Aperture's Blog, page 37

The Monumental Films of Wang Bing

In 2003, the Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, then an unknown graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, debuted a durational colossus: West of the Tracks, a nine-hour document of industrial decline in the Tiexi factory district of Shenyang Province. Amassed over four years with little more than an amateur video camera and faith in the instructive texture of reality, West of the Tracks found a new form for the chasmic infrastructural changes of post-Socialist China.

Wang Bing, Stills from West of the Tracks, 2003

Immense run times and handheld spontaneity have come to define most of Wang’s subsequent films, each teeming with the minutiae of daily subsistence in various pockets of regional China. Although Wang is attuned to the present, his work is always marked by a broader intuition of historical process and state-led economic restructuring. His subjects have spanned the extractive labor of oil-field workers on the Tibetan plateau in Crude Oil (2008), the carceral optics of a psychi- atric institution in Yunnan Province with ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2013), and, in 15 Hours (2017), the conditions of migrant workers at a children’s garment factory in Zhejiang Province.

Wang Bing, Still from 15 Hours, 2017

Last fall, these latter two films, along with West of the Tracks; Man with No Name (2010); Father and Sons (2014), which follows the solitary days of a migrant worker’s unsupervised children; and a shorter piece, Traces (2014), were screened as multichannel video installations at Le Bal, a photography space in Paris, in a solo exhibition titled The Walking Eye. For a filmmaker who seems so steadfast in his outward orientation to the world, it’s striking how often he has invoked a vivid subjectivity to describe his output. As Wang recalls about the early days of making West of the Tracks: “I wondered how I could create . . . something singular, something personal.”

Installation view of Wang Bing: The Walking Eye, Le Bal, Paris, 2021. Photograph by Marc Domage

Across a two-decade oeuvre laden with the heterogeneous rhythms of life in contemporary China, what is “personal” in Wang’s work is not its proximity to his own biography but to a deeply embodied experience of discovery made possible by his filming. Wang seems prone to self- effacement—no on-screen appearance; only the rarest flashes of his voice as interlocutor—but his physical presence is both anchor to and genesis of every film. Even as he enlists a stray assistant here and there, Wang is the very force that walks the camera’s unblinking eye.

Wang Bing, Still from Man with No Name, 2009

Against his categorization as a maker of documentaries, Wang has stressed a different impetus: “The most important thing for me is to film people and to understand why and how I film them. Whatever story and whatever kind of cinema that may produce.” Wang’s films exceed the mere accrual of information. We learn, for instance, that the metal- workers in West of the Tracks undergo mandatory hospitalization to treat the lead that has leeched into their bodies. Where another filmmaker might briefly limn this as a sobering medical fact, Wang lingers on the eventless days of he workers’ confinement, as they sing karaoke together in scantly furnished rooms, lounge and rove listlessly through hospital halls awaiting their release.

Installation view of Wang Bing: The Walking Eye, Le Bal, Paris, 2021. Photograph by Marc Domage

In the usual context of their single-screen display in cinemas, the audience is asked to move through factories and fields, following a figure from behind or stuck to whichever lone purview Wang has framed. But the multiscreen installation of The Walking Eye alters the experience. Of the five films in the exhibition at Le Bal, only Father and Sons was screened in its entirety; the others were presented as curated sequences approved by Wang himself, split across two or more screens. If the theatrical presentation of Wang’s filmmaking invites a kind of temporal immersion into one monumental trajectory, their multiplied projection in the gallery seems to pull apart their layered rhythms, as if to unveil all the dense strata that comprise any given moment in history.

Spread from Wang Bing: The Walking Eye (Roma Publications, 2021)
All works courtesy the artist and Galerie Paris-Beijing and Galerie Chantal Crousel

There is a similar effect in The Walking Eye, the eponymous book published by Roma Publications for the exhibition. Of its over eight hundred pages, more than seven hundred display stills and translated text from eight of Wang’s films. Most of these are single images that bleed across two pages, sandwiched like centerfolds, or vertically stacked, two stills to a page. Some are further miniaturized and arrayed as four—maybe six, maybe eight—frames in quick succession, trained on the unfolding of a specific scene. Any print-based documentation of moving-image work is fated to stasis, but the unusual heft of The Walking Eye is, admittedly, confusing. Why freeze and compile thousands of images from a filmmaker who has said, in an interview closing this very book, “I conceive of the camera as the instrument of movement”?

These arrested frames risk turning real-time discovery into fixed curios of an ethnographic other. Wang knows that the “movement” of a world as it becomes known—as it draws us into its opening— cannot be pinned down and collected. If anything, The Walking Eye in book form shows us the limits of fixing moving-image art on the printed page and, in the end, the power of Wang’s films in motion.

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking,” under the column “Viewfinder.”

A Look Inside the Launch Party of Shikeith’s Debut Monograph

On July 25 Aperture hosted a special book launch at The Times Square EDITION in partnership with Jack’d to celebrate the launch of Notes towards Becoming a Spill, the first monograph by multimedia artist Shikeith.

The intimate celebration featured an evening of cocktails and hors d’oeuvres alongside a lively DJ set by BMAJR. As part of the event, a newly released limited-edition silkscreen print by Shikeith was installed for viewing, alongside complimentary editions of Aperture magazine.

In attendance to celebrate were curator and critic Antwaun Sargent, Aperture’s executive director Sarah Meister, Aperture Board Trustee Michael Hoeh, designer Rush Jackson, Ian Bradley, Prince Adams, Jahvaris Fulton, Jakeem Powell, Angel Glasby, and many more. Shikeith called the gathering “a truly lovely night.”

Shikeith with guests Angel Glasby Ty Sherman, Prince Adams, Derrick Sanders Angel Glasby, Maxi CanionAntwaun Sargent, Shikeith, Andrea FranchiniBook Launch in partnership wtih Jack’d Shikeith, Michael Hoeh Rush Jackson, Kailee Faber Shikeith signs editions of his monograph Notes towards Becoming a Spill (Aperture, 2022)Miranda Barnes, Shikeith, Rahim Fortune Ian Bradley, Shikeith Lesley Martin, Michael Hoeh, Sarah Meister Isabelle McTwigan, Steven Chaiken, Anna Eisenhour, Kevin Doyle Shikeith, Bradley Hill DJ BMAJR Chivas Michael, Jakeem Powell, Shikeith, Israel Erron Ford
All photographs by Christos Katsiaouni, July 25, 2022

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Book launch made possible by Jack’d and The Times Square EDITION.

For a pro-account on Jack’d use promo code “APFDN2022.”

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill was made possible, in part, by leadership support from Arts, Equity, & Education Fund and the 7G Foundation, and by the generosity of Michael Hoeh.

Sibylle Bergemann’s Striking Photographs of Postwar Germany

The Sibylle Bergemann retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie—an institution focused on art made in Berlin in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—aligns the late German photographer’s work with a particular haltung. While that word translates directly to “attitude,” the German is more expansive in conveying a way of relating to something, describing a kind of inner compass that guides thoughts and actions. In the myriad photographs that comprise Town and Country and Dogs: Photographs 1966–2010, something in the quality of Bergemann’s observation, whether for a fashion editorial, commissioned reportage, or her own projects, lends the images a palpable coherence. A quiet sensibility, subtler than style, imbues the works on view, and is bolstered by her continuous return to several motifs: women (self-possessed, often in center frame); juxtapositions between remnants of demolished East Berlin and new architectural constructions; and windows, dogs, and people on the move. 

