was born in Gaza. He left, against his family’s wishes, to study art in Europe in 1994. Those were the heady days of the Oslo Accords, when it seemed like a real peace deal between Israel and Palestine might be possible, before the assassination of Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and, soon after, the ascension of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has now held office in Israel longer than anyone and has become, in the words of New York Times columnist and pundit Thomas Friedman, “the worst leader in [Israel’s] history—maybe in all of Jewish history.” For ten years, Batniji was able to go back and forth between Gaza and France. The trip was often terrible. 

In 2003, Batniji was detained for three days at Rafah, on the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, which was occupied by Israel at the time (in mid-February, Israel was poised to launch an aggressive ground invasion of Rafah despite international outcry). Due to the security and surveillance regime, Batniji was unable to document his detention in Rafah with his camera, but he replicated the listlessness and anger of being there, the intimidation and exhaustion, and the fights and desperation that broke out among men in a cinematic series of pencil drawings on paper titled Transit #2 (2003). Two years later, Israel abruptly withdrew from Gaza. A power struggle between Fatah and Hamas ensued. Hamas took over the local government, at which point Israel imposed a punishing blockade. Although Batniji harbors a dream of returning to Palestine permanently, it has been impossible for him to enter Gaza since 2006. In the intervening years, he has turned the experience of exile into a kaleidoscopic practice, venturing as far as to the Palestinian diaspora in the United States, the subject of his 2018 Aperture book and exhibition Home Away from Home, to consider the complicated relationship of racism and colonialism to national-liberation struggles.

Cover and interior spread from Taysir Batniji, Disruptions, 2024

Batniji’s most recent publication, Disruptions (2024), published by Loose Joints this winter, offers a harrowing meditation on the tensions between the impulse to document reality and the potential for abstraction to communicate something more. The book is only 128 pages long, with a short, evocative text at the back written in French by the writer and photography historian Taous R. Dahmani and translated into Arabic and English. A nervy watercolor from Batniji’s 2022 series Fading Roses appears on the front cover, laid over what appears to be a beautiful blue sky but is more likely, and effectively, an error screen on the artist’s mobile phone. 

These images cannot but appear achingly beautiful, if for no other reason than for how they capture a refusal to die.

Disruptions follows a sequence of around seventy images, divided by dates ranging from April 2015 to December 2016. All of these images are screenshots that Batniji took during WhatsApp calls to his mother and family in Gaza. The screenshots capture moments of communications breakdown. They show the glitches, frozen pictures, and dropped signals of video calls failing in their promise to connect in real time. Page after page of Batniji’s book reveals eruptions of wild pixelation, accidental grids, and intense waves of blue and green, which might have suggested verdant landscapes and dazzling seas if they weren’t so obviously the colors of broken tech. Every so often a face appears, or parts of a face, showing a sudden smile, a look of uncertainty, palpable fear, distress, or expressions of soul-sucking fatigue. As soon as one begins to recognize buildings and street scenes, it looks as though the very same buildings and street scenes are exploding on the following pages. 

The images that make up Disruptions are therefore already a consolation, with the video call as the next best thing to meeting his loved ones face to face, embracing them, and feeling their warmth. But given everything that has happened in Gaza since Israel’s withdrawal in 2006, including several major bombing campaigns by Israel and countless smaller attacks and skirmishes—and more broadly in Palestine since the eruption of wars, dislocations, and displacements that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—Batniji’s work here, in Dahmani’s words, “acts as a repository of grief.” His images visualize the compulsive violence and terror from which Gazans have been unable to escape. Blasted by bad connections, these images cannot but appear achingly beautiful, if for no other reason than for how they capture a refusal to die, a refusal to stop calling your mom, a refusal to stop loving and needing and reaching out to friends, relatives, and colleagues. 

