Aperture's Blog, page 42

A Photographer’s Pensive Vision of Life on a Yemeni Island

In Charles Thiefaine’s photographs of the Yemeni island of Socotra, the sea is a persistent presence, a leading character. It encloses, laps, borders. The sea is at the heart of Socotra’s prospects—a key factor in its striking natural splendor and wildlife—and, in turn, its many problems: conflict, constant uncertainty, the international meddling from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others, driven by struggles for power, water access, and trade (from the beaches of Socotra one can gaze to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a busy choke point between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East). “The water, it is their way to survive, to get money, and to eat,” Thiefaine, who is French and lives in Paris, notes of the people he met and photographed on Socotra. “But it is also their borders. They are stuck in this island, most of the people there, they cannot move, or they can only move to the mainland, where there is a war.”

Charles Thiefaine, A stranded ship in Delisha Beach, near Hadibo, Socotra, 2021

Socotra lies in the Indian Ocean, tugged by competing hopes, identities, and ideals. It is 155 miles from Somalia and 210 miles from Yemen. Politically it is part of the latter, which sits on the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia, even if, geographically, Socotra seems to be a fragment of Africa. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Socotra was a Soviet navy base—one of Thiefaine’s photos shows an abandoned Soviet tank on the beach—and a part of South Yemen. Since the 1990 unification, it has been part of Yemen, which has in turn, since 2014, been in a lengthy, tangled conflict, the frustrations and oddities and duplicities of which are plainly revealed by Socotra’s current situation.

Today, Socotra is controlled by the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC), following a long struggle between the Council and troops loyal to Yemen’s President Hadi. The STC, a separatist movement, seeks an independent South Yemen, which contradicts the agenda of Hadi’s government. And yet, across the sea on the mainland, the UAE supports the government, and both the STC and pro-Hadi forces are fighting against the Houthis. As the circle of violence beats on, the tide comes in and out, the coral fish swim, and, in Thiefaine’s photos, the surface of the water glitters and teases in turquoise. So much trouble, so much beauty.

Charles Thiefaine, A diodon fish in the hand of Abdullah, a fisherman from Qalansiyah, Socotra, 2021

Charles Thiefaine, Socotran Desert Rose, an extraordinary-looking plant sometimes called “the bottle tree” due to its odd shape, Socotra, 2021

Thiefaine, who is thirty, explains that the nature on Socotra offers inhabitants a counterbalance to the oppressive turmoil. “Almost all of the people in the island go fishing,” he says. “They sell their fish, or they eat their fish. Almost everyone knows how to fish. They fished when it was USSR, now it is STC, before it was the Yemeni government—they keep doing it.”

The notion of consistency and routine in the face of upheaval has shaped Thiefaine’s current work as a photographer, and his recent shift from classic photojournalism. He has a background shooting in areas of conflict and first visited Iraq in 2015, when still a student. Just as he was graduating, the battle of Mosul broke out, and he returned, forming friendships and bonds with locals. He has since returned some fifteen times on assignments for publications such as Vice, and yet recently, he has rethought the focus of his images, believing that seeing inhabitants solely within the context of distress—conflict, invasion, death—only serves to other them. “These are countries that are stuck with a certain kind of imagery, which is most of the time linked with violence, or images that show them as victims,” he says.

Thiefaine’s approach has been fueled, in part, by the ongoing refugee crisis shaming Europe’s governments. 

As if in direct contrast, he now deliberately seeks out the quiet, the simple: day-to-day habits and seemingly mundane occurrences, rather than the epic or shocking. His decision to go to Socotra was partly inspired by this shift; he wanted to go somewhere where he had no experience, where he could see things afresh. When making work, Thiefaine will often follow certain people for weeks, integrating himself in their pastimes and commutes to show their “adaptability, their way of acting, their routines and gestures.” He shoots with film on a medium-format camera—the bulkiness of which sometimes amuses his subjects. He likes natural pictures, though he occasionally directs his subjects, often ironically, in the pursuit of ease, to avoid them making signals at the camera or posing.

Charles Thiefaine, Ibrahim, originally from Taez, a city in south Yemen where Yemeni troops and Houthi militias fought at the beginning of the civil war in 2015, came to Socotra in September 2021, and works in a restaurant with his friend Mohamed, Socotra, 2021

Charles Thiefaine, Fishing is the main activity on Socotra, 2021

Thiefaine arrived in Socotra on November 14, 2021, without a fixer or translator; he had no plan of whom he would photograph or how he would get access. He did not have a journalist’s visa—which is tricky to acquire—and instead attained the right to travel by taking a job teaching English in a school in Hadiboh. He spent one month living in a small room above Shabwa, a restaurant named after the owner’s home city in Yemen: “I went to the restaurant every day, and they started to recognize me and to talk with me, and I got to know one of the people who worked there, and then eventually all the staff.”

His new friends invited him to come hitchhiking on their days off, join them on the beaches for swims, play football, hang out in their homes, and visit Firmhin forest, where one can find dragon’s blood trees, which, in Thiefaine’s photos, look like rolls of soft, squidgy flesh or the folds of a tightly clenched fist. Most of the men Thiefaine captured were in their late twenties or thirties. “We really, really had fun together,” he says. “The violence they are facing, it’s real, it exists, so it’s important for me to acknowledge it, but it’s important also for me to show how people are dealing with this violence, and how they manage to have a good life.” The images show “la bonne vie,” as Thiefaine calls it.

Thiefaine’s approach has been fueled, in part, by the ongoing refugee crisis shaming Europe’s governments. In recent years, thousands of migrants have drowned at sea, attempting to reach the EU. Public support for settling many of those displaced by war is muted (a sentiment made more blatant by the contrasting enthusiasm among Europeans for housing and supporting recently displaced Ukrainians). Xenophobia and racism thrive, fostered and fanned by various right-wing political figures across the continent. Thiefaine says that many people in Europe see those in the Middle East “as foreigners, people who live another life, who don’t have the same routines.” In his pictures, he tries to draw connections, to reveal shared points or experiences. We see the reach of technology, branding, and commerce: Gucci T-shirts, iPhones. His subjects photograph each other. They pass around clips from YouTube. One man attaches his device to his cap to go hands-free while fishing. “I am trying to show their contemporaneity,” Thiefaine says.

Charles Thiefaine, Mohamed, Khalifa, and others watch the match between Qalansiyah and Hadibo, Socotra, 2021

Thiefaine’s photographs capture the bizarre contrasts of Socotra—not only between the seeming bliss of the landscape and the backdrop of violence, but also between the sense of history and heritage embodied by those trees, the creatures, the rocks, and the arrival of the new, the glossy, the plastic, the man-made, and with it, so many questionable priorities and warped customs. His portraits provoke intrigue, comparison, identification. And yet, the quest to highlight his subjects’ modernity—to relate them to Western norms and standards in the hope of sparking a kinship, a kindness among viewers—bolsters some of the habits of thinking the project seeks to question, by inferring loaded ideas of who the images will be consumed by and whose norms they are catering to.

Thiefaine acknowledges that he cannot ever untangle his work from what he calls “the personal approach of me, a European, white photographer from France, from somewhere where there is no violence, no war.” Still, he says, these are images without manifesto or political argument, without great claim, other than a desire to know how another man spends time, how he passes his day, how he looks when happy, when living well. “I don’t pretend to show the reality,” he says. “I prefer to assume that it’s not the reality, but a personal approach, a personal way to photograph them. It is only some things I discovered, with the people I decided to spend time with.”

Charles Thiefaine, A fisherman gets on his motorbike to sell fish in Hadibo’s restaurants, Socotra, 2021Charles Thiefaine, Ibrahim, a young man from Taez, Yemen, came to Socotra in 2021, and works in a restaurant in Hadibo, Socotra, 2021

Charles Thiefaine, Khalifa, a young painter from Hadibo, spends time with his brothers, Socotra, 2021

Charles Thiefaine, Mohamed, a young man from Hadibo, goes to fish with his friends, Socotra, 2021

Charles Thiefaine, Socotra dragon trees (or dragon blood trees) on the mountain of Firmhin, Socotra, 2021Charles Thiefaine, Mohamed fishes with his friends, Socotra, 2021Charles Thiefaine, Young Socotri supporters watch a football match in Hadibo, Socotra, 2021Charles Thiefaine, “Allah Foq” (God is above us) carved in the trunk of a bottle tree, an endemic species of Socotra, 2021Charles Thiefaine, Owad, a fisherman from Qalansiyah, fishes every day with his father, Socotra, 2021. All photographs from the series Walking with Dragons, Socotra, Yemen, 2021
Courtesy the artist

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

The Inventive French Magazine That Published Legendary Photographers

“There was just one delicate catch,” Robert Delpire once remarked. “I had no competence.” Then twenty-four years old and studying to become a doctor, he had been asked by faculty to create a periodical aimed at medical professionals with an interest in art and culture as well as medicine. “No experience in publishing. Nothing even related,” Delpire continued. “I came from a milieu in which the word ‘culture’ didn’t exist. . . . So, in the unconsciousness of youth, I asked for texts from Claude Roy, Jacques Prévert, André Breton; photographs by Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Brassaï; drawings from André François, Saul Steinberg. And I was astonished to be so warmly welcomed.” Delpire was destined to be a publisher, not a surgeon.

Spread from NEUF, no. 4, devoted to the theme of sports, October 1951

For his new periodical, he chose the name NEUF. Perhaps this was because nine was the number on his basketball jersey, and he was an avid player. Or simply because neuf in French means “nine” but also “new.” NEUF would run for nine issues before ceasing publication in 1953 (it did not have enough subscriptions to sustain itself). But seventy years after publication, no complete collection of NEUF, public or private, exists; even the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s set is incomplete. To make the periodical accessible to photography enthusiasts and a larger public, delpire & co recently decided to reissue a facsimile of the original nine issues in a slipcase. The box set also contains a special supplement by art critic Michel Ragon titled Expression and Non-Figuration (1951), as well as another pamphlet with an essay by photography historian Michel Frizot.

Cover of NEUF, no. 8, with photography by Robert Frank, December 1952

To produce his magazine, Delpire was helped by his friends: Ragon and Pierre Faucheux, an innovative graphic designer. With their guidance and the support of the medical board dedicated to the arts, the cultural periodical was diverted to increasingly reflect Delpire’s eclectic interests. He learned day by day on the job, and NEUF evolved from issue to issue, giving greater room to photography until entire issues were dedicated to photographs of a selected theme (such as the heart, games, sport, the circus) or to an individual artist (such as Brassaï, Robert Frank, or, in the last issue, illustrator André François). To finance high-quality printing, Delpire obtained money from pharmaceutical companies who wanted their products shown in full-page ads, often in color, and he also persuaded them to assign his photographer friends to create visually striking advertisements. Paul Facchetti’s ad for a protein pill, for instance, features a surreal wicker mannequin projecting ominous shadows onto the background; for an ad for Mitosyl skin cream, a photographer who went by the name Casini made a compelling image of a tricolor snake emerging from its transparent molted skin.

