Aperture's Blog, page 27

Samantha Box’s Pictures of Dreams and Diaspora

To make the Jamaican national dish of ackee and codfish, first you have to find ackees, a fruit that’s poisonous before it’s fully ripe but delicious when cooked with garlic, onions, peppers, and tomatoes. One of the purveyors of canned ackee, originally native to West Africa, is the company Caribbean Dreams. “Which struck me as being hilarious,” says the photographer Samantha Box. “Because it’s like, who’s dreaming of what? What are these dreams? What does it mean for this thing to be called Caribbean Dreams when it’s a symbol of Jamaican culture?” 

Box set these questions in motion with her still life The Jamaican National Dish (2019), part of an ongoing series she began in 2018 called Caribbean Dreams: Constructions. She was fascinated by the botanical and social history embedded in fruits and vegetables, particularly the names, which trace the triangular trade routes between Africa, North America, and Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. The word ackee, for example, derives from a word in the Akan language group, spoken by people in present-day Ghana, but the scientific designation, Blighia sapida, refers to British naval captain William Bligh, who brought the fruit from Jamaica to England. Ackees and yams were transported by enslaved Africans, and took root in the new world, a symbol of both horror and survival.

Samantha Box, The Jamaican National Dish, 2019

Food markets in the Bronx, where Box lives and works, have become the prop warehouse for the series, with barcodes and receipts providing evidence of the commodification of diasporic cuisine. “Everything gets flattened into a price,” she says, “including the person who’s ringing things up, the people who own the place, the people who are buying the things.” Box lit her photographs like Dutch still lifes, what she calls a “record of empire,” and set several against a backdrop created from details of a painting by the nineteenth-century Trinidadian artist Michel-Jean Cazabon, who idealized the British colony’s lush landscapes. The reproduction is rough and seams in the backdrop are visible. “I wanted the background to be something that everybody knew was fake,” she says. Yet in this scene-setting that plays with art and commerce, a hybrid kind of truth emerges. 

Box was born in Jamaica to a Black Jamaican father and an Indian Trinidadian mother. “I’m descended from the enslaved and the indentured, and other people who were brought together in this crucible that is the Caribbean,” she says. Her parents met at the University of the West Indies. They had a “deep, abiding love and passion” for organic chemistry. In the early 1980s, her father was offered a job at an American pharmaceutical company and the family moved to Edison, New Jersey. It was the kind of immigrant community where people from a variety of backgrounds were writing a new chapter of their lives, often with great sacrifice. “That trope that people had in the ’80s of the cab driver who has a PhD, that’s who I grew up around,” Box says. “I think quite literally the guy who delivered our newspapers was an engineer.” 

As a child, Box read National Geographic and Natural History, the magazine published by the American Museum of Natural History. She studied biology at Cornell, but decided to try a semester at City College of New York, where she took up photography and studied with Shawn Walker, an early member of the Kamoinge Workshop, the collective of photographers that included artists such as Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, and Ming Smith. Box sent a cold cover letter (“the best in my life”) to Contact Press Images to inquire about an internship. She ended up working there as an technician for nearly ten years, during which time she made piercing long-form photo essays about queer youth and the Kiki scene in Manhattan, influenced in part by the Buffalo photographer Milton Rogovin.

Samantha Box, One Kind of Story, 2020

Caribbean Dreams: Constructions is the fruition, you might say, of Box’s lifelong preoccupations with what it means to create diaspora in the United States—and to be created by diaspora. In One Kind of Story (2020), she draws upon images of her grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-aunt, while centering herself in a pixelated self-portrait modeled after a photograph by Felix Morin, a studio photographer who worked in Trinidad in the late nineteenth century. An inset photograph in Navel (2022) depicts a strike in the 1930s by sugarcane cutters in St. Kitts, an act, she says, of “self-emancipation” undertaken by the descendants of enslaved Africans. 

All of these layers in Box’s work offer a riposte to the questions immigrants are frequently asked about their origins. Where are you originally from? And where were you from before that? These questions assume the essentialism of homelands, but elide the hybrid narratives that emerge from the crucible of places like Jamaica or Trinidad, homelands embedded in the history of forced labor and capitalist enterprise. Sometimes, as in Box’s dizzyingly recursive “constructions,” family lineage can be expressed in snapshots or passport stamps, barcodes or botanicals. Memory has a way of returning through the senses. The writer Bryan Washington has published his own recipe for ackee and saltfish, a dish his mother used to make, and one he only came to appreciate as an adult. “Our meals are associated with memories, but that’s not to say that we can’t carve out new ones,” he says. “The things that we run away from can be the same things that call us back home.”

Samantha Box, Edges, 2020Samantha Box, Navel, 2022Samantha Box, Multiple #3, 2018Samantha Box, Four Hands, 2020Samantha Box, Portal, 2022
All photographs from the series Caribbean Dreams: Constructions, 2018–ongoing. Courtesy the artist

Samantha Box 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.

How a Young Chinese Photographer Subverts Traditional Gender Roles

Ziyu Wang grew up in Xinyang in a traditional Chinese family, meaning that he was constantly aware of the gendered expectations that his parents have for him. “My father had hoped I would become a government official, because in his eyes, this was a symbol of masculine power,” Wang says. “As a result, I took a photo of myself wearing a suit against a blue background, as in China, all government officials have ID photos with this backdrop.” But what might it mean for Wang, who is queer and now lives and works in London and Shanghai, to upend these expectations, and to challenge himself and others through photography?

Ziyu Wang, Lads, 2022

In his playful self-portrait series Go Get ’Em Boy (2021–22), Wang performs traditionally masculine archetypes in front of the camera, embodying different characters to point out the often absurd assumptions of traditional gender performance, in China and elsewhere. The reflexive nature of self-portraiture allows Wang to explore these themes and remain authentic to his own life. Informed by gender theorists such as Judith Butler, whose germinal writing in the 1990s framed gender as a form of performance, Wang inflects ideas of “gender parody” into the context of Asian men, subverting stereotypical ideas to capture gay, Asian men in the role of “alpha” males. In Lads (2022), Wang poses in a line with other Asian men, all shirtless, flexing, ordered from largest to smallest physique. It’s a striking image that, on one hand, cleverly confronts stereotypes of Asian masculinity as it relates to the body while, on the other, questioning the viewer’s expectations of what a “man” should look like.

While Wang employs a supporting cast of characters, the focus in Go Get ’Em Boy remains on how he himself can personify these masculine archetypes. “I believe that using myself as the subject allows me to create a deeper connection with the viewer, as they are able to see me, my body, and my emotions in a way that they might not be able to with an image of someone else,” he notes.

Wang’s photographic influences include Hans Eijkelboom’s With My Family (1978), a series wherein the Dutch photographer took self-portraits with real families, interloping as a fake father figure. “What I love about this series is Eijkelboom’s ability to subtly shift identities and insert humor into a familial context,” Wang says. He also cites Yushi Li’s self-portraiture work as a touchstone of photography that deals with tangential ideas of gender and race, using a similar approach.

Ziyu Wang, Go Handstand, 2022

Wang approaches image-making with levity and wit. “Humor and playfulness are key to making conversations about masculinity and gender identity more inclusive,” he says, which “allows for detachment and questioning, connects with audiences, and creates a more accessible and relatable experience.” However, the pleasure of viewing Wang’s parodies of masculinity (for example, being held in a pose of extraordinary athleticism by two conspirators in morph suits), belies the use of humor as a critical device. “I had been pretending to be heterosexual in my parent’s presence,” Wang says. “It struck me as absurd.”

While Go Get ’Em Boy is foremost a playful refraction of his own lived experiences, Wang is aware of the broader ideas communicated by his work. “Many young Chinese people are often pressured to conform to cultural and societal expectations surrounding gender, sexuality, and identity,” remarks Wang, who has come across similar experiences of familial prejudice in conversations with his queer, Chinese friends in London. This experience of having to live a double life—being able to be openly queer in London, but not China—is something he wants to explore in a future body of work. “Overall, I want to bring attention to the struggles faced by the queer, Chinese community.”

Ziyu Wang, Wedding Rehearsal, 2021Ziyu Wang, Untitled 1, 2022Ziyu Wang, With My Daughter, 2022Ziyu Wang, With My Buddies, 2022
All photographs from the series Go Get ’Em Boy . Courtesy the artist

Ziyu Wang 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.

Akshay Mahajan Searches for Mumbai’s Past Lives

The city of Mumbai—once Bombay—has long suffered an identity crisis. Before Bollywood and the Bombay Stock Exchange, the rise of cotton mills and Gothic facades, and the fall of the Raj, the territory was a gift, a seventeenth-century dowry from the Portuguese to the British. This rather bureaucratic maneuver set the stage for Mumbai’s many evolutions: first as an archipelago of seven islands, then a colonial port, and then a modern metropolis. With each mutation, a grand narrative was developed and preserved with great care: on paper, celluloid, and stone. But for those willing to look closely, the city is full of cracks.

Akshay Mahajan, Certain things about a place become its memory, 2022 Akshay Mahajan, Empty pedestal, 2022

The historian Gyan Prakash once said that Mumbai “can be read in the detective novel form.” It may not come as a surprise, then, that the protagonist of Akshay Mahajan’s ongoing series To die is to be turned to gold is on a citywide search. Recalling an old urban legend, the title underscores the city’s image as a place of extremes. As the saying goes, those who move here either prosper or die trying, ultimately turning into gold themselves. But ask any Mumbaikar: the dead don’t die so easily.

“Within the city’s postcolonial reality is a pre-colonial memory,” explains Mahajan, who called it home before moving down the coast to Goa. “I refer to these as ghosts.” Using a mix of portraits, street photographs, landscapes, and still lifes, he envisions Mumbai through the eyes of a young sculptor who walks the city in search of a muse. One could imagine him as a student at the Sir J. J. School of Art, a pioneering Indian arts institution founded in the nineteenth century, where several photographs from the series are set. The city and school have been historically intertwined; a popular story claims that the gargoyles mounted on Mumbai’s most recognizable Gothic structure, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, were student art projects.

Akshay Mahajan, They say unusually in the case of the artist and their muse, the passing of time only seems to amplify, rather than fade perception, 2022 Akshay Mahajan, The Fine Arts department at the JJ School of Arts, 2022

For Mahajan—who has a special interest in archives, colonial histories, and urban forms—the series is an experiment with historical continuity and memory. Relics are reinterpreted, replicated, and used as reference material, as the sculptor’s attention seesaws between the colonial and the contemporary, the center and the margins. He understands his debt to Mumbai’s past, but can also intuit its failures and contradictions. In one photograph, Laxmi, a longtime professional nude muse at the school, leans against the plinth of a marble statue. She then reappears in another image as the subject of two student paintings. The sculptor’s eye attempts to preserve Laxmi within the record; instead of disappearing, she multiplies. “There must be a room somewhere with hundreds, if not thousands, more,” Mahajan adds.

