Aperture's Blog, page 36

Wolfgang Tillmans’s Democratic Vision of Photography

Wolfgang Tillmans is a convener of intimacy. His static images—from the sweaty, tangled bodies in his photographs of 1990s gay clubs to more recent portraits of friends and lovers in Berlin, London, and Fire Island—invite us to think dynamically about ways to be together. Even his abstract, cameraless photographs involve the sensuous intermingling of chemicals on paper.

This quality was especially poignant for Roxana Marcoci when production on Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, the career survey exhibition she has curated for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, was stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic. On May 19, 2020, when museum staff were isolating at home, Marcoci posted a brief essay for MoMA Magazine introducing “On My Own,” a symphonic electro-pop track recorded by Tillmans in 2018. The artist sings a refrain over the sound of rushing New York subway trains, which at the time of lockdown were largely empty: “I’m on my own and not alone.” “The idea of togetherness, which comes up so much in his work, is also at the forefront of how he thinks,” Marcoci told me recently. “At a time when people were secluded and felt completely severed from their friends and family, it was critical.”

Wolfgang Tillmans, still life, New York, 2001 Wolfgang Tillmans, August self portrait, 2005 Wolfgang Tillmans, Tukan (Toucan), 2010

The pandemic was just one challenge to the organizing of a survey exhibition for an artist with a famously idiosyncratic vision of photographic display. Tillmans is well known for hanging prints of varying sizes clipped and pinned to gallery walls in arrangements that achieve, through startling asymmetries and interruptions, a sense of balance and flow. Since his inaugural 1993 exhibition, at Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, he has exhibited, free of disciplinary hierarchies, conventional photographs alongside notes, drawings, photocopy collages, and magazine pages. This array is partly what makes his work feel so capacious; as Tillmans himself has put it, his roomy installations are “always a world that I want to live in.” The MoMA team spent years studying the strategies he employed in every one of his prior shows. “Wolfgang is someone for whom exhibition and installation making are the very grammar of his practice,” Phil Taylor, a former curatorial assistant at MoMA who helped organize the exhibition, told me. Saying something new about Tillmans’s work required learning his language.

The pandemic was just one challenge to the organizing of an exhibition for an artist with a famously idiosyncratic vision of display.

Unusually for a photographer, that language is very often verbal, and so, in addition to the wide range of literature on display in the galleries, from early zines and journal pages to the collection of news articles and artist texts known as Truth Study Center (2005–ongoing), the exhibition is accompanied by two publications, a catalog and a reader. The latter grew in scope over the pandemic, when the curatorial team was unable to travel or work in the galleries, to encompass brief essays by the artist, interviews, Instagram posts, playlists, and even spam emails.

Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022. Photograph by Emile Askey

“It is the installations that I have always understood to be the actual works,” Tillmans writes in the accompanying catalog. At first, visitors to the exhibition may feel overwhelmed by the diversity of materials included. In addition to photographs and text, there are movingimage works from the past twenty years and a room screening the music videos for Tillmans’s 2021 studio album, Moon in Earthlight. Yet this screening room is one of many moments of respite in the sprawling show, which, like all of Tillmans’s installations, aims to be an inviting social space. This approach is a manifestation of what Marcoci calls his “ethics of care”: his steadfast belief that art can prompt us to reflect on lived political and social realities while also making us feel safe and loved. It extends from his tender images to his decades-long commitment to activist causes such as LGBTQIA and immigrant rights. For Tillmans, photographs are no more precious than the world in which they circulate.

Related Items

Aperture 237

Shop Now[image error]

Aperture Magazine Subscription

Shop Now[image error]

“Wolfgang thinks about the photographic print as akin to a body,” Taylor says, “and focuses on the borders, the edges of photographs, the negative spaces, the intervals between images.” The social dimension of his work exists both in these paper margins and in the dynamic spaces where these photographic bodies come together. Like a body, the show has been subject to changes—“a living entity,” as Marcoci says. If such open-endedness seems anathema to MoMA’s reputation as the gatekeeper of modernism, it’s also reflective of the way the museum has been changing since the rehang of its permanent collection in 2019. It could even be argued that Tillmans partly inspired the erosion of disciplinary hierarchies there. These changes made possible many close relationships, and, like Tillmans’s work, they will create space for new ones.

Wolfgang Tillmans, The Cock (kiss), 2002
All photographs courtesy the artist; David Zwirner; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London

“I want to open up an affirmative space,” Tillmans told the curator Neville Wakefield in 1995. MoMA’s survey is proof that in the ensuing decades he has accomplished even more. “To look without fear” perhaps means to look without worrying about what will be reflected back at you. It’s a form of viewership whose root desire is to engage. This democratic vision of photography can be seen equally in the ways Tillmans gathers text and images together and the ways that bodies commune within them. His work has room enough for us all.

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 1, 2023. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue,” under the column “Backstory.”

17 Photographers Reflect on Key Images for Aperture’s Seventieth Anniversary

This month, Aperture marks seventy years since its founding in 1952. In celebration of this anniversary, we’re kicking off a special limited-edition print sale bringing together original works by seventy artists, available in editions of seventy each.

“Aperture has always encouraged connection between photographers, and created a space to connect us with the work they do,” observes Sarah Meister, Aperture’s executive director. “It is inspiring to browse through this collection of images that point to our history, and to know that these artists and estates have generously participated to help Aperture create similar opportunities for future generations.”

Throughout September, collect signed or estate-stamped, 8-by-10-inch prints by some of the most revered and influential photographers in the history of the medium, with proceeds directly supporting Aperture and the artists.

See here to browse the complete Seventy x Seventy sale. Below, enjoy a few highlights from the sale.

Tina Barney, Bridesmaids in Pink, 1995, from Aperture, issue 159, Spring 2000
Courtesy the artist

Tina Barney

“This was taken at the wedding of my best friend’s daughter. Two of the girls are my nieces and the other their cousin. Definitely a family affair. My favorite detail is the glove of the brunette on the right. The extended finger almost touching the edge of the frame and its starched, white cotton glove are reason enough to print this picture.

The Jackie O–style pink satin dresses and pillbox hats were definitely chosen with a sense of humor. I sat and watched those hats being made with real roses before I came upon this photo, and knowing the intensive labor involved made me appreciate the scene I witnessed even more. What I can never plan on or even dream of are the perfectly choreographed spaces between this trio: the two girls pushed together on the right and the third girl leaning against the left side of the frame, as if she were the leader of the pack.”

Dawoud Bey, Two Girls at Lady D’s, Harlem, 1976, from Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (Aperture, 2019)
Courtesy the artist

Dawoud Bey

“I spent five years in the mid-to-late 1970s making photographs in Harlem, New York. It was the first project I undertook at the beginning of my career. I was led back there by my family’s history in the neighborhood: my mother and father had met in a church in Harlem and eventually got married. When I was born several years later, they moved to Queens, to a house with a front yard and backyard, something more spacious than the Harlem apartment they had in Sugar Hill. But we continued to visit the neighborhood, as various friends and family still lived there.

In 1975 I decided to ‘return’ to the community where I had never lived, but had a deep connection to, to make photographs. I encountered these two young girls one afternoon on Seventh Avenue near West 138th Street. When I asked if I could make a picture of them in front of this establishment, they joyfully struck an exuberant pose for me, full of all of the energy and expressiveness of youth.”

Gregory Crewdson, Special Edition Detail from Untitled (2003-2008), from Aperture, issue 190, Spring 2008
Courtesy the artist

Gregory Crewdson

“In the spring of 2008, Aperture featured Beneath the Roses (2003–2008) in the magazine, a body of work I had just completed over the course of six years and eight large-scale productions. The issue had a double cover using two pictures from the series, and this was one of them. This picture was shot in the summer of 2006.”

Tim Davis, Van, Ocean, Los Angeles, 2021, from I’m Looking Through You (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist

Tim Davis

“All of my pants get holes in the knees. I am constantly kneeling and photographing things down on the ground. I should probably get some steel-kneed pants. Do those exist? This picture was made around the corner from the Oscars ceremonies at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. I’d gone there to see what catching some of that gaudy glamour would feel like. I made some decent pictures of the setup for the event, but my favorite of the day was this little clamshell of industrial design and the muddy realities of human life. I love images that prod at the flatness of the photographic image and test our sense of its certainty.”

Thalía Gochez, Every Worry Melts Away (Naomi Rodriguez and Grace Sanabria), San Francisco, 2019, from Aperture, issue 245, “Latinx”
Courtesy the artist

Thalía Gochez

“Every worry melts away when I’m with my community. This photograph was created in hopes of capturing the sense of safety and belonging one may feel when they’re in spaces where their identity and experience are mirrored and honored. A space where you can be yourself and rest your head on another without worry. I was interested in broadening the conversation around BIPOC experiences that isn’t linked to trauma or resiliency but explores tenderness and feels celebratory.”

Ethan James Green, Peter and Stevie, 2018, from Young New York (Aperture, 2019)
Courtesy the artist

Ethan James Green

“This is a portrait of my friends Peter and Stevie, whom I have always known as a couple. They are the only high-school sweethearts that I have ever encountered in New York. This image was one of the final pictures shot for my book Young New York, and I remember it feeling effortless to capture.”

