Aperture's Blog, page 21

31 Photobooks for Everyone on Your Holiday Gift List

Looking for the perfect holiday gift? From a gift subscription to Aperture magazine, major debut monographs, newly released book bundles, engaging photography reads, and so much more—we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.

Must-Haves for Photo Lovers

Aperture Magazine Subscription

The source for photography since 1952, Aperture features immersive portfolios, in-depth writing, and must-read interviews with today’s leading artists. Numerous luminaries have guest edited issues, including Wolfgang Tillmans, Tilda Swinton, Alec Soth, Sarah Lewis, Nicole R. Fleetwood, and Wendy Red Star, making the magazine essential reading for anyone interested in photography and contemporary culture.

Josef Koudelka: Next

Josef Koudelka: Next is an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists. Drawn from extensive interviews conducted over nearly a decade with the artist and his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborations from around the globe, author Melissa Harris offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and world of this notoriously private photographer. Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, this visual biography includes personal and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, alongside iconic images from his extensive body of work spanning the 1950s to the present.

Looking for more inspiring photography reads? Bundle and save with our Reader Book Bundle featuring Josef Koudelka: Next, Strange Hours by Rebecca Bengal, and We Were Here by Sunil Gupta.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion

In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in art and fashion today, highlighting the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

Alex Webb: Dislocations

In Dislocations, Alex Webb draws from photographs across the many disparate locations of his oeuvre in a meditation on the act of photography as a form of dislocation in itself. A contemporary update of the long out-of-print book by the same name, Webb returned to this idea of dislocation during the pandemic when he began to look at images produced in the twenty years since the original publication. Featuring previously unpublished images, Dislocations expands a beloved limited edition with a series of photographs that speak to today’s sense of displacement.

Contemporary Classics

Wendy Red Star: Delegation

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow), centering Native American life and material culture through the artist’s 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. 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.

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax

From hip-hop to Nefertiti, Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and re-imagines African American and African visual culture, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to span this rising artist’s career. Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reimagines Western art, often by casting Black subjects in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination,” Erizku states. “When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.” Blending Erizku’s studio practice with his work as an editorial photographer, the volume is accompanied by essays from acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Félix, alongside interviews with Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent.

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph

Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has portrayed the personal and the powerful in her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. One of the most compelling photographers working today, Lawson’s Aperture Monograph is the long-awaited first photobook by the visionary artist. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in the book’s essay. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

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

For the Reader

Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists by Rebecca Bengal

In Strange Hours, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Whether speaking with William Eggleston or traveling with Alec Soth, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and the vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.

Aperture Conversations: 1985 to Present

What led Stephen Shore to work with color? Why was Sophie Calle accused of stealing Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert? Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews pulled from Aperture’s publishing history, highlighting critical dialogue between esteemed photographers and artists, critics, curators, and editors since 1985.

Pioneering Voices         

Dawoud Bey: Elegy

In Elegy, acclaimed photographer Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history in the US, narrowing in on the deep historical memory embedded in its geography. Weaving together three of Bey’s landscape series, the artist takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, the plantations of Louisiana, and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio. Divided into an elegy of three movements, Bey not only evokes history, but retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences.

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours

In her searing, diaristic portrait of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together over a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020. Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay, “they know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”

Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer

Kimowan Metchewais’s exquisitely layered works explore Indigenous identity, community, and colonial memory. After his untimely death at the age of forty-seven in 2011, Metchewais left behind an expansive body of photographic and mixed-media work—including an extensive polaroid archive that addresses a range of themes, including self-portraiture, the body, language, and landscapes. A Kind of Prayer is the first-ever survey dedicated to the late Cree artist, showcasing Metchewais’s essential artistic vision.

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been underrecognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.

For the Armchair Traveler

Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed (Limited Edition Box Set)

In Wires Crossed, Ed Templeton offers an insider’s look at the skateboarding community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond. Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding, the book reflects on a subculture in the making and the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world he helped create. “I picked up a camera to remember my youth as a skateboarder which started disappearing the very millisecond I could fathom I was mired in it,” Templeton reflects. “Playing the roles of both observer and participant, I wanted to document the extraordinary things I was able to do, and the people I was doing them with.” This limited-edition box set features a unique hand-painted print, enclosed in a specially-designed slipcase.

Zhang Xiao: Community Fire

Photographing Shehuo, a Chinese Spring Festival tradition, Zhang Xiao provides a local, hometown look at the event—and how it has transformed over the years. Celebrated in rural northern Chinese communities, Shehuo boasts a history that spans thousands of years. However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with a myriad of regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. Community Fire narrows in on how the mass-produced substitutions of Qing dynasty-era costumes and props have transformed the practice of Shehuo. Through a colorful and fantastical blend of portraiture and ephemera, Zhang blurs the edges between the everyday and absurd.

A Long Arc: Photography and the American South

Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture, and reckoned with its fraught history. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with both the history of photography and America, offering an apt lens through which to examine American identity. A Long Arc collects over 175 years of key moments in the visual history of the Southern United States, featuring works by artists such as Walker Evans, Baldwin Lee, Robert Frank, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Alec Soth, An-My Lê, and more.

The Road Trip Photographer Bundle

Hit the open road by traveling near and far through the work of illustrious photographers Justine Kurland, Stephen Shore, and Alex Webb. In Highway Kind, Justine Kurland explores the reality of the American dream with photographs equal parts raw and romantic. Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s large-format color photographs, brought together in the legendary Uncommon Places, have influenced a generation of photographers. The Suffering of Light gathers some of Webb’s most iconic images taken in distant corners of the world, distilling Webb’s unique ability to pull together gesture, color, and contrasting cultural tensions into single, beguiling frames.

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Give the Gift of Inspiration

The Photography Workshop Series Book Bundle

In our Photography Workshop Series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography, offering the workshop experience in a book. From Richard Misrach on landscape photography and meaning, to Graciela Iturbide on how to employ a deeply personal vision while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds, to Todd Hido’s insights on the genres of landscape, interior, and nude photography—these books offer inspiration to photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

What is a “photo no-no”? Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, or sometimes even arbitrary. Edited by Jason Fulford, this volume brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility—offering a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice

How does a photographic project or series evolve? How important are “style” and “genre”? What comes first, the photographs or a concept? PhotoWork is a collection of interviews with forty photographers about their approaches to making photographs and a sustained body of work. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, editor Sasha Wolf’s interviews provide essential insights and advice from both emerging and established photographers—including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Todd Hido, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth, and more—while also revealing that there is no single path in photography.

For the Design Lover     

Viviane Sassen: Venus & Mercury

In 2018, Viviane Sassen was invited by Versailles to make a series of photographs throughout its vast grounds. For six months, she was given free rein, often after official hours when the buildings were empty, to wander and photograph the palace’s extravagant gardens, gilded baroque interiors, and even Marie Antoinette’s private correspondence. Drawn to the bodies represented in the palace’s many marble statues, Sassen created hybrid forms that play with notions of sexuality and gender, calling to mind traditions of Surrealist art and the work of figures such as Hans Bellmer. Brought together in a limited-edition book crafted by the iconic designer Irma Boom, Venus & Mercury offers a fresh vision of the storied palace—and all its beauty, melancholy, and intrigue.

David Benjamin Sherry: Pink Genesis

With his mesmerizing analog photograms, David Benjamin Sherry melds queer history, abstraction, and darkroom magic. Born out of what Sherry has called the “transformative potential of the darkroom,” each of his large-scale, cameraless color photograms is laboriously made by hand in the darkroom. Using cardboard masks to create geometric forms and incorporating his own body into the images, Sherry actively references histories of photography—while also thinking through the intersections of identity, form, and the hypnotic power of extreme color. Pink Genesis collects twenty-nine one-of-a-kind works that delight in the pleasures of form and color.   

Children’s Activity Books          

The Shutterbug Book Bundle

Inspire young readers with three special books that explore the magic of photography. In Eyes Open, Susan Meiselas compiles a sourcebook of photography ideas and prompts for children to engage with the world through the camera. Seeing Things acts as a wonderful introduction to photography, with narration by Joel Meyerowitz on how photographers can transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography.

The Colors We Share by Angélica Dass

Inspired by her family tree, Angélica Dass—a Brazilian artist of African, European, and Native American descent—began creating portraits of people from all over the world against backgrounds that match their skin tones. Brought together in a book made for young readers, The Colors We Share celebrates the diverse beauty of human skin, while also considering concepts of race and the limited categories we use to describe each other.

For the Collector           

As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic (LP)

Aperture’s first record release is a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the diaspora, featuring artists such as Jamaican dancehall musician Tenor Saw, North American guitarist Jeff Parker, British funk band Cymande, and South African artist-singer-activist Miriam Makeba. The LP expands upon the ethos of the book As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Limited-Edition Puzzle by Tommy Kha

Released in celebration of Tommy Kha’s first major monograph, Half, Full, Quarter, this limited-edition puzzle features one of the artist’s idiosyncratic self-portraits. Known for his visually mischievous, yet deeply personal photographs, Kha’s work is an investigation of Asian American identity in the American South.

The Collector Book Bundle

In this special book bundle, take an inside look at the photography collections of renowned artist collectors Judy Glickman Lauder, Dr. Kenneth Montague, and Elton John. Presence brings together over 150 images from Glickman Lauder’s collection in a celebration of photography’s ability to capture the human experience. Drawn from Montague’s Wedge Collection in Toronto, As We Rise looks at the multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Considered one of the greatest private collections of photography in the world, The Radical Eye presents an unparalleled selection of modernist images from the collection of musician and philanthropist Elton John.

Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (Limited-Edition Box Set)

Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits are an investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture. Working in her studio, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives eBay purchases in visually complex photographs that examine how images circulate online, as well as how the lives and purposes of both physical objects and their likenesses change over time. This special limited-edition box set features a differentiated version of Cwynar’s debut monograph, Glass Life, accompanied by a signed print from the artist.

Visions in Black & White           

Kristine Potter: Dark Waters

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 century. Brought together in Dark Waters, Potter’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. Featuring a short story by Rebecca Bengal, Dark Waters both induces and exorcises the sense of threat that women often contend with as they move through the world.

American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams

For fifty years, Robert Adams has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show us the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. American Silence features over 175 works from Adams’s career photographing throughout Colorado, California, and Oregon—capturing suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and the land. By examining the artist’s act of looking at the world around him, this volume showcases the almost palpable silence of his photographs.

Tom Sandberg: Photographs

In a signature, modulating gray scale, the late Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg spent decades rendering the shapes and forms of everyday life in his exacting vision. From dark abstractions of asphalt and sea, to the hard edges of an automobile or curved tunnel, to anonymous figures cast in shadow, Sandberg creates subtle yet transformative studies of stillness that radiate mystery. A perfectionist in the darkroom, Sandberg was acutely sensitive to the rich spectrum of black and white, and his handmade prints project a powerful physical presence. Tom Sandberg: Photographs is the first major publication dedicated to one of Norway’s most important photographers.

Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, book bundles, magazines, and limited-edition prints.

The Oppositional Energy of Zines

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 249, “Reference,” Winter 2022.

If you got lucky in the summer of 1947, your hands might have wrapped themselves around a mimeographed collection of typewritten thoughts called Vice Versa. Edited under the nom de plume Lisa Ben, it was among the first of what we now think of as zines. It was almost certainly the first queer one. Small in scale and big in voice, Vice Versa defined itself from page one as “a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of Convention. . . . Please keep in mind that the entire publication was originated and compiled by one person.”

Spread from Sound Aspects Part 1 (BlackMass Publishing, 2020)
Courtesy BlackMass Publishing and the Center for Book Arts, New York Spread from Stay Close to Me (BlackMass Publishing, 2021)

That one person, “Lisa Ben,” was actually Edythe Eyde, an employee of the film production company RKO, presumably living in the Los Angeles area. Given the long history of alienation from mainstream culture queer people have, perhaps Eyde saw the independent science-fiction publications on drugstore racks and found inspiration in their longing for other worlds. But she made Vice Versa more or less on her own, publishing film and theater reviews and thrillingly sentimental, and horny, poetry. From the start, then, zines—handmade collections of often-appropriated art and text, run off via mimeograph or copy machine, and usually handed out or otherwise distributed outside of traditional publishing networks—have offered a way around waiting for the future. They are a way to make yourself a present, and to share it within a like-minded community.

