Aperture's Blog, page 4

June 24, 2025

Inside Rosalind Fox Solomon’s New York Studio

This article originally appeared in Aperture, Spring 2023, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” under the column Studio Visit.

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s home and studio are on an upper floor of an eight-story former commercial building in the NoHo Historic District of New York. Completed in 1893 and named by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1999, it was designed by the German American architect Alfred Zucker at a time when the area’s Federal-style mansions were being replaced by high-rise structures.

Fox Solomon has lived and worked inside Zucker’s iron, granite, and terra-cotta building on Broadway since 1984. Her loft is a treasury for a nomadic life spent traveling around the world taking photographs of people—meeting them where they live. For more than fifty-five years, she has built an affecting body of images attentive to the human condition, probing its vulnerability and struggles, scrutinizing the pleasures and toxicities that define us. “What I was interested in was psychological . . . what was going on inside people,” Fox Solomon told me.

Entering for a recent visit, I’m greeted by the photographer’s cat, Little Lady Lola, and immediately encounter a large sculpture, of human height, created by the artist in 1980. Titled Adios, the piece (something of an homage to her divorce around that date) is based on tombs in Peru. “I really loved working there,” Fox Solomon says. “At that time, people came to mountain climb; otherwise there weren’t any tourists. It was kind of untouched.” Fox Solomon has traveled extensively throughout the United States, as well as to remote places in Asia and Latin America. The studio’s walls are filled with her own images, interspersed with art and objects collected on the many trips. Portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron and Richard Avedon—of John Szarkowski—also adorn the walls.

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Born in a Chicago suburb in 1930, Fox Solomon began photographing with an Instamatic camera at the age of thirty-eight while living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her then husband and two children. While participating in a cultural exchange program called the Experiment in International Living, she cultivated an interest in travel and photography. On a visit to New York, she was introduced to Lisette Model, the legendary Austrian-born American artist who helped redefine street photography. In 1974, Fox Solomon began studying privately with Model, continuing until 1976. A mere decade later, the Museum of Modern Art organized Rosalind Solomon: Ritual, an exhibition of thirty-four pictures made between 1975 and 1985.

Her photographs complicate and layer meaning, challenging viewers to go beyond familiar narratives. Early examples taken in the 1970s pointedly capture the legally desegregated but still racially divided American South, a place Fox Solomon would photograph into the 1990s. A collection of these images is featured in the book Liberty Theater (2018), named after one of the last cinemas in Chattanooga to remain segregated. Abroad, Fox Solomon made photographs that depict cultures and locations amid political strife—violent terrorism in Peru, apartheid in South Africa, ethnic violence in Northern Ireland—but that move beyond conventional documentary description to work that is suggestive of her relationship with her subjects. “I don’t like to talk too much to people when I’m photographing because I’m interested in reaching the interior. I don’t want them to be functioning on a superficial level,” she says.

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At ninety-two, Fox Solomon shows no signs of slowing down. Her groundbreaking and intimate project Portraits in the Time of AIDS (1987–88), first exhibited at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, three blocks from her apartment, was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art. Last year’s edition of Paris Photo included a solo exhibition, organized by MUUS Collection, of Fox Solomon’s early series from the 1970s portraying scenes at a flea market in Scottsboro, Alabama. She is currently focused on a new book due out this year. “I’m enjoying having my work get out the way it’s been getting out,” she says. “It’s exciting to have all this going on at my age. I’m really fortunate to have lived to see this recognition. It’s kind of beyond belief.”

All photographs Rosalind Fox Solomon home studio, New York, October 2022
Photographs by Jason Nocito for Aperture

Never one to photograph commercially, and rarely on commission, Fox Solomon has had a prolific career that includes more than thirty solo exhibitions and a hundred group shows; her work is held in prominent museum collections worldwide. Even decades after she photographed them, Fox Solomon’s remarkable pictures continue to hold their power. They are as much about the subjects and how they see themselves as they are about how we see and understand the subjects. Her particular method of portraiture urges us to examine people and our preconceptions more carefully.

“If I had the courage, today I would go photograph people on the extreme right. That’s what I would be attracted to doing,” says Fox Solomon. “And probably I could do it because I’m old and nobody would think of me as dangerous. That was how I did a lot of my work. Because I was always older and I just don’t think that people were afraid, although I think they could have been.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” Spring 2023.

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Published on June 24, 2025 13:45

June 20, 2025

A Portrait of Creative Community in Ivory Coast

A slinky crease of a jacket, a streetlight lurking in the background, marbles resting in the scoop of a collarbone, flowers forming a shadow on a model’s face. These intense details of light, shape, and form heighten an atmosphere of crepuscular intimacy in the brooding and buoyant images of Nuits Balnéaires, a photographer, musician, filmmaker, poet, and set designer based in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast.

Nuits Balnéaires’s interest in photography can be traced back to some high school modeling he did casually for friends. “In that age, it was the boom of Facebook,” he told me recently. “It was all about doing cool photos for social media.” When his mother came back from a trip with a compact Sony camera, he began to make his own pictures. This eventually led him to the fashion industry—magazines, advertising, brand photography, as well as deep admiration for the know-how of local artists and designers in Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, and Dakar. “It was a great environment to learn,” he said. “But at some point, I had that need to focus on more personal stories.”

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After moving in 2019 from his former home in Abidjan (Ivory Coast’s de facto capital) to a new-to-him scene in the small, historic town of Grand-Bassam, Nuits Balnéaires was renewed by nature. His embrace of landscape is evident in depictions of soft water bathed in twilight. After all, the moniker Nuits Balnéaires translates to “seaside nights” in English and is also meant to provoke what he refers to as an “idea of nostalgia, this melancholy of the Gulf of Guinea, this strong relationship to memory.”

In Grand-Bassam, he created a meditative series called Scent of Appolonia (2021), in which he pays homage to the land of the N’zima Kôtôkô people, an ethnic group of southwestern Ghana and southeastern Ivory Coast. “I was very interested about the link between those territories and the resilience and the sustainability of this whole culture, despite the borders that we inherited from the colonial era,” he explained. “These people still coexist, still share things, even if they exist in those two lands and are separated by these borders.”

Nuits Balnéaires, from Dreaming, Ivory Coast, 2020

Nuits Balnéaires’s interventions, then, mark a wider community. His subjects include friends, professional models, and family. “I work a lot with my sister, who is definitely my main muse,” he said. Another series stems from a partnership with a curatorial platform, Yua Hair, which focuses on textured hair in Africa and the African diaspora. These exquisitely staged photographs take their inspiration from 1960s and 1970s West African studio portraiture, where self-fashioning was understood as a political act within Africa’s postcolonial cultures. A relentless respect for fashion, tailoring, jewelry, craft, and aesthetics are, to Nuits Balnéaires, “a way to really reclaim that identity which is strongly African, but also with a lightness that equals an openness to the world, to this contemporary world, to this global world in which we exist today.”

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While Nuits Balnéaires’s crisp and ecstatic images suggest an homage to iconic West African photographic practices, they also attempt to forge ahead, naming and creating a contemporary culture that is specific to his community in Ivory Coast but encouraged by friends in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Europe, and the United States. “I feel like I’ve been so nourished and built up by the space I come from and its people,” he said with pride. “I think I’ve been lucky.”

Nuits Balnéaires, from Infinite Stories for Yua Hair, 2024

Nuits Balnéaires, Keren Lasme et Noella Elloh, Ivory Coast, 2018

Nuits Balnéaires, Guy Martial, Ivory Coast, 2018

Nuits Balnéaires, from Infinite Stories for Yua Hair, 2024

Nuits Balnéaires, La Fleur D’Appolonie (Scent of Appolonia), 2021
All photographs courtesy the artist

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads.”

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Published on June 20, 2025 11:00

June 14, 2025

Melina Matsoukas Creates Space for Black Stories in Hollywood and Beyond

Melina Matsoukas has made a lasting mark on visual culture as the director of unforgettable music videos—among them Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and Beyoncé’s “Formation”—and the 2019 feature film Queen & Slim, which bends the romance outlaw genre into an utterly contemporary meditation on police brutality and Black love.

In some ways, though, it feels like Matsoukas is just getting started. The Los Angeles–based polymath is currently developing a flurry of passion projects (the only projects she does), among them adapting a legendary female mobster’s life for the screen and documenting her own experience as a new mother. On top of everything, Matsoukas also runs De La Revolución, a bicoastal collective of photographers and directors that she founded in 2021 as an alternative to exploitative models of inclusion in the creative sphere.

Solange Knowles, the singer-songwriter, recently sat down with Matsoukas for the “Barbara Walters treatment,” interviewing her friend and collaborator about her expansive image making across the fields of photography, music, television, commercials, and film.

Andre D. Wagner, for Melina Matsoukas’s “Precious Cargo” campaign, Levi’s, 2023

Ming Smith, Sun Ra, Space II, New York, 1978
Courtesy the artist

Solange Knowles: One of the powerful things about an image is that it lives far beyond us, forever. At what age did you understand the gravity of image making?

Melina Matsoukas: I was raised by freedom fighters. My parents were part of a socialist movement called the Progressive Labor Party, and I was raised to create change and incite dialogue, to challenge the status quo and how people think. I always felt like I had this purpose to do these things and honor my family and the people that empowered me. I just didn’t know what the tool or medium would be to do that.

