Aperture's Blog, page 26

How Do Asian American Photographers Envision New Possibilities for the Future?

In the summer of 1953, Charles Wong’s photo-essay “1952 / The Year of the Dragon” was published in the fifth issue of Aperture. The impetus for Wong’s piece—a carefully designed sequence of photography and poetry—was an extortion scheme that had plagued the immigrant community in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The perpetrators peppered vulnerable immigrants with fake notices about kidnapped family members in China. Cut off from communication by the Communist Revolution, many of the scheme’s victims opted to pay an expensive ransom, while others made the difficult decision to forsake their loved ones to imagined captors. The themes of Wong’s work—immigrant displacement, vulnerability, memory, and intergenerational trauma—reveal wounds of the Asian American immigrant experience that feel no less raw today. Wong’s piece might be read as a statement about the impossible choices and pain of forgetting that building a new life in this country continually demands.

Spread from Aperture, Summer 1953, with photographs by Charles Wong Photographer unknown, Portrait of a Chinese woman with daguerreotype, ca. 1850
© the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

As guest editor of this issue of Aperture, I have found solace and inspiration, throughout my research, in seeing how generations of artists have used the medium of photography to grapple with questions of visibility, belonging, and what it means to be Asian American. Just as there is no single point where Asian American experience converges, photography produced by Asian American image makers encompasses disparate ways of viewing the world—and demands to be approached as such. But to seek connection and coherence among these perspectives is to acknowledge a shared story of immigration to the United States that relates to a long legacy of exclusionary policies and struggles for recognition and citizenship. Being and becoming Asian in America is an unfixed, constantly evolving, and expansive process, and photography plays an essential role in envisioning it.

Since the first Asian immigrants arrived in America in the mid-nineteenth century, social visibility has conferred vulnerability. Our modern-day system of passport controls was based upon nineteenth-century forms of visual policing developed specifically to regulate the movement of Chinese and Japanese bodies, the first national methods of biometric identification to utilize photography. Falling under the gaze of the camera was an experience shared by most Asian immigrants, not primarily as a hobby of self-documentation or leisure but as a bureaucratic fact of racialized surveillance and policing. Under the threat of deportation or detention, many early immigrants opted for self-effacement and erasure as strategies for survival. A daguerreotype from 1850s California that shows a young, working-class Chinese woman cradling a picture of an absent loved one in her hand is a rare exception. The dearth of historical photographs portraying Asian men and women at ease speaks to contested ideas of place, identity, and belonging that continue to shape our collective image of the United States.

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The author Ocean Vuong once identified a generational divide in the aspirations of Asian Americans. To paraphrase Vuong, first-generation immigrants saw life in America as such a privilege that they were content to put their heads down, work, fade into the background, and live a quiet life—so much so that they expected their children to do the same. But with the second generation, there came a desire to be seen. A great paradox for these children of immigrants, many of whom seek agency and self-expression through art, was that they betrayed their parents in order to subversively fulfill their parents’ dreams.

This issue provides an opportunity to discover generative ways of seeing that are rooted in connection and empathy.

For this younger generation of artists and immigrants, the desire for visibility is about more than individual self-fulfillment. It arises from a want to understand a past that continues to act on us and forms part of who we are but remains unspoken and closed off from view. This phantom pain of forgetting creates its own particular sense of loss—so clearly articulated in Wong’s piece—that marks where immigrant hopes intersect with intergenerational melancholy. Whether one arrived generations ago or today, being Asian American requires coming to terms with absences, omissions, and silences, as well as with the complications of human choices that entail various acts of abandonment. It involves negotiating the in-betweenness of here and there, past and future, breaks of language and culture—or, as the creators of the recent film Everything Everywhere All at Once imagine it, multiverses that can fracture a sense of self across infinite chains of unrealized possibilities.

Corky Lee, Sikh Man with US Flag at a Post-9/11 Vigil, New York, 2001
Courtesy Corky Lee Estate Stephanie Syjuco, Pileup (Brass Bells), 2021
Courtesy the artist; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York

This issue of Aperture explores the myriad ways in which Asian American image makers have approached questions of visibility and belonging on their own terms. They create works that reveal the full complexity and diversity of stories that make the experience of being Asian in America. They creatively navigate the tension between being seen and unseen as strategies of survival, play, and reclamation, from the pursuit of anonymity or effacement during times of exclusion to self-fashioning and commemoration. And in the spirit of the late photographer and activist Corky Lee, they are working toward what he called “photographic justice” by exploring areas of hope, celebration, and connection alongside doubt, uncertainty, and sorrow across generations. What comes into view in these pages is not a single story or image but a kaleidoscopic refracting of shared patterns and impressions that is connected to the specifics of an evolving Asian American identity and its potential.

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How might we acknowledge the invisible wounds of US warfare and imperialism in Asia? Artists have employed diverse approaches to reflect the trauma inscribed on our bodies and psyches, from landscape to portraiture, abstraction, and conceptual practices. Toyo Miyatake’s photographs show the mundane highs and lows of Japanese Americans’ daily lives while interned during World War II at the Manzanar concentration camp in California. They are testaments to the resilience of a community and the ways in which art perseveres even in the darkest hours. In reenactments of Vietnam War battles, An-My Lê draws on the landscape tradition to investigate how history seeps into the present. Yong Soon Min explores the emotional terrain of displacement in self-portraiture that marks the body as a repository for personal and national histories. And while both Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and Stephanie Syjuco turn to archives for source material, their projects pursue different ends: Matthew’s animations collapse time by merging immigrant family photographs from different generations in an act of suturing or repair; Syjuco calls attention to the evidence gathered to quantify, categorize, and understand the Philippines in order to question the unseen power structures still embedded in national archives and museums today.

Family is central to the stories of Asian American lives, but what new visions of our loved ones—what entirely different multiverses, of what could have been and what is possible for the future—might emerge from the push-pull of picture making? In the early 1960s, the Low family in New York City used cut and paste to create an ideal world in which family members separated by immigration policies are reunited in one image. In the same vein, Leonard Suryajaya’s theatrical tableaux and Guanyu Xu’s layered domestic spaces are filled with symbols of hope, history, and affection. From the vibrant, dignified portraits taken at May’s Photo Studio in the early to mid-twentieth century to Michael Jang’s wryly observant photographs of his suburban family in the 1970s and the haunting series Half Self-Portraits made collaboratively by Tommy Kha and his mother in the beginning of this century, photography acts as a prism, allowing us to glimpse the dazzling humor, ambitions, desires, and regrets of our expanded families and ourselves.

Photographer unknown, Low Family Portrait, ca. 1961
Courtesy the Museum of Chinese in America Collection Janice Chung, Grandma’s Room, Flushing, Queens, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Reconciling this yearning to be seen—to find meaning, be acknowledged, and, finally, belong—with the habits of opacity is part of the process of being and becoming Asian in America. It has taken me time to realize that there is agency and subjectivity in both positions. That there are emotions that cannot be expressed or articulated but are deeply felt. Photography has the ability to help us navigate what we choose to bring to the surface and what we hold back. It can address losses that are difficult to name by making visible, with attention and respect, the actions and concerns of previous generations. Perhaps it is this fundamental act of care that will aid us in moving from personal experience to greater collective action and solidarity.

It is my hope that this issue provides an opportunity to discover generative ways of seeing that are rooted in connection and empathy. It is through the work of artists that we can change our perceptions of the past and heal generational wounds.

In seeing one another and recognizing the beauty and creativity of these endeavors, we take part in a project of reclaiming agency and humanity.

Charles Wong is now over a hundred years old and still living with his partner, the photographer Irene Poon, in San Francisco. It has been seventy years since his photo-essay was published in Aperture. The two don’t have cell phones or email, but Wong sent a handwritten note on the occasion of this issue: “This is a brave project, and is heading into the 2024 elections. We are with you.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.”

The Photographic Traces of Luc Tuymans’s Ghostly Paintings

In the late 1970s, when Luc Tuymans started painting, the pursuit was seen as quixotic, archaic. Painting had been declared dead, superseded by Pop and Conceptual art—that is, if we disregard both the bold and wildly colorful brushstrokes of the neo-expressionists and the Transavanguardia, including Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente, as well as the cleverly thought through paintings of the older Germans Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer, who each engaged with the Nazi era in their own ways. In any case, Tuymans, born in 1958 and raised in Belgium, outside of Antwerp, was quite removed from all these conversations.

Tuymans was born into the TV generation, with, as he later put it, “an overdose of images and a lack of meaning.” World War II may have been always present in the media for him, but it remained far from comprehensible. He was three years old when Adolf Eichmann was on trial in Jerusalem—the German SS Obersturmbannführer was being made to answer for the murder of millions of Jews. It was the first such trial to be piped into living rooms across the world. The TV cameras captured a bespectacled man who felt he was not guilty of anything but bureaucratic diligence and obedience. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, covering the trial for the New Yorker, would describe his crimes as “the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil.” The most terrifying thing about Eichmann, for her, was his normality, so at odds with the atrocities he oversaw; he was somehow both monster and administrator.

