Aperture's Blog, page 30

A Photographer Considers the Vulnerability and Visibility of South Africa’s Shebeens

On June 26, 2022 twenty-one high-school children below the legal drinking age of eighteen died in a tavern in East London, South Africa, after inhaling methanol fumes in the overcrowded, unventilated venue. In a Soweto shebeen two weeks later, fifteen patrons were gunned down with rifles and pistols in what survivors called “an orchestrated hit.” The actual targets had already left. Follow-up reports of other murders dominated the current affairs programming through much of July until the media frenzy cooled off. 

As I mulled over these grisly stories, I thought of the photographer Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo’s work constantly. Last April, the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg presented a solo exhibition by Hlatshwayo, Umnyakazo, which included his compelling tavern-based series Slaghuis I and II. Hlatshwayo, the child of shebeen owners in the township of Lawley, southwest of Johannesburg, doesn’t deny the social impact of the business that fed him. Instead, he seeks catharsis from his inextricable links to it. (Under apartheid, shebeens referred to illegal taverns, as Blacks could not drink or purchase alcohol without restriction.) As a result, there is space and quietude to the images as they explore his invisibility within the shebeen’s confines.

Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022 Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022

In 2016, Hlatshwayo joined the East Rand–based Of Soul and Joy project based on a tip by his mentor Jabulani Dhlamini, a photographer and project manager of the initiative, which seeks to expose vulnerable youth from Thokoza to photography and art through mentorship. (Alumni include the Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa.) Through the program, Hlatshwayo was inspired by his contemporary Tshepiso Mazibuko’s use of expired film. The effect was that of “a lot of dirt on the surface,” a kind of spotted, off-color grain. “There was an interruption,” he told me, from his bare home studio in Lawley. “It was not a clean image and I really liked that.” 

Hlatshwayo found a permissive environment at Of Soul and Joy and access to photographers who gave interesting workshops. “What I liked about Jabu was that when he didn’t understand the space you were entering, he’d call on someone who could understand it better to give you more feedback,” says Hlatshwayo, referring to Dhlamini. “Some people try to recreate themselves through their students.” Two years later, Hlatshwayo embarked on the series Slaghuis (an Afrikaans word meaning slaughterhouse or butchery) as a way of voicing the violence of his surroundings. In a reflective article he penned for the Mail & Guardian, he describes, at the age of seven, waking up to a dead body and feeling “overwhelmed by the desire to disappear.” 

Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Repose, 2022

In Slaghuis I (2018), Hlatshwayo reenacts this desire, layering his images through multiple phases of photography until the subject (often himself) appears distressed, distorted, or dismembered. To add further textures, Hlatshwayo reintroduces prints of the initial photographs into the tavern space, allowing patrons to step on or ash their cigarettes on them, and then rephotographs the paper. In this initial series, Hlatshwayo’s impulse to experiment comes across as feverish and fearless, but also a bit literal. 

By the time he has a second go at the topic—Slaghuis II (2019) was first exhibited at the Market Photo Workshop in February 2020—an embodiedness begins to permeate his approach. This time, Hlatshwayo exhibits a flair for the Ballenesque; with less situational context in favor of more conceptual execution. These stylistic changes have been gradual, but the photographer’s openness to collaboration and keenness to explore multiple disciplines has meant that breakthroughs are always around the corner.

As soon as Slaghuis II opened in February 2020, the exhibition had to move online because of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Fatigued, Hlatshwayo retreated and thought about how to create new work. “I was wondering about walls and imposing movement on walls,” he says of a process-driven style through which he began to regard installation as performance. When the photographer and curator Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose was selected to be part of the Goethe-Institut’s Young Curators Incubator 2022 program (in partnership with the History of Art department in the Wits School of the Arts), he opted to collaborate with Hlatshwayo, after they had each exhibited work at the South African Pavilion at the Dubai Expo in 2021. 

Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022 Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022

The resulting exhibition repurposes some of the images contained in Slaghuis I and II and explores interiority through tactility while experimenting with various modes of presentation. “You saw newsprint, you saw wallpaper, you saw video and engraving, which are all super related to his image-making process,” says Nyawose.

Nyawose, who describes their collaboration as “collapsing the line between curator and artist” nudges Hlatshwayo towards the idea of inconclusiveness, where the production process—and the subversion of it—becomes a language in and of itself. The Umnyakazo exhibition became both “format and medium in real time,” says Nyawose, crammed with affective details such as the use of specialist paint that would change hue according to the time of day. He spent time thinking about “the idea of shadows,” which is prominent in Hlatshwayo’s work. 

While the shebeen was a site of momentary pleasure and an appendage of the migrant labor system for predecessors like Rose Motau and Santu Mofokeng, for Hlatshwayo the speakeasy of today lays bare the limits of self-determination. What Umnyakazo achieves through a lack of finish, a speculative approach, and a preference for less stable materials, is a sharp dissection of alienation. As we are decreasingly able to physically access the tavern in his newer work, a suggestion that the photographer is no longer preoccupied with his pain as an individual, Hlatshwayo edges towards more systemic concerns. Through the use of scrawls and screens, he ponders the unaltered spatial landscape of apartheid (suggested here by materials that evoke the posterized city), and the overarching violence that still corrals the underclasses to the beer hall.

Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Ngingaphakathi, 2022Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Untitled, 2022
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

In London, a New Approach to Preserving Britain’s Photographic History and Future

London’s Piccadilly is one of the main arteries of the city. The mile-long stretch of road connects the traffic-choked “circus” to the more genteel surroundings of the Royal Academy of Arts, with Buckingham Palace not far beyond. While slick, commercial art galleries have begun to swallow up the streets to the north, pockets of old Piccadilly remain, not least on Jermyn Street, where traditional purveyors of men’s suits and sundries still dominate.

It is here that British dealer, academic, and photography collector James Hyman has established the Centre for British Photography, which opened on January 26 and celebrates the past and future of photographic practice throughout the United Kingdom. Hyman found the space—an empty Italian tailoring store—only last October, and quickly went about creating a home for the substantial collection of photography that he has built with his wife Claire, chair of the Centre’s board of trustees. Along with housing the roughly three thousand photographs they own, the Centre features three galleries and several research spaces.

Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr, June Street, Salford, 1973 David Moore, Baby, TV, Earth, 1988

This is not the first British institution dedicated to the medium. The Photographers’ Gallery is just up the road, and Autograph has supported underrepresented photographic and filmic practices since the 1980s; the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new photography center is also set to open on May 25, 2023. But Hyman is clear that much more could be done, particularly when it comes to supporting organizations beyond the capital. The Centre functions as a springboard for museums, galleries, and grassroots projects further afield, with its ethos being to shine a light on lesser-known practices while offering a greater degree of autonomy to image makers themselves.

Although it’s privately funded, the Centre will be an open, public-facing institution from the outset, with no entrance fee. “It will not be a private monument, but a public institution,” Hyman says. In an ideal world, he adds, the Centre would eventually be publicly funded, yet, with ever-tightening austerity measures and ferocious cuts to the arts—in 2021, the government announced 50 percent cuts across all arts and design higher education—such a future is far from certain.

One may have expected an air of nationalistic nostalgia from an institution that focuses on British photographic practices, but the Centre boasts a diverse range of artists and perspectives. “This is not about a passport or nationalism. It is about the subject of Britain, as opposed to the identity of the photographer themselves,” says deputy director Tracy Marshall-Grant, whose previous posts include director of Belfast Exposed, a leading photography gallery in Northern Ireland, and director of development at the Royal Photographic Society.

Vicky Hodgson, Untitled, from the series Beauty Contest, 2022
Maryam Wahid, The orange lehenga, near the Queen Victoria Statue in Birmingham, 2018, from the series Women from the Pakistani Diaspora in England, 2018–ongoing

For the inaugural program, an expansive idea of Britishness is evident, with exhibitions that encompass both Britain as a central subject, but also as a place that has nurtured artists exploring issues ranging from gender roles to systemic racism. 

The exhibition that visitors first encounter was curated by the research group Fast Forward: Women in Photography, which focuses on contemporary female self-portraiture. Titled Headstrong: Women and Empowerment, it encompasses artists who are first- and second-generation immigrants, refugees, and women who challenge societal perceptions around aging and visibility.