Sibylle Bergemann, Unter den Linden, Berlin, 1968Sibylle Bergemann, Moscow, 1974Sibylle Bergemann, Caravan Exhibition, Berlin, 1980

Bergemann’s mode of documenting—and implicitly addressing—the world around her developed out of the political context of the German Democratic Republic. The native Berliner was just twenty years old when West Berlin was sealed from the East by a wall in 1961 that prevented passage between the regions. While state-sanctioned photography glorified happy workers in vibrant color, Bergemann’s photography stood adjacent to such posturing. Alongside a few other photographers, including her future husband, Arno Fischer, Bergemann formed Gruppe Direkt in 1965, a collective that articulated its members’ principles of free observation. Their preference for black-and-white photography may have been a question of access (color film, like much else, was hard to come by in the GDR), but it also accentuated the contrast between their images and those produced by the state. 

Sibylle Bergemann, Marisa and Liane, Sellin, 1981

The group’s divergence in style and subject matter was largely subtle enough to avoid censorship. However, Bergemann’s Marisa und Liane, Sellin (1981)—a photograph of two women in black racerback dresses beside a row of beach cabanas on the island of Rügen—was edited before it ran in the popular fashion magazine Sibylle: the printer manually retouched the blonde’s scowl to turn her lips up into a smile. The original photo, with the woman’s arresting glare, would become one of Bergemann’s most iconic images and was prescient in tapping into a burgeoning sense of discontent in the GDR.

Another of Bergemann’s most striking images also took on a sense of meaning beyond its original context from February 1986. The image shows a life-size bronze statue of Friedrich Engels, coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, and was made as part of her series Das Denkmal (The Monument) (1975–86), a commission from the East German Ministry of Culture to document the creation of the Karl Marx and Engels monument in Berlin’s Mitte district. Bound in rope, the statue is suspended at a seemingly precarious angle as it is lowered to the ground. The monument bisects the picture plane on a diagonal, while several GDR buildings, including the TV tower that had been built as a symbol of Communist power twenty years prior, hug the corners of the frame. 

Sibylle Bergemann, Das Denkmal, Berlin, February 1986Sibylle Bergemann, Birgit, Berlin, 1984

When the wall came down a few years later, Bergemann’s image began to circulate, mistaken as a depiction of the statue’s removal, rather than its installation. (It still stands, beside the seated Marx, in Berlin’s Mitte district.) The mix-up is emblematic of how Bergemann was able to work within, and quietly transcend, the parameters of her commissions. While securing significant opportunities—notions of women’s role in society were relatively progressive in the GDR, particularly compared to West Germany—Bergemann also cultivated a moving visual language. Nine photographs from The Monument series are hung in a grid in the exhibition in Berlin, concluding with the image of the dangling statue. The photographs seem like a study of tones of gray, as Bergemann captures the monument as a work in progress in sequential moments that are anything but grandiose. 

Sibylle Bergemann, Nina and Eva Maria Hagen, Berlin, 1976Sibylle Bergemann, Niederlande, 1986Sibylle Bergemann, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, 1989

Bergemann’s reportage of mounting protests in East Berlin in the weeks before the fall of the wall and the commotion after its toppling are similarly understated. In a small black-and-white photograph titled Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin (1989) she captures a procession of people carrying white candles alongside the elevated railway at Schönhauser Allee. In a another photograph, she lingers on the vacant street after the vigil: the arches beneath the train tracks, spindly winter trees, and several white candles left standing at the edge of the sidewalk. The image appears like a haunting harbinger of the streets that would soon be emptied as scores of East Berliners traversed the breached wall. It is also perhaps an elegy for what the socialist state might have been, in line with writer Christa Wolf’s declaration in her famous speech a few days before the wall toppled: “Revolutions happen from the bottom up . . . Let’s dream with our eyes wide open. Imagine this, it is socialism and no one wants to leave.”

Sibylle Bergemann, Shibam, Yemen, 1999Sibylle Bergemann, Bassé, Île de Gorée, Senegal, 2010

But leave they did, including Bergemann, who namely went on far-flung international travels to Yemen, Portugal, and Senegal, on assignment for GEO magazine. The photographs taken on these trips until her death in 2010 conclude the exhibition, bringing Bergemann’s perspective into color and turning it toward the world at large. A group of photos from her 1999 trip to the mudbrick town of Shibam in Yemen is particularly stirring, as Bergemann carefully developed the images herself in the darkroom, drawing out numerous tones of beige, white, and pale pink. But Berlin remained her greatest muse, and she always eagerly returned home to document its ever-changing face. As such, this exhibition functions like a window not only into history, but also into the present, underscoring Berlin as a city where the past hangs close to everyday life.

Sibylle Bergemann: Town and Country and Dogs, Photographs 1966–2010 is on view at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, through October 10, 2022. 

How Lee Miller Out-Surrealed the Surrealists

“One could say that Lee’s feel for the incongruities of daily life made her a Surrealist,” writes Lee Miller’s biographer, Carolyn Burke. Although she was never an official member of the group (according to Burke, she couldn’t abide André Breton), her feeling for incongruity and unexpected juxtapositions, for dreamlike imagery and tears in consciousness, her ability to perceive instabilities in apparently ordinary scenes, and her ethical commitments to getting the picture against all odds make her one of the movement’s great photographers.

Miller was surrounded by Surrealist men in both her personal and professional lives. Her mentor turned lover, Man Ray, introduced her to Surrealist art and artistic circles in late 1920s Paris; she starred in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930); her second husband, Roland Penrose, was an established practitioner of Surrealism in Britain and later a cofounder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. But while these influences were important to her, Miller had her own decided view of the world. “I think she’s a Surrealist from the beginning to the end,” says Patricia Allmer, author of Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016).

Lee Miller, Nude bent forward (thought to be Noma Rathner), Paris, ca. 1930

In The Lives of Lee Miller (1985), recently rereleased in paperback, her son, Antony Penrose, depicts his mother as a woman who bolted from adventure to adventure, who “rode her own temperament through life as if she were clinging to the back of a runaway dragon.” Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, Miller got started with photography by having her picture taken hundreds of times—often nude—by her father, an amateur photographer with a darkroom tucked under the stairs of the family house. She continued modeling as a young woman in New York City, appearing on the cover of the March 1927 issue of Vogue within months of her meet-cute with Edward Steichen of Condé Nast (she stepped in front of a moving cab; he yanked her out of harm’s way). She became one of his favorite models. In Steichen’s viewfinder, Miller looks modern and eternal at the same time—Baudelaire’s own definition of beauty. However, as Miller herself would later recall, “I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside.”

The angel paid the bills, but the fiend wanted to hold the camera herself. In 1929, she got on a boat and tracked down the photographer Man Ray in Paris. “I’m your new student,” she told him. He didn’t take students, but he took her. For three years, they lived and worked together; Miller learned everything she could about making and developing pictures. He would sometimes pass assignments to her; as the story goes, Miller was at the Sorbonne medical school photographing something for Man Ray when she witnessed a mastectomy procedure. She took the severed breast to the offices of Vogue and photographed it on a dinner plate before she and the breast were thrown out.