All images by Taysir Batniji, Disruptions, 2024
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

And this is to say nothing, yet, of the unconscionable damage that Israel has done to Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on Israeli military sites and kibbutzim, killing, among others, some of the most ardent peace activists in Israel. Disruptions begins with a shattering dedication to his family. Batniji lost his mother in 2017. Then, during Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza (funded like all of Israel’s military campaigns by massive amounts of US aid), fifty-two members of Batniji’s family were killed in the month of November alone. His sister was killed, and a few days after that, his brother died for lack of medical care. That Batniji could produce a book under such circumstances is remarkable. That he could direct all of the proceeds from Disruptions to Medical Aid for Palestinians is heartening. That his images could create a language for addressing the cataclysmic violence that we are witnessing from near and far, a language both abstract and evidentiary, is an audacious sign that life persists.

Disruptions was published by Loose Joints in February 2024.

What Does It Mean to Collaborate in Photography?

Consider the origin stories of two famous photographs. In 1936, Dorothea Lange photographed a white woman displaced by the Dust Bowl who was staring into the distance. In the image, the woman’s two children cling to her but turn away from Lange’s camera so we see only their tousled hair. The photo’s protagonist—whom we now know to be Florence Owens Thompson—gingerly touches the corner of her mouth and looks as if she wants to disappear. Migrant Mother became an icon of the Great Depression, and Lange was apparently eager to cast Thompson as a consensual so-called subject. Even though Lange never asked Thompson for permission to snap her, she once told an interviewer that the sitting dynamic had “a sort of equality about it.” For her part, Thompson felt affronted. “I’m tired of being a symbol of human misery,” she later said. “I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t taken my picture.”

Dorothea Lange, Destitute Peapickers in California, a 32-year-old Mother of Seven Children, February 1936
Courtesy the Library of Congress Pierre-Louis Pierson, Scherzo di Follia, 1863–1866. Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a far more exuberant exchange, Virginia Oldoini, better known as the Countess of Castiglione, orchestrated more than seven hundred self-portraits down to the last detail: the dress, the shawls, the hairdo. In 1863, she commissioned a representative tableau vivant titled Scherzo di Follia from the French court photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson. The masterpiece reveals the countess wearing a tasseled robe, with her salt-and pepper hair swept away from her forehead like spindrift floating up from the ocean. In her bejeweled hand, she presses a surreal monocle made of cardstock up to her eye. “I equal the highest-born ladies with my birth, I surpass them with my beauty, and I judge them with my mind,” she once bragged, in a testament to her amour propre.

One woman was exploited; the other was affirmed. What links Thompson and the countess? In a new book, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler show us that the women were both photography collaborators—and that the term itself is due a reconsideration. “Collaboration is the condition of photography in the most basic sense,” the authors explain in their introduction. Yet too often participation is “disregarded or unnoticed.” Collaboration offers the stories of Thompson and Castiglione along with 113 other examples from the history of photography (each accompanied by short essays written by art-world luminaries) that should be understood as products of community action—not as rarities birthed from solitary genius. In cases like Thompson’s, collaboration issues from a photographer’s usurpation, which jostles against the photographed person’s manifestations of discomfort or protest; in cases like the countess’, it can be a joyous co-creation made possible by resources and willpower. Regardless, photography is often a group undertaking shaped by power, race, and wealth.

Carolyn Drake, Uyghur Community, 2007–2013
Courtesy the artist

Some of the most important revelations in Collaboration reinterpret important photographs as imperialist-subaltern composites. One example is Nick Ut’s “shooting” of Phan Thi Kim Phúc, the child in Napalm Girl (1972). A ubiquitous figure in Nixon-era reporting on the Vietnam War, and a shorthand for US barbarity, Phúc flees a bombing while nude, screaming, and flayed alive by napalm. How did she “collaborate”? First by suffering, and then by dissenting. “I didn’t like that picture at all. I feel like why he took my picture when I was in agony, naked,” Phúc subsequently asserted. Another case is Marc Garanger’s images of Algerian women, whom he snapped in the 1960s at the orders of a military commander who had stripped them of their veils. Collaboration reproduces three of these images, which show the incensed faces of the captives. In the aftermath, Garanger admitted that “the women had no choice in the matter. Their only way of protesting was through their look.”