For example, Vicky Hodgson recreated photographs that she was forced to pose for as a child to enter a beauty contest. The series, titled Beauty Contest (2022), is a poignant investigation of the sexist stereotypes associated with aging. For The Bully Pulpit (2018), Haley Morris-Cafiero created and posed as caricatures of online trolls who have demonized her appearance, while Maryam Wahid’s series Women from the Pakistani Diaspora in England (2018–ongoing) considers the perception of migrant identity. The artist visited places around Birmingham, England, that were significant to her mother when she first moved to the city, and posed for portraits while wearing her mother’s traditional Pakistani clothes. The resulting images forge links between the place Wahid grew up and her ancestral heritage.  

Markéta Luskačová, Whitley Bay, 1978
© the artist Bill Brandt, West Ham Bedroom (London), 1937
© Bill Brandt Estate Bill Brandt, The Perfect Parlourmaid – English Parlourmaid (Evening), 1935
© Bill Brandt Estate

Also on display are the outcomes from Fast Forward workshops that took place in different venues around the United Kingdom, including at Impressions Gallery in Bradford and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Photographers and educators worked with people from marginalized groups to help them express themselves creatively through photography, whether that involved making zines or keeping a visual diary. In projects such as Putting Ourselves in the Picture (2021) and I was, I am, I will be (2021), migrant and refugee women visually depict the realities of their lives, from reuniting with loved ones to passing a driving test.

In the Centre’s basement, the allure of more conventional British documentary photography endures in the second major opening exhibition, The English at Home: Photographs from the Hyman Collection. And yet, this selection of some 150 photographs is full of surprises. Alongside well-known accounts of working-class British life by the likes of Bert Hardy and Bill Brandt (who was born in Germany but identified with his English heritage) are images from Karen Knorr’s series Belgravia (1979–81). These see the American photographer peel back the veneer of the English upper crust by including snippets of her sitters’ opinions on politics and identity alongside their portraits. Elsewhere, Czech photographer Markéta Luskacová treats families dedicated to pitching tents on the frigid British seaside with the true curiosity of an outsider.

Back upstairs, three separate displays across the mezzanine focus on individuals who further interrogate representations of women. A presentation of Jo Spence’s Fairy Tales and Photography, or, another look at Cinderella from 1982 (curated by the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive) showcases the photographer’s pivotal work on the performance of gender through annotated photographs that mock “wifely” duties such as cooking and cleaning, and the fantasy of domesticity. Similarly, Natasha Caruana’s series Fairytale for Sale (2011–13), a recent Hyman Foundation acquisition, includes hundreds of images uploaded to e-commerce platforms like eBay, by women hoping to sell their wedding dresses online. The result is an uneasy montage of blurred-out faces and staged portraits, where the dream falls apart.

Natasha Caruana, Fairy Tale for Sale, 2011–2013
Courtesy the artistHeather Agyepong, 1. Le Cake-Walk: Rob This England, from the series Wish You Were Here, 2020
All photographs courtesy the Centre for British Photography, London

Finally, a display from Heather Agyepong presents the culmination of an original commission from the foundation. The artist was invited to respond to early twentieth-century imagery of the cakewalk, the dance craze dominated by vaudeville sensation Aida Overton Walker that began as a way for enslaved African Americans to mock enslavers, later becoming a popular form of entertainment for white audiences. Agyepong reimagines the postcards used to commemorate Overton Walker’s performances through her own vaudeville scenes, which incorporate historical and contemporary objects to reflect on ideas of self-worth and agency.

With such a variety of works on show, and so much to prove in an inaugural program, there is a risk of attempting to do too much. However, there’s something undeniably cohesive about the Centre. While a “British” remit may at first seem limiting and restrictive, it instead provides a focus for photographic practices that other major institutions may have overlooked. It demonstrates how British identity is fluid, multifaceted, and ever-changing. For the near future, the Centre promises collaborations across the country, sharing resources, and championing upstarts and in-depth research. One can only hope that its work will resonate far beyond British borders.

Headstrong: Women and Empowerment and The English at Home: Photographs from the Hyman Collection are on view at the Centre for British Photography, London, through April 23, 2023.

An Uncanny Chronicle of Ukraine, Before and After the War

Olga, a resident of Kyiv, is frightened by sunrises, prefers to be called by her full name, considers the patronymic form a kind of company, loathes the times when the city feels empty, and, when it stays that way too long, begins to “see what nobody sees and hear what nobody hears.” She claims to perform acts of transformation—turning a pot of kasha into a hydrangea, a spoon into a blue ribbon, a postcard commemorating International Women’s Day into a trio of matches. She swears this is all true. Depends, of course, on your definition of truth. This is one of the ideas at the heart of Lucky Breaks (2018), a collection of short fiction by the Kyiv-born photographer Yevgenia Belorusets, who intersperses the thirty-two brief stories, intermittently, subtly, with her documentary pictures.

Since the war broke out in Ukraine—the revolution of 2014, that is—another of Belorusets’s characters has lost all sense of beginnings, and now wakes in the afternoon. This woman and her sister, a dishwasher at the American embassy, wear too-large clothes donated to them by Americans. The sister grows so bored of telling the siblings’ story to the journalists, directors, and actors who come asking to hear that she starts replacing their narrative with the various traumas and misfortunes of their friends and neighbors, or with totally invented stories: “convoluted, complicated tales to force someone to really listen to what she was saying.”

Many of the protagonists in Lucky Breaks may come off as eccentric, probably because they are isolated, which is also because they have been displaced. Most are women. They fled the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, site of the conflicts of 2014, or they have to move away to earn a living, or their husbands are gone for months on end, also for work. The characters in the story “The Stars” finally begin to venture out of their basement shelters by charting the hours in which a newspaper column declares them astrologically safe—all clear for a Pisces to emerge between three and five in the afternoon, while a Scorpio is allowed out into the evening for a walk in a city “both smoky and bright.” Even as long lines of “soiled and sullen” cars exit her city, the title character of the story “My Sister” is determined to stand her ground, no matter that she’s almost all alone, surrounded by broken windowpanes and cords that snake in and out of other apartment windows attempts to steal electricity by others who have refused to leave.

Snaking along, too, below the current of the subjects of the short stories of Lucky Breaks is a fugitive stream of black-and-white pictures made by the author. Belorusets, as translator Eugene Ostashevsky writes in an afterword to the 2022 US edition, came to writing from her life in photography, in which she uses “documentary methods,” and she’d arrived at photography via a life in political and social activism. Her photographic series have focused on animals, brick-factory workers in west Ukraine, queer and trans families throughout the country, the residents of Roma settlements under attack by the far right, and protesters during the revolution of 2014, also known as the Revolution of Dignity. Russian special-ops and troops disguised as locals embedded in the fighting in the Donbas had turned the region into a surreal world in which notions of truth became increasingly murky—a fog of war that in the book Belorusets coats with photography.

Here and there in Lucky Breaks are pictures of abandoned-looking industrial buildings; a grinning, uniformed worker; persons sleeping in the grass. They are pulled, without identifying marks, from two of her documentary series: one, a project depicting people hanging out in parks—the dislocated feeling of leisure during wartime; the other, of the employees of a government-run coal mine who in 2015 and 2016 formed a protest to avert ecological disaster in their homeland, demanding that the mine’s closure adhere to environmental standards.

None of this background is apparent in Lucky Breaks, whose themes already verge on the Gogolian absurd. Dislodged from their original context, thrown into the realm of fiction, her images add a semblance of authenticity—the “presence of the thing,” as Roland Barthes put it, presumably assuring a more skeptical eye—in a place where reality has been upended. At the same time, her inclusion of the photographs plays on the reader’s inherent desire for concrete evidence. At second glance, the picture asks more than it answers.

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Lucky Breaks pushed Belorusets to look further into the unknown. In 2021, she published Modern Animal, her second book of fiction but her first published in English—a short, surreal novel told through diaristic accounts, fairy tales, and a series of lectures, some of which are delivered by animals. As in her photography, Belorusets had used documentary methods before she began to write, sometimes collaborating with her human interview subjects to transform the material of their conversations into fiction—”a kind of contemporary folk literature,” according to one of her editors, Sebastian Clark, of the subscription-based imprint Isolarii. Like Lucky Breaks, Modern Animal includes some of Belorusets’s photographs—the series Zhyvy Kutochok (The Living Corner) (2019–21) of chickens and cows on a farm, dogs, and birds of prey.