In high school, I started dabbling in photography. My father was an amateur photographer, and he introduced me to the power of the lens and the idea of documentation and what that can do as a tool in the revolution. And then, when I got to college—I went to New York University—I really started understanding the reach and the scope and the conversation and the story you could create with the photograph, and understanding the power of filmmaking to reach the world and to give voice to the unheard, to document communities that we don’t necessarily see all the time, and use that power to unify people. That felt like my purpose.

Knowles: I love this origin story. I didn’t know your father was an amateur photographer.

Matsoukas: He’s going through all his slides now, thousands of slides of our family and friends, and just our lives. It’s so beautiful to have that archive.

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Knowles: I think a lot about the photographs that you took in Cuba in 2001 and how personal and intimate and special they are, and the gravity they hold. Although, obviously, your style has evolved and changed, I still see the loving, tender, and attentive gaze of how you see Black women—and have always seen Black women—in those images, celebrating their strength and vulnerability, but also allowing them to just be. I wonder how your adult self sees those images.

Matsoukas: NYU had a summer exchange program where I went to Cuba and studied photography for a summer. That was actually my first time in Cuba, my first time returning to my mother’s homeland. It was an incredible experience to be able to take that camera and have the courage to photograph people—and learning how to do that and thinking of Ming Smith and Gordon Parks and Anthony Barboza, all these people who have documented our history. I remember being shy, and not wanting to essentially steal these images of people without asking permission. But then, it’s a hard dance to play. You ask permission and then people start posing, and that’s not necessarily what you want. Anyway, I was able to really hone the skill of being a street photographer there.

At the same time, I had this other side of me, and I still do, where I like fashion and celebrating Black women and bodies, and embracing our sexuality and our beauty. One of my main goals in life is to change the idea of what traditional beauty looks like in our culture. I was also able to photograph some of my friends and the people that were on the trip with me, and other Cuban women. I did a series of nudes, I remember.

Knowles: And some pregnant women.

Matsoukas: Yes, that was a friend of mine. When I look back at those pictures, I feel like, Oh, they’re very amateur. It was definitely part of my journey to understand the technicality of how to take a photograph. But there’s a lot of themes in that work that have continued and evolved through my career, which seems pretty evident, in terms of how I look at Black women and try to celebrate them and honor the role that they’ve played in my life and my artistry.

Still from Melina Matsoukas’s music video for Solange Knowles’s “Losing You,” 2012<br />Courtesy the artist

Still from Melina Matsoukas’s music video for Solange Knowles’s “Losing You,” 2012

Courtesy the artist

Knowles: When you talk about the song and dance between the gaze and the lens, and also finding that trust with people to capture them authentically, I often think about our first time—well, second time—working together, which was the video for “Losing You,” and being in South Africa, and us wanting to enter the continent with as much sensitivity as possible. When you pull out the camera, you feel definitely a little shy or hesitant in some ways. But as soon as the cameras came out, the sapeurs came to life. I know from being on the other side of the lens, sometimes the photographer can have all of the technical skills in the world, the best lighting, the best set design, or can capture on an expert level—but if the synergy is not there and I don’t feel comfortable or safe, then my jaw is tight and it’s clenched, and you can see that in the image. Are there any specific skill sets you bring to the experience to have people put their guard down and feel safe with you to capture them at their most vulnerable and authentic?

Matsoukas: I think the key to that, and to my success, is humility and respect for the subject. My job has always been to tell someone else’s story. It’s never to tell my story. I’m trying to document and bring out somebody else’s influences and feelings and values and inspirations. So it never begins or ends with me.

Knowles: I think that you are one of the best commercial directors of our generation, and I know it’s really difficult to find a way to maintain a sense of authenticity and integrity and even spirituality when working with commerce and the idea of selling something. It’s something that I actually have thought a lot about in my practice, because in our creative industries, people sneer or frown upon commercial work, despite the gravity to storytelling and the incredible ways that you can use commercial work to tell stories. That’s something that I’m fascinated by.

What is your approach to commercial work? And how do you choose the projects that you wish to be a part of?

Matsoukas: I was so influenced by pop culture, with MTV and music videos and, honestly, with commercials. I always wanted to start on music videos. In my younger years, I definitely did things just to pay bills. But at one point in my career, I was like, I can’t do this anymore; it’s not worth enough to work on things I’m not passionate about.

So in my commercial work, I try to find brands or stories that I believe in. And with commercial work, the reach is so much greater because of the money behind it. I find that it’s actually a great way to create change. When we talk about changing what the standard of beauty is, that’s created by commercials—commercial advertising and what you see on television and all of that. So in order to be a part of that dialogue, you have to actually enter that dialogue.

I try not to get too product heavy. I hate shooting products, so that’s kind of a deal breaker for me. But I love to tell stories. I made a Levi’s commercial two years ago, in Jamaica. I’m part Jamaican, and they sent me a story of how Levi’s in the ’70s made its way to Jamaica, and these people made it their own, and it was kind of the staple of reggae and dancehall, and the role that denim played in that culture. I felt such closeness to that subject matter and that era and time and that visual language.

Portrait of American fashion model and actress Beverly Johnson, with braided hair, as she poses beside a mirror, New York, 1970s. (Photo by Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)

Anthony Barboza, Portrait of Beverly Johnson, 1970s
Courtesy Getty Images N129_AWA_QueenandSlim-02 001

Andre D. Wagner, Still from Melina Matsoukas, Queen & Slim, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Knowles: I want to use that as a segue into De La Revolución and talk about how you have transitioned not only as a businesswoman and an agency but as a mentor to emerging directors and photographers, and what that day-to-day looks like for you, how that’s changed the way that you approach your own work. Tell us more about that.

Matsoukas: So I did a film called Queen & Slim. I fought really hard to bring in four different photographers to shoot alongside me as I was making that film, to interpret the film in a way that was different than what I was shooting. One of them was Andre Wagner. He’s an amazing, primarily street, photographer. I call him our generation’s Gordon Parks. I also invited the incredibly talented photographer Lelanie Foster, who was there the whole time. She’s my cousin, too, so that helps. She was able to photograph the actors and the behind-the-scenes, and have access in a way that I thought was just so powerful. I brought Awol Erizku there a couple times to take objects from the film that symbolize the story and create still lifes around them.

I loved the idea of this collective coming together to tell one story. I thought back to the Kamoinge Workshop, the Black collective in the ’60s. Anthony Barboza was part of it, Ming Smith, Shawn Walker, Daniel Dawson, Jimmie Mannas, and many others.

In my journey, I’ve gone from photography to music videos, to commercials, to narrative and film, to TV—and they’re all very separated. There’s not a lot of crossover in terms of the people you work with, and the crew. They like to keep it so segregated. I hate that, because obviously there’s incredible crossover. So being a part of this collective during my film inspired me to create a space that actually helps guide directors and photographers in their goals and what they want to achieve.

De La Revolución was born of a time when people were starting to exploit Black artists, and feeling like, Oh, I want to have this person on my roster because they’re Black, and I want them to shoot Black people, but I have no understanding of the culture, I don’t care about who this is profiting, where it’s going, I just want to check a box. I wanted to provide a safe space that felt more like community, a collective of support and empowerment. So that’s why I started De La Revolución over one banner. My mother is from Cuba and was a child of the revolution, so I feel like I’m a child of the revolution in ways that I’ve inherited from her.

I always felt like I had this purpose to do these things and honor my family and the people that empowered me.

Knowles: I’m so proud of you and what you’ve done with. . . would you call it an agency? A studio?

Matsoukas: It’s all of that. Agency, studio, production company, collective, whatever you want it to be. That’s family. That’s who we are.

Knowles: It’s been incredible to watch it unfold. Thinking about Queen & Slim, and the world that you created not only with just the film but with the music and with the style and with the rollout and the stills, what have you learned from that process of world making and the importance of the space that surrounds the film just as much as the film itself?

Matsoukas: That was an incredibly challenging journey, creating the film. I didn’t realize it, because I had never done a film, that the way that you market it is just as important to the success of the film as the film itself. So for me, it actually was a way that I was able to take what I felt my skill set was and bring it all together. Obviously, I started in music, so the music’s going to be really important. The collaborative nature of filmmaking is what I truly enjoy and flourish in, and is one of the reasons I became a filmmaker. So to have all these different, incredible artists involved in the making, but also the rollout, of the film was really important, and it felt important to stay true to the messaging behind the film.

We wanted to make sure our community had access to the film first. So we had a screening at the Underground Museum in LA and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York before it was out, and we focused on Black publications and journalists first before we brought it to the broader audience.

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Knowles: I’m curious how at this stage, after your success with Insecure and The Changeling, you decide on other projects you want to pursue.

Matsoukas: I’m working on a lot of things. I’m developing a film based on Marlon James’s novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which is a story that takes place in ’70s Jamaica and moves to ’80s New York—two periods that are very important to me in my life and my artistry. I’m working on a film on Stephanie St. Clair, who was this West Indian woman who ran Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance and protected it from white mobsters. It’s a gangster flick about this incredible woman who has been erased from history. And I’m working on a TV show on Jack Johnson, who was the first Black heavyweight boxing champion—he’s from Galveston, your place—with HBO. That’s a series. There’s a bunch of other projects that are in the works that I hope will come to fruition in the next couple of years. I’m also working on raising my baby and documenting that journey of motherhood and life.