The early issues reflect Delpire’s eclectic, whimsical taste, with its mix of illustrations, documentary photography, drawings, poetry, ethnography, and literature.

Delpire excelled as a photo researcher. He culled stock photographs from agencies or archives and often gave them the same full-page billing as photographs by recognized authors. He likened their unpolished charm to “a kind of raw state of photography.” For instance, in one image in the circus-themed issue, a trumpet-playing bear in the foreground looms over the circus master in a braided military tunic. In an issue dedicated to sports, the curved body of a diver is crowned with a cloud of bubbles, and the body of another swimmer, whose arms and legs we see from above, parallels an octopus’ twisted limbs. Their compositions and focuses may be imperfect, yet these photographs have the spur-of-the moment charm of amateur photographs found in family albums.

Spread from NEUF, no. 3, with photography by Robert Doisneau, May 1951

Still, NEUF relied on major photographers of the era, especially on humanists such as the Dutch photographer Carel Blazer, Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Izis, and George Rodger. Izis and Brassaï are featured with studio portraits of painters such as Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall. Other photographs by Izis show a melancholic street florist on a cold day, sitting in a tiny stand with hands warming in her muffs, and an extraordinary, surreal image of two socks suspended, like a hanged man’s legs, in front of an attic window with views of Paris roofs. Some of Doisneau’s strongest images—first published in his 1949 book, La Banlieue de Paris, with text by Blaise Cendrars—appear in a thematic issue about games: children, armed with sticks and a garbage-can lid as a giant shield, wage war in a desolate wasteland of smoke and fog. 

Spread from NEUF, no. 4, with photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson, October 1951

Delpire’s visit to Magnum Photos, the agency that had been recently established, yielded two important portfolios: George Rodger’s on the Nuba people of Sudan and their rituals, in which warriors, their limbs rubbed with ash, fight in a desolate landscape; and Cartier-Bresson’s “La Maison du muscle à Téheran (Muscle House in Tehran),” a competent but somewhat undistinguished and short reportage shot during a brief trip to Iran in 1950. The portfolio ends with a surprising pairing of an image of an Iranian man in training with a calligraphic ink drawing of dynamic silhouettes by Henri Michaux.

The early issues of NEUF reflect Delpire’s eclectic, whimsical taste, with its mix of illustrations, documentary photography, drawings, poetry, ethnography, and literature, but an abrupt change in editorial direction took place with issue number five. Dated December 1951, it focuses firmly on one artist, Brassaï, and his photography, drawings, and sculptures. The photographs are printed as full pages, with minimal captions grouped near the beginning; the only texts are passages from Brassaï’s memoir about his childhood, and articles by Henry Miller (“L’Oeil de Paris” is titled after his nickname for Brassaï, following the photographer’s 1932 publication Paris de nuit). On the red cover, two hoodlums appear as if emerging from behind a velvet theater curtain. Delpire deliberately mixed images from different series and periods of Brassaï’s work to create unusual visual connections. The reader’s gaze travels from image to image. When two images shot inside cafés are aligned, their characters seem to join to form a triangle. Two night photographs of a sex worker are shot from the back, then from the front, as if we were following the photographer as he circles his subject. Two little-known, surreal photos close the sequence: a still life of ivy cascading down a broken plaster statue, and a group of cornette-wearing nuns walking away under a vault of gigantic, lush saguaro.

Cover of Revue NEUF, no. 7, with photography by Carel Blazer, September 1952

Issue number seven is dedicated to the theme of the circus, with a beautiful photographic cover of acrobats by Blazer, and photos by Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, and, for the first time, Robert Frank, who was almost unknown at the time and contributed images of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. The most striking is perhaps a portrait of the famous clown Emmett Kelly: He faces us, holding a cigar in his outsized glove, and wears a wistful expression. His white face in full makeup is framed by the back of a black overcoat, worn by a man in a top hat. Frank’s diaristic-like vision, with offbeat, uncentered views, strongly differed from the style of photography usually championed by Delpire. Even so, the following issue would be dedicated solely to Frank’s study of Indigenous people in Peru. His images are empathetic and melancholy, not a classic reportage with a narrative but a loose wandering, where his drifting eye follows his subjects’ exiles and displacements. The accompanying text, however, by Georges Arnaud is shocking for its stark and racist view of these Native people.

Spread from NEUF, no. 8, with photography by Robert Frank, December 1952

In between the two world wars, photographs had often been used in art and literary journals, especially in George Bataille’s Documents or Albert Skira’s Minotaure, two Surrealism-oriented publications. But these photographs were mostly uncredited and often perceived as documents illustrating the texts; photographers were not considered authors. On the contrary, NEUF prioritized images from the beginning. Photographs occupy an essential place as works in their own right; they were printed full-page on thick, coated paper and credited to individual authors.

Spread from NEUF, no. 5, with photography by Brassaï, December 1951
All works © delpire & co

Issues of NEUF resemble books in progress and may collectively be viewed as a bridge between Delpire’s early work and his later career as an esteemed book publisher. Soon after NEUF, he went on to create his publishing house Delpire Éditeur, releasing many books that have since become classics: Brassai’s Séville en fête (Fiesta in Seville); Robert Frank’s Les Américains (The Americans); Josef Koudelka’s Gitans (Gypsies); William Klein’s Contacts; Werner Bischof’s Japan; Daido Moriyama’s Memories of a Dog; and many other volumes by Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Inge Morath, Marc Riboud, and George Rodger. Delpire’s series Photo Poche, of compact, low-priced monographs by well-known photographers, helped introduce generations of readers to photography. It now numbers close to two hundred volumes.

But looking back at the playful pages of NEUF, we can view the experimental ground on which the young publisher tried out his strengths and developed a feel for photographic sequencing, the expressions of typography, and collaborative teamwork. With this reissue, we are given the chance to observe how Delpire’s intuitive and eclectic vision developed on the page, first tentatively, then in leaps and bounds. “Luckily, my eye does not get worn,” he once wrote. And luckily for us today that it didn’t.

REVUE NEUF 1950–1953 was reissued by delpire & co in 2021.

The Photographs That Help Us Celebrate When Nothing Feels Ordinary

A pack of wolves gathers to celebrate the birth of a pup. They look up at the sky, eagerness in their eyes, and howl in unison. All of them welcome births with joy, and must have from their beginning, I think; and wonder what the first humans celebrated. Newly standing up, likely some covering on their naked, hairy bodies—did they celebrate their difference from other animals? Probably not. At the birth of a tiny, bloody one emerging from another’s body, did they howl like wolves? To celebrate is a behavior that the human species took time to develop, though cave drawings might be a version of celebration.

From long-ago, unpictured days, humans have found ways for communally expressing grief and showing joy. Affection, attachment, love, fellowship, feelings toward others must have been transmitted with grimaces, hugs, shrugs, headshakes, gestures for all occasions. Then, events must have sprung up: a huge bonfire at harvest time, a totem pole to honor gods, sun worship at dawn, a merging of clans in something like marriage. Feelings for and about oneself and others—pride, shame, rage, jealousy—ancient texts attest to them.

Frances F. Denny, Cake (Cambridge, MA), 2013
Courtesy the artist

There are the spontaneous or the planned or the obligatory celebrations, analogous to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of “the raw and the cooked,” the dialectics of culture, “categorical opposites drawn from everyday experience.” Of the cooked: U.S. civil society has Thanksgiving, an ignorant and disturbing holiday, mostly enjoyed or suffered for overeating, decidedly not enjoyed by First Americans whose ancestors were massacred by white Europeans. Halloween, nonobligatory and semi-raw, is fun, most especially for children, when disguise offers them a chance to be superheroes and scare adults, while adults can regress to childhood. About which the comic Richard Lewis quipped: “At Halloween, my family dresses up as obstacles.”

Few people celebrate failure, but the British commemorate a failed revolution with Guy Fawkes Day. On the street, children ask, “Penny for the guy?” A resilient irony rescues the British from maudlin sentimentality, except at Christmas.

Celebrations proclaim significant moments and events, and also shape the appropriate responses. They teach people when to applaud or weep.

Weddings, Christmas, birthdays, the planning for these occasions sows happiness, worry, and agitation; then come their festive, or not, results. Ask a friend: “Did you get gifts for Christmas when you were a child?” or, “Did you have birthday parties?” The response will be immediate and specific, details often vivid and surprising, or so vague and bland as to indicate trauma. Holidays can be the most ambivalent days of your life.

“I’m going home for Christmas” might begin a stand-up comic’s routine, while many movies depend on family fractiousness for plot points. Getting home may be difficult, flights bumped, but being at home can be bumpier. Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s 1978 scene of an overdecorated living room in Hartford is Christmas gone wild. Without people, it’s an expectant, perfectly idealized Christmas. The reality of adults arguing near the tree imposes itself on the picture, while a lament can be heard: Why did we ever come home?

Michal Czerwonka, Supporters of Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama react to news that he has won the presidency, Grant Park, Chicago, November 4, 2008
© Getty Images

Sociologists claim celebrations foster social cohesion by honoring key community figures, denoting public accomplishments and private ones, such as success in love with marriage ceremonies and medals awarded for daring and courage in war. Celebrations proclaim significant moments and events, and also shape the appropriate responses—a gold watch for retirement after fifty years. They teach people when to applaud or weep, and sometimes people do both at weddings and funerals.

President Barack Obama’s 2008 election night was tense, exciting, dramatic. A Black man had been nominated for president in a nation whose written Constitution recognized slavery, embedding racism within it. Black communities were buoyed by possibility, and enthusiasm for Obama crossed races. Many non-Black Americans didn’t feel it, not at all. And his win most likely aroused their already active and latent racism.

Ruvan Wijesooriya, Rain and Shine at St. James Joy, Brooklyn, 2020
Courtesy the artist

In Chicago, where Obama lived and was a U.S. senator, Michal Czerwonka documented the ecstasy at his 2008 victory gathering in Grant Park. Two American flags and Obama’s image on a placard wave behind a crowd of beaming supporters; in the foreground, an exultant young Black man has raised his fist in the Black Power salute. The gesture also foregrounds the civil rights movement, without which a Barack Obama wouldn’t have had a chance in hell. He had run on hope, and hope animates Czerwonka’s photograph. Now, it is an image of unfulfilled wishes.