Shown in black and white, certain of her images-especially the closely depicted owls and hawks, and the sense of calm that seems to surround her cows and calves-aspire to the sensibility of Peter Hujar’s magnificently secret and intimate photographs of animals. In one sense they are Belorusets’s attempt to redress the hierarchical relationship of humans and animals taught in Soviet-style education—one in which schoolchildren learned to take care of plants and animals that were kept in a dark, small “living corner” of the classroom. “At that time, it was taught that the human being was the pinnacle of creation and animals were just tools,” she said in an interview with Palm, the online magazine from the Paris museum Jeu de Paume.

“Pictures, if you think about it, are a kind of cage for animals,” she continued. “In the book, text and images work in parallel. The photographs are not illustrative of the story, but arise from the same kind of interrogation.” Her desire to photograph animals was grounded in her awareness of the fact that she would never be able to fully know them.

When she photographed and interviewed residents of the Donbas during wartime in 2014, Belorusets often felt like “a guest in a catastrophe.”

The English translation of Lucky Breaks was first published in the United States on March 1, 2022, five days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Belorusets has said that when she photographed and interviewed residents of the Donbas during wartime in 2014, she often felt like “a guest in a catastrophe,” someone who had a home to return to. Photographing and writing short stories had prepared her for the events of February 24, 2022, only in the sense that, when Russia invaded Kyiv, as she wrote in her diary, “my body memory kicked in.” That memory, coupled with shock, soon came to register as grief, and the recognition that the war was a continuation of the work she had already begun, as she also found herself doing things she had imagined for her fictional wartime characters. It gave Lucky Breaks an added layer of eeriness, although most of the eeriness of the book has to do with the cycles of historical time and myth embedded within the tales.

For the first forty-one days of war, Belorusets continued to keep a diary, which was published as a daily online dispatch and eventually collected as In the Face of War (which includes her photographs as well as works by historical artists such as Maria Prymachenko and Tetyana Yablonska, and the contemporary artists Nikita Kadan and Lesia Khomenko), also published by Isolarii. Isolarii titles are designed as tiny volumes, the size of a small cell phone or a pocket hymnal. Each book, even one that amounts to 444 pages, as this one does, fits in the palm of your hand. You are conscious of the sensation of physically holding the first unsettling weeks of the war. In those days, Belorusets compulsively photographed, mostly in color, the things around her—perhaps the most common impulse in photography, to preserve the sense of something before it disappears altogether. She did it, she writes in an afterword, “to somehow interrupt the flow of this particular, unbearable story.” And yet, she was caught in the position of preserving a story she herself had written, with uncanny, disorienting prescience.

All photographs from Yevgenia Belorusets, Lucky Breaks (New Directions, 2018)

With Lucky Breaks, Belorusets had been operating in the vein of others before her who have inserted photographs into literary texts, but especially W. G. Sebald, whose melancholic-cosmic novels of time, memory, and the aftermath of war—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz—famously interweave uncaptioned photographs within the twisting narratives that wander alongside their forever rambling protagonist as he falls into digressive encounters with strange fellow travelers, stepping into a great pool of time.

No one likes to be duped, but some people don’t like to have a good time. Some of Sebald’s critics, like all overly literal-minded readers, spend too much energy worrying about what stories and images he may or may not have borrowed or embellished, invented or not, which stories came from familiar photo albums and which came from unknown subjects of photographs sold by antique dealers—which is to miss out on the pleasures and lessons of his books. It is to miss the notes of comedy in his writing, and in the interplay between word and image.

In an essay for the New Yorker praising the too rarely observed humor in Sebald’s work, the writer James Wood locates the comic in the photographs in the books, particularly in the “self-conscious antiquarianism” of Sebald’s unnamed first-person narration: the existence of “an otherworldliness of the present. His very prose functions like an old, unidentified photograph.” The haunting cover image of Austerlitz—an old photograph of a young boy in a field, wearing an outfit as aristocratic as those in a Rembrandt-could not be “of” Jacques Austerlitz, an invented character. But did the picture itself make it seem as if it could be? When Wood, examining the photograph in the author’s archive, flipped it over, he found a junk dealer’s penciled-in price: 30 pence. “Scandalously,” Wood writes, “where documentary witness and fidelity is sacred, Sebald introduces the note of the unreliable.” The greater issue, he proposes, is whether Sebald’s use of that particular photograph implied a more direct connection to the historical events of the book.

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Perhaps we’re meant to question these things, and that’s part of the point—not that Sebald was the sort of writer who had “a” point. For a writer such as Belorusets, whom I would call an indirect descendant of Sebald’s, both photograph and story seem to gain power the more assiduously she calls their veracity into question. “Any document is partly a lie,” Belorusets has said, “and this is especially true of documentary photography, which only ever conveys a small part of reality.”

Like the found photographs of Sebald’s novels, Belorusets’s repurposing of her own pictures allows them to function as enigmas. Rather than illustrate, they suggest the feeling of a world. Rather than dutifully serve the plot, they tend to shift the attention elsewhere. In place of proof, they respond in dreamlike fragments, deliberately casting doubt. Sometimes her photographs misbehave, like punchlines. Reminiscent of the isolated, dream-spinning Silesian narrators of Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night, the protagonist of Belorusets’s “The Seer of Dreams” insists on her fantastic somnambulant visions of ancient Ukraine, of rivers of blood, of elephants wearing embroidered saddles.

The seer’s final divination of the story—of a prophetic, two-headed dog who forecasts images of prosperity and happiness—is instantly undercut by the mortal intrusion of Belorusets’s own photograph, of what appears to be a miners’ locker room, with shelves of rusted tools and hard hats and coffee mugs. Is this a joke on the dreamer or on the reader? Does it matter? Do we even have to ask?

This essay is drawn from Rebecca Bengal’s collection Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists (Aperture, 2023).

The Photographers Who Showed the Whimsy and Eros of Ukraine before the War

A bomb shelter in Kyiv. A mass grave in Mariupol. Bodies of dead civilians strewn on the streets of Bucha. While these pictures of Ukraine have flooded international media and brought the country to the attention of foreign spectators, its struggle for independence and self-determination began long before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Instead of focusing on these images, might a look back to photographic projects predating the present war reanimate the complex richness of the region and pay tribute to the continued vitality of Ukraine’s people?

In the mid-1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alexander Chekmenev took an official assignment on behalf of the newly formed Ukrainian government to make passport photographs of the elderly and disabled in their homes in Luhansk. What he encountered were people in a state of near total impoverishment who had worked for the government all their lives and received nearly nothing in return. Their Soviet-era apartments were not unlike the one Chekmenev himself had lived in with his grandparents, parents, and sister—often with no running water or gas. Chekmenev’s images from these home visits capture a generation largely on the verge of death, untouched by the promise of their burgeoning democratic nation.

Alexander Chekmenev, from the series Passport, Luhansk, Ukraine, 1995
Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing Alexander Chekmenev, from the series Passport, Luhansk, Ukraine, 1995
Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing

Working in black and white with one camera, Chekmenev took the official passport-format headshots of weary visages against a portable white backdrop; while using a wide-angle camera with color film, he captured all that lay beyond in photographs that would eventually form the series Passport (1995). “I saw that the frame needed to be widened,” he told me recently. The photographs represent a people entrenched in an old Soviet system that cared little for, deceived, and effectively abandoned the individual. Depicting a generation trapped in time, the pictures teeter on the precipice of uncertainty.

Even in scenes of war, there is tenderness. Even in a landscape of political strife, there is whimsy and eros.

Chekmenev says he never could have predicted his country’s progressive impoverishment, nor that he would become one of Ukraine’s most renowned documentarians: his reportage of the 2014 invasion in the Donbas region and, over the last year, portraits from the streets of war-torn Kyiv and of President Volodymyr Zelensky have appeared in publications ranging from the New York Times to Time magazine. And could the elderly in his photographs, many of whom had lived through World War II and possibly even Stalin’s 1932 forced famine in Ukraine, have predicted that, thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia would launch a military invasion of their country?

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View cart Description Get a full year of Aperture—and save 25% off the cover price. Your subscription will begin with the winter 2022 issue, “Reference”. Justyna Mielnikiewicz, from the series Ukraine Runs Through It, 2014–18
Courtesy the artist and MAPS Justyna Mielnikiewicz, from the series Ukraine Runs Through It, 2014–18
Courtesy the artist and MAPS

Ukraine Runs Through It (2019), by the Polish documentary photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz, chronicles mostly the period from 2014 to 2018 and the individuals who took an active part in a major chapter in Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty. The book uses the Dnipro River as its conceptual through line—a body of water marking a divide between eastern and western Ukraine, but also muddying the notion of clearly delineated territories. Mielnikiewicz, like many of the protagonists in her images, believes this independence movement represents a shift from seeing Ukraine as a former Soviet country to seeing it as part of a new Eastern Europe: “When you say the new Eastern Europe, it becomes like East versus West, West versus East. Whereas when you say ex–Soviet Union, Russia is somehow always in the center,” she explains. Mielnikiewicz’s book includes a 2014 photograph of Petro, a young man serving on Ukraine’s eastern front. He had joined the protest movement at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv earlier that year and wears a teddy bear pinned to his uniform, a gift from a girl he met at the protests.