Graciela Iturbide, La niña del peine, Juchitán, Mexico, 1979, from Graciela Iturbide on Dreams, Symbols, and Imagination (Aperture, 2022)
Courtesy the artist

Graciela Iturbide

“When I undertake a project, I never start with a preconceived idea. In Juchitán, I began by going out walking with no fixed destination. That is how I came across this girl combing her hair. I titled the portrait La niña del peine because Manuel Álvarez Bravo was very fond of a flamenco singer called La Niña de los Peines. In this way, just walking around, I encountered many of the scenes I portrayed in Oaxaca.”

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2011, from Illuminance (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist

Rinko Kawauchi

“What connects the inside to the outside.
What you can see by cutting a rectangle.
Looking out the window helps me to unclench a little bit of what’s been hardening inside of me.”

 Tommy Kha, Constellations XVIII, Whitehaven, Memphis, 2019, from Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter (Aperture, 2023)
Courtesy the artist

Tommy Kha

“In my series Facades, ‘cut-up pictures’ take the form of installations, unique photographic prints, puzzles, temporary tattoos, face masks, stickers, lenticulars, as well as my mother’s image. I am a cutout of my mother. I do not use Photoshop in my work—most of my work is done in-camera, using a combination of lo-fi tricks such as inserting fabricated props, using available light, and documenting performances—allowing the artifice of the props and sets to show. Through play and experimentation—NOT foreplay—I create pictures that straddle the lines between still life, portrait, and self-portrait.”

Justine Kurland, Toys R Us, 1998, from Girl Pictures (Aperture, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Justine Kurland

“I wanted to make the invisible communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experience as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls—they would multiply through the sheer force of togetherness and lay claim to a new territory. Their collective awakening would ignite and spread through suburbs and schoolyards, calling to clusters of girls camped on stoops and the hoods of cars, or aimlessly wandering the neighborhoods where they lived.”

Gillian Laub, Chappaqua backyard, 2000, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist

Gillian Laub

“Chappaqua backyard is an image from Family Matters, an over two-decade-long project confronting issues of privilege, class, and other fissures in the American dream. Family Matters is an exploration of the conflicted feelings I have about where I come from—which includes people I love and treasure, but with whom, most recently in a divided America, I have also struggled mightily. It is made with the intention to accept as well as to challenge—both them and myself.

When I started making pictures professionally, I would sometimes get editorial fashion assignments. Taking pictures of models never much interested me but creating narratives for them did. Certain editors would let me cast my family and friends, and when they did, my grandparents were always willing participants. They are pictured here in the backyard of the home I grew up in.”

Duane Michals, Young Soldiers Dream in the Garden of the Dead with Flowers Growing from Their Heads, 1995, from Aperture, issue 146, Winter 1997
© Duane Michals and courtesy DC Moore, New York

Duane Michals

“During the Korean War I was a second lieutenant in armor. Luckily, I never saw combat. If I had gone to combat, I’m sure I would not have survived. This photograph is about all those innocent young men whose lives were wasted in battle. I see them underground with flowers growing from their heads.” 

Tyler Mitchell, Tuesday Afternoon, 2021 
Courtesy the artist

Tyler Mitchell

“This image, of my friend Jaycina’s daughter Syx in Atlanta, feels like everything I wanted an afternoon to be as a kid, nearly naked, free, and blowing bubbles. I like that this image can be a potential portal to those sorts of memories and wishes.”

Martin Parr, Mayor of Todmorden’s inaugural banquet, Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England, 1977, from The Non-Conformists (Aperture, 2013)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Martin Parr

“Every time I go to an event where there is a buffet, I know there will be a scramble for the food. It’s that slight moment of madness where the greed in us all takes over, and the scrum begins. It is the moment I am waiting for, behind the table, with the action taking place before my lens. However, try as I may, I can never get a better shot than this one taken around 1977. This image just sticks in my mind, with the guy half-cupping a pork pie being the single character I will never forget.”

Alex Prager, Eve, 2008
© Alex Prager and courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London

Alex Prager

“Eve is part of my Big Valley series that I created very early in my career. At the time I was experimenting a lot with references from artists I admired, and Eve was my homage to Hitchcock. I wanted to be so outward about my love for him that there could be no doubt. The intention of Big Valley was to investigate the human psyche and create images that embody the noir spirit, fabricating moments in time that hint at a much larger story with a disquiet lurking just underneath.”

Stephen Shore, Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974, from Uncommon Places
Courtesy the artist

Stephen Shore

“Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts was the image used on the cover of the first, 1982 edition of Uncommon Places. Not only was Uncommon Places my first book; it was the first monograph in color that Aperture published. That was forty years ago. The book was an early milestone in my career. I cannot begin to express how indebted I am to Aperture for this.”

Silvana Trevale, Mariposa, Corfu, Greece, August 2020
Courtesy the artist

Silvana Trevale

“This photograph is part of my project Aproximaciones, in which I explore longing for my past through people around me, unfamiliar scenarios, and my relationship with the sea.”

Through September 30, shop the Seventy x Seventy sale to collect signed or estate-stamped, 8-by-10-inch prints available in editions of seventy for $250 each.

The Punk Portraitist of New York’s Underground

“People thought it was a fake name because I lived in leather. Leather shirts, leather pants, leather jackets,” the photographer Marcus Leatherdale once told me over the phone. Another rumor was that he was the heir to a Canadian logging empire. From the late 1970s until the early 2010s, Leatherdale photographed notable and obscure figures around the world, from New York underground heroes like Cookie Mueller to Bollywood actresses and holy men in India. Looking at photographs of a dashing young Leatherdale, who died last April, one can easily imagine how he elicited a sense of intrigue among admirers, unsettled the stodgy, and inspired rumors among the envious.

Leatherdale was born in 1952 and raised outside of Montreal. He studied fine arts at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, focusing on painting and finding inspiration in formalist beauty and the art of Modigliani, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt. In 1977, he moved to San Francisco to study at the Art Institute. There, he immersed himself in the punk scene and started experimenting with photography. He made his first foray into portraiture outside of the classroom, shooting album covers for his new friends, members of the local cult band The Avengers.

Marcus Leatherdale, Claudia Summers . . . Issey Miyake, 1983

San Francisco is also where Leatherdale met Claudia Summers, who would become his roommate, muse, and eventually, wife. Their marriage began as a practical arrangement between dear friends, as it allowed Leatherdale to remain in the US while traveling freely to visit his family in Canada. But the two also found comfort in each other’s presence, as shape-shifters at ease at mosh pits and gay discos alike. “All these years later, I can still see, feel the flash blinding me, bathing me. The low-dull click of the umbrella flash still resonates in my ears,” Summers writes in Out of the Shadows (2019), an anthology of Leatherdale’s work between 1980 and 1992. “Marcus’s contact sheets were sacrosanct. He shared them with no one but me.”

During this time, Leatherdale also met Robert Mapplethorpe, who was visiting from New York for his solo exhibition, Censored, at Simon Lowinsky Gallery. In the spring of 1978, Mapplethorpe sent Leatherdale a postcard, inviting him to stay at his New York apartment while he traveled to Amsterdam. Before the year was over, the young photographer had transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the two became lovers, starting an intense relationship that lasted for years.

Marcus Leatherdale, Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe, 1980Marcus Leatherdale, Hidden Identity (Andy Warhol), 1986

New to the city and having run out of scholarship funds, Leatherdale ended up managing both Mapplethorpe’s studio on Bond Street and, later, the studio of photography curator Sam Wagstaff. It was likely a “cash in hand, work off the books” arrangement, as many things were in those days, says the writer Martin Belk, Leatherdale’s longtime friend.

Finding a niche of friends—who also became his subjects—in the downtown nightlife and art scene, Leatherdale evolved as a character-study portraitist, masterfully incorporating myth, melodrama, and identity into his work. He photographed celebrated figures from the art canon, from a young Keith Haring to Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg; fashion luminaries like designer Thierry Mugler and models Tina Chow and Iman; drag queens Divine and Ethyl Eichelberger; nightlife impresarios Susanne Bartsch and Leigh Bowery; and performers Blondie, Lydia Lunch, and International Chrysis.

Marcus Leatherdale, Divine . . . reclining, 1982

Key to Leatherdale’s practice was his conviviality. Often, but not always, he photographed at his home studio, a Lower East Side loft on 281 Grand Street. From 1979 to 1985, he lived there with Summers and his cat ZoZo. At the time, Summers worked as a dominatrix and waited tables. She also sang for the 1984 track “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” which enjoyed popularity in the club scenes of New York, London, and Paris. 

“It was not very glamorous. The outside smelled like rotting Chinese food, with lots of trash and dirty boxes,” says the performance artist Joey Arias, another friend of Leatherdale. “But once you were in the sanctuary, it was great.”

Finding a niche of friends—who also became his subjects—in the downtown nightlife and art scene, Leatherdale evolved as a character-study portraitist.

In 1981, Diego Cortez, co-founder of the legendary Mudd Club, included Leatherdale’s portraits in MoMA PS1’s canonical yet controversial New York/New Wave show. Cortez’s curatorial ethos was to provide a platform for downtown’s emergent post-punk and New Wave artists. A portrait of Summers, topless and in a garter belt (a wedding present from Mapplethorpe), was among the works by Leatherdale on view.