Covid lockdown, masking, and being housebound, everyone felt like a prisoner. In the summer of 2020, about two months into the pandemic, whatever fears these Brooklyn neighbors felt, they ran into the streets, masks on, to escape their boredom, for a block party known as St. James Joy. “There was dancing in the street,” to quote Martha and the Vandellas. Pictures of the event burst with human energy and the beauty of spontaneity, exemplifying what well planned events can’t ever do—let the moment happen, when sudden pleasure roars, when nothing else matters, it’s just full on partying.

Malick Sidibé, Soirée familiale, 1966–2008
© the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Now, with vaccinations, apartment doors have opened. People meet and greet. There’s still need for caution—the threat of new variants—but there’s reason enough to celebrate the advent of almost ordinary life. The first season of Succession launched with an episode titled “Celebration.” The eightieth-birthday luncheon for the patriarch, Logan Roy (le roi), was attended by his entire nuclear, or unclear, family. No one enjoyed it, especially the birthday boy. The ironic festivity united the series’ disunited characters, inviting Succession’s viewers into the family’s vicious infighting. Some birthdays are like that.

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Malick Sidibé’s photograph of a jolly family gathering in Soirée familiale (1966) sings with ebullience. The family’s liveliness overflows the frame. Most of the group looks at his camera, but not everyone. Those not looking, otherwise engaged, register individuals as related to each other and unique from each other. Sidibé didn’t insist, Look at me, the camera, smile, the standard gimmicks to organize group portraits. He let this family act as it wanted. Maybe they’re being themselves, though one can’t know. The family composition thrives with personality, a portrait of resemblances and differences.

In Frances F. Denny’s Cake, Cambridge, MA (2013), a round, high, heavily frosted white cake is metonymic, either for a birthday or small wedding. Cake might even be a tiny monument to the uniformity of celebrations. Sitting on a black table that disappears under it, Denny’s cake is spotlighted like a movie star. But half of it is gone, likely eaten, so the cake is undone. The assumption is that it was once whole, which comments on the ways viewers narrate pictures, imagining a before them and an after them. The exposed interior might be, curiously, about interiority, what lies beneath or inside a luscious surface. Nobody’s waiting for a slice, and Denny’s solitary half cake says, It’s over. On reflection, the party might not have been as sweet as the cake, now just a leftover.

Peter Hujar, Palermo Catacombs #11, 1963
© 2021 The Peter Hujar Archive/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photography’s genesis must have been influenced by people’s fascination with themselves; knowing death awaits is a perpetual insult to their narcissism. Might a picture subvert eternal disappearance? “Life is a movie. Death is a photograph,” Susan Sontag famously wrote. She saw a still object, necessarily of the past, the subject absent—death. But a photograph is seen by the living who enliven it with meaning. It is, instead, a fitting subjectfor a photograph, this stasis.

The dead are also celebrated, honored, and photographers’ concepts range as widely as burial customs. Peter Hujar’s elegant style in Palermo Catacombs #11 (1963) articulates the texture and architecture of the tombs. In the sixteenth century, the Capuchin friars used these crypts when their cemetery became full. Initially, they dried the corpses, dousing them with vinegar to preserve them.

Hujar’s photograph is shocking, the way death is. Hujar wants to see death, get close, focus on details. God is in the details, and maybe death is also. Their robes drape around their mummified bodies. Those faces, their icy expressions, what do they tell us? Standing up, the dead might just walk away. The liminal passage between life and death—she passed, he passed—is heightened by Hujar’s inclusion of a staircase, signifying ascension and descent. The friars will walk up and down it, until, one day, they can’t.

Chandra McCormick, Traditional Jazz Funeral of James Black, Drummer and Composer, also known as Guardian of the Grove, Treme, New Orleans, 1988
Courtesy the artist

Far from Palermo, the death of a drummer, James Black, merits a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral in 1988. It’s a joyous celebration. Chandra McCormick places the stark white, flower bedecked casket, raised high by pallbearers, in the center, motoring the dynamic procession and the photograph. Some of the Black and non-Black mourners have raised their fists. So many people surround it, fan out from it, walking in front of and behind it, the coffin might be floating in the air, even though three pronounced arms do the work. James Black’s life of making music has ended, and the tunes he played and loved will see him out. Exultant faces proclaim their fervent belief: James is going to a better place.

In the here and now, celebrating feels right. The vaccine—and the promise of helpful new pills—is freeing people to roam the streets, meet in bars, go shopping, see friends, dine out—even the usual seems a celebration. Nothing feels ordinary, though, while it is also very ordinary, except for the threat of the vexing unvaxxed and new variants. Still, it’s a dangerous world where much more than viruses are killing people. Many would still prefer to stay home.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 246, “Celebrations,” under the title “What Makes a Celebration?”

How Jamie Hawkesworth Creates a Dreamscape of Everyday Encounters

A boy watches as Jamie Hawkesworth passes the couchette the child’s family is riding in on the Trans-Siberian Railway as it runs from Moscow to Beijing. As his parents play chess, the boy hangs upside down from his upper berth, poised and perfectly still as he addresses Hawkesworth’s lens. The scene evokes the strange comfort that travel sometimes produces when, close to one’s nearest in small surroundings, the world unfurls on the other side of the window.

Since making his name in fashion photography, Hawkesworth has used any available space in his work schedule to go on trips to places he hasn’t visited before. This desire arises from his wanderlust about the United Kingdom, the island nation he lives in, and the vastness of the lands that lie beyond. But rather than being a means to establish himself as a travel photographer, the trips have served as opportunities to simply take photographs of people in the places he finds them. For Hawkesworth, it’s not so much about his journey, or destinations visited, but about the journeys of those he meets along the way: the world is the means to illuminate an upside-down boy as sunlight shines through the train’s window, to make us think of his view of the world in that topsy-turvy moment.

The pictures in this issue of Aperture, the majority of which are published here for the first time, are a selection of photographs taken on many of these trips. Together, they form a tender portrait of people around the globe. We are shown a checkerboard of cities—Detroit to Kerala, Los Angeles to Mumbai—and we travel along fantastical routes: Jamaica, Sweden, Mongolia, the Netherlands, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The work, made between 2009 and 2021, is illustrated without titles, so we don’t learn the specifics of locations or when they were visited. Hawkesworth is not interested in a grand tour. Instead, we see an accumulated, and fragmented, picture of the world as it appears in the twenty-first century: the ground is dusty, the buildings are sun bleached, the sky is mostly cloudy, and it rarely rains. And in the midst is all humanity—a riot of dyed hair, tattoos, colorful mass-produced clothes—going about its business. Traces of older orders of society persist in certain Indigenous dress styles or in the layout of arable land. But what accrues, image by image, is the remarkable consistency of how individuals present themselves.

The more we see of Hawkesworth’s imagery, the more we seem alike in our multitude of differences. But this is a fiction the work raises, collapsing time and space, cultures and continents into a set of faces addressing a camera. In this process, it differs from the documentary universality found in initiatives such as Edward Steichen’s exhibition The Family of Man (1955), in which he curated a collective photo-essay about human experience.

Hawkesworth, by contrast, gives us a dreamworld from a single viewpoint about quotidian existence. The historian Ludmilla Jordanova, who has written about The Family of Man, has observed that the ordinary people who are the staple subjects for such photography projects “see through photographs because, since there are so many of them, they have long ceased to be remarkable.” What is left to them is to inhabit images that draw attention to the “selective artistry of photographs,” which they, by and large, fail to profit from. Viewed today, Hawkesworth’s work largely represents a prepandemic world; part of its charge lies in how it allows us to wander in places now less easily traveled. This body of work, which follows Hawkesworth’s celebrated photobooks, The British Isles (2021), To the Antarctic (2021), and Preston Bus Station (2017), suggests new territory for the photographer.

Hawkesworth was born in 1987 in the English county of Suffolk. He first studied forensic science at the University of Central Lancashire (founded as the Institution for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1828) before shifting to photography, having been taught to use a camera to document mock crime scenes. After failing the law exam element of the forensic-science program, Hawkesworth decided to reject the objectivity of forensics and learned to use a camera according to a creative set of concerns. “It was a bit of a whim when I switched to photography, but within a week I just completely fell in love with it,” he told me when we spoke last autumn. “For the first time ever, I could use my hands to play around with something and make something.”

In 2010, a year after graduating, Hawkesworth spent a weekend in Lancashire in northern England with his former tutor, the writer and curator Adam Murray, photographing young people at Preston Bus Station, a key example of British brutalist architecture. The portraits were published that year in a newsprint pamphlet titled Preston Bus Station, one of the first publications of the collective Preston is my Paris, founded by Murray and the photographer Robert Parkinson. In 2012, hearing that the bus station was threatened with demolition, Hawkesworth returned to Preston for a month to document it again, taking photographs and making a film. Every day, he studied the people who arrived at and left the terminus according to the timetables of the numbered bus routes, along with those who loitered all day hidden in plain sight. The large plate-glass windows of the station showed him how light moved hour by hour, illuminating the details of appearance in all manner of journeymen. The project became a pictorial symbol for local campaigners trying to save the building, with the pressure group Gate 81 securing a site-specific installation of Hawkesworth’s images in the bus station. The opposition forced the local council to abandon its redevelopment plans, and the building became a Grade 2 listed building (a building warranting preservation as being of architectural significance) only a year later in 2013.

Hawkesworth is not interested in a grand tour. Instead, we see an accumulated, and fragmented, picture of the world as it appears in the twenty-first century.

This formative undertaking taught Hawkesworth how to negotiate a portrait. “Growing up,” he says, “before I got on the phone to call someone, I would always have to practice what to say because I was quite shy. When I started to approach strangers, I’d be incredibly nervous and knew that person was also probably nervous, so it was very awkward, which I found really exciting.” Hawkesworth adds, “I very quickly learned how to talk to someone, how to use my camera under pressure, how to conduct myself so that person feels comfortable—all these millions of things in such a simple exchange.” He began photographing with a Mamiya RB67 with a 127mm lens, which he continues to use, as it was “always about trying to keep things basic.” His focus lay in the nature of the encounter over and above the securing of the picture: “I always said to myself, If I hold on to that excitement, then the pictures are always going to feel honest.”

The other contributing factor to Hawkesworth’s aesthetic style is his practice of developing and printing his own work. “The biggest thing that I got from the darkroom,” he explains, “was that once, by mistake, I opened the door a fraction and it brought this warm glow into the picture.” He turned the mistake into a stylistic feature, infusing the subject matter with a different disposition: “It was a huge part of my printing, particularly at the beginning with a project like Preston Bus Station, a very cold space. When I came back to the darkroom that technique would help me to warm up the photographs, making them feel a lot more optimistic than they were in reality. It felt celebratory of the place rather than it being a freezing cold bus station—which it was.” The project brokered a different framework for photographing people, perhaps not in the documentary tradition, but one more analogous to the contemporary art model of participatory practice, or the design model of codesign, both of which flatten out hierarchies between artists/designers and audiences/consumers through open collaboration in creation and development.