Julie Poly, from the series Ukrzaliznytsia, 2018–20
Courtesy the artist Julie Poly, from the series Ukrzaliznytsia, 2018–20
Courtesy the artist

Even in scenes of war, there is tenderness. Even in a landscape of political strife, there is whimsy and eros. The artist Julie Poly’s project Ukrzaliznytsia (2020), with photographs that act as a love letter to the Ukrainian national rail company, where Poly was briefly employed, is an homage to a childhood spent traveling the country by train, observing its landscapes and inhabitants. Flamboyant colors attest to the joyful, coquettish aesthetic of a country of sunflowers and watermelon, cherry jam and pickles. Each train car has its own patterned carpet, baby-pink floral drapes, and faded yellow tables—a Technicolor balm against the drab gray of all things Soviet. The young people she photographed may even refuse to define themselves in any relation to the USSR. A lanky man with a red rose in his hair plays cards with two elderly women, but his gaze is outward, staring at the camera. He’s seeing something that they cannot.

Julie Poly, from the series Ukrzaliznytsia, 2018–20
Courtesy the artist
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Still, in the face of war, Poly responds with eros: she is putting together an erotic magazine, inspired by vintage pinups and Marilyn Monroe’s visit to US troops, which will be sent to Ukrainian soldiers on the war front. When Russian air strikes began in 2022, Poly fled Ukraine while eight months pregnant. Now residing in Germany, she continues to be optimistic that life in Kyiv will return to its previous vibrancy. She looks at her photographs from Ukrzaliznytsia with nostalgia and admiration. “Ukrzaliznytsia is still transporting people, but now in the context of evacuating them,” Poly says. “The book itself feels like a testament of the past, but I hope these journeys will start up again. I hope these colors, these patterns, these people, the smiles on their faces will all return.”

Viewed together, the works of Chekmenev, Mielnikiewicz, and Poly generate a kind of “alternative photography,” as the critic John Berger once called for—a photography that instead of freezing images in time returns them to a living context, reintegrating the past into the present for the preservation of socio-political memory. More than mere spectacle, these photographs bear witness to a people immersed, consciously or unconsciously, in emergent history—one in which individual stories play out against the backdrop of a nation’s ongoing becoming and its striving to define its sovereignty.

Julie Poly, from the series Ukrzaliznytsia, 2018–20
Courtesy the artist Justyna Mielnikiewicz, from the series Ukraine Runs Through It, 2014–18
Courtesy the artist and MAPS

This article is originally from Aperture, issue 250, spring 2023.

William Christenberry, RaMell Ross, and the American Crucible of Hale County, Alabama

The first landmark you see is red dirt framed in wood, behind museum glass—Alabama red soil, crucially. In Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land; Altar (2021) by RaMell Ross, red dirt undulates in triangulated peaks, toward a horizon of what appears to be the roof of a house. It’s the opening work in William Christenberry & RaMell Ross: Desire Paths, an exhibition in the form of a dialogue, at Pace Gallery in New York. Desire paths, meaning those trails worn into the ground contrary to roads planned and paved. They are herding animals’ footpaths to water, they are shortcuts sometimes, or they are secret passageways, or they are escape routes, or, particularly when it comes to the impressions left behind by human footprints, they are often driven by some less practical, enigmatic impulse.

Around a corner, that same dirt appears in the base of a sculpture of a barn painted green, by William Christenberry. “You don’t call it dirt, son!” Christenberry recalled in a 2005 Smithsonian lecture, quoting the redressing he’d once received from an Alabama agronomist uncle. “It’s soil! Soil nurtures life!” But soil, he lamented, inevitably came out as soyl in his Tuscaloosa-born accent. He’d eventually adopt the word earth to describe the substance that he’d carry back to his home in Washington, DC. “He would bring home boxes and boxes of red earth, and he had a screen that he made, so he would take it out in the back yard and sift it,” Sandra Deane Christenberry, his wife, told the New York Times in January.

RaMell Ross, Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land; Superstition, 2021 RaMell Ross, Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land; Altar, 2021

That red earth rises to meet the countenance and consciousness of a Shel Silverstein drawing—Ross’s appropriation of the cover illustration of A Light in the Attic, featuring a kid with a house sprouting straight from his head, framed under glass surrounded by more Hale County dirt. Ross fills in the space of the line drawing with brown crayon, giving color to the child’s skin; the house and its pointed, triangular roof are left paper-white. Ross, a photographer, artist, writer, and filmmaker whose childhood geography followed the paths of a military family’s relocations, lives both in Rhode Island, where he teaches at Brown University and, since 2009, in Hale County. Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), his transcendent and acclaimed essay-film, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2019.

Despite being artistically anchored in the same place, Ross and Christenberry, who died in 2016, did not meet in life. But they converse meaningfully, powerfully, in this group of selected works: paths that crisscross, overlap, double up, converge and diverge. It feels less like an exhibition than a spiritual dimension—a Hale County of the mind—and also a real and actual physical place: a forest in which the people of Ross’s photographs move across time, finding their own place among Christenberry’s dream buildings and monuments, barns and slowly transforming buildings, among trees, and among churches. There seem to be as many of those per capita—as those of us who are from these places can attest—in a rural Southern town. Mining, digging, moving through, replanting, Ross and Christenberry are working with the same dirt, that red earth.

William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1974–2004

Two more works by Ross hold more red dirt inside containers for memorial flags, but the triangular shape of the frames makes them appear as if they’d been plucked out of a pasture of pyramids. They are signposts along a trail that passes by Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama (1974–2004), twenty 4-by-5-inch pigment prints that Christenberry made over the course of three decades—some of the small, square, serial photographs for which he’s best known and often misunderstood. Even before his good friend William Eggleston turned to color, Christenberry had begun photographing with a Brownie camera he received as a Christmas present in his teens, processing the film at drugstores. A visual artist whose first love was drawing, he initially didn’t think very seriously of the photos.

In 1961, during a year of mostly odd jobs in New York, Christenberry showed his paintings to Walker Evans, whose own Hale County project Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) was known then to Christenberry though it had not yet become the prevailing portrayal of his home region. It was Christenberry’s drugstore photos that Evans, who’d hired the young Alabama artist to file photos at Fortune, was most taken with. “Your camera is like an extension of your eye,” Christenberry later recalled Evans saying. Though he didn’t last long in New York, Evans’s encouragement was enough to propel Christenberry toward Hale County, a place to which he would return annually, from Memphis or Washington, DC, to photograph, over and over, the same places and things. Including this red barn and an old warehouse, with its impossibly verdant, practically fertilized shade of green.

William Christenberry, 5 Cent, Demopolis, Alabama, 1978

Perhaps you have misread Christenberry before, as simply another photographer of old barns and rural gas stations and general stores and Southern landscapes, subject matter that dares to brush up against sentimentality. And yet his small pictures, approached in a style influenced by Evans (“a severe frontality,” as Christenberry described it), only appear at first to be objective—they demand a closer, longer look to perceive the subjective and conceptual undertones at play. “I don’t want to evoke nostalgia but deep, profound feeling about these little structures,” he once said, meaning both his pictures and the sculptures of them he also made, and the works that would come to him through the subconscious.

Installation view of William Christenberry & RaMell Ross: Desire Paths, Pace Gallery, New York, 2023

In truth, Christenberry’s photographs don’t want to show or preserve the little old house as it once was, but to reveal its changes over time, to suggest the impressions of humans without actually depicting any people. The eventual appearance of a prefab gray shed in front of the red barn—tacked with a hand-painted sign reading Vote Here. Christenberry was drawn to the folk expression of a graveside cross made of egg cartons; he loved and collected vernacular signage as object and as omen, whether the benign, the accidentally suggestive (a roadside sign featuring a particularly phallic ear of corn adorned one of his early book covers), and the rural mystic. PALMIST reads the sign of a local reader and fortune teller, its puffy painted hand waving an upside-down hello from a dusty window. (The Underground Club, a similar series not included in this exhibition, witnesses the rise and fall of a country store over decades, eventually resurrected as a nightclub—perhaps following its own desire path.) Returning yearly without wandering inside enhances the buildings’ unknowability: What might have occurred within these places? Who might have met within them? What darker secrets might they hold? “I had a desire, as I say, to come to grips with that landscape in which I grew up, the positive and negative, the dark and the light,” Christenberry said.