Marcus Leatherdale, Michael Musto in “Hidden Identities,” DETAILS magazine, 1989
Courtesy Martin Belk Marcus Leatherdale, Joey Arias in “Hidden Identities,” DETAILS magazine, 1989

As a result of his hard work and rising reputation, Leatherdale was commissioned the following year to photograph a monthly series in Annie Flanders’s seminal culture magazine, Details. The page-length feature, titled “Hidden Identities,” focused on the who’s who of New York’s downtown scene as artfully as possible, without revealing their faces. “Marcus loved original people that made a statement—visually, mentally,” says Arias.

Leatherdale honed in on his sitters’ inimitable styles; he had no interest in any obvious fashion branding, even though he was photographing some of the era’s most influential designers and models. A young Dianne Brill stands statuesque, the club maven identifiable by her thick, long hair and a signature latex getup. Designer Stephen Sprouse is masked head to toe, save for his punky black nail polish. Then there’s rock and roll designer Betsey Johnson in one of her own creations, stripes and ambitions outstretched.

“It was so Betsey,” Arias recalls, “to be the Martha Graham of fabrics.”

Marcus Leatherdale, Stretch . . . Betsey Johnson, 1986

Work continued to go well for Leatherdale. In 1983, as he photographed for Details, he also shot a series of portraits for Issey Miyake’s traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Body Works. Miyake sought out Leatherdale for the “purity of his aesthetic,” says Rande Walsh, Body Works’ production coordinator. The commission led to one of Leatherdale’s most famous photographs, often erroneously attributed to Man Ray.

It was of his dear friend Larissa. Known as the Coco Chanel of rock and roll, Larissa designed fur coats for Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and Jefferson Airplane, among others. Using dramatic light and shadow, Leatherdale attunes the viewer to Larissa’s enigmatic grin, the texture of her sheer sleeves, and her half-finished cigarette. Like Summers and Mapplethorpe, Larissa left a lasting impression on Leatherdale. His portrait of her resembles another he made for the same series, of Summers, his most photographed subject, wearing a rattan cage around her torso and a hat, an S and M crop in her hand.

Marcus Leatherdale, Torso, 1984

As the first wave of AIDS ravaged New York in the 1980s, Leatherdale experienced a series of life-altering losses. The death of many of his friends and subjects gave his portraits the anthropological patina of a bygone era: downtown New York as a queer Babylon of upstarts, junkies, starlets, and misfits. Leatherdale made a guest list of every friend he had lost, who he would invite to an imaginary cocktail party. Then he began buying new phone books, which allowed him to omit names as opposed to crossing them out, which he felt was disrespectful.

During the 1990s, Leatherdale met and fell in love with Jorge Serio, a makeup artist from Portugal, who became his partner for the rest of his life; still his tether to New York was loosening. He would often leave for months at a time for India, frequently visiting the northern city of Varanasi. Over the course of nearly three decades, Leatherdale learned Hindi and Sanskrit, studied Hinduism, and photographed rural Adivasi tribes whose customs and languages were on the verge of cultural extinction.

To photograph these Adivasi communities, Leatherdale often went on weeks-long expeditions to remote villages, leading to a lifestyle and practice that was considerably off-grid. Privacy—which included creating a refuge for just Jorge and himself—was critical to his self-expression, sense of security, and happiness.

Another series of tragedies shook his life this past year. In July 2021, Serio died. Then the couple’s dear dog Sascha passed, and a few months later, Leatherdale lost his mother, Grace. When Serio died, Leatherdale left Portugal for New York and Canada, and finally returned to India by the winter of 2022, for what would be the last time. In one of our final phone calls, he also expressed another grief that had been more prolonged: the loss of where he came of age as an artist, the rich bohemian world that no longer exists. “Whenever people ask me if I miss New York, I say, ‘Of course, especially when I’m there,’” he would say.

Marcus Leatherdale, Ethyl Eichelberger, 1985

I recently went to 281 Grand with Summers to see what remained. The dirt pits and dope markets on Forsyth, and many of the Jewish linen stores on Grand Street, are gone. And Leatherdale is too. He passed away on April 22, 2022, after hanging himself on the grounds of his estate in Jharkhand, India.

For Summers, the history of 281 Grand, and Leatherdale’s portraits, is something historical as well as deeply personal. It is a place that represents both a generational and an intimate belonging.

“We were all aware of how the work moved against the accepted grain. Not in our community, but outside of it,” she says.

Marcus Leatherdale, Madonna, 1983
All photographs courtesy Throckmorton Fine Art

Looking back, Summers sees Leatherdale’s gift as this: he could move between the famous and the marginal, photographing both with dignity. “What was so special was that he allowed me the freedom to be who I was—a glamorous but fucked-up individual, sometimes with track marks still on my arms. Marcus photographed the best of who we were.”

I took a photograph of her in front of 281 Grand, and we walked toward what used to be Moishe’s, a diner on Bowery she and Leatherdale frequented for eggs, potatoes, and toast. The rest, she told me, was dangerously bad.

Christina Fernandez’s Multifaceted Visions of Life in California

Christina Fernandez’s eye for images has changed. Recently, while going through contact sheets of her early work, the Los Angeles–based photographer wondered why she chose one image over another—like a writer editing an old draft with a fresh outlook on each sentence or slightly altering how each word leads into the next.

Fernandez’s career spans more than three decades, and this careful looking imbues much of her work. While her images aren’t defined by geography, she is a significant maker of California photography. The series View from Here (2016–18) includes images framed by doorways and windows in artist studios across locations like Desert Hot Springs, Joshua Tree, and Manzanar, the former site of a Japanese internment camp. Sereno (2006–10) captures scenes from El Sereno, the artist’s neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, particularly those that hint at the parallel existences of nature and urban life. In Lavanderia (2002–3), Fernandez bottles the essence of Los Angeles laundromats, rendering blurry traces of the people who rotate through these spaces. Yet the themes of labor, migration, and capitalism in her work extend the images beyond any borders. 

Christina Fernandez, Lavanderia #11, 2003, from the series Lavanderia

Now, Fernandez is gearing up for the release of her first major monograph, forthcoming in October, as well as three concurrent exhibitions. Her first significant survey exhibition, Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures, opens at the California Museum of Photography at UCR Arts on September 10 and runs through February 5, 2023. The exhibition also marks the first time the Lavanderia series will be shown in its entirety. Multiple Exposures will travel to places the artist says she’s never visited before—its future hosts are the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; San José Museum of Art, California; and DePaul Art Museum, Chicago. (The exhibition was organized by UCR ARTS and is curated by Joanna Szupinska, senior curator at the California Museum of Photography, with curatorial advisor Chon A. Noriega, a distinguished professor of film, television, and digital media at the University of California, Los Angeles.)

Fernandez’s work doesn’t neatly fit into a single genre or photographic history. There are clear nods to street, landscape, and documentary photography, along with portraiture—plus elements of mediums like embroidery, collage, performance art, and installation. One particularly strong thread is Fernandez’s focus on socioeconomic inequities and her Chicana identity.

Christina Fernandez, End of Road, 2010, from the series Sereno

When Fernandez was growing up, her parents were organizers with United Farm Workers, and she would read newsletters that they often received from the group. Around the time of Cesar Chavez’s 1968 hunger strike, she says, the newsletters reported on the deaths of farmworkers due to pesticide exposure, violent attacks during boycotts, and dangerous machinery.

As an undergraduate student at UCLA, Fernandez typed the details of these deaths, and the names of the workers, onto index cards like those found in a library’s card catalogue. She then planted the cards in mounds of dirt so they stood upright. The resulting work, Untitled Farmworkers (1989), is significant in how it displays her effective weaving of activism, Chicanx identity, labor issues, and migration throughout her career. She revisited the piece in graduate school, photographing her brother’s hand as he placed each card into the dirt, then created a grid of thirty-five such images. But Fernandez says “it was basically shut down” in her critique class, and “the validity of the information was questioned.”

Christina Fernandez, Untitled Farmworkers, 1989/2020

She has revisited the work at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, California, where her solo exhibition, Under the Sun, opened on August 24. The photographs of Untitled Farmworkers (1989) hang on a wall near a 2020 installation of the same name that references Fernandez’s undergraduate project; this time, the informational cards in the dirt show recent data on farmworkers’ deaths due to climate change. Both iterations of Untitled Farmworkers powerfully document these fatalities, yet the pieces “refuse the spectacle of death and suffering,” as art historian Cecilia Fajardo-Hill writes in the monograph. Fernandez’s work expands the ways a photograph can speak to the viewer. For the exhibition, the artist has also chosen to display works from the museum’s collection, thus generating new dialogue. They include press images of Cesar Chavez and of picket lines, as well as photographs by Danny Lyon.

Related Items

Aperture 232

Shop Now[image error]

Aperture 245

Shop Now[image error]

Fernandez has also explored her family history in works such as the 1995 to 1996 series Maria’s Great Expedition, which chronicles the story of her great-grandmother—a story that “just keeps on living,” she says, through exhibitions. To create the images, she spent hours thrifting for costumes and interviewing her family, fueled by “the energy and drive of youth.” She adds that she sees a certain fearlessness and dedication in earlier works such as this. 