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News of the Preston Bus Station pamphlet came to the attention of Julie Brown, director of M.A.P, a fashion-image agency. She made contact with Hawkesworth to request a copy and signed him at their first meeting. An ongoing collaboration with the designer JW Anderson across a number of seasons and projects soon followed, with Hawkesworth participating in Disobedient Bodies, the exhibition Anderson curated at the Hepworth Wakefield, in 2017, for which Hawkesworth photographed 123 local schoolchildren in key examples of twentieth-century and contemporary fashion designs.

Hawkesworth’s desire to resist being categorized was brought into sharp focus by the agency. “I remember them saying that they wanted the website to have my personal work in one section, fashion in the next section, and documentary here, and I was always really confused,” he says. “Why would you separate any of it?” Hawkesworth is disinterested in such divisions. “I’ve always just been plodding along, doing portraiture, traveling around the country, and then an interesting fashion project will come up, and I’ll treat that in exactly the same way, same camera, same printing, so I never really separated anything.”

Hawkesworth’s photographs of India, Kashmir, and Bhutan taken in 2019 made the Japanese fashion designer Junya Watanabe nostalgic for Asia in the midst of lockdown. For his Spring 2022 womens wear collection, usually shown at Paris Fashion Week but this time staged in Tokyo to a remote audience, Watanabe presented the models in front of large projections of Hawkesworth’s images of golden deities, monks, and mountain peaks to frame a collection that incorporated collaborations with Chinese, Thai, Nepalese, and Japanese artists and craftspeople living in Asia and around the world. It’s a poignant statement about connectedness and isolation, with both the visuals and the clothing allowing the eye to travel. Watanabe knew of Hawkesworth’s reputation through his fashion editorials in Vogue (U.S. and U.K.), Love, and the New York Times as well as advertising campaigns for Alexander McQueen and Holland & Holland. That Hawkesworth’s foothold in the space of fashion is matched by the photography he produces beyond this category is why a designer such as Watanabe finds the nonfashion/fashion intersection of his portfolio appealing.

Indeed, ordinary individuals with distinct personal style permeate Hawkesworth’s most recent book, The British Isles, a three-hundred-page publication that collects the photographs Hawkesworth has taken on trips around the United Kingdom. Hawkesworth printed from the negatives in his darkroom in Shoreditch, London, over a sustained eighteen-month period. The British Isles arose out of him setting himself small journeys, he says, “where if I hadn’t been to a place, I’d just go and see who I’d come across. Just really that simple.” Keeping his observant eye on what he witnessed allowed him to perceive often-overlooked details. What the trips were not about was cataloguing a nation and a country. “When I went to Scotland, I never thought, Oh, for the next three weeks I’m going to explore the identity of Scotland, or what it is to be Scottish. I never had the idea to document Britain, it just sort of happened.”

When thinking what to call the publication, Hawkesworth remained very conscious of the word Britain in a climate of Brexit, devolution, and disunity. The title deflects a political position, merely raising “all of the little islands that I went to, plus all of the mainland.” The book contains no captions, so the lack of place names or dates produces a rounded experience of a people and land redolent of subtle seasonal transitions and temperate climate. At the book’s heart is a sequence of portraits of pupils at Christ’s Hospital school. They look like extras from a Harry Potter movie, but their uniforms are, in fact, unchanged from the school’s inception in the City of London in 1552. The private school is now in East Sussex, but it upholds its tradition of offering scholarships to academically gifted children from disadvantaged backgrounds. And it’s here that we find the just model for the country Hawkesworth was searching in, a paragon for social equity distinct from the current British government’s rhetoric of “levelling up” economic disparities as the country recovers from the pandemic.

All photographs by Jamie Hawkesworth, Untitled, 2011–21
Courtesy the artist

In Hawkesworth’s own education, his first year studying forensic science was where he learned to use a camera to document evidence. The course involved simulated crime-scene houses where “you are actually searching for the evidence to then photograph as it hasn’t been marked for you—you have to find it.” Was dusting for fingerprints that different from photographing people he hadn’t met before? “It is very similar in that you’re running around trying to find something, and then you photograph it,” he says. Hawkesworth’s photographs uncover as much about his subjects as the setting he finds them in, revealing faces and places, and the unseen connective tissue that binds one to the other.

Hawkesworth has worked in fashion, documented global communities, and detailed uninhabited regions, but he is unusual in resisting the trope of the glamorous photographer-explorer typified by Peter Beard, or maybe even Patrick Lichfield. In his unassuming manner and in the gentle nature of the images he produces, he has no need for a safari jacket to signal his ego or his photographic output. This is not to suggest he is unaware of such precedents. In traveling to Antarctica, he downloaded a copy of Werner Herzog’s documentary about the polar region, Encounters at the End of the World (2007), onto his phone. He explains that when you sleep on the ice, “you dig a hole, and you sleep in the hole in a special sleeping bag, and that was where I watched that documentary.” Hawkesworth’s wanderlust is as much about dreams as it is about exploration. I also get the feeling Herzog would be pleased to know of Hawkesworth’s viewing experience.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 246, “Celebrations,” under the title “Around the World.”

15 Essential Photobooks by Women Photographers

Florence Henri, Composition Portrait, Cora, 1931
Courtesy the artist/Galleria d’arte Martini & Ronchetti

Florence Henri: Mirror of the Avant-Garde, 1927–40 (2015)

A central figure at the Bauhaus and an active photographer in the decade before World War II, Florence Henri was a forerunner of photography in the twentieth century. Her experimental photographs pushed the medium forward with their highly original use of light, composition, and portraiture.

László Moholy-Nagy, who was a supporter and contemporary of Henri, wrote: “With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase—the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today.” Florence Henri: Mirror of the Avant-Garde, 1927–40 pays homage to her essential, but under-recognized, contributions to photography.

Diane Arbus, Woman with a veil on Fifth Avenue, New York, 1968
Courtesy the Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, 2011 (First published 1972)

One of the best-known photographers of her generation, Diane Arbus was already a legend in the photography community when she died at the age of 48 in 1971. Despite her significant influence, only a relatively small number of her pictures were widely known at the time.

The following year, Aperture first published Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, featuring eighty of Arbus’s now-iconic portraits—offering the general public its first encounter with her momentous achievements. Designed and edited by the painter Marvin Israel and Arbus’s daughter, Doon, the book aimed to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work and hoped it would be seen.

The response was unprecedented. Now, fifty years after its original publication, the monograph is universally acknowledged as a timeless masterpiece and remains the foundation of Arbus’s international reputation.

Judith Joy Ross, Untitled, Easton, Pennsylvania, 1988
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 (2022)

The work of Judith Joy Ross marks a watershed in the lineage of the photographic portrait. Her black-and-white, large-format portraits—unpretentious, quietly penetrating, startling in their transparency—consistently achieve the capacity to glimpse the past, present, and perhaps even the future of the individuals who stand before her lens.

“Ross’s pictures are holy in their awkwardness,” writes Rebecca Bengal, “the teen with the dark gothic bangs wielding a rake, the way the girls clasp their hands over their bathing suits.” Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 gathers over two hundred photographs, serving as a vital introduction to Ross’s groundbreaking work, as well as a testimony to her influence in the medium.         

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983
Courtesy the artist

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 2021 (First published 1986)

Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis.

First published by Aperture in 1986, over twenty-five years later, the influence of The Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms can still be felt, firmly establishing it as a contemporary classic. As Goldin reflects in an updated afterword from Aperture’s 2021 edition: “I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise.”

Ming Smith, Acid Rain (“Mercy Mercy Me,” Marvin Gaye), ca. 1977
Courtesy the artist

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. Smith first moved to New York in the 1970s, supporting herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, before going on to join the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1975, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes, “Her remarkable body of photography belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and for its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, not unlike today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Paz Errázuriz, Evelyn IV, Santiago, from the series Adam’s apple, 1987
Courtesy the artist

Paz Errázuriz: Survey (2016)

Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz is known for her steadfast commitment to her subjects, spending months or years with a community in order to build trust and carefully study social structures. During the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s, Errázuriz photographed brothels, shelters, psychiatric wards, and boxing clubs—all places where women were not welcome.

“Errázuriz’s objective is not to translate current events onto photographic paper, as many photojournalists and reporters have done,” Juan Vicente Aliaga writes. “She strives to destabilize the normative visual order—an order based on bourgeois, classist values, patriarchal law, male heterosexist hegemony, and the language of white men.” Throughout all of her photographs, Errázuriz’s brave gaze stands out, showcasing the strength in her life-long methodology based on coexistence, trust, and mutual respect.

Susan Meiselas, Sandinistas at the walls of the National Guard Headquarters: “Molotov Man,” Estelí, Nicaragua, July 16, 1979
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua, 2016 (First published 1981)

In the late 1970s, Susan Meiselas traveled independently to Nicaragua to document the Somoza regime during its decline, culminating with the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The photographs she made during this time would transform her career.

First published by Aperture in 1981, Nicaragua is widely regarded as a landmark contribution to the literature of photojournalism. Alongside Meiselas’s compelling images are interviews with various participants of the revolution, many of whom she got to know while photographing—forming an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil. In 2016, Aperture released an updated edition featuring a conversation with Kristen Lubben on the history of Meiselas’s work in Nicaragua; how it has been circulated, revisited, repatriated, and reconsidered; and how and why it endures.

Sally Mann, Jessie Bites, 1985
Courtesy the artist

Sally Mann, Immediate Family, 2015 (First published 1992)

When Aperture first published Immediate Family in 1992, it was met with both acclaim and criticism. Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland summer home in Virginia, Sally Mann’s intimate portraits of her children captured the sublime dignity and feral grace of family life, and explore the eternal struggle between a child’s simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy.

At the time of publication, the book caused an uproar among religious conservatives who deemed the work pornographic. Today, Mann is firmly established as a preeminent American photographer, and Immediate Family is lauded by critics as one of the great photography books of our time.

Justine Kurland, Poison Ivy, 1999
Courtesy the artist

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (2020)

The North American landscape is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth: cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland, known for her utopian images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series Girl Pictures. Taken between 1997 and 2002, Kurland’s photographs stage scenes of teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism.

Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, swim in sun-dappled watering holes. Kurland imagines a world at once lawless and utopian, an Eden in the wild. “I wanted to make the communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experiences as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls,” writes Kurland. “Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it—one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.”