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“Zines are repositories of oppositional energy,” says Branden W. Joseph, a professor of art history at Columbia University. “They’re made by people who feel outside of some larger conventional institution.” Today, of course, they are institutions in their own right, racking up sales at buzzy art-book fairs and stuffing influential anthologies such as Lisa Darms’s The Riot Grrrl Collection (2013) and AA Bronson and Philip Aarons’s Queer Zines series. Museums are finally taking the medium seriously. In the fall of 2023, Drew Sawyer, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, and Joseph will mount a comprehensive retrospective of zines as a form of artistic production. “It’s turning into a kind of photo show,” says Sawyer, to his surprise. “From the 1970s through, say, the early 2000s, the photocopy machine was the main technology for zines. That’s a photographic technology. And it’s also a reproduction technology, intentionally going against the sort of value that was placed on the gelatin-silver print.” Zines rely on the documentary authority of the photograph, while destabilizing the preciousness of the print.

The Canadian queer-punk polymath G. B. Jones has made a career out of that kind of authoritative destabilization. As a young woman in 1980s Toronto, she led the post-punk, proto–riot grrrl band Fifth Column while working at Just Desserts, the city’s answer to New York’s Florent, the mythic all-night meatpacking-district hangout that shuttered in 2008. Jones had encountered Candy Parker and Caroline Azar’s zine Hide, which used a photocopier as a camera to build blown-out assemblages rivaling the murky surrealism of the graphic designer Vaughan Oliver and the psychosis of David Lynch, at a fraction of their time frames and budgets. Hide’s first cover, for example, feature a kind of nightmarish, swollen-chested clown. Jones eventually joined the team and Hide began including cassette compilations of punk and experimental music with the printed issues.

Reproduction of Untitled, 2002, in Paul P. and G. B. Jones, Zine (Andrew Roth, 2013)
Courtesy the artist Page from G. B. Jones (Feature Inc., 1995), designed and edited by Steve Lafreniere, with a photograph of Jones by Jena von Brücker originally from Jane and Frankie’s Joy O’ Sex (Jena and Klaus von Brücker, 1990)
Courtesy the artist

In 1985, Jones applied her virtuosic talents to a new publication called J.D.s, an eight-issue collaboration with Bruce LaBruce, now an underground film legend, but at the time an aspiring artist and local bon vivant who had served as Fifth Column’s go-go boy. The zine’s name referenced “juvenile delinquents” and lay claim to a constellation of homocelebrities that didn’t quite exist, but should. “We were trying to merge different worlds that were isolated from each other,” Jones says. “We just invented this scene, and we took pictures of all the people who worked at the restaurant.” Like a dyke Oscar Wilde, Jones declared the genius of her friends. They became stars because, in the universe of J.D.s, they were. Eventually, the friends would also become stars of the underground film scene in Super 8 shorts such as the picaresque The Troublemakers from 1990 and 1992’s The Yo-Yo Gang, a tale of rival girl gangs teeming with sex, violence, and wild joy.

The Canadian queer-punk polymath G. B. Jones has made a career out of authoritative destabilization.

Jones also began a long and fruitful collaboration with the Canadian artist Paul P., whose own work recontextualizes gay porn as intimate portraiture. Their dyadic collages blur the boundaries between archive and activism, drawing from sources including Canada’s sordid history of raiding bathhouses and the police brutality around the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. The work builds on Jones’s 1980s output, fearlessly confronting misogyny, antiporn second-wave feminism, and the Canadian government. “We did it because we wanted to have fun. It was a way of interacting with the culture and developing a culture that was kind of more fun than, you know, standing on the street corner with a sign and yelling at the police,” she says.

And the police didn’t like J.D.s. “We were sending out hundreds of copies,” Jones says, “and almost all of our mail would be opened.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Canadian post office was “at the height of what you could only call a persecution campaign against LGBT bookstores,” she says. “They routinely seized almost everything coming to bookstores. You had to make packages as boring, as uninteresting as possible.” Closeting queer publications was, she notes, a familiar survival mechanism.

Cover of Ho Tam, Hotam #1: A Brief History of Me (88Books, 2013)
Courtesy the artist Cover of Ho Tam, Hotam #5: Hot Asian Men (88Books, 2014)
Courtesy the artist

The artist and filmmaker Ho Tam is also familiar with government censorship. Growing up in Hong Kong, he says that he “was always cutting up magazines to create my own kind of little play books.” In 2019, he opened a bookshop and gallery in Vancouver, where he relocated in 2010, in part to show work on newsprint by Hong Kong dissidents who had embraced newsprint for its lack of a digitial footprint. “I don’t think I can go back to Hong Kong without being arrested,” he says. “We think of zines as being ephemeral, but they’re so weighty.”

Tam left Hong Kong to attend college in Ontario, where he taught himself to paint. Then he moved to Toronto, perhaps lured by the work of figures such as Jones and the influential collective General Idea, which in the 1980s had fused AIDS activism with a range of art practices. “There was a lot of discourse about racial representations,” he says of his arrival in the early 1990s. He began exhibiting his paintings, which often explored idealized depictions of Asian male idols, but soon shifted direction. “I wanted to turn everything around,” he says, and “laugh at myself, make trouble.” That trouble became The Yellow Pages, a 1993 artist book he made into a color-Xerox-on-parchment-paper edition the following year and, later, a silent video.

Spread from Ho Tam, Hotam #12: The Yellow Pages (88Books, 2016)

The work juxtaposes pictures that display stereotypes of Asians (a smiling woman serving a steaming plate of food) or the impact of U.S. imperialism (the explosion of an atomic bomb) with a slur (the words Dog Meat under the former; Zen paired with the latter). Over the next few decades, Tam issued various editions of The Yellow Pages, along with books and zines, some by other artists. His fifteen-issue Hotam (2013–17) begins with a fifty-page memoir, A Brief History of Me, in which each page lines up photographs from a single year of his life with a time line of political events. Page 32, for example, situates a portrait of the stylish, smiling Tam in winter street clothes between markers for the sarin gas attack in Tokyo and the Oklahoma City bombing. The connection asserts Tam’s place in history while also questioning that position. Issue #5, titled Hot Asian Men: Special Literary Issue, alternates spreads of beefcake Bruce Lee playing cards and covers of OG magazine, likely the first gay Asian softcore porn targeted at the West, with poetry and reporting by leading gay Asian writers. His publication Poser (2013–16) compiles disarmingly intimate solo portraits in public spaces. Its final issue, for instance, lines up snapshots of passengers sitting in the waiting lounges of Chicago’s O’Hare, Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi, and Tokyo’s Narita airports, charging phones or eating McDonald’s, smiling indulgently or staring down Tam’s lens, each navigating post-9/11 international travel, with its increased surveillance and distrust of strangers, in their own discrete way.

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In the twenty-first century, artists still have to navigate bureaucracies of power just to get where they want to go, and the journey for artists of color can be particularly grueling. Rather than convincing arts and publishing institutions to support them, some take matters into their own hands. The New York–based visual artist and writer Yusuf Hassan founded BlackMass Publishing in the fall of 2018 to circulate his own work, such as the Sound Aspects series of zines, which programs duets of Black culture and audio ephemera: in the first volume, for instance, a shirtless, shimmering Little Richard hollers across the page from a diagram of a hearing aid. Named after the 1966 Amiri Baraka play A Black Mass, the collective counts the artist and poet Kwamé Sorrell among its frequent collaborators. It has amassed a catalog of publications recognizable for their restrained, minimal design. Another zine from 2021, Stay Close to Me, features a poem by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter titled “Death of a Comrade,” opposite an upended photograph of the punk band Bad Brains. The photograph, printed, like the rest of the zine, in black on vibrant green paper, is its own kind of explosion—Black punks upending the white punk world with irresistible force.

Installation view of work by BlackMass Publishing in Greater New York, MoMA PS1, 2021–22
Photograph by Martin Seck. Courtesy MoMA PS1

Institutions, including the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, are finally taking notice. For MoMA PS1’s 2021 survey exhibition Greater New York, BlackMass built a “study hall,” an archive of independent publications from their own collection. In a throwback to zines’ origins in correspondence art, and in a nod to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they also set up a post office box in Jamaica, Queens, and made a global call for contributions to be mailed in. (In a less inspiring echo of Jones’s trouble with the Canadian post office, Hassan and Sorrell likewise reported that packages sent to them were intercepted and opened by the authorities, without explanation.) “Reading rooms are generally quiet places,” Sorrell says. “We wanted the installation to be active. We wanted courtship and hanging out and music playing in the space. We fought for an installation where people are able to touch and experience the work, where things can be weird.” The project inspired its own network of artists and audiences, one pair of eyes at a time. “We’re not interested in mass production,” says Hassan. “Zines have this nomadic spirit, in the way information is disseminated, handed from one person to another”—just as with the earliest zines, all those decades ago. “It’s a way to hold on to culture.”

A Feminist Memory Project in Nepal

To be absent from history is to be denied possibility. In contemporary Nepal—a former monarchy that has seen a turbulent shift to democratic representation over the last several decades—questions around the public record, and who is and isn’t included, have gained renewed force. For twelve years, the Nepal Picture Library (NPL) has been building an expansive digital archive of the country’s social and cultural life, amassing more than 120,000 photographs from a variety of sources with the aim of creating a collective sense of historical place in Nepali society.

In 2018, drawing from its larger collection, the NPL launched the Feminist Memory Project, an archival effort responding to the need for a comprehensive women’s history in the country. That same year, the vast portions of the archive were presented as an exhibition, titled The Public Life of Women, at Patan Durbar Square in Lalitpur during the 2018 Photo Kathmandu festival. “We want to highlight what the feminist experience has felt like in Nepal,” the curators NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Diwas Raja Kc wrote in a statement, and “show how the structures of history that push women into oblivion are in fact contingent and changeable.” In its most recent expression, The Public Life of Women has taken the form of a photobook, published this past October by the NPL’s parent photography platform, photo.circle.

Gurung Kakshapati is the cofounder and director of the Nepal Picture Library, and Raja Kc is its head of research. On the occasion of the launch of The Public Life of Women, which was recently named Photography Catalog of the Year at the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, I spoke with them about the project, the possibilities of their archive, and photography’s relationship to historical memory.

Members of the Women’s Security Pressure Group at a rally in Kathmandu, 1993
© Sushila Shrestha Collection

Varun Nayar: I want to begin with the role of the photographic archive in Nepal. What do you mean when you call the Feminist Memory Project an “archival campaign”?

NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati: When we set up the Nepal Picture Library in 2011, we’d been working as photo.circle for about five years. I come from a background of storytelling, so I was drawn to the history-making work that the archive does. There’s this strong subjectivity and set of values we’re bringing, saying, “These are important histories to be preserved and documented, be told and retold,” especially to local publics here in Nepal. This idea of an archive being state-run, or in some kind of big, clunky institutional setting that is very static, slow, and not very approachable or accessible—we’re trying to spin that on its head.

Diwas Raja Kc: We’ve done quite a bit of redefining of the concept to be able to do the kind of work we do, and have thought of the archive as something active. The idea of a “campaign” is associated with that way of thinking. It’s about the building of the archive itself—which for us means collecting and cataloging all the photographs we are working on making publicly available—but we also understand that this building is an unfinished process.

We have a double objective for the Feminist Memory Project. One is the repository nature of these photographs, thinking about the longevity of the project, and what can we do to make these materials last for people who come after us. But it’s also equally important that they have an immediate effect on public discourse. We see the archive as really about shaping public memory in Nepal, and we want to have an impact on how the politics around memory are being played. This was more severely felt around ten years ago, after the Maoist insurgency in the late 1990s and early 2000s, then a peace process, the formation of the republic in 2008, and then the reorganizing of the country as federated states, and the demand for new forms of knowledge, new histories, and new ways of thinking about ourselves as people. That’s been the context in which we’ve been working, and that was also the context in which some of these questions about memory were really intensely being felt in public life.

Nepali activists attend the Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing, 1995
© Anjana Shakya Collection and Binda Pandey Collection Labour activist Bishnu Ojha addresses an assembly of workers at Bhutan Devi Secondary School in Makwanpur, 1981
© Bishnu Ojha Collection

Nayar: As its title suggests, The Public Life of Women considers Nepali women’s relationship to the public sphere as politically significant. You’ve also described it as a key feminist strategy. How does the idea of publicness frame your work?

Gurung Kakshapati: In one sense, it’s a basic question of who do you want to reach with this work. If the archive is an active one, then who are we reaching? Of course, as a repository in more traditional ways, an archive is something that serves, say, an academic demographic, or writers, journalists, and so on. But ownership of history—and particularly at this juncture of political and social transformation in Nepal, with this real wish to want to be included in the history of this place—has been something that has driven political participation before, during, and since 2006, which is when officially we had the second People’s Movement and became this federal democratic republic. I think a lot of our work has been shaped as a generational response, to understand ways of life here, ways of organizing ourselves. I think in terms of who we are speaking to, the hope has always been to reach different publics and also think of publics as not just one broad sweeping category but, within that, of layered and nuanced identities and groups.