Knowles: I love seeing you as a mother to Charli, and I’m very excited to see how that will impact and influence your work in your lens as well—because I know that it will.

I had a few other questions. My favorite moment, among my top three Melina moments, was Master of None’s “Thanksgiving” episode. The fact that you created such iconography with one episode.

Matsoukas: I never really wanted to do episodic work because I like to create the world from inception. But Lena Waithe is a very persistent person, and she really wanted me to direct this episode of Master of None, which was a bottle episode about her character coming out as a lesbian to her mother, played by Angela Bassett. The story is told through several Thanksgivings, from childhood to adulthood. Like I say with everybody, “Send me the script or the song or whatever it is, and if I love it, I’ll do it.” And I fell in love with the script.

Photographer unknown, Portrait of Madame Stephanie St. Clair, 1930
Courtesy Bettmann/Getty Images

Knowles: I love that about your work, that no matter what the medium is you have such a distinctive fingerprint. Whether it’s a music video, a film, just one episode, or a photograph, we can quickly identify that it is your language.

My last question is about the power of image making through the lens of Blackness. I feel like there was a renaissance in photography and filmmaking of Black artists, but that renaissance was through the gaze of whiteness and white validation. It’s been really interesting to see this moment in 2020 when everybody was running out to prove that they saw us and that they valued us in one way or another. What do you think the future looks like for Black artists, Black filmmakers, Black photographers in this space? And what would you like to see the world look like and evolve into?

Matsoukas: I feel like there was a renaissance when I was growing up, when there were these beautiful Black films and filmmakers that were actually kind of blacklisted afterward, like Julie Dash, Darnell Martin, Theodore Witcher, and Ernest Dickerson, to name a few. And then, yes, around 2020 or 2019, there was another renaissance for Black film, and a lot of what maybe you can call white guilt about the systemic racism within filmmaking. People were trying to move against it, which was necessary. There was a lot more space for Black stories and for those to be told by Black artists. Now a lot of people are reverting back to their racist ways, and they’re like, We never really felt differently, and now we don’t have that same pressure, and we can go back to excluding Black and people of color from this conversation, and denying access to them. Honestly, this last year has been very difficult, even for me, to get projects made that are about people of color. Many of my projects have been dropped.

I would like to see that change. I would like to see that renaissance not be a renaissance, but just be a standard. I will continue to make room for artists of color involved in filmmaking and stills and image making, period. But I think it’s also about creating that access and us being on the other side of it. I was just talking about working on a film on Stephanie St. Clair, which I had taken to a bunch of people, and nobody was interested in making it until I took it to this Black executive who was looking for a gangster film that centered on a Black woman, and she was very excited about it—and now, we’re developing that together and getting it made. A lot of other people who I have great relationships with just didn’t see the value or the idea that that has appeal to an audience—of any color. So it’s important that we’re on the other side. It’s important that we’re creating our own platforms, so that we’re creating these opportunities, and having ownership on the business and the decision-making side of things, and are on some of these boards. Until that happens, we are relinquishing the power to control our image, which is really upsetting.

Knowles: Well, we look to you.

Matsoukas: Thanks. I mean, I’m going to keep on fighting the good fight. And I will continue standing on the shoulders of many who came before me, who fought that good fight, and be influenced by them and their work, and even stand arm in arm with my fellow comrades, you being one of them, and creating Black art, and archiving it, and creating space for other Black artists, and collaborating with each other. And, also, just being able to be a cheerleader at times and showing that there’s value to our stories and our image, and we need that. That’s what feeds us. And it’s not just us. It’s the world. I feel like, especially as African Americans, our greatest commodity is our culture, and it has been shipped around the world and appropriated, and we need to regain ownership of it. And you are very much a part of that story. One of the things I love most about you is not only your art but your appreciation for our artists and our stories and the idea that we have to own them and own that history and also protect it. That’s what we need to do.

Knowles: Yes. We can end it with the words of the great NeNe Leakes: We see each other!

Matsoukas: Exactly.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads.”

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Published on June 14, 2025 07:02

June 5, 2025

8 Exhibitions to See This Summer

Schadde Brothers Studio Display, sample or trade catalog photograph for the sweet manufacturer Brandle & Smith Co., ca. 1915
Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

American Photography — Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum may have come late to acquiring photography, but in three decades it has amassed a collection of more than two hundred thousand photographs, a fraction of which is on view as part of American Photography, the first comprehensive survey of its kind in Europe. Spanning three centuries, the show corrals marquee names (Sally Mann, Irving Penn, James Van Der Zee) alongside amateur and commercial obscurities in a sprawling visualization, and vivisection, of the American dream. As we know from the Swiss-born Robert Frank, whose epochal The Americans is included in the exhibition, sometimes it takes an outsider to see the place clearly.

American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, through June 9, 2025

Lucia Moholy, Edith Tschichold, Dessau, Germany, 1926
Courtesy collection Fotostiftung Schweiz and © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Lucia Moholy — Winterthur, Switzerland

The Bauhaus existed only from 1919 to 1933, but its ideas transformed modern society—in no small part due to Lucia Moholy, whose legacy was long eclipsed by that of her male peers. As the Bauhaus’s house photographer, Moholy helped define the visual identity of the design school, immortalizing its architecture, objects, and circle in photographs that distill their subjects’ quintessence. She also played a key role in perfecting the photogram technique often solely credited to her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, and, in 1939, published one of the first histories of photography in English. As this current retrospective makes clear, any history of the medium today would be utterly incomplete without her.

Exposures: Lucia Moholy at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, through June 9, 2025

Annegret Soltau, With Myself, 1975/2022
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Annegret Soltau — Frankfurt am Main

For more than six decades, the German artist Annegret Soltau has sought to exceed the strictures of the self through the visceral manipulation of images. Her hallmark is the use of black thread; she stitches representations of her own body and that of other women into photo collages that delve into themes of mother- hood, pregnancy, and aging. Soltau, a product of the feminist movement, is now having her first retrospective—an opportunity for audiences to encounter remarkable multimedia work by an artist decidedly unbound by aesthetic and social conventions.

Uncensored: Annegret Soltau–A Retrospective at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, through August 17, 2025

Wolfgang Tillmans, Pompidou poster study, 2024
Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London

Wolfgang Tillmans — Paris

The name Wolfgang Tillmans more readily evokes nightclubs and day-long raves of the sort he chronicled in the 1990s than the hushed environs of a library. But this summer, the German photographer is taking over the bibliothèque of the Centre Pompidou, which will go dark in September for a five-year renovation. Given carte blanche, the artist will bring together photographs, videos, music, text, and archival material to transform the mostly empty, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot Public Information Library into a node of epistemological inquiry and Tillmans-esque togetherness.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait (Nothing prepared us for it – Everything prepared us for it) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 13–September 22, 2025

Black Style as a Form of Resistance and Joy

MELANIN ABUNDANT. The dark lenses of South African activist Amonge Sinxoto’s Black Vibe Tribe sunglasses obscure her eyes. The message, written on the frames in white block text, speaks for her. Sinxoto’s pride is so uncontainable it bursts through her dermis. Holy Ghost dances on her melanated skin. It’s an offering. We give thanks.

The Kenyan-born, Johannesburg-based Cedric Nzaka (who runs everydaypeoplestories, the popular photography blog) snapped this image of Sinxoto at the 2018 Afropunk music festival in Joburg. By composing the portrait around Sinxoto’s face, Nzaka enunciates the power of Black abundance. It’s in the architectural baby hairs, the Senegalese twists that expand into a low Afro puff ponytail, dainty pearl earrings, and the headdress—designed by the South African hair artist Nikiwe Dlova—that resembles a helmet (it can also be worn as a Zulu-style crown). Dlova’s technique of affixing hair over flexi rods offers a new take on the now-iconic hair-in-rollers aesthetic, elevating it from a pre-style to royal wear. The photograph is simultaneously vintage and futuristic, dainty and militaristic.

Cedric Nzaka, Afro Punk 2018, Constitutional Hill, Johannesburg, South Africa
© the artist P217_SJA_JilSander_018-05 001

Shaniqwa Jarvis, Untitled, 2021
© the artist

It’s the circles. On Sinxoto’s shades, on the headpiece. They offer a Global South Black girl geometry that emanates from the ancestral soil and conjures itself into a way of knowing that is equally artistic and mathematical. A geometry that imagines new theorems for new worlds. A cosmology, flexible like the rods on Sinxoto’s crown, bending and folding time. MELANIN ABUNDANT.

Fashion has never been trivial for people of African descent.
It is an act of personal expression.
A pleasure practice.
A ritual.
A political language.
A tool of resistance.

When I started writing about Black fashion over a decade ago, I was taken with the ways that Black women across the African diaspora incorporated dress into everyday acts of resistance in the 1960s and 1970s. Afros, dashikis, cowrie shells, and head wraps communicated something about their sense of self, pride in their Blackness, and an embodied vision of freedom. In the United States, they wore denim overalls in solidarity with Southern sharecroppers. In South Africa, they sported hot pants and brandished stiletto heels as weapons. In the United Kingdom, they adopted the leather jackets and berets of the US Black Panther Party. I was taken by what I identified as a cycle of pleasure, innovation, and social violence through which Black styles across the diaspora were fortified. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (2015) was the book that emerged from years of research across three continents and a constellation of cities.