Luc Tuymans, Allo! III, 2012. Oil on canvas

It is precisely this discrepancy, this mismatch between harmlessness and horror, that Tuymans would later address in his paintings. It’s almost as if the trial served as a kind of blueprint for his work, which stands out from that of his peers through its uncanny sense of paralysis. Over the next thirty years, he created paintings whose ghostly, pallid morbidity evokes history and triggers memories—yet transcending mere illustration and eschewing the sensationalism artists’ engagement with the Holocaust can involve. Instead, Tuymans’s paintings speak through their very silence. His only apparently immaterial portraits and interiors convey a particularly dark energy, an ominous atmosphere in which evil is palpable but never exactly present. He models his work after photographs and film stills taken from a wide variety of sources, such as books and postcards, but also photographs or footage taken by himself or others. Tuymans’s art transforms these into something more complex and sinister than historical documents. They gain a ghostly presence that tells of trauma and of death. Death, though always inherent in photography as a medium, here acquires an indefinable, sickly quality that is strangely undead.

Using subjects from the Nazi era early on in his career, the artist set a tone that permeates his oeuvre to this day: seemingly arbitrary, often zoomed-in image sections and laconic titles illustrate topics that elude any poetry. Our New Quarters from 1986 shows a schematically roughed out, anonymous building—giving no indication that it’s actually a courtyard from the “model” concentration camp Theresienstadt, depicted on a postcard that Tuymans saw printed in a book by Alfred Kantor, a Jewish Czech artist who survived three concentration camps. One of these camps was Schwarzheide, of which Kantor made a drawing he then cut into strips to hide it from the SS guards. In 1986, Tuymans used a small section from that composite drawing that depicts a few treetops for a painting titled Schwarzheide; he took up the subject again in 2019. Viewers unfamiliar with its background story remain in the dark.

Luc Tuymans, The Frame, 2023. Oil on linen Luc Tuymans, Bell Boy, 2003. Oil on linen

His painting of a fallen skier whose face remains unrecognizable is similarly unsettling and strange. However innocuous its title—An Architect (1998)—seems, the figure sitting in the snow and turning to us is disturbing. Based on Tuymans’s interest in the Third Reich, we might guess that this is Hitler’s chief architect and armaments minister Albert Speer, whom the artist painted based on historical photographs again and again—along with other Nazi rulers such as Himmler, Heydrich, and Hitler himself. Here, Tuymans used a still from private footage by Speer, in which his face is clearly recognizable despite the poor quality of the film. Tuymans, however, anonymized the architect, rendering identification impossible. Painting him at leisure also creates a stark contrast to his role at Hitler’s side. His snowy fall, on the other hand, points to the downfall of the Nazi regime, of whose brutal “final solution” Speer claimed to have known nothing. Tuymans took a similarly reductive approach to his portrayal of Reinhard Heydrich in his 1988 painting Die Zeit. Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, where the mass murder of European Jews was plotted and decided. The source of this painting came from the propaganda magazine Signal, which dedicated a special issue to Heydrich when he died of sepsis after an assassination attempt by Czech agents. The original photo shows the Nazi sleek and determined in a white fencing jacket with SS badges. Tuymans reduced the image to a few white surfaces, hiding the yellowy face behind sunglasses and posing him as if stuffed in front of a kind of filing cabinet. The typical mixture of anonymization and allegory is at work here too: the man may be unrecognizable, but even detached from his historical context you can sense an abstract threat whose chilling silence sets your imagination reeling.

Installation view of Luc Tuymans: The Barn, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

One might say that Tuymans copied his approach of modeling paintings after photographs and then blurring them from Gerhard Richter. But unlike Richter, who experienced the war himself as a child in Dresden, Tuymans explicitly explores questions of power, representation, and memory—and how they are reflected in images. The Flemish artist certainly also works with blurring and reducing, but whereas Richter used family photos for his paintings on the Nazi era (such as Uncle Rudi [1965], the subject in his Wehrmacht uniform), Tuymans is not concerned with his own personal history, but with the way images, like morgues, can contain rigid and incomprehensible horrors. It is important to note that, at the beginning of the 1980s, Tuymans gave up painting for film for four years. His experience working with a camera, which he used to shoot his own footage but also filmed television broadcasts, often makes his later paintings look like close-ups, or frozen scenes or images, which he also produces in series.

As mysterious and reduced as Tuymans’s paintings appear at first glance, so much in them speaks of the brutality to which their photographic originals silently bore witness.

When asked why he remains captivated by World War II, Tuymans once said that when he was growing up his family constantly talked about this era over dinner. And yet: “Added to this was the tabooing of these events on the grounds that it’s impossible to depict their horror in its entirety.” This is how he came to paint small, excerpted images with a conscious degree of distance and indifference that conveys instead a feeling of what happened, of where it happened. What he thus manages is to interpret visual material artistically and “bring it to the point at which—through the aesthetics of depiction on the one hand and the ethics of what is depicted on the other—it can be interrogated at length. This is the foundation of my painting, which through seeks to give form to feeling, to the inexpressible.”

Luc Tuymans, Big Brother, 2008. Oil on canvas

Tuymans also applies this attitude to topics beyond the Holocaust, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Belgium’s brutal colonial history in the Congo, or 9/11. Images of the last are familiar to us, but he depicted it through a large-scale, classical-looking still life, which offended some people. But it is precisely this distance that demonstrates the power of Tuymans’s method, which is free of nostalgia and irony, making it inexhaustible. His images of images strip the photographic sources of their realistic sharpness and undermine photography’s only recently destabilized claim to truth. Although they remain chilly, because they grant an immediate proximity to—almost an involvement in—historical events, Tuymans creates an atmosphere that takes your breath away.

He succeeds in doing so even when he draws on images of fiction. The Valley (2007) is part of a series based on the 1960s sci-fi horror movie The Village of the Damned, whose parable of mind control is reflected in a boy’s absent gaze and clean-cut aspect. Photographed from the film in extreme close-up, the boy’s face embodies a sense of emptiness and threat in Tuymans’s customary cold blues and grays. But Tuymans also makes use of contemporary pop culture. Based on a photograph the artist took of his television set, the work Big Brother (2008) shows the dormitory of the titular reality show that films its contestants 24 hours a day. Michel Foucault’s analysis of “discipline and punishment”—Tuymans’s central focus, if you will—takes on an absurd dimension here. Instead of in a concentration camp or some boarding school, the people lying in this image are in a TV studio, voluntarily giving away their human dignity to a questionable TV genre. Issei Sagawa (2014), Tuyman’s painting of the Japanese man who murdered and cannibalized a Parisian student in 1981, also stems from a TV documentary. Tuymans took the picture with his smartphone. It shows Sawaga before he committed the crime, wearing a mask and a pith helmet. The transfer of the snapshot into a quickly applied painting reflects the blurring of the video itself, which achieves an eerie effect: the figure appears spooky and frightening, seething with violence and delusion.

Luc Tuymans, Italy, 2020. Charcoal on paper

Tuymans’s fascination with monstrous characters continues. The cowboy in Still (2019) corresponds to the ominous figure in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive whose stubbornly white, ice-cold visage shows no feelings. It is hardly surprising that Tuymans has now directed his attention to the pandemic, since silences, standstills, and unconscious biases in our unfolding history conjointly form something like the DNA of his images. Italy (2020) shows a dark, empty piazza above which hovers the digital play button of an online video. Apparently taken directly from a screen, Tuymans’s piece alludes to a present that has come to a standstill, now accessible only via the internet. And when he called his 2022 exhibition at David Zwirner’s Paris location Eternity—the second in a trilogy of exhibitions across Hong Kong, Paris, and New York—he was also referring to a temporality that’s not subject to any chronology. The painting Eternity (2021)—a red shimmering ball that could be the sun or some kind of magic orb—is actually based on the model that the physicist Werner Heisenberg used to design the hydrogen bomb.

Luc Tuymans, Still, 2019. Oil on canvas
All works © the artist and courtesy David Zwirner

Violence, destruction, horror, and death. As mysterious and reduced as Tuymans’s paintings appear at first glance, so much in them speaks of the brutality to which their photographic originals silently bore witness. In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes describes the paradox that photography can capture for eternity a moment that has passed immediately afterward, which is why photography prematurely mortifies life: “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.” Tuymans translates this catastrophic paradox of photography into painting. By engaging in memory work, he keeps us aware that barbarity could break out again at any moment. His paintings somehow exist between times, impossible to be pinned to one particular past. With their strange incorporeality they reach into our world, and these spirits Tuymans keeps evoking will never let us go. Where photography can keep us at a distance, his painting grabs us by the throat. Without any consolation, beyond poetry and nostalgia, they convey the chill of horror, the power of trauma that continues to throb inside of us and is far from defeated.

Translated from the German by Florian Duijsens.

Gregory Crewdson and Lauren Ambrose on the Making of an Iconic Photograph

In 2003, Gregory Crewdson visited the set of Six Feet Under to shoot a campaign for the acclaimed HBO series depicting a family-run funeral home. There, he met Lauren Ambrose, who was starring in the show. Crewdson made a photograph of Ambrose in his signature cinematic style, a photograph that has never before been seen, released, or published—until now.

For one week only, Aperture will host a Gregory Crewdson special edition print sale of Untitled, Unreleased #4 (2003) to benefit the Triplex, an independent movie theater in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Like many independent movie theaters across the country, the Triplex faces an uncertain future. When news of its possible closing spread, a group of people living in or with ties to the Berkshires quickly came together and started a non-profit to buy the theater.