Raja Kc: The question of publicness is a loaded and multifaceted one. When we were doing the research, we noticed how the journey of becoming a feminist for many women was always associated with this idea of becoming public. There are all these stories about what women were doing to become part of public life and the shaping of the nation as it was going through this tumultuous and fascinating movement towards democracy, and through anti-establishment histories, which are very rich in this country.

When the democratic movement began here in the mid-twentieth century, it made a universal appeal to everyone, including women. I think even when men at the time—back in the 1940s and ’50s—hadn’t quite meant for women to leave their homes and become part of nation-building, a lot of women were interpreting the call of democracy that way, that this actually is beckoning us. That became a way in which many women were talking about their relationship with the public sphere and the nation.

Saraswati Rai, who campaigned for girls’ education and travelled widely across Nepal to promote women’s literacy and raise awareness on social discrimination, 1950s
© Saraswati Rai Collection
Rashmi Shah and her husband Jagat Prakash Jung Shah at their residence in Gyaneshwor, Kathmandu, ca. 1955
© Naveen Prakash Jung Shah Collection

Nayar: You’ve catalogued a great deal of material that reflects these political shifts. Does it translate differently between the exhibition and the book?

Raja Kc: With the book, even though it’s full of images, it really asks you to engage both aesthetically and historically. Because of the form itself, and by turning pages, even when you fight against it, you take in the information in a linear format. So I think the narrative-building happens with the form itself, not just with the content of a book. With the exhibition, we focused on the abundance of the archive, and just hitting people with the size of the feminist history. That decision emerged from a context of people repeatedly saying that women don’t have a history or don’t have archives too. We amassed a lot of photographs, and wanted people to feel that volume. The point for us was to say there are archives that you can build and ways to pull out these histories.

Gurung Kakshapati: I’ve been thinking about our work as being on the periphery of mainstream media, on the periphery of the arts world, on the periphery of academic research. We’re not at the center—in more traditional definitions, I suppose—of any of these spaces. That has its pluses and minuses, but it’s actually quite an advantageous place to be too. Because then you can sometimes draw people into this conversation or process in ways where they will enter the work or what you are proposing very unassumingly. People will respond because we’re outsiders or we are familiar enough, but we’re still not dragged down by the baggage necessarily.

Journalist and activist Prativa Subedi sees the ocean for the first time during a tour to launch the Japanese translation of her book Nepali Women Rising, Osaka, 1994
© Prativa Subedi Collection

Nayar: I noticed a productive tension between some of the regionally well-known figures you highlight and your emphasis on tracing collaborative networks of exchange and support. What is the significance of collectivity to this history?

Raja Kc: In some ways, this is the primary argument that we’re making, which has been consistent through the years for us. My own sense is that the mode in which feminist politics has been done in the last, let’s say, two decades or so has really valued these ideas of empowerment. And so, I think what feminism has meant in that kind of context is success, and success specifically in the neoliberal definition, because those are the dominant ways that allow for one to succeed and fail.

I think one way of telling history is through profile-building, which is like an index of women who have become successful, [suggesting] that the feminist is one that is success-driven. I think that idea of what a feminist looks like has dominated the world, and it really has also formed the way feminism is practiced here in Nepal. What we noticed looking at a deeper history of women’s movements in Nepal is a desire to belong to a group. To actually, when you step out of the house, have a collective that is not based on your kin relationships or friendships but forms of solidarity that go beyond that. I think these histories are everywhere in the world, and a certain erasure of feminism as a collective experience and longing is something that has been written out in the last twenty years. Those desires are very much there, and they’ve been the framework through which we were looking at our work: what to collect, what to value, what to assemble. It’s really about making an argument about feminism as a collective experience.

Kabita Poudel, Yamuna Ghimire, Dil Maya BK, and Maiya Bhattarai pose for a group portrait at a studio after being released from prison in Palpa, 1990
© Rambha Poudel Collection

Nayar: There’s a clear sense of relationality across the archive.

Gurung Kakshapati: Yes, such a telling is not possible without the contribution, active participation, and ownership-taking of many people. It’s also about being able to bring together, as a collective repository, an archive of many acts of resistance. For instance, that photograph of two protestors behind bars from the 1960s; another one of the four women who’d been arrested for having attended a protest and then went to a photo studio to mark their day of release; or those portraits of Tharu women from the Karjahi movement in 1980.

In some ways, many of these women only meet in the archive. They might not have lived during the same time, or even known of each other. It has a cumulative impact on me: that it’s taken several generations of women resisting for us to get here. We’ve really tried to be mindful about foregrounding images with lots of people, crowds, masses. It’s not just about individual women. Outside of the domestic thresholds, many women were experiencing collectivity for the first time when they started going to college, school, the workplace, or even a protest. Whenever we feature individual or passport-size photographs in the book, such as from the collection of the Nepali writer Bhagirathi Shrestha, we tried to put many of them in one place. So it does feel like the archive is also a correlation of all of these experiences.

Two teachers at their high school in Tehrathum, 1970
© Bill Hanson, Peace Corps Nepal Photo ProjectWomen at a national scout master training event in Sundarijal, 1975
© Shanta Laxmi Shrestha Collection

Nayar: In a conversation at the end of the book, you both discuss: “Do photographs make people think more historically?” What possibilities do photographs offer this project?

Gurung Kakshapati: Photographs have really been central to a lot of the work we do. We’re thinking visually, and we’re very much producers, but also consumers, of a visual and image culture. If we’re thinking of posterity, of why we’re building this archive, it’s so fifty years later these records and narratives exist. It feels like fifty years later the visual record is what people will feel most familiar with, or people will have most fluency with. And, I mean, in Nepal, photography actually hasn’t had that long of a history, and only a very small segment of society has had access to photography for a considerable amount of time. But regardless of that, it does feel like women were always taking photographs, to give to each other as tokens of friendship, to mark something, to validate something. That’s what I meant by “thinking historically” and what photographs perhaps allow and encourage us to do.

Raja Kc: The way that we work is not just building repositories. We actually also do these projects so that we can put them out as forms of activation and engagement, to the extent that we’re not just collecting; we’re creating narratives as well. We’ve noticed that there are affordances that photographs have that allow for the kind of work we do, for collective storytelling. With this history, we really wanted a democratization of narratives, or to contest the feeling that history is written for certain kinds of people with power.

Prem Kumari Tamang of Nuwakot and Lal Maya Tamang of Dhading held at Dillibazar Prison after coming to Kathmandu to protest King Mahendra’s Panchayat government, 1961
© Shanta Shrestha Collection

The nature of the photographs we’re really sort of activating is that everyone owns them. These are very familiar genres of photography, and people feel like these are their material. They actually have them in their homes, so the archive itself begins to be defined as something that is not in a state or institutional repository, but actually what we own in our homes, in our personal lives. That is the foundation for telling history, and because photographs were that genre of documentation, I feel like some of the success in the democratizing of the history is fundamentally linked to the thing that a photograph is. We’ve been really thinking about the sensorial or haptic qualities of photographs, or the way they elicit emotions and affects, that the way that you relate to what you’re seeing is based on the triggering of certain kinds of reflections, emotions, and instincts. That to me is really fundamental to what photographs are as artifacts.

The other thing we talk about is the way iconicity and indexicality work in photographs, and how they could be used to tell the story of women’s history as one of presence. Just the sheer force of evidencing presence through photographs really matters in a historical sense. I think photographs allow you a kind of evidencing that is not contestable, and we were really using these affordances and techniques to make an argument about feminist history in Nepal.

N ayar : It’s about seeing this history in full, but also—I imagine—allowing it be seen by more people.

Raja Kc: There are all these photographs that are not properly annotated or documented to be of much use to people who might want to access them. So we’ve been thinking about possibly spending the next year or two to really dedicate our time and commitment to the Feminist Memory Project.

Gurung Kakshapati: We’ve had conversations about the politics of metadata or annotation, like: Who puts in what data or information? Is there a way to do that in a collective or plural sort of way? We’ve talked about the possibility of crowdsourcing annotations and metadata, for example. How possible is that? How do you fact-check the reliability of one person’s memory versus another’s? There are all of these challenges to consider.

Visitors sit for a photograph with the acclaimed Nepali writer Bishnu Kumari Waiba (left) in her room in Mhepi, Kathmandu, which served as a hub for the city’s progressives to meet and share radical ideas, 1980s
© Sukanya Waiba Collection

Nayar: Where does The Public Life of Women go from here?

Gurung Kakshapati: I’ve been thinking a lot about how this book is going to circulate. We’ve been self-publishing for some years now, but the distribution, which then impacts the circulation, is really not easy, as all of us who make books know. We did two thousand copies of this book, and that’s a larger print run than we’ve done before. It feels like we’re going to run out very soon. We want this book to circulate in a different way; at least half of this print run will go out to the 130-plus contributors and the institutions that they’re tied to. We’re also really keen to do free distributions for colleges, schools, and libraries, and also outside of Kathmandu.

Perhaps, several years down the line, we will need a second edition that is a much less expensive paperback version, for example. It feels very experimental each time, and it’s been interesting to revisit a project five years after it was published, for example, and really think about circulation then. There are certain things that we want to be very intentional about in terms of where we want this book to reach. For instance, I think next year, we’re really hoping to travel to different places in Nepal, partner with different groups and organize engagements, and enter or create discursive and civic spaces in different towns and villages. I’m curious to see what something like this book feels like in that kind of milieu and space, as we build the archive, deepen what we know, and create layers of knowledge around these collections. We can’t be everywhere all the time, but we’re thinking about how to work in decentralized ways, build partnerships, and allow for other people to take this work out into the world, and then into their own worlds also. Sometimes if it’s too precious, that defeats the purpose.

A Screenwriter’s Forgotten Photographs of American Televisions

In 1969, shortly after graduating college and returning home to Los Angeles, Dennis Feldman found himself photographing televisions. It was a time when TV organized the American home and society at large, pervading everyday spaces, public and private, and transfixing its consumers as the radio never could. There were three national networks and programming genres galore—quiz shows, soap operas, Westerns, situation comedies, sporting events, the news. Feldman, the son of a distinguished television and motion picture producer, grew up in Beverly Hills, and was a part of the first generation in history to be glued to the television screen, or any screen whatsoever, for essentially a lifetime. Since his family was among the first on the block to have a television set, kids from the neighborhood spilled into their home after school to watch the puppet program Time for Beany. He would go on to write in his epochal photobook American Images (1977), a project with a national scope in the tradition of Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958): “There is something overwhelmingly appealing to me about containing the world in one of those rectangular shapes—to live my life in one room.” 

Dennis Feldman, Downtown LA, 1969

At the time, TVs were a site of both desire and anxiety, providing a magnificent portal to other worlds inasmuch as it confined vision to an addictive electronic box. By 1970, 95% of American households had at least one television set, watched on average for 5.9 hours per day. While the concept of “screen time” emerged in parenting discourse about TV in the early 1990s, becoming an unshakable cultural fixation with the rise of smartphones in the 2010s, the prominence and temporal demands of screens indeed dates to the postwar period. Children and adults were captivated by their television sets in ways not entirely dissimilar to our contemporary engagement with screen devices.

Feldman’s interest in TVs and the fantasies they propagated arose from a photography project he was pursuing after college. Visiting cheap residential hotels in the downtown Los Angeles district once known as Skid Row, he politely asked the inhabitants if he could both take their portraits and turn the camera around to record the other side of the room. Some agreed; others didn’t. For him, these impoverished dwellings symbolized his anxiety of being a failed artist; fear of withering away in one of those dreary rooms was what led him to photograph them. Because the individuals, down on their luck, were often watching TV, the second set of photographs he took almost invariably showed a boxing match or a rerun episode of The Lone Ranger, frozen in time. The process of finding subjects was reminiscent of his former summer job selling encyclopedias to working-class households in the Los Angeles suburbs. Though short-lived, the position taught him to knock on doors and cajole people into inviting him into their living rooms to recite his sales pitch. He drew on this skillset as he went door to door with a Leica.