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The “movement of movements” that shaped the 1960s represented the pinnacle of fashion activism. Radical activists; entertainers; fashion designers; and young students like my mother, Amye Glover-Ford, battled Jim Crow segregation, apartheid, European colonialism, and the afterlives of slavery. Their clothing became a uniform, armor in the struggle. As I excavated archives across the Black Atlantic, I stumbled upon the work of photographers such as Kwame Brathwaite, Malick Sidibé, James Barnor, Neil Kenlock, and Ming Smith, among many others chronicling this global movement. They used the fast-changing technology of the camera to capture the political imaginations and freedom dreams of young people of African descent, laid bare on garments and accessories.

These photographs served as portals to an era. An era that for Gen Xers like me, was taught in US history classes and conveyed through popular culture as one of seismic social shifts and legislative changes, the likes of which we had never seen before and would never see again. But their rendering of the history was mangled and distorted. In these photographs lay another political reality. An episteme, a way of knowing a Black past through the practice of adornment. These images wrench the words style and fashion from the grips of the Western fashion world, which had proselytized and commodified them by linking them to conspicuous consumption and superficiality.

Nontsikelelo Veleko, Hloni, 2003/2007
Courtesy the artist

Kathleen Cleaver on the cover of Jet, December 1971

Their messages were echoed elsewhere in my emerging Black style archive. In Black magazines—Ebony, Essence, Jet, Sepia, South Africa’s Drum, Flamingo, a West Indian magazine published in the UK—on jazz, soul, and funk album covers; and in memoirs, yearbooks, and personal correspondence. They told of underground African diasporic fashion economies that resisted capitalist impulses, with their own taste cultures, revered designers, tailors and seamstresses, second-hand markets, and politics of the liberated Black body.

I wanted to curate a visual conversation between Black image makers who are remixing, reimagining, and, in some cases, rejecting the aesthetics and political grammars of the 1960s and ’70s soul era.

I engaged in this form of deep study about Black style and its transgressive politics amid the “they sleep, we grind” culture that was social media in the early 2010s, tweeting in 140 characters about my archival finds. Like the rest of the world, I became enamored with posting selfies on Instagram. We were amateur photographers. Playing with aperture and saturation until our self-portraits were soaked with color, so wet they bent reality. Auteurs making filmic shorts for Vine with our smartphones. Bleaching out the edges, blurring, shadowing. Filters as play. A digital visual language.

As 2011 folded into 2015—the year that Liberated Threads was published—my tweets and IG posts became more enraged and furious as a large-scale Movement for Black Lives unfurled around me. Names of Black folks of all genders memorialized on T-shirts, their names linked with the & sign. Hashtags proclaiming #blacklivesmatter, #sayhername, #handsupdontshoot. Viral videos of the Black massive taking to the streets in protest, dancing and screaming to Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 anthem “Alright”: We gon’ be alright / We gon’ be alright / Do you hear me, do you feel me? / We gon’ be alright.

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We were living through an immense social and political uprising to end anti-Black violence in all forms. Suddenly, the book I’d written was not about the past in the ways my teachers had presented it. Liberated Threads was living history. Just like the young people of the 1960s and ’70s used clothing and accessories to define the contours of their movement, chanting “Black Is Beautiful” and “The Revolution Has Come,” folks in the 2010s were too. In the United States, hip-hop fashions (a direct middle finger to “respectability politics”) were garments of choice. Skinny jeans and joggers, hoodies and screen-printed T-shirts, snapback ball caps, Jordans, tattoos and piercings, box braids with Kanekalon hair in the colors of the rainbow, and hoop earrings. A new generation of documentary photographers—including Andre Wagner and Devin Allen—were recording the moment.

It’s a moment we still have not had time to process, to fully understand. A moment that was punctuated in many ways by the pandemic. A calendar of death marking time as we marched into the turbulent 2020s. When latex gloves and face masks became an essential part of our everyday attire. When grind culture was replaced by “soft life” and “rest is resistance.” We were gearing up for an even bigger fight.

Ten years after the publication of Liberated Threads, the world is still on fire. It is time to revisit the concept of style as resistance across Africa and its diaspora.

James Barnor, Sick-Hagemeyer shop assistant with darkroom chemical bottles used as a guide for the colour processing laboratory, Accra, ca. 1970
© the artist and courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière

Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2016
Courtesy the artist

But this is not a typical fashion issue. It does not aim to prove that Black people are stylish, with our own fashion ecosystems. It does not beg for Black people to be seen as beautiful, or human. It’s not a primer on Africana histories. It is a refusal.

I wanted to curate a visual conversation between Black image makers who are remixing, reimagining, and, in some cases, rejecting the aesthetics and political grammars of the 1960s and ’70s soul era. Liz Johnson Artur captures the beautiful clash of high fashion and London street style through the work of designers such as Feben and Mowalola, from Ethiopia and Nigeria, respectively. Interviews with director Melina Matsoukas and stylist Yashua Simmons—who are innovating in the commercial space—contrast with that between Ja’Tovia Gary and Fatima Jamal, who both subvert dominant narratives of Black life through filmic collages that experiment with the politics of form. Devin Allen offers us another way to think about protest photography, capturing activists in moments of joy or rest. Amy DuBois Barnett on the legacy of millennial lifestyle magazine, Honey, with its fly fashion editorials. The hair artist Nikki Nelms, whose work epitomizes the Black whimsical imagination. The generational influence of the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta, as seen in the work of Silvia Rosi and Nuits Balnéaires. This issue is on a mission to unearth unusual pairings, the Black uncanny. Images that disturb and confound vis-à-vis those that avail conventional visual tropes. Ultimately, I wanted to see what happens when we take the renegade tool of the camera—or what the historian Dan Berger calls “insurgent technology”—to demand answers of style. I wanted to hear from contemporary Black image makers about what’s at stake for Black communities today in the face of a rising tide of global capitalism and genocide. How have camera and film technologies made new modes (and nodes) of creative expression possible?

I hope this issue offers a metalanguage for people who are trying to make sense of the world. Who refuse to accept current conditions. Who dare to imagine a free, Black future. MELANIN ABUNDANT.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads.”

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Published on June 05, 2025 06:48

Photography in a World Where the Center No Longer Holds

Bernd and Hilla Becher started paying attention to the weather sometime in the late 1950s. The couple had just commenced their lifelong project of documenting the water towers, blast furnaces, coal mines, grain elevators, and other Industrial Age rejectamenta of the Ruhr, and the shadowless light and neutral backdrop of overcast skies were required for achieving the preternatural flatness they desired in their photographs. The Bechers had other rules, too: Shoot head-on, with a large-format camera. Arrange in grids or rows. No people.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1966–1986
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher and courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive

By frankly depicting what was in front of them, the Bechers set themselves apart from others in the West German art world, which had largely embraced the consolations of abstraction after the unrepresentable horrors of the war. With their ostensibly plain, technical pictures, the Bechers found a way forward by looking back, bridging the uncanny verism of August Sander’s New Objectivity portraiture with the mechanized repetitions of the American avant-garde (think Minimalist sculpture and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Marilyns). “We don’t have any message,” Bernd said. “We are only interested in the object.” The couple photographed thousands of machines and factories—obsolescing blights transmuted into totems of alien beauty—but their most compelling subject was arguably the camera itself. The reticent majesty and rational order of their inventories, in which every form correlates to a clear function, belie an uncertainty about the function of photography in a world where the center no longer holds.

Installation view of Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, Fondazione Prada, 2025. Photograph by Roberto Marossi
Courtesy Fondazione Prada

This air of uncertainty, if not full-out melancholia, pervades Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, an exhibition on view at the Prada Foundation in Milan. Curator Susanne Pfeiffer had first set out to make a show about the Dusseldorf School, a loosely knit group of photographers educated by the influential Bechers at the Kunstakademie during the 1970s and ’80s. Six alumni made it into Typologien—Candida Höfer, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gurksy, Simone Nieweg, and the Thomases Ruff and Struth—but the exhibition quickly outgrew its academic origins as Pfeiffer decided to mine a more general proclivity for typologies (that is, systems of classification used to organize things) among German photographers, here represented by some six hundred images by twenty-six artists.

Hilla Becher, <em>Studie eines Eichenblatts (Oak Leaf)</em>, 1965<br><br />© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher and courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/Bernd & Hilla Becher Archive”> </div> <div class=

Hilla Becher, Studie eines Eichenblatts (Oak Leaf), 1965

© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher and courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/Bernd & Hilla Becher Archive Karl Blossfeldt, <em>Adiantum pedatum, haarfarn, junge, noch eingerollte Wedel (Maidenhair fern, young, still curled fronds)</em>, n.d.<br><br />Courtesy Berlin University of Arts/Karl Blossfeldt Collection/Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur<br />“> </div> <div class=

Karl Blossfeldt, <em>Adiantum pedatum, haarfarn, junge, noch eingerollte Wedel (Maidenhair fern, young, still curled fronds)</em>, n.d.<br><br />Courtesy Berlin University of Arts/Karl Blossfeldt Collection/Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur<br />“> </div> <div class=

Karl Blossfeldt, Adiantum pedatum, haarfarn, junge, noch eingerollte Wedel (Maidenhair fern, young, still curled fronds), n.d.