RaMell Ross, Man, 2019

In 2009, Ross left Washington, DC, to work as a teacher and a basketball coach in Hale County, where he found himself pulled into the place, entranced by its “haptic lull,” as he wrote in a 2015 essay. His first three years there, without making photographs or filming, translated into a longitudinal perception and a desire to free the people in his eventual pictures, especially the city’s Black residents, from the framework of imagery. “I wondered in a daydream’s light how to unburden the African-American body and skin,” he wrote. “The problem of representation had become a conceptual challenge. I wanted to engage the photographic narrative of the historic South, but provide its representation some breathing room and loosen the hold of iconic meaning.”

The people in Ross’s photographs are often seen in the midst of doing everyday things within deep time, in the midst of a larger landscape, so that the prosaic becomes almost mythic.

The people in Ross’s photographs are often seen in the midst of doing everyday things within deep time, in the midst of a larger landscape, so that the prosaic becomes almost mythic—whether simply sitting, overlooking a field, maybe on a break (Gahhh Damn, 2022), or a young girl kneeling, absorbed in a flowering plant (Yellow, 2013), a man carrying long lengths of pipe through a forest (Koo-See Mountain, 2019). Even Man (2019), a photograph of a boy exploring the underside of a car, curling himself in the space between body, chassis, and tire, is endowed with a dreamlike languor. It was a moment, Ross has said, that occurred naturally, one he noticed in the midst of an afternoon hanging out in a friend’s yard; like many of his photographs, Man emerges from familiarity and stillness, an awareness of time that allows the people in them to be seen whole, rather than assessed in a decisive instant. His pictures quietly overturn the historic violence of photography and the language that describes its mechanics: capture, frame, shoot, take.

RaMell Ross, Yellow, 2012

In most interviews and lectures he gave in his lifetime, Christenberry has recounted the encounter in the 1960s when, as a young art professor still living in Alabama, he had a run-in, alone, with a fully hooded Klansman in an upstairs room in a courthouse in Tuscaloosa. He fled in terror. A couple weeks later, while sleeping, he had a vision of his first “dream building.” The Dream Buildings, several of which are in this exhibition, with deeply pitched, evocative white roofs, are coated in a white glue, a material that Christenberry equated with memory. When an assemblage of red earth, a long, thin wooden stick, and gourds converge in Dream Building (“Strange Fruit—in Memory of Billie Holiday) (2004), it feels also like an homage to Magritte (Christenberry acknowledged the influence of the Surrealists). Think of the Dream Buildings as extensions of the photographs, or as expressions of perception and the subconscious. In an essay in the Summer 1989 issue of Aperture, “Memory Palaces,” Christenberry says, “I would like the viewer to imagine him or herself on a back country road at night; you would come around a curve and suddenly before your headlights you would hit an object—almost as if in a dream.”

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Toward the back of gallery there is another structure, life-size and preceded by a grave warning on a placard: viewer beware. Desire Paths marks the first time Christenberry’s Klan Room Tableau (1962–2007), has been shown in a gallery setting; it has only rarely been exhibited in museums. Like a closet, an annex, or a hidden corner inside a garage, a basement, an attic, a barn—the Klan Room Tableau is separated from the white-walled, well-lit space of the gallery. It’s dark and crowded in there, claustrophobic, crowded with four hundred drawings, sculptures, photographs, paintings. You may feel as if you are stumbling into some evil subconsciousness, as if you are discovering the manifestation of someone’s sinister desires.

William Christenberry, Green Warehouse, Newbern, Alabama, 1995. Wood, paint, and Alabama red soil
© Estate of William Christenberry and courtesy Pace Gallery

Unlike Philip Guston, with his gleeful, satirically cartoonish Klan figures, Christenberry, for the most part, constructed faithful representations of actual iconography and costumes of the KKK. In accumulation, they are impossible to dismiss as an isolated instance or an aberration, but are joined to an entire story of terror that extends beyond Alabama and the South. “What I want to do is make people look at evil,” the artist once said. There are the satin Klan costumes Christenberry made by hand, placed on dolls—GI Joe figures and reversible rag dolls, little cloth girls who, flipped over, are dressed in white hoods. There are Christenberry’s photographs of the costumed dolls. A white neon cross. A drawing of a hooded man, who seems to match Christenberry’s description of the faceless figure that struck him with revulsion in the city building in Alabama in the 1960s, looking back at him silently through the eyeholes sliced into its white hood. Christenberry’s tableau is haunted by that encounter, compelling him to engage with his own whiteness and the closeness of white supremacy—perhaps motivated, as Ross has written, by the “fear of the terrific reflection of a potential self.”

“I feel as an artist, you can’t just back away,” Christenberry wrote in Aperture‘s Winter 1983 issue. In 1979, sixty-four pieces from the tableau—representing years of work—were stolen from Christenberry’s studio in a theft that went unsolved. Regardless of the overwhelming trauma of violation and loss, regardless of his fears for the safety of his family, he resumed the project. As you exit the room through a curtained doorway, it might dawn on you that Christenberry must have been as haunted by his nightmares as he was driven by his dreams.

RaMell Ross, Return to Origin, 2021. Alabama railroad ties, synthetic baize, bed roll foam, LED light, plywood, hardware, water, urine, stencil text. Installation view at Pace Gallery, New York, 2023

Back in the wider gallery, enter into escape. In 1849, the abolitionist Henry Box Brown traveled to freedom inside a wooden box, shipping himself from Virginia to Philadelphia on a trip by railroad, steamboat, wagon, and ferry. In 2021, Ross made a reverse migration, shipping himself in a four-by-eight wooden crate from Rhode Island to Hale County. You encounter this box just outside the Klan tableau; one side is stamped DRY GOODS, and on top, “Hale County, AL This side up with care”: instruction and guide. Drop to the gallery floor to get a full sense of the dimensions of that space, its bag of supplies, shelf of water bottles for the fifty-nine-hour journey, its confines, the impressions Ross left behind (he brought along a dictionary he’s owned since childhood and copied its entries in black marker, prefacing each term with the word black, filling his interior space with a revised vocabulary: “black aberration . . . black abet . . . black abloom . . . black abluted: washed clean”). A video excerpt, playing on a wall behind the crate, documents this work and multiple vantages of Ross’s passage—the artist inking the walls, and a look like happiness evident as the crate is finally delivered, opened, and Ross releases himself in Hale County, where he’s received by a friend.

RaMell Ross, Gahhh Damn, 2022

Desire paths converge. But the physical layout at Pace insists that you wind back through everything you’ve encountered before you can leave for good. Like emerging from a dark theater back into the world, eyes adjusting to the light, you are bound to see things differently. Walk among the trees and woods and painted buildings, past Christenberry’s tall churchy monuments and dream buildings, and Ross’s toppled steeple in a parking lot (Sleepy Church, 2014), conscious that you are slipping in and out of the past sixty years. Notice how, for instance, even when they do not include actual people, Ross’s photographs bear their impressions, footprints, tracks, whorls in the soil, winglike shapes left behind on the snowless red earth, the dirt angels of Hale’s Angels (2022). The is the red earth Christenberry sifted through; this is red earth rewritten.

RaMell Ross, TypeFace, 2021

You are bound to recognize your own dirt. Seeing Ross’s TypeFace (2021)—a lush field of wild green plants just above a vast bank of red dirt, whose face is engraved with indentations by construction vehicles, like a neat row of sentences—you flash on your own red-soil memory, seen through a flutter of sheer curtains across a gravel road. It’s hundreds of miles from Hale County, but nearly that same red, a bare-faced dirt bank grooved by rain and marked with footprints like phrases, the paths you made. It leads to a pasture of cattle, a hot-wire fence, the woods, a place where you once built pretend houses and invented made-up games in the middle of nowhere. The dirt was where you came from. The dirt was the past you held and the present you walked through. You sift it in your hands, you make your stamp. The dirt is imagination. The dirt is the future.

William Christenberry & RaMell Ross: Desire Paths is on view at Pace Gallery, New York, through February 25, 2023.