Lee Miller, Untitled (Severed breast from radical surgery in a place setting 1), Paris, ca. 1929

Miller’s Surrealism has to do with her ability to look “awry” at the world, says Allmer. For instance, there is the striking image of a woman’s hand reaching for the doorknob as seen through the scratched shop window at Guerlain, which Miller calls Untitled (Exploding Hand) (ca. 1931). She captures otherwise imperceptible moments like this and, in spite of their ordinariness, finds great drama. There is an element of chance in this picture, but there is also an alertness to the potential readings of the work that is all her own.

By contrast, a studio image such as Nude Bent Forward (ca. 1930) clearly involved planning and forethought to set the camera and the lighting in just the right way so that when the model leaned over, naked, her torso would fill the frame, arms and neck cut off, the lower half of her body seeming to disappear into the shadows below. As Mary Ann Caws, author of Surrealism (2004), writes, the composition creates “the disquieting effect of making the body appear gradually to be dissolving.”

Lee Miller, Untitled (Exploding Hand), Guerlain Parfumerie, Paris, ca. 1931

The female body—so fetishized in Surrealist art—is almost unrecognizable in Nude Bent Forward. That we are looking at a body is clear; the grain of the skin has been beautifully, duskily rendered. But it is also contorted beyond recognition; there is something troubling in its visceral ambiguities.

In 1934, having left Man Ray and resettled in New York to start her own studio two years prior, Miller married the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, eventually moving with him to Cairo. The time she spent in Egypt was crucially important to her development as a photographer. In Portrait of Space (1937), her Surrealist gaze could see a whole world of suggestion in the torn and tattered mosquito net, the tent’s window seeming to hang askew like an empty frame. The scholar Katharine Conley writes in Surrealist Ghostliness (2013) that the emptiness of this frame “resembles the ‘unsilvered glass’ of Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields that metaphorically divides a body’s psychic unconscious from consciousness, separating outer from  innermost realities.”

Miller’s Surrealism has to do with her ability to look “awry” at the world. She captures otherwise imperceptible moments and, in spite of their ordinariness, finds great drama.

Allmer points out that Miller is present in the form of a shadow in many works from this period—in a photograph of Deir el Soriani Monastery in Egypt about 1936; in one taken from the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza about 1937 (a shadow within a shadow); in the image of Eileen Agar looking pregnant with her camera at Brighton Pavilion in 1937. The shadow is a supremely Surrealist motif, “simply an effect,” Allmer writes, “always in flux.” Or, as the writer Pierre Mac Orlan put it in 1930, with reference to Eugène Atget’s Paris scenes, “Photography makes use of light to study shadow. It is a solar art in the service of night.” Solarization would also be one of Miller’s great contributions to Surrealist photography—it was Miller and Man Ray who discovered what could happen if the lights were suddenly turned on during the development process: the tones reverse, and a ghostly outline forms. Man Ray would create a solarized portrait of Miller in profile, appearing like an electrified angel.

Lee Miller, From the top of the Great Pyramid, Giza, Egypt, ca. 1937
All photographs © Lee Miller Archives, England

Allmer considers this interest in the shadow, and a willingness to include herself in the image, an important part of the ethical charge of Miller’s work: “Perhaps, if you’re a photographer, and you are there in these really traumatic situations, you are part of this story and not detached from it.” Miller’s involvement in world events was confirmed during World War II, a time when most of her Surrealist group (Breton and Man Ray among them) fled to the United States to escape the violence. (So much for Surrealism in the service of the revolution.) Miller, on the other hand, stuck it out in London, where she moved after Egypt to be with her second husband, Roland Penrose, surviving the Blitz and the constant threat of annihilation. She even put herself on the front lines of the U.S. invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944.

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In Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, a title card declares that the poet composes “a realistic documentary of unreal events.” Miller’s work in the war strikes me as a Surrealist corollary to that statement, a surreal documentary of real events. In wartime London, Miller photographed the destruction caused by the Blitz. Her eye was trained to see the uncanny qualities in the fragments of the city she encountered; she out-surrealed the Surrealists.

“She finds the battered typewriter or the mannequin standing in the street corner or the window blown in such a way that the glass makes a pattern. She’s just constantly looking for the concretization of dreams,” Antony Penrose tells me. “That’s what she’s finding.” One such example is of a stone angel, fallen to the ground with her neck severed by a metal bar, a brick smashing her breast. Miller called it Revenge on Culture (1940). “Who is taking the revenge?” asks Caws, the author of Surrealism, when we speak. “She was taking her revenge on us for not knowing whose revenge it was or why . . . and which culture, of course. Everything about that particular image says to me that’s why she’s a Surrealist.” Miller’s wartime photographs would appear in a book called Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941), published so that U.S. audiences an ocean away from the conflict could appreciate the terrifying realities of life during the Blitz.

Although her accreditation did not permit her to report from combat zones, Miller found herself in Saint-Malo for the Allied offensive and, staying on with the infantry, was among the first people let into Dachau and Buchenwald after they were liberated. The image of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub is well known (taken in collaboration with David E. Scherman), but the photographs that she made as the concentration camps were liberated are among the most haunting and disturbing documents of the war.

Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb, near Siwa, Egypt, 1937

Suffering from alcoholism and probably post-traumatic stress disorder after her return home, Miller lost the desire to keep taking photographs. Production eventually slowed to such a point that her son didn’t realize the “extent” of what she had made, the “depth and penetration” of her wartime work.

Miller, who in 1966 became Lady Penrose when Roland was knighted for his services to art, threw herself instead into cooking, training at Le Cordon Bleu London and taking great pride in whipping up the most original, surreal dishes she could: Her son remembers being served blue spaghetti and pink breasts made of cauliflower with cherry tomatoes for nipples. Her recipe for chicken was prepared with so many herbs it turned green. Miller’s cooking is often underappreciated as an important continuation of her Surrealist work—it’s domestic, it’s fleeting, and it’s not war photography, after all. But it was just as much about unsettling people’s received ideas about how the world should be. A Surrealist from beginning to end.

13 Photographers on Their “Photo No-Nos”

What is a “photo no-no”?

Edited by Jason Fulford, Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Aperture, 2021) brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, it covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility.

At turns humorous and absurd, heartfelt and searching, this encyclopedic volume offers a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

Below, read excerpts from thirteen artists featured in Photo No-Nos.

Guido Guidi, Passo del Muraglione, 1983
Courtesy the artist

Beautiful Landscapes Seen from Above & from Afar, Guido Guidi

I think most subjects are easily photographable a priori, before observation, and this leads to an annoying proliferation of certain subjects. I would add that the real problem is not the subject, but the way you deal with it. If I had to indicate a subject that I usually avoid, I would say beautiful landscapes seen from above and from afar; perhaps because of the strong myopia that has affected me since childhood. I want to believe that for this very reason, as well as in homage to Eugène Atget, I have become a partisan of the close-up view.

I am wary of categories and subjects constructed from a distance or a priori; they are incompatible with the close-up gaze.

Mimi Plumb, Family by the Side of the Road, 1975
Courtesy the artist and Robert Koch Gallery

Car Pictures, Mimi Plumb

I didn’t avoid taking car pictures. My archive is full of them. But I didn’t fully realize the prevalence or richness of those images until I scanned my archive on retiring. The car, in my work, epitomizes the desire for the American dream or symbolizes our degradation of the environment. I try never to stop myself from photographing subjects that are interesting to me. Yet this question of what I avoid photographing, regrettably and sadly, reminded me of a time when I implored my students not to make the car picture. It was likely that cliché picture that I wanted them to avoid, the car as a symbol of status and wealth. Boy or girl standing proudly next to their car in the late afternoon light. Their self-portrait and their desire to be part of the American dream. I think now of the pictures lost in their photographic archive due to my shortsightedness, and my bias. Likely, hopefully, they were smart enough not to listen to me.