Christina Fernandez, Element #6, from the series Maria’s Great Expedition, 1995–96Christina Fernandez, Lavanderia #4, 2002, from the series Lavanderia

That daring spark led her to set up her four-by-five-inch camera on Cesar Chavez Avenue in Los Angeles to photograph laundromats at night for Lavanderia. Later, motherhood taught her to loosen her attachment to a specific theme or topic and instead go out in search of images. Around 2015, she started photographing during road trips with her son, adapting a more off-the-cuff process.

“I’m working on a few different things at once, and there is no singular approach to any of these things,” says Fernandez. “I’ve become comfortable working that way now.”

Fernandez asks her viewers to reconsider what may constitute a portrait as we know it. Though not traditional portraiture, her series American Trailer (2018) provides just enough context for us to imagine who might stand in the frame. The photos expand on the contradiction of a trailer as “this symbol of travel, freedom, comforts of home, [and a] sense of adventure,” she says, but also a sign of the housing crisis in the US. It brings to mind the figures of disillusioned Americans across the country: couples, families, and single folks dreaming of home ownership but discouraged by rising costs. 

Christina Fernandez, American Trailer, 2018

The image resulted from three different photography sessions. “The third time I went back, it had been burned down,” says Fernandez. “That’s the last part of the image you see—these sort of skeletal remains of the trailer. That piece just says what I wanted to, and I didn’t really see the need to continue to photograph other trailers.”

Fernandez calls it her most “spooky work” yet, and the specter of violence certainly lingers in the composition. A scorch mark could be read as the dark stain of hate crimes and division across the country, stoked by the political climate of the Trump administration as well as the unceasing power of white supremacy.

Christina Fernandez, Untitled Multiple Exposure #4 (Bravo), 1999, from the series Untitled Multiple Exposures

All photographs courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles Christina Fernandez, Juan, 2017, from the series reflect/project(ion)

As Fernandez’s work has continued to resonate, she’s also focused on mentoring, teaching, and spotlighting the next generation of photographers. Her series reflect/project(ion) (2016–ongoing) depicts her former students, with an image of photo equipment layered over each portrait. Images in a forthcoming group exhibition, Tierra Entre Mundo, opening September 11 at the Barbara and Art Culver Center of Arts in Riverside, California, is also all about a certain “commitment to the photographic language” that this next generation is embracing,” she says. The show, significantly, focuses on Fernandez and three other Chicana photographers in California: Arlene Mejorado, Lizette Olivas, and Aydinaneth Ortiz. 

“A lot of people question the power of the photograph,” says Fernandez. “But even though I’ve tried a lot of different approaches to photographing, I’m still very much a traditional photographer. I still hang things on the walls. I still do think that there’s power in that 2D image. It’s just what you do with it.” 

Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is on view at the California Museum of Photography at UCR Arts, Riverside, from September 10, 2022 to February 5, 2023.

Spirituality Is Solidarity

How should we live if life is finite? What is our responsibility to our families, our communities, and our environment? How can we practice a secular faith beyond the constraints of institutionalized religion? In his latest book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019), the renowned professor of comparative literature and humanities Martin Hägglund grapples with notions of faith and freedom spanning the work of writers, theorists, and activists from Martin Luther King Jr. to Karl Ove Knausgaard. The meaning of life, he argues, is not found in devotion to eternal existence but instead in caring for what we know will be lost. “Secular faith will always be precarious,” Hägglund writes, “but in its fragility it opens the possibility of our spiritual freedom.”

For Aperture’s “Spirituality” issue, guest editor Wolfgang Tillmans spoke with Hägglund about his own connections to spiritual awareness and the responsibility of photography amid a “terror of images” in our online networks. Long interested in the concept of fragility, Tillmans poses questions about the anxieties of time and the need for solidarity under global capitalism. If an artist can make meaningful connections between people, does photography foster respect for the world?

Collage by Wolfgang Tillmans, 2019, for Aperture

Wolfgang Tillmans: When I was asked by the editors of Aperture to guest edit an issue, I immediately knew that it should be spirituality because I strongly sense that the political shifts in Western society that have surfaced in the last ten years stem from—besides actual growing inequality—a lack of meaning in the capitalist world. This lack is happily filled with substitutes like religion, nation, sport, and consumption, plus, of course, family values. But this lack of meaning is expressed a great deal in a quest for spirituality, which, I have observed, is primarily a self-bettering one. It is about feeling better.

And I wondered about the role of photography in that quest. Ten years or so ago, there were articles about having discovered the God gene, a genetic tendency for religious feelings. If true, I would say I have that gene. I’ve always felt a closeness to a spiritual awareness. But I’ve found also the contradictions in that awareness, and the role photography plays in it.

Martin Hägglund: One thing I’m concerned with in my book This Life is how we should diagnose that sense of something lacking in our society. And a very dominant narrative, which is usually associated with the idea of disenchantment, is that we have this sense of lack because we have lost something we once had: the spirituality that we supposedly need to get back to. In contrast to that perspective, I’m trying to show that if something is lacking, it’s not because we have lost something that we should retrieve. It’s rather because we haven’t fully actualized our freedom, our spiritual freedom, both individually and collectively. So I want to focus on understanding this sense of alienation and lack that many people have, not in terms of the loss of a religious past, but in terms of us not yet having achieved a secular, free future.

Tillmans: What is interesting in your proposal is the lack of anger at being finite.

Hägglund: Right.

Tillmans: The existentialists had to somehow put in the concept of revolt, or the “even though”—even though it’s pointless, we are still doing it to make peace with the human condition. But that anger is completely lacking from your book and thinking. Which is very disarming. Have you been criticized for that?

Hägglund: Actually, I think it has contributed in deep ways to the positive response to the book. I want to make clear, though, that I acknowledge and underline that it is painful and difficult to be finite. But I think that pain and difficulty are also intrinsic to anything that can matter, to anything that can be important. For the same reason, even though I am not angry at us being finite, the book is very concerned with how we can lead our finite lives in a better way. So This Life certainly wants to be transformative and revolutionary in that sense. But instead of aiming to overcome the condition
of finitude per se, I am concerned with how we can flourish more deeply in our finite lives and do justice to our vulnerability and our interdependence.

Wolfgang Tillmans, book dust jacket, 2006

Tillmans: I feel fundamentally that we want connection, and that really is the most meaningful when it means connection to other people. But how do you explain this focus on being one, on being connected to nature, to the inner self, to crystal energy, and so on? This self-optimizing spirituality that is focused not on what we do together.

Hägglund: Precisely because of the antagonistic form of social life under capitalism, people tend to think of spiritual fulfillment in terms of turning away from our interdependence—precisely because that interdependence is so constraining and painful under capitalism. But the desire for social connection as expressed in the alienated form that you are talking about could be turned toward more social, emancipatory ends, which would recognize what I’m calling “a secular impulse to cultivate our shared life”—rather than trying to escape our shared life into some sort of fantasy of self-fulfillment.

Tillmans: As a photographer, I have been observing for a long time a dichotomy in myself between aiming to live in the moment and the very nature of photography as materializing moments. This life lived in full awareness that there’s nothing beyond the here and now leaves behind a trail of images and physical prints. Have you ever thought about this photographer’s dilemma?

Hägglund: It has actually been an abiding concern for me. There’s a connection to an important distinction I make in the book between two things that we tend to conflate—an aspiration to what I call “living on” versus an aspiration for eternity. To live on is not to transcend finitude, but to prolong a finite life. What’s interesting about photography is that it tries both to seize a moment that is fragile and fleeting, and to preserve it or trace it in some way. Not to make it eternal, but so that it can live on for the future and be taken up again. That whole desire is animated from within by the fleeting sense of the moment as you try to capture it. But it’s not about eternity—it’s about connecting across time and space.

Tillmans: Yes.

Hägglund: There is a tendency to think of our attempts to counteract the passage of time, or preserve memories (whether through photography or other means), as testifying to our desire for eternity or timelessness. But I think it actually testifies to our desire to live on and keep the mortal alive, which is quite different from making it eternal. Photography is a particular manifestation of that desire.

Albert Renger-Patzsch, Das Bäumchen (The Sapling), 1929
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art and courtesy Art Resource, New York

Tillmans: People always think that this megaphotography proliferation happened in the last ten years. But for me, there was already a crazy increase in the late 1990s with small point-and-shoot cameras. When I looked at what people did, I realized that they were not really interested in the pictures they were taking; instead, they were interested in being seen taking photographs. So they wanted to be seen as doing something about the situation, in response to the situation they were in, as opposed to being one with the group or the situation.

Hägglund: And how do you see that in relation to the problem of social connection that you’re thinking about? Do you see it merely as an alienated expression of the desire for connection, or is there some truth in it?

Tillmans: You’ve put the finger in a sore spot, because of course, by observing that in others, I wholeheartedly exempted myself from it.

Hägglund: Yes.

Tillmans: I am, of course, taking pictures only for my own purpose and for no reasons of empowerment or disconnection. [Laughs]

Hägglund: What role do you see for photography in your own work with regard to negotiating the problem of social connection?

Tillmans: One could stop the question quickly with the question, Why take a photograph of the sky or a tree if we have the option to simply lie in the grass and look at them and enjoy the nature surrounding us? But that doesn’t do justice to the very nature of art (and photography included). Art is not, and photography is not, just a depiction of a kind of reality; they are also a new reality in their very existence. They not only speak about something, but are actual things, objects that do something new entirely and something that the depicted subjects don’t do on their own. So there is an act of transformation happening, which is not just recording. I don’t believe that photography is just an act of appropriation.