Courtesy Berlin University of Arts/Karl Blossfeldt Collection/Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur

Why this show now? Photographic typologies “enable a clarity of their own, which allows similarities and differences to emerge,” the curator writes, a bit mistily, in the show’s catalogue, adding that typologies’ “photographic equivalence is simple and liberating, but also disturbing, frightening.” There are no explanatory labels or thematic sections. Photographs speak for themselves, or don’t, floating in a labyrinth of artificial gray walls suspended across the hangarlike space of the Prada Foundation’s Podium. Despite a lack of argumentative thrust, Typologien can easily be read as a kind of stealth exhibition about AI, its typology of typologies issuing an elegant rejoinder to the malign systems of image- and meaning-making—our world of infinite surveillance and slop—brought about by machine vision. We could stand to invest, the show suggests, in slower, more embodied, and more unsettled ways of connecting images.

A mania for typologien first swept German photography during the Weimar era. Amid compounding postwar crises, artists and intellectuals turned to classificatory patterns as a way to impose psychological order on their infant democracy. Typecasting in interwar Germany fit hand in glove with physiognomy, the ancient practice of reading character from outward appearance. Spellbound by this pseudoscience—which extended beyond human beings to objects, nature, and even entire cities—German photographers of all political hues began to reconceive the modern camera as a facial recognition technology able to represent and simplify categories of race, class, religion, age, occupation, and politics, such that by 1927, the critic Siegfried Kracauer could remark that reality itself had assumed a “photogenic face.”

Installation view of Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, Fondazione Prada, 2025. Photograph by Roberto Marossi
Courtesy Fondazione Prada

Surprisingly, portraiture is nowhere to be found on the first floor of the exhibition. It opens with Karl Blossfeldt’s gorgeous 1920s close-ups of ferns, a reminder of typology’s origins in seventeenth-century botany. These unfurling fronds, photographed in unprecedented detail with a homemade camera, neighbor the sensual orchids of Lotte Jacobi, studies of leaves by Hilla Becher, and Simone Nieweg’s late-twentieth-century photographs of neglected garden plots on the fringes of German towns. Nearby, Thomas Struth’s photographs of dew-dappled lilies, shy sunflowers, and other flowers, originally commissioned as art for hospital rooms, act as foil to Andreas Gurksy’s gargantuan 2015 aerial view of a tulip field, abstracted à la Color Field painting into machined bands of dull red, green, and brown.

In lieu of isolating types for comparative analysis, many of these artists offer variations on a theme of dispassionate obsession. Sigmar Polke’s 1966 morphology of everyday things—a black glove, a balloon, a folding ruler, etc., all ostensibly manipulated to look like palm trees—snickers at the show’s very premise, wryly deflating a German typological tradition that emerged during the Enlightenment. Candida Höfer’s forlorn menagerie of zoo animals, as with Struth’s much-celebrated photographs of museumgoers, taxonomize nothing so much as the camera’s inability to generate new sight lines within Europe’s stagnant institutions. A massive 1989 Cibachrome by Struth of tourists at the Louvre dwarfed by The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) may be a masterpiece in its own right, but Géricault’s painting inside the photograph feels, strangely, like the more contemporary image.

Heinrich Riebesehl, Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969 (People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969), 1969
© Heinrich Riebesehl/SIAE

Amid so much famous work, there are a few hidden gems. The show’s real discovery, a group of quietly wondrous photographs by Heinrich Riebesehl, records harshly lit encounters with elevator passengers over the span of a single day in 1969. Isa Genzken’s 1979 appropriations of ads for hi-tech Japanese record players—“The clean and simple truth,” goes one tagline—link the Capitalist Realist painting of 1960s Düsseldorf with the sleek cynicism of New York’s Pictures Generation. They may also bait thoughts of RAF ringleader Andreas Baader, whose 1977 suicide was carried out with a gun secreted inside his jail-cell record player. At least, that was the spin. Nine years after the dark German Autumn, Gerhard Richter included Baader’s record player in October 18 1977, a fifteen-painting cycle that portrays a gray, blurry reality where the truth is neither clean nor simple. October 18 1977 didn’t travel to Milan, but a kindred series by the underrated artist Hans-Peter Feldmann is on view. Die Toten 1967–1993 (The Dead 1967‒1993, 1996–98) depicts about ninety people who died during the wave of domestic terrorism that convulsed West Germany, a reaction, in part, against the capitalist system that brought about the country’s economic miracle, so called. Across three walls, a crawl of newspaper photographs silently tallies and ambiguates the instigators and victims of assassinations, shootouts, kidnappings, hijackings, and crossfire, a monument to national trauma as ephemeral as birdcage liner.

Isa Genzken, Front Operation, 1979
© Generali Foundation/Isa Genzken/SIAE

The human face is finally pulled into focus on the second floor, where the familiar subjects of August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century greet us like the return of the repressed. Sander undertook his vast, unfinished compendium of portraits, beginning in 1928, as a way to represent the seven types of Germans—“The farmer,” “The skilled tradesman,” “The woman,” “Classes and professions,” “The artists,” “The city,” and “The last people”—who, as he saw it, made up a country undergoing an intense identity crisis. He called it the “physiognomic image of an age.”

Hindsight haunts Sander’s words, of course. The critic Allan Sekula once described the photographer’s naive vision of society as that of a “neatly arranged chessboard,” set up only for the Nazis to send it all crashing to the floor. But Sander’s triumph resides in the futility of his project: The particularity of his sitters always manages to break through whatever category he has filed them under, and the portraits astonish for their simple demonstration of how objectivity and subjectivity can exist only through each other. Each person’s anonymity, later echoed in the Bechers’ phrase “anonymous sculpture,” gains new resonance at a time when algorithmic typologies are relentlessly arrayed to create brutal regimes of identification. How to read Walter Benjamin’s 1931 description of Twentieth Century as a “training manual” for democracy and not think of the billions of AI training sets that reduce photographs to inputs and humanity to datapoints? Even so, it’s often hard to requite the gaze of Sander’s people, characters in a dream about to go bad. In 1936, the Gestapo destroyed the plates for Face of Our Time, a portfolio of sixty Twentieth Century portraits, for being insufficiently Aryan.

Erich Sander for August Sander’s studio <em>Politischer Häftling (Political Prisoner)</em>, 1941–1944<br />© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/August Sander Archive/SIAE”> </div> <div class=

Erich Sander for August Sander’s studio Politischer Häftling (Political Prisoner), 1941–1944
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/August Sander Archive/SIAE August Sander, <em>Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln (Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne)</em>, 1931–1950s<br />© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/August Sander Archive/SIAE”> </div> <div class=

August Sander, <em>Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln (Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne)</em>, 1931–1950s<br />© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/August Sander Archive/SIAE”> </div> <div class=

August Sander, Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln (Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne), 1931–1950s
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur/August Sander Archive/SIAE

Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 1997 in Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, Fondazione Prada, 2025. Photograph by Roberto Marossi
Courtesy Fondazione Prada

The maze of Typologien finally deposits you into a sparse section devoted to Holocaust-related panels from Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, a vast reservoir of found pictures juxtaposing the banal with the harrowing, from sunsets and bouquets to the atrocities of Auschwitz. In this room, gridded thumbnail photographs of corpses and soldiers waver in and out of focus, some completely illegible. Begun in 1962 and still ongoing, Richter’s Atlas seems to descend from the Mnemosyne Atlas (1928–29) by the Jewish German art historian Aby Warburg (conspicuously absent in Typologien), who attempted to map the “afterlife of antiquity” through hundreds of reproductions of artworks mounted on sixty-three panels. But whereas Warburg traced how cultural remembrance is constructed through imaginative connections across time, Richter questions whether collective memory is still possible when the guarantors of truth and presence no longer sway. Yet, by hallowing this somber passage of Atlas with its own alcove and depriving it of juxtapositions with other works in the show, no doubt out of an abundance of caution, the show risks undermining Richter’s profound project, which acquires its painful meaning by treating all images as equally significant.

Typologies are intended to help us understand the world, but the works in Typologien repeatedly parade photography’s failures: to document, to mourn, to bend experience into arcs of narrative. In 1997, as Feldmann was compiling his book of the dead, Wolfgang Tillmans began photographing the Concordes screaming over Heathrow. For the artist, these Cold War symbols of tomorrow conjured “an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology” at the speed of sound. The airliner was retired after a 2000 crash killed more than a hundred people, lending the photographs a valedictory mood, glimpses of the future slipping into history. “The true picture of the past flits by,” Benjamin wrote in in his final essay, composed shortly before his death in flight from the Nazis. “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized, and is never seen again.” The sentiment has been internalized by many of this show’s artists, who treat the camera not as a lepidopterist’s pin but as an instrument of unknowing, a tool to unfix our way of seeing a world that exceeds any attempts to predict or name it.

Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany is on view at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, through July 14, 2025.

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Published on June 05, 2025 06:45

May 27, 2025

Sebastião Salgado’s Vision of the Human Condition

Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian documentarian renowned for his searing black-and-white images capturing humanitarian crises, industrial labor, and environmental destruction, passed away on May 23, 2025, in Paris, at the age of 81. Initially trained as an economist, Salgado transitioned to photography in the 1970s, and dedicated his life to documenting global social issues, all with empathy and uncommon visual power. Aperture had the privilege of publishing several of Salgado’s books throughout his career, including An Uncertain Grace (1990), Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1993), Migrations: Humanity in Transition (2000), and Other Americas (2015).