New statues emerge, mills are turned into luxury malls, and colonial offices are repurposed as investment banks. Nonetheless, repetitions continue to appear. An image depicting a young student sitting in front of two Greco-Roman replica statues bears an uncanny resemblance to one made over thirty years ago by the photographer Raghubir Singh for his own Mumbai book. All the elements are there: the replicas, the hardwood floor, and nearly the same corner of the sculpture department. Another photograph of a boy on horseback riding into the Arabian Sea seems to mimic an equestrian statue of King Edward VII. Once a centerpiece of the city’s colonial urban plan, the nearly seventeen-foot-tall bronze king now sits in a nearby zoo. If the politics of India is increasingly a politics of revisionism, Mahajan enacts an attentive close reading. “Every successive boom has come at the cost of a class of people who were never pedestalized as statues,” he says. In their search for a Mumbai beyond received frameworks of colonial architecture, art, and commerce, the photographer and his invented guide share the same vision, that “one sculpts bottom up.”

Akshay Mahajan, One sculpts bottom up, with slabs of clay, 2022Akshay Mahajan, It’s hard to rid oneself of these traces, like wet sand, Bombay sticks to your ankles, 2022Akshay Mahajan, Bust in plastic, 2022
All photographs from the series To die is to turn to gold, 2022–ongoing. Courtesy the artist

Akshay Mahajan 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.

Photographs That Show the “Fire and Thunder” of Contemporary Life

The Image Equity Fellowship, in partnership with Google, Aperture, For Freedoms, and FREE THE WORK, aims to support the next generation of image makers of color in the US. Throughout a six-month fellowship, a group of twenty artists made new bodies of work with the dedicated mentorship of Lebanese filmmaker and photographer Ahmed Klink; American artist and 2016 Guggenheim Fellow Lyle Ashton Harris; photographer and documentarian Bee Walker; multi-hyphenate creative Mahaneela; and Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. An exhibition of their work Through Fire and Thunder opens at Pioneer Works on May 12, 2023.

“The role of the artist is to dream up a world where we collectively transcend the limits of inequitable systems,” notes the exhibition’s curator Adama Kamara of Creative Theory Agency. “We rely on them to cast light on our experiences through the fire and thunder, but also to imagine a world on the other side.” The Image Equity Fellowship and subsequent exhibition grow from Real Tone, Google’s efforts to more accurately and beautifully represent people of color on camera and in image products, and has since developed into a collective of imagemakers capturing their communities through the lens of identity, belonging, movement, coming of age, home, and beyond.

Jamil Baldwin, For Olivia “Olee” Lee, 2022

Jamil Baldwin

“This is my ode to the lives of Jabari Benton, Jonathan Sandoval-Aleman, Millard Frazier Jr., and Olivia Lee,” says Jamil Baldwin of his series Tenacity. Baldwin’s poignant black-and-white images begin as photographs of family members from his group of friends, who are seen at sites of importance for loved ones who have passed away, holding images that Baldwin has printed and framed. Each image reappears within the image being held, creating a recessive effect where each family photographed is therein holding the next. This gesture, Baldwin notes, reflects “what it is to be held by your community of friends and family; a reminder that grief isn’t held by any one individual.” Baldwin then soaks the silver-gelatin prints in water, to a point where the image begins to dissolve and abstract. These abstractions, for Baldwin, reflect the process of losing a loved one. “In some ways I don’t want Black bodies to be the anchor for conversations about death and grief and adversity. This series is really about love, but to know love as deeply as I know it, you need to know the depths of loss.”

Miranda Barnes, Untitled #1, 2022

Miranda Barnes

When Miranda Barnes graduated from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2018 with a degree in Humanities and Justice, she was unsure how photography would fit into her career plans. That year, she was commissioned for a New York Times story about Memphis for the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. “It gave me the confidence to pursue photography as something I could use my background for in a more visual sense,” says Barnes, a self-taught Caribbean American artist who grew up in Brooklyn. In the years since, she’s taken on a range of commercial and editorial work across the country, including for Nike, Apple, Vanity Fair, and TIME, developing an approach that draws from the visual language of street portraiture and environmental and vernacular photography. The intimate and vibrant work in her sub-series Labor Day Parade­—which focuses on the West Indian Day carnival that takes place in Brooklyn every September—forms one part of a much longer-term project exploring celebration, community, coming-of-age, and Black subcultures across the country, including Cotillion and Debutante Balls. For Barnes, who has been photographing the parade since she was a teenager, style is as much about individual expression as it is about community relations and history, which is why people, in celebration and communion, are always at the center of her work.

McKayla Chandler, Only Mama’s Hands, Minneapolis, MN, 2023

McKayla Chandler

Growing up in Minneapolis, McKayla Chandler’s mother would often braid her and her three sisters’ hair, and then photograph the styles as references for her circle of local clientele. However, it wasn’t until 2020, when Chandler moved back home due to the pandemic, that she rediscovered her mother’s braid book, the photographic ledger of all the different styles she had braided, and realized the artistic potential behind it. Chandler’s series, MOBETTA, uses her mother’s braid book as a launch point into a documentation of contemporary braiding styles and culture. Chandler’s work captures the innate beauty and expressiveness of braiding as an art form and a means of self-expression, but also the symbolic potential of braiding styles as vessels for personal and communal history. Just as the braid book preserved a moment in her own family’s story, Chandler sees her project as a work of “archiving in real time.” As she notes, “There’s so much erasure that happens, especially in the Black community, especially being in America. One way to preserve this history is to just make sure you’re taking those photos, and understanding the importance of being able to pass these things down.”

Neesh Chaudhary, The Dream of the Heron, 2023

Neesh Chaudhary

Neesh Chaudhary’s series Diluted explores the physiological and emotional impact of colorism in Indian culture. “The color of your skin is still something that defines your place in society,” Chaudhary says. “But what’s so complex is that it’s something that’s also perpetrated by the victims themselves—it’s ingrained in society in a way that’s just become natural.” In several staged scenes shot on film and then digitally stitched together, Chaudhary envisions the tensions within the interior landscape of her heroine, who has been split between her natural self and an idealized, European beauty-standard alternative. Throughout her photographs, the power dynamics of these two “selves” is constantly shifting—in some moments, the heroine blissfully ignores her alternate, in others, she sits vulnerable while her other takes on a dominant role—pointing to the fluidity of these anxieties and self-perception, and that the ways one sees themselves is always changing. In the concluding photograph of the series, Pranama, Chaudhary plays on the traditional act of bowing at the feet as a form of respect and reverence. Her heroine’s alternate bows at her feet, reversing the roles of reverence in a moment of reclamation for her true self. As Chaudhary states, “It’s taking a strong cultural tradition and turning it on its head, asking: How can we have this tradition about respect for one another, while simultaneously having this cultural view that judges someone based on their skin tone, something they can’t control?”

Nykelle DeVivo, birth of the purple moon, 2023

Nykelle DeVivo

Tha Crossroads is one part of DeVivo’s ongoing series that explores the different ways Black people throughout the diaspora connect to the spirit. The source of DeVivo’s inspiration comes from the Kongo cosmogram—a core symbol in Bakongo spirituality that depicts the cyclical nature of the physical and spiritual worlds. In this iteration, DeVivo narrows in on the point at which the spirit rises, whereas they describe, “birth and potentiality reach their ultimate point.” Working with a mix of photographic techniques including Polaroids and burning and layering images, DeVivo is less driven by the representative nature of photography, instead stating, “I’m more interested in the ephemeral or emotional space we connect to through image-making.” Throughout the photographs, a purple moon births into the world; two bodies intertwined call to sexuality and pleasure as a space of connection; and the recurring motif of sparks offer a visual representation of the spirit’s birth into the physical world. For DeVivo, who has family connections to Southern vodou, Creole heritage, and Hinduism, the creation of these photographs feels tied directly to their lineage. “I call my art practice my spiritual practice,” says DeVivo. “It’s a place where I can commune with my ancestors.”

Emanuel Hahn, California Dreaming, 2023

Emanuel Hahn

In America Fever, Emanuel Hahn intersects Korean cultural and historical elements with mythologies of the American West in an exploration of Korean American immigrant experiences in the 1970s. The title refers to citizens in postwar Korea who, inspired by the image of American culture, desired to immigrate to the US for a better life. Hahn’s staged scenes reflect the luster and romance of an American West coming out of the Hollywood age. Inspired by artists such as Alex Prager and Gregory Crewdson, who created their own worlds through cinematic techniques, Hahn’s work reflects upon the duality America has to offer: a hopeful, yet potentially dangerous, future. “I wanted to do that for the Korean American community, depicting this specific time and place in our history that hasn’t really been seen or celebrated,” Hahn says. One image from the series, Jultagi,references a historical Korean performance in which an entertainer tells witty stories while walking a tightrope. Hahn depicts a man dressed in Western clothes walking towards the camera, and his future, while a woman, dressed in traditional Korean attire, has her back turned, reflecting longingly on her past. “The tightrope acts as a metaphor for the immigrant experience,” says Hahn. “There’s no room for mistakes, but it’s also a performance.”

Eric Hart Jr., Range (Mister, Mister Series), 2023

Eric Hart Jr.

Eric Hart Jr.’s sitters are aware of your gaze, their own performance, and the inequalities that have long haunted photography. “I’m interested in dissecting what it means to perform as a man, as a queer man, as a Black queer man,” says the Brooklyn-based artist and NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate. Using a highly stylized approach, Hart’s portraits reimagine Black men against a range of historical circumstances, racist visual tropes, and critical and cultural references, including Du Bois’s “double-consciousness,” Fanon’s anti-colonialism, New York City’s Ballroom scene, and the photographer’s own upbringing in Georgia. In addition to a growing body of commercial work for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post, his debut monograph, When I Think About Power (2023), explores power and its relationship to the Black queer experience––using theatricality, overtly produced elements, and dramatized black-and-white imagery. Hart’s more recent series, Mister, Mister (2022–23), builds on this idea while widening its scope, using constructed scenes and postures to comment on artifice, photographic representation, and its historical associations. “So much of power is performance, and I think performance is so broad,” Hart says, explaining his proclivity toward artists that produce work that feels made, including Zanele Muholi, Kerry James Marshall, and Dana Scruggs. “I have so much more to say.”