Dennis Feldman, TV in hotel lobby, Seattle, WA, 1974Dennis Feldman, TVs for sale, New York City, 1974

A committed documentarian, Feldman never manipulated the environment or took more than a few pictures total. He photographed each television set in the full specificity of its domestic setting, whether it served as makeshift shelf for prescription bottles or rested askance on a dirt-encrusted floor. In this respect, his photos contrast with the sterile, more decontextualized apparatuses of Lee Friedlander’s Little Screens from 1963 to 1969—a series Feldman was only marginally aware of. As he recently told me, “The interiors of peoples’ homes, the images they had in their homes, their clutter and disorder were a portrait of their mind, of their consciousness. And the TV was the national consciousness, generating images and words, dialoging characters. Those fantasies and realities . . . clashed, but they coexisted for that person in that moment.” Taken in Skid Row, a short drive from the Hollywood studios that pumped out irresistible visions of glamor across the country and around the world, Feldman’s photos couldn’t have laid bare this class discrepancy any more plainly.

Dennis Feldman, West Haven, Connecticut (TV with small flag), 1971

In 1974, Feldman traveled to forty-nine states with his then-wife Beverly, driven by his preoccupation with the national psyche along with his desire to emulate the storied trajectories of Walker Evans, his friend and professor during his graduate studies at Yale, and Robert Frank, an encouraging acquaintance. His mission was simple: to document disparate scenes of American life. Over the course of eleven months, the couple zigzagged around the country in a pickup truck with a shell on top, used a piece of plywood with foam as a bed, and heated up canned Dinty Moore stew on a propane gas stove. It was a far cry from Beverly Hills. When there was enough money for a motel room, Feldman covered the bathroom windows in tinfoil and developed dozens of pictures, many of them unsurprisingly involving televisions.

In a living room in Ellamore, West Virginia, he photographed a shirtless white boy who averts his gaze from the TV for an instant and looks suspiciously toward the camera. In a campground in Lodi, Ohio, he photographed a small TV perched on a shady picnic table, its screen conjuring two Black women with smiles plastered on their faces. In his own motel room in Springfield, Missouri, he photographed the live resignation of President Richard Nixon—the culmination of more than a year of publicly broadcast Watergate hearings that had engrossed the country. A screen decontextualized from its setting, as if to stress the event’s historical significance, the image was Feldman’s most frontal television portrait.

Dennis Feldman, Sherwood Forest Campground, Lodi, Ohio (TV on picnic table), 1974Dennis Feldman, Nixon Resignation, Springfield, Missouri, 1974
All photographs courtesy the artist and Harvard Art Museums

Across this TV series, screen time was not measured in the minutes and hours spent watching Orson Welles costume dramas or Mr. Whipple toilet paper commercials, but felt in the sheer quantity of bright surfaces that populated multitudinous environments and brought new imaginaries and affective arenas to public and private cultures. The series casts screen time as both an individual and a collective experience. “I saw every interior as a picture of the mind of the person(s) who assembled that space. A portrait by other means,” he told me recently. “And the one moving thing in the room was the image on the TV—the same national consciousness running in millions of different interiors.”

As a young photographer in the 1970s, Feldman had a rigid idea of what counted as a good picture and only printed and published a small number of television sets. But revisiting his contact sheets decades later, after a noted career in Hollywood as a screenwriter, film producer, and director, he found about two hundred television images spanning his travels from this period. The Harvard Art Museums recently acquired forty-one prints from the TV series, where, in late October, a selection of them were put on view—some for the first time, anywhere. After heralding a time of screens a half-century ago, Feldman’s photographs continue to question how prolonged encounters with them—and the fantasies emitted from them—have been reshaping the human subject.

Aperture and Dikan Center Celebrate the Launch of “Accra”

On September 15, Aperture and the Dikan Center in Accra, Ghana, hosted a panel discussion and celebration for the launch of the Fall 2023 issue “Accra.” Following acclaimed issues centered on Delhi, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and São Paulo, “Accra,” guest edited by the artists Lyle Ashton Harris and Nii Obodai, is an opportunity for audiences around the world to learn more about the Ghanaian capital as a site of dynamic and historically important photographic voices.

Panelists at the launch of the “Accra” issue, from left to right: Fibi Afloe, Lloyd Foster, Paul Ninson, Anakwa Dwamena, Kobby Ankomah-Graham and Carlos Idun-Tawiah

The lively gathering featured an insightful discussion between contributing artists and writers, including Kobby Ankomah Graham, Carlos Idun-Tawiah, Lloyd Foster, and Fibi Afloe, and was moderated by Paul Ninson, founder and executive director of Dikan Center, and Anakwa Dwamena, a writer based in Ghana and an Aperture contributor. The evening was a testament to Accra as a catalyst of photographic excellence and the ever-growing presence of Ghana as a beacon for Pan-African thought and political activism.

Ghana has been a nexus of compelling photography since the late nineteenth century, from the output of the hundred-year-old Deo Gratias photo studio to the stylish midcentury visions of James Barnor. Aperture’s “Accra” looks both to the archives that catalog Ghana’s visual past and to the visions of a new generation. Featuring exclusive interviews with Zohra Opoku, whose textile-based works evoke mortality and resilience, and John Akomfrah, the celebrated Ghanaian filmmaker, “Accra” displays artists connecting local visual culture to global conversations, engaging in history, and facing the contemporary moment.

Nii Korley Clottey talking with audience members Anakwa Dwamena Audience members during the panel discussion Guests reading a copy of “Accra” Carlos Idun-Tawiah Fibi Afloe and Lloyd Foster Aperture‘s “Accra” issue Nana Oforiatta Ayim Paul Ninson Guests during the panel discussion Kobby Ankomah-Graham Guest reading a copy of “Accra”Left to right: Carlos Idun-Tawiah, Lloyd Foster, Kobby Ankomah-Graham, Fibi Afloe, Paul Ninson, Anakwa Dwamena

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Announcing the Winners of the 2023 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—the eleventh annual celebration of the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. A final jury met in Paris on November 9, 2023, to select this year’s winners. The jury included Laia Abril, artist; Tamara Berghmans, curator, Fotomuseum Antwerpen (FOMU); Alexis Fabry, curator and founder, Toluca Fine Art; Alona Pardo, curator, Barbican; and Mark Sealy, director of Autograph and Professor of Photography Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London.

Related Stories PhotoBook Awards A Look Inside the Titles Shortlisted for the 2023 PhotoBook Awards

Berghmans observed that the shared goal of the final jury was to “select photobooks that are relevant today—choosing some books that celebrate the pleasure of looking, and others that offer us deeper insights into the lesser-known histories, or to the deeply personal journeys of an individual photographer.”

An exhibition of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2023 PhotoBook Awards is currently on view at Paris Photo through November 12 and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City, from January through February 2024, and then to international venues, including presentations at the Helsinki Photo Festival and Photo Australia Melbourne, among others.

Below, read about this year’s winning titles.

Photography Catalog of the Year

The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project
Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, Nepal Picture Library / photo.circle, Kathmandu, Nepal

The Public Life of Women is an inspirational collection of images, documents, and the profiles of key contributors to feminism and champions of women’s rights in Nepal. Organized by photo.circle, a platform for photography and the force behind Photo Kathmandu, the more than five hundred images included in this volume were drawn from the Nepal Picture Library, a visual archive created with the goal of preserving and exploring the country’s social, cultural, and photographic history. The Public Life of Women was published on the heels of an exhibition of the work that has traveled to New Delhi, Singapore, and, most recently, the 2023 Istanbul Biennial. Shortlist juror Lesley A. Martin calls the book “a compelling, eye-opening document delivered in a compact but satisfying and impactful form. It’s a testament to the power of a carefully cultivated archive activated via the book form.” In words and images, The Public Life of Women is a moving roll call of lives and names—a fierce and consequential preservation of the inspiring stories and contributions of Nepali women who made a difference to their mothers, daughters, sisters, and fellow citizens. 

A mass meeting of former kamlaris (women bound laborers), Kanchanpur, Nepal, 2010, from The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, 2023 Members of Women’s Security Pressure Group take a rally, from The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, 2023

First PhotoBook Award

Tender by Carla Williams
TBW Books, Oakland, California

“This reads and feels like a beautiful and intimate journey realized in book form, evocative of an artist in tender commune with her younger self, by someone who has committed much of their artistic practice to advocating for Black women’s visibility and representational politics,” observes juror Renée Mussai. Tender by Carla Williams reveals a series of images, including private self-portraits of an eighteen-year-old Williams taken during her time studying photography at Princeton University in the mid-1980s and ’90s. The design is modest yet sophisticated, offering an intimate glimpse into a pivotal moment of the artist’s life. The book remains coherent and engrossing in all aspects of the work, from the artist’s motive to its intellectual rhythm communicated through an essay by artist and scholar Mireille Miller-Young that serves as a mediation around Black feminist expression. “Williams conjures a visual alchemy and shifting sensuality from one page to the next—from image to image, consistently imbued with a profound sense of being and becoming, of stillness, fierceness, and desire. This publication is a very generous and special gift,” says Mussai. Tender is gentle yet immensely seductive as a platform for the artist’s coming-of-age, conveying maturity, sensuality, and possibility.

Carla Williams, Untitled, 1985–86, from Tender, 2023 Carla Williams, Untitled (Crying #2), 1984–85, from Tender, 2023
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PhotoBook of the Year

The Drawer by Vince Aletti
SPBH Editions, London

The Drawer illustrates the vivid accumulation of photographic ephemera gathered over the years by esteemed photography critic and curator Vince Aletti. “This phenomenal publication offers special insight into one person’s unique commitment to collecting, curating and archiving imagery in public circulation over several decades. Deeply engaging, it represents a bold testament to complex notions of desire and visual pleasure,” states juror Renée Mussai. The seventy-five multi-layered compositions brought together in this book include gallery announcements, magazine tear sheets, newspaper clippings, and other printed materials dating from the 1970s to the present. The pages’ layout references the chance layering and juxtapositions of Aletti’s flat files. Each oversized spread is printed on lush, uncoated paper, unencumbered by text, entwining the worlds of art and fashion with homoerotic candor that feels provocative and daring. The images utilize the entire printed page, as full bleeds from beginning to end. “A visual feast, it is an apt reflection of Aletti’s long-standing career and commitment to art history, inviting readers to an astute mode of looking and seeing which has long nourished his practice as a critic,” says Mussai. The Drawer is an ode to the collector, a personal yet recognizable retelling through the printed page and the lure of the photographic image. 

Vince Aletti, from The Drawer, 2022

Juror’s Special Mention

Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures
Sandrine Colard, Lannoo Publishers, Tielt, Belgium, and Fotomuseum FOMU, Antwerp, Belgium

Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures takes on the crucial task of reclaiming the colonial visual narratives of the Congo, providing an extensive, multi-layered examination of this complicated photographic history. Published as a companion to an exhibition at FOMU Antwerp, the volume functions as a dialogue between texts by contemporary Congolese writers Sinzo Aanza, In Koli Jean Bofane, and Annie Lulu, and the historical archival photographs, breathing new meaning into images created and received through a biased, colonizing lens. The catalog design takes its inspiration from the minimalism and primary colors utilized by W. E. B. Du Bois in the sociological graphs created for his 1900 Paris World’s Fair “Exposition des Nègres d’Amérique.” This understated approach allows for an elegant and clear visual structure in support of the consequential and pressing historical analysis contained within. Anna Planas called out for special attention the book’s work to “bring together invaluable research conducted across three continents.” In addition to the generous spirit of scholarly collaboration as a means of redress and reconciliation, Planas notes that this is a thorny but important subject, recalling that the jury appreciated its concern with “the role of visual culture and its influence on history, as well as the importance of addressing the colonial roots of photography.”

Photograph from Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures, 2022

An exhibition of 2023 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo November 9–12, and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City in January 2024.

Note: Given jurors’ extensive engagement in the scholarship and production of photography books, the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards maintain a strict policy of recusal, in which the juror in question must state their conflict in advance and remove themselves from the discussion of books in which they were directly involved; any such book must be unanimously voted in by the remaining jurors.

How John Akomfrah’s Videos Tell a Story of Migration and Belonging

For more than four decades, John Akomfrah has sought to tell myriad tales of migration and belonging. Akomfrah left Ghana for the UK as a young child after the country’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown in the 1966 coup, which put his activist mother’s life in danger. In a 2012 interview for The Guardian, Akomfrah stated that his father’s death was due in part to the turmoil and “struggle leading up to the coup.” In 1982, he and a group of peers cofounded the organization Black Audio Film Collective. Inspired and energized by the work of theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, the collective addressed landmark moments in British history with an astute critical gaze, connecting the discrimination that migrants to England faced to the malaise and postindustrial decline of the country.