The Triplex is currently the only full-time working movie theater in Great Barrington, or for forty-five minutes in any direction. But its legacy looms larger than that. For Crewdson and many others, the theater is associated with the late legendary film critic Pauline Kael, who lived in Great Barrington. Kael was a family friend of Crewdson’s, and he used to see movies there with her, especially in her later years. Many other local artists, writers, and filmmakers have their own anecdotes about Kael frequenting the theater, and there are even discussions about renaming it after her. A young Wes Anderson famously screened Rushmore there for her, and then wrote about the experience in the New York Times.

Crewdson and Ambrose are among the local residents who are actively trying to save the theater. Crewdson recently came across the Ambrose picture in his archives, and was struck by its beauty and magical quality, and what a time capsule it had become. He decided to use it to benefit the cause. The picture was made when Crewdson was embarking on the body of work that would ultimately be made across eight productions, shot on an 8 x 10 camera with his full cinematic lighting team and a production crew of over a hundred people. Beneath the Roses remains his most elaborate and lengthy undertaking to date. Here, Crewdson and Ambrose speak about the intergenerational experience of movie theaters, art in the Berkshires, and the making of an iconic image.

Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003 Collect a signed printed by Gregory Crewdson, with proceeds supporting The Triplex, an independent movie theater in Great Barrington, MA, and Aperture. View product [image error] [image error]

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Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003

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Starting June 2, for one week only, Aperture will host a Gregory Crewdson special edition print sale in benefit of The Triplex, an independent movie theater in Great Barrington, MA. The picture, made by Crewdson 20 years ago, features actress Lauren Ambrose, and has never before been released, published, or shown publicly.



The Triplex, like so many small independent movie theaters across the country, faces an uncertain future. When news of its possible closing spread, a group of people living in or with ties to the Berkshires quickly came together, started a non-profit to buy the theater and save it. The small movie house is currently the only full time working movie theater in town, or for 45 minutes in any direction. But the Triplex’s legacy looms larger than that. For Crewdson, and many others, the theater is associated with the late legendary film critic Pauline Kael, who lived in Great Barrington. Kael was a family friend of Crewdson’s, and he used to see movies there with her, especially in her later years. Many other local artists, writers, and filmmakers have their own anecdotes about Kael frequenting the theater, and there are even discussions about renaming it after her. A young Wes Anderson famously screened Rushmore there for her, and then wrote about his experience in The New York Times.



Gregory Crewdson and Lauren Ambrose are among local residents who are actively trying to save the theater. By a stroke of serendipity, Crewdson had just recently come across the picture he made featuring Ambrose in his archives and was struck by it, its beauty and magical quality, and what a time capsule it had become. He decided to use it to benefit the cause. The picture was made in 2003 when Crewdson was just embarking on the body of work that would ultimately be made across 8 productions, shot on an 8 x 10 camera with his full cinematic lighting team and a production crew of over a hundred. Beneath the Roses remains his most elaborate and lengthy undertaking to date. This is the first time Crewdson has made an unreleased work from the series available as an editioned print.



Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003, Digital pigment print, 8.2 x 12.7 in. (image) 11 x 14 in. (sheet), will come signed by the artist. The special edition will remain open and available for one week only, through June 9th at 11:59 PM ET. The price of the print is $250. Details

GREGORY CREWDSON
Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003
Digital Pigment Print
Signed by the artist
Image Size: 8.2 x 12.7 in.
Sheet Size: 11 x 14 in.
© Gregory Crewdson

About the Artist

Gregory Crewdson (born in Brooklyn, 1962) is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. His series Beneath the Roses is subject of the 2012 documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. Crewdson’s awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship. His prior books include Twilight (2002), Beneath the Roses (2008), Cathedral of the Pines (Aperture, 2016), and An Eclipse of Moths (Aperture, 2020). Crewdson is represented internationally by Gagosian Gallery.

Lauren Ambrose: I’m interested in how you came to be a part of Save the Triplex. My husband Sam [Handel] is working very closely on this project. And we immediately got involved when we heard what was going on, because basically, it makes immediate sense why the Triplex needs to be owned by the community in a nonprofit format.

Gregory Crewdson: Absolutely, I mean, I grew up in Brooklyn, but my family started coming to Becket when I was young and eventually built a small log cabin there. We were very isolated in the woods, and one of my central experiences from childhood was going to movies in Great Barrington or Pittsfield. And that continued ’til I grew older. And I’m not sure if you’re aware that my family was very close with Pauline Kael, the film critic. My mother was and still is very close to Gina, her daughter. And when Pauline was starting to get older, I actually would go to movies with her in Great Barrington; and so, I have so many deep connections with this place and movies, you know, in my mind. And not just with this movie theater, but with the kind of ritual of going to a movie with my family, driving down our hill in the woods, and coming into town for a special event. So for me, a lot of wanting to be a part of this and supporting the Triplex is tied up in these deep memories of the Berkshires.

Ambrose: Yeah, and not wanting to lose that, for myself, but certainly also for my children. I mean, I grew up in New Haven, but going to the movies, you know, going to a small independent movie theater—for me it was the York Square Cinema in New Haven, which of course has since closed.

Crewdson: Oh, that’s crazy. I used to go there a lot too. I saw Blue Velvet at that theater for the first time.

Ambrose: For me, it was going to the new releases, going to the less mainstream or foreign films that opened up a whole world of storytelling. They would have revivals, and they’d have the midnight showings of Rocky Horror on Saturday night; stuff that was tied into the community, stuff that was tied into Yale, and I know that’s very much the dream for what the Triplex can be. I was attracted to living in this area because of Tanglewood, and studying there when I was a teenager. I feel like the town having a good movie theater was another reason to move here and raise children because, you know, going to movies, like you said, the event of it is just so special.

Crewdson: It’s a very different experience than any other form. That kind of collective thing of going to a place, leaving the world, and having an experience that’s kind of a collective dream in a way.

Ambrose: It is truly an intergenerational meeting place, the movie theater. And it’s democratic. Everyone can buy a movie ticket and have access to stories. And it feels like social infrastructure. And frankly, an antidote to loneliness. To be able to share emotions and laughter and tears and all the things that the movies transport us to, as a group. And, in a place like the Triplex, with some space for discussion and debate. I mean, what a special thing that you were probably introduced to with Pauline. What a lucky thing to have had a companion that could ask you questions about film; it must have really opened your mind.

Crewdson: Yes, I mean, definitely; I think Pauline was like a central figure in my life in terms of my relationship to movies and maybe even one of the reasons I wound up moving here.

Lauren Ambrose on the set of Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003
Courtesy Crewdson Studio Gregory Crewdson and Lauren Ambrose on the set of Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003
Courtesy Crewdson Studio

Ambrose: It’s striking that this community, including you with this generous donation, is coming together to continue this legacy and to continue to have this experience. It’s actually pretty inspiring, the outpouring of hope and support.

Crewdson: This picture feels really fateful. It’s been waiting all these years for the right moment. I should say that Juliane and I were trying to piece together the chronology of the making of this picture. So, you and I first met on the set of Six Feet Under when I did the picture—

Ambrose: Yeah! And I couldn’t believe it because there were all of these people from the Berkshires all of a sudden on our set in LA.

Crewdson: I know, I know [laughs].

Ambrose: You were shooting that amazing poster for what I think was our third season.

Crewdson: To this day, by the way, it’s the only thing I ever did like that, ever, and it was because I was such a huge fan of the show.

This picture feels really fateful. It’s been waiting all these years for the right moment.

Ambrose: We were so excited.

Crewdson: And I was mentioned on the show, right? Which I had no idea about. That was previous to shooting the campaign. I was just watching the show on TV like everybody else and I was like, Did they just say my name?

Ambrose: Yes, and it was either me or a character that I was in a scene with that mentioned you. Because my character was a photography student at an art school—or she became that. And there was an opportunity to mention you. I just remember all of us: me, Peter Krause, Michael Hall, and Rachel Griffiths were watching you guys bring in metric tons of soil and flowers and we were like, What is happening right now?! [laughs]. It was so exciting.

Crewdson: It was around that same time I was just beginning Beneath the Roses, and then we connected up in Great Barrington because you had moved there, right?

Ambrose: Yeah! Yeah.

Crewdson: And I asked you to be in a picture. And my original conception for it—I don’t know if you remember, but there were all these local teenagers in the picture. And I always loved the picture but there were so many distractions. And I felt that I messed up the picture.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003

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Ambrose: And there were going to be moths or something, in the light . . .

Crewdson: Yes.

Ambrose: And it felt like some version of a dental X-ray where I had to hold incredibly still during the super-long exposures.

Crewdson: [Laughs] Yes, yes, oh God.

Ambrose: Also amazing to me that your crew is comprised of so many people in the Berkshires, so, it was this “community art project” at the time, and now it’s supporting this community art project. Also so fitting of course is that your work is so incredibly cinematic, and shooting that photo, for me, other than the dental exam part of it, was also just like being on a film set, because of the scale of your operation, which was like a Spielberg set or something, where it’s lit down the entire street. And there’s a DP and a camera operator and grips and electrics and all the same equipment and all the same lingo and all of the same process, basically, but only for one still image. It’s very touching to me that all these years later the picture is now in service of a cinema.

Crewdson: Everything has its time, you know? So the strange thing is, I felt like I just—independent of all this—I had gone back to that picture a few months ago, strangely, and I was like, This is such a beautiful picture, but it has to be more isolated, it has to be quieter. So I pieced back the picture together, as we do, with different composites, and focuses, and removed all of the other figures, and I was like, my God, is that so beautiful? And it also captures a moment twenty years ago. Twenty years ago.