Vikesh Kapoor, The Day After, 2023

Vikesh Kapoor

Vikesh Kapoor is a singer-songwriter and a photographer. “My medium changes depending on the kind of story I want to tell,” he says. The story Kapoor is telling in his latest photographic series is a story about his family, specifically the lives of his parents, Sarla and Shailendra, who were married in 1969 and immigrated from India to London and New York before settling in Pennsylvania. They were doctors. “We’re a Team,” a promotion from the Lockhaven Hospital declared in an announcement about the couple. Beginning in 2018, Kapoor decided to make a record of his parents, photographing them at home and drawing upon family albums and documents, in an effort “to explore their life aging, as immigrants.” He discovered letters his mother wrote to his father after their engagement and portraits from their wedding day. All of these details suddenly held new meanings when Sarla died on January 11, 2023. Grief can be distorting and illuminating. A woman’s hands as she steams milk or a man’s blazer worn to a funeral: the fragility of the body and the resilience of memory. One photograph shows an altar before which Kapoor’s family told stories of Sarla. At the center is a portrait Kapoor made of Sarla posed against a plain white backdrop, poised and self-possessed—a final collaboration between mother and son.

Adeline Lulo, Lydia, Washington Heights, New York, 2022

Adeline Lulo

“When you visit a Dominican household, you’re welcomed with open arms, and treated like family,” says Adeline Lulo. “Visitors are welcomed with a kiss on the cheek, and conversations flow over freshly brewed cafécito.” This particular sense of warmth and hospitality is the focus of Lulo’s project A La Orden (At Your Service), in which she photographs intimate scenes of the interior life of immigrant families who have migrated from the Dominican Republic to New York. Images of walls and shelves adorned with family photos, flowers, and reliquaries tell a rich story of past and present, while portraits of family and friends are captured with care and reverence. Lulo, who herself has roots in Washington Heights, the Bronx, and the Dominican Republic, sees this work as a love letter to the Dominican community. “This is my way of giving them their flowers,” Lulo says. “By sharing these stories and images, I hope to create a space for reflection, conversation, and healing for the Dominican community, while preserving a piece of Dominican history for future generations.”

Tiffany Luong, But we just got here, 2022 (Re-imagining 1948)

Tiffany Luong

Tiffany Luong stages imagined moments in her family history in order to expose the personal weight and lingering effects of immigration. Her series Reclamation is a restorative work; having been never told the details of her grandparent’s journey from Taishan (Toisan in Cantonese), China to the United States, Luong was motivated to fill in the gaps herself. Through intensive research through resources like the National Archive Record Administration, Luong surfaced her grandparents’ immigration documents and entry interviews, and began to piece together an idea of their history. “Reclamation is me trying to figure out what made my grandparents who they were, what made my parents who they are, what made me who I am, and finally what I’m passing down to my own children,” Luong says. The images, made between Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and California, while informed by her historical research, seek to inhabit the emotional space of her grandparents during their immigration rather than adhere to an idea of historical fact. Luong notes, “I realized that I didn’t have to do an accurate documentation, because I don’t actually know what happened exactly. Instead, I could have artistic license and freedom. That was an important revelation—although I wanted to tell a true story. I don’t know the truth, because no one ever told me.”

Maya June Mansour, I’m Still Here, 2022

Maya June Mansour

In her ongoing series Light Brown Butterfly,Maya June Mansour investigates the lasting physical and emotional impact of an act of sexual assault she experienced in her youth. Mansour was prompted to begin the projects after being diagnosed with an ovarian cyst that formed as a result of internalized stress and anger from the event. Working between a variety of mediums, from 35mm film to Polaroids to multi-frame cameras, Mansour’s series of self-portraits depict the non-linear process of healing, describing each of the photographs as “pages from a journal.” Beauty is an integral part of the work and her creative process, acting both as a tool of self-care as well as an exploration of the spiritual attributes beauty can offer. “I want victims or survivors of sexual assault to feel seen in a way that they haven’t before,” she says. “I’ve never really resonated with the stories or the phrase #MeToo before, so this is my version of that.” The mirror, a recurring motif, integrates Mansour’s emotional journey of reflection to create this work, while also asking viewers to consider their own life and position as it pertains to sexual violence and patriarchy. In I’m Still Here (2022), a small mirror featuring Mansour’s reflection is almost invisible against the larger interior space, hinting at the ways in which trauma can often be invisible on the outside. “When you have that kind of trauma it becomes a part of you, it informs everything,” Mansour says. “This photograph shows how it’s almost easy to look at a person and not see it—but once you see my face in the mirror, it’s impossible to miss.”

Da’Shaunae Marisa, Charm, 2023

Da’Shaunae Marisa

Da’Shaunae Marisa’s mother was the family photographer. When Marisa was in kindergarten, her mother gave her a disposable camera to document her friends. That was the beginning. Marisa grew up in Cleveland and although she has extended family in Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia, they weren’t close until Marisa’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, which would become “the reason for an overdue reunion.” Marisa’s work is about connectivity, about “finding all the similarities between different cultures and generations.” But it’s also about how emotions can be stored in the body and the face, protected most of the time, released only in spaces of trust and intimacy. After her mother passed away in May 2020, Marisa made a series of sensitive portraits with the muted color palette of Ohio’s early-spring light, probing questions about grief and survival. For her newest project, she invited her own family, a friend’s family, and twin brothers she met in South Africa into the studio, working with a large format camera and a Lomography Instant Back, often taking upwards of two hours to make detailed composite portraits. The long studio process allowed for deep discussions about grief “and how each family member processes that differently.” Sometimes you only see a fraction of what a person is thinking or feeling, if that’s all they can give. Sometimes, as in Marisa’s patient, collaborative portraiture, you can catch glimpses of their true self.

Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, te recuerdo, asi incompleto, 2022

Giancarlo Montes Santangelo

When Giancarlo Montes Santangelo searched the Library of Congress for photographs of Puerto Rico, he discovered an excess of images that appeared to frame the island’s history through a nationalist perspective. He began to wonder about the impact of these images, many from the early twentieth century, on larger cultural stories, “and how these stories settle into the present.” Montes Santangelo’s mother was born in Argentina and his father was born in Puerto Rico; they met in Washington, DC. The artist’s dual heritage has, in part, prompted an ongoing inquiry into archives, both public and personal, that might fill in missing chapters of history about the Caribbean and Latin America. But he’s also drawn to photographs that resist interpretation. In his work, multiple, often competing narratives are drawn together in layers. For some pieces, he collects and collages photographs, enlarges the collages to create studio backdrops, then sets up his studio to make yet one more image. For others, he poses himself or friends in performative actions that recall the strategies of artists Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Whitney Hubbs. There’s a “spectrum of experience” Montes Santangelo notes about his intricate collages, which consider ritual, pain, masculinity, and spirituality. “My own body is affected by those images and can affect those images,” he says. “I’m trying to create a space where I can open up those histories but also contribute to them.”

Xavier Scott Marshall, Untitled (Harlem Ballroom), 2023

Xavier Scott Marshall

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Cotton Club in Harlem hosted a dizzying array of iconic Black musicians and performers, but Black patrons were not permitted entry. Xavier Scott Marshall was questioning that double standard—a space where a Black man in a suit could only be seen as the entertainment or “the help”—when he encountered a Harlem community program called We Do It Too, which teaches boys to wear suits, invites guest speakers and mentors, and generally invites boys to “come into their manhood in a confident way.” As Marshall began photographing the boys in their suiting, he thought about James Van Der Zee’s classic Harlem portraiture and Ming Smith’s experimental approach to portraying musicians. He also thought about W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double-consciousness,” the sense, as Du Bois wrote in 1897, “of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” For these young boys from economically challenged backgrounds, would suiting be a form of “class armor”? Would a suit equalize the playing field? Marshall used a 4×5 camera to make double exposures and processed the film by hand, allowing for subtle imperfections to remain part of the final images. “I wanted to glorify them while also paying homage to the past,” Marshall said of the Harlem boys. Instead of dancing for patrons, in these photographs, the boys are dancing for themselves.

Ricardo Nagaoka, Caress (Justin), 2022

Ricardo Nagaoka

Growing up in Asunción, Paraguay, as the grandson of postwar Japanese immigrants, photographer Ricardo Nagaoka found himself surrounded by narrow and patriarchal models of masculinity. “As I tried to perform that very form of masculinity,” Nagaoka says, “my body felt what it meant to be seen as less than because of my race.” Through constructed images featuring close friends, chosen family, and collaborators, Nagaoka attempts to pry open masculinity’s historical and cultural baggage, as well as its performance, to push for a broader understanding of gender and queerness. His quiet and intimate imagery draws from personal experiences: “Whether it’s a memory of touch, a glimpse of a gesture, or a translation of my emotional state,” he explains, “my work relies on intuition during its making process.” Nagaoka brings in a range of visual references and ideas when constructing his photographs—from the work of Catherine Opie, Masahisa Fukase, Sam Contis, and the twentieth-century Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, to the broader legacies of New Topographics and the Pictures Generation. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 and then spending nearly a decade outside art education institutions—working with the New Yorker, TIME, and FT Magazine—Nagaoka will start his MFA at the University of California Los Angeles this year. “I want my work to continue these conversations, and to be contextualized within academic, institutional, and cultural understandings of how we define masculine performance,” he says.

Nasrah Omar, Proteus Effect XXVI, 2023

Nasrah Omar

Nasrah Omar is drawn to the limits and possibilities of world-building, both online and in real life. In her series Proteus Effect (2021–ongoing), iridescent slime oozes in from a French window, amethyst runic stones scatter over a game board, a head appears just above the surface of a bioluminescent body of water. “I’ve always thought of photography as an apparatus to manipulate reality,” says Omar, who was born in India, graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2012, and now lives in Queens. “The imagery explores how virtual spaces become deeply affective and integral to the composition of layered identities, agendas, and ideologies.” Through photographic tableaus, references ranging from spiritualism to Tumblr, and collaborative portraits with queer Muslim Bangladeshi activist and model Nova A, Omar explores how constructed ecosystems are able to challenge power structures encoded within technologies, often expressed through surveillance systems, algorithmic biases, and censorship. Among her influences are thinkers who’ve drawn potent links between digital systems and real-world imbalances, including Legacy Russell, James Bridle, and Zainab Aliyu, who co-taught a class Omar took at the School for Poetic Computation in New York. At its heart, the world built by the series is an experiment in imagining—as Omar says—“how the digital world can be an avenue to create agency for marginalized persons.”