An-My Lê, Night Operations VII, from the series 29 Palms, 2003–4
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain (2020)

Throughout her thirty-year career, An-My Lê has photographed sites of former battlefields—spaces reserved for training for or reenacting war—and the noncombatant roles of active service members. Lê is part of a lineage of photographers who have adapted the conventions of landscape photography to explore the structures of conflict that have long informed American history and identity. Yet she is one of the few who have experienced the sights and sounds associated with growing up in a war zone, having evacuated her home country of Vietnam as a teenager in 1975.

On Contested Terrain is the first comprehensive survey of Lê’s work, featuring formative early works, as well as her well-known series Small Wars, 29 Palms, and Events Ashore, and Lê’s most recent photographs from the US-Mexico border. “Lê’s photographs are balanced, quiet, and nuanced works of art that offer the viewer an opportunity for contemplation,” Dan Leers writes. “She invites us to examine our own perception of, and involvement in, war as something that is not straightforward or clear-cut.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme (Shadow), from the series Momme Portrait, 2008
Courtesy the artist

LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Notion of Family , 2016 (First published 2014)

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s award-winning first photobook, The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacies of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Examining this impact throughout the community and her own family, Frazier intervenes in the histories and narratives of the region. Setting the story across three generations—her grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—Frazier’s statement becomes both personal and political.

In The Notion of Family, Frazier knowingly acknowledges and expands on the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, enlisting the participation of her family, her mother in particular. In the creation of these collaborative works, Frazier reinforces the idea of art- and image-making as transformative acts, means of resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives—both those of her family and of the community at large.

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

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance , 2021 (First published 2011)

In her images of keenly observed gestures and details, Rinko Kawauchi reveals the mysterious and beautiful realm at the edge of the everyday world. For Kawauchi, the act of photographing is less a way of referring to the appearance of everyday reality than it is evoking the luminous openness that exists when the boundaries between things become blurred. As Kawauchi describes, “I want imagination in the photographs—a photograph is like a prologue. You wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ You feel something is going to happen.”

Ten years after its original publication, Aperture published a new edition of Kawauchi’s beloved photobook, retaining the artist’s original sequence alongside new texts by David Chandler, Masatake Shinohara, and Lesley A. Martin that contribute new context to and perspective on Kawauchi’s influential work.

Deana Lawson, Oath, 2013
Courtesy the artist; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

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

Aperture published the artist’s landmark first publication, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, in 2018. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson’s images portray the personal and the powerful.

Diana Markosian, The Disappointment, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara (2020)

In Santa Barbara, Diana Markosian recreates the story of her family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, moved to the US with her two young children. The family moved in with a man named Eli in Santa Barbara, California, a city made famous in Russia when the 1980s soap opera of that name became the first American television show broadcast there.

Weaving together reenactments by actors, archival images, and stills from the original Santa Barbara TV show, Markosian reconsiders her family’s story from her mother’s perspective, relating to her mother for the first time as a woman, and coming to terms with the profound sacrifices Svetlana made to become an American. Brought together in Markosian’s debut monograph, the series offers an innovative and compelling hybrid of personal and documentary storytelling.

Sara Cwynar, Sahara from SSENSE.com (As Young as You Feel), 2020
Courtesy the artist

Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (2021)

Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits are an investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture. Cwynar’s work circles around a large range of ideas and interests, from the ways subjective notions of beauty form through images, to the fetishization of consumer objects and color, to informal image archives.

Working in her studio, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives eBay purchases into her visually complex tableaux that examine how images circulate online, as well as how the lives and purposes of both physical objects and their likenesses change over time. This work is brought together in Glass Life, the first comprehensive monograph of this celebrated multidisciplinary artist.

7 Ways the Photography Community Is Responding to the War in Ukraine

Stephen Shore, Room 509, Dnipro Hotel, Kiev, Kyivska Province, Ukraine, July 18, 2012
Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York

Stephen Shore: Survivors in Ukraine at 303 Gallery

Stephen Shore’s 2012–13 series Survivors in Ukraine documents in and around the homes and villages of Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. Shore’s colorful, melancholic photographs present an arresting body of work on the lingering effects of war on the landscape and its people.

An exhibition of this work is on view at 303 Gallery in New York through March 12. As part of the exhibition, Shore and 303 Gallery raised over $300,000 in a fundraiser for the Ukrainian American Relief Committee.

In Ukraine at the Gallery of Dobbins Mews

In Ukraine is an exhibition cocurated by Ira Lupu and Fred Ritchin aiming to provide a larger viewpoint of Ukraine and its people through a range of photographs, video, sculpture, paintings, and more by Ukrainian artists.

On view at the Gallery at Dobbins Mews in Brooklyn starting March 12, the exhibition will also feature an opportunity for visitors to make donations in support of Ukraine.

Julie Poly from Slava Ukraini!
Courtesy the artist

Slava Ukraini! at Galeria Czwartek

In a response to the Russian invasion of Ukriane, Galeria Czwartek in Warsaw has dedicated its space to a new exhibition featuring works by Ukrainian artists. On view March 10–20, the exhibition highlights work from over twenty artists, including Sasha Kurmaz, Daniel Kosoy, and Synchrodogs. Prints from the exhibition will be available for purchase in editions of one hundred each, with all proceeds donated to humanitarian charities helping war victims in Ukraine.

Mark Neville from Stop Tanks With Books (Nazraeli Press, 2022)
Courtesy the artist

Mark Neville: Stop Tanks With Books

Last year, British artist Mark Neville moved his home and studio from London to Kyiv. Since 2015, he has been documenting life in Ukraine—from holidaymakers on the beaches of Odessa, to the churches and nightclubs of Kyiv, to both civilians and soldiers living on the front lines in Eastern Ukraine.

The new book Stop Tanks With Books (Nazraeli Press, 2022) calls on the international community to urgently support Ukraine. Neville’s photographs are published alongside short stories about the conflict by Lyuba Yakimchuk and research from the Centre of Eastern European Studies in Berlin about the 2.5 million Ukrainians already displaced by the war.

Daniel Jack Lyons, Tanya, 2015, from Pictures for Purpose Print Sale
Courtesy the artist

Pictures for Purpose Print Sale

Founded in 2020, Pictures for Purpose aims to raise proceeds and awareness for urgent causes through the medium of photography. Previous iterations have raised funds for the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis.

The third edition of Pictures for Purpose runs March 10–24 and will feature prints from dozens of photographers. Proceeds from the sale support World Central Kitchen, an organization providing fresh meals on the front lines to those in need during humanitarian, climate, and community crises.

Jamie Hawkesworth, Flower, 2014
, from Have a Butchers Print Sale
Courtesy the artist

Zuzu Valla, Peace, 2022
, from Have a Butchers Print Sale
Courtesy the artist

Have a Butchers Print Sale

Have a Butchers, in association with Hempstead May & May Print, has launched a charity print sale in solidarity with Ukraine. Through March 11, collect cover ninety prints for £50 each, all sold in open editions, with proceeds supporting the British Red Cross, Ukraine Crisis Appeal.

Lorenzo Meloni, People evacuated under heavy shelling by the Russian army on the outskirts of Irpin, a city about 20km from Kyiv, Ukraine, 6 March, 2022, for Obscura
Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

Ukraine: Updates from Magnum Photographers in the Field

Magnum photographers—including Chien-Chi Chang, William Keo, and Jérôme Sessini—are on the ground in Ukraine documenting the Russian invasion and its impact on life in the country. Here, Magnum gathers coverage as it’s published, alongside stories reporting on the international response to the conflict.

Why “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” Endures in the Twenty-First Century

It’s thirty-five years later and the twenty-first printing of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. I love this book, it’s why I’m here now. It amazes me that it still resonates in the world. I’ve lived many lives since then. That was perhaps the lifetime that formed me the most, the years of the Ballad. I still believe these photos tell the truth of that time. It’s important, for me, to recontextualize the afterword every ten years. The foreword is forever, that’s the real narrative of this work. Just like I constantly re-edit my slideshows, I want to continue updating the record of my life.

I grew up in a period in which the glue of suburbia was denial. It maintained the culture, the mentality, the outer face. I didn’t accept the myths that families tell themselves and present to the world. I saw very early that my experience could be negated. That I never said that, I never did that, that never happened. I needed to get away.

Nan Goldin, Flaming Car, Salisbury Beach, N.H., 1979

I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise: not a safe, clean version, but instead, an account of what things really looked like and felt like and smelled like. I don’t think I could, at this age and in this body now, live the life that I lived then. It took a certain level of fearlessness, a wildness, quick changes—of clothes, of friends, of lovers, of cities.

When I wonder what people are talking about when they say that the Ballad helped them, I guess that it showed young people there was another way to live, that they didn’t have to swallow the version of the norm that hurt them, that they didn’t feel part of, that was destroying them. The book gave a mirror to kids who had no reflection of themselves in the world around them. They knew that they weren’t alone.

In the old days, people told me they moved to New York because of the Ballad. They were introduced to other great artists, other great personalities, and a whole other world of brilliance and beauty. They found a world where friends could replace family, where the people who kept you alive were the ones you chose. Relationships weren’t based on toxic expectations of who you were. You were free to be anyone you wanted. Somebody told me recently my work averted their suicide. If I can help one person survive, that’s the ultimate purpose of my work.

Nan Goldin, C.Z. and Max on the beach, Truro, Massachusetts, 1976

Nan Goldin, The Hug, New York City, 1980

It’s commonly said that this book is about “marginalized” people. We were never marginalized. We were the world. We were our own world, and we could have cared less about what “straight” people thought of us. I made my people into superstars, and the Ballad maintains their legacy.

In the ’80s, there was a certain freedom, and a sense of immortality, that ended with that decade. AIDS cracked the earth. With everyone dying, everything shifted. Our history got cut off. We lost a whole generation. We lost a culture. We didn’t just lose the actors, we lost the audience. There are few people left with that kind of intensity. There was an attitude towards life that doesn’t exist any- more, everything’s been so cleaned up.

Lately when I’m working with the photos of my missing friends, it’s as if they are frozen in amber. For long periods of time I forget they’re not on this planet. But the pictures show me how much I’ve lost; the people who knew me the best, the people who carried my history, the people I grew up with and I was planning to get old with are gone. They took my memory with them. The pictures in the Ballad haven’t changed. But Cookie is dead. David is dead. Greer is dead. Kenny is dead. I talk to them all the time, but they don’t talk back anymore. Mourning doesn’t end, it continues and it transmutes. This book is now a volume of loss, as well as a ballad of love.