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Ambrose: And I can’t quite look at it, like fully look at, and I have to, like, partially look at it, because I’m in it [laughs]. No, really, it is very beautiful and striking what you guys have done with it. It’s very beautiful.

Crewdson: So, weirdly, when we started becoming involved with the Triplex, and I was actually at Yale, swimming at the pool, and I just thought of it. I was like, oh my God, there’s this picture we’ve been working on, and you happen to be in it, and we both live in the Berkshires, and Sam had contacted us, and I was like, this has to be it. It was fate. I couldn’t be happier and I am a firm believer in timing and fate. It feels like there’s a reason that this is the moment to bring this picture out into the world.

Ambrose: Yeah, I’m thrilled about it.

Crewdson: Can you believe it’s been twenty years since we made that picture?

Ambrose: No. It’s proof time is relative [laughs].

Crewdson: But time moves on. And so many great things happen in life in the meantime.

Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003, a digital pigment print, 8.2 x 12.7. in. (image) 11 x 14 in. (sheet), will be signed by the artist. The special edition will be available through June 9 for $250, or paired with a subscription to Aperture magazine for $310.

Gregory Crewdson Releases a Limited-Edition Photograph to Benefit the Triplex Movie Theater

In 2003, Gregory Crewdson visited the set of Six Feet Under to shoot a campaign for the acclaimed HBO series depicting a family-run funeral home. There, he met Lauren Ambrose, who was starring in the show. Crewdson made a photograph of Ambrose in his signature cinematic style, a photograph that has never before been seen, released, or published—until now.

For one week only, Aperture will host a Gregory Crewdson special edition print sale of Untitled, Unreleased #4 (2003) to benefit the Triplex, an independent movie theater in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Like many independent movie theaters across the country, the Triplex faces an uncertain future. When news of its possible closing spread, a group of people living in or with ties to the Berkshires quickly came together and started a non-profit to buy the theater.

The Triplex is currently the only full-time working movie theater in Great Barrington, or for forty-five minutes in any direction. But its legacy looms larger than that. For Crewdson and many others, the theater is associated with the late legendary film critic Pauline Kael, who lived in Great Barrington. Kael was a family friend of Crewdson’s, and he used to see movies there with her, especially in her later years. Many other local artists, writers, and filmmakers have their own anecdotes about Kael frequenting the theater, and there are even discussions about renaming it after her. A young Wes Anderson famously screened Rushmore there for her, and then wrote about the experience in the New York Times.

Crewdson and Ambrose are among the local residents who are actively trying to save the theater. Crewdson recently came across the Ambrose picture in his archives, and was struck by its beauty and magical quality, and what a time capsule it had become. He decided to use it to benefit the cause. The picture was made when Crewdson was embarking on the body of work that would ultimately be made across eight productions, shot on an 8 x 10 camera with his full cinematic lighting team and a production crew of over a hundred people. Beneath the Roses remains his most elaborate and lengthy undertaking to date. Here, Crewdson and Ambrose speak about the intergenerational experience of movie theaters, art in the Berkshires, and the making of an iconic image.

Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003 Collect a signed printed by Gregory Crewdson, with proceeds supporting The Triplex, an independent movie theater in Great Barrington, MA, and Aperture.

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Starting June 2, for one week only, Aperture will host a Gregory Crewdson special edition print sale in benefit of The Triplex, an independent movie theater in Great Barrington, MA. The picture, made by Crewdson 20 years ago, features actress Lauren Ambrose, and has never before been released, published, or shown publicly.



The Triplex, like so many small independent movie theaters across the country, faces an uncertain future. When news of its possible closing spread, a group of people living in or with ties to the Berkshires quickly came together, started a non-profit to buy the theater and save it. The small movie house is currently the only full time working movie theater in town, or for 45 minutes in any direction. But the Triplex’s legacy looms larger than that. For Crewdson, and many others, the theater is associated with the late legendary film critic Pauline Kael, who lived in Great Barrington. Kael was a family friend of Crewdson’s, and he used to see movies there with her, especially in her later years. Many other local artists, writers, and filmmakers have their own anecdotes about Kael frequenting the theater, and there are even discussions about renaming it after her. A young Wes Anderson famously screened Rushmore there for her, and then wrote about his experience in The New York Times.



Gregory Crewdson and Lauren Ambrose are among local residents who are actively trying to save the theater. By a stroke of serendipity, Crewdson had just recently come across the picture he made featuring Ambrose in his archives and was struck by it, its beauty and magical quality, and what a time capsule it had become. He decided to use it to benefit the cause. The picture was made in 2003 when Crewdson was just embarking on the body of work that would ultimately be made across 8 productions, shot on an 8 x 10 camera with his full cinematic lighting team and a production crew of over a hundred. Beneath the Roses remains his most elaborate and lengthy undertaking to date. This is the first time Crewdson has made an unreleased work from the series available as an editioned print.



Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003, Digital pigment print, 8.2 x 12.7 in. (image) 11 x 14 in. (sheet), will come signed by the artist. The special edition will remain open and available for one week only, through June 9th at 11:59 PM ET. The price of the print is $250. Details

GREGORY CREWDSON
Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003
Digital Pigment Print
Signed by the artist
Image Size: 8.2 x 12.7 in.
Sheet Size: 11 x 14 in.
© Gregory Crewdson

About the Artist

Gregory Crewdson (born in Brooklyn, 1962) is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. His series Beneath the Roses is subject of the 2012 documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. Crewdson’s awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship. His prior books include Twilight (2002), Beneath the Roses (2008), Cathedral of the Pines (Aperture, 2016), and An Eclipse of Moths (Aperture, 2020). Crewdson is represented internationally by Gagosian Gallery.

Lauren Ambrose: I’m interested in how you came to be a part of Save the Triplex. My husband Sam [Handel] is working very closely on this project. And we immediately got involved when we heard what was going on, because basically, it makes immediate sense why the Triplex needs to be owned by the community in a nonprofit format.

Gregory Crewdson: Absolutely, I mean, I grew up in Brooklyn, but my family started coming to Becket when I was young and eventually built a small log cabin there. We were very isolated in the woods, and one of my central experiences from childhood was going to movies in Great Barrington or Pittsfield. And that continued ’til I grew older. And I’m not sure if you’re aware that my family was very close with Pauline Kael, the film critic. My mother was and still is very close to Gina, her daughter. And when Pauline was starting to get older, I actually would go to movies with her in Great Barrington; and so, I have so many deep connections with this place and movies, you know, in my mind. And not just with this movie theater, but with the kind of ritual of going to a movie with my family, driving down our hill in the woods, and coming into town for a special event. So for me, a lot of wanting to be a part of this and supporting the Triplex is tied up in these deep memories of the Berkshires.

Ambrose: Yeah, and not wanting to lose that, for myself, but certainly also for my children. I mean, I grew up in New Haven, but going to the movies, you know, going to a small independent movie theater—for me it was the York Square Cinema in New Haven, which of course has since closed.

Crewdson: Oh, that’s crazy. I used to go there a lot too. I saw Blue Velvet at that theater for the first time.

Ambrose: For me, it was going to the new releases, going to the less mainstream or foreign films that opened up a whole world of storytelling. They would have revivals, and they’d have the midnight showings of Rocky Horror on Saturday night; stuff that was tied into the community, stuff that was tied into Yale, and I know that’s very much the dream for what the Triplex can be. I was attracted to living in this area because of Tanglewood, and studying there when I was a teenager. I feel like the town having a good movie theater was another reason to move here and raise children because, you know, going to movies, like you said, the event of it is just so special.

Crewdson: It’s a very different experience than any other form. That kind of collective thing of going to a place, leaving the world, and having an experience that’s kind of a collective dream in a way.

Ambrose: It is truly an intergenerational meeting place, the movie theater. And it’s democratic. Everyone can buy a movie ticket and have access to stories. And it feels like social infrastructure. And frankly, an antidote to loneliness. To be able to share emotions and laughter and tears and all the things that the movies transport us to, as a group. And, in a place like the Triplex, with some space for discussion and debate. I mean, what a special thing that you were probably introduced to with Pauline. What a lucky thing to have had a companion that could ask you questions about film; it must have really opened your mind.

Crewdson: Yes, I mean, definitely; I think Pauline was like a central figure in my life in terms of my relationship to movies and maybe even one of the reasons I wound up moving here.

Lauren Ambrose on the set of Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003
Courtesy Crewdson Studio Gregory Crewdson and Lauren Ambrose on the set of Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003
Courtesy Crewdson Studio

Ambrose: It’s striking that this community, including you with this generous donation, is coming together to continue this legacy and to continue to have this experience. It’s actually pretty inspiring, the outpouring of hope and support.

Crewdson: This picture feels really fateful. It’s been waiting all these years for the right moment. I should say that Juliane and I were trying to piece together the chronology of the making of this picture. So, you and I first met on the set of Six Feet Under when I did the picture—

Ambrose: Yeah! And I couldn’t believe it because there were all of these people from the Berkshires all of a sudden on our set in LA.

Crewdson: I know, I know [laughs].

Ambrose: You were shooting that amazing poster for what I think was our third season.

Crewdson: To this day, by the way, it’s the only thing I ever did like that, ever, and it was because I was such a huge fan of the show.

This picture feels really fateful. It’s been waiting all these years for the right moment.