David López Osuna, Andre Guerrero, 2023

David López Osuna

The sterile environment of a chain restaurant is nothing like the places where California-based photographer David López Osuna grew up eating. As an undergraduate at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he began noticing that much of the work he was seeing didn’t relate to his own experiences, or was overly influenced by commercial media. That’s when he began photographing the fast-food industry—particularly the people behind the counter, their relationship to their communities, and their attempts for fair working conditions. “I come from a family of working-class people,” Osuna says. “I’m the first person in my family to actually pursue a career as an artist.” What began as a project documenting corporate chains like McDonalds soon evolved into a more community-centered approach, focused on two family-owned restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area. Osuna spent months documenting their owners, patrons, and staff, using an intimate and interpersonal approach that contrasted with the sanitized worlds envisioned by corporate advertising. Having worked as a lighting assistant for similar commercial projects, Osuna is familiar with how these consumer fictions are manufactured; his work remains focused on real people and the lives they attempt to conceal or embellish. “As an artist, I’m very concerned with the role that corporations have in the lives of working-class people,” he says.

Walé Oyéjidé, Le père, la fille et le ballon, 2022

Walé Oyéjidé

When COVID-19 began to hit statewide, Walé Oyéjidé, like many other artists at the time, found himself turning to his domestic space and those he shared it with to create new work. The resulting series, Joy and Daughter at the end of the world, is an intimate yet joyous reflection of life with his ten-year-old daughter in these precarious years. Weaving together a mix of stated scenes and naturalistic images, Oyéjidé depicts the sense of imagination of a child at this age, bringing a sense of play and fantasy to each of his photographs. For Oyéjidé, who has a background in film and fashion, the beauty in his photographs is a deliberate attempt to challenge narratives around fatherhood that are often negative—particularly for people of color. The role of collaboration between himself and his daughter further bolsters this idea, allowing her to have a direct hand in her own representation, as well as transforming photography into an act of father-daughter bonding. “We all connect in whatever ways we can,” says Oyéjidé. “But as an artist, the tools that I have are storytelling or photography.”

Oluwatosin “Tosin” Popoola, Mom & Ola, December, 2022

Oluwatosin “Tosin” Popoola

Tosin Popoola moved from Nigeria to the US in 2014 and bought his first camera on eBay the following year. During college, he discovered the work of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. His photography, he says, which encompasses fashion and portraiture, is about “feelings, everyday life, little moments.” Several years ago, he decided to begin making pictures of his family, many of whom had emigrated to the US and settled in Ohio. “I wanted to honor them and introduce them to the world,” he says, but also to document “the changes in my parents’ faces.” Not everyone in his new portraits is a family member in the strictest sense, but all are like family in their bonds to the photographer. Here, we see regal postures and gazes, gleaming skin and perfect manicures, brown swag fabric flowing against a white studio backdrop, and the kinds of clothes Nigerians are known to wear on Sundays or special occasions. In one image, Popoola’s mother wears a vivid pink gown originally made by an aunt. Popoola’s youngest brother, zigging and zagging in the background, makes a cameo in a few pictures, adding a dash of kinetic energy to the formal studio scenes, which Popoola created with a large-format camera. “It just happened,” Popoola says of his brother’s sudden appearance. So, everyone said, “You know what, just jump in.”

C.T. Robert, Terry, 2022

C. T. Robert

C. T. Robert’s images of the West side of Chicago reflect the resilience and grace of a community dealing with crisis. Having spent time in Chicago after creative directing musical artist Saba’s album Few Good Things, Robert wanted to return to the community in order to create photographs that counteracted the negative stereotypes of the city that he saw pervading popular media. With the resulting project, Cycles, Robert hopes to celebrate the quiet beauty of the neighborhood and its residents. “At one time, during the great migration, Chicago was seen as a place of hope for the Black community,” says Robert. “Now there’s a vacant home crisis, among other things. So, it’s like, okay, how do we go from there to there? What are the stories within that?” Robert spent time integrating himself into the local community, getting to know the people he was photographing on a deeper level before even making their portrait. In his collaborative approach, his subjects’ own reflections often accompany their image. “I wanted to slow down and be super intentional. To make a project that doesn’t lean on stereotypes of Black death and Black trauma, but instead, flip those ideas, and tell a story about the cycles of life that exist in a place.”

Interviews by Brendan Embser, Noa Lin, Varun Nayar, and Cassidy Paul.

Through Fire and Thunder is on view at Pioneer Works, New York, May 13 and 14, 2023.

Joanna Piotrowska Visualizes the Power of Small Gestures

In what sense are the gestures in Joanna Piotrowska’s pictures photographic? A woman, whose face we do not see, crosses her arm over her torso, the tip of her index finger landing below her clavicle. A man lifts his head, although the picture is framed so that we can see only his neck and Adam’s apple. An older woman presses her closed fist onto the forehead of a younger woman. An unshaven young man lies with his head cradled in the arms of an older man. Another woman in side profile rests her head against a wall, her arms dangling, midway up a stairwell.

Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2022

Joanna Piotrowska is a Polish artist who lives and works in London. She has exhibited widely, including at last year’s Venice Biennale, the Tate Britain, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In Entre Nous, Piotrowska’s current retrospective at Le Bal in Paris, photographs and two videos from each of her major series are on display. All of the pictures are untitled black-and-white prints, several large-scale, and many have the gestural expressiveness of Baroque religious painting. They present us with scenes in which people are often in mid-pose. Unlike Catholic art with its symbolism, Piotrowska’s photographs seem, at first, to lack the keys to unlock their specific meanings. And yet, it is accurate to say that the meaning of the gestures is elusive only if the viewer is unfamiliar with referents of Piotrowska’s images, because she imbues her work with very specific meanings.

In the lower level of Le Bal, two series come into conversation: Self-Defense (2014–22) and Frowst, (2015–21). The former depicts women’s self-defense strategies against aggressors, while the latter explores family dynamics through reenactments of poses from a book about group therapy. But even before we learn of the photographs’ origins, the figures’ gestures are charged with an ambiguity that has an arresting power. In another series displayed on the ground floor, Shelter (2016–19), people make small, tent-like structures inside their domestic spaces. These photographs are exhibited alongside those of enclosures, such as zoos. In many of the Shelter images, the subjects hide in their play-forts; the tones of each flutter between childlike lightness and something more sinister yet undefined.

Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2014–18 Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2016

Critics and curators have described Piotrowska’s work as a mixture of photography and performance art, primarily because of how she uses theoretical research, often from feminist theory and psychotherapy, to choreograph her figures. But the performative element feels less important than how she employs it as a method for picture-making. Whether or not we know what her pictures are “about”—that is to say, what her theoretical or performative source materials are—the actions that her figures perform command attention. In his essay “Gestus” (1984), Jeff Wall, an artist known for his depictions of human gesture, discusses how his own work is “based on the representation of the body.” He writes: “In the medium of photography, this representation depends upon the construction of expressive gestures which can function as emblems.” Gesture, he offers, by way of definition, “means a pose or action which projects its meaning as a conventionalized sign.”

His thoughts—much like mine about Piotrowska—lead him to Baroque art. For Wall, the deeply imbued meanings from those earlier forms of European painting may no longer be available to contemporary artists. Industrialization and the mechanization of city life, he claims, have rendered our gestures “small.” But this smallness, he continues, “corresponds to our increased means of magnification in making and displaying images.” With photography, we no longer need the symbolic expressiveness of Gentileschi or Caravaggio; the camera can capture subtleties, depicting and transforming seemingly simple movements into significant emblems.

Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2017Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2015
All photographs © the artist and courtesy Galerie Madragoa, Lisbon

At Le Bal, Piotrowska also debuts a new series that at first glance may appear different from her earlier work. The images are large-scale prints in blurry black and white, evoking degraded memories. A close-up of a sweater and necklace worn by a woman. A candle burning on a table, behind it a bowl of fruit and some dishware. A vase or urn on a shelf with a framed photograph and, behind that, books. A child’s hand held by that of an adult, with a clock and some ceramic object in the background. All of these are details from negatives found by the artist, taken by her father before she was born. A bit like the protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966), Thomas, the fashion photographer who enlarges a snapshot and obsesses over what he might have inadvertently captured, Piotrowska uses a telephoto lens to magnify particulars within each image—searching for proof, perhaps.

But of what? Even if we are given the context of their picture-making, they withhold their meaning. The “gesture” of these images is far more intrinsic to photography: it is their magnification. They become silent emblems—perhaps puzzling but nonetheless powerful. As is the case with her previous material, where Piotrowska deals with the silences that surround domestic violence and how we feel safe or unsafe in our homes, these new pictures, if not exactly baroque, are ideal for how they capture a “smallness” of photographic gestures. They represent the ways individuals claim control over their lives, even if their meaning remains elusive.

Joanna Piotrowska: Entre Nous is on view at Le Bal, Paris, through May 21, 2023.

Juan Pablo Echeverri’s Subversive and Multifarious Self-Portraits

For twenty-two years, every day, wherever he was in the world, Juan Pablo Echeverri took a self-portrait. A moment of action, followed by five minutes of waiting. His life was active, restless, multifarious—but the daily ritual of facing himself in a photo booth, this constant thread, was never skipped.

The genre of artists’ self-portraits has a rich and well-documented history—think of the eighty that Rembrandt made in his lifetime—and within the history of photography there is a whole lineage of artists who have interrogated the serial self-portrait at the core of their practice, embracing the transformative potential of a fluid understanding of identity. Artists like Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence come to mind.

Self-portraits, paradoxically, have a peculiar quality of transcendence as they point beyond the self. They address and involve various aspects of picture-making, of control, of the psyche, and of portraiture as such, not only as an artistic activity but also as a human and social one. Self-portraits are as much a distillation of the now as they are a record of what will be passed tomorrow. They are always pictures against our disappearance, our vanishing. Each one is a performance and construction of the self. They answer to the maker’s and the sitter’s desire to play a role, to create and face one’s persona for this moment in time, allowing for it to be seen and witnessed in the contemporary and into posterity.

Juan Pablo Echeverri, miss fotojapón (detail), 1998–2002

I like artists who have an even though sensibility in their approach to making, a drive and dedication to make their work against the weight of art history. Echeverri could have thought that the photo-booth self-portrait has been well explored in the twentieth century, but instead he dug deep, and made it a territory all his own. Echeverri’s distinct negotiation of the lens, the very act of looking back with an unflinching expression suggests being in control of the image of himself—of his self.

Begun in 1998, miss fotojapón was an ongoing process of self-affirmation that spanned over eight thousand days. During this time the project evolved from very much staged and thought-out photos—for which he would meticulously plan his outfits and appearance, also considering the pictures to fit in a larger grid of time (sometimes repeating the same outfit at a specific day of the month, for instance)—to more spontaneous photos that sought to capture the opposite, the improvised and uncontrolled, the indefinable quality of his being and living.

Superficiality was not a flaw but a quality: a human characteristic to be dissected and to harvest for joy and transcultural understanding.