Nan Goldin, Cookie and Vittorio’s wedding, New York City, 1986

In spite of everyone dying around me, there is that sense in your youth that you’re immortal. Death isn’t relevant to you directly. I went from being young to being old, I didn’t experience the transition. In your sixties, it’s a much different awareness of death, of seeing how limited your time is and how quickly it goes. After fifty a woman is invisible in this country, which is sort of a relief, it gives you a freedom that I like. Americans are not conditioned to respect their elders. Young people are really dismissive, you lose your credibility. They treat me like a crazy old lady because I look like a punk grandma. I’ve talked to other women over fifty and many of them feel the same. I would like to just not give a fuck.

The world has changed so much as to be unrecognizable. These are dark days. Everybody has to find their way to fight back, because that’s all we have. We don’t have elected officials that are going to fight for us. We don’t have leaders that will save us. We don’t have courts that will give us justice. We have the media but it’s been jeopardized. The people in the streets are the only chance we have.

When I got sober in 1988 and came out of my self-imposed isolation, I realized the extent of the AIDS epidemic and how many of my friends were dying. I curated the first show about AIDS in New York, Witnesses Against Our Vanishing. The catalogue was censored because of the brilliant and furious words of David Wojnarowicz, which provoked outrage and brought people to the streets. Witnesses helped lay the foundation for the art world to start organizing around AIDS.

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When I got sober in 2017, I needed to find my fight again. As always, I did what I know in my body. For three years, I’d been lost in a deadly addiction to Oxycontin. I came out of my own opioid crisis and realized that America was in the throes of a terrible overdose crisis. I couldn’t stand by to watch another generation disappear.

I decided to make the personal political. I organized a group of artists and activists called P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Our first mission was to , the family behind Oxycontin. Their private Pharma company ignited the opioid overdose epidemic, profiting off the addiction and death of five hundred thousand Americans. To get their ear we called them out on the stage where their name was most celebrated––the museum world. Through their toxic philanthropy they created a myth, but we succeeded in changing their legacy.

My work is in the permanent collections of these museums and at the risk of ruining my career I confronted them as an artist. P.A.I.N. is a small group but we make a lot of noise through direct action. We started by throwing thousands of fake Oxy bottles into the Nile at The Met in 2018 and since then we’ve acted up in museums across the world. We’ve been successful in pushing institutions to live up to their ethical mandate by cutting ties with the family and taking down their name.

Nan Goldin, Trixie on the cot, New York City, 1979

By giving a public face to the opioid epidemic we’re helping to destigmatize drug use and over- dose. P.A.I.N. is not anti-opioid, we’re anti-opioid profiteers. We’re working with other activists to create a safe world for drug users.

One thing I haven’t talked about all these years is my sex work in the late ’70s and early ’80s. That’s how I could afford to buy the film and to develop the photos in this book. I’ve always needed to protect this secret. Many people already write about the Ballad in a very reductive way, that it’s only about drugs and sex. I worried that this would become the voyeuristic filter through which all of the work would be viewed. That who I am and everything I do would be discredited by that role.

A sex worker is a hard worker, and it’s a term that shows due respect. Words matter. The same evolution of language applies to people with substance-use disorder, those of us who used to be called junkies. I feel it’s important to share my last secret, the one I’ve held onto since the ’70s, in order to combat stigma. If it gives a voice to somebody else to feel less shame, then it’s worth it.

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983
All photographs courtesy the artist

My thoughts about relationships and interdependency have changed over the decades. I still make no emotional distinction between my friends and my lovers. But I don’t want the same kind of stranglehold intimacy that I needed in the past. I don’t need somebody else to prove I exist. There’s no Nan Goldin in my house, there’s only Nan.

Photography has been redemptive for me, it’s helped me chart my descents and my reconstruction. For many years, I didn’t pick up a camera except to photograph the sky. I lost the need to photo- graph my life or the people in it. My photos were no longer my diary, my paintings were. Then during the COVID-19 quarantine, I started photographing a new friend for the first time in years. I wanted to show my friend her beauty. It’s fascinating to see how much a face can change over a year when you look at someone deeply enough and how the degree of intimacy colors a photo.

When I was a kid I thought, What a waste if I don’t leave a mark on the world. Through the Ballad I found a way to make a mark.

This essay originally appeared in Aperture’s 2021 edition of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

The Designer Translating Photographers’ Visions into Inventive Books

Session Press was founded in 2012 in response to the ongoing demand for photobooks and my belief in the book as a perfect platform for photography. We also recognized a role for independent publishers to play in meeting and satisfying collector demands. In particular, Session Press has worked hard to support Japanese and Chinese voices through our publishing program, which is focused on introducing these photographers to English-language audiences.

Working with printers, lithographers, and designers that I trust is key for successful book making. If I gain critical acclaim for my publications, it’s in large part thanks to the world-class collaborators with whom I work. Alex Lin is one of my favorite designers in NYC. I’ve worked with his studio for Mao Ishikawa’s Red Flower (2017) and Ren Hang’s Athens Love (2016) and New Love (2015). In my time as the manager at Dashwood Books, we have carried many publications that Studio Lin designed, including Hello Future by Farah Al Qasimi (Capricious, 2021), Tyler Mitchell’s I Can Make You Feel Good (Prestel, 2020), David Brandon Geeting’s Neighborhood Stroll (Same Paper, 2019), Mark Ghuneim’s Surveillance Index Edition One (self-published, 2016), John Edmonds’s Higher (Capricious, 2018), and Naoya Hatakeyama’s Excavating the Future City (Aperture, 2018), among others.

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Park Frivolity), 2019, from I Can Make You Feel Good (Prestel, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

As a New York–based publisher, Session Press wants to create books with a team that understands both Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions. I don’t want to make books that feel like those published by Japanese designers or publishers. But it’s also important for me to team up with a designer who understands and respects Eastern design philosophies. Alex has this and melds his understanding with a strong, rigorously trained design practice based in contemporary Western theories. For example, he studied traditional Chinese calligraphy as a child, and it’s important for me that he has a capacity to see Asian language in a creative and intellectual sense, not just as typefaces available on a computer. I appreciate working with Studio Lin because they always contribute unique ideas that are respectful to the photographer’s work, even in very difficult circumstances. I am excited to interview Alex Lin of Studio Lin and share his ideas about design here.

Interior spread of Red Flower by Mao Ishikawa (Session Press, 2017)

Miwa Susuda: One of my favorite books you’ve done with Session Press is Mao Ishikawa’s Red Flower. Can you tell me how you arrived at the final design?

Alex Lin: Red Flower is a collection of photos Mao Ishikawa took from 1975 to 1977. The photos capture intimate relationships between Japanese bar women and soldiers stationed in Okinawa, Japan. We started with poor quality scans of physical prints; in fact, we weren’t even sure we could work with these scans since they had dust all over them. Thankfully, our frequent collaborator Sebastiaan Hanekroot was able to remove all the dust and duotone the images for printing. 

The photos were printed full bleed in a chronological sequence in five undivided chapters. We chose Munken Print as the interior paper stock because of its rough texture and high ink absorption. The wood content in the paper causes a beautiful yellow patina when pages are exposed to light. We were after a design that felt timeless, so you wouldn’t necessarily know when the book came out. Typography is often the element that dates a book, so we intentionally left that off the cover. Instead, we silkscreened a primary character from the book in fluorescent red for the cover. The exact color came from a parking sign in Manhattan that I walked by every day; it felt like the perfect supercharged red. We sent a piece of the sign to the printer, who was able to mix a custom silkscreen ink to match. A statement from Ishikawa is printed on the opening spread in the same fluorescent ink, directly on top of an image. The tactile and imperfect quality of the silkscreen ink gives the book a special feeling when held. 

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Boys of Walthamstow), 2018, from I Can Make You Feel Good (Prestel, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Susuda: You’ve worked with many young photographers, often on their first monographs. I’m thinking about Tyler Mitchell’s I Can Make You Feel Good and Farah Al Qasimi’s Hello Future. Can you talk about that?

Lin: I feel fortunate to have been trusted with the design of many young photographers’ first books. It is a humbling experience, as I’m often in awe of the work that I’ve been charged with giving physical form to. In each case, I try hard to incorporate as much from the photographer as possible. 

Tyler wanted to create a special object within the constraints of a large commercial publishing house (Prestel). We achieved this through various tweaks in the binding and cover design. The cover is a printed book cloth that wraps onto the front and back cover boards. Since there are no endpapers, you can see exactly how the cover image folds over, giving the book a handmade quality. The cloth adheres directly to the book block along the spine, allowing the book to be exceptionally limber despite being a hardcover. All surfaces of the interior are printed full bleed on uncoated paper; there is no white space. And lastly, we printed the title of the book on a ribbon that is attached to the inside back cover instead of along the spine.

Hello Future is published by Capricious, a small independent publisher. Farah Al Qasimi was the winner of the third annual Capricious photo prize (previously, John Edmonds and Sasha Phyars-Burgess). Her work is incredibly playful and references things ranging from SpongeBob to postcolonial structures of power, gender, and aesthetics in the Gulf Arab states.

Interior spread of Hello Future by Farah Al Qasimi (Capricious, 2021)

Interior spread of Higher by John Edmonds (Capricious, 2018)

The primary body of photos is presented one per spread. Occasionally, the sequence is interrupted by research images that are printed with only the cyan channel, giving them clear separation from the main body of photos and also referencing how printed images often fade in UV light. For the cover, we looked at an exhibition Farah had at Helena Anrather gallery (New York). The frames around her prints were a reflective chrome metal, which we thought worked incredibly well with her work. We sourced a similar material for the cover and endpapers. Farah wanted to do something with stickers from the very beginning, but we were struggling to find a way to incorporate these that didn’t feel too gimmicky or separate from the book itself. We thought a book jacket would be the perfect place for this. The book jacket features four large images and a series of thumbnails on the spine. Each image is kiss cut around elements within the photo, allowing Farah’s work to live in any place you can adhere a sticker. We also left the chrome hardcover under the sticker jacket blank to encourage each book owner to create their own cover image. 

Susuda: What do you think has changed in the last five years in the world of photobooks?

Lin: Prior to Instagram, once you designed the book, you didn’t really have any insight into how it lived in the world. Now you can literally follow it into the hands of the people who have purchased it through images posted. My favorite is seeing people’s photos of the object; you can see the book in ways and places that you’d never imagine.

Mark Ghuneim, who we worked with on his Surveillance Index (Mediaeater, 2016) book, told me that unless something is printed, it doesn’t exist. Paradoxically, I believe this is even more true with the rise of digital media and social networks.