After the collective dissolved in 1998, Akomfrah continued to write and direct films and video essays, including the three-screen installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012) and The Stuart Hall Project (2013), both based on the life and work of the pioneering postcolonial scholar. In 2019, Akomfrah was one of six artists invited to show at Ghana’s first-ever pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and in 2024 he will represent Great Britain at the international event. Akomfrah’s practice and oeuvre is testament to the notion of hybridity: his project is to name the political ghosts and specters that haunt the present day, to confront complex histories—no matter how violent or gruesome—and tackle the bad spirits. Last spring, Akomfrah spoke from London with the writer Vanessa Peterson and the artist Lyle Ashton Harris about the dialogues between Ghana and its diaspora.

Installation view of Five Murmurations, 2021, Lisson Gallery, New York. Video, 45 minutes, black and white, sound Still from Testament, 1988. Video, 79 minutes, color, sound

Vanessa Peterson: An interesting place to start would be to talk about your first narrative feature film, Testament (1988), which was shot in Ghana and England. The film follows Abena, a political exile who returns to Ghana after the overthrow of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, to interview the German director Werner Herzog, who is also in the country, shooting Cobra Verde. Abena also seeks to reunite with her former political colleagues. I’d be curious to know what led you to making Testament, and the origins of the film.

John Akomfrah: The paradox of the film was that even though I am the most Ghanaian of Ghanaians—born in the year of independence, parents were anticolonial activists completely committed to that project of the transfer of power, both political and cultural—even though all of that was me, and continues to be me, I hadn’t really thought about making that film. I, like the character, was in flight from that subject, for all kinds of emotional and psychic reasons. But it was inescapable at a certain point. Even though you might suppose that the reluctance to engage with Ghana was a reluctance to engage with Africa in general, that was the very opposite of the case. I had been tracking and following African cinema and its histories for many years.

I was in Ouagadougou for the Pan African Film Festival when a number of other filmmakers, Haile Gerima being one of them, said to me: “Did you know that Werner Herzog is in Ghana making a film? What are you doing sitting here? Why don’t you go and make one, rather than allowing that guy to do your story?” I was like, “Okay. I’m not sure he’s going to do my story, but I get the point.” It was really via Pan-Africanism that I returned to the nation, and very specifically, it was the urgings of other filmmakers who were all part of that Pan-African movement that took me there.

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Lyle Ashton Harris: I saw Testament when you showed it at CalArts. It seems prescient, if you think about the book White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa (2021) by Susan Williams, who writes about the Cold War–era involvement of the United States in assassinations and coups in newly independent African states. You address a lot of similar themes.

Akomfrah: One of the reasons for avoiding the subject was precisely to do with the terrain that White Malice covers. There were a number of living rooms in that African revolution, and I happened to be in probably the epicenter of the living rooms, because both my parents were involved with it, working for the Convention People’s Party, founded by Nkrumah in 1944. My mother was at the university, the ideological institute that the film deals with. Many of the subjects later covered by Susan Williams were ones I was intimately familiar with. For instance, I remember having a conversation with my mom in the ’70s when I first read Malcolm X’s autobiography. She must have seen it on my desk. She said, “Oh, you’re reading Malcolm X?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Oh, I knew him.” That blew me away.

Since the ’70s, I had known that there were these forces at play on our continent, and specifically in Ghana. I didn’t want to go there.

Black Audio Film Collective (John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, and Trevor Mathison), Stills from Handsworth Songs, 1986. Video, 58 minutes, 33 seconds, color, sound

Peterson: Testament makes me think of autofiction—it’s fictional, but it’s also playing on deeply biographical elements. Sometimes it’s the only way to tell a story, especially one filled with pain and dislocation. To me, that is what writing and directing Testament was for you. Did you feel it was a way for you to reckon with your familial circumstances, as well as the legacies of Ghana’s turbulent politics? To guard against a sense of amnesia that comes with the passing of time?

Akomfrah: Yes, of course. What’s been odd for me since we made it in 1987 is that it became a kind of subgenre of African filmmaking. This “returning” film. There were so many films afterward of people returning for one reason or another.

Ashton Harris: Such as Sankofa by Haile Gerima. In actuality, you anticipated his film.

Akomfrah: Yes. That’s very odd. I hadn’t even thought about that. But it is true. Including the grandmaster Haile himself. Basically, this primal scene of African suffering with its tragedies and its accidents. It was almost Greek in profile, in the sense that there were forces at play that seemed bigger than individuals. One of the ways in which I think many of us exilic kids came to deal with this was via fiction and filmmaking. Many people seemed committed to the idea that there was this hidden country that they felt—a country of ghosts, if you like—where they felt brave enough to go only through cinema or the moving image. That was an extraordinary thing.

Ashton Harris: With regard to returning-to-Ghana narratives in literature, we can also look at travelogues by Richard Wright, Saidiya Hartman, and Ekow Eshun.

Akomfrah: Certainly. There was a period when very many people who had either left as children or came of age and were old enough to begin to chart their connections with the continent—for them the moving image was a very good source, as well as literature. I think in the “war zone of memories” here, as Testament very clearly says. And in that war zone, the politics of location and identities is crucial. Malcolm was prophetic in all kinds of ways, not just for himself but for my mother and our institute. A year after he died, the military coup happened in Ghana, on March 6, 1966. Everything that that moment stood for was wiped away. You can say that, had Malcolm been alive in ’66, and had he wanted to be in Ghana, none of the conditions that made it possible for him to be there would have existed. He wouldn’t have been allowed in because the military would have seen him as a troublemaker. Many Pan-African institutions had been shut down for being communist and Marxist. He was prophetic in a way that he hadn’t anticipated, because when he spoke about his end, he was actually speaking about the end of a lot more than that.

Installation view of The Unfinished Conversation, 2012, Museum of Modern Art, NewYork. Video,
45 minutes, color, sound
Courtesy Art Resource, NY

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Peterson: And then your life suddenly changed.

Akomfrah: Yes. Following my father’s death, we were quite literally in flight, and through a circuitous route via the US, we arrived in this country, begging for shelter, which is so bizarre to me, then and now. The thing that was bizarre to me was the fear of being in Ghana. The fear that something terrible was about to happen to us was palpable. I was very young, but I knew it. I could feel it. Let no one tell you fear does not have a personality, an ontology. It really does. Ghosts do fucking exist, and they do stuff. I was aware, palpably, that we were being stalked by something. I mean, phantom is too innocent a word. A kind of ogre. And nothing but flight would save us. I was absolutely relieved when we arrived here, in a way that I think people who now go on boats to leave, to come to this country, would know, would understand. The palpable sense of relief was extraordinary for me.

We arrived here in the late ’60s and continued to try to make this place a home. At the time, we consciously tried to create an Accra in London, in our house, which would stand for the Accra that I left. In this weird Faustian bargain that I think most exilic figures make with the historical, you slice a piece of it, a manageable piece, you construct a tableau either in your bedroom or your house or your new town, and that becomes your version of where you’ve left.

Having been brought up in a Pan-African environment, a lot of things were easier for me to navigate than they might appear at first.

Peterson: Did you speak about Ghana?

Akomfrah: We spoke about narratives. I remember my mother being obsessed with the narratives of betrayal—who did what, when; how this happened; who was responsible. And it wasn’t just a regional thing. It wasn’t just a local thing. It was a continental thing. We were in the space of every defeated, every vanquished, every political uprising that didn’t happen. I’m including in this all of the ones that were to be, whether it’s Angola or South Africa or Zimbabwe—it was just all these places of defeat and the vanquished, which became our country and our continent. In London, you met other people who’d lost their home and were running from violence. There is this incredible, ironic reversal in that period, where you meet all of these folks who had left to go and throw out the British, coming, begging, cap in hand to the British to take them on.

Ashton Harris: I’ve used a quote of yours many times, and it has been a guiding force to me: “The problem with the Black avant-garde is that we’re constantly having to reproduce itself, because we don’t actually protect it. We don’t give a citation. We don’t acknowledge it.” Starting with Testament, there’s a thread through all of your work in terms of its radical project of, to Vanessa’s point, anti-amnesia. How did you emerge? Why were you chosen by Stuart to be the architect of The Unfinished Conversation or The Stuart Hall Project?

Akomfrah: Growing up in a house of the vanquished, of the dismissed, I am aware of what I would call the thing to come, which is the thing that stalks all powerless lives. It’s the coming of the disaster, really. All of that made me comfortable with the unpopular. I never had a problem with the avant-garde because many of its conceits had organized my life: asymmetry, bricolage, nonlinearity.

Stuart was one of the few who made generational sense to us. I think it’s to do with his purchase on this place, because he got here when he was young and had worked his way into many institutions. He became a product of all of those. When he spoke, we could feel that he inhabited several living rooms at the same time. I wasn’t born here, but I always felt more connected with people of my generation here. I didn’t see what I was doing as being something from a Ghanaian kid. I knew that I had to make the transition from a Ghanaian kid to a Black British one. But at the same time (and this is the important thing that the people who usually call me Ghanaian are not aware of ), most of my generation were doing exactly the same thing. Because their parents had come from somewhere else. It fell on them, as the children, to deliver on the promise of post-migrancy. Sometimes people say to me, “Oh, it’s so interesting that you understood Caribbean culture so well that you’d make Handsworth Songs.” What do you mean? It became clear that Black Britishness was going to be arrived at by a mélange of Caribbean and West African culture.

Having been husbanded, schooled, brought up, and nurtured in a Pan-African environment, a lot of things were easier for me to navigate than they might appear at first. And the navigation wasn’t at the expense of being Ghanaian, because no one could remove that. Even as a seven- year-old, I knew that I was forever marked by that place. I knew things that everyone who lives abroad has to contend with. It’s typical to meet somebody from the Caribbean who goes back to where they grew up and realizes that they embody everything that that place has lost. The place itself has moved on and doesn’t cherish anymore the kinds of fruit that were there that you liked. All that’s gone. You have, in a very real sense, become a custodian for that lost life.

Still from Four Nocturnes, 2019. Video, 50 minutes, color, sound Still from Vertigo Sea, 2015. Video, 48 minutes, 30 seconds, color, sound

Peterson: In relation to being a custodian, there are specific references to being Ga—an ethnic group from the Greater Accra region—throughout Testament. You reference rivers in relation to memory, for instance. Can you speak more to your relationship with your Ga heritage, and how memory and legacy appear in your work?

Akomfrah: I am aware of huge strands of Ghanaian life that only people like me embody, because it’s gone. I remember a time when it was common knowledge that as Ga people, people of the rivers, that our gods were the rivers. I realized that once you lose your memories, everything else will be gone. One of the things I was certain about as a grandson of a Ga elder was what those things mean—what it is to be the high priest of a river, what it means to be an herbalist in a certain kind of tradition. Testament was trying to make an oblique reference to a familial past that may not make sense to everybody else. I think there was all kinds of what would now be called ecological consciousness that being Ga entailed. There was an ascetic, frugal relationship with our environment. Quite a lot of it disappears, because the frugality of it was one of the reasons people wanted independence—they were sick of living these frugal lives.

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Peterson: I’m also Ga. My family are from La and Jamestown, where various colonial administrations, such as the British, were based. We’ve been speaking about anti-amnesia, and now initiatives, such as Year of the Return—when in 2019 Ghana invited African diasporans to return to the country and commemorate four centuries since the beginning of transatlantic slavery—have been put in place to regather and bring those in the United States back to the continent.

Akomfrah: One of my relations with the country at the moment is via a morbid symptom, which is that I go to Ghana frequently, usually to bury someone or to attend memorials. My father had six sisters, five of whom have now passed away in the last fifteen years. I’ve returned to La every two years or so to bury someone. I flew into Accra a few years ago, and it happened to coincide with the Year of the Return project. The airport was full of hundreds of people—it was the most extraordinary thing. It reminded me of something that I’ve always felt. We talk about ghosting, phantoms, and unseen guests. There’s a real sense in which these figures and apparitions have a right to that landscape. Many generations of people may not necessarily be from Accra but passed through Accra on their journey elsewhere. We’re one of these strange spaces where I think our sense of sovereignty needs to be a postmodern one. Our sovereignty cannot simply lie with the living any more than it can lie with just the dead of that place—we have several millions of dead elsewhere who are of that place.

Akufo-Addo, Ghana’s president, may have just had economic logic with Year of the Return. Whatever reasons they have, cynical or otherwise, fine. The important thing was that it happened, because someone needed to swing that door of no return the other way. It reduced me to tears because I knew that there would be a day when it wasn’t just Maya Angelou and a few friends or Malcolm X who visited—there’d be thousands of people of African origin who feel connected to the place and feel it is indebted to them. And that’s right. Because it is. It’s indebted to them, in a sense that it has to open the door of memory.