Echeverri grew up in the 1990s in Bogotá in an era when civil war was raging in parts of Colombia and, although his hometown wasn’t directly affected, a sense of personal safety was nevertheless a daily concern. Growing up as a young gay man in the conservatism of a Catholic society left little room for his identity and added pressure to develop further personal defenses. He did mention to me the terror of boarding the school bus and being picked on for being gay years before he knew for himself that he was. 

Juan Pablo Echeverri, futuroSEXtraños, 2016

Instead of retreating, he deployed a practice of wit, charm, and humor—and exaggeration: a formidable artistic tool often used to uncover “truths” buried under cultural conventions and misconceptions. His own set of references was certainly formed by the Latin American popular culture, while also having a sharp personal take on the offerings and desires of US American, British, and Spanish pop culture. His in-depth understanding of communication in its visual and linguistic forms made him a seismograph of larger trends that would soon dominate culture in general and image consumption in particular. Superficiality, for him, was not a flaw but a quality: a human characteristic to be dissected and to harvest for joy and transcultural understanding. 

Echeverri wanted to trace life, tracking contemporary ways of living across cultures in the modes du jour. A man of great and unfiltered empathy, he observed his fellow human beings, in his own country and abroad, with warmth and an acute sense of the absurd. He would portray stereotypes as well as individualists who would catch his attention at a local supermarket, a bus stop, or who were just passing by. Despite, or maybe even because of, the specificity of his approach, a strong sense of universalism was at the core of his practice.

Juan Pablo Echeverri, MascuLady, 2006. Inkjet print mounted on painted MDF A-frame sandwich board

Echeverri’s work has to be understood in equal parts as the innumerable miss fotojapón (named after the Colombian photo-lab chain Foto Japón) passport-photo self-portraits, and the over thirty distinct series of larger-format photographs and videos produced of him as actor of various personas. These series were meticulously staged by himself and with the help of collaborators. Being an obsessive collector whose entire life was preproduction for future projects, he took pop-cultural samples wherever he traveled to and turned them into props for scenarios that took shape in his head long before they were realized in short, frantic periods of shooting.

These series take a magnifying glass to highly generic as well as specific angles of human appearance, sometimes even drifting into the fantastical and posthuman. In this way, hair came to play a central role. In 2006 Echeverri created MascuLady, a replica barbershop street sign fusing traditional Latin hairstyles with what he observed as a new generation of metropolitan male vanity. The MUTILady (2003) photographs—the title playing with the word mutilate in Spanish (also meaning bad haircut)—show Echeverri in nine stages of transformation from a full-length rock-star mane to a shaved head, while his upper body is painted with a glance of the muscles located just beneath his skin.

Juan Pablo Echeverri, MUTILady, 2003

Visits and residencies in Mexico offered inspiration for the series Mucho Macho and Mariquis (both 2008), as well as the astonishing Identitad Payasa (2017) double portraits. The sixty-piece futuroSEXtraños (2016) series is a melancholic meditation on the anonymizing black-and-white silhouette displayed in the profiles of social-media dating apps of those who don’t want to or can’t reveal their real faces, for any variety of reasons. The honeycomb-shaped PRES.O.S., made a year later, takes a sharp look at thirty-seven identities Echeverri culled from his memory of seeing people in public, lost in interaction with their mobile phones; the title is yet again a play on words (here, the Spanish word for prisoners).

The photographic languages used by Echeverri—and there were many—often employed an anti-aesthetic approach that questioned established values of taste, going beyond even the common visual repertoire of campness. He never fully revealed his personal position within the visual firework he unleashed, between parody and the social documentarian, the self-analytical and the hilarious. Not everything was readily digestible, and his works could easily throw you in a “Does he really mean this?” way. The subversive quality of this, however, was meant not to blow everything up, but to bring us together.

Juan Pablo Echeverri, PRES.O.S., 2017

In a recent conversation about Echeverri’s video works, his close friend, the artist Sofia Reyes, described him as “invasive”—a characteristic that he took with him to every city he visited for his video project Around the World in 80 Gays. Echeverri was proudly a citizen from the Global South, and his suitcase would burst open with the props he carried with him. In each place he would inject himself into the larger community, unafraid of any looming cultural misinterpretations. It is unusual for “invasive” to characterize a positive trait. One might add “infectious”—positive throughout, not least due to Echeverri’s incredible skill with both the English and Spanish languages. 

Too subversive to indulge in the politeness of puns, he launched assaults at good taste and language as a whole. He would disarmingly throw you off guard with a cascade of word plays, rhymes, inflections, and cross-language mistranslations, always delivered with a twinkle in his eye that gestured the faux unawareness of the wildly funny insanity he had just created. Again, exaggeration served as a powerful tool for him to demonstrate how shaky some of our certainties can be. 

Juan Pablo Echeverri, IDENTIDAD PAYASA: Acuarela, 2017
All works courtesy the Estate of Juan Pablo Echeverri

His work Identitad Payasa with street clowns in Mexico, who he in turn invited to transform him into copies of themselves, perhaps cuts closest to the vulnerability, resilience, and joy that drove all his life. So I spare myself from writing a last heartfelt sentence about missing him badly, as he surely would have jumped in to complete the sentence in a lovingly twisted disruption.

This piece is adapted from Juan Pablo Echeverri, published by James Fuentes Press in 2023.

Juan Pablo Echeverri: Identidad Perdida is on view at Between Bridges, Berlin, through July 29, 2023. A concurrent exhibition is on view at James Fuentes Gallery, New York, from June 7 through 28, 2023.

Two South African Artists Reflect on the Memories of Apartheid

On May 10, 1994, South Africans inaugurated Nelson Mandela as their first Black president, bringing to an end the country’s notorious system of apartheid. Nearly thirty years later, crucial questions remain about ensuring equal rights for all South Africans. How might these citizens account for the trauma of violent racial segregation? How can they reconcile personal memories with official state accounts? And what role can artists play in creating new avenues for those personal and national narratives?

Sue Williamson, Caroline Motsoaledi I, 1984, from the series All Our Mothers
Sue Williamson, A Tale of Two Cradocks (detail), 1994

The exhibition Tell Me What You Remember, curated by Emma Lewis and currently on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, thoughtfully addresses these questions as they surface in the work of South African artists Sue Williamson, who was born in 1941 and grew up under apartheid, and Lebohang Kganye, who was born in 1990, the year that then president F. W. de Klerk unbanned the African National Congress, setting in motion apartheid’s dismantling. Importantly, the landmark 1994 general elections created a generational divide between those who directly experienced the horrors of apartheid and those who have grown up in its aftermath (often referred to as “born frees”). Bringing together an artist from each side of this divide, the exhibition highlights how each thinks about memory in relation to both trauma and healing, as well as the subtle differences in their approaches.

Entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by images of women who lived through apartheid. Williamson’s contributions include multiracial portraits from her series All Our Mothers (1983–ongoing), which documents—with real emotional force—everyday people who fought against that system. The entryway to the exhibition also includes Kganye’s larger-than-life portraits of matrilineal ancestors from her series Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2022), which the artist has beautifully rendered in carefully quilted swatches of fabric. This first moment of Tell Me What You Remember is the only one where Kganye’s and Williamson’s work is directly in dialogue; the rest of the exhibition is divided evenly between the two artists.

Sue Williamson, Truth Games: Joyce Seipei – as a mother – Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, 1998. Laminated color laser prints, wood, metal, plastic, PerspexSue Williamson and Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka, That particular morning, 2019, from the series No More Fairy Tales, 2016–19. Two-channel video, color, sound
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London

In her multifaceted practice, Williamson explores the ways that apartheid laws affected individual lives and communities, and her side of the exhibition is organized into areas loosely categorized as “Testimony” and “Memory Work.” Her works in the latter section center on the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and demonstrate the exhibition’s focus on the complexity of living memory. In the video installation That Particular Morning (2019), Doreen Mgoduka and her son Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka discuss the loss of Glen Mgoduka, a police officer whom apartheid police murdered in 1989 to cover up the role of white police colleagues in activist assassinations. More than a retelling of that trauma, the video stages a long overdue, and at times strained, conversation in which the two talk about how the death of Doreen’s husband and Siyah’s father has affected their relationship. Throughout much of the dialogue, Doreen sits back in her chair with her hands clasped or arms crossed as Siyah gestures broadly and occasionally wipes away tears. Each is captured by a different camera, although the two videos are projected onto one screen. This approach illustrates their different access to memory, and the difficulty of bringing the two perspectives into a seamless narrative.

Recreating images from family albums, Kganye returned to the sites of the photographs, often putting on the same outfit that her mother had worn and assuming her mother’s pose.

Reflecting an important theme of the exhibition, That Particular Morning seems to ask, what does all of this sharing of memory add up to? This question links many of Williamson’s works. For instance, in the series Truth Games (1998), she directs this question at the TRC hearings, in which victims of apartheid violence were brought together with perpetrators who confessed their crimes in the name of national “healing.” In each of these works, a press photograph from a well-publicized case is sandwiched between a photograph of an accuser on one side and a defendant on the other. Movable Perspex slats partially block the images, demonstrating how words can obscure the truth, or perhaps that full transparency remains forever out of reach. Similarly, Memorial to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (2016) resembles a tombstone upon which the alternating and repeating phrases “can’t remember” and “can’t forget” are printed onto glass. The difference between the inability to forget and the desire to not remember marks the power differential in the TRC process as well as the problems inherent in transforming personal memories into collective histories.

Lebohang Kganye, Setupung sa kwana hae II, from the series Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story, 2013
Lebohang Kganye, Ke tsamaya masiu II, from the series Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story, 2013

In contrast, Kganye’s practice largely addresses apartheid indirectly, leading with explorations of her family’s archive. In the exhibition, works grouped together under the label “In Search for Memory” suggest the urgency and poignancy of such searching. For example, the sudden death of the artist’s mother in 2010 inspired a series called Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story (2013). Recreating images from family albums, Kganye returned to the sites of the photographs, often putting on the same outfit that her mother had worn and assuming her mother’s pose. What began as separate images of reenactment transformed into photomontages of the two women, with the figure of Lebohang creating a ghostly double of the elder Kganye. The longing in these montages is especially apparent in Setshwantso le ngwanaka II (2013), where Kganye, wearing a red dress and a tender smile, mirrors her mother’s gesture of beckoning to a toddler who is the artist herself. These images bring to mind performance scholar Joseph Roach’s notion of surrogation, a process through which individuals—or collectives—perform the past to enact a sense of continuity. But as Roach points out, the process is always marred by the deficit or surplus created when a new person steps into an established role.