Wendy Ewald, Reza, 2003–5
Courtesy the artist

Beyond these instances of forced entanglement, Collaboration’s authors also assess that photographic co-action can be generative, such as when community members work together to unearth new narratives. Such hopeful forms of participatory photography are exemplified by Wendy Ewald, who in the 1970s asked her students in rural Kentucky to “photograph themselves, their families, their animals and their community.” Radiant results are found in Denise Dixon’s Self-Portrait Reaching for the Red Star Sky (1976­–82), which reveals a young girl jubilantly raising her arms to the empyrean with her eyes closed, and Janet Stallard’s I Took a Picture with the Statue in My Backyard (1980), showing Stallard’s awestruck face as she gazes into her own lens.

Denise Dixon, Self-Portrait Reaching for the Red Star Sky, 1976–82
Courtesy the artists Janet Stallard, I Took A Picture with the Statue in my Backyard, 1980

Participatory photography can also take on more expressly activist incarnations. In the 2000s, LaToya Ruby Frazier recorded the effects of environmental racism on her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Since the late 1800s, many Black Americans have worked at a local steel mill once owned by Andrew Carnegie, and now by US Steel. The mill has polluted the environment with soot, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide to the extent that, in 2022, US Steel had to pay the government a $1.5-million-dollar penalty for “longstanding” air-pollution violations. Frazier and her mother suffered the effects of the toxins and have “battled cancer and autoimmune disorders like lupus,” the artist said. To document these ills, Frazier took pictures of her mom, who then took pictures of her. “It’s irritating when you put that camera in my face,” her mother told her. But the results are striking: Momme (2008) shows Frazier facing the camera and fronted by her mother. Both women’s facial expressions convey the weight of their love and the health problems they carry.

Alberto Korda, Guerrillero Heroico, Havana, March 5, 1960Cuban Ministry of the Interior, featuring Che Guevara and his slogan that translates as “Until Victory, Always,” 2008
Courtesy GM Photo Images/Alamy

Another photographic collaboration driven by similar environmental and ethical concerns comes from the DIY, opensource nonprofit Public Lab. Since 2019, Public Lab has partnered with communities across the Gulf South to track the health effects of petrochemical plants on nearby Black communities. Public Lab provides local “grassroots mappers” with helium balloons, kites, and digital cameras, which they send skyward to take images that are later stitched together into atlases used to pursue interventions. In an adjoining essay, the artist-activist Imani Jacqueline Brown observes that the endeavor allows locals to “surveil the corporate-state and reclaim both their sense of place and their place in the struggle.”

Eugene Richards, Final Treatment, Boston Hospital for Women, Boston, 1979
Courtesy the artist

As Collaboration reveals, photography is a wide-ranging practice of joint creation. This discipline ranges from the felicitous exchanges between the Countess of Castiglione and Pierre-Louis Pierson to the dominance and opposition that activates Migrant Mother, Napalm Girl, and Marc Garanger’s arrogations; to the communal imaginings of Ewald, Dixon, Stallard, the Fraziers, Public Lab, and Southern Gulf community members—and also to the viewers and writers who insist on cocreating photographs with their perceptions and critique.

In an age when conflict and disaster photography transfixes audiences with scenes of individuals’ experiences of violence, grief, abandonment, famine, and terror (consider, for example, the current coverage of the crisis in Gaza and the 2023 Libyan floods), we would do well to practice Collaboration’s brand of consciousness-raising. By viewing these images as collaborations, we can pivot from easy narratives about solo photographers who “capture” their “subjects” toward an understanding that the pictures we consume are community-created artifacts whose most important participants often lack full voice and choice.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography was published by Thames & Hudson in 2024.

The Sweetened Reality of Marcelo Gomes’s Photographs

The remarkable story of the photographer Marcelo Gomes begins in northern Brazil, near the equator. It was wet there. When he was twelve, his parents took him to a concert by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso, a cofounder of the avant-pop psychedelic movement Tropicália, who had been exiled from his home country during its military dictatorship. For Gomes, who grew up in a smaller city, it was a transformative, visceral experience, an introduction to how art could move people. As an adult, in 2016, he took Veloso’s picture at a concert at the Inhotim art gallery in Minas Gerais. I asked Gomes in a recent conversation what he wanted from such portraits of his heroes. “To preserve them,” he says. “There’s a dream where I’m from, a dream of Brazil that sort of dies with him, in a sense, which will be very sad.”