I’ve always felt a closeness to a spiritual awareness. But I’ve found also the contradictions in that awareness, and the role photography plays in it.

Hägglund: Right. It’s also transformation.

Tillmans: Language, I find, often prefers yeses and nos, black and white, and I find that photography is both. It’s not an act of appropriation, yet we are taking pictures—there is this act of somehow feeling empowered by doing it, even if it’s very benign and mild.

Hägglund: Even though, as you rightly point out, photography is not simply representational and it’s a transformative practice, is there still a question of fidelity to the object? A question of fidelity and keeping faith with what you’re depicting?

Tillmans: There’s definitely no rule to that. For me, authenticity speaks primarily about the authenticity of the idea behind the photograph, because it can never be faithful to the original, because it’s actual ink on paper or dyes on paper. I find there is a direct correlation between how genuinely interested I am in what I’m looking at and how faithful the photograph is—between how genuine the photograph is and how likely it is that I care about that picture. Meaning, when I am really interested in what I am looking at, it usually yields a good result, whereas when I am only taking a picture because I want to make more of the same subject, for example, or because I want to please somebody, then that intention is what is written into the photograph, and it’s the first thing one sees. It’s the same with if you want to take a picture in order to take control of the situation, then that is also what is visible. But when you have a humble approach, that humility, or that genuine interest in the subject, is somehow what can be felt, what is visible.

Wolfgang Tillmans, New York, 2019

Hägglund: Do you see it as a task of the art of photography, and yours in particular, to create the form of social connection that you have been talking about?

Tillmans: I see photography as nothing else but an expression of how I look at the world, which sounds like a very banal truism, but how we look at things is actually all that matters, and it’s in the how. If it is nonjudgmental, if it is from above, from below. I hope for connection with others who recognize that similar approach to the world in the texture or the mood or the feel of a photograph. They might sense, Oh, I know how that feels. Or, I know how that smells. That’s the only connection I can really go by, and that is a moment of feeling less lonely in the world. We can ask: Does photography foster respect for the world?

Hägglund: One of the things that photography does is disclose someone’s take on the world, and thereby our responsibility—our answerability—for the stands that we take. Insofar as photography fosters respect for the world, I think it has to do with recalling us to our responsibility for the stands we take.

Tillmans: Going against the introspective sense of spirituality, I chose to consider the theme of the issue with the word solidarity—“Spirituality Is Solidarity.” How do you define the word solidarity?

Hägglund: I argue emphatically that spiritual life should be understood in social and material terms rather than in contemplative or supernatural terms. I think that immediately links it to solidarity.

Related Items

Aperture 237

Shop Now[image error]

Aperture Magazine Subscription

Shop Now[image error]

Tillmans: Now we are experiencing what I call “the terror of images.” With social media, et cetera, everybody is engaged in the act of photographing their lives and making these objects. They are no longer prints but mainly data banks. I feel like it’s this materialism that is disturbing the peace of mind of people. This constant torrent of turning moments into pictures is creating ever more matter, even though they are only data bits, as they are usually not printed. But what is this closed loop, this short circuit doing?

Hägglund: There would be one type of approach that would say that the problem with the onslaught of images and the obsession with Instagram is that they deprive us of our peace of mind. Then one thinks about spirituality in terms of contemplative peace or something like that. In contrast, I define spiritual freedom in terms of our ability to own the question of what we ought to do with our time, which is compromised if we are just absorbed by an onslaught of images.

Tillmans: It takes so much time to look at them.

Hägglund: That kind of absorption tends to make you forget that there’s always a question of what you ought to do, and what your priorities are, and what really matters. That’s where art and photography can play a counteracting role—precisely by art not being absorbing in the same way that social media is absorbing.

Wolfgang Tillmans, London Underground poster, 2005

Tillmans: This correlation between freedom and the time that we are able to spend, which you make in your book, is so striking and goes back, as you explain, to Marx and others. I was really struck, like a bolt, in the London Underground, in 2005, seeing this huge billboard from IKEA, which I sent an image of to you yesterday.

Hägglund: Oh, yes.

Tillmans: It reads, “Welcome to life outside work,” and it shows a couple looking at books, and the signature says, “If your kitchen costs less you can work less.” That’s so fantastic, to be in London in that decade, which was already a hyper- hyper-work-driven climate, and which, of course, is even more so today. But this assumption that if you have a little bit more money, you can actually spend less time working, as if there is such an elasticity in today’s world, was fabulously naive, utopian. It could only come from a Swedish company.

Hägglund: We tend to associate freedom with freedom from work, or leisure time, in the simple sense. Precisely because so much of the actual work we have to do is not meaningful, and we can’t see the purpose and the point of it. The emancipatory point, however, is not to be free from work, but to be able to be engaged in, and committed to, activities and work that are meaningful in themselves. Work in which you can affirm and avow the point and the purpose of what you are doing. So I think it’s a very reductive and misleading idea of freedom and liberation that it would just be freedom from work, and just be leisure. But that’s also a symptom of how labor is organized under capitalism.

Tillmans: Yes. Have you read, or are you familiar with, Jiddu Krishnamurti? He has been influential at times in my life. He is striking in his complete and utter rejection of religion and religious authority, but he has written dozens and dozens of books on spiritual thought and thinking and philosophy. There’s one line that says: “How am I to be rid of every image I have gathered so that the mind is completely fresh and young, so that it can observe anew the whole movement of life?”

Hägglund: I think one needs to be careful here, because there’s one notion of the movement of life that is vitalistic and in my view deeply problematic: a notion of life as just this flowing force that you can tap into, and that would transcend the fragility and materiality of living beings. That’s a very misleading speculative temptation: to make the idea of life so dynamic that we end up denying the finitude of the material support on which any form of life depends.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Two Krishnamurti book covers with photographs by Cecil Beaton, 2006
All works by Tillmans courtesy David Zwirner, New York/ Hong Kong; Maureen Paley, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Tillmans: Another thing, of course, is that the idealized images often deny the fragility of life. And pictures in capitalism and also commercial pop culture are all idealized and are almost designed to deny the fragility. They are sort of feeding into this terror of images that leaves people alone with these feelings of their own fragility, as if that is something wrong, as opposed to seeing the strength in being in touch with your fragility.

As I wrote to you in my recent letter, I have had this close connection to the word fragile since I was a teenager in the 1980s, when I used it as my nom d’artist for my fledgling artistic endeavors.

Hägglund: I was fascinated by that detail.

Tillmans: In recent years, I have resurrected the word in my work, using it as the name for my record label and band project. I noticed the word, in general, coming up so much more in discourse and language and conversation. It’s striking. And again, it is a central word in your book.

Why do you think we have a greater sense of fragility today than fifteen years ago?

Hägglund: Well, one very obvious reason has to do with the climate crisis, and the fragility of the conditions of life itself being more and more manifest to us. Alongside, of course, an increased sense of social precarity. Even though we’re more fragile, our fragility is also unevenly allocated, depending on social and historical circumstances. The way in which we are finite and fragile differs so much, depending on the conditions we find ourselves in, and recognizing that is part of being committed to transforming those social conditions.

Sinaida Michalskaja, Linke Wand links 3, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Tillmans: Where it all matters is what we actually do about it together.

Hägglund: Exactly.

Tillmans: I wanted to keep the focus close to photography, and what it does to people, what it answers and leaves unanswered in people. Do you have maybe one last thought on that? I feel there’s a lot of passion with photography. It’s very central in our world now. But it’s also never really talked about, because there is a lack of language. Even among art historians, often there is a lack of language about photography. Especially among everyday people, it’s very limited. And at the same time, increasingly pictures are being used as words. They are somewhat substituting for words, emojis are becoming words, but there is no language about them that people are engaged in.

Hägglund: Photography, in a way, becomes a sort of focal point for all the anxieties about truth and representation that we’re facing. Because, of course, photography historically has been seen as a truth-bearer, and yet people are now so intensely aware of how easily manipulated photography is. So it becomes a focal point for anxieties concerning the language of truth, and we need to own up to that anxiety.

Tillmans: In that way, let’s hope we keep that language more nuanced.

Hägglund: Yes. Absolutely.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, 237, “Spirituality,” under the title “Spirituality Is Solidarity.”

How Lisetta Carmi Changed the History of Italian Photojournalism

“I was interested in people, the lives of human beings, especially the poor,” the photographer Lisetta Carmi once said. Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1924, Carmi died in July at the age of ninety-eight in Cisternino, a small town in Puglia. She was an interpreter of humanistic photography in a literal sense. An artist who changed the history of Italian photojournalism, she exposed the public to discomforting social realities of marginalized communities. But in Le cinque vite di Lisetta Carmi (The Five Lives of Lisetta Carmi), a book about her life by Giovanna Calvenzi, the chapter devoted to photography is a mere eighteen-year parenthesis, from 1960 to 1978. The other phases of her existence, described in the 2013 biography, are no less fascinating.