Stephanie Syjuco Confronts the Power of the Archive

During her residency at the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., the Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco sifted through material, tracing ideas of American empire, memory, and citizenship. The records she uncovered range from bureaucratic records of the Ohio chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to an image of Filipino women from the photographer Alexander Alland’s project American Counterpoint, which sought to document ethnic and racial groups in America and was published as a book in 1943.

Stephanie Syjuco, Nationalities: Eleven Filipino women in native dress (from the American Counterpoint project, Alexander Alland, Sr., Photoprints, circa 1940, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, NMAH.AC.0204), 2022 Stephanie Syjuco, Professional Rejects (film box from the studio of H. C. Anderson, circa 1970, National Museum of African American History and Culture), 2007

Working in the archive, without access to studio equipment, Syjuco first made images of documents and objects at low resolution. She then printed them in sections on office paper, taped the sheets together to reconstruct the original image, and rephotographed the collages in high resolution. In one image, Syjuco shows us a closed Kodak photo-paper box. Its yellow cover features the brand’s trademark portrait of a white woman with coiffed blond hair, and a handwritten annotation reads “Rejects.” Only the image title indicates that the box belongs to the archive of Henry Clay Anderson, a Black photographer who documented segregated life in Greenville, South Carolina, during the mid-twentieth century. While the final image is crisp and smooth, the visible evidence of its assembly reveals layers of labor and scrutiny, which point to the constructed nature of the archive and the power dynamics that underpin it.

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The close examination of objects held by institutions has been a preoccupation for Syjuco, who over the years has trawled several collections across the United States. If one of the considerable twentieth-century projects of the Western world was the generation of institutional archives, then one of the urgent challenges of the twenty-first century is to reckon with them. As places to learn about the past, about human achievement and failure, and about the stories that shape who we are and how we understand one another, these shared treasuries, and their contents, remain invaluable. Yet the subjective choices of those responsible for shaping these repositories of so-called collective memory are often deeply embedded in obscure, outmoded institutional and colonial structures.

Related Stories Portfolios An Artist’s Clever Reuse of the Fashion Image Portfolios The Strange and Beautiful World of Deborah Turbeville’s Photo-Novella Stephanie Syjuco, Officer (from Alexander Schadenberg photographs of the Philippines, circa 1881–1896, National Anthropology Archives, NAA.PhotoLot. 15), 2022

For her project Image Trafficking, Syjuco was invited to respond to the vast collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. The photograph that closes this portfolio shows her studio pinboard, with reference images of reference images layered over one another—an expansive collage of the collection in all its complicated beauty and violence. An image of a Native person scalping a white woman is abstracted and obscured by overlaid archival documents; another depicts a reconstructed image of a milky-white-crowned bust of a woman, made in 1860 by Hiram Powers, simply titled America.

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In a photograph called Still Life, a bright green backdrop highlights a mise-en-scène of museological props: various kinds of tape, a photo color chart, a knife triumphantly skewering a foam wedge. Here, “the ‘peripherals’ all of a sudden became the subject matter,” as Syjuco says, making visible the museum’s tools for maintaining, repairing, or documenting the items it holds in trust. Syjuco’s rigorous photographs show us that collections themselves may be the most powerful tools we have to dismantle the systems that built them. They remind us to look carefully and slowly, to work to unravel the threads of history within and among the things we’ve gathered—and, in the process, to find new stories.

Studio production view of reference images for the exhibition MATRIX 190: Stephanie Syjuco: Image Trafficking, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, 2022

All photographs courtesy the artist; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York

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

11 Essential Photobooks for Black History Month

Samuel Fosso, ‘70s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist and JM.PATRAS/PARIS

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (2021)

In 1997, Dr. Kenneth Montague founded the Wedge Collection in Toronto in an effort to acquire and exhibit work by artists of African descent. As We Rise features over one hundred works from the collection, bringing together artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa in a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Jamel Shabazz’s definitive street portraits; to Lebohang Kganye’s blurring of self, mother, and family history in South Africa; to J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s landmark series documenting Nigeria’s rich hairstyle traditions, As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. As Teju Cole describes in his preface, “Too often in the larger culture, we see images of Black people in attitudes of despair, pain, or brutal isolation. As We Rise gently refuses that. It is not that people are always in an attitude of celebration—no, that would be a reverse but corresponding falsehood—but rather that they are present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.”

Kwame Brathwaite, Model wearing a natural hairstyle, AJASS, Harlem, ca. 1970

Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles Kwame Brathwaite, A school for one of the many modeling groups that had begun to embrace natural hairstyles in the 1960s, ca. 1966

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019)

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath founded the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling agency for Black women. Working with these two organizations, Brathwaite organized fashion shows featuring clothing designed by the models themselves, created stunning portraits of jazz luminaries, and captured behind-the-scenes photographs of the Black arts community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis.

Until recent years, Brathwaite has been under-recognized. This is the first-ever monograph of his work. “To ‘Think Black’ meant not only being politically conscious and concerned with issues facing the Black community,” writes Tanisha C. Ford, “but also reflecting that awareness of self through dress and self-presentation. . . . [They] were the woke set of their generation.”

Ernest Cole, Sometimes check broadens into search of a man’s person and belongings, South Africa, ca. 1960s
© Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole: House of Bondage (2022)

First published in 1967, Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage has been lauded as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century, revealing the horrors of apartheid to the world and influencing generations of photographers around the globe.

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Cole photographed the underbelly of apartheid in South Africa—often at great personal risk. Methodically documenting the daily atrocities and indignities for the Black majority under the apartheid system, Cole pictured its miners, police, hospitals, schools, and more. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa and smuggled out his negatives, becoming a “banned person” and settling in New York. A year later, House of Bondage was published.

Over fifty years later, a new edition of House of Bondage brings this powerful and politically incisive document to a contemporary audience. Retaining Cole’s original writings and photographs, this edition adds unpublished work found in a cache of negatives recently returned to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. It features never-before-seen photographs of Black creative expression and cultural activity taking place under apartheid—recontextualizing this pivotal book for our time.

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Shop Now[image error] Deana Lawson, Binky & Tony Forever, 2009
Courtesy the artist; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

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

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

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

Zora J Murff, Kenny at 19, 2013
Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London

Zora J Murff: True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (2022)

Zora J Murff’s photographs construct an incisive, autobiographic retelling of the struggles and epiphanies of a young Black artist working to make space for himself and his community.

Since leaving social work to pursue photography over a decade ago, Murff’s work has consistently grappled with the complicit entanglement of the medium in the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race, often contextualizing his own photographs with found and appropriated images and commissioned texts.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) continues this conversation, examining the act of remembering and the politics of self, which Murff describes as “the duality of Black patriotism and the challenges of finding belonging in places not made for me—of creating an affirmation in a moment of crisis as I learn to remake myself in my own image.”

Micaiah Carter, Adeline in Barrettes, 2018

Courtesy the artist Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Twins II), New York, 2017

Courtesy the artist

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (2019)

In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The book highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation—including Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer to shoot a cover story for Vogue; Campbell Addy and Jamal Nxedlana, who have founded digital platforms celebrating Black photographers; and Nadine Ijewere, whose early series title The Misrepresentation of Representation says it all.

From the role of the Black body in media; to cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture; to the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers, The New Black Vanguard opens up critical conversations while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future. “Often in this culture, when we think about the work of Black artists, we almost never think about, How do we celebrate young Black artists? And I wanted to change that,” Sargent states. “I wanted to say that what was happening right now with these very young artists is significant. It has shifted our culture, it has shifted how we think about photography, and it has shifted who gets to shoot images.”

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Courtesy the artist Souls of a Movement, An Honoring of the African Diaspora, February 2021

Courtesy Souls of a Movement (Carlos von der Heyde)

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

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

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

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (_2070386), 2017

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

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (2020)

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s studio portraits challenge and deconstruct traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, all through the perspective of a Black, queer gaze. Although the creation of artist books has been a long-standing part of his practice, this 2020 volume is the first widely released publication of Sepuya’s work.

For Sepuya, photography is a tactile and communal enterprise, with his multilayered scenes coming together through groups of his friends, fellow artists, collaborators, and himself. Moving away from the slick artifice of contemporary portraiture, Sepuya’s frames are filled with the human elements of picture-taking, from fingerprints and smudges to dust on mirrored surfaces. Sepuya pushes this even further by directly inviting us to look inside the studio setting—while also considering the construction of subjectivity.