Michael Northrup, Tire Fire, 1981
Courtesy the artist

Color as a Subject, Michael Northrup

In 1980, I was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, like most photo programs at the time, they were opening up to the new color processing kits. I wanted to photograph in color, but after shooting black-and-white for ten formative years, I was way over-self-conscious about it. I started shooting red fire hydrants and yellow curbs. And I was bored to death. A visiting artist recognized this and told me, “Just shoot like you always did in black and white. Don’t think of color.” I think that was the best advice I received in my entire photo-education. Sometimes big problems have simple solutions.

Ricardo Cases, El Blanco, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Distant Cultures, Ricardo Cases

Normally, I don’t even feel that I can legitimately speak about my own neighbor—and this difficulty increases the farther I get from my house, my neighborhood, the suburbs surrounding my city, and, more concretely and by extension, Spain’s Mediterranean coast. I am not attracted to the Iguazú Falls or the peculiar and ancestral diet of the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea. My game is local. My work explores familiar situations, and to do them justice, I need the tools that only someone in everyday contact with that cultural environment can possess. This is why I don’t need to get on an airplane to take pictures. On the contrary, it makes more sense for me to go for a walk or get on my bike with my camera.

“To each their own,” as they say. At this point in my life, I know that my emotions are transformed when I recognize things.

Shane Lavalette, Untitled, 2016, from the series Still (Noon)
Courtesy the artist and Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin

Hands, Shane Lavalette

In photographs, hands are always alluring. They can be so beautiful in a way that feels timeless, sculptural, even transcendent, though often, all too easily cliché.

At one point, hands became a subject that I felt I may have overphotographed and therefore, should avoid for a while. But after a few years of practicing this arbitrary avoidance, I allowed myself to again appreciate the endless possibilities of a gesture—and, in doing so, I made one of my favorite images.

Whether we photograph them or not, sometimes it’s the very subjects that we tell ourselves to avoid that are worth returning to in order to try and see them differently and, perhaps, more deeply.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, 1/2 Charity Street, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Houses, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

I developed a fascination with looking at American houses when I came to the States for graduate school in 2012. I was dumbstruck by the homogeneity of their design, and read an interesting essay about the propagation of this one ubiquitous style of suburban house in D. W. Meinig’s anthology The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (1979), which intrigued me. But I was also fascinated by the way that they so often pointed to a particular history of American expansion that (to my untutored eyes) evokes wagon trains and the “open” frontier, and that sublimates settler-colonial violence under an aesthetic of humble domesticity. I gradually realized that photographing houses was not only pleasurable, but also served as a means of deferring having to make other kinds of pictures—a means of keeping people at a certain distance—or as a way of avoiding having to knock on people’s doors, so I forbade myself the freedom to make pictures of houses. Bit by bit, the other pictures began to change and improve as a result of the constraint.

Erica Deeman, Untitled 2 (Self-Portrait During COVID 19 Quarantine), 2020
Courtesy the artist and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco

Me, Myself, & I, Erica Deeman

Honestly, I never thought I would be the photographer to turn the camera on myself—never, not once. I have found a deep joy in collaboration, making portraits with the people generous enough to give me their time and energy. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the camera and the power it holds, and the care that I’ve taken (and continue to take) in making my work. It never crossed my mind to apply that care and time, holding the camera up to myself. Something switched for me in 2019, almost like a snap of the fingers. I had this desire to see who I was becoming since moving to the United States. So I tentatively began making self-portraits, though

I didn’t intend to share them in a pure photographic form. Then COVID-19 happened, and the ability to work together with another human being became difficult and unsafe. Everything felt (and still feels) compounded. Here I was, in my home, and I knew that the one person I needed to collaborate with, commune with, share, and see, was myself.

Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira, Untitled, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Open & Empty Fields, Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira

Empty fields fascinate me: big, open fields; misty fields; green fields. Whenever I’m driving, I feel the urge to stop and photograph them. I wonder about all the lives that have walked through them. I visualize multiple times—deep time, cyclical time, human time—converged and suspended. Giving in to my desire, I get out of the car. Then I remind myself that I have done this hundreds of times and that I never end up using any of these photos. I retrace my steps and continue my driving, until the following day, when the urge arises again.

Jeff Mermelstein, New York City, 1993
Courtesy the artist

Pigeons, Jeff Mermelstein

Quintessential New York creatures, resilient and filthy. Gray feathers with spats of purple and green. Wings flapping sound like rubber or people’s fat shaking. I can’t stop taking pictures of pigeons, really.

Pigeons feed my drive. Overdone, everywhere, again, the same. Avoidance, repeat, question, stop, no more, take another photograph, why not, I don’t know, really I don’t, and when I don’t really know I do know. Worst scenario, I’ll put it in a box.

I don’t think photographers can stop taking pictures of anything; we just may not show some of them. But then twenty-five years later, we might change our minds.

Max Pinckers, Performance #1, Los Angeles, 2018, from the series Margins of Excess
Courtesy the artist

Recycled Icons, Max Pinckers

Documentary photography has always contended with tension between form and content—the subject (and their agency) versus the visual qualities of the photograph itself. Constricted by the frame, photographs cannot escape the fundamental aesthetic conventions that govern it, and the subjects depicted in it cannot become unstuck from the frame. The danger is when visual tropes are arbitrarily applied to whichever subject in whichever situation, simply because of their effective visual rhetoric.

Documentary photography, and especially its cousin photojournalism, is dominated by these recognizable templates, a form of recycled iconography, casting the world in the same mold over and over again. You know them, perhaps unconsciously or by some kind of deeply engrained affinity: pietà figures, toys or shoes among the rubble, bodies emerging from the smoke, wailing women, faces half submerged in water, eyebrows peaking over the bottom of the frame, black silhouettes against brightly lit landscapes, hands displaying objects of interest, kids jumping in the water, feet dangling in the top of the frame, a bomb’s distant smoke-cloud rising above a city, close-ups of emotionally distressed people, photographs made through car windows or other frames within the frame. When applied, conformist aesthetics overpower the subjects depicted. This is when photographic conventions become self-referential instead of self-reflexive.

These types of images are published over and over again with maximum emotional impact, because readers can more comfortably identify with them than with images of the actual transgressive event.

Cristina de Middel, Untitled, 2018, from the series The Body as a Battlefield
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Roses, Cristina de Middel

I do not want to be seen as a fragile and romantic person/woman in my work, so I just cannot take pictures of roses. And that’s that. The funny thing is that I absolutely love the smell of roses and wear that perfume a lot, but I try not to take any photos of them. Roses are so loaded with meaning; a picture of a rose is never neutral. They symbolize love and romance, passion and luxury, in cliché ways, and have even come to represent cliché itself. Roses also encapsulate most of the stereotypes for femininity from a masculine point of view: the passive-aggressive energy in the visible beauty versus the hidden spines, that idea of beauty that can hurt you, the trap of sensuality, the metaphor of blooming, the scent of a woman. A photo of a rose taken by a woman has a different meaning.