Ambrose: We were so excited.

Crewdson: And I was mentioned on the show, right? Which I had no idea about. That was previous to shooting the campaign. I was just watching the show on TV like everybody else and I was like, Did they just say my name?

Ambrose: Yes, and it was either me or a character that I was in a scene with that mentioned you. Because my character was a photography student at an art school—or she became that. And there was an opportunity to mention you. I just remember all of us: me, Peter Krause, Michael Hall, and Rachel Griffiths were watching you guys bring in metric tons of soil and flowers and we were like, What is happening right now?! [laughs]. It was so exciting.

Crewdson: It was around that same time I was just beginning Beneath the Roses, and then we connected up in Great Barrington because you had moved there, right?

Ambrose: Yeah! Yeah.

Crewdson: And I asked you to be in a picture. And my original conception for it—I don’t know if you remember, but there were all these local teenagers in the picture. And I always loved the picture but there were so many distractions. And I felt that I messed up the picture.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003

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Ambrose: And there were going to be moths or something, in the light . . .

Crewdson: Yes.

Ambrose: And it felt like some version of a dental X-ray where I had to hold incredibly still during the super-long exposures.

Crewdson: [Laughs] Yes, yes, oh God.

Ambrose: Also amazing to me that your crew is comprised of so many people in the Berkshires, so, it was this “community art project” at the time, and now it’s supporting this community art project. Also so fitting of course is that your work is so incredibly cinematic, and shooting that photo, for me, other than the dental exam part of it, was also just like being on a film set, because of the scale of your operation, which was like a Spielberg set or something, where it’s lit down the entire street. And there’s a DP and a camera operator and grips and electrics and all the same equipment and all the same lingo and all of the same process, basically, but only for one still image. It’s very touching to me that all these years later the picture is now in service of a cinema.

Crewdson: Everything has its time, you know? So the strange thing is, I felt like I just—independent of all this—I had gone back to that picture a few months ago, strangely, and I was like, This is such a beautiful picture, but it has to be more isolated, it has to be quieter. So I pieced back the picture together, as we do, with different composites, and focuses, and removed all of the other figures, and I was like, my God, is that so beautiful? And it also captures a moment twenty years ago. Twenty years ago.

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Ambrose: And I can’t quite look at it, like fully look at, and I have to, like, partially look at it, because I’m in it [laughs]. No, really, it is very beautiful and striking what you guys have done with it. It’s very beautiful.

Crewdson: So, weirdly, when we started becoming involved with the Triplex, and I was actually at Yale, swimming at the pool, and I just thought of it. I was like, oh my God, there’s this picture we’ve been working on, and you happen to be in it, and we both live in the Berkshires, and Sam had contacted us, and I was like, this has to be it. It was fate. I couldn’t be happier and I am a firm believer in timing and fate. It feels like there’s a reason that this is the moment to bring this picture out into the world.

Ambrose: Yeah, I’m thrilled about it.

Crewdson: Can you believe it’s been twenty years since we made that picture?

Ambrose: No. It’s proof time is relative [laughs].

Crewdson: But time moves on. And so many great things happen in life in the meantime.

Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled, Unreleased #4, 2003, a digital pigment print, 8.2 x 12.7. in. (image) 11 x 14 in. (sheet), will be signed by the artist. The special edition will be available through June 9 for $250, or paired with a subscription to Aperture magazine for $310.

A Photographer Captures the Vitality of Life in Brazil

When she arrived in Salvador in northeastern Brazil in 2016, despite being only twenty-three years old, the photographer Laryssa Machada carried a suitcase full of the past—as well as a lot of future. After studying journalism and social sciences (but not completing a degree) in Porto Alegre in the country’s south, she wanted to create and recreate, write and rewrite. She gathered the tools offered to her up to that point, but she also went on to build her own based on her distillation of collective knowledge. “I wanted to give importance to things that journalism generally didn’t,” she says. 

She decided to leave one of the most economically powerful regions of Brazil to live in one where social-inequality indices are startling. Out of Brazil’s five regions, the northeast is home to the greatest number of people living in poverty, according to a 2020 study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. This reality—fostered over centuries by political and economic interests—means that the images of the place almost always carry pain and misery instead of showing the many technologies, advances, forces, agencies, and lifestyles that permeate this vast area. Without docility or domestication, this beauty fills Machada’s still images and videos, which was nominated for the 2022 Pipa Award, one of the most important in Brazilian visual arts. Her work has also been included in several exhibitions, such as the 37th Panorama of Brazilian Art at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.

[image error]Laryssa Machada, 71 interferences (Vírus and Lila), 2019

Machada photographed as she circulated through Salvador, doing odd jobs in restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts. She began to feel what she desired: a less technical and more fluid way of meeting and behaving. In her organic snapshot of the São Joaquim market, she blended people, beaded necklaces, Pomba Girastatues, bananas, chickens, peppers, trays of cilantro, shrimp, and more. She also gathered discarded bags previously used to wrap fruits and vegetables and repurposed them into garments. She then invited regular market customers—as well as other artists, including Vírus, Talit Pereira, Vivial Silva, and Lila Deva—to wear the outfits and pose among the stalls. The result is a series of performance photos titled (71) Interferências (71 interferences, 2019).

Among Machada’s cameras is an analog Olympus with a small defect in the shutter through which light can seep, transforming each image into an experiment that the photographer herself can’t foresee. “It’s a photo that I don’t control,” she says. The results of these surprises are often small pearls: in images of the Festival of Santa Bárbara, held in December in Bahia, smudges are presences, presences are smudges, and red emerges like a child to be lullabied. 

Machada, who moved to São Paulo in 2023, is an experienced documentarian: in 2014, she recorded Indigenous people, quilombola communities, fishermen, and field hands in Rio Grande do Sul for the agricultural organization Empresa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural. Those images provided the centerpiece for her 2015 exhibition of minidocumentaries and photographs at the Centro Cultural CEEE Erico Verissimo in the heart of Porto Alegre. That same year, her work Elas mergulham na carne vermelha do solo (They dive in the red meat of the earth, 2013) was featured in an exhibition at the cultural center Usina do Gasômetro, also in Porto Alegre. The series of twenty-four black-and-white photos shows HIV-positive women in Malawi, where Machada had lived in 2013 for six months. In 2016, she produced the documentary Somos Río (We are river), in which she chronicles the struggle of the Munduruku people from the state of Pará, in northern Brazil, against the development of hydroelectric dams. In 2017, she traveled to southern Bahia to photograph and direct the documentary Jaçanã Pahab Joopek, named for its protagonist, a healer and midwife from the village of Aldeia Velha. 

Laryssa Machada, Before you love me, she was already loving me, 2022 Laryssa Machada, Before you love me, she was already loving me II, 2022

“I didn’t imagine being an artist,” Machada says. “That seemed far-off to me. But when my work began to circulate, I thought, Wow, I wish my grandmother, my great-grandmother were able to witness these things happening.”

Issues of race, territoriality, memory, capitalism, and destruction enlace Machada’s research. These have begun to circulate with unprecedented frequency in galleries and magazines, in Brazil and beyond, with substantial interest in Black, LGBTQIA, Indigenous, and other artists from historically marginalized groups. For Machada, this landscape is also a crossroads. “The space of hypervisibility appears at the same time these existences are being extinguished,” she says. “This is the central point. It’s not enough to have the images and not guarantee basic rights, housing, health care, food. We are talking about human beings, about people, not a bunch of pixels.” For this reason, self-narration is crucial. To maintain the spirit of different populations that are particularly downtrodden, one tactic is to keep secrets. “Many things only remain alive because they aren’t revealed,” she says. 

Laryssa Machada, Cosma e Damiana (Victor e Moxca), 2019Laryssa Machada, Caminhos (Mariana), 2022 Laryssa Machada, 71 interferences (Vírus, Lila, and Vivian), 2019 Laryssa Machada, Rainha do Rio Niger (Queen of the Niger River), 2019 Laryssa Machada, Obedience, 2020. Performance photograph by Shai Andrade Laryssa Machada, Terra de ninguém I e II (No man’s land), 2019, with Eduardo Machado Laryssa Machada, Ouro por espelho (Gold mirror), 2019, with Eduardo Machado
All photographs courtesy the artist

Translated from the Portuguese by Zoe Sullivan. Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Will a Retrospective Revive Interest in Darrel Ellis’s Experimental Images?

In 1979, Darrel Ellis and another artist named James Wentzy applied for a P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center studio residency, still a fledgling program at the time. Ellis had been out of high school for only three years, and he’d worked mostly in painting and illustration. But when the two got to the defunct school that had become P.S.1, in Long Island City, they built a makeshift darkroom where Wentzy taught Ellis to develop and print his own photographs. The furnace at P.S.1 would shut off at five o’clock each afternoon, but Ellis lived there for two years anyway, often wearing a coat and gloves inside. It was here that he and Wentzy devised the approach that would become Ellis’s calling card, of projecting negatives onto unevenly shaped sculptural forms to produce strange and illusory distortions. 

James Wentzy and Darrel Ellis in their studio at P.S.1 with a plaster projection surface used for their experimental photographs, 1979. Photograph by James Wentzy
Courtesy the artist and Visual AIDS

As source material, Ellis used mostly family photographs taken by his father, who was tragically killed by police in a street altercation before Ellis was born. For Ellis, these placid pictures of family get-togethers represented a kind of prelapsarian peace he never knew, having grown up in the “Bronx is burning” era. After transforming the images into serial variations, he would reproduce them as paintings and watercolors, a process he referred to as deconstruction and reconstruction. These enigmatic sequences are the main attraction at the late artist’s first-ever museum retrospective, Darrel Ellis: Regeneration, a collaboration between the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it opened in 2022, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, where it goes on view this spring.