Gomes, who now lives in Paris after years in New York, came to the United States to attend the University of Iowa on a full basketball scholarship. Team sports resonated, he explains, because of the surrender, the subsuming of one’s self into a composite. “There’s something really beautiful about the fact that you’re a collective of very disparate upbringings and cultures and geographies,” he says. “There’s something really nice about just sticking these people together and letting them figure it out. And if they do figure it out, the odds are that they will be much better than the individual.”

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Photography is an individual pursuit that often relies on team collaboration. Gomes makes evocative work entirely for himself but also dips into the fashion world. Lately, he says, the two are blending further, as he’s permitted to use personal work in commercial contexts. His images for Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle feature red rectangular forms, like an olfactory Rothko canvas. He trades traditional advertising’s aspirational charge—buy this so you can be this—for expressions of beauty that are expansive yet found mostly in closely observed moments and things.

A bubble becomes, in its bursting, a portal. A fig beads with ooze. In the end, natural splendor depends on submission. An image from Hydra is all cerulean swoon, but accessible only because someone built a ladder of bent metal and stuck it in the sea. The water is still, but we know those waves. They can pool like the wooden beard Gomes cropped from a large statue he saw in Paris, its ostentatious masculinity virile and swirling. The image is grainy; it could almost be chewed. Gomes calls his world of texture a “sweetened reality.” It’s bigger and beautiful. What more could one want?

Marcelo Gomes, Untitled (After Durer, New York), 2017 Marcelo Gomes, Untitled (Fig, Paris), 2017 Marcelo Gomes, Untitled (Hydra), 2020 Marcelo Gomes, Untitled (Marrakesh), 2020
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Marcelo Gomes, Untitled (Milan), 2016 Marcelo Gomes, Untitled (Paris), 2022 Marcelo Gomes, Untitled (Flower Study, Paris), 2020
All photographs courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire.”

In Sierra Leone, a Photographer Finds Beauty in Everyday Encounters

One afternoon last March, while he was walking along Lumley Beach in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr. decided to pray. The photographer set his equipment down, and as he reached for water to start his ablution, he was approached by three boys selling water in plastic sachets. Could they join him in prayer? Yes, Kanu replied. But first, with his camera, he immortalized a moment of the boys squatting by the unending ocean, vigorously wiping their faces with water. A folded cloth—for cushioning a vending pan—still sat on one boy’s head. Kanu led them in prayer. When they finished, he shared words of encouragement: he had fasted for the first time when he was about their age, so they could do it too; they should focus on school and do their best. “That was a really beautiful encounter for me,” Kanu told me.

The photographer has a knack for having beautiful encounters. He runs into fishermen, boxers, street cyclists, hooligans, vagrant kids. In his almost minimalist black-and-white images, Sierra Leone’s capital becomes its own universe that is poetic, even mythical. Everyday people are seen marching on valiantly on epic quests. Kanu’s images are ostensibly of the obvious things one might encounter in a city. But they also give a glimpse of a richer architecture of human relations, desires, and preoccupations that lurk just beneath the obvious. “We Sierra Leoneans are storytellers by nature,” he said. “You ask someone today how [their] day went, and they’ll tell you how they slept, what happened overnight, if they had mosquitoes, if it was really hot, but [it] turned out fine.”

Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., Boys performing abultion before Asr prayers, Lumley Beach, Freetown, 2023 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A man walking on Lumley Beach, Freetown, 2022

Kanu was exposed to photography from a young age. His father would carry around a camera and take photos of his sister and him all the time. His mother worked as a cashier at one of the first digital-photography studios in the area, on Rawdon Street. A peaceful childhood was cut short: for him and many of his peers, the decades-long civil war in the country threw life as they knew it into disarray. Kanu’s family sought refuge in Guinea, until their return to Freetown in the early aughts. The image of Salone had by then become one of destruction and disorder, desolation, chaos, and fear—all the negative stereotypes of Africa that feed the Western imagination.