Alex Webb, Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, 1993
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Sunsets, Alex Webb

Ever since I embraced working in intense, vibrant color in the late 1970s, I’ve had a deep ambivalence about photographing sunsets. While their otherworldly glow often seduces the eye, I find that another part of me viscerally resists their clichéd beauty. I remember showing Josef Koudelka an early color photograph of mine from Jamaica of a group of men in trees silhouetted against a brilliant orange sky at a Bob Marley concert. “Too sugar,” he said in his blunt Czech way. And he was right—but it wasn’t just that it was too sweet, it was too easy.

But every once in a while, I discover something that qualifies and complicates the one-note refrain of the setting sun: a mercury vapor lamp casting its greenish hues across baseball spectators in Cuba with a burning red sky behind, or the cold blue tones of a quay in Greece contrasting with the pinkish notes along the horizon. That’s when I leave my anxieties behind, and give myself permission to photograph the complex music of certain sunsets.

Kyoko Hamada, Yakuza, 1999
Courtesy the artist

Yakuza, Kyoko Hamada

In 1999, while I was going to art school in New York, my father in Japan was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As a result, I’d go back to Japan every three months or so to visit him in the hospital. As a young photographer, I thought a lot about how to approach taking a picture of my fading father. The hospital was near Asakusa, Tokyo, and after these visits, I would roam the streets with my 35 mm camera, usually feeling very sad.

On one of these walks, I happened on a small back road where a group of policemen were hanging out smoking cigarettes. As I walked by, I saw a man lying on the ground in a fetal position. He was passed out with his eyes closed, facing the blue sky, drool dripping out of his mouth. The police weren’t paying him any attention, and a cleaning lady was busy trying to sweep the street around him. It was one of those social-journalism moments. I remember thinking that this was probably not the kind of picture I should take. I knew it wasn’t fair to the man on the street, whose life could be at its lowest point, and who was completely unaware of a girl with a camera observing and contemplating. Against my better judgment, I raised my camera and photographed the cleaning lady and the man on the ground. Then, unable to stop myself, I moved in closer to the fetus shape. His body contrasted with the dark asphalt in the bright daylight, and a water puddle reflected shiny light next to him. He looked like he was floating in a dark universe. As I framed my shot, I fantasized about making a contrasty print in the darkroom to accentuate this. I clicked the shutter and all of the sudden, I heard a deep, heavy voice right next to my ear. It said, “Hey, hey Jo-chan.”

My heart almost stopped. I slowly turned my head and a bald man with a toothpick sticking out of his mouth was staring right into my eyes. He smelled of strong cologne and cigarette smoke, and a colorful flower shirt was sticking out from under his dark pinstriped suit. His eyes were quietly fixated on my face. My brain just repeated the words, Shit, shit, shit. At the same time, I felt that I had to maintain eye contact with him. My heart was pounding, but I was trying not to show it. Then he quietly said, “There’s a photograph to take, and there’s a photograph not to take. Which one do you think this is?” Before I got a chance to respond, he quickly shifted from his threatening yakuza [gangster] character into a silly comedian and said, “Why don’t you take a picture of me? You don’t see too many good-looking gents like me around here!” With that, he struck a pose and waited for me to take a picture. So I did. Click. The yakuza nodded and seemed pleased that my attention had moved from the passed-out man on the street to him.

On the way home that day, I imagined having a drink of cold sake with the yakuza man. I wondered what he would have said about me taking a picture of my dying father in the hospital, plugged into all those tubes and the urinary drainage bag. “There’s a photograph to take, and there’s a photograph not to take. Which one do you think this is?”

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This text originally appeared in Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Aperture, 2021).

Collapsing Time in the Swedish Countryside

Photography is notable both for its ability to objectively witness, and, paradoxically, for its access to the surreal. Something beyond our control can happen after the lens closes. It might be a light leak, movement recorded as blur, some shadow unaccounted for. History is similarly ambivalent, an uneasy conglomerate of fiction and testimony, which often employs photography in staking its claims. It is precisely in the overlap between these two murky territories that Maja Daniels, a Swedish photographer based in London and Gothenburg, begins her work.

Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2019 Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2019

To Daniels, the past is just as fictitious as the future. She leans into the all-too-human penchant for mythmaking and fantasy, our desire for saints and sorcerers and false closures. What becomes apparent is that history is a patchwork of stories and images, a condition that does not make it any less real. She looks for strangeness in what’s already there: “I take that something that must be in the water, and I run with it,” she told me recently.

One weird fish swimming upstream was Tenn Lars Persson, a mystic and photographer, whose early twentieth-century pictures of the Älvdalen region of Daniels’s grandparents have found a place among her own. They appear first, in her book, Elf Dalia (2019), clearly juxtaposed in dialogue, but also in her work as it has developed since. The photographs increasingly form a kind of synthesis; it becomes more and more difficult, and, perhaps, irrelevant, to say which belong to whom. Another example is Gertrud Svensdotter, a twelve-year-old girl, also in Älvdalen, who was thought to have walked on water in 1668, an event that ignited the Swedish witch hunts. Can we see in Daniels’s depictions of knobbly trees and people, shielding their eyes from the sun, some of the same magic and mystery that Persson portrayed a hundred years before? And in other little Älvdalen girls, a similar magnetic pull as Gertrud’s?

Tenn Lars Persson, Älvdalen (1878–1938)
Courtesy Elfdalens Hembygdsförening (EHF)

Every one of Daniels’s photographs is something of a mystery. Subjects often turn their backs to her lens, or appear without the sort of context that might give us an idea of their purpose or location. An animal in a forest or in a child’s embrace; a collection of feathers held up against the light; a bonfire. About these individual images, we still have to ask what, who, where, why, but we can also expect the answers to refer, more or less, to the world as we know it. The greater mystery is in the space between them; how Daniels arranges her motifs to become part of a story.

Take the picture of a dragonfly on a tree stump, Persson’s one of three women and a child seen from a distance in a pine forest, and that of a green-haired, dog-eared figure, facing away. Look at those pictures all together, spaces included, and ask what the logic of the assemblage is. You’d be hard pressed to answer. Yet in trying to make sense of these fragments of narrative, the possibility of a whole other constructed world, another time opens up. We get the recipe for mythmaking, but without losing the allure of the myth itself.

Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2020Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2019Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2019Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2021Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2021. All photographs from the series On the Silence of Myth
Courtesy the artist

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking,” under the title “On the Silence of Myth.”

A Photographer’s Search for Acceptance in the Landscapes of Ohio

In 2002, when he was living in rural Ohio, Blake Jacobsen convinced his hairdresser mom to give him highlights. He had been watching the first season of the new singing competition show American Idol and found himself captivated by Kelly Clarkson. Kelly had highlights, so Jacobsen wanted them as well. His mom dutifully helped him actualize his vision, much like she would help color and style his hair for other looks he became fascinated with—there was a period during fourth grade when he became the living embodiment of Ash Ketchum.

“She really would bleach my hair or dye it crazy colors, which was super taboo for boys my age where I’m from,” Jacobsen said recently of those early years. “But then, when I got older, she started to impose her own sort of rigid expectations.”

The title of the twenty-nine-year-old’s latest body of work is built, in part, around that ritualistic experience: taking care of roots. The name at once refers to the process of tending to undyed hair roots, or treating them with other harsh chemicals, as well as to the roots from which you came: your family and home. “The duality between love and care and harm and violence is really rich territory for me,” Jacobsen says.