[image error]Shikeith, O’ My Body, Make of Me Always a Man Who Questions!, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (2022)

In his striking studio portraits, multimedia artist Shikeith envisions his Black male subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. In work he describes as “leaning into the uncanny,” Shikeith’s subjects’ faces and bodies glisten with sweat (and tears) in a manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims “an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” Brought together in the artist’s first monograph, Notes towards Becoming a Spill redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy.

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Shop Now[image error] Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space II, New York, 1978
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Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Aperture 223: “Vision & Justice ” (Summer 2016)

The art historian, curator, and writer Sarah Elizabeth Lewis guest edited Aperture’s summer 2016 issue, “Vision & Justice,” a monumental edition of the magazine that sparked a national conversation on the role of photography in constructions of citizenship, race, and justice. The issue features a wide span of photographic projects by artists such as Awol Erizku, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deborah Willis; alongside essays by some of the most influential voices in American culture, including Vince Aletti, Teju Cole, and Claudia Rankine. “Understanding the relationship of race and the quest for full citizenship in this country requires an advanced state of visual literacy, particularly during periods of turmoil,” writes Lewis, “but America’s progress would require pictures because of the images they conjure in one’s imagination.”

In 2019, Aperture worked with Lewis to create a free civic curriculum to accompany the issue, featuring thirty-one texts on topics ranging from civic space and memorials to the intersections of race, technology, and justice. Taking its conceptual inspiration from Frederick Douglass’s landmark Civil War speech “Pictures and Progress” (1861)—about the transformative power of pictures to create a new vision for the nation—the curriculum addresses both the historical roots and contemporary realities of visual literacy for race and justice in American civic life.

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What Uta Barth’s Images Tell Us about the Limits of Sight

In the fall of 1996, Uta Barth exhibited her then-new series Field and Ground at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. Barth was living in Los Angeles, having joined the art faculty at the University of California, Riverside, in 1990 after earning her MFA at UCLA in 1985. The critic Mark Van de Walle reviewed the show in Artforum, invoking Barth’s relationship to the minimalism of Agnes Martin, the play between photography and painting in Gerhard Richter’s blurred paintings, and the sensitivity to light shared by Vermeer. Even in her foundational work, Barth was understood in relation to a long and significant history of artists. Van de Walle mused that Barth’s photographs, “by virtue of being pictures of nothing in particular, manage to be about a great deal indeed.”

At the time of that show, I had just moved to New York, as a recent college graduate, and happened to be working at a photography gallery down the hall from Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. I wasn’t reading Artforum regularly and had only just begun to learn about photography, but I must have stopped in to look at Barth’s show dozens of times. I still remember stretching my breaks during the workday as long as I thought I could get away with, to sneak in a few more minutes with Barth’s photographs. I would stare at them, and consider what they were telling me about photography, about seeing, about how to signal what matters.

Uta Barth, …from dawn to dusk (December), 2022Uta Barth, white blind (bright red) (02.13), 2002

Both of those early series—Field (1995­–96) and Ground (1994–97)—feature prominently in Barth’s current major exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Uta Barth: Peripheral Vision, curated by Arpad Kovacs. Filling the entirety of the museum’s West Pavilion photography galleries, the exhibition is a generous and expansive look at the artist’s key bodies of work from the 1990s up through the present. It opens with …from dawn to dusk (2022), a work commissioned by the Getty. On view for the first time, these new images crystallize the artist’s ongoing fascination with the fleeting effects of light on place and the potential of photography to sequentially capture and reflect this human, and bodily, experience. Notably, in a side gallery, Kovacs also includes Barth’s early and experimental work from the late 1970s and ’80s: rarely seen collages, self-portraits, iterative sequences of space, and experiments with light and its blinding capacities—all early traces of ideas that will persist and play out for decades.

Installation view of Uta Barth: Peripherial Vision, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2023
Photograph by Kayla Kee

Field and Ground established Barth’s commitment to disrupting the conventional habits of photographic seeing. Here, the camera’s focus is not associated with objects but with space, foregrounding color, compositional arrangement, and a fundamental question about how both photographic and human vision affect perception and experience. Barth does a lot with a little: a wall, a light fixture, the edge of the frame, a window, or light as it lands. These elements form relationships that are as intricate and nuanced as they are spare. Later works, such as …and of time (2000), …and to draw a bright white line with light (2011), and Compositions of Light on White (2011) express the refinement of these ideas, along with Barth’s exquisite attention to the most ordinary domestic surroundings. In Barth’s photographic world, the soft glow of a shifting line of light becomes everything. That these photographs are made in her own home quietly establishes the grace of our everyday, most immediate, and most personal surroundings.

Uta Barth, Untitled (…and of time, 00.4), 2000 Uta Barth,…and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.2), 2011

Among Barth’s great strengths is her ability to play with options, to present variations on a theme, not as variations in and of themselves but as a true reflection of and insight about how we look, and how it feels to look, again and again, over time. This dedication plays out intensively in the series white blind (bright red) (2002) and Sundial (2007), both of which are given whole galleries. These rooms most effectively shift the psychology and mood of the exhibition from the meditative and contemplative beauty of the ordinary to something more visceral and acutely destabilizing, even strange. The installation of white blind (bright red) is purely linear. An even line of photographs depicting gnarled tree branches in winter, punctuated by color inversions, shocks of entirely red or nearly black frames, and washed-out images of the same branches, barely visible, surround the viewer.

Uta Barth, Sundial (07.4), 2007, from the series Sundial

The effect, moving from image to image, mixes sight with both the memory of sight and with literal afterimages—a convergence of vision and its effects, which, Barth seems to suggest, are really one and the same. She made these photographs during a period of convalescence, looking out a window from her bed, recovering from an illness. We may think of vision as occupying a largely conceptual realm—the eye and the mind—but Barth shows a distinct bodily awareness of vision. Both may be as universal as the other, but an acute sense of the physicality of vision, and visual processing, feels like the greater revelation. Standing in the gallery, I can envision my own self, lying in bed, looking out the window, again and again, waiting in a space of vulnerable limbo, to be well.

Sundial offers a similarly complex and slightly surreal vantage point on what it might mean to spend a lifetime looking closely, or even a few minutes. Barth invites us to stare with her, tracking the warm play of late afternoon light on the refrigerator, the floor beam, the edge of a cabinet. Soon enough, like a familiar word spoken over and over, the everyday becomes strange, and it is evident that total attentiveness to the real can be slightly hallucinatory.

Uta Barth, Thinking about…In the Light and Shadow of Morandi, 2018

In their foregrounding of the complex physicality that can be associated with vision, Sundial and white blind (bright red) offer a contrast to several of the other series featured in the show, where mindfully contemplating the subtle passage of light feels more aspirational, like what one’s best self does, the most focused, clearest, and attentive version of vision. But, Barth shows, vision also comes from sick and tired bodies, aging or just-awoke-and-still-disoriented eyes. This sight is wrapped up in our bodies, this sight is unstable, this sight second-guesses itself. Remarkably, no matter which version of sight she is prompting viewers toward, Barth’s photographs do not just depict these experiential states. Rather, they make the viewer’s re-enactment of them possible. Ultimately, both are equally part of our existence and relevant to an experience of a world that is, at once, visual, perceptual, felt, lived, embodied, subjective, flawed. And, yet, coherent.

Uta Barth: Peripheral Vision is on view in Los Angeles at the J. Paul Getty Museum, through February 19, 2023.

Gordon Parks’s Strident Vision of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power Movement

On June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, who had just been elected head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), appeared at the Meredith March Against Fear in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael, alongside leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, had resolved to continue the weeks-long protest march begun by the voting-rights activist James Meredith, who, while on his solitary walk from Memphis to Jackson, had been shot by a white supremacist. Facing a crowd that evening, Carmichael grabbed a microphone and said, “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” The marchers cried back, “Black Power!”

The white establishment wasn’t happy with Carmichael’s language, and photographs taken during his speech didn’t soothe its fears. The photographer Bob Fitch had captured Carmichael baring his teeth as he forcefully gesticulated, his features underlit like those of a villain in a silent movie. News outlets cautioned against a rise in reverse racism, and the polls saw a white backlash that November when many Anglos interpreted “Black Power” as a call to violence.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Watts, California, 1967

During this tumult, Gordon Parks met Carmichael in Berkeley while on assignment for Life magazine, where he was the first Black staff member. This Vogue alum was so impressed by Carmichael that he went on to shadow him into the following year. Five pictures would illustrate Parks’s 1967 Life profile, “Whip of Black Power.” While some of the article’s photographs have been collected by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the rest of Parks’s photographs and contact sheets had not been exhibited or published until the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, staged its 2022 exhibition Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power and published an accompanying catalog.