Photography took a back seat for Kanu until a stint as a student in Turkey rekindled his love for the art. In 2015 he moved to Sakarya, a town by the Black Sea just northeast of Istanbul, to pursue a degree in information-systems engineering, but he struggled and felt isolated. “I knew Turkish and was fluent in it,” he said, “but it was quite different when it came to the academics.” He also wasn’t truly passionate about his topic of study. “At some point, I got good at coding and building programs, but it wasn’t as interesting as photography.” The province is full of traditional and historical Ottoman sites and natural scenery like lakes, rivers, and springs. He ventured around town with a camera, interacting with people and breaking the bubble of loneliness that sometimes engulfed him. But the real thrill was during breaks when he traveled to Istanbul. There, he met and learned from other street photographers as he tried to explore every corner of this legendary city that charmed him.

Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., Boys playing a football tournament inside an unfinished building, Brookfields, Freetown, 2023

Kanu’s photographs display a preternatural ability to be in the right place at the right time. He knows the city’s cadences, and time seems to slow down for him to observe his surroundings, so that his viewers may peer into a brief but more detailed view of things. One day, while running an errand for his dad, he came across a soccer gala organized by some neighborhood kids in the sitting room of an unfinished building. Abandoning his bike, he raced to the scene to take a photo; through his eyes, the viewer becomes part of the throng of ecstatic spectators who consume the action in the arena.

Kanu’s major influences range from old-school photographers such as Gordon Parks and James Barnor to the young, self-taught New Yorker Steve Sweatpants. He finds particular resonance in Parks’s documentation of segregation across the United States, famously portrayed in the series Segregation Story. Several of Kanu’s own photographs have echoes of Parks’s. Take one photograph of a man in a kufi and billowy caftan. The photograph captures him mid-step, neck strained as he looks in the direction of a house; in Parks’s from 1948, Leonard “Red” Jackson, seen from behind, is also mid-step, his slightly baggy suit billowing in the wind. In Parks’s photo, the tall buildings tower over the man, suggesting the scale of what a Black man has to contend with in America. In Kanu’s, the more modest building is made of zinc and wooden parts. It reminds the photographer of the Freetown of old: “Twenty years ago after the war, when you look around, you’d see places like this,” he said. “People just rebuild slowly using zinc, wood, and whatever materials they can find.” In their adornments, the men in both photographs communicate dignity in the face of a reality that looms large.

Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., My aunts at my late grandpa’s house, Rogbin Village, Northern Province, 2022 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A man looking at a zinc house, Freetown, 2022

The work of Kanu and his generation represents a continuation of attempts to establish new relationships to the image and image-making in Sierra Leone. During and immediately after the war, Sierra Leoneans were subjected to the exploitative Western gaze of international journalists and organizations in search of what we now term poverty or disaster porn. Some people, tired after years of cameras being pointed at them, coined the phrase “you click you pay,” demanding recompense.

Today most people smile at Kanu and ask him to make more photos. Once, he was photographing a street celebration when a little girl waved him down. “Snap me, I’m fine,” she demanded. Recalling this beautiful encounter, he told me: “I literally just burst into tears of, like, Oh my god, the confidence. I’m always grateful to be able to capture these little moments of time, and the people.” Kanu sees his work as a way of documenting life and being in community. “Initially, one of the top goals of my work was to counter some of the narratives that were around about Sierra Leone not being safe,” he said. “And one way I feel like you can answer that is by showing daily life.”

Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., Boys leaning on a coconut tree to get a view of a drone, Moyamba, Southern Province, 2021 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A boy stands by a bicycle, Lunsar, Northern Province, 2023 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., Siaka Stevens Street at sunrise, Freetown, 2023 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A rollerblade club, Freetown, 2023Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A young lady and a bubu player at a political rally, Lunsar, 2023 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A man talking about livestock, Malontho Village, Northern Sierra Leone, 2022 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A girl getting braids for school, Calaba Town, Freetown, 2022 Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., A man walks through a hazy street, Freetown, 2022Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr., Boys after Eid Prayers, Goderich, Freetown, 2023
All photographs courtesy the artist

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.