Blake Jacobsen, Taking care of Mimi’s roots, 2021

Shown as the thesis project for his masters of fine arts in photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, taking care of roots includes a chapter titled buzzcuts, baptisms, and bleach: notes on gender and beauty in the bible belt. This subseries features photographs of Jacobsen’s mother doing his hair as well as the hair of various family members like his grandmother. The images swirl with the themes Jacobsen often engages with: working-class labor, gender expression, sexuality, religion, family, and community.

Here, his mother is both a conduit and gatekeeper of Jacobsen’s gender presentation while cutting his hair. There, she baptizes his grandmother Mimi in the kitchen sink, the depiction of a routine hair washing charged with tension: Mimi seems to brace herself as her daughter cradles her head. Elsewhere, Jacobsen and his mother swap tools of their respective trades, with him poised to cut his hair while she operates the camera’s cable release.

“When I first started this project that involved my mother, it was very intimidating,” he recalls. He points to the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier that features her mother, like the series The Notion of Family (2001–14), as inspiration. He was “forcing this dialogue to happen, and there was an awareness that certain truths may be revealed that I had been avoiding, and that was also why I wanted to do it. But it was hard.” Those truths included Jacobsen’s own sexuality.

Buzzcuts, baptisms, and bleach also includes landscapes that document the Ohio countryside. Jacobsen’s intent was to imbue the genre of landscape photography with a queer subjectivity. This materialized in work like Out of the closet and into the barn (2019), a black-and-white scene of a barn and farmland, which Jacobsen has imagined as a possible locale for cruising—a site of potential discreet homoerotic activity. In other lush, full-bleed color images, Jacobsen puts his own queer body into these same, often unforgiving, environments.

Blake Jacobsen, Out of the closet and into the barn, 2019

“Those two parallels have been there since the start,” he says of the inclusion of self-portraiture alongside landscape photography. “The awareness that photography could be used as a tool to represent myself or create a visibility for myself, along with photography’s ability to document a place or landscape.”

In 2009, at the age of sixteen, that meant shooting portraits of the landscape by day on a cross-country trip from Florida to Alaska and running off to secretly shoot self-portraits in area parks during the evening. Jacobsen published many of those self-portraits on platforms such as a fashion blog that he ran called The Style Manual and his Lookbook.nu profile, where he racked up more than thirteen thousand fans over several years. But now, those parallels have crystalized into this body of work that tackles specific questions: How do you belong somewhere that doesn’t accept you? How do you appreciate a landscape that doesn’t welcome you? These are questions that Jacobsen ultimately finds himself confronting as he wrestles with his hometown and family being at the center of a gravitational pull, despite the ongoing pain emanating from those very sources.

Throughout taking care of roots, Jacobsen also digs deeper into his family and the fraught relationships battered by migration, trauma, and tropes of masculinity. In Learning to carry weight (2020), his nephew Hudson attempts to pick up a jug of water. The photograph becomes a portrayal of “how masculinity and, specifically, toxic masculinity is being projected onto him through the way he’s fashioned, through the way that he carries himself, and through the weight that he’s decided to carry,” Jacobsen says. In another image, a version of that masculinity is represented as an American-made pickup truck, left rusted and decaying, having been taken over by nature.

In what Jacobsen calls one of the more powerful images of the series, Hudson crawls through a hole in a door that’s been kicked in by his father, Jacobsen’s brother. The family dog had chewed away at the jagged edges of the splintered wood. “It becomes, in a way, a portrait of my brother.”

Blake Jacobsen, Learning to carry weight, 2020Blake Jacobsen, In your image, 2020 Blake Jacobsen, Wombs and Wounds, 2020 Blake Jacobsen, Migrant Son, 2020 Blake Jacobsen, Relics of Adolescence, 2020 Blake Jacobsen, Crucifix, 2020
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.’s Uncanny Inner Worlds

The photographer Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. makes imagery that is weird, obscure, ambiguous, and freaky, packed with impossible, hard-to-decipher elements that never betray any simple or obvious meaning. His titles are cryptic, often splitting the difference between punchy non sequiturs and deeply felt but emotionally abstract poetry—information that only gets more puzzling when you learn that Brown writes them in reference to part of the overall picture. His subjects, who are without exception Black men and women, are often out of frame, subtly distorted, or caught in the cross fire of competing optical illusions. In the rare instances when they face Brown’s camera directly, their features are lit up with campfire-story menace or bolts of neon light, their expressions halfway between a belly laugh and a masklike grimace.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Slowly, surely (after Jill), 2020 Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., A well commanded army tucked at the corners of his lips, 2019

Inspired by Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson, Brown’s early work riffed on the idea of the domestic realm as a private theater of unguarded Black humanity, posing his friends and family in casual scenes heavy on themes of desire and intimacy. In subsequent years, Brown internalized his heroines’ ambiguity (Simpson), drama (Weems), and boldness (Lawson), while veering away from literal living spaces into much odder kinds of interiority, ditching straightforward representation or easily nameable emotions in the process.

His recent work is more intuitive, informed by the contrived-casual body language on Instagram, notes and sketches on his iPhone, and the practicalities of photographing. Brown occasionally finds inspiration closer to home. Holes in the plastic lattice weave of his kitchen chair led to the unusual shot-from-below composition of I want to impress leaves on paper with colors they could only know there, where cherries blossom in jacaranda blue (2020). The portrait depicts two men embracing at a table. In the foreground, a hazy fist is either clutching or punching the viewer while what looks like a child’s homework assignment and sixth-birthday candle are taped to the wall beside it. On closer observation, you realize that the “wall” is the underside of the table, the punch is actually holding them steady, and the embrace is both sweeter and stickier than at first appearance.

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Brown’s subjects’ inner worlds are as elliptical and compelling as an M. C. Escher staircase, with an internal logic built up more from fiction than depiction. In breaking from the familiar, the artist has front-loaded his images with uncanny details that are striking and confounding: skin crawling textures, poisonously bright colors. In the tradition of Hitchcock, much of the suspense found in Brown’s photography comes from what he withholds from the frame. We seek the answers to the riddles: Why does he photograph from those angles? What are the reactions on his models’ faces? Where in the flurry of impressions should we direct our focus?

In a 2020 interview with W, Brown explained, “Working with the margins at first grew out of a political positioning, recognizing that the margin is an important way to read the center. And what’s held at the margin—there’s a lot of power there . . . tucking things into the margins of the photograph allows me to indicate that there is something beyond the focus, or the purported focus.” By keeping his viewer looking on from the furthest ends of the margins, Brown creates a vision of Black subjectivity that is infinitely definable, drawing the viewer’s attention past more obvious emotional and political dimensions to the most fraught and unresolvable states of what it means to be human.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Dish soap in the jacuzzi , 2020 Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., 2021 Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Slow want, 2020 Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Fallen out of responsibility with myself, she was born into something that could receive her, 2020
All photographs courtesy the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking,” under the title “Where Cherries Blossom.”

A Photographer’s Unseen Archive of the Hawaiian Renaissance

What to do with a photographic archive that can’t be viewed? This sounds like the premise of a Jorge Luis Borges short story, but the question haunts the half-century of photography taken by Franco Salmoiraghi, the Illinois-born photographer who has documented life and art in Hawaii since he moved to the islands in 1968. Because the Hawaiian Renaissance from the 1960s to the 2000s saw a flourishing of Native Hawaiian, or Kanaka Maoli, art and cultural practices, his black-and-white images—usually taken with a medium-format camera, or one of several Leicas—document the rebirth of interest in music, dance, navigation, food, and other traditional ways of life termed aloha ʻāina. Next year, his image of Hawaiian kuma hula (hula master) Edith Kanakaʻole will circulate widely, having been chosen to appear on a new US quarter.