Naoya Hatakeyama, #02607, Loos-en-Gohelle, Pas-de-Calais, Hauts-de-France, France, 2009, from the series Terrils, from Excavating the Future City (Aperture, 2018)

Susuda: Can you give a brief summary of your design philosophy when it comes to photobooks? What, in your mind, makes a great photobook stand out from the many competing titles that get published every year? 

Lin: Books are an obsession for me. My favorite place to be is where the best books are, like Dashwood, the Strand, or McNally Jackson. I’m always on the hunt for old books that still feel contemporary or fresh, despite being twenty, forty, or even sixty years old. Sometimes it is the layout or typography, sometimes the material, binding . . . you never know. Quite often, I literally decide which books to pull out of the rows and rows of shelves by what the typography on the spine looks like. The way the type looks on the spine supersedes anything else, so it doesn’t even matter to me what the book is about!

I strive to design books that have lasting value. I want to capture the idiosyncrasies of each photographer. I seek to make decisions that are meaningful in some way. Sometimes when faced with an important decision like binding method or paper choice, I’ll ask myself how I’d tell the design story when the book is done. That often helps me make a more meaningful decision.

This interview originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review, issue 019, under the title “Designer Spotlight: Studio Lin.”

A Photographer Conjures the Hypnotic Power of Extreme Color

Pink Genesis, David Benjamin Sherry’s 2017 series of photograms, was born out of what the artist has called “the transformative potential of the darkroom.” The series title was inspired by James Bidgood’s 1971 film Pink Narcissus, which explores the fantasies imagined and enacted by a male prostitute played by Bobby Kendall. Kendall’s character realizes multiple roles in a created world of spectacular costumes and intense colors, not unlike the vivid colors that Sherry uses in his work. (The film was made over the course of eight years and shot almost solely in Bidgood’s New York apartment.) Amid the shock and horror Sherry felt at the end of 2016, following the US presidential election, he was also energized by the example of Bidgood’s film, in which a small interior space—specifically, a space of queer imagination—can be a site of fantasy and possibility. In his own artistic practice, Sherry also hopes to find a place of alternative possibilities, and in Pink Genesis, the photographic darkroom becomes that place. Following the election, Sherry found himself making pictures while attending protests, documenting the immediate responses of his and others’ communities. But he also felt the urge to turn toward something elemental, in an effort to investigate a new path in his own work, and to find a way forward during a difficult period. It was a time to start from the beginning. As he later reflected, photograms are “the most primal form of the analog photographic process.”

David Benjamin Sherry, Submission, 2017

Sherry first experimented with color darkroom photograms in an earlier series, Astral Desert (2011–12). In fact, eleven of the plates in this book are drawn from that body of work, while the rest are from Pink Genesis. In those earlier works, Sherry also used stencils to create areas of color, but the overall compositions of each work were based on the monochrome landscape photographs that were part of the series. Sherry has long been committed to interrogating and reinvigorating a tradition of American landscape photography. In much of his work, he uses a large-format film camera to capture the beautiful wilderness of North America, much like his photographic predecessors. Yet rather than considering an “untouched” sublime that is seemingly immune to human exploitation, Sherry highlights the rapid environmental change of our time, often utilizing saturated monochromatic color.

David Benjamin Sherry, Sailing on Solar Winds (Self-Portrait), 2017

Prior to initiating the Pink Genesis series, he was already investigating the ways landscape photography could be edged toward abstraction by removing horizon lines and “pushing color to its extremes to evoke an emotional experience.” He spent 2015 capturing the devastating effects of climate change across the country, and had recently completed the series Paradise Fire, a body of work titled after the massive fire in Olympic National Park, in Washington State, that burned almost three thousand acres that year. The series title pairs those two seemingly contradictory words, paradise and fire—an amalgam that attempts to articulate the incomprehensible toll of humankind’s impact on the natural world.

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As a queer photographer on the road, Sherry struggled with understanding his own position in relation to that of recognized heterosexual white male forebears, but he found particular inspiration in the work of Minor White, a founder and longtime editor of Aperture magazine. White approached photography with a uniquely personal vision, striving to achieve a kind of spiritual practice, including through sequences in which a poignant portrait might follow a series of abstracted landscapes. “White’s work has been an endless road map of encouragement, power, and comfort on some of my darkest nights while alone on the road,” Sherry has noted. “His work is proof to me that magic is real in the world; queerness is power and the camera can be a tool used to harness the energy.” In the book Minor White: Rites and Passages, which was conceived with White’s participation and published posthumously by Aperture in 1978, passages from White’s diaries and letters are interspersed with what Sherry has called his “empathetic abstractions.” One passage reads, “The spring-tight line between reality and photograph has been stretched relentlessly, but it has not been broken. These abstractions of nature have not left the world of appearances; for to do so is to break the camera’s strongest point—its authenticity.” For Sherry, stripping things down further—rendering images as fields of color, produced through chemicals, light, and time, but without the camera itself—was an opportunity to go back to the beginnings of photography at such a fraught moment.

David Benjamin Sherry, Winter, 2017

The first photogram made for the Pink Genesis series, Winter, consists of a rich green field with a circular motif at its center. Sherry later realized that this shape, with its round depth augmented by multiple shades of green, approximates the hollow form of a pipeline, an object that was the subject of some of his recent landscape photographs shot in different areas of the United States, inspired by the #NODAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) movement. But Sherry understood that he had not just reimagined, in the darkroom, a form that he had encountered in the landscape; the circles held other meanings too: “The work became not only a pipeline but also an escape tunnel, an evacuation route, and a portal to another place.” Other works, such as the pink-hued Sublime Bottom II, further link this motif to the potential of queer transcendence. In this way, at a time when Sherry was acutely aware of himself as a witness to the struggles, environmental and otherwise, within the world around him, the darkroom became a refuge and a place to realize new possibilities.

David Benjamin Sherry, Sublime Bottom II, 2017

David Benjamin Sherry, Revolution, 2017

The depth of this portal is intentional. Sherry wanted to find a way to counter the “two-dimensional” quality he had normally associated with photograms. He embraced moments of texture: the imperfect edges of the spheres were the result of hand-cutting his stencils from board. Though the exposure process itself required a great degree of control and precision—carefully counting down seconds, completing multiple steps in a specific order—the handmade character of Sherry’s works is immediately apparent. He has cited the influence of Francis Picabia’s Dada explorations of the 1920s, in which the artist painted depictions of mechanical tools and technical operations; these works left a strong impression when Sherry experienced them in the artist’s 2016 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Sherry’s photogram Revolution, three circles of different sizes float on a blue ground. Each has been halved and built through concentric semicircles of gradually changing intensity. These pulsating targets might recall the interchanging black and white rings of Picabia’s Optophone [I] (1922), which was titled after an instrument that could read variations in light as variations in sound. Likewise in Sherry’s Revolution, an image rendered from light can be understood through aural tones.

David Benjamin Sherry, Metamorphosis (Self-Portrait with Wizard), 2017

Picabia’s Optophone depicts a human silhouette at its center, and in a number of major works in Pink Genesis, Sherry also incorporates the human form—his own body—by literally climbing onto the enlarger table and putting himself in direct contact with the paper. In Sailing on Solar Winds (Self-Portrait), Sherry overlays an undulating wave pattern onto his own silhouette, playing with notions of space and depth while conjuring the impact of the buzzing energy of those vibrations on the self. In another self-portrait, Metamorphosis (Self-Portrait with Wizard), Sherry achieves a different kind of symbiosis by bringing his dog, Wizard, into the darkroom with him. Sherry has pointed to Robert Gober’s Death Mask (2008) as an important predecessor to his own portrait. Gober’s plaster sculpture combines a cast of his own face with the sculpted snout of his dog Paco, who had recently died, in the tradition of death masks made to keep the image of loved ones in memory. Sherry’s medium also invokes Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg’s collaborative cyanotypes from about 1950, which were largely made on the floor of the New York apartment they shared and which therefore inherently picture their domestic life, just as Sherry pictures himself with his chosen family member Wizard.

David Benjamin Sherry, Pink Genesis (Self-Portrait with Mars), 2017
All photographs courtesy the artist

“Let the subject generate its own photograph. Become a camera,” Minor White wrote in another excerpt quoted in Rites and Passages. Of course, Sherry typically photographs outdoors with a large-format camera, a process that requires a physical relationship with the apparatus. But to make his photograms, that tool is put aside and the process is pared down to the essentials; he works with only the paper and chemicals in the darkroom itself. In the titular work from the series, Pink Genesis (Self-Portrait with Mars), Sherry’s long figure stands out against a deep pink background. His arms are positioned such that he appears to hold a rectangle of light in front of his chest, a white shape filled with a texture that he appropriated from a NASA photograph of sand dunes on Mars. Sherry is holding in his hands the fantasy space of another world and harnessing the possibilities of emerging anew.

This essay and photographs originally appeared in David Benjamin Sherry: Pink Genesis (Aperture, 2021).

How Pictures Can Shape an Essential History of Queer Life

“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy famously chanted. Queer people find themselves still under that spell, wrapped in its ambivalent multivalence: longing for a safe space of our own, relieved to leave childhood trauma behind, settled into the uncertainty of our place in the world. “They say that home is where the heart is,” mourned troubadour of the demimonde Marc Almond, “but home is only where the hurt is.” 

Curator and historian Stephen Vider seeks to complicate all that in his new book The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II. The work assembles material records and cultural meanings of “home”: from pictures of weddings and other domestic/clandestine gatherings in the 1950s, through 1965’s blockbuster, camp culinary guide The Gay Cookbook; from lesbian feminist architect Phyllis Birkby’s 1970s multiple relationship “domes,” to contemporary queer and trans elder housing. Vider recently Zoomed from his own home to discuss with Jesse Dorris how the work of Samuel Steward, Susan Kuklin, Bruce Pavlow, and countless anonymous others should broaden our understanding of what homemaking looks like.

Photograph from the albums of a Philadelphia lesbian couple, ca. 1953
Human Sexuality Collection, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

Jesse Dorris: What is the origin story of this book?

Stephen Vider: It was at a moment when the same-sex marriage cases were beginning to make their way through the courts. A lot of the critiques were that same-sex marriage was going to be a kind of normalizing project that was going to strip queer culture of everything that made it different. What intrigued me was the ways that domesticity, or home, seemed to be made synonymous with marriage—which meant that “home” was a normalizing project. And I got interested in thinking about the ways that queer people had, in fact, used home spaces in ways that challenged gender and sexual norms. We are always in the practice of opening our homes to other people. Feminist scholars have pointed to the labor of home; we should think about that as part of a political project also. And so, home is a kind of portal to public life. If we disentangled home from marriage, what else would we see?