Lisetta Carmi, I Travestiti, 1965Lisetta Carmi, Genova, Il Porto (The port), 1964

Born into a Jewish family, Carmi was forced to drop out of school at age fourteen due to the racial laws introduced by the Italian Fascist regime in 1938. She had already begun studying piano at the conservatory in Genoa, and that was her sole focus until 1943. Returning from exile in Switzerland, she became an esteemed concert pianist, performing successfully in Italy and abroad. But Carmi’s musical career soon came to an end. In June 1960, protestors in Genoa called a general strike against the Italian Social Movement, the neo-Fascist party. The young pianist also wanted to participate, but her teacher, Alfredo They, warned her about the possible consequences. “He told me that if they broke my hand, I would no longer be able to play,” Carmi recalls in her biography. “But I replied that, if my hands were more important than the rest of humanity, I would have stopped playing.” She joined the protests.

Carmi encountered photography by chance. A Jewish musicologist and friend, Leo Levi, invited her to accompany him on a research trip in Puglia, and she brought along a camera of little worth. Upon her return, she had nine rolls of film developed. Her friends responded enthusiastically: “They look like Cartier-Bresson’s photos.” It was enough to convince her to make photography her profession.

Lisetta Carmi, Erotismo e autoritarismo a Staglieno (Eroticism and Authoritarianism), 1966Lisetta Carmi, Erotismo e autoritarismo a Staglieno (Eroticism and Authoritarianism), 1966

By 1962, she was working as a still photographer at the Teatro Duse, a theater in Bologna, and later collaborated with Grazia Neri, Italy’s first photo agency, shortly after it was founded in 1966. Her most powerful series from this period focuses on the port of Genoa, where her images reveal the dockworkers’ squalid working conditions. At the same time, Carmi was photographing the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, famed as an open-air museum of sculpture. She focused her lens on statues of plump gentlemen alongside nude women, of wives in reverence to their husbands, of contrite and obedient children. “I despised what many sculptures depicted, because of the stereotype of the fearful woman, dependent on men, but I was also struck by the ability of those, still living, to design their own tombs,” she told Giovanna Calvenzi. Carmi published the images in a book titled Erotismo e autoritarismo a Staglieno (Eroticism and Authoritarianism in Staglieno).

Lisetta Carmi, I Travestiti, 1965–70

Carmi is most remembered for I Travestiti (Transvestites), a book from 1972 that brings together her images of people who lived in the alleyways in the heart of Genoa and were often forced to support themselves through sex work. The work was seen as scandalous in Italy. The photographs show something far removed from the conformist, self-righteous imagination. Carmi had earned their trust, and they had revealed themselves with generous nonchalance. Today I Travestiti is a collector’s item, although at the time of its publication, bookstores wouldn’t display it.

Lisetta Carmi, I Travestiti, 1965–70

But Carmi’s masterpiece is a lesser-known series. These are twelve shots of Ezra Pound, taken on February 11, 1966, at Sant’Ambrogio, a village in the northern Italian region of Liguria. The poet had taken refuge there in his final years, and Carmi arrived with a journalist who wanted to interview him. They knocked on the door of a small house. Writing in L’ombra di un poeta. Incontro con Ezra Pound (A poet’s shadow. Meeting Ezra Pound, 2006), Carmi describes him as skeletal and disheveled—even ghostly: “I photograph him but he seems to me like an apparition, like someone who lives in a closed world, a world we cannot enter, I am almost afraid that the strength lying within him might be unleashed, the terrible strength and lost desperation that shine in his eyes. And instead, Pound continues to ignore us, turns and goes back in the house. He didn’t say a word, we just looked at each other: we have encountered the shadow of a poet.” The same year, Carmi received the Premio Niépce per l’Italia, the Italian division of the prestigious French prize founded in 1955, for these images. The jury included Umberto Eco, who stated: “The images of Pound shot by Lisetta say more than anything that has ever been written about him, his complexity and extraordinary nature.”

Lisetta Carmi, Ezra Pound, 1966Lisetta Carmi, Genova, Il Porto (The port), 1964
All photographs courtesy Archivio Lisetta Carmi

Carmi’s career as a photographer ended as it had begun: unexpectedly. In 1978 she decided to establish an ashram in Cisternino on the advice of Haidakhan Babaji, a spiritual leader she had gotten to know in India two years earlier. She never picked up a camera again, but she often talked about her images and what had made them possible. In 2011, she told Calvenzi: “The ultimate reality does not allow itself to be captured by words. The ultimate experience can be communicated only with silence.” Her words are a lesson about life but also photography.

Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.

8 Summer Reads from Aperture’s Editors

From the very first issue of our magazine, Aperture has explored words and pictures and the relationship between them. As Nancy Newhall mused in that issue, now seventy years ago in the summer of 1952, “Perhaps the new photograph-writing—so new we have no word for it—is [. . .] the form through which we shall speak to each other [. . .] for a thousand years or more.”

Inspired (in part) by Newhall, we’ve asked a few Aperture colleagues to share their current favorite photo-adjacent titles while the Aperture PhotoBook Club pauses for a summer holiday. Below, read an eclectic mix that mirrors the many ways in which we engage with photographs, and the many ways in which they circulate in the world.

—Sarah Meister, Executive Director

Dayanita Singh from Dancing with my Camera (Hatje Cantz, 2022)
Courtesy the artist

Lesley A. Martin, Creative Director

As befits this self-proclaimed “offset artist”—who directly engages with bookmaking as part of her practice—Dayanita Singh produced two catalogues for her survey show at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, which ran from March 18 through August 7. The first is entitled Let’s See. Entirely visual, Singh calls the book a “photo-novel” of her journey as a young photographer. The second book, Dancing with my Camera, however, serves as a primer for those interested in the discourse that surrounds Singh’s expansive practice, and is just right for losing oneself in on a hot summer day. The texts are generous, intriguing. Curator Stephanie Rosenthal highlights the role of the artist’s “gut feeling” during editing, the unique aspects of Singh’s “photo-architecture,” and the way that she sees Singh’s photography as anchored in ideas of choreography. Teju Cole, Thomas Weski, and many others offer equally engaging takes on the work. For those of us who did not have the good fortune of visiting the show itself, there are plenty of installation shots and voices incorporated into the pages of this book—almost enough to imagine oneself there, in the most excellent of company.

Interior spread from Graciela Iturbide on Dreams, Symbols, and Interpretation (Aperture, 2022)

In the opening pages of Graciela Iturbide on Dreams, Symbols, and Imagination, Iturbide states: “Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life, to know yourself.” This poetic, lyrical statement is the thread that draws the reader through this book, the most recent offering from Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series (the series as a whole could fuel an entire summer’s worth of reading). In this latest volume, Iturbide guides us through the stories of her most well-known images, as well as images we might not be as familiar with. One of Iturbide’s arguably most iconic photographs, Nuestra Señora de la Iguanas, for example, is accompanied by a contact sheet that shows the precise fraction of a second that “made” this image, alongside fascinating context from the shoot (who knew that the vendor had sewn the iguana’s mouths shut in order to keep them from biting!). In this book, as with Singh’s, you feel as though you’ve been granted access to incredible secrets, legacies, and profound and inspiring conversations about photography.

Cover and interior spread of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 (Primary Information, 2021)

Noa Lin, Editorial Assistant, Books

Borrowing its name from the popular “anarchistic lizard,” Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network was a vibrant and influential collective, founded in 1990 by artists Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida. The group started as a forum for Asian American artists in New York City to share and develop ideas, but eventually became a nationwide organization that campaigned for the visibility of Asian Americans within the art world. Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 is a sprawling anthology of the group’s activities and reproduces letters, photographs, publications, and other ephemera from their eleven-year period working. As I encountered the work of Godzilla for the first time through this book, I found it was not only an excellent introduction to their history, but a reminder of the power in community-building for marginalized people, and the necessity of continued political action within an often-exclusionary art world.

Bettina Grossman, From the Xerox portfolios, 1960s, from Bettina (Aperture, 2022)
Courtesy the archive Bettina Grossman

I’ve also enjoyed discovering Bettina, which charts the work of Bettina Grossman, a prolific but widely unsung artist who worked in an incredible range of media. Her photographs, drawings, and sculptures are all striking and hypnotic, and as you see the breadth of her work throughout the book, you can begin to track the way she filtered the world around her into her artistic practice, transmuting the shapes and patterns of the cityscape into wonderful abstractions.

Related Items

Graciela Iturbide on Dreams, Symbols, and Imagination

Shop Now[image error]

Philip Montgomery: American Mirror

Shop Now[image error]

Object Lesson: On the Influence of Richard Benson

Shop Now[image error] Trent Parke from Cue the Sun (Stanley/Barker, 2022)
Courtesy the artist

Varun Nayar, Assistant Editor, Aperture

Trent Parke’s new photobook for Stanley/Barker—Cue the Sun—was somewhat accidental. After twenty-five years away, the Magnum photographer returned to India in 2020 to assist the Australian cricketer Steve Waugh with a photobook of his own. Traveling for eight to nine hours a day between shoots, Parke felt he had returned to a different country altogether, one governed increasingly by commerce and faith, and a new book began to take shape. With photographs made from his bus window, Cue the Sun tracks Parke’s journey across the vast north Indian countryside and bears stylistic traces from his previous work in Australia—night photography, dramatic use of flash, and the meandering focus of a road trip. Despite its lack of text, the book is sequenced like a travelog and designed as a fold-out double-printed concertina, splitting the images between night and day. Made just before COVID-19-induced lockdowns across India, I thought Parke’s transient views into pre-pandemic street life feel both striking in their detail and original in their approach.