Salgado’s work had an indelible impact on documentary photography, sometimes arousing debate and raising fundamental questions about the power relationships inherent in the field. Even so, his images endure as vivid records of a turbulent and fragile world. In 2014, Melissa Harris spoke with Salgado on the occasion of his exhibition, Genesis, at the International Center of Photography. The traveling show focused on the natural world and outlined how engaged photography was for Salgado a way of life. —The Editors

Sebastião Salgado, Bolivia, 1983, from Other Americas (Aperture, 2015)
Courtesy the artist/Amazonas Images

The timing for the opening of Sebastião Salgado’s eight-years-in-the-making, epic project Genesis (2004–2011), on view at the International Center of Photography from September 19 to January 11, 2015, could not be more ideal or inspiring. With both a UN Climate Summit and a People’s Climate March (expected to include an unprecedented number of participants) also taking place in New York within the next week, Salgado’s exhibition, curated by his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, is a call to action. Salgado—who has focused on poverty and starvation in his work in the Sahel, child refugees and migrants, the struggle of the landless peasants in Brazil, the end of manual labor, and the displacement of the world’s people at the end of the twentieth century—does not consider himself an activist. Rather, he said to me simply, “I am a photographer. Photography is my life, and my way of life.”

And yes, he is first and foremost a photographer, committed to rendering our quickly evolving world as he experiences it. His view is infused with empathy and a deep engagement with his subject. With Genesis, which was published as a book in 2013, for the first time he has focused on animals and the landscape, as well as people who are still living as they lived for centuries. In his book, From My Land to the Planet (2014), Salgado writes of Genesis: “I wanted to recount the dignity and the beauty of life in all its forms and show how we all share the same origins. . . . For me, it has nothing to do with religion, but indicates that harmony in the beginning that enabled the diversification of the species: this miracle of which we are all part.”

Speaking with him for thirty minutes or so during the final stages of the exhibition’s installation, his sense of wonder and his belief in the planet’s resilience resonate passionately. His prognosis for humanity? Well, he’s more circumspect . . . but still hopeful. What follows are a few excerpts from our conversation. —Melissa Harris

Sebastião Salgado, Fishing in the Piulaga Laguna during the Kuarup ceremony of the Waura Group, Upper Xingu Basin, Mato Grosso, Brazil, 2005
© Amazonas Images, Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Sebastião Salgado, Jaú River, Jaú National State Park, 2019
© Amazonas Images, Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Melissa Harris: I’m looking at the reforestation project you and Lélia did in Brazil through your [nonprofit organization] Instituto Terra on the land your parents gave you, where you planted over 2.5 million trees and really reestablished the whole ecosystem. Were you thinking about ecosystems with Genesis?

Sebastião Salgado: These are macro ecosystems. These are huge regions of the planet that are, in a sense, with a certain equilibrium. In this section of the show, all this is Africa. Africa we cannot say is just one ecosystem. But it is a macro region of the planet. If you go from one ecosystem to the other, to the other, to the other, it creates a huge movement of ecosystems—and so you understand it in a more macro way. I made nine trips to Africa in order to get these pictures, working from the desert in the south of Africa to the Sahara Desert in the north of Africa, and working in between in Ethiopia, in Zambia, in Botswana, in Namibia . . .

We had another chapter in the north of the planet with an entirely different group of ecosystems, because I worked in the Kamchatka in Russia; worked on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia; worked with the movement of reindeers in the north of Siberia also, in the Yamal Peninsula; worked in the Brooks Range in Alaska; worked in Canada, the border of Canada and Alaska on the Pacific side; worked in the United States in the Colorado Plateau.

Sebastião Salgado, Eastern Part of the Brooks Range, Alaska, United States, 2009
© Amazonas Images, Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Harris: What happened to you in this process? Did you experience something you hadn’t experienced before?

Salgado: Incredible. For me, it was incredible, this thing. I did eight years of trips, eight months a year. I went to thirty-two regions or countries. But the big trip that I did was inside myself. I discovered that I am part of all this, that I am part of the animals. That we are part of everything alive in the planet. We are part of this huge equilibrium. You know? For me, it was the most important thing.

We came out of the planet. We must go back to the planet. And I went back to the planet. I thought before, being human, that I was part of the only rational species. That’s a big lie. Because each species is deeply rational inside its own species. We are all—the mineral species, the vegetable species, the animal species—we are all the same. We have the same life. We are all alive.

Once I was with a scientist here in the United States in this incredible chain of mountains—the Rocky Mountains. The guy tells me, “Sebastião, these are young mountains.” I said, “You are lying; these are billions of years old.” He said, “Yes, but this is the second generation of the Rocky Mountains, because the one that was there before was eroded to the ground zero, and the new one is young because she is growing still.” The Rocky Mountains are still growing! Incredible!

I’ll show you a picture of a mountain in Africa that is two days old. We were in front of the mountains here, which are billions of years old. In these I discover all that we are … we are part of all this. We are not important. We give too much importance to ourselves. The life of this land is as important as we are, and we are part of it. I was astonished. You see, [in this picture] a volcano is going off, and it projected this new material, this new mountain. But I had to keep lifting my feet up and down as I photographed, or my shoes would start to melt.

It was amazing. To see these stones when they have just come out of the oven. It was so amazing. So amazing to discover these things.

And working on Galápagos, that was . . . I can show to you a cactus, one cactus, that you can touch—it has no nails that hit you. So soft. So small. But this cactus was born in the middle of these stones that came out of a volcano, which created these lives!

I remember once I was working in Alaska. I was in the Brooks Range. I had a small plane that drove me to a point, and left me there, and came back for me one week or ten days later. Because in Alaska, you cannot fly always. It was June. You have the cold air coming from the Arctic and hot air from inside Alaska, and they meet over this Brooks Range, over this mountain, and it creates a lot of micro-climates. In June, I had a lot of snow, a lot of rain—hot, cold, everything happened there. The plane sometimes was forced to leave me there. I’m sitting there all day long in front of the mountain. You are the planet; you are part of all this together. And you see how the wind cuts at these mountains like a knife, and it creates sand that will create soil, and you see all the vegetation, the small vegetation fights to survive. It’s amazing.

You see, that is the important thing. No? Even before, I photographed all one species, and with Genesis I became so open to every other species.

Sebastião Salgado, Mexico, 1980, from Other Americas (Aperture, 2015)
Courtesy the artist/Amazonas Images

Sebastião Salgado, Church Gate Station, Western Railroad Line, Bombay, India, 1995
© Amazonas Images, Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Harris: Do you feel differently about man now?

Salgado: Completely different about man. If you consider the history of it: our earth, it started here—the beginning of this wall. At the end of this wall came the animal, then the human. We arrive in the last millimeter here. That’s the important idea. All of this lived before us. All this creation was happening. All these relations, linked to evolution, creating this kind of huge intelligence and evolution that was born from all these things. This for me was fantastic, so great.

Harris: Is there still such a thing as “wild,” Sebastião? Is it possible to find something that is pristine and wild?

Salgado: There are places where no one from Western civilization has gone; there are humans who still live like we lived fifty thousand years before. There are a lot of groups that never made any contact with anyone else. They are the same as us. There is still a percentage of the planet that is in the state of genesis.

Harris: That’s extraordinary.

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Salgado: What we think is no more, what has been destroyed, is true—but it is not the whole thing. In the desert, in the Arctic, in the Amazon.

Yes, a good half of the planet—where we built our farms, where we built our agriculture—we destroyed. It’s ecologically destroyed. But a good half is there, and we must hold on to this if we want to survive as a species. Because we are not a danger to the planet; we are a danger to ourselves. It will be the end of our species. Because the moment that we go, the planet renews itself in five hundred years or a thousand years. It’s always done that. The forests come back. The planet can renew quite quickly. It’s not that damaging for the planet. It’s damaging for us. If we want to survive as a species, we must change our behavior.

These chemicals introduced to the planet with war or poison or anything damaging are the chemicals of the planet that we put in concentrated portions through here or through there. But the planet has a capacity to absorb all these things in the long term. Now we live longer lives. And we live outside of nature. We are the only species that has a real consciousness, I believe, that we will be dying. The others just live. And this consciousness that we’ll be dying happens in this modern urbanization. Because when you work with the Indians in the Amazon, they use their body. They have their body to be used. If they cut, they cut. If they break a leg, they break a leg. If they become old, they separate from the others, they go to the forest . . .

If we don’t change our behavior, we’ll disappear very fast. We’ll disappear as a species. You see, we have species that lived for a hundred and fifty million years. They were much more strong than us. The dinosaurs. They’re gone a hundred million years ago. And we are here after a few hundreds of thousands of years, no more than this. We are cutting the trees at a very high speed. They could help save us, and we are destroying the trees.

If we go, there are a lot of species that will go with us. But there are a lot of species that will not go—that will stay. For example, the species inside of the ocean will stay. The process can start again. In billions of years, the humans can come back again.

I believe at least that we must try to go back to the planet, probably not to live more inside the forests—that won’t happen. But we must, at least spiritually, go back into the planet. Feel that we are part of the planet. Add to the beautiful part of the planet, not destroy it. We have money, we have technology; we must have a spiritual comeback to the planet, being part of the planet. If we do this, we can control a majority of the carbon emissions that we have. If you control the quantity of the emissions, we can reduce them. We can use solar energy. We can use the movement of the world, the wind, so many things, to produce energy. We can change our concept of consumption.