Mark Haldane’s illustration for ONE magazine’s cover story, “Let’s Push Homophile Marriage,” June 1963
Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries

Dorris: Home can be protection from the state. But it can also be a site of the state’s power. Queer people have always been present in the creation of these spaces: the interior decorator, the butch handyperson—they’re acting as boundaries for what heteronormative homes look like. They pose a threat. But there’s the idea that gay men began to decorate as a way to assert themselves in the home, to convince people their presence is valuable.

Vider: One starting point for the stereotype is a 1917 piece Dorothy Parker wrote for Vogue, about a fictional decorator named Alistair St. Cloud. Everywhere you look in this house he decorated, there were tassels. Off of the curtains, off of the furniture. And he’s also wearing a robe with tassels coming off of it. So there’s a way that his queer body inhabits this space. In the 1940s and ’50s, this image of the gay decorator really takes off. It’s partly this idea of an alignment of gay men, especially, with a kind of expert taste—only as a visitor, someone who’s creating all the conditions for the heterosexual home and then going to depart it. And who knows where he goes after that, because he often doesn’t seem to have a home of his own. There’s also a profound anxiety about gay men corrupting the home.

Bruce Pavlow, Resident at Survival House, 1977
Courtesy the artist

Dorris: Meanwhile, some forms of photography require a private space, an actual darkroom, a home or space of your own. Artists like Samuel Steward and James Bidgood made their homes projection screens of their own fantasies.

Vider: Well, George Platt Lynes developed his own photography. But Steward is using Polaroids, and so he doesn’t have to worry about going to a drugstore to have them developed. There’s a photo of his in the book where he has one of his lovers sitting on his Murphy bed, and behind him are these drawings he had painted of two men, naked, smoking. There’s a strange kind of mirroring, of fantasy becoming reality and then fantasy again, in the frame of the photograph. There’s a quote I love from anthropologist Mary Douglas, “The home is the realization of ideas”—home is the process of making a fantasy real. And that complicates our ideas about gay men in the ’50s: we think of a lot of sex happening in public—in bathrooms, in parks. But what happens when you pick someone up and bring them back to your apartment? What happens in that space, after?

Dorris: And how to hold onto the memories.

Vider: There’s a series of photographs in the book of a gay wedding in Philadelphia around 1953. There’s cutting the cake, there’s doing the ceremony, there’s kissing after the ceremony, there’s dancing. It looks like any other wedding album. We know what the poses are supposed to be. And they perform them. The difference is that this is happening at home, because it can’t happen in public. And so that raises, again, the larger question about what it is that home made possible.

Philadelphia couple cutting their wedding cake, 1957
Courtesy the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries

Dorris: There’s a tenderness and sadness in thinking about these gay designers telling women how to organize their houses, their living rooms, with a wedding photograph in a lovely frame in pride of place over the mantel or whatever.

Vider: In places like Casa Susanna, the mid-century retreat in the Catskills for trans women, taking photographs was really important. This was a space where people could go and be themselves, express themselves as they wanted to, as they felt, without fear. Photographs were part of preserving that, but also mirroring it back. To take a photograph of a moment is to affirm it.

Dorris: These photographs must have been so treasured. But also, perhaps, hidden. Because they’re evidence of their subjects’ existence, but also of the kind of gender crimes the people in them are committing. Their existence creates danger.

Vider: The early trans leader Virginia Prince, who published the magazine Transvestia, wrote about her first time at Casa Susanna. Going to the house was a way of having life the way you always wanted it to be. If home is about the realization of ideas, photographs help hold onto those ideas and that reality, even as time is passing, and even when that life isn’t always possible.

Photo shoot, 1964-69. Attributed to Andrea Susan
Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario

Dorris: Home was also the place where one could receive Transvestia. Which gets to this idea of privacy. We’re at this extraordinary moment where we have this infinite and encouraged ability to represent ourselves, to represent our homes, mediated through companies who make money off it. At the same time, the US Supreme Court is poised, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to more or less overturn Roe, and thus, let’s say, complicate our current idea that we have a right to privacy within our own bodies. And, so many of us have been stuck in our homes for so long, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vider: Even though privacy is often thought about as a right, the way that home actually mediates privacy is always a kind of privilege.

Video still from Two Men and a Baby, 1992, dir. Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski for Living With AIDS
Courtesy Juanita Szczepanski, Jean Carlomusto, and GMHC

Dorris: The right to privacy might be a right, but the right to a home has never been established.

Vider: In the book, I write about attempts to set up the earliest group homes and shelters for queer and transgender youth in the 1970s. What does it mean when privacy at home cannot be taken for granted? What does it mean to try to create that space for people whose lives are very precarious? It is a particular class of queer people who are able to take their privacy for granted. The link between privacy and home really becomes clear in the case of unhoused youth. These group homes, they are not private: there are a lot of people coming in and out. They’re being talked about in funding reports. They’re being photographed. It’s a mediated privacy.

But also, home can be isolating. For people living with AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, home became a space that could keep them invisible. It reinforces silence and shame and stigma when people are too sick to go and do grocery shopping for themselves. How do we think of who is reaching into these spaces, volunteers going into these spaces to care for people? If you think of home as simply private, you can miss those stories. If you think of home as porous, you start to think about it as a space of connection, people making connections across different types of racial or gender or sexual difference in ways that are meaningful and powerful.

Dorris: It’s also a space in which technology comes through and changes. For Samuel Steward, and for the makers of documentaries you write about including the TV series Living with AIDS (1987), their work was possible because of a relative democratization of the machinery. Home is a site of creation.

Vider: There was a recognition by artists and activists that the ways HIV and AIDS were playing out in people’s home lives actually needed to be made more public. Because to make everyday home life with illness more public is to destigmatize it and restore humanity to people who are often disavowed by the culture at large. A photograph that’s really been important to me is one by Susan Kuklin of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis volunteer Kachin Fry and Michael, her buddy or client, as GMHC would have called him.

Susan Kuklin, Kachin and Michael at Michael’s Apartment, 1987
Courtesy of the artist

Dorris: How did you come across this photograph?

Vider: I was curating an exhibition called AIDS at Home for the Museum of the City of New York, doing research on GMHC’s Buddy Program. And I stumbled on Kuklin’s book, Fighting Back: What Some People Are Doing about AIDS (1989), for which she had followed a Buddy team in the East Village for a year to create this mixture of photographs and writing. I spent a lot of time talking to her about her photographs. There’s so much happening in this one. First, there’s this surface level of a kind of unlikely pairing of people. Then, Michael is wearing a T-shirt with the “Silence=Death” emblem, and the photo is from 1987, just as that emblem is being introduced as activism. So the photo is raising questions about what happens when activists go home. The photograph itself is a form of activism.

Susan Kuklin, Ed and Steven at Steven’s Apartment, ca. 1987
Courtesy the artist

Dorris: The caregiving is activism.

Vider: And we don’t always think of caregiving that way. Susan captures their emotional intimacy so well, but also their physical intimacy. It’s really important to remember that this is a moment when people had a lot of misconceptions about how HIV was transmitted. The idea of somebody coming into your home, lying on your bed and talking with you—it’s really powerful.

Bruce Pavlow, Residents at Survival House, 1977
Courtesy of the artist

Dorris: There’s another photo I can’t stop thinking of, by Bruce Pavlow of a resident at the group home Survival House in 1977. What was the background here?

Vider: Pavlow self-published a book of the photographs he had taken as part of a class at Berkeley, where he was an undergraduate—and this would have been very new for 1977, a class on gay space. This is a moment where there’s so much growing of queer commercial space; this is the moment of Harvey Milk. The fact that Bruce thought to go to a queer group home is really fascinating in itself. He also created a two-hour documentary film about Survival House with all of his interviews, which we’ve worked together to preserve and digitize. But the photographs convey a sense of the range of people who were living in Survival House. The photo on the cover of the book is of the group of residents playing Monopoly. It has this sweetness of playing a board game, which we think of as so much of a family activity, to claim their household as a new kind of queer family. And then there’s the irony that Monopoly is a game that’s entirely about buying property being played by a group of unhoused youth.

The photo you pointed out is of one of the unnamed residents, who’s not interviewed in the film. There’s something really classic about the pose in the photograph, and of this floral armchair taking up the full frame. The curtain behind her, the cup of coffee next her. And the way that she inhabits the space, looking off. It conveys a kind of privacy, a boundary about how much we can know.

Bruce Pavlow, Janis, a resident at Survival House, 1977
Courtesy the artist

Dorris: Because we don’t know the story, we project all kinds of things over the image. I don’t know the subject’s pronouns, I don’t know if they consented to having the photograph taken, and I don’t know the stakes of the photograph’s existence. As we were talking about life at Casa Susanna, this is proof that a certain life was being lived in a certain way. And that proof can be weaponized, right?

Vider: Survival House closes in 1978 because they can’t maintain the funding. But other queer and trans group homes for unhoused youth come after. The Buddy Program continues from 1982 into the early 2000s. So I guess I’m looking at moments of emergence. By the Clinton years, home was starting to be political in a new way, when you saw domestic-partnership legislation and the early debates around same-sex marriage. Domesticity takes on a different meaning once you start really seeking legal recognition of queer couples and families. And now, there are these new group homes for queer and trans elders. That’s striking, because it seems like another iteration of the way queer people use home: recognizing the importance of having an affirming home and its precarity.

Dorris: Home has changed again, as a result of COVID.

Vider: There was a sense, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, that people felt driven to preserve the moment, because it felt so exceptional. COVID archives emerged very quickly, and those are archives of domestic life. And I’m thinking of all those moments of people clapping for health care workers, which was a profoundly public moment of people in their private spaces performing together. That challenges what home is.

Gay Liberation House, Washington, D.C., ca. 1970
Courtesy the Rainbow History Project

Dorris: And we see it all instantly. Whereas there’s much less information around queer pasts. It’s meaningful to see that, yes, these people lived, and their homes looked very different than ours, and just like ours. There’s a continuity and a difference.

Vider: What I hope the book shows is a method for thinking about everyday life. The photographs give us emotional access in ways other types of material culture don’t, because they are representations of moments, but also because a lot of care goes into taking a photograph. A lot of care went into making the decision to take a photograph. When you see one of someone’s home life, you see a desire to preserve that moment. They make real to us a moment in space and time. But they’re also a kind of willed testimony of people in the past who wanted this story to be preserved. Maybe they didn’t imagine it being preserved for us.

Dorris: But they saw themselves as valuable in a way that’s deeply moving. It’s maybe easy to take it for granted, like taking privacy for granted. But the proof that they saw themselves as valuable enough to make these little monuments to themselves is deeply moving.

Vider: And there’s a tension in them. Some of it’s moving, some of it’s challenging. And that’s why it’s powerful.

The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2021.