Philip Montgomery, The Chatman family at home following widespread protests in the wake of the grand jury announcement against the indicment of Darren Wilson, a white police officer charged with the killing of Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, November 2014, from American Mirror (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist

Another, very different book I’ve been spending time with is the award-winning photographer Philip Montgomery’s debut monograph from Aperture, American Mirror. Having first discovered him through his work on the front lines of the COVID-19 response, I was delighted to see the book-length treatment, which highlights Montgomery’s natural talent for storytelling and his ability to bear witness in active and attentive ways. While each image tells a distinct story about the country’s recent past, from the opioid addiction crisis to protests in support of Black lives, collectively, as Jelani Cobb writes in an essay reproduced in the book, “these are simply scenes of life seeking to prolong itself.”

Sarah Meister, Executive Director

It was Richard Benson who first revealed the way in which my work might be enhanced by inviting in life (without him, I wouldn’t have dreamed of including my children’s handprints in an exhibition at MoMA!). When I read the fifty-plus contributions to Object Lesson: On the Influence of Richard Benson it’s apparent I’m not the only one. Benson loved photography, catalyzing that love into an exploration of why printed pictures look the way they do, and why we should care. As my colleague (and the book’s editor) Lesley Martin noted, Benson understood that the way photographic images are rendered is an integral part of how we connect with them, and by extension the world they represent. Our appreciation of both is enhanced when we follow his curiosity and careful attention.

Cover of Object Lesson: On the Influence of Richard Benson (Aperture, 2022) Cover of Looking at Photographs (Museum of Modern Art, 1973)

Of the many talented artists and creative co-workers featured in Object Lesson, it is John Pilson’s introduction where one finds a reference to John Szarkowski’s 1973 book Looking at Photographs. It was assigned reading in my undergraduate history of photography course, and my admiration for it continues to grow. Both Szarkowski and Benson—friends, fellow photographers, and co-conspirators in probing photography’s peculiar charms—offered their insight in delightfully accessible terms. These books aren’t exactly beach reads, yet they evoke for me a sensation akin to sunshine and sea air.

This text originally appeared in The Aperture PhotoBook Club newsletter. The Aperture PhotoBook Club brings together artists, makers, and photobook lovers. Sign-up for free to become a member.

How Irving Penn and Issey Miyake Redefined the Fashion Photograph

The late Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake held a rare appreciation for the role of image-making in design creativity. His longstanding working relationship with the photographer Irving Penn, whom he called Penn-san, is testament to Miyake’s understanding of how he could regard his work anew, by looking at it through the creative eye of another. 

When Miyake saw how Penn had photographed his clothes for an American Vogue editorial in 1983, he exclaimed, “Wow! I never thought of looking at clothes in that way! The clothes have been given a voice of their own!” On one page a model held out the wide-cut legs of a drawstring jumpsuit she wore, drawing attention to the volume of fabric and accentuating the garment’s graphic shape. 

Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Poncho and Apron Belt, New York, 1987Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Staircase Dress, New York, 1994

The pair met in Tokyo over dinner, after an introduction by a mutual friend, the publisher Nicholas Callaway. In 1986 Penn started to shoot Miyake’s seasonal collections in New York, resulting in advertising campaigns, exhibitions, and publications. But these outputs were not the principal intention; they were the mere fruits of a long-distance creative exchange between the two. 

To look at the photographs is to see how Penn essentializes Miyake’s designs, bestowing them with a graphic clarity and a highly dynamic sense of how they can be worn.

Miyake insisted on Penn being unhindered, so he always absented himself from the New York shoots. Instead, Penn was supported by representatives from Miyake’s team, makeup artist and photographer Tyen, and hairstylist John Sahag. Penn would sit at a table with a pencil and paper and sketch as models wearing the designs were directed. Polaroids were then taken in preparation for the main shoot. Following a session, Penn would then send the complete run of transparencies generated to Miyake in Tokyo, who would use them to review his design work and as the springboard for new design directions.

Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Design with Black Fan, New York, 1987 Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Elephant Crepe (Front View), New York, 1983

A comprehensive set of images from their work together is reproduced in the photobook Irving Penn Regards the Work of Issey Miyake, published in 1999 and edited by Mark Holborn. To look at the photographs is to see how Penn essentializes Miyake’s designs, bestowing them with a graphic clarity and a highly dynamic sense of how they can be worn. The visual directness affirms the precise and calibrated way Miyake’s garments are designed and made, which is magnified by how Penn takes photographs. They possess a visual style that is highly readable, like animation or hieroglyphs. And this clarity arises, according to Holborn, in how “the work of one provides a mirror for the work of the other.”  

In an essay for the 1997 exhibition catalogue Irving Penn: A Career in Photography, Miyake reflected, “Through his eyes Penn-san reinterprets the clothes, gives them new breath, and presents them to me from a new vantage point—one that I may not have been aware of, but had been subconsciously trying to capture. Without Penn-san’s guidance, I probably could not have continued to find new themes with which to challenge myself, nor could I have arrived at new solutions.” He ends by crediting Penn’s influence on his invention of permanently pleated garments, known as Pleats Please. 

Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Fashion: Face Covered with Hair (A), New York, 1991Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Onion Flower Bud Coat, New York, 1987
All photographs © the artist and courtesy Pace Gallery

In the obituaries published recently in honor of Miyake, many commented on the black mock turtleneck that the fashion designer made for Steve Jobs as his personal uniform. (Jobs ordered over one hundred.) Observers saw this as evidence of the relationship between fashion and technology and the idea of a garment as a kind of machine for living. Penn wore a similar kind of everyday uniform: blue jeans, sneakers, and a shirt with a collar band designed for him by Miyake. It’s an outfit that speaks with great understatement about the relationship between fashion and photography, about the inventiveness and imagination shared between practitioners from adjacent visual fields, and about the need for critical distance and critical friends. It’s an outfit that materializes Miyake’s principle that we all should continue to live by: “One always needs someone who can look over one’s shoulder and evaluate one’s work from a detached and objective point of view—someone who can act as a sounding board.”

Thomas Boivin’s Sensitive Exultation of a Parisian Neighborhood

The first time I look through Thomas Boivin’s book Belleville, I try to find the places I know. Belleville is a neighborhood in northeastern Paris, and Boivin made these black-and-white photographs while wandering its streets. I live on rue de Belleville, behind a shop called Bazar de Belleville, which gives the book’s presence on my table a certain Being John Malkovich quality. Immediately I spot the area’s two parks, a certain plumber’s shop front, the hard-to-describe atmosphere of particular points on certain streets. I linger longest on the exterior of the print shop I visited recently for a passport photo, which the employee took in a simple studio in a corner at a cost of €5.50. Boivin’s image centers a side window whose awning guarantees the use of “Kodak-quality paper.”

This text is in both French and Chinese. Belleville is home to one of Paris’s two major Chinatowns, just one community within a patchwork of cultures: Belleville is also more ethnically diverse than almost any other neighborhood in the French capital. To walk down any side street is to pass through several micro-districts that often seem to comprise little more than a shop, café, and bakery, yet feel as though they embody some long-since-settled wave of immigration. The portraits in this book, of strangers Boivin is drawn to, reflect this intricacy but are not essentialized by it. A woman lies on a defunct fountain, reading a novel. A man in a polo shirt and blazer clutches an uprooted plant in Buttes-Chaumont Park.

The second time I look through Belleville I am struck by the stillness, a sort of ghostly silence, that seems to emanate from each photograph, even when people are present. Perhaps this is to do with a certain tonal quietness and Boivin’s aversion to black and white extremes in favor of the middle grays. Or perhaps it stems from his preoccupation with what one could call nonspecific places: a flower bush obscuring a drain, a faded curtain in an anonymous window, tree tendrils on an unplaceable fence. The result has a woozy or hallucinatory quality, as if we are slightly removed from reality. Despite spanning a decade’s work, these fifty-five images, shot on film, feel indifferent to the passing of time. Occasional clues—a bus ad for a 2020 Man Ray exhibition, say—seem merely part of the cyclical flow of a city that both changes and doesn’t.

This is not really a “portrait” of a neighborhood, as some might yearn for. In a statement released with the book, Boivin says: “Although the photographs hardly depict the city, I find they convey the sensation that I had, walking the streets of Belleville.” What is meant by “the city” here, as something that is hardly depicted? Crowds? Belleville is densely populated even by Paris standards, a fact far from evident in this series. Or perhaps Boivin refers to crowd pleasers, such as wider street scenes, emblematic locations, Haussmannian architecture, or other easy tropes of street photography.

Before looking through Belleville for the seventh or eighth time I cycle to the gallery Les Douches by Canal Saint-Martin to see an exhibition of Boivin’s work. While it overlaps somewhat with the book, the show takes a different approach, with almost none of the images featuring people. Where they do appear, they are presented less as subject than as circumstance: a man holds a melon, a woman stands in front of a set of old windows, and each person’s head is cropped out of the shot. Boivin also likes food and drink, and several images nod to the still-life tradition: a half-drunk carafe of water on the table in an empty bar. A lemon squeezer in a shard of light on a kitchen table. Piles of grocery delivery boxes, wrapped in enough cling film to make your recycling efforts seem futile. And the titles always assert a location—either Belleville or somewhere in its immediate vicinity: Melon, Belleville (2019); Serviettes, Les Lilas (2019); Petit Déjeuner, Ménilmontant (2014).