Stills from Five Murmurations, 2021. Video, 45 minutes, black and white, sound
All works courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery

Peterson: On a granular note, I’d like to think about hybridity. This is a term that is often used to describe your work and practice. With your relative distance to the country, alongside your project of anti-amnesia, I would love to know what representing Ghana in 2019 at the Venice Biennale brought forth for you.

Akomfrah: The strange thing is that by 2019, a lot had been ironed out for me. Some of the creases of discomfort are gone. One is also aware of this question of temporality. Just about everybody who was involved in my being turfed out is gone. There’s no one alive who was an architect of the 1966 coup. So you’re aware of being slowly moved to the front of the queue. That seems to me to come with certain obligations. If you’ve known Nana Oforiatta Ayim, who curated the pavilion; David Adjaye, who designed it; or Okwui Enwezor, an advisor on the project, for as long as I had, and they ask, then you’re not just saying yes to a country; you’re also saying yes to an ambition of theirs to do something.

Nana made it clear that she was interested in this conversation between Ghana and its diaspora, the old and the young, midcareer and emerging artists. I am, too. I might not live in Ghana, but I am Ghanaian in one very important sense, which is that its future matters to me. I’ve got relatives who still live there, cousins and aunties. I have very real connections that are ongoing, which make demands on me. For those reasons alone, when someone decides to pull me into a space called the Ghana Pavilion, I thought, Well, I’m not officially, but I’m sort of already there.

If you’d told the younger me that there would be a time when I’d be happy with this, I would have shot you. There was just no way that I wanted to be owned by that place, because it had disowned us in a very violent way, and for me, that was the end of the story. I was quite happy for it to be that. The disavowal of the place or people, it was a disavowal of the connection—the presumed connection between me and it. Providing it didn’t try to acknowledge or claim me, I was quite happy for it to be there, doing its own thing. I’d even go there, but when I left, that was it. It’s like, Okay, you’re there and I’m here. Finished. It’s only recently that I’ve started to understand it. That places don’t let you go so easily.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”

Tyler Mitchell Stages a Homecoming in Georgia

The SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, is a former depot building of the Central of Georgia Railway, a line that once transported cotton and drove the state’s economy in the nineteenth century. One of the museum’s galleries, at nearly three hundred feet long, retains the heritage of the building, constructed in 1853, with its archways and original Savannah-gray brick. This is the setting for Tyler Mitchell’s latest exhibition, Domestic Imaginaries, which marks the debut of new fabric prints by the photographer and sculptural pieces inspired by vintage furniture. “I started imagining the cargo that came through here, the people that came through here, that maybe worked here, what this exact site was hundreds of years ago,” Mitchell, who grew up in Atlanta, told me, when the exhibition opened in September. The light-filled gallery’s unconventional shape presented an opportunity for him to move photographs off the wall, to play with the idea of the home and the backyard as an art space, and to pursue a form of storytelling based on gesture and memory—a “collective memory,” Mitchell says, “of what nature and the South and the Southern landscape means for Black people now and then.”

Tyler Mitchell, Threads of Memory, 2023. Installation views of Tyler Mitchell: Domestic Imaginaries, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, 2023

At the center of Domestic Imaginaries, a laundry line zigzags from a brick wall to a row of tall windows. Numerous photographs, dye-sublimation prints on silk, jersey, linen, or cotton and clipped with clothespins, sway gently as visitors move about. The pictures retain the signature pastel color palette of Mitchell’s well-known fashion and editorial work, but the figures are elusive: many are only partially visible, obscured by sheets of fabric within the original image, which offers a surreal, mise en abyme quality. “I wanted to push further into loosening the boundaries of photographic presentation,” Mitchell says. “It’s not just about pushing against what a photograph can do, it’s also expanding into what stories a photograph can tell through gesture, through poetic shape.” Other fabric-based photographs are draped over open frames and installed on the wall, an homage to David Hammons’s mixed-media paintings that stage a refusal by blocking visual elements, thereby inciting all the more intrigue. 

Domestic Imaginaries also contains several works, commissioned by the SCAD Museum of Art, fabricated in Georgia cherry and walnut, and modeled after objects Mitchell found in antique shops or through his research about midcentury Black domestic life. Some of these “altars” contain books of literature, sociology, poetry, and photography by artists including William Eggleston and Baldwin Lee. The spines or covers are visible through glass windows, in the way that precious heirlooms might be displayed in a home, while some panes are covered by Mitchell’s own photographs, printed on glass. One altar, a hexagonal tower, seems to ask the viewer to move continuously round and round, absorbing all the words and references at new vantage points. And as the seasons change, the arc of the sun will cast varying degrees of light throughout the exhibition, making each encounter a new one. In the conversation that follows, Mitchell speaks about these themes with Daniel S. Palmer, chief curator at the SCAD Museum of Art, and how Domestic Imaginaries is an exhibition that should be experienced “holistically.” —Brendan Embser

Tyler Mitchell, Threads of Memory, 2023

Daniel S. Palmer: Domestic Imaginaries is your most ambitious exhibition to date and your first solo exhibition in your home state. Maybe we should start off talking a bit about your upbringing—and the influence of Georgia on your artistic outlook?

Tyler Mitchell: My work has been informed by narratives of how Black life connects to nature and to the outdoors. This exhibition heightens that to a new degree, I would say. Being from suburban Atlanta, I reflect a lot on the sheer amount of nature that surrounded me in my upbringing. Atlanta has the most amount of nature in any American city. I like the idea of making images that offer an expanded lens of where Black life can reside. I don’t think that we immediately, in terms of the wider culture of images of Black people, think of Black life as being tied to nature in a deeply leisurely way. I think we’re constantly bombarded with other kinds of images. So, my work tries to center that as a place for meditative repose and leisure, as well as joy.

Domestic Imaginaries frames these ideas as an installation and invites the viewer to go on a journey through proverbial domestic space, from the outdoors, which is signified by laundry lines—the photographs hung on diaphanous fabrics in the gallery—to the altar sculptures, which reference historical furniture and place. I situate my own photography inside the sculptures.

Palmer: That leads perfectly to a discussion about the gallery within the museum where your work is exhibited, which we call the Pamela Elaine Poetter Gallery. It is a unique and large-scale space that is about three hundred feet long. One side is all windows out to the museum’s courtyard, and the other side is a wall of historic Savannah-gray brick. It’s a very impressive space but also a challenging space for a lot of artists. I think you approached it so brilliantly. What did you think about the space when you first came to the SCAD Museum of Art to consider doing a show?

Mitchell: I visited SCAD a little over a year and a half ago, initially for an “in conversation” with Antwaun Sargent. And then I saw the museum, and I was very impressed with the spaces. The Poetter Gallery is the only daylit space in the museum. When you told me that the museum is situated in what was the oldest train station in Savannah, Georgia, and in that gallery you could see the arches of the Savannah-gray brick, where the train would pull up and where cargo was moved, immediately there was this flood of historical imagery that came into my mind. It became a space I was inspired by physically but also historically. And the idea of situating my work against that backdrop created for a really powerful conversation. You think about the idea that the bricks were themselves laid by formerly enslaved people, that Savannah is a city that is still alive with its complicated and sometimes horrible history—all of that plays a role in this work. In many different ways, my work is about striving for self-determination, for agency, for empowerment and joy against the backdrop of history.

Tyler Mitchell, Threads of Memory (detail), 2023

Palmer: Then the question of what we would do in this space arose. You approached that by making your most ambitious laundry-line work to date. How did the laundry line as a series begin? And how did it evolve for this installation?

Mitchell: The initial idea started over three years ago, when I was invited to do an exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, which was curated by Isolde Brielmaier. There was a very unique space that I was given, which was a long and very narrow hallway, about sixty feet long. It suddenly felt inappropriate to hang framed works in that hallway. The viewer might breeze past them or might not be able to properly engage with them at different distances. It was actually an idea borne out of a need, a very functional need for what was going to happen in that space. I’ve always been interested in playing with ideas of photographic presentation in a gallery space, but it was there that I thought to make my first laundry-line installation. It included six years of my portraits across both commissioned and personal work.

This iteration, expanded for Domestic Imaginaries, is a marriage of form and content. These new images in the laundry line think more deeply about textile and fabric not just as a presentation or aesthetic choice, but as a formal and conceptual choice. I’m thinking about how textile contains cultural and material significance. I’m thinking about how fabric plays a role within the home, how it can contain memory, physically and literally, by being worn, by being engaged with as lives, as sheets, as towels—how those things play a functional role in our everyday lives. In the images themselves there are figures silhouetted or masked or partially hidden by fabrics blowing in the wind. Fabric is literally in motion and interacting with the young Black men and women that I photographed.

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Palmer: Since the gallery space can be navigated in two directions—there is not a formal front or back—the exhibition has created an environment for people to navigate and explore. Then your images have this trompe l’oeil dimension to them, where you see a picture of somebody behind fabric as well as laundry lines and clothespins in the image, but you also see the physical laundry lines and clothespins that are actually hanging the work in the gallery. Can you share a bit about the kinds of scenes you were setting—and how you chose the different types of fabric that certain images were printed and displayed on?

Mitchell: It was a very intuitive process. I’m interested in wanting to disrupt the formality of the framed photograph. I’m interested in making dynamic experiences with my work, which comes about through sculpture and installation. And that while I’m committed to the photographic image as an object, I’m also committed to expanding on notions of what that can be. The photographs themselves continue a lot of the scene-making that I do in my other work, my portrait work, which features young Black men and women, who I usually cast, whether they’re young artists, whether they’re friends of friends, whether they are models that have appeared in fashion projects that I’ve done before. They are the “protagonists,” as I call them. We have a day together, in which we make these images, in which real moments of leisure are experienced, real moments of community are experienced, and real moments of togetherness are had. Usually, when I’m making my work, I allow for a looseness and collaboration with my sitters. In one image you see two young men silhouetted lifting up or unveiling or revealing or concealing themselves behind fabric. You see a young girl posing in front of a fabric that’s blowing up against her back in the wind. And you almost feel the wind or that joy yourself as the viewer. And that’s the goal of the work.

Tyler Mitchell, Longing for a Future, 2023. Dye-sublimation print on fabric with walnut frame Tyler Mitchell, Altar VI (Urn) (detail), 2023. Cherry wood, UV print on glass, glass, ephemera

Palmer: The other central aspect of this exhibition is the series of altar works that you made—the sculptural pieces that reference historic furniture and evoke domestic spaces. This feels like another point of connection. How did these altar works come about for you? Why did you think it was an important element to incorporate?

Mitchell: Throughout the past few years, I’ve been thinking about the essential power in how we dress everyday spaces like our homes. The gesture of framing and displaying a photograph of a loved one can be a very simple or ordinary act, but one that shows true and high admiration. The home is the most important public-private gallery in the world. It’s where you invite those close to you, or guests, to come and see how you live, and oftentimes at the center of that is photography.

In 2019 I was named a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow, which culminated in a solo exhibition at the Foundation’s gallery space in upstate New York in 2021. At that point in time, I don’t think I had been home to Atlanta in over eighteen months due to the various COVID-19 lockdowns, and having been distanced from my roots for so long, only then was I starting to think about making work that really considered how those years were formative to me. So I made, first, a work that’s called The Grand Sofa, which is a custom-fabricated sofa which features my photographs of a Haitian family in New York embedded into the upholstery. I started to think about these domestic objects as containing within themselves very important visual memories and moments. That’s where these altar sculptures emerged from. And they also fused my own love and compulsive obsession with collecting photobooks. Some of the works include books from my own personal library and studio—Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life; Robin Coste Lewis’s To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness; and even Blu-ray DVDs like To Sleep with Anger, directed by Charles Burnett. Those books and DVDs are repositories of knowledge, and they come together to string a sentence about the makeup of my own artistic practice, and about image-makers, writers, and thinkers that have come before me that I would like to keep with me.

Installation view of Tyler Mitchell: Domestic Imaginaries, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, 2023

Palmer: You’ve also embedded images in these altar works. Your own images that you’ve taken and printed on metal or glass, but you’ve also included smaller, postcard-like reference images. Between those tipped-in images, the books, and the DVDs, I feel like this is a wonderful annotation of all your artistic inspiration.

Mitchell: Exactly.