Lebohang Kganye, Setshwantso le ngwanaka II, from the series Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story, 2013Lebohang Kganye, Re intshitse mosebetsing II, from the series Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story, 2013

Rather than lament this lack of seamless continuity, Kganye makes works that revel in it, embracing the idea that family albums and, more broadly, family stories, are spaces of fantasy and creative possibility. In a short video titled Pied Piper’s Voyage (2014), she performs stories, gleaned from family members, about her grandfather’s journey from farmland in the Orange Free State to Johannesburg in search of work. As in the series Her-story, Kganye dons her grandfather’s clothes, but in this work, the doubling is even more theatrical: The artist moves among cardboard set pieces that are scaled-up photographs from the family archive. Posing alongside the black-and-white, two-dimensional set pieces, she enacts both the disjunct between the present and the past as well as the mutability of memory, demonstrating how an artist can rearrange elements of the past at will.

If Kganye’s work illustrates the power that artists have in restaging the past, the series In Search for Memory (2020) extends this idea into a speculative future. The works, photographs of miniature dioramas, are based on Ta O’Reva (2015), a science fiction novella by the Malawian writer Muthi Nhlema. In Nhlema’s apocalyptic setting, South Africa has collapsed in a sequence of events that began with a race riot and resulted in the spread of a deadly contagion. Kganye’s works picture some of the novella’s most powerful moments, as in the image He could hear the voices of his ancestors (2020), in which a little boy hides under a kitchen table as his father is being murdered by a white farmer, or The stranger stood before what to him was a monstrosity (2020), in which a reanimated Nelson Mandela surveys the nation’s ruin, an outcome that occurs in spite of a lifetime of sacrifice. If the images gesture to Afrofuturism, they are also resolutely dystopic.

Lebohang Kganye, Untouched by the Ancient Caress of Time, 2022, from the series In Search for Memory, 2020–22. Fiberboard, cardboard, light
Courtesy the artist

In her essay on Williamson in the exhibition’s catalog, the writer Nkgopoleng Moloi describes the artist’s work as “the unfinished project of emancipation.” Tell Me What You Remember proposes that both Williamson and Kganye participate in this project, whether mining collective or personal archives or picturing possible futures. In either case, the artists powerfully engage memory as a material, pointing to its potential for transformation.

Sue Williamson & Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember is on view at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, through May 21, 2023.

How Tommy Kha’s Mischievous Portraits Challenge the Idea of Belonging

Tommy Kha told me about a moment, not too long ago, when he was photographing his mother and she asked him: Why is art always so sad?

She fled Vietnam in the eighties, raising Tommy and his sister in Memphis. When they were children, the history that had delivered their family to America was passed down in fragments and gestures. It was a story that was never told. Rather, it was carried through expressions or habits, with a tendency toward conversational dead ends, and in the chasm between shouting and silence. In her closet, Tommy’s mother had kept photographs from when she was younger, some from Vietnam but most taken in Ontario, her first home in North America, in the eighties. Washed-out snapshots of friends gathered around plates of food or birthday cakes, self-portraits on a pier, at the beach, with enormous stuffed animals, or perched in a tree. These pictures weren’t art, she was suggesting to Tommy, just moments from a past she never discussed.

Tommy Kha, May (Acting), Mom’s Bedroom, Whitehaven, Memphis, 2013 Tommy Kha, Constellations VIII, Prop Planet, Miami, 2017

As Tommy pursued his own path as an artist, he and his mother settled into a routine. She would make him food, and then he would take pictures of her, usually inside her home or in her backyard, making these overfamiliar settings feel mysterious and alien. She frequently looks troubled in these images; maybe she is just annoyed. People need to smile more, she told him.

I don’t find Tommy’s work sad at all. A life-size cutout of Elvis Presley with Tommy’s face slapped over the iconic singer’s? This is hilarious, mischievous, surreal stuff. That’s not where he’s supposed to be, which is part of how his art seizes you. The compositions are gorgeous and meticulous, with Kha masterfully capturing these soothing, garish auras in the naturally occurring colors of our world. But there’s often something a bit off. A flourish—visual jokes, out-of-place expressions, a glimpse of a cutout of his own face—that marks his presence.

(Re) Assemblies, 2023 A limited-edition puzzle of one of Tommy Kha’s idiosyncratic self-portraits from the monograph Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter (2023).

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(Re) Assemblies, 2023

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View cart Description Aperture is pleased to release this special limited-edition puzzle by the artist Tommy Kha on the occasion of the publication Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter (2023). In this first monograph, the result of the Next Step Award, a collaboration between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, in partnership with 7|G Foundation, the artist explores the personal psycho-geography of his hometown and weaves together self-portraits and classically bucolic landscapes punctuated by the traces of East Asian stories embedded in the topography of the American South. In assembling a visual record of the struggle to find his own voice and to create a fragmented portrait of his family, Kha challenges the cultural amnesia around Asian lives and experiences in recent American histories. (Re) Assemblies, 2023 brings together a limited-edition puzzle of one of Kha’s idiosyncratic self-portraits. Details

Limited-Edition Puzzle
Size: 8 x 10 inches
Edition of 150
Signed and numbered by the artist

About the Artist

Tommy Kha (b. 1988, Memphis, TN) lives and works between Brooklyn and Memphis. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2013, and is the recipient of the 2021 Aperture–Baxter St Next Step Award.

When Tommy began taking photographs, he was inspired by the work of Nan Goldin to document his friends, many of them performers and musicians, as they made their racket around town. To better pull focus for his self portraits, he toted around an Elvis cutout. But over time, inspired in part by Claude Cahun, Reka Reisinger, and Tseng Kwong Chi, he began incorporating the cutouts themselves, producing a different kind of self-representation. On one hand, these self-portraits dramatize his sense of dislocation—of not belonging, maybe even invading, or judging, these scenes of pure Americana. They suggest an insolubility, the impossibility of assimilating, whether into a nation or an everyday background. He experimented with printing his face on pillows or puzzles so that he was, quite literally, fragmented. But all of this felt playful too. His family and friends cradled his cutout, played dress-up with a reproduction of his face, as if poking fun at its overly serious, some might say inscrutable, expression.

Tommy Kha, Headtown (XII), Midtown, Memphis, 2021
 May (Pattern Drafting), London, Ontario, ca. 1984


Most of the photos in this book were taken by Tommy. Interspersed are faded snap-shots from a photo album his mother passed onto him and his sister a few years ago with little explanation or context. The pictures are full of friends and acquaintances from her early years in Ontario, most of whom the children do not know. Some of the photos are reproduced here in full; others have been cut to lift figures from backgrounds and are arranged into collages, leaving only jagged, island-like clusters of new immigrants against a blank expanse.

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The children of immigrants learn of the world first through the oft-limited horizons of those around us. We don’t see ourselves in the culture, so we learn how to breach America by studying our families, our parents, and nearby elders. Photography was the only form of art they participated in, only it wasn’t art, it was just something to do. It was a ritual, a place to put their memories, fleeting visions of the new world to mail back to the old one, if anyone was still there. There were minor details of self-presentation, like a cherished piece of clothing or a carefree smile, perhaps the only gestures of self-fashioning that felt comfortable in those days. The fact that Tommy’s mother had kept this album all these years communicates enough.

Tommy Kha, Stations (Viet Hoa Market), Cleveland Street, Memphis, 2021

And you realize: this isn’t just Tommy’s book, and the photos from the eighties aren’t just there to provide context about his world. These snapshots sit effortlessly alongside his austere pictures of Memphis and his carefully staged family portraits. Together, they offer us a sense of collaborative possibility, a wondrous back-and-forth between present and future, a collaboration that goes unremarked upon, since there are certain aspects of the past that we never talk about. Instead, the images in this book speak to one another in glances, smiles, echoes. What we inherit isn’t just language but the angle you hold your head when you listen.

Tommy Kha, Mine IX, Den(tist Room), Whitehaven, Memphis, 2017 Tommy Kha, May (with Her Half Self-Portrait), Whitehaven, Memphis, 2017

There are photos of Tommy’s mother in the corner of her father’s home dental office, where he practiced in private for family and friends after not being able to establish his license in the US. A cutout of Tommy’s face is nestled in the chair. He doesn’t belong there. Then again, the room itself indexes an entire history of not belonging. Elsewhere, mother and son lie next to one another in a living room, gazing in different directions. Her face is weary, perhaps because that’s what she thinks she’s supposed to do with her face. She’s playacting. But sometimes, she looks back at the camera, at Tommy, and she understands that they are there at the same time, sharing a moment, even if neither of them can put to words what that is.

These pictures aren’t sad; they’re hopeful. They luxuriate in the ongoingness of family and history. Nothing is resolved. But what draws us forward are moments of reckoning, as generations take turns telling a shared story. A fragment will never join with the whole. It is a new whole.

Tommy Kha, Exchange Place VI, Midtown, Memphis, 2019 Tommy Kha, May (or Half a Self-Portrait), Whitehaven, Memphis, 2017

This essay originally appeared in Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter (Aperture, 2023).

A Midcentury Portrait of Black Culture in Pittsburgh

Sometime in the middle of the last century, Charles “Teenie” Harris became known for often taking only one picture of his subjects, and was aptly nicknamed “One Shot” by the former mayor of Pittsburgh David L. Lawrence. “He was fast,” Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the Teenie Harris community archivist at the Carnegie Museum of Art, told me over Zoom in late October 2022. “He’d run in and say, ‘Get together, everybody, I’m only gonna take one shot.’” With a determined energy, Harris took “one shot” many, many times in his long career, capturing the ordinary beauty of Black life in the city.

Professionally, Harris started out at the Washington, DC–based Flash Weekly Newspicture Magazine, but he had been exposed to photography since he was a small child. For more than forty years, Harris was the leading photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country’s largest Black newspapers. At the Courier, he worked on assignments ranging from the civil rights movement (protests, rallies, and marches) to local events such as birthdays, community meetings, cultural programs, and sports activities. Intersecting with the lives of innumerable Pittsburgh residents as a street photographer, studio photographer, and photojournalist, he made note of what he saw as a member of Pittsburgh’s Black communities, touching on themes of sexuality, religion, intimacy, memory, slavery, and more. He lived for ninety years, nearly the twentieth century in its entirety. His work poses the question, How can photography be conceived as a history of experience?

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Greyhound buses going to the March for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, DC, 1963 Charles “Teenie” Harris, Protesters, Pittsburgh, ca. 1963

Harris’s presence in Pittsburgh’s historically Black Hill District, Speed Graphic camera in hand, was ubiquitous. As exclaimed in He’s a Black Man!, an early 1970s Sears Public Affairs radio series, “There may very well be a Black person in Pittsburgh who hasn’t had his photo snapped by ‘Teenie’ Harris, but that would more than likely be a Black person in Pittsburgh who hasn’t had his picture taken at all.”