All photographs from Thomas Boivin: Belleville (Stanley/Barker, 2022)

A sense of place is more potent when sublimated into something else entirely. Belleville often seems less about questing for the essence of its titular neighborhood than attempting a personal exaltation of the ordinary. It simply makes sense that this occurs where the photographer happens to live. Georges Perec’s term infra-ordinary feels relevant to the preoccupations at play here, as does his famous quote: “What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms . . . Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.” Perec, I should add, grew up in Belleville, near the pond that dominates the second image in Boivin’s book. It certainly appears that there is something ordinary in the local water.

Thomas Boivin: Belleville was published by Stanley/Barker in April 2022.

The Photographer of Mexican Sex Appeal and Pathos

I was eating a shrimp cocktail by the ocean in Oaxaca one November when I spotted a young man rolling around on the beach, covered in sand and striking cat-like poses for a photographer who was egging him on. “That’s @MexicanoMX!” my friend whispered, lowering her sunglasses to get a better look. Sure enough, when I pulled up his Instagram, the photographer’s stories were full of sun-kissed Oaxacan beauties surfing, fishing, and splashing around in the powerful waves of the Pacific. Watching him work, I was struck by his effortless way of making this young man feel empowered enough to strut his sensuality in front of a crowded beachfront restaurant. “I think it has to do with my honesty,” Dorian Ulises López Macías, the photographer behind the account, tells me two years later over Zoom. “I’ve never been afraid to walk up to a man on the street and say, ‘I want to take your photo because I think you’re handsome.’” 

Dorian Ulises López Macías, Untitled, Toluca, 2018, from the series Mexicano

Macías has refined a genre of street portraiture that skillfully balances pinup sex appeal with soul-gazing pathos. Stylistically, you could say his work hearkens back to the documentary tradition of groups like the Photo League, which set out to produce dignified images of the working class. But where the social realists aspired to eliminate artifice in favor of objectivity, Macías encourages his subjects to pose and preen. He’s particularly drawn to facial features, and not just of men he’s attracted to, but any traits that hint at a person’s rich interiority.

This approach reflects the mindset of his day jobs in fashion—first as art director for magazines like ELLE México, now as director of Casting en el Parque, a Mexican modeling agency—which involve a never-ending hunt for interesting faces. But the faces that interest him aren’t the ones that dominate the Mexican fashion industry, with its overwhelming bias toward white and light-skinned models. Instead, what distinguishes Macías is the way he captures the range and vitality of Mexico’s moreno, or dark-skinned, majority. 

Dorian Ulises López Macías, Mexicano Americano, 2022

When Macías connects to our video call, he is silhouetted against a wall jam-packed with photos and paper ephemera: some he took, some were gifts from friends, and others he collected over the years. He’s lived in this Mexico City apartment for seventeen years—it was one of the first rooms he rented when he moved from his rural hometown outside the city of Aguascalientes. Photography has been a hobby for him ever since his father (“a junk collector just like me,” he says) gifted him a camera, and when he got hired for his first job in the capital, he began photographing workers on his commute. 

“I grew addicted to going out in the street in search of portraits,” Macías tells me. “I’d bring the camera everywhere, even on the bus, and just wait for interesting people to show up. It was such a thrill.” His approach grew out of a magpie impulse to “conserve moments, to conserve people,” and for years he didn’t share the images with anybody but cherished them like treasures in the privacy of his bedroom. He tried not to overthink his process, allowing his instinct (erotic or otherwise) to take over and guide him on long walks through the city. “It’s like when a dog sees another dog and gets excited,” he says. “Obviously I’m a human so I can control myself, but otherwise I’m just like a dog. I’m driven by the instinct to get up close to other humans.”

Dorian Ulises López Macías, Untitled, Mexico City, 2015, from the series MexicanoDorian Ulises López Macías, Untitled, Mexico City, 2017, from the series Mexicano

From his first job as a graphic designer at the now-defunct lifestyle and arts magazine Código, Macías steadily rose through the Mexico City media world, landing at ELLE México in 2012. For years he lived what he calls a “double life.” By night, he was the street photographer who glamorized Mexico’s native features, and by day, the art director of fashion magazines full of gaunt Russian models. “What I was doing as a street photographer was attacking what I was doing in the fashion world,” he says. 

Eventually, he started insisting that his clients employ, if not dark-skinned models, at least Mexican ones. Most refused. Several magazines and major fashion brands also stopped working with him, and for a few years he had to borrow rent money from his mother. It wasn’t until Chiara Bardelli-Nonino, the photo editor of Vogue Italia, hired him to direct a fashion editorial with Mexican models that his old clients came crawling back. 

“All those producers who had turned their back on me, all of the sudden they were interested in me again,” he says. “Like, Wow, Vogue is paying attention to you, and not just any Vogue—Vogue Italia! Even Vogue Mexico was interested again. That’s how things work in Mexico.” 

Dorian Ulises López Macías, Untitled, Acapulco, 2013, from the series MexicanoDorian Ulises López Macías, Untitled, Mexico City, 2013, from the series Mexicano

In 2016, Macías began uploading portraits to the Instagram account @MexicanoMX. Three months later, the Los Angeles–based performance artist Rafa Esparza invited him to create work to display in his installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a semicircular wall of adobe bricks Esparza had built out of dung, dirt, and water from the Los Angeles River. “It was a shock because I was suddenly entering the art world at this super serious level,” Macías said. “Like, I uploaded the photos, and the next thing I knew I was in the Whitney.” Inside Esparza’s rotunda, Macías hung five closely cropped photos of masculine young men. All make eye contact with the camera but with subtle gestural differences that elude interpretation even as they invite it. In one image, a man in an orange reflector vest and hard hat peers over his right shoulder as if the photographer had just called his name. It’s a psychic glimpse of someone who might otherwise appear as an anonymous construction worker.

“He sees us often times before we even see ourselves. He makes us feel worthy of the space in photography that has historically prioritized white bodies.”

But the Whitney presentation didn’t exactly catapult Macías into art-world fame. He was busy with his day job, building an agency roster and directing surreal, often conceptual, fashion shoots for magazines like Vogue and i-D. Then in early 2020, he received an email from Paulina Lara at LaPau Gallery, an unpretentious new space in the back of a Los Angeles office building. Lara wanted to mount his first solo exhibition in the US, with highlights from his Instagram project. The only issue was that Macías was sitting on, by his estimate, roughly twenty hard drives of photos and videos that had to be pared down. At first, he thought of papering the gallery’s walls with images, like posters in a teenager’s bedroom, but he realized that was too chaotic. “So I decided to give them a sense of what the Mexicano project is like for me,” he says. “I recreated what it’s like for me to come home, put on music, roll a joint, and go through the photos I took that day.” 

Installation view of Dorian Ulises López Macías, Hasta Que Te Conocí (Until I met you), LaPau Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022. Photograph by Monica Orozco

It took him a year to edit a one-hour slideshow called Hasta Que Te Conocí (Until I met you) (2022), which from last March to May played on a floor-to-ceiling monitor in the dark, diminutive gallery, set to a soundtrack of high-intensity techno—what he listens to while working. The final selection isn’t just a group of lusty photos of butch guys, though there are occasional flashes of homemade pornography. Most of the material is actually quite wholesome, especially his reports from Mexico City Pride parades, which show the seemingly infinite ways of being queer and Mexican. Macías also included dispatches from his travels around Mexico, which document the diversity of its regional customs and characters, from the Afro Mexican surfers of Chacahua to the rodeo cowboys of Aguascalientes. He has a knack for creating family portraits that show what love and care look like outside the Americanized model of middle-class success; his tender shots of men riding with their sons on their bicycle racks or handlebars are an antidote to the media’s tendency to pathologize poverty. “My dream is to take the photo for every Mexican’s ID card,” he says, laughing. 

Dorian Ulises López Macías, Untitled, Agusacalientes, 2015, from the series Mexicano

Recently, Macías’s personal and commissioned projects have started to converge. His latest editorial for i-D, Mexicano Americano, uses both Mexican and Mexican American models to illustrate the ties that bind homeland and diaspora. Shot in New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, it’s styled with oversized jackets, baggy pants, and other items by designer Willy Chavarria that nod to the sartorial innovations of working-class Chicanos in the US. “Dorian makes us feel beautiful,” Esparza, who modeled for the shoot, wrote in a heartfelt statement on Instagram. “He sees us often times before we even see ourselves. He treats us with integrity, respect and adoration. He values us. He makes us feel worthy of the space in photography that has historically prioritized white bodies.” 

Dorian Ulises López Macías, Mexicano Americano, 2022
All photographs courtesy the artist

As satisfying as a project like this is for Macías, nothing feels as good as flying solo—stepping out the door and chasing his intuition through the city. “At the end of a day,” he tells me, “I love fashion because it’s something I do with my friends. I always enjoy it, even if it’s for a commercial campaign. But there’s never a moment I enjoy as much as when I step off set to take a portrait of a subject I spotted from a distance.”