Parks wanted to draw Stokely Carmichael’s full character as a multidimensional person.

“When I came to Houston, a Parks project was on my list. I went out to the Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, New York, and I knew immediately that this was the project we had to do,” the associate curator of photography Lisa Volpe recently told me. “It has such resonance with the Black Lives Matter movement and the entire long history of the civil rights movement. I jumped at the opportunity.”

Gordon Parks, SNCC Office, Atlanta, Georgia, 1967

Volpe appreciated that Parks initially questioned Carmichael’s ideas: in Life, he pressed Carmichael about whether he was “preaching violence”—a charge Carmichael eloquently rebutted, even as he emphasized the need for Black self-defense. Parks eventually warmed to the concept of Black Power, ending his essay with uneasy admiration for Carmichael, and the images he took countered Fitch’s sensationalizing depiction. In Stokely Carmichael, Lowndes County, Alabama (1966), Parks captured Carmichael canvassing Lowndes, which was 80 percent Black but, due to white violence, had no registered voters of color. Carmichael helped form the pro-voting-rights Lowndes County Freedom Organization, whose mascot was a pouncing black panther. When he snapped Carmichael on one of the county’s gravel roads, Parks drew on his fashion background, highlighting the activist’s combat boots and preppy pullover emblazoned with the feline, which would later be adopted by the Black Panther Party.

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As Volpe sifted through Parks’s contact sheets, she encountered a cascade of images similarly deploying detail to bring the viewer into Carmichael’s mission-driven world. A 1967 picture shows a man securing the scene at a November rally in Watts, Los Angeles: dressed in a slim gray suit, he talks intently into a walkie-talkie while a large crowd sits expectantly on the ground to hear Carmichael speak. Another photograph documents SNCC’s Atlanta office, whose walls are papered with leaflets and pamphlets, one of which reads “The Black Panther Is Coming!”

Parks accompanied Carmichael on the car trips that brought him to these mobilizations, at one point snagging an image of him driving through town while laughing with his unseen companions. Volpe’s research revealed that Carmichael usually sat at the wheel, because he’d been trained in defensive driving. “Stokely always wanted to be in the driver’s seat because that was the position of responsibility, and he was caring for his SNCC colleagues,” she says.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, 1967
All photographs courtesy Gordon Parks Foundation

Carmichael died in 1998, but his words are very much alive today. The 2022 documentary Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power was recently acquired by the streaming service Peacock; the newly created Black Migrant Power Fund seeks to support Black-led, migrant-focused nonprofits; and the artist Hank Willis Thomas recently installed his monumental sculpture All Power to All People (2017), which combines a hair pick with the Black Power salute, in New Orleans’s Lafayette Square. Parks’s Life photographs form an essential part of the Carmichael and Black Power archive.

“Parks was very aware that the vast majority of Life’s readership was white,” Volpe says. “But he understood that it was his voice that could humanize people like Stokely Carmichael, who had been shown in such a terrible, one-dimensional manner. He wanted to draw Stokely’s full character as a multidimensional person. And, in the end, you can see Parks really took in Black Power, interpreting it in his own way.”

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

An Artist’s Photo Archive Tells a Story about Race and Labor

Archival images can find us in the most discreet and serendipitous ways—stashed in a forgotten book, orphaned at a flea market, tucked in the sleeves of a photo album. Their scenes are portals to a different time, and often, with patience, they are a compass for our present one. At least this is how the artist thinks and speaks of them. Her series Toward a History of Women of Color in the Workplace (2018–ongoing) is a result of the artist’s search for answers about her past and her place as a mixed-race person in the United States. She found these images—a collection of prints from around 1969, when her mother worked as a secretary—among her family’s belongings, wrapped inconspicuously in plastic pharmacy bags.

Sifting through them struck a chord: “I enjoyed going to work with her as a child when I had days off from school,” Mestrich says of her mother, Lydia, who raised her alone, “so it was fascinating to see this visual record of her first office job.” Inspired, Mestrich talked to her mother about the images, tried to track down the photographer, and became engrossed with contextualizing them.

Qiana Mestrich, Lydia is using a desktop calculator and unaware of the camera, ca. 1969

The photographs helped Mestrich feel closer to her mother, who emigrated from Panama to the United States in 1969, in her early twenties. When Lydia arrived in New York, she found an opening on the assembly line at a perfume factory. The work was grueling, and she didn’t stay for long. Through a friend from her English classes, Lydia got a job as a secretary at Rugol Trading Corporation. “She quickly had to be independent,” Mestrich notes of Lydia’s early days in the city. “She made this community of girlfriends who were all immigrants from Latin America, and they were all in the same boat of trying to make it on their own.”

Rugol, a wholesale hardware company, no longer exists. Its former office building, at 55 North Moore Street, has been converted into million-dollar co-ops. And the neighborhood it once called home—Tribeca—is now more famous for luxury lofts and restaurants than warehouses. Mestrich’s series captures a transitory phase in the area’s past—after the demise of commercial outlets and factories but before it became an artists’ haven and, later, a bastion of wealth. They show her mother and her colleagues working and milling about in an industrial workshop turned office space. In one photograph, provisional walls separate each employee’s desk area and fluorescent lights dangle from the high ceilings. A white column plastered with a baseball poster—Mestrich’s mother is a fan of the sport—interrupts the flow, another reminder of the space’s makeshift nature. “It wasn’t built to be an office,” Mestrich says to me as we huddle over her laptop. She points out Lydia, hunched over a desk in the far-left corner, and then her mother’s coworker, fiddling with a typewriter.

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Another photograph of Lydia—this time smiling while seated at her desk—expands the office topography. Behind her stands a row of green-tinted filing cabinets and two-door storage closets. Precariously stacked reams of paper sit on top of some, while others display notes held up with magnets. Lydia smiles warmly at the camera, her hands clasping a document. These images convey a familiarity between subject and photographer. Lydia told Mestrich that they were taken by her coworker, an African American man who worked in the mail room. (Mestrich has tried to get in touch with him but hasn’t yet been successful.) He would happen upon his colleagues, sometimes asking them to pose, other times snapping candids. His proximity to his subjects lends the photographs an affectionate warmth. They are the kind of pictures friends take of one another, endearing attempts to capture the ephemeral.

How does spending time with the archive enhance our understanding of the role women of color play in the workplace—yesterday, today, and tomorrow?

In that same photograph of Lydia at her desk, follow the trail from her slender fingers to her earlobe and you can see a thick band of bracelets decorating her wrist, then a globular gold earring. Mestrich takes joy in observing her mother’s style, which serves as a window into late 1960s fashion. This was the era of the Black Power movement, “Black is beautiful,” Woodstock, and the Harlem Cultural Festival. The photographs in the series reflect Lydia’s elegance and her varied wig collection. In some images, she wears her natural hair coiffed into an Afro, in others, she dons a tall wig with a chic side part. Fellow employees have similarly sophisticated garbs. Take the photograph in which Lydia’s coworker nibbles on a piece of birthday cake: See the coworker’s outfit, a checkered dress cinched at the waist with a wide belt. Look at Lydia, seated at her desk, in a white collared button-down under a gray dress. A string of pearls hangs from her neck, connecting the two garments.

Qiana Mestrich, Lydia poses for a portrait in the boss’s chair, ca. 1969. All photographs from series Toward a History of Women of Color in the Workplace, 2018–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Toward a History of Women of Color in the Workplace begins with Lydia, but Mestrich doesn’t want it to end there. The time she has spent with her mother’s archive has inspired more questions about the professional legacy of women. She thinks of the 1980 film 9 to 5, its vision of office spaces including no one who isn’t white, and compares that to her mother’s reality and her own as a working artist. I can’t help but think of Mestrich’s project alongside Ling Ma’s, Raven Leilani’s, and Natasha Brown’s novels, works that have, in recent years, tried to capture the office experiences among women of color. In the spirit of tethering archives to a community, Mestrich, a recipient of the 2022 Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories grant, has started an Instagram account for these photographs. She hopes they will inspire others to submit family pictures of working mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. “We are the backbone of these companies,” Mestrich says.

If there is a broader goal for the series, it’s to possibly answer questions about gender discrimination, pay discrepancies, and the continued lack of representation of Black women in leadership roles: What can images from 1969, or throughout the past century, tell us about the contemporary moment? How does spending time with the archive enhance our understanding of the role women of color play in the workplace—yesterday, today, and tomorrow?

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