Through Harris’s eyes, the pressures of historic events including the Great Depression, the Great Migration, Black freedom struggles, civil rights campaigns, World War II, and Jim Crow were given rich visual references. Harris captured the contours of political life: a Black elder named Mary Reid holding a note defaced with swastikas, reading “Kill All Blacks” and “Stop Niger [sic] Take Over”; a billboard advertising the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign demanding low-income housing and a moratorium against redevelopment in the Hill District; and a 1970 broadside of the Black Panther manifesto. He also photographed cultural icons when they passed through a deeply segregated and heavily policed Pittsburgh, a city he rarely left: well-known musicians (Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington), politicians (John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard Nixon), civil rights leaders and organizers (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael), dancers (Josephine Baker), singers (Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt), and athletes (Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Willie Mays). As the art historian Nicole Fleetwood writes in her 2011 book Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, “Harris’s lens provides an alternative visual index of black lived experience of the twentieth century, one that does not rely on the familiar device of photographic iconicity.”

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Possibly the Loendi Club, Pittsburgh, ca. 1930–45

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In 1937, Harris opened his own studio. In addition, he regularly freelanced for advertising agencies and insurance companies in order to make ends meet given the scant resources on offer from the Black press. Still, roaming around Black Pittsburgh, he made photographs that were just for him, for the sake of his craft, which often exceeded the limits of documentary photography and reportage. Harris’s practice combined the ordinary, uniquely vibrant character of Black life, including such shiny events as family portraits, weddings, baptisms, and funerals, with the more quotidian subjects of work and birth. He took pictures inside hotels, nightclubs, homes, restaurants, boxing rings, and kitchens; on tree-lined, brick-paved, stoop-filled streets; at railroad yards, police stations, demolitions, groundbreakings, and picnics. He never stopped taking pictures.

The Carnegie Museum of Art’s permanent Teenie Harris collection contains more than seventy thousand negatives from Harris’s working career, spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s. Tens of thousands still need to be digitized; among the selection here are several previously unpublished images, part of a major scanning project underway at the museum. Some images from Harris’s formidable photographic archive are online and searchable. They have woozily long titles describing what they depict (partly because the recording of this information is ongoing). Over the past twenty years, since the institution purchased the Harris archive in 2001 from the artist’s estate (a wish of Harris’s before his death), the Carnegie has searched for more details and identifications. The catalog listings, which continue to evolve as new information becomes available, come from oral histories done with people who appear in Harris’s photographs or from research via the Pittsburgh Courier or Flash Weekly Newspicture Magazine.

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Untitled, Pittsburgh, ca. 1962 Charles “Teenie” Harris, A television playing coverage of James Baldwin at the March for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, DC, 1963

Instrumental to the contemporary and historical Harris moment, as well as to the Carnegie, is Foggie-Barnett, who knew Harris and was photographed by him as a child in the Hill District. She describes Harris as a friend of her parents, Bishop and Mrs. Charles H. Foggie, who were civil rights leaders. “Teenie was just an everyday occurrence,” she recalls, with pride. “It was not uncommon, for a lot of people, to have Teenie pop up at any time.”

In 2006, when Foggie-Barnett read in the newspaper that the Carnegie Museum of Art was looking for children photographed by Harris, she was the only person who showed up at the museum. “Part of the concern, of course, was what is the Carnegie doing with these images?” she says. The recording of this history is urgent, but the critique of big institutions, which often excluded and exploited the Black community, is just as pressing. Many of Harris’s acquaintances are nearing the end of their lives, but they still express an unsurprising distrust of institutional archives or a fear that they may not say the “right thing.”

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Foggie-Barnett ended up creating an oral history with the museum. “The archive had come almost exclusively unidentified to the Carnegie,” she says. “And so, the first-person interviews and people talking about their lived experiences as seen through Teenie’s lens was the way they were building the information of the archive. I got so excited by and so appreciative of how the staff treated the information. They were very delicate in how they asked questions and were very clear and sincere about what their intentions were,” she explains. “I started bringing some people with me that they couldn’t get to come down. And a lot of those were elderly people, like my original childhood hairdresser [Gloria Golden Grate], who had her own shop but was also one of the first Black models in Pittsburgh.”

Foggie-Barnett began volunteering at the museum in 2006 and was hired in 2010 as the community archivist. She is now a well-respected steward of the Harris archive, involved in preserving, curating, and broadening the collection’s scope and community relevance. Along with the archivist Dominique Luster, she co-organized In Sharp Focus: Charles “Teenie” Harris, a permanent exhibition in the Carnegie’s Scaife Galleries that opened in January 2020. As a researcher studying the Harris archive, Foggie-Barnett conducts oral histories and coordinates outreach by bringing exhibition prints to nursing homes, delivering lectures in schools and on campuses, and giving tours of the exhibition.

Looking at the subjects in Harris’s pictures, we see people who find comfort and trust in a world where comfort and trust are never guaranteed.

At its core, Harris’s picture-making practice was aimed at a Pittsburgh in transformation, shifting from a steel-producing hub of industrialism to a city best described as postindustrial. As the city changed, many tensions around segregation and desegregation, for example, unraveled at the Highland Park pool. In the 1940s and 1950s, civil rights organizers in Pittsburgh staged demonstrations involving interracial swimming. As the historian Joe William Trotter Jr. notes in his essay “Harris, History, and the Hill,” published in the 2011 catalog Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History, white people harassed the swimmers. Harris photographed many outdoor and indoor pools: some give off a sense of leisure (glamorous poses, a hand on the hip), others focus on sports (boys lined up at the edge of a pool for a swim meet), but all are overburdened by the historical fact that municipal swimming pools were crucial sites of racial violence during segregation. The corresponding fear of Black people “contaminating” whites loomed large.

Harris wanted you to see, but he also wanted you to listen to the stories he was presenting in his art. “He is leaving clues, he is revealing story lines and truths,” says Foggie-Barnett. “He’s making a statement.” Harris trains the eye to notice more idiosyncratic acts, that mental montage of stills ever blowing in our head, at the edges of memory.

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Swimmers, Pittsburgh, ca. 1971 Charles “Teenie” Harris, Sabre “Mother” Washington, a formerly enslaved person, on her 109th birthday, in her home on Conemaugh Street, Pittsburgh, 1954

A single Harris photograph can take the form of a transgenerational account of the present. In one image, from December 1954, Sabre “Mother” Washington, a formerly enslaved woman, stands in her Conemaugh Street home on the occasion of her 109th birthday. The image would be remarkable on its own, but Washington, seemingly having just stood up from her floral-patterned chair for the picture, and with her shadow imprinting the living room wall behind her, gives the impression that she
is hovering, evoking the hauntings of the slave trade.

In other photographs, in which people aren’t always as readily identifiable, some looking directly at the camera and others seemingly posed, subtleties break through the frame: a Sylvania television playing footage from the 1963 March on Washington, forcing the viewer to take note of the technologies of representation. Harris’s oeuvre chronicles historic events but also what the art historian Cheryl Finley calls, in Teenie Harris, Photographer, “glimpses of everyday life and the people who gave it vitality, dignity, and purpose.”

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Harris often provided visual language to interstices only he could see. Swirling night scenes—the subtle shift in brightness as lights twinkle over a foggy steel mill; sparsely populated urban landscapes; the subdued, anxious excitement of people standing around Greyhound buses for a march—reveal an aesthetic perspective that is an essential element of his work, cementing Harris’s position as not only a photojournalist and studio photographer but an artist. Harris’s rendering of Black skin and epidermal intensity was yet another sign of his creative virtuosity. Foggie-Barnett informs me that Harris used dodging and burning techniques in the darkroom so that Black skin would develop in rich shades.

As The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords, a 1999 documentary film by Stanley Nelson, illuminates, Black print culture played a determining institutional role in fighting white supremacy, especially during the twentieth century. Photographs are not only visual archives of the past but the axis on which people represent themselves, or see themselves represented. In Teenie Harris, Photographer, the historian Laurence Glasco describes Harris as a people person who often used comedy as a way to deflect attention from his four-by-five-inch handheld camera. Looking at the subjects in Harris’s pictures, we see people who find comfort and trust in a world where comfort and trust are never guaranteed, especially considering the ethnographic exploitation at the time by many American photographers slumming it for the shot.

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Untitled, Pittsburgh, ca. 1962
All photographs courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Heinz Family Fund

Yet another important instance of Harris’s representation of the ill-represented: “He has an array of photos of the LGBTQ+ community that most people didn’t know existed,” Foggie-Barnett tells me. In 2018, Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND) Gallery, in Toronto, exhibited Harris’s work in a show called Cutting a Figure: Black Style through the Lens of Charles “Teenie” Harris, which featured midcentury scenes of queer and transgender aesthetic culture, such as the drag performers “Gilda” and “Junie” Turner in feathered costumes. “These images reveal the complete trust his subjects had in Harris,” reads the online blurb. “Any spectacle related to outlandish dress is overshadowed by Harris’s intimate and familial treatment of his subjects.”

Harris’s work was, and is, part of the fabric of the continued making of a heterogeneous Black narrative in Pittsburgh and beyond. One finds oneself changed by his visually quiet sociability. “He is the keeper of our history,” Foggie-Barnett says. She encourages those who are young to explore Harris’s archive and ask questions about what it means for them and their future. What remains will be up to them.

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

The Photographers Who Envisioned Queer History and Resistance

On the evening of February 9, 2023, in a standing-room-only presentation for a raucous audience at the LGBT Center in Manhattan, Joan E. Biren (JEB) did something for the first and last time in thirty-nine years: a live performance of her Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present (1979–1985). The Dyke Show, as it is more popularly called, is a slideshow comprised of hundreds of portraits, documentary images, and erotic photography by artists ranging from Alice Austen to Tee Corinne. Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s, an exhibition curated by Ariel Goldberg and currently on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York includes a digitized version of The Dyke Show and seeks to carry on the ambition, enthusiasm, and intergenerational through lines of JEB’s work.

The exhibition is overwhelming—in the best way—in its six distinct but inextricably connected sections. These include photography by Lola Flash alongside ART+ Positive (a small artist collective dedicated to fighting AIDS phobia); documentary images from the vast archive of artist and educator Diana Solís; a selection of images of African American lesbians from the Lesbian Herstory Archives; snapshots, correspondence, and newsletters that showcase sundry trans networks; and Electric Blanket, a slideshow installation of images related to HIV/AIDS, from portraits of dead loved ones to photo essays to protest slogans and statistics.

Images on which to build, which was originally presented at the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial in Cincinnati, showcases artists and collectives that participated in, and ultimately built, robust trans and queer image cultures with lasting influence. The title card for each section looks and feels like a vintage activist button, reminding us that these projects were never only “art for art’s sake.” And neither is this exhibition. Indeed, in form and content, Goldberg’s mission is in keeping with their predecessors’: the work is offered in the spirit of education, inspiration, and interconnection.