Franco Salmoiraghi, Aunty Edith Kanaka‘ole chanting in the koa forest of Kipuka Puaulu in Volcano National Park, Hawai‘i, 1976

Some of what Salmoiraghi has been invited to document by the Native Hawaiian community has been sacred: burial sites, makahiki (annual religious celebrations), and cultural practices conducted both at protests and in private. For this reason, some of his best-known work can be seen, at his request, only through collaboration with Hawaii’s community of Kanaka Maoli activists, scholars, and curators. A recent exhibitionat the Honolulu bookstore Arts & Letters Nu‘uanu, titled I Ola Kanaloa! I Ola Kākou! Photographs of Kaho‘olawe, 1976–1987, documents trips Salmoiraghi made to the island of Kaho’olawe during the peak of the Hawaiian Renaissance in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It featured eleven archival photographs and a dozen contemporary reprints selected in collaboration with Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana, the grassroots group of Native Hawaiian aloha ʻāina activists that cares for the island.

Franco Salmoiraghi, Hiking 1,800 feet above Hi‘ilawe Falls in Waipi‘o Valley, Hawai‘i Island, 1976Franco Salmoiraghi, Planning an exploration of the island of Kaho‘olawe on foot, 1979

Salmoiraghi moved to Hawaii on an invitation from the University of Hawaii to teach darkroom photography in 1968, after studying photojournalism at Southern Illinois University and earning an MFA in photography in Athens, Ohio. His aunt and uncle had once sent his family a postcard from Waikiki, and he remembers having seen The Don Ho Show, but he’d never previously visited the state. Immediately upon his arrival over winter break, the state’s archaeology department asked him to photograph sites along a long road being constructed from Waimea to Kailua-Kona. Officials air-dropped him in a remote lava field, amid ancient stone houses that were later destroyed.

In an archive of half a million negatives, Salmoiraghi eschews easy romanticism for a look at the cultural contradictions of life and landscapes in America’s newest state. 

Throughout the 1970s, a period of extensive commercial development in Hawaii, the Hawaiian state hired Salmoiraghi to document historic sites on the islands. Later, the Native Hawaiian community invited him to photograph land-back protests (starting with Waipiʻo Valley in 1974) and religious ceremonies. Over coffee at Fendu café in his neighborhood of Manoa, he recently described to me his subjects as places “you cannot buy your way in. There is no price. Like fate dropping me off in that helicopter for a week on that lava field.” His gelatin-silver prints of Hawaiian people and landscapes evoke aspects of the lucid magic of the photographer Peter Henry Emerson; Salmoiraghi himself references Cartier-Bresson. “I like to print full frame, no cropping, some spotting,” he says.

Franco Salmoiraghi, US Navy Marine helicopters landing to remove a group of PKO members visiting Kaho‘olawe, 1976Franco Salmoiraghi, Entering Diamond Head crater tunnel for the Sunshine Music Festival, 1970Franco Salmoiraghi, Laupae kalo loi in Waipi‘o Valley on Hawai‘i Island, 1974

In an archive of half a million negatives, he eschews easy romanticism for a look at the cultural contradictions of life and landscapes in America’s newest state. One sees derelict industrial sugar mills and historic sites, vast fields of taro and native flowers that feel lit from within with metaphoric meaning, and portraits of families who have lived on the land behind them forever. Others photographing and filming the Hawaiian Renaissance include Phil Spalding, Ed Greevy, and Francis Haar. Of this group, Salmoiraghi’s prints have perhaps the most deft and uncanny touch.

His Kaho‘olawe images, for instance, tell the story of the struggle for land and self-determination. The island was repeatedly bombed by the US military, and its use as target practice rendered it inaccessible and dotted with unexploded mines. Letters on display at Arts & Letters Nu‘uanu, between the activist George Helm, Salmoiraghi, and the Navy, document the process of the group of activists obtaining permission from the US military to conduct cultural ceremonies on the island. The group of Native Hawaiian aloha ‘aina leaders, including Noa Emmett Aluli, Walter Ritte, and Aunty Emma DeFries, was eventually able to do them in the presence of the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel. In the photographs, the activists look ragtag with their shag haircuts, guitars, cutoff shorts, and kalo cookouts. The prints, on warm Agfa paper, render cultural protest both quotidian and glowing. As a result of these interventions, the Navy stopped the bombings in 1990; in 2003, the US military returned the island to the state of Hawaii. Today, as the Navy’s pollution of urban Honolulu’s major aquifer from ongoing leakage of the once-secret Red Hill military fuel-storage facility is under scrutiny, the exhibition of the PKO protests at Kaho’olawe was a timely reminder of a recent past when protest changed the fate of the land. 

Franco Salmoiraghi, Wao Kele o Puna protest on Hawai‘i Island, 1989Franco Salmoiraghi, Uncle Harry Kunihi Mitchell, mentor to the PKO, sings “Mele o Kaho’olawe,” a song he wrote for the island, 1979

What viewers cannot see are images that the Native community deems sacred. One, which Salmoiraghi described to me, shows a man “chanting [another man] into invisibility,” as the photographer put it. In another set of photographs deemed kapu, or taboo, women beat kapa, or mulberry paper. The collaborative discussion initiated by Salmoiraghi with members of PKO about what may and may not be shown adds to the contemporary interest of exhibitions of his historical work. Salmoiraghi cites several “five-hour meetings” leading to the selection of the images. “There is a tremendous amount of protocol in the Hawaiian culture,” he says. The Kanaka Maoli curator Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick, who helped organize the exhibition, adds, “Some of the moments Franco witnessed and recorded are appropriate for public display and some are not. Knowing the difference is how we demonstrate our understanding and sense of responsibility.”

Franco Salmoiraghi, Orange Heliconia flower with leaves, 1991
All photographs courtesy the artist Franco Salmoiraghi, Art and his apprentice, 1991

Salmoiraghi’s negatives are contact printed, and in his vast archive, images of the sacred mix with ones that might reasonably be shown, complicating the very act of preserving his life’s work. What can and can’t be shown also changes over time, with photographs that were once carried or widely shown on the sides of trucks at protests in the 1970s retroactively considered kapu by the community today. The dangers are not only in showing what was never meant to be seen, or seen only by certain groups. “My grandsons are part Hawaiian. I have a lot of feeling for them,” says Salmoiraghi. He would like to preserve the archive, he adds, decades into the future for Hawaiians to see what happened during the 1970s and ’80s, in part because he fears the commercial exploitation of sacred images on merchandise that target tourists. His archive is in constant conversation with contemporary notions of the sacred and the unseeable—and its preservation is essential.

“Photography is about stories,” Salmoiraghi says. “Even if you come home without a photograph, you lose your film, for example, you still have that experience. This is what my whole life in photography has been about.”

In Iran, Death Has a Face

During the heady days of the Arab Spring in early 2011, we were celebrating a low-key Persian New Year in Tehran, transfixed by scenes on television of the protests across Muslim countries. A year earlier, out of fear of violence, we had abandoned our own protests in Iran, which were triggered by the disputed presidential elections that brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to his second term in 2009. So we watched in wonder as people in Arab-speaking nations, from Tunisia to Syria, took to the streets, and when they seemed so close to their goal of achieving democracy—which we have been regularly trying for in the past hundred years—a sense of jealousy set in. Yet, all the time, the number of dead increased in Egypt, and especially in Syria, where the uprising would soon be followed by outright war.