Palmer: To many people, you’re known as a commercial photographer whose images grace the covers of magazines or fashion photography spreads. But, I think that this exhibition is so important in showing that you are an art photographer too. Not just an art photographer, but also a major innovator in the field of fine art, that you are pushing photography beyond the bounds of the printed, framed photograph. The final element in the show is the group of three “relief” works which each have a walnut frame mounted on the wall with an image printed on fabric draped over them. This really feels to me like a thesis in innovation in photography.

Mitchell: That’s a very high compliment. And I can only hope to continue to push in all those ways. I like to think of myself as someone who is pushing the boundaries of categorization in general, be it fashion or art. I’m thankful to have done that with this exhibition. It has been such a beautiful journey to find a community initially as solely a fashion photographer, to find, I would say, a purpose. I enjoy communicating visually about personhood by way of style and by way of clothing. And I was also a student under the tutelage of Deborah Willis, taking classes like Black Body and the Lens at NYU, where I found a way to marry my own concerns, questions, explorations about identity—my own identity and the identity of other young Black people around me, my contemporaries—into this work.

Tyler Mitchell, Threads of Memory, 2023
All images courtesy the artist, SCAD, and Jack Shainman Gallery

Palmer: Domestic Imaginaries is on view here at SCAD, at a teaching museum. I wonder if we could wrap by asking if you have any advice for the students here at the university, and young artists generally. What do you hope to impart with this exhibition?

Mitchell: One element that I really enjoy talking about with this exhibition, and what I hope could potentially inspire others, is the emphasis of humanism in the work. The word humanism has been thrown around quite a lot in wider discourse, but to me it’s really a certain striving for moments of personal and unencumbered joy or happiness and whatever that may look like, especially, I have to say, in these anxiety-ridden times. Hopefully the work encourages young people in general, but especially young artists, to make work that is about their own interiority, and their own visualizations of joy.

Tyler Mitchell: Domestic Imaginaries is on view at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, through December 31, 2023.

What Was the NFT?

In the winter of 2021, it was hard not to suspect that the world had produced a wholly novel lament. That December, the art dealer Todd Kramer took to Twitter and cried out: “All my apes gone.”

The apes in question—for those who were not terminally online during that phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, were not the majestic beasts that have fascinated primatologists like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal (though those, too, are in danger of being gone). Rather, Kramer was referring to his collection of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which had been stolen from him by an enterprising hacker. (NFTs are unique digital objects that have been indelibly recorded on the blockchain, a decentralized ledger that is the backbone of all cryptocurrency and digital collectible transactions.) Part of a collection of ten thousand unique cartoon chimps, whose faces sport lackadaisical pouts and yawns, smug grimaces and manic grins, and who come with a dizzying array of clothes and accessories that are randomly combined to create a chucked-in-a-blender mélange of looks, Kramer’s band of apes were then worth an eye-watering $2.2 million.

This was during the heady days of the 2021 NFT frenzy, when fortunes were made and lost and sometimes made again in mere days. Everyone, it seemed—celebrities, fly-by-night financial wizards, credulous day traders—was thirsting for a piece of the lucrative market in monkey JPEGs. (Collectors are currently suing several bold-faced names, including the late-night host Jimmy Fallon and the pop star Justin Bieber, along with the auction house Sotheby’s, for allegedly promoting the project “misleadingly” and colluding with BAYC creator Yuga Labs to artificially inflate prices.)

It wasn’t just Bored Apes. People clamored for CryptoPunks, Doodles, Cool Cats, Azukis, Pudgy Penguins, and more. Buyers snapped up so-called “generative-art” projects—collections of related yet subtly unique images made by creatively coded algorithms—like Tyler Hobbs’s Fidenza and Erick Calderon’s Chromie Squiggles. Blue-chip artists like Jeff Koons, Urs Fisher, Takashi Murakami, and Damien Hirst jumped on the bandwagon. New collectors flush with crypto cash swooped in and transformed the lives of previously unknown artists with the click of a button. Who could forget the meteoric rise of Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann), whose massive NFT collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021) sold at Christie’s for $69 million? Once the fire hose of money got turned on, it seemed like anyone could have a drink.

During the hype, photographers were eager to join the NFT circus too. Outside of digitally native art like Bored Apes, whose commercialization and monetization via NFTs was something of a no-brainer, photography was the medium most ripe for an NFT crossover. After all, most photographs are consumed through screens now. Why not sell them that way too?  

Screenshot of the Coinbase page hosting the “August Sander 10K” collection. “By engaging in the collection of Contact Sheets of Sander’s work,” the marketing copy reads, “you become a part of the history of this groundbreaking body of photography.”

Photography’s push into the cryptosphere saw prominent artists—Joel Sternfeld, Gregory Crewdson, Alec Soth, Joel Meyerowitz, and others—dig into their archives to unearth unseen pictures, whether to tokenize ephemera such as production stills or release older projects in NFT form. There was even an attempt by Julian Sander, the great-grandson of August Sander, to enshrine the entirety of the eminent photographer’s output—over ten thousand photographs in all—as a collection of NFTs, which has resulted in an ongoing legal battle. Others, like Justin Aversano, whose lackluster project Twin Flames (2017–18) gained a baffling amount of market momentum, became overnight sensations. Perhaps these photographers were motivated by a true interest in the blockchain’s brave new world. But most, I suspect, were seduced by the opportunity for a quick cash injection.

Unlike the market for painting and sculpture, which has come roaring back after the 2008 crash, the market for photography has recently been in a bit of a slump. (This remains the case despite the notable efforts of the fledgling photography-focused art fair Photofairs New York, and a smattering of recent expectation-defying auction prices fetched by significant historical works like Man Ray’s 1924 Le Violon d’Ingres, which sold last year for a record-breaking $12.4 million at Christie’s.) Collectors, it seems, have lost some of their taste for photographic prints. At the same time, economic headwinds for photographers have been picking up: the cost of producing and framing a photograph, which has always taken a bite out of photographers’ comparatively thin profit margins, has been pushed ever higher; teaching jobs have become simultaneously more competitive and lower paid; lucrative commercial work looks increasingly threatened by artificial intelligence. No wonder so many photographers jumped at the chance to make NFTs. It was one of the few places where the money was.

The mere idea of photography being bought and sold as an NFT is likely to raise the hackles of connoisseurs of fine photographic prints and other members of the photo world’s old guard.

The crypto crowd is fond of pithy mantras. Those who didn’t believe the hype were told to “have fun staying poor.” When speculators are asked about the rationale for purchasing a particular NFT or altcoin (the catchall term for non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency), they might respond simply, “Because number go up”—a line that provided the journalist Zeke Faux with the title for his recent book Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. But numbers can’t go up forever. In 2022, the prices of both cryptocurrencies and NFTs spectacularly collapsed, immolating untold amounts of wealth and leading most sane people to strongly question the wisdom of spending sums more commonly associated with the purchase of, say, a Learjet or a chalet in Gstaad.

Now, as we survey the rubble, the landscape appears bleak. At the market’s peak in January 2022, global sales of NFTs reached $5.7 billion dollars, according to DappRadar; by May 2023, that number had dwindled to $675 million, a decrease just shy of ninety percent. The biggest NFT sales event of this year so far, a Sotheby’s auction entitled “Grails: Property from an Iconic Digital Art Collection Part II,” pulled in a respectable haul just under $11 million. But it was tainted by the fact that it was organized by an advisory firm handling the liquidation of disgraced crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which made the event feel less like a white-glove evening sale than like a police auction. Recent analysis by dappGambl, a crypto-gambling and gaming-analysis website, concluded that 95 percent of all NFT collections are now effectively worthless.

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Galleries that had dived headfirst into the NFT space, like Galerie Nagel Draxler in Germany, appear to have either stopped their crypto-based programming entirely, or radically throttled it. Last summer, Takashi Murakami issued a public apology after his Murakami.Flowers NFT collection experienced a spectacular peak-to-trough price collapse of 99.2 percent. And after the bottle-popping, Lambo-flexing, NFT hypefest that was Art Basel Miami Beach 2021 and the calculated pomp of Art Dubai Digital 2022—during the boom, the UAE emerged as the premier tax haven for the crypto rich—the new art-market trend seems to be a reversion to the safest bet for minting money: painting, painting, painting.

Nevertheless, some have kept the hope alive. Kenny Schachter, an artist, collector, and prolific arts journalist, has emerged as one of the foremost cheerleaders of NFTs. During the boom, he wrote incessantly about them in his regular column in Artnet and extolled their virtues to his legions of Instagram followers. He also made and sold them, both through traditional galleries and online NFT marketplaces like Nifty Gateway. (His first round of sales, he tells me, netted him three hundred thousand dollars.) Famously, he even had the name of his one-man art movement, “NFTism,” tattooed on his arm. After the market crashed, he amended it to read “post-NFTism.”

Schachter believes that the NFT space is “in the healthiest, most beautiful place it’s ever been.” Indeed, he sees this moment in NFT history as an echo of the art world of the 1990s. “When I started out in the art world, there was a recession where the market didn’t constrict, it all but evaporated,” he tells me. In his mind, the implosion of the market brought with it a kind of cleansing fire, burning away the dross. “A lot of the adult population, when it comes to making money in crypto, is reduced to infants,” he says. “They’re like limited-edition tchotchke thingies that you can buy and sell with your friends, like baseball cards for rich people.”

Absent this kind of speculative buffoonery, real creativity and community will be allowed to flourish, he assures me. Schachter and others I talked to were particularly keen to emphasize the communal aspect of the NFT scene, where virtual camaraderie on Discord has taken the place of boozy exhibition openings, and direct access to artists is assumed to be part of the package, rather than the exclusive privilege of, say, those who get invited to the gallery dinner. “Art is a means of self-expression, and a crucial conduit to relate to other people,” Schachter says. “I can’t imagine anyone who ever made art with a digital inclination before the collapse stopped doing so then.”

Installation view of Collecting the Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain, Assembly, Houston, 2023. Left to right: works by Klea McKenna, Matt DesLauriers, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Penelope Umbrico, Daniel Gordon, and ArandaLasch. Photograph by Peter Molick
Courtesy Assembly

Shane Lavalette, a photographer who is also the former director of Light Work and founding director of Assembly, a gallery focused primarily on photography and video in Houston, and Assembly Curated, which he calls the “first curated fine-art photography NFT platform,” would tend to agree. “In terms of a longer timeline, I feel like we are still very early in the emergence of a technology,” he tells me. “Digital collecting is not going to be something that’s less a part of our lives as we go forward, it’s going to be more a part of our lives. And the technology that was introduced makes that very easy when it comes to the things that we need to create and collect digitally, which is authenticity and ownership and provenance.” Notably, Lavalette also points to the usefulness of NFTs for securing royalties for artists when their work, whether digital or physical, is resold on the secondary market, a transaction that can be coded into an NFT’s smart contract, which is a computer program written into the blockchain that is designed to execute automatically. (After a 2018 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco struck down the California Resale Royalty Act, artists are no longer entitled to receive royalties on the resale of their artwork anywhere in the US.)

The mere idea of photography being bought and sold as an NFT is likely to raise the hackles of connoisseurs of fine photographic prints and other members of the photo world’s old guard, but Lavalette sees the development as part of a continuum that stretches back to the medium’s origins. “I think the medium of photography has been intrinsically linked to technology since its beginnings,” he says. “And we’ve seen all of these moments with, you know, the emergence of digital photography, people rejecting that as actually being photography, and then ten or fifteen years later, those same people shooting with a digital camera and it not being a question.” But Lavalette doesn’t assume that NFTs will supplant old modes of photographic distribution and display. “Yeah, I definitely think of it more as an addition,” he says. “And photography is a medium that is well suited to existing in many forms.” As for the question of the NFT’s appeal over more traditional forms of collecting photography, Lavalette admits that sometimes it’s the draw of a hot new technology, while other times it comes down to more practical concerns: “As a collector, you can, in a way that’s actually very efficient, kind of have a stake in an artist’s cultural capital. And, that’s something that’s not going to appeal to everyone, right? For people who it does appeal to, it’s extremely exciting, because you don’t need storage space.”

It seems clear that even after the market apocalypse, artists will continue to mint NFTs and collectors will keep collecting them (though in what quantities is still anyone’s guess). But a fundamental question, which seemed to be lost on everyone during the hype cycle, remained unanswered for me: Is the NFT actually a medium, or merely a medium of exchange?

Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers #11, 2011–12. Cartagena’s photograph was later issued as an NFT.
Courtesy the artist

For an answer on the photography front, I turned to Alejandro Cartagena, an artist, publisher, and infectiously enthusiastic NFT advocate who has cofounded two photography NFT platforms: Obscura, where he is currently an advisor, and Fellowship, where he now works full time. Cartagena began by turning my question around, asserting that photography is a medium that has an ambivalent relationship to its materiality in the first place. “As a commissioned artist,” he tells me, “I get sent by the New York Times to do pictures, and I send them back ten JPEGs. They send me digital money for those JPEGs. So in in essence, I’ve been selling NFTs for quite a while. It’s just that we didn’t call them NFTs.” There is nothing inherent in a photograph that dictates the fine-art print must be its final—collectible—form. Once a photograph is taken, it becomes a kind of wandering image, in search of a home. So, in a digital world, why couldn’t that home be the blockchain? “Maybe we’re ready to think of photography as this unsettling medium that doesn’t have a native thing for it,” Cartagena says.

Cartagena did acknowledge, however, that photographers were not taking advantage of the expanded possibilities of digital distribution nearly enough. This is something he and his cofounders at Fellowship are looking to remedy. One project he described, which strikes me as truly novel, is a collaboration with the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, called Sequels. To make it, Meyerowitz arranged 3,650 previously unseen images from his six-decade archive into a preposterously long, playfully associative sequence. With the help of a custom smart contract, Fellowship is currently in the process of minting one of the images in this sequence per day and putting it up for auction, so that collectors can, it is hoped, not buy only individual images but smaller subsequences of photographs from the larger whole. The minting process of the entire sequence will take a decade, making it something like the miniature visual equivalent of a concept-driven long-haul composition like John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), a performance of which is currently underway in Germany and is slated to last another six centuries.

But such projects are still few and far between. When I talked to Brian Droitcour, the editor in chief of the high-toned fine-art NFT platform Outland, he described a few NFT projects for which custom-designed smart contracts were fundamental to the work itself but generally took a more utilitarian view. “I think their main use is just as an editioning technology for digital art,” he tells me. “A lot of people in the art world say they hate the phrase ‘NFT art,’” he adds, “because it doesn’t really refer to the medium in the way that talking about, like, video art does. But it’s about the social and economic environment in which that art circulates. Think of it as an analog to, say, something like ‘contemporary art,’ which doesn’t really say a lot about the work, but it does put it in this field of museums and galleries, and art magazines and art schools, and sets it apart from people who are just painting landscapes.” In other words, NFT art is not a medium, it’s a milieu.

How, then, can we sum up the NFT milieu, at this point in its young life? It was, on the whole, a reflection of the culture at large, which increasingly rests on the cornerstones of greed and grift. (It is not a coincidence that quadruply indicted former president Donald Trump, avatar of these particular vices, issued his own collection of NFTs after leaving office.) It was also, like the crypto boom more generally, fueled by desperation. Vast numbers of people hoped that they, too, could flip enough monkey JPEGs or Dogecoin or what have you to have a chance at a comfortable, dignified life, as the writer Sarah Resnick brilliantly chronicled last year in an essay for n+1, entitled “Walk Away like a Boss.”

For all its unseemliness, excitement generated by NFTs produced a little bit of good too. “Regardless of what happens to the market,” Tina Rivers Ryan, a curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum who specializes in digital art, tells me, “it’s gratifying to know that at the very least, NFTs appear to have helped broaden the audience for digital art within the mainstream contemporary art world in the long term, and that some artists were able to reap benefits in the short term.” As for the great mass of people who were convinced that they were buying into the next great revolution in art? Well, most of them got stuck holding the bag.

How Can Photobooks Expand the Canon?

Gregory and Rachel Barker founded their photobook publishing house, Stanley/Barker, based in Shropshire in the West Midlands of England, in 2014. Their first publication, Tod Papageorge’s Studio 54 (2014), sequenced the photographer’s unpublished portfolio as a one-night journey into the depths of perhaps the most mythical nightclub ever. Stanley and Barker, who studied photography and art in London, and who are now both in their midthirties, have since published monographs by lesser-known but nonetheless formidable photographers, reviving interest in Mimi Plumb, Judith Black, and Jack Lueders-Booth. Superb black-and-white reproductions and narrative structure have become hallmarks of the Stanley/Barker approach, as well as a sensitivity to the look and feel of a publication held in the hand.

Spread from Tod Papageorge, Studio 54, 2014 Spread from Christopher Anderson, Marion, 2022

Alistair: First off, could you tell me how you both got into publishing?

Rachel Barker: Greg studied photography, and I studied fine art. Then we met at Blurb, the print-on-demand book company.

Gregory Barker: It was quite fortuitous. We had both graduated and gone to work at probably the worst place to work when you’re interested in publishing. But it was 2009, the very start of the golden age of photobooks. We ran a book fair together called Photo Book London, which was the first photobook event in London. But we did it only once. Then, we spent the next three years looking for our first project, because we had a very clear idea of what we thought a photobook could be.

In 2013, we went to Paris Photo and saw Tod Papageorge’s Studio 54 images as a wall at Galerie Thomas Zander, and then we spent the next six months convincing Tod and Thomas to let two twenty-five-year-olds who had no prior experience publish a book about it.

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Alistair: And now, a decade later, following the pandemic and other changes, how would you describe the photobook market in 2023?

Gregory: It’s returning.

Rachel: It can change rapidly, and we keep our eye on it constantly. With the decisions we make and the books we choose to publish, we have to be sure that in the current market there is an audience for a book and that we are going to be able to sell it. We’re just gearing up for the spring 2023 release of Trent Parke’s new book, Monument, and it’s one of our biggest presellers ever. People are really excited about it. So, that’s a signifier that there is still a real energy around photography and photobooks and buying them and printing them.

Gregory: We’ve always seen our role in the publishing community as righting the wrongs of our forebears in terms of finding these projects that should have been books, but they didn’t quite get the attention they deserved. We’ve always thought that we need to make books that people actually want to buy and are important books that need to exist.

Trent Parke, from Monument, 2023 Trent Parke, from Monument, 2023

Alistair: So as much as they are reassessments, they are also contributions to the canon?

Gregory: Yes, finding where those holes are that shouldn’t exist. We do a lot of work with people who were in Massachusetts and the surrounding states in the 1970s, such as Sage Sohier, Mark Steinmetz, Sergio Purtell, Susan Kandel, Paul McDonough, Mike Smith, Joan Albert, Henry Horenstein, Jack Lueders-Booth, and Katherine Turczan. There was such a movement of female artists making incredible images. And for some reason, it didn’t quite take off at that time. It’s really bizarre. We’ve been quite fortunate to be able, as you say, to reassess the canon and put that important moment back in place.

Alistair: How do you conceive a photobook?

Gregory: For us, the bookmaking process is always about being as collaborative as possible. It’s definitely a three-way collaboration between the artist, us, and the designer. We’re always trying to take the artist’s work and present it in a way that allows the viewer to have the greatest depth of understanding. We don’t want the book to be our taste. We want it to be an extension of the content.

Photographers spent so long making these bodies of photographs—they devoted twenty to thirty years of their lives. So, it’s important that the physical object have as much attention to craft and design as possible. But having said that, we keep the insides of our books very simple. Once you get past the title page, what follows are clear, beautifully rendered prints of the photographer’s work, because at that point, we’re in their headspace. Everything coming before is trying to put the reader in the space where they can appreciate the photographs to the best, fullest extent.

Mimi Plumb, from Megalith Still, 2023

Alistair: You mentioned that you’re very motivated by the principle of narrative.

Rachel: Yeah. Probably the book that really inspired what we do was Watabe Yukichi’s A Criminal Investigation from 2011. When we both looked through it, we were just so blown away—it is so elegant and simply done. But the detail in it is just amazing, in terms of the points at which it makes you think about the journey you’re going on, and the references, such as the typewriter font and the band around it, make the book feel like a criminal dossier.

Gregory: The sequencing.

Rachel: The sequencing, yes. You’re following this sort of investigation. It’s a story. It’s like a novel but visual.

We took a lot from that book and put those ideas into our publications. Looking at the Mark Steinmetz books that we publish; Carnival (2019) follows a day at the carnival. When you’re looking through its sequence, we take you right from the start, arriving at the carnival, through enjoying the carnival, to the end, when the daylight fades, and the lights of the carnival come on. It’s really simple, but it’s a pleasurable experience, hopefully, for whoever buys the book and looks through it. They’re taken on that journey.

Gregory: There’s nothing more boring than “this looks like that.” In sequencing, people so often think, Oh, there’s a picture of a ball. And then on the next page, There’s a picture of a moon. That really takes you out of experiencing the pictures. Instead, it puts you into a space of trying to find how someone has linked things visually. Whereas we’re always trying to get back to—no one talks about it in reviews or anything anymore—the emotional experience of looking through a body of work. We’re trying to get people away from looking at pictures and toward experiencing looking at pictures. If we can give them something very direct, like a journey that they’re going to go on, once the brain cops on to this very simple idea, you’re no longer looking at the sequence. You’re experiencing the pictures and the flow of pictures. That’s not to say we don’t do conceptual editing. We’ve just edited a Mimi Plumb book, and it’s sequenced to the Zen story of the ten ox-herding pictures, like the journey to enlightenment. It was a really interesting way for us to edit a book.

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Cover of Dave Heath, Washington Square, 2016 Cover of Mike Smith, Streets of Boston, 2021

Alistair: Journey is a really good word to describe it, because it’s almost as if the journey you take the reader on is slightly different from, perhaps, the journey that the photographer’s portfolio established. Do you think that’s a fair distinction?

Rachel: Yeah, I guess. Sometimes the photographer trusts us with their work, and the sequence we put together perhaps isn’t what they brought to us in the first place. I mean, even looking at Studio 54, I’m not sure Tod Papageorge ever thought about those images in that sequence—of coming to the nightclub, and then in the middle of the book, you’ve got the buildup to the real crescendo of the party in full swing, and then you see, as it kind of peters out in the last pages, people lying around on the floor, they’ve had too much to drink, they’re too tired, and then it ends.

Gregory: He didn’t have the idea, but he did do forty PDFs of the sequence. We were incredibly fortunate that with the early photographers we published—Tod Papageorge, Bill Henson, Larry Fink, Karen Knorr—it’s like having a master class every time you work with one of these people.

Cover of Judith Black, Pleasant Street, 2020

Alistair: Why do you think sequencing is not up for discussion in the critique of photobooks? What do you think the critique is more attentive to?

Gregory: I think it’s because it’s harder to talk about your emotional response to art. It’s a really difficult thing to do well in any way that means anything to anyone else. Ten people can look at a book and have ten different emotional responses.

Dave Heath’s work—we’ve published two of his books, One Brief Moment (2022) and Washington Square (2016)—is people walking along a street, and there’s nothing inherently emotionally driven about a street scene. But the way he captures skin and light has such an emotional resonance; it’s almost impossible to say how that works. It’s like the Minor White quote about looking at photographs to see what else they are, which is difficult and kind of nonsensical at the same time. But that’s what’s special about it. We always look for books that are two things. So, to one extent, Dave Heath’s books show street scenes; someone who’s not interested in photography can totally understand these are pictures on the East Coast in 1967. But someone who’s interested in our world can look at them and see unfathomable depths of beauty and sadness.

Dave Heath, from One Brief Moment, 2023 Dave Heath, from One Brief Moment, 2023
All photographs courtesy Stanley/Barker

Alistair: It’s also about a kind of metropolitan life, a kind of interaction with other human beings that doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s gone. Washington Square is not like that anymore. As we see in some of these portfolios, there is a sense of loss articulated in the act of looking back and trying to reappraise the canon.

One last question. You’ve got a lot of books piled behind you, and I don’t think they’re all published by you. So, you enjoy collecting books yourself, I presume? How do you buy books today?

Gregory: More often than not, the books we buy now are bad books of good photography. Because the type of photography that we love generally wasn’t made into beautiful books, since it’s from an earlier time period. We tend to buy a lot, just because you see one picture by someone, maybe scrolling through a museum’s archive pages, and you think, I bet there’s more there, there’s got to be more, there’s a whole series there. So you buy the book to see, and then you realize there is just that one picture. But then, you’ve got the book.

Rachel: We come back with a lot of books from events as well. We’ll always go in and have a look at other book stands and end up buying more than we need.

Gregory: Yeah, and the bookshelves fill up, and then other rooms get filled with books.

Alistair: It’s a terrible problem of modern life. It’s not the bookcases you have, it’s the book towers at the side of them.

Gregory: If a fire marshal came in, they’d just say, “Oh, what are you doing? There’s kindling everywhere.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra,” in The PhotoBook Review.