The show has come together, in part, through the advocacy of Ellis’s friend Allen Frame, an artist and curator who began compiling the work when Ellis died, of AIDS-related causes, in 1992. Frame has been trying to secure Ellis’s legacy ever since. He curated a 1996 retrospective at the Manhattan space Art in General that traveled and received favorable reviews, but he later found it hard to get dealers and collectors interested. “The fact that he was using family photographs may have confused people at a time when that kind of imagery and photography was not so welcome,” Frame recently told me. “For most of the ’80s, the idea of photographing your friends and family was still not seen as legit in fine-art circles.” 

Rediscovery isn’t as simple as it might seem, especially for gay artists such as Ellis who didn’t live to see their work celebrated.

Then, around 2015, the curator Drew Sawyer happened upon one of Ellis’s photo-projection pieces, which the Museum of Modern Art had purchased for its New Photography 8 show in 1992, in MoMA’s collection. The uncanny image, Untitled (Mother) (1990), depicts the artist’s mother against a neutral photo-studio background, her eyes and forehead redacted by a vaguely ominous floating rectangle. Sawyer pitched a show to the art space OSMOS that went up in New York in 2019, kicking off a posthumous career revival for Ellis.

Darrel Ellis, Untitled (Mother), 1989–90
Courtesy Galerie Crone, Berlin and Vienna, and Darrel Ellis Estate, New York

At the Baltimore Museum of Art, the work was presented in the Cone Wing, which is typically reserved for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European art: the period that most inspired Ellis. From frequent visits to hallowed Manhattan museums, he discovered that his artistic vision shared many concerns with turn-of-the-century painters such as Édouard Vuillard, who depicted the quiet magic of interior and domestic scenes. 

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After Ellis’s P.S.1 residency, he was accepted, in 1981, into the Whitney Independent Study Program—the only participant that year without a college degree—where he read poststructural theory, which got him thinking about the semiotics of photography and sculpture. Many of his photo-projection pieces are mind-bending object lessons about the thingness or materiality of the surface itself, especially such works from the late 1980s and early 1990s as The Kiss (1990).

For some black-and-white prints, Ellis projected a studio portrait of his mother and sister onto a surface of scooped-out squares and circles, causing their faces to be swallowed by light. He would create third-generation renderings of these second-generation images by painting the photograph of the projection on canvas. The result is a profound disorientation, as in the painting Untitled (Mother, Father, and Laure) (ca. 1990), which has the what-is-even-real effect of trompe l’oeil. Regeneration includes full displays of some of these works so viewers can see how Ellis’s ideas developed from one medium to the next.

Darrel Ellis in his studio at the Whitney Independent Study Program, 1981–82. Photograph by Allen Frame

“Reading his notebooks, it’s clear Ellis had a conceptual vision of how he wanted his work presented, which was to show it in all of its plurality,” says the exhibition’s cocurator Antonio Sergio Bessa. “We hope that by displaying some of the complete sequences, we can present the complexity of that vision.” It’s hard to know why the wider art world took so long to acknowledge that vision. Rediscovery isn’t as simple as it might seem, says Allen Frame, especially for gay artists such as Ellis who didn’t live to see their work celebrated. “In the aftermath of the AIDS pandemic, a lot of estates needed to be attended to,” he explains. “And not only that, but there was a lot of exhaustion and fatigue around it.” It may have taken thirty years, but the slight has finally been amended, and there’s no feeling like watching art history rewritten before your eyes.

Darrel Ellis: Regeneration is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts from May 24 through September 10, 2023.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live.”

Eikoh Hosoe’s Mythic Worlds

It is said that the kamaitachi spirit resembles a weasel, rides on a whirlwind, flies through the air, and moves so incredibly fast that before you know it it’s already gone. With strong and sharp claws, the invisible beast attacks suddenly and sucks blood from its victim’s wounds.

Such a kamaitachi, half-naked and with its clothing blown up by the wind, jumps high in front of a group of curious farm children. Darkly surreal, a female head appears under a male arm and stares at the viewer, her eyes wide open. An androgynous figure runs across Tokyo. A young woman sits pensively between portrait paintings and striking busts with crying faces. Hauntingly poetic and depicted in high-contrast, these scenes tell of human physicality, sexuality, and a wide array of emotions. The images, by the legendary Japanese photographer and filmmaker Eikoh Hosoe, are expressive, subjective, and mythic; they whisper, speak, and shout fantastical stories that engrave themselves in the viewer’s mind.

Eikoh Hosoe, Kazuo Ohono, a visit to the home of Yutaka Haniya III, 1995 Eikoh Hosoe, Sawako Goda II, Artist, 1972

Brought up in a Shinto shrine where his father was a priest, Hosoe, who was born in 1933, came to photography at a young age. He borrowed a camera that belonged to his father, who supplemented his income during World War II by taking photographs at festivals and graduation ceremonies. In 1951, as a teenager, Hosoe won the inaugural Fuji Photo Contest and first gained widespread attention in the photography world with his 1960 solo show Man and Woman, at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery, featuring stylized nude compositions that reflect his career-long interest in the human body. Hosoe’s fascination with the body’s forms, movements, and eroticism is evident also in what was to become his best-known series: Ordeal by Roses (1961). The theatrical photographs featuring the writer, actor, and ultranationalist Yukio Mishima, a tireless promoter of his celebrity image who would commit ritualistic suicide through seppuku disembowelment a few years later, convey a sense of dark eroticism. “The series made me famous, and I started to work with Light Gallery in New York,” Hosoe told me recently. Selling prints overseas enabled him “to live a good life and get married.” And, he recalls, “Mishima came to my wedding and gave a rather ironic speech.”

For his equally striking series Kamaitachi (1965–68), Hosoe collaborated with Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the founders of the experimental dance form butoh. The work is linked to the photographer’s childhood memories of the war, when he was evacuated to the rural Tōhoku region. Hijikata, who grew up there, embodies the kamaitachi spirit of folklore said to haunt the rice fields. The dynamic scenes show the dancer running in the fields, dramatically jumping, hiding, or “stealing” a local farmer’s baby, and they also often mirror Hosoe’s own physical involvement, taking photographs while running or from unusual vantage points. Even today, elderly people in the village remember the photoshoots.

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Soon after, Hosoe began to work with Ohno Kazuo, the other founding figure of butoh; this collaboration was to last for more than forty years. Another highlight in Hosoe’s oeuvre is the series Simmon: A Private Landscape (1971), which features the artist and actor known as Simmon Yotsuya—a stage name inspired by the artist’s love for Nina Simone’s music and the Yotsuya district of Tokyo. The beautifully made-up, effeminate actor was a participant in Juro Kara’s avant-garde Situation Theatre troupe (Jōkyō Gekijō). Hosoe photographed Simmon Yotsuya in different areas of Tokyo, including around Kannon Temple in Asakusa. His energetic poses and facial expressions are juxtaposed with the urban landscape, blurring the lines between the real city and passersby, on the one hand, and the performative and photographic narrative on the other. This results in an expressive aesthetic that links the performer’s inner “private” side with the outer “landscape.” In contrast to Kamaitachi, Hosoe has described the series as a recollection of his adolescence when he had returned to Tokyo: “I have created works based on special encounters with photographic subjects. At that time, I had met Simmon Yotsuya—through him, the adolescent scenery of Tokyo awakened from my memories and was turned into a work of art.”

Eikoh Hosoe, A Private Landscape #13, 1971

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Hosoe communicates memories and personal realities, challenging conventional notions of photography. In 1950s and 1960s Japan, his work embodied the hunger for a subjective and experimental form of photography in opposition to the then dominant trend of social realism. The photographers’ group Vivo, named after the Esperanto word for “life” and cofounded by Hosoe in 1959, is an early manifestation of this hunger. Like Hosoe, its five other members, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, Akira Tanno, and Shomei Tomatsu, had participated in a group exhibition titled Jūnin no me (Eyes of Ten) at Konishiroku Photo Gallery two years earlier, organized by the photography critic Tatsuo Fukushima. The Vivo artists shared an office, a manager, and a darkroom in East Ginza, Tokyo. Despite existing for only two years, this office became the epicenter of a new subjective style of photography, whose protagonists were soon referred to as the Image Generation and became highly influential in the history of Japanese photography. As the critic Kotaro Iizawa once wrote, the Vivo members “gave the image its independence.”

Dramatic and dreamlike, Hosoe’s imagery remains radical, powerful, and moving—it deserves to be discovered by a wider audience.

Whether presented individually or as a series, in exhibitions or photobooks (often designed by key figures of Japanese graphic design, such as Kohei Sugiura and Tadanori Yokoo), Hosoe’s photographs grab viewers and lead them into a cinematic world. None of the series have a beginning, ending, or story line; however, most of them convey a strong narrative quality. But whose stories do they tell? They are born out of collaborations, while also recording a specific time and place. The narratives are based on Hosoe’s artistic choices in terms of photographic angle, perspective, light, shadow, background, and printing techniques in the darkroom just as much as they come into existence through the facial expressions, spontaneous gestures, and movements of the photographic subjects. Hosoe creates an inspiring atmosphere in which the performers and the photographer engage in a fantastical Ping-Pong match, passing ideas back and forth to each other.