I asked a Colombian friend and journalist who has covered Iraq and Syria why we Iranians retreated after some two hundred people died in our protests, but Syrians would still go out despite reports of thousands of deaths. What makes them go on? She had an interesting take: “Every time a protester is killed, Iranians immediately circulate their photograph. They very quickly turn a number into a face, a person.”

Amin Yousefi, Martyrs Admiral Mahmoud Reza Koosha and Amir Mohammad Reza Safaei, Sayad Shirzi Highway, Tehran, 2021

In Iran, death has a face. Our mourning rituals are now influenced by photography and the digital technology that can transmit images in all sorts of media, including setting the dead person’s photo in stone. When you step outside in Iran, you literally walk on the memory of the dead: almost every street and highway is named after martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War or the lost heroes of the Islamic Republic, an ideological system that thrives on memorialization of martyrdom through huge murals, posters, billboards, stamps. Any flat surface that can be seen.

Death is a big event for Iranians, marked with obligatory rituals that last for an intense seven days, peaking on the third, and later repeating at day forty and the one-year anniversary. The rituals are accompanied by printed notices that are posted around the deceased’s neighborhood and placed in the rear windscreen of relatives’ cars. A picture of the deceased is set in the center of the notice amid decorative margins, with a brief eulogizing text and details about the time and place of mourning.

Amin Yousefi, Death notice, Mohammad Shahr, Karaj, Iran, 2021

The rules of modesty imposed in Islam are upheld beyond this earthly life, so no photographs of dead women can be displayed on their death notices. Instead, they are generically represented by a block print–style representation of a flower in black or recently with a color photograph of an actual flower. Once traveling through Qom, a desert city of seminaries where the guardians of faith and fortune in the country congregate, I saw a death notice for a woman that was adorned rather eerily with the shape of a magna’e, the wimple-style hijab women are required to wear to access universities and government offices. The flat, white void in the middle of a rigid, black bell shape was a genius of contradiction, effacement rendered in eye-catching graphics. Sometimes the families of a departed woman don’t bother with the visual metaphors that are meant to soften this last blow of censorship and instead dive straight into the text. While the portraits of men gazing at the living—fixed, suspended in a different time, visually present for the duration of the funeral—help remind mourners of what they looked like when they lived, the women disappear as soon as they die.

Amin Yousefi, Laserprint headstones, Emamzadeh Taher, Karaj, Iran, 2021Amin Yousefi, Headstone, Bagh-e Rezvan Cemetery, Isfahan, Iran, 2021

Until a few years ago, headstones were embellished with poetry in fine calligraphy. These days, walk into any cemetery in Iran and you are likely to stand among rows and rows of faces, etched in white onto black marble, creating a collage like a giant monochrome yearbook. Many of these images are of women, some lifted from photographs of them in private moments when they were not observing the enforced rules of hijab. This new fashion in memorializing the dead so violently contradicts the decree on the representation of women that some local authorities are covering the images with white paint or trying to ban the practice altogether. But on the dusty road outside Tehran’s main cemetery, rows of stone masons’ shops display these eye-catching new forms of art to draw new customers in. How did this trend take hold in a country that likes to hide its women from view?

Amin Yousefi, Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran, 2021 Amin Yousefi, Martyr, Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran, 2021

The answer may lie in the cemetery itself. A large section of Behesht-e Zahra, or Zahra’s Paradise, the sprawling cemetery south of Tehran and the country’s largest, is dedicated to the dead of the Iran-Iraq War, the eight-year conflict that began in 1980 soon after Iran convulsed into a revolution that put an end to secular rule. The official count of the dead varies from hundreds of thousands to a million. This section of the cemetery is packed with graves. Almost all are decorated with some kind of photograph. Some have a glass box that contains personal and military paraphernalia and resemble small shrines; some of their photographs show the soldier dead. In keeping with the main cemetery in the capital, every small cemetery across Iran has a martyrs’ plot, where regimented rows of graves feature enlarged headshots set in metal vitrines. These figures all have that vacant look common to passport photography.

Visuals of death became a staple of life in Iran. People became used to seeing banners and posters of those who died in the war.

Iranian news photography was invigorated by the revolution, but it was the war with Iraq that birthed the genre of war photography in the country. The Islamic Republic has never shied from depicting death in its full gory detail. Unlike the depiction in the West of soldiers as untiring warriors, Iran’s memorialization of the war relied heavily on the demise of the soldiers. Their martyrdom, echoing the martyrdom of Imam Hossein who is beloved by Shia Muslims, is a badge of honor that secures entry to heaven. Such idolatry of death brought the Iranian public face to face with disturbing and graphic scenes that would be censored in other cultures. Visuals of death became a staple of life in Iran. People became used to seeing banners and posters of those who died in the war. State television produced documentaries of the front, beaming images of the war into Iranian homes at peak hours. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s burial was a widely televised affair, as one would expect, but his death, on his hospital bed, complete with a ticking clock and the flatline on the cardiogram, was also recorded for posterity.

Amin Yousefi, Laserprint headstone, Emamzadeh Taher, Karaj, Iran, 2021Amin Yousefi, Child’s headstone, Bagh-e Rezvan Cemetery, Isfahan, Iran, 2021

The printing press brought us paper death notices. The new technology of laser-engraving digital images onto stone would seem a natural evolution and may be the reason for this new enthusiasm for picturing the dead on headstones. The practice exists in Russia, as seen in the works of Denis Tarasov, who has collected a series of similar engravings. Marina Abramović’s Seven Deaths (2021) also uses the same technique to transfer imaginary death portraits of herself onto alabaster, referencing this headstone art. Depicting dead people, of course, is not a new phenomenon. As Egypt’s mummy portraits, the full-scale statues that wealthy medieval Europeans commissioned to rest on top of their tombs, and Victorian-era postmortem photography demonstrate, the impulse to preserve an image of the dead is an enduring one. There is a difference, however, in this new Iranian trend. The photos engraved on these headstones capture a moment of life and set them literally in stone: a young man is shown with his boxing gloves, a business man with his briefcase, an elderly couple stands close to each other. We endlessly record every moment of our living lives on our phones, so this last grand photographic gesture for our dead seems like a fitting substitute for the complex and costly mourning rituals that had to be cancelled as COVID-19 swept mercilessly across Iran.

Amin Yousefi, Death notice, Mohammad Shahr, Karaj, Iran, 2021
All photographs for Aperture. Courtesy the artist

Beyond the cemetery, new death rituals are emerging with the help of photography. Iranians have an established tradition to publicly express their condolences by hanging cloth banners, with messages of respect made by professional calligraphers, on the walls of a house, alerting the neighborhood that the household was in mourning. The minimal handwritten banners have now transformed into digital banners with extra color and decorations. But we have gone one step further. Nowadays mourning families order advertising banners, with an enlarged photograph of their dead relative, which they affix to lampposts on the main street, replicating the posters and banners with images of the war dead that proliferate the country’s public spaces. Instead of the lofty poetry of the gravestones, or the propaganda of the war, these banners have short everyday messages for passersby, like one I recently saw of a young man who had turned to wave back at the camera as he was walking away. The banner read, “Goodbye friends, bless my soul.”