Sebastião Salgado, Iceberg between the Paulet Island and the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica, 2005
© Amazonas Images, Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Sebastião Salgado, Chinstrap Penguins, South Sandwich Islands, 2009
© Amazonas Images, Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Harris: Are you sure you’re not an activist?

Salgado: No, it’s not activism. This is a way of life. It’s different. It’s my life. Activists are putting people in the street. We are planting the trees. I chose the word genesis just to say we live here with the beginning of life. That is also the planting—the beginning of life.

Harris: Sebastião, was it different to photograph landscape and animals?

Salgado: You must respect people. You must respect nature. This [photograph of a giant tortoise] was one of my first pictures in Genesis. To make her portrait was at first impossible. She was afraid. In a moment, I was so tired that I put myself on my knees. When I put myself on my knees, by chance, I was at her level and it happened. I lay down. I started to work with her like this [gestures crawling, using his knees and elbows]. She came to me! And I moved back a little bit, to show her that I was respecting the territory, and she was as curious of me as I was of her. I stayed two hours with her, because she wasn’t afraid of me. It’s fantastic, our planet, and we are just a micro part of this huge life.

Harris: What did you read? Were you reading Darwin? Were you reading poetry?

Salgado: I read Darwin, absolutely. I came to start at Galápagos because Darwin finished all his trip up with the Beagle, his boat. It is here that he finalized all the research to create the theory of evolution, and I came here trying to understand what he understood. I had all the writings. I went to exactly the same place Darwin came.

Harris: So now what are you going to do? What’s next?

Salgado: Now I am working on another story. After last year, I started to do a story with the Indian movement in the Amazon. I want to do a story about the Amazon Indians and the Amazon forest, link the two.

Harris: Man and nature, and the nature of man. Is it complicated to get access?

Salgado: It is. I am working with the National Indian Foundation, the Ministry of Justice. You must get authorization to be accepted by the Indians. It’s a long preparation. Now we were in Brazil this past winter for them to get three authorizations for the next year. I go to three different tribes next year.

This interview was published in Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018).

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Published on May 27, 2025 14:16

May 16, 2025

How An-My Lê Makes Meaning from History’s Psychic Debris

It is tempting, when considering An-My Lê’s body of work, now spanning three decades, to mention the depth and scope of the projects, which include vexed approaches to landscape, still life, portraiture, and detailed, photographic studies of social and industrial processes. However, such variegated modes are already evident in Lê’s first monograph from twenty years ago, Small Wars. While debut projects, in any medium, often bear the crude joints where nascent, searching forays were pruned back by mentors or colleagues in graduate workshops or formal schooling, Lê’s first effort marks a subversive, even defiant, commitment to variations in subject, style, and obsessions. It is immediately sure-footed, richly intelligent, and momentous in its seeking.

An-My Lê, Lesson, 1999–2002, from the series Small Wars

An-My Lê, Bac Giang, Northern Vietnam, 1995, from the series Viêt Nam

Bringing together three projects—all with distinct approaches—that cross two continents and multiple tonal gradients, what immediately becomes clear is Lê’s dismissal of the novice artist’s anxiety to find and establish a signature, and in theory “marketable,” voice and style. And while Lê’s stylistic language is remarkable across the entire book, she has decidedly allowed the project’s inquiry to determine how these frames are shot, refusing to warp them into the narrow cage of affect and thesis. This is perhaps why, despite being shot on a view camera at slower shutter speeds, the photographs give off the distinct sensation of both being found and fashioned at once. It is not surprising, least of all to a fellow Vietnamese refugee like myself, that Lê’s work would be mimetic of the myriad, layered, and often contradictory history of imperial war, humanitarian crisis, and the violence endured by displaced bodies and their memories. What might be seen, often to Western standards of art-making, as a disorientation, or lack of cohesion or logical accretion, is actually an accurate representation of photography’s more global attempt to fashion meaning, however tenuous, out of history’s material and psychic debris.

An-My Lê, Mekong Delta, 1994, from the series Viêt Nam

An-My Lê, Tien Phuong, 1995, from the series Viêt Nam

Most striking of these techniques is Lê’s masterful understanding of blur and stillness. In one frame, a Vietnamese boy aims a slingshot toward the branches of a tree, the coiled charge of his body and the sling’s flexion giving the scene an anticipatory torque. The man to the left is blurred in motion, his presence more weather-like and haunting. In another shot of a typical apartment courtyard in Ho Chi Minh City, a man crouches in critical focus while others, caught in the flow of an impromptu soccer game, foam around him, their gestures both graceful and ghostly, giving a scene of recreation the finest touch of elegy and loss. The tension of stillness as agency, pleasure, play, and rest are potent treatments of the Vietnamese body, whose presence in American media has often been trafficked as corpses. The stillness Lê captures is not one of lifelessness—but of life lived so fully—the arrested movement of these figures, as in another shot of a crowd of people observing a solar eclipse, is a reclamation from the semiotics of war and tragedy.

An-My Lê: Small Wars 60.00 The twentieth anniversary edition of An-My Lê’s acclaimed first book Small Wars, reissued with five new images and an afterword by Ocean Vuong.

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Photographs by An-My Lê. Text by Richard B. Woodward. Interviewer Hilton Als. Afterword by Ocean Vuong. Designed by Andrew Sloat.

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The twentieth anniversary edition of An-My Lê’s acclaimed first book Small Wars, reissued with five new images and an afterword by Ocean Vuong.

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling.

First published in 2005, Small Wars brings together three interconnected series. In Viêt Nam, Lê returns to the country she left in her teens and attempts to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape; in Small Wars, she engages a small community of Vietnam War reenactors; and in 29 Palms, she documents the preparations of marines in the California desert as they undergo training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war.

With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work. The twentieth anniversary edition of Small Wars is a lush reissue of the original, with five additional images and a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 144
Number of images: 82
Publication date: 2025-05-27
Measurements: 11.75 x 8.75 x 11.75 inches
ISBN: 9781597115773

Contributors

An-My Lê (born in Saigon, Vietnam, 1960) is a Vietnamese American photographer, filmmaker, author, and the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. Lê came to the United States as a political refugee at age fifteen. She received a grant to return to her homeland just after US-Vietnamese relations were formally restored, and traveled there several times between 1994 and 1997. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation, and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently a major retrospective of her work was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is based in New York.
Richard B. Woodward was an arts critic whose essays on art and photography were featured in dozens of monographs, catalogs, and publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic, Bookforum, Film Comment, American Scholar, New Yorker, and Vogue.
Hilton Als is a staff writer and theater critic at the New Yorker. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, he is the author of The Women (1996), White Girls (2013), and Joan Didion: What She Means (2022). He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University.
Ocean Vuong is author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) and Time Is a Mother (2022), and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and is professor of creative writing at New York University.

Why Does the Italian Polymath Bruno Munari Still Spark Joy?

Bruno Munari is a monumental figure in Italian twentieth-century design: a polymath who throughout his seven-decade career seamlessly created book series, lamps, toys, ashtrays, and useless machines (a dig at the Futurist obsession with technology). He taught to adults and children with the same unwavering credos: that art, life, and design should be one, that playing is the best education, and that books make life better. That his path should cross with Jason Fulford, a US photographer and publisher working today, is not strange at all. They share an obsession with open-endedness, a childlike sense of wonder, and a love for the printed page. Luckily for us, the publisher of Munari’s books today, Pietro Corraini, brought them together. Corraini fished unpublished Munari photographs from all over Milan and set up a perfect fotochiacchierata (an Italian wordplay meaning “informal chat with pictures”), resulting in a 2024 exhibition with the same title and a book with a slightly cryptic one: 47 Fotos.

Bruno Munari, Untitled, date unknown

Chiara Bardelli Nonino: Why forty-seven?

Jason Fulford: It’s a restriction. I picked a couple of numbers I liked: thirty-three, my favorite, and forty-seven, the favorite number of a writer I used to collaborate with, a good friend of mine who died. I knew that I wanted to add pictures of my own, but they had to be fewer than Munari’s, so out of the forty-seven images, thirty-three are Munari’s. Then I did what I usually do to edit: I printed images out small, and I started to play with them, like a deck of cards. When you do that, you just start to see things, to find connections, to feel a flow. Our images were activating each other, like a chemical reaction.

Bardelli Nonino: Basically, you played a Munari game with Munari. How did you discover his work?

Fulford: A friend gave me and my wife a book about his life, and it just . . . blew our minds. Immediately, I wanted to know more, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

Bardelli Nonino: What resonated with you?

Fulford: The fact that he was a Futurist in his teenage years and left them because he felt uncomfortable with their dogmatic nature. The fact that he always made his own way, that he was really difficult to define. His freedom of movement through mediums, from the hardware store to museums.

Bardelli Nonino: He had a penchant for subverting rules. I remember listening to an interview where he said that to spark creativity in children, you have to teach them a rule, and then tell them to break it.

Fulford: He is a great teacher. And there’s a specific type of play that he does. It’s a play that’s rigorous, that’s both on the surface and deep. It reminds me of a quote from a 1970s novel by Don DeLillo. The character is a football coach in college, and when he’s trying to psych up his team before a game, he tells them: “It’s only a game but it’s the only game.”

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Bardelli Nonino: Munari was very invested in the idea of democratizing culture. “While the artist dreams of museums,” he wrote, “the designer dreams of street markets.” He thought that there should not be beautiful things to look at and ugly things to use.