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In a recent monograph titled Eikoh Hosoe: Pioneering Post-1945 Japanese Photography, edited by Yasufumi Nakamori, the curator Christina Yang proposes viewing Hosoe’s expansive practice as “exquisite world-making”—I suggest attributing this act of “world-making” to Hosoe as well as to the people in front of his lens, situating both on a par with each other. It is no coincidence that the subjects of Hosoe’s best-known photographs are strong characters who enjoy working with their bodies and faces, be they dancers, actors, or public figures such as Mishima, who transformed his physique through bodybuilding. Hosoe is aware of the photographic subjects’ power during the creative process; unlike his peers, he has credited Hijikata, Mishima, Simmon Yotsuya, and others, acknowledging them as equal collaborators. With many of them, he developed a friendship. When I asked Hosoe a few years ago what he likes best about photography, he pointed first to his subjects, responding that “the most interesting and attractive aspect of photography is the simple joy of the people who are photographed. I have always liked human relationships.” Storytelling in Hosoe’s photography is based on an indescribable fantasy world that exists between the photographer and photographic subject(s); a unique moment of space, time, and feeling is captured on camera, during the vivid exchange of ideas.

Eikoh Hosoe, Kamaitachi #17, 1965 Eikoh Hosoe, Man and Woman #33, 1960
All photographs © the artist and courtesy Akio Nagasawa Gallery

This March, Hosoe will be ninety years old. With his distinct visual language, pioneering collaborative approach, and relentless activity promoting photography in Japan—including through education and copyright protections—he has been one of the country’s most influential photographers since the postwar era. Hosoe has inspired his peers as well as younger generations of artists. Kikuji Kawada, a legendary photographer himself, who is best known for his experimental photobook Chizu (The Map, 1965), described Hosoe as someone who “searched for a new world of thought based on the eye,” creating “dramatic evidence and unforeseen stories within overwhelmingly photogenic and poetic frames.” It is telling that, having aspired to be a diplomat and also having won Tokyo’s very first English speech contest as a child, Hosoe chose the Japanese character ei for his pen name, Eikoh, which is also used in the term eigo, “English,” suggesting internationality. According to Kawada, both the Vivo office and what is now the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum would probably not have been founded without Hosoe. Daido Moriyama, who at the beginning of his own photographic career in Tokyo assisted Hosoe, argues that before Hosoe, the Japanese photography world was dominated by a type of photography that had “a strong sense of documentary and was strictly not staged. Hosoe confronted this, creating theatrical, staged photographs based on collaborations with the photographic subjects. It was a major achievement.”

With his openness, beginning in the late 1950s, to viewing photography as a form of creative collaboration, Hosoe was well ahead of his time. After early attention in the United States and Europe, however, his work has not been exhibited on a large scale outside of Japan. Dramatic and dreamlike, Hosoe’s imagery remains radical, powerful, and moving—it deserves to be discovered by a wider audience internationally, including all current and future photography lovers.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live.”

A Festival in Kyoto Dazzles with Photography and Architecture

If tourists flock to Tokyo to be wowed by its urban acceleration, Kyoto provides the inverse as a serene city showcasing the splendors of ancient Japan. During the height of the pandemic, the city saw an influx of new residents seeking more space and a less frenetic lifestyle. With new galleries opening and support from the local government for the arts, it continues to evolve as a vibrant center of contemporary culture. 

Kyotographie, a photography festival held annually (excepting interruptions due to the pandemic), smartly takes advantage of the city’s overwhelming number of shrines, temples, gardens, and other alluring architectural destinations. Founded in 2013 by Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, the festival staged its eleventh edition in April, loosely themed around the idea of borders. Projects addressed both literal and metaphysical spins on this idea, including a series on migration and one on elderly people isolated by dementia. (Japan had only recently fully reopened its own borders after three years of pandemic-related restrictions for foreigners, and tourists were out in force.) In a photography field crowded with festivals, Kyotographie distinguishes itself through clever site-specific exhibitions within many of the city’s stunning, and usually off-limits, locations. The event is as much a photography festival as it is celebration of the city’s majestic architecture and cultural heritage.

Installation view of Kazuhiko Matsumura, Heartstrings, Hachiku-an (Former Kawasaki Residence), 2023. Photograph by Kenryou Gu Installation view of A dialogue between Ishiuchi Miyako and Yuhki Touyama: Views through my window, Kondaya Genbei Chikuin-no-Ma, 2023. Photograph by Takeshi Asano

The impressive Nijo-jo castle tops any visitor’s must-see list for the city. Built in 1603 by the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, it is a magnificent complex of buildings and gardens. One building features famous “nightingale floors,” designed with dry wood to chirp when walked on and alert its eminent residents of an impending ninja ambush. Where tourists won’t find themselves, though, is in the castle’s normally closed Okiyodokoro, the kitchen area where, centuries ago, samurai gathered to eat.

The architect Tsuyoshi Tane was initially apprehensive about designing a photography exhibition of work by the fashion photographer Yuriko Takagi within this storied space. Tane, whose studio is in Paris, is known for elegant designs that absorb the particulars of local context into their execution and thoughtfully harness the specificity of place. His design for the Estonian National Museum follows the straight line of a former Soviet-era runway on which the building is constructed; his firm’s completed Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, in Japan, features a “cider gold” roof, a reference to the region’s robust apple production.

Yuriko Takagi, Gateway, Yuriko Takagi × Nanao Kobayashi, Japan, 2023
©︎ the artistInstallation view of Yuriko Takagi, Parallel World, Nijo-jo Castle Ninomaru Palace Daidokoro Kitchen and Okiyodokoro Kitchen, 2023. Photograph by Kenryou Gu

This holistic approach is also present in Tane’s work inside Nijo-jo castle. Takagi and Tane had long wanted to collaborate after meeting in 2017 during a public program for an Issey Miyake exhibition in Tokyo. For four decades, Takagi, who once worked as a fashion designer, has photographed the collections of Miyake, Commes Des Garçons, Dior, and Yohji Yamamoto, among others, to create sumptuous, dreamlike fashion imagery. Her work on view in Kyoto sought to unite what she sees as fashion’s parallel worlds: luxury haute-couture creations and traditional, functional, yet beautiful styles of dress found in a range of cultures around the world.

Placing art in iconic spaces can be fraught. Historical spaces have a way of taking the limelight. They also come with a litany of restrictions. Constraints, however, are often generative, allowing for new ideas and possibilities—even if that means you cannot attach anything to a wall, or to the floor, or you are required to call upon a specially appointed staff member to open and close a sliding door.

And then there’s the weight of tradition. Tane was at first apprehensive about the “very Japanese” architecture of the castle, as he put it, and concerned that viewers wouldn’t be able to ignore the context and focus on the photographs. However, as he worked on the project, he says he became enamored with the “strong presence” of the building and saw the project as a “lifetime opportunity.” To present Takagi’s photographs, he leaned not away but into tradition, devising an installation based on shoji, traditional Japanese screens. In one cavernous room, photographs were printed on rice paper and presented in a large-scale configuration that allowed viewers to walk around the images.

Installation view of Yuriko Takagi, Parallel World, Nijo-jo Castle Ninomaru Palace Daidokoro Kitchen and Okiyodokoro Kitchen, 2023 Photograph by Kenryou Gu

Takagi’s work moves “beyond the image,” Tane says. “It is about texture imagination and the journey.” And the installation had a transporting effect, as the main room opened onto smaller ones where additional photographs were presented as a field of unglazed prints situated atop metal pedestals. “I wanted to play with shadows and darkness, and follow the geometry of the Japanese construction,” Tane noted. With only natural light filtering into the space, the tonality of the prints seemed to match the dim but warm atmosphere of the interior, recalling Junichiro Tanizaki’s classic 1933 essay collection In Praise of Shadows, a treatise on what Japanese aesthetics were losing with the advent of electrical lighting and modernity.

The presentation at Nijo-jo may have been a high-water mark of site specificity, but it was not alone. Joana Choumali, a resident of the festival, presented at the Ryosokuin Zen Temple a series of mixed-media fabric works featuring images of West African landscapes that she made during morning walks in her hometown of Abijan, Ivory Coast. The series was installed on the floor in an arrangement of custom-made wooden boxes with the feel of domestic furniture, and continued in two tea houses beside a painterly Edo-era garden.

Joana Choumali, MAYBE I GREW UP A LITTLE TOO SOON, 2022
© the artistInstallation view of Joana Choumali, Alba’hian, Ryosokuin Zen Temple, 2023. Photograph by Takeshi Asano

An exhibition of works by Yu Yamauchi, who explores the natural landscapes of Yakushima island, was staged in a large machiya (townhouse) built a century ago by a Shinto shrine carpenter. A selection of images by Ishiuchi Miyako, a giant of postwar photography in Japan, was paired with photographs by Yukhi Touyama in a modest exhibition staged inside a space belonging to a wholesaler of obi—a business that has been operating for nearly three hundred years. This presentation teased out an intergenerational dialogue between two photographers reflecting on family loss—although Ishiuchi, considering her position as an artist and feminist cultural force, warranted a castle of her own.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Mother’s #5, 2002
Courtesy The Third Gallery Aya Ishiuchi Miyako, Mother’s #39, 2002 Installation view of Yu Yamauchi, JINEN, Kondaya Genbei Kurogura, 2023. Photograph by Takeshi AsanoYu Yamuchi, Existence #11, from the series JINEN, 2023
© the artist
All installation views courtesy Kyotographie 2023

The festival’s decision to make the architecture and local context as much a part of the festival has the benefit of highlighting not only the histories and stories embedded in the locations, but also the work of exhibition making that often goes unseen and uncredited—the many collaborations between artists, curators, and designers. The dynamic pairing of images and architecture underscored how photography transports viewers into other worlds and temporalities. In an era when so much is mediated by the screen, the spirit of this festival is entirely physical, almost performatively so. You have to be there to take off your shoes, step inside, look carefully, and be taken away.