I recently spoke with Goldberg, who exudes passion and purpose. “When I started to approach people, my tenor was one of humility,” they told me. “I never thought I was discovering anyone; I was simply bridging the gaps of historical erasure for all those artists and culture workers who have been ignored by incomplete photographic histories.” The result of their gap-filling is a sort of interstellar vastness as moving as it is galvanizing.

JEB (Joan E. Biren), Delaware Dykes for Peace, Jobs, & Justice, ca. 1979, from The Dyke Show
Courtesy the artist

Kerry Manders: What was the impetus for this exhibition?

Ariel Goldberg: The fire—fueled by anger and disbelief—really started in 2015 when I was finishing my book The Estrangement Principle about the label “queer art” and asking: what’s my queer lineage in photography?

I knew it had to be deeper than Robert Mapplethorpe and his Hasselblad. I was starting with how modes of representation are contested in queer history, reading Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, thinking about Lyle Ashton Harris and others who were pushing back against an elite white gay male history. I wanted to learn about everything that doesn’t assimilate into the commercial fine art world.

The fire was also ignited when I read Sophie Hackett’s article on The Dyke Show by JEB [Joan E. Biren] in the “Queer” 2015 issue of Aperture. That gave me a concrete example of what we could find if only we looked.

Manders: Your mission was to recover and re-present those artists.

Goldberg: I started this research in part because I wanted to experience the slideshows that I was told I can’t see anymore because they were live events. You can reconstruct historical multimedia projects like The Dyke Show if you are devoted to the long process and move at the speed of trust with the people who made them.

Diana Solís, Flexing our Muscles: Gathering of Friends, Greenview Street, Lakeview, Chicago, IL, 1981
Courtesy the artist

Manders: Can you give us a snapshot of this moment in time on which your exhibition focuses? How do you differentiate it from what came before?

Goldberg: The late ’70s through the late ’90s is a very important moment in trans and queer history because that was when people were coming out and taking that risk in perpetuity: they were not going back in the closet. Right before this, visual records of trans and queer life most often belonged to the state—like arrest records—or were tabloid-y, sensationalized news stories of gender “discovery.” There were criminalizing narratives, or even outright destruction—families destroying personal archives of their queer relatives and even people destroying their own archives for fear of discovery. Even Diane Arbus’s photograph of Stormé DeLarverie was too controversial for Harper’s Bazaar to publish in 1961.

Manders: Where and how did you find these artists? Can you pull back the curtains on the “making of” this exhibition?

Goldberg: It’s multifaceted—there’s no template. My methods depend on the person I’m researching. I do the maximum amount of research I can before engaging in dialogue with an artist or archivist.

The artist Nicole Marroquin, whom I met at a Magnum Foundation event, introduced me to Diana Solís. Ever since, I leave each conversation with Diana—and the many artists and scholars working with them—with more names of people and events to look up, more books and articles to read. I remember the first time I visited Chicago, Nicole said I must read this book Chicanas Movidas, and has since shared articles in English on the Encuentro Feminista Latinoamericana y del Caribe. I still have a lot of learning to do about Chicago social movement history, Chicana, Mexicana histories of the Midwest, and Latin American feminist history if I’m to even fathom Solís’s work.

I apply to get travel funds that are available through archives to go to personal papers. I basically riffle through boxes and boxes of stuff. I try to zoom out and understand who was supporting the photographers’ work. Especially when I was just beginning in JEB’s papers, I started to see repeated names like Tee Corinne and Morgan Gwenwald, and patterns of relationships.

Morgan Gwenwald, Working on the “Keepin’ On” exhibition, 1991. Left to right: Paula Grant, Jewelle Gomez, Georgia Brooks
Courtesy the Artist

Manders: That’s lovely. You built this exhibition via a network of relationships you found in the archives, which you then translate in your curatorial choices. Interconnection and overlap are key elements of the show.

Goldberg: Yes! When I was working with Diana Solís on the edit of their photographs, I remember getting excited when I saw, in the background of a photograph taken at Mujeres Latinas en Acción, matted photographs on the wall behind the table where a group of women were having a meeting. That group included Diana’s mother, their friend Diane Ávila, and her mother, too. When I asked whose photos were on the wall, Solís responded it was their own work and likely their students’ work from the photography class they were teaching at Mujeres in the late 1970s.

The late ’70s through the late ’90s is a very important moment in trans and queer history because that was when people were coming out and taking that risk in perpetuity: they were not going back in the closet.

This scene is what I am hoping to achieve with the exhibition broadly: creating a space for people to gather and make connections about photography and art’s critical role in organizing across generations. At the openings in Cincinnati and New York, artists and archivists from different cities were getting to meet and appreciate each other through the varied contexts of each other’s work.

The goal was not only about finding material, but also about meeting and connecting people who were not already acquainted. Personally, the ongoing power of this work is the relationships and mentorships I’ve been lucky to cultivate through this process.

Manders: That makes me think of one of the various resonances of the exhibition title—images on which to build relationships. This exhibition seems to be as much about community as it is about art.

Goldberg: Aldo Hernández, one of the organizers of ART+ Positive, reminded me that their work was about communities and collectivities, not about individuals and careers. It was about organizing and doing as much as you could with what little you had. He once said to me, “Oh, we were foam core queens!” And I thought, That kind of sums it up, getting work out there in the ways that were most affordable and easiest to schlep around.

One of my design challenges was to honor the Lesbian Herstory Archives foam core exhibition boards alongside framed archival ink-jet prints. I wanted to show that these practical materials traveled. They’ve been to student centers and volunteer-run archives. That ding on the corner of the foam core board—that wear and tear—is filled with the love of the previous audiences receiving the work.

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Manders: What have you learned in the process of curating this exhibition? What are some crucial takeaways?

Goldberg: The first, most beautiful lesson is that organizing as image makers takes so many different forms.

On the one hand, I’m looking back. I’m doing all this inspiring time travel and celebrating the ways in which our predecessors came together and solved problems. AIDS activists learned the science for treatment—and tirelessly fought for the funding.

On the other hand, I’m thinking in the present tense. We are in a horrifying conservative backlash right now that could really be immobilizing. How can I work and pay my rent, but also bring my skills to all the amazing grassroots organizing happening right now, from prison abolition, defunding the police, affordable housing, canceling student debt, Palestine—all of which are interconnected struggles—to the current onslaught of anti-trans legislation? How can I be of service?

Installation views of Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, 2023
Photographs by Object Studies

Manders: Now you’re reminding me of the rest of the quotation from which you borrowed your title. In an early review of JEB’s Dyke Show, Carol Seajay claimed these were “Images on which to build a future.” This exhibition, like the image cultures it showcases, is as interested in doing as it is in being.

Goldberg: A lot of trans and queer image making was all about self-determination beyond representation.

For example, Loren Rex Cameron, who was a part of the FTM support group in San Francisco, took pictures of people at different stages of transitioning, and those pictures played a part in educating people about hormones and surgeries. His photographs give us a way to understand how people were using photography to share non-pathologizing transgender medicine and build stronger movements.

The “doing” also speaks to how I wanted to share materials about the joy of gathering! I don’t want to lose that aspect of it. I’ve learned that didactic projects are also about community building and fun. Look at ART+Positive’s Queer Beauty series that Lola Flash photographed: people were spelling the phrase with their naked bodies! This isn’t dry material! Enjoyment in education is part of the work.

Diana Solís, Women Free Women in Prison, March on Washington, 1979
Courtesy the Artist

Manders: I’m struck by the breadth of this exhibition—the fullness of your curatorial essay and exhibition text and even acknowledgments. We’ve joked about our shared “maximalist tendencies.” It’s not an inability to edit but, instead, a commitment to community, pedagogy, and material history.

Goldberg: Captions are a great metaphor for my work. I felt inspired to begin research for this exhibition while I was working on my photo history book Just Captions: Ethics of Trans and Queer Image Cultures. The caption is my rallying call to learn the names of people who appear in images. To then ask questions about how they were showing up for movements. Beyond the literal, I think of captions as an expandable poetic space, as curiosity for multiple narratives.

The show demonstrates how people were supporting and making culture. The columns in the exhibition space are wheat pasted with a single flyer or newsletter page from each of the six sections of the show. The Electric Blanket slideshow call for photographs, Rupert Raj’s Metamorphosis, which was the inspiration for Lou Sullivan’s FTM Newsletter. I want to show how these projects addressed their audiences. Wherever possible, I included a review of the slideshow or exhibit, in part to prove the work was recognized in feminist, trans, and queer communities.

JEB (Joan E. Biren), Connie Panzarino, New York City, 1979, from The Dyke Show
Courtesy the artist Portrait of Bet Power (now Ben Power Alwin), April 1990
Courtesy the Sexual Minorities Archives, Miscellaneous Photography Collection and Digital Transgender Archives

Manders: That makes me curious about the echoes and reverberations of these image cultures. How do we see their influence in the years after? And today?

Goldberg: We see the influence of these image cultures where artists are distributing their work in unconventional, non-institutional ways that also foreground material struggles and support their peers. Publishing hard-to-find materials online, with captions, for example, and making it freely accessible, as Sky Syzygy’s Gender.Network website does.

I am excited by contemporary work that tries to understand, through photographs, the texture of the lives that we’re now celebrating, as opposed to relying on iconicity and fantasies. If we insist on context as part of the work, we can resist the erasure of material struggles that often happens when queer culture is appropriated into mainstream culture.

The exhibition highlights inherited strategies of practical resistance, ways to fight the violence and stigma and discrimination that come with a denial of queer and trans life and history. Image makers and archivists in the timeframe I’m looking at realized that they have skills in documenting and preserving queer history and organizing, and needed to put those skills to use.

Allen Frame, Documentation of Electric Blanket: AIDS Projection Project, Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. Eddie Marookian by Robert Williams on screen, 1993
Courtesy the artist

Manders: Can you give us a contemporary example of that formula in action?

Goldberg: Here’s one that was really moving: this student, Avery Camp, is in a class I’m teaching at the New School, and we went to the archives at the LGBT Community Center in New York to look at periodicals. Their assignment was to make a newsletter, message, poster, or sign. Avery made a flyer with information about how to volunteer for the Trevor Project, which is currently dealing with a high volume of calls and a lack of volunteers.  

I asked the museum to distribute Camp’s flyer at the exhibition. J. Soto, director of engagement and inclusion at Leslie-Lohman, printed it in a handbill size for visitors to take and spread the word. That’s the legacy right there. You don’t need a lot of people to get something done. It’s not that complicated. Let’s do something now.

Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s is on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, through July 30, 2023.