Fulford: Almost every year, I teach a workshop in Urbino, in a school that people such as Bruno Munari or Italo Calvino visited, people who remain major influences in Italy. It seemed like they all came out of World War II with a lot of ideas about rebuilding things, redesigning society.

Bardelli Nonino: And making things simpler. Another Munari quote: “Complicating is easy; it’s simplifying that’s difficult.”

Fulford: One of the things that I learned through studying graphic design is how you can take something complex and reduce it to a simple form. I apply it to my photographs: I want them to have an easy entry point, but with deep levels of things the pictures can give you if you spend time with them or if you think about your life through the picture’s filter.

Bardelli Nonino: Have you ever felt intimidated by Munari?

Fulford: I put a lot of pressure on myself. I worked on the book as if I had to show it to him, and I wanted him to be happy with it. I even tried to add some writing into the book, to channel his voice—but it didn’t feel like me, and it didn’t feel as good as his. So I removed it all. What I like to do with images is to show very specific things that are also open. It’s really difficult, at least to me, to do that with words. You either sound totally pretentious or overly sentimental.

There’s a specific type of play that Munari does. It’s a play that’s rigorous, that’s both on the surface and deep.

Bardelli Nonino: Why is this openness so important to you?

Fulford: Probably two things. One is that the aesthetic experience lasts longer. You can think of pictures that expose something or teach you something, but then you don’t need to look at them again. I remember reading Benjamin Buchloh, a German art critic, talking about Gerhard Richter’s paintings as these puzzles that remain a vexation for the viewer, that resist any attempt to solve them. There’s something in that.

Bardelli Nonino: I remember that Munari in an interview was talking about the importance of toys being open-ended, otherwise they kill children’s creativity.

Fulford: I love that.

Bardelli Nonino: What’s the second reason?

Fulford: When I was growing up, I was raised in a pretty intense fundamentalist Christian faith. The only thing I want to preach now is an open mind.

Jason Fulford, Sea Circus, 2009. Photogram

Bardelli Nonino: You know, Munari used to say that his name in Japanese meant “to make something out of nothing.” I think you have a similar approach to photography.

Fulford: I remember talking to a curator once, he was looking at some work of mine and asking questions like, “Why this picture?” And I said something along the lines of, “Oh, I could have just grabbed stuff from the garbage and made something, it would have been the same.” I never heard from him again. But it was true.

Bardelli Nonino: What do you think about Munari’s relationship with photography?

Fulford: I worked on a book last year about Corita Kent, the Catholic nun who became a famous Pop artist, and there’s a lot of crossover. Looking at her archives, I realized that the camera for her was just a tool that was always around. She used it for many different things: to remember something, to make aesthetic images, or as a scanning tool in the process of making silkscreens. Photography was a tool to make something else, in the same way that Munari takes a fork, bends it, and makes it into all these different characters.

Bardelli Nonino: Like in your work, where a photograph can be a whole universe or just there to affect the meaning of another.

Fulford: When I teach, I ask the students to bring images. We print them small, and we put everything into the middle in a big ocean of images. We use them for most exercises, but I don’t let anybody use pictures that they brought themselves. They have to work with other people’s images, so nothing is precious, or definitive. That immediately makes things go faster, looser. As soon as they change the sequence of the images, they realize their meaning changes, that they become alive.

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Bardelli Nonino: Photobooks are your primary creative language. Does it ever bother you that they can be kind of niche?

Fulford: It’s hard to say. If you make a thousand or two thousand books, that’s a lot of people but also not many people at all. Numbers are really difficult. People get obsessed with them on social media. Let’s say you have a few hundred people who like something, but you wish it was a few thousand. A few hundred is still a lot of people. I mean, think of how many friends you have.

Bardelli Nonino: Oh, like, three.

Fulford: [Laughs] I was thinking about this today, though. When the Velvet Underground’s first album came out, it didn’t sell very well. But people said that everybody who bought that record started a band, and all of those bands were great. So they had a huge influence. It’s the same with books. You can go back to them at different times in your life, and they tell different stories, because you are a different person. Your book can speak after you are dead, it can find its way to people by accident. I love that a book can do that.

Bardelli Nonino: You can enter into people’s minds through books.

Fulford: That’s why I feel this affinity for Munari —through the printed page.

Bardelli Nonino: What books are you working on now?

Fulford: There’s one I’ve been working on for several years, and I recently printed it in Italy. It’s called Lots of Lots, and it’s eighty pages of grids of images.

Bardelli Nonino: Why the three-by-three grids?

Fulford: Well, Sol LeWitt made two books that I love, Photogrids, from 1977, and Autobiography, from 1980, and mine reference those a lot, in a whimsical, less conceptual way.

Bardelli Nonino: It looks like a captcha test or a beautiful visual Turing test.

Fulford: I hadn’t thought about that. That’s hilarious. I remember one time I got an email from someone who found my 2006 book Raising Frogs for $$$. He said that he loved how I connected the images, that he was working on this computer-learning model and wanted to replicate my way of working, and asked me if I wanted to get involved. It must have been early AI research. I wrote back an email that said something like: “That sounds awful. It sounds like Satan. Why would I want to do that?” I never heard from him again either.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting,” in The PhotoBook Review.

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Published on May 16, 2025 14:19

May 13, 2025

Alana Perino Crafts a Haunting Story of Family and Memory

In a spare, domestic tableau, a bare-chested older man sits pensively on the edge of a nightstand. He looks down at a white bird resting on his hand as a lamp casts light across his body and an empty mattress. Above the bed, a small wooden frame holds a painting of an angel.

The figures within this image—man, bird, angel—permeate Alana Perino’s Pictures of Birds (2017–24), an elegiac series of photographs that searches for meaning in memory and mortality.

Perino, who was born in New York and raised by separated parents, finds home in many places. In 2020, they moved to live with their father, Joe, and stepmother, Letty, on the small Floridian island known as Longboat Key. Perino had begun to photograph their family in the Longboat Key condo a few years earlier, as they noticed Letty first experiencing symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s. By the time Perino relocated to Florida, Letty’s condition had worsened.

Alana Perino, Dad and Samuel, 2024

Alana Perino, Lori’s Shell, 2023

In these years, their sense of home was upended along with the “strange, unwritten contract of the family,” as Perino put it. Letty was younger than Joe, and ostensibly would have cared for him as he aged; now, new family roles formed in which Perino and their sister became caretakers of their stepmother. “The entire island became this eulogized space,” they said. “Everything began to represent her death.”

At night, Letty would speak aloud in the room Perino shared with her. “I realized, after many nights, that she was talking to the same people in the room,” Perino said. “She was talking to ghosts.” Pictures of Birds does not shy away from the idea that spirits dwell in this home, and in many ways, the photographs take comfort in their presence. Perino’s family on their father’s side is Catholic, though the photographer was raised Jewish; in the spiritual treatment of ancestral remembrance and protection, they find common ground among traditions. Outside Longboat Key’s Catholic church, Perino photographs the three wise men conjured as statues shrouded in plastic, an uncanny scene mediating the animate and inanimate.

Perino’s sense of home was upended along with the “strange, unwritten contract of the family.”

Letty died in 2021. Perino continued to photograph their father, sister, niece, and a few other family members until 2024, when their father sold the Longboat Key condo and moved away. The later photographs resonate with the loss and Letty’s continued presence in their lives. A portrait of Perino’s niece Madi floating in a pool recalls an earlier photograph of their father, though where his face turns toward the sky, Madi’s is obscured by her hair as she looks down into the water. In a self-portrait, Perino, eyes closed, lays on their back in a pit dug in the sand on a beach.

Alana Perino, Nina’s Afghan, 2020

Alana Perino, Madi on Stair Lift, 2020

Letty would repeatedly ask Perino as they photographed around the house, “Why don’t you take pictures of birds?” After all, that is what most people do on Longboat Key. Perino initially decided to photograph anything but the flamingos and egrets of Sarasota County. In time, they came to understand everything they photographed as birdlike, every portrait as a self-portrait. The mutability and fluidity of corporeal figures was never more apparent than in the countless seashells cast aside on the shore. Letty had collected shells for years; Perino viewed them as an extension of nonhuman ghosts, long discomfited by the removal and disruption of a creature’s life cycle. They eventually photographed the shells, too, and made excursions around the island to photograph a wider perspective: the ocean, statues, a shark living in an aquarium.

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“This is when the project really began to expand from this notion of memorializing a really sad event for our family that was prolonged and changed the shape of all of our roles, to a kind of internalization of these realities, of our lived everyday experience with the dead and their presence in our home,” Perino said. “How all of these ecosystems—and this particular ecosystem within Longboat Key, the humidity, the scope of life—it highlights how interconnected all of the different species are and how reliant we are on the shells, the mangroves, the water, and even things like the aquarium to survive and to proceed from one generation to another.” Perino’s photographs rarely depict Letty, who resisted the camera’s presence. In one of her few appearances, only an out-of-focus glimpse of a hand at rest is visible in the foreground. The picture’s title, Nina’s Afghan (2020), refers to the shawl made by Perino’s grandmother and draped over the back of a chair. A painted portrait of their father and Letty hangs on the wall above the chair, their faces just out of the photograph’s frame. Nobody ever sat in that chair. Instead it stayed empty, an outsize and invisible presence filling it, a ghostly apparition just out of reach.