Kyotographie 2023 was on view at multiple locations in Kyoto, Japan, from April 15 to May 14, 2023.

Vân-Nhi Nguyen’s Bold Perspective on the Lives of Young People in Vietnam

A young woman sits on a plastic-covered bed in a cheap motel room. She is dressed without pageantry or occasion, in a black tank top and a pair of shorts. A small tattoo is visible on the inside of her elbow. She is barefoot. Her gaze is one of neither confrontation nor seduction. “See me as I am,” she seems to be saying. “Look at me as I look at you.” Behind her, a poster depicting a flat, computer-rendered landscape of a beach is tacked to the wall. This could be Vietnam, but it could also be anywhere tropical.

What does it mean to grow up in a country violently marked by colonization and war? For Vân-Nhi Nguyen, the twenty-three-year-old Vietnamese photographer who took the untitled image as part of her 2022 series As You Grow Older, it is a disorientating experience, one that overwhelms her emotionally.

Vân-Nhi Nguyen, Untitled (Girl in Pearls), Vietnam, 2022 Vân-Nhi Nguyen, Untitled (Between Two Centuries), Vietnam, 2022

“Our history has been wiped clean every single time from thousands of years of colonization,” she told me in a recent conversation. “It strips us of our identity so that, even now, young Vietnamese people don’t even know who they are to begin with, to even tell a story. When you actually look at the history of Vietnamese people, we didn’t really gain any sense of our own identity until our independence in 1975, which was forty years ago. That’s still within a human’s lifetime.”

Nguyen’s relationship to photography has been complicated. Initially, art was more a means to escape a conventional life and less a way to express herself. “Art, in general,” says Nguyen, “is not something too important to public education in Vietnam. I think it’s fair to say that people need to stay alive first. Not just in Vietnam, but, typically, it’s understandable that people can’t look for anything else if their stomach is empty or their beer is not cold.”

Under Nguyen’s lens, the flattening stereotypes of Vietnamese culture are never present, even if she is perfectly aware of them.

At sixteen, she began taking photographs, and soon, while in college, found a place for herself with commercial and fashion-oriented work. But Nguyen eventually came to see that this type of image making was essentially meaningless. She was equally unimpressed with the clout that the camera lent her socially, and, in a radical gesture, she put it down when she was twenty and stopped producing altogether for two years. “Photography became to me something so shallow and so superficial,” Nguyen says. “I hated the emptiness of images I saw scrolling Instagram, and I hated the cleanliness of the fashion images in magazines. Everything was too sterile and dishonest.”

That time was a fallow period for Nguyen, who spent it looking at photography books, studying not only her peers but those who came before her. One of her biggest influences is the photographer Deana Lawson, whose portraits of Black American men and women, often at home, are striking in their ability to capture a kind of out-of-time noble or aristocratic manner.

Vân-Nhi Nguyen, Untitled, Vietnam, 2022 Vân-Nhi Nguyen, Ba Cô (Three Aunties), Vietnam, 2022

As Zadie Smith wrote in a 2018 essay for Lawson’s Aperture monograph: “Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa.” To Nguyen, this kind of framework was a revelation. She asked herself: What am I even doing if I can’t put my people on a pedestal?

Nguyen’s photographs in As You Grow Older are a serious attempt at exactly that. She asked friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to pose for her, sometimes staging them in intimate settings such as their bedrooms, other times in unfamiliar spaces. In one memorable photograph, three women stand defiantly in the center of the frame, each striking an identical pose, their hands on their hips, like a line of chorus girls. But the image is unsettling in its power, even though its setting—a dimly lit hallway of an apartment walk-up—is ordinary, almost bland. Nguyen was, in fact, referencing a pose from a historical image she had come across, of three Vietnamese women on the verge of being executed by European settlers, their necks shackled together by chains.

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“Even though that image was taken by a white person, a settler, the women looked as though they owned the space,” Nguyen observed. In her pictures, masculinity, too, is its own kind of pure beauty: two young men lean against each other at night on the banks of the Hong River; another young man poses calmly on a bed, shirtless. Nguyen has a knack for seeking out the idiosyncrasies of those around her, to find intimacy with her gaze. Under her lens, the flattening stereotypes of Vietnamese culture are never present, even if she is perfectly aware of them.

Lately, Nguyen has been productive, completing the first portion of a series of photographs called Under the Sun, taken by the Siem Reap River in Cambodia earlier this year, and is at work on an upcoming show this August with Aperture. Her relationship to photography is still complex. “I feel like I’m in a marriage,” she says of her art. “Some days, I can feel intense passion for it that feels like I could survive off photographs and images alone, and some others, I just want to stop altogether and never touch a camera again.” But she is spending more time deepening her craft. She allows herself to fall in love with people and places. She is open to where photography will take her next.

Vân-Nhi Nguyen, Untitled (Dan Ni), Vietnam, 2022 Vân-Nhi Nguyen, Untitled (Vietnamese Pieta, By the River), Vietnam, 2022
All photographs courtesy the artist

Vân-Nhi Nguyen is the winner of the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize. A solo exhibition of her work will be on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York in August 2023.

This piece appears in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian In America,” under the column “Spotlight.”

A Photographer’s Final Collaboration with His Father

“To me, photography recontextualizes and embraces death,” explains the photographer Brian Lau. In 2019, Lau’s father had an abrupt stroke, and passed away the following year due to brain cancer. Before his passing, Lau and his father began a collaborative series, We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys, a deeply personal exploration of family, grief, and Asian American identity.

Lau, who was born in Honolulu and is currently based in Seattle, is a self-taught photographer. Like many of his generation, Lau’s formative experiences with photography stemmed from online platforms such as Tumblr and Flickr that were prominent in youth culture in the early 2010s. “Most of my education with photography has been from the popularization and influence of these online platforms,” says Lau. “Many of my peers I found and formed friendships with were due to these social platforms and found communities.” In 2022, Lau founded the online platform Arcanite Pictures, dedicated to highlighting the work of emerging artists.

Brian Lau, Dad’s Shave (A Week After Surgery), 2019

Lau’s relationship with his father was a tumultuous one. Lau’s father, who had been incarcerated during his youth, left his son and family behind in 2010, when he returned to Vietnam in pursuit of a new life. Yet, when faced with the news of his father’s stroke, Lau made the decision to travel to Ho Chi Minh City with no return date in sight. Lau spent several months with his father’s new family, finding himself faced with an unfamiliar set of customs and family dynamics. It was in his final month there that Lau’s father made a proposition: work together to create a series of photographs documenting what was ultimately an unsuccessful journey to recovery. 

Throughout We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys, Lau weaves together black-and-white images of his father’s life in Vietnam alongside landscapes of the Pacific Northwest made after returning home. Drawing upon the idea of the family album, Lau is less interested in the idea of direct representation, instead offering a more ambiguous, open-ended (or, unanswered) depiction, which Lau describes as “acts of evidence being unearthed.” In photographing his father in tightly framed, small interior spaces, Lau brings us into this newly intimate space between them, while simultaneously blocking our view beyond the frame—making a direct link between their changing relationship, his father’s condition, and his history with the prison system. 

Brian Lau, House in Flurry, 2020

Despite being shot across various locations and years, Lau’s series creates an amorphous blend of time and place. A dark cave leads to a bright opening; his father, post-surgery, attempts to play a song on a guitar; a house is sunk roof-deep into a curved landscape; a family dinner is imbued with a sense of anxiety when lit with flash. In one image taken during Lau’s first winter without his father, a flurry of snow is illuminated with flash at night in a suburban neighborhood, giving an almost ghostly, spiritual presence. “This series became more of a reflection on the relationship between my father and me, one of mutual interpersonal grievances, and a practically ouroboran cycle of shame and alienation,” explains Lau. “I began to look at the pictures as an attempt to answer the ambiguities left in his wake, and the lack of emotional closure we shared.”

Photographs exist with almost opposing realities: they stop at a moment in time, and yet live on indefinitely, constantly transforming alongside us as we grow, learn, and change. We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys narrows in on this tension, acting not only as a means to process grief—the loss of a father, the dysphoria of his Vietnamese lineage, a deteriorating sense of home—but also as a way to make sense of Lau’s relationships. “Finding the story, and unraveling what had happened and the many infinite layers in our relationship that ended so abruptly took the most time and patience,” says Lau. “It took years and I’m still finding answers.”

Brian Lau, Parent’s College, 2022Brian Lau, Last Supper, 2021Brian Lau, Dad’s Cave, 2019Brian Lau, Dad’s Song, 2019
All photographs from the series We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys. Courtesy the artist

Brian Lau is a runner-up for the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.