Aperture's Blog, page 43

A Collaborative Photobook Makes the Case for Radical Democracy

“Our book was supposed to be published in the summer of 2020. Then the virus came. What’s your take on the last year?”

So begins one of the several conversations in Politics & Passions (MACK, 2021), a stunningly multifaceted collaborative book in which the artist Anna Ostoya revisits a 2002 essay of the same name by the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and repurposes her own artistic archive to create a dialogue in images and words. It’s a complex revisiting—and a manifest reminder that all art and theory is inherently collaborative. It’s also an exchange of image and text, as Ostoya finds in Mouffe’s work the “inspiration to make things differently.” The “experience of looking,” Ostoya notes, “has been always connected with a political, historical, and personal reflection. It immediately raises the questions ‘what was?’ and ‘what is?’.” 

In her 2002 essay “Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy,” Mouffe offers a bold critique of the abiding politics of neoliberalism and a warning about what it enables: the upsurge of right-wing populism. She attributes the effectiveness of the right to the appeal of the stories it tells about itself. Worrying and wondering about how the left might radicalize democracy, about how to resist the status quo and prevent violence, Mouffe asserts the need for equally passionate counternarratives that move beyond moral condemnation of the “other” side. She convincingly argues for the futility of such condemnation, however emotionally satisfying it might feel; historically, shouting “capitalism is bad” has proved a losing strategy. 

In 2009, Ostoya made of Mouffe’s essay a booklet of textual collages. Compelled and convinced by Mouffe’s ideas—and struck by Mouffe’s uncanny prescience—Ostoya revisits the original essay, her 2009 booklet adaptation of it, and a decade’s worth of her own artwork to create a new Politics & Passions (or, to render “Politics and Passions” anew). In this 2021 version, Ostoya reproduces her 2009 textual intervention and composes for it a series of twenty-five composite portraits.

Ostoya’s portraits are based on sketches she made of fellow citizens riding the J line of the New York City Subway system. “It was striking how the demographic changed along the route,” she muses, “since the train went from Wall Street through Chinatown and the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Williamsburg, Bushwick, all the way to JFK Airport and the Jamaica stop in Brooklyn.” Ostoya liked the energy of her drawings and the variety of people represented—a microcosm of our larger common life—but wanted to do something more with them. She decided “to follow the sketches’ outlines to compose photomontages,” using reproductions of her own paintings and collages from the preceding decade. They are, in effect, fragmented forms of Mouffe’s ideas. Each image foregrounds a central but abstracted figure and constitutes a moving testament to the ways Ostoya is moved by Mouffe’s words and aspires, in turn, to move us. 

Conventional in form, Mouffe’s original essay is a succinct sixteen pages. Ostoya cuts it up, spreads it out, and extends it, making it a book-length piece, leaving scanner shadows intact. In other words, the copy is a self-consciously lo-fi reproduction—Ostoya’s translation rendered visual. In her hands, the theoretical essay becomes a veritable conceptual poem (what she calls “vertical compositions”), replete with enjambments and caesuras, offering it a different tone and tenor. She “followed an imaginary reader’s voice” to decide just how to truncate and separate Mouffe’s prose lines, giving them more time and space—breathing room that encourages heightened attention and intimacy. It’s a taking apart that builds anew. 

Here, most lines are a mere word or two long, and some pages contain only a line or two, variously spaced. In places, full pages remain blank. Still others reproduce one simple line—not a line made up of words, but the black horizontal line that in Mouffe’s original appears under the essay’s page numbers or above her footnotes. Ostoya isolates such lines and turns them, too, refusing to play it straight. The slant becomes a rich visual pun, the manifestation of a different perspective, a new angle. It’s a reminder to look again and askance. The verbal and visual play radiates in multiple directions. It asks questions. 

Intriguingly, while Ostoya arranges Mouffe’s essay otherwise, she omits nothing but page numbers, frustrating traditional citational methods in the process. She leaves Mouffe’s original word order and thus the overall argument intact. That said, the very act of formally translating Mouffe’s text is inherently interpretive. Ostoya alters our experience of it, its affect, by transforming the look, feel, and rhythm of the words and adding her visually dense portraits throughout. She asserts that the “only rule I followed was to put the ‘I’ and its derivatives on top of a page. These are the pages with colorful images.”

Every portrait and textual collage is an exploration of “the stakes of democracy,” and an invitation to consider their implications and revelations.

The first colorful image we encounter (it’s also the book’s cover image) appears on the left-hand side of a spread with a radically enjambed line on the right: “I / have / been / concerned / with / what.” Next to Ostoya’s portrait, we might read this line and its exaggerated caesuras as a question: who is “I” (Mouffe? Ostoya? both? neither?) and with what is “I” concerned? We might well read this line as I have been concerned with what is happening on the political left—arguably the animating concern of this project. (Notably, all the portraits appear on the left-hand side of page spreads.) Looking to the left, there’s a subtle yet discernible interrogative in the portrait itself, a curved line around the primary subject punctuated at its collar. In the background, there are archival photographs of quite serious people (all men, save one), but the most powerful photographic impression is that central eye (coded female) with its direct stare. The homonymic relation between visual “eye” and textual “I” remains a question of perspective. 

The “eye” is ripe with interpretative potential. We might read it as a kind of disturbing surveillance or, instead, as an invitation to connect—to be in relation, to look more intimately and more deeply. It might also function as confrontation or challenge: Can you see and acknowledge the “other”? What separates and connects “I” and “you”? Can you resist turning away, despite potential antagonism and discomfort? In conjunction with Ostoya’s spatial extension of the original essay, such visual motifs prolong readerly attention and engagement. It’s also a testament to the care, respect, and intimacy necessary for political engagement. 

Every portrait and textual collage is an exploration of, among other things, “the stakes of democracy,” and an invitation to consider their implications and revelations. Ostoya’s portrait collages are made up of many things—including images of others—in various configurations. No two look alike. Her subjects are not sovereign, necessarily existing in relation with others. There is a constant interplay—or irreducible tension—between the individual and collective, self and other, women and men, friend and enemy, mind and body, visible and invisible, literal and figurative, (photo)realism and abstractionism, past and present, presence and absence, interior and exterior, black-and-white versus color, hard lines and supple curves, access and denial, political left and right, “us” and “them.” The portraits are Mouffe’s ideal of an anti-essentialist “agonistic pluralism” aestheticized, illustrations of a “multiplicity of positions in society, some of which can never be reconciled,” and a strong assertion that they can “coexist without violence.” 

All works by Anna Ostoya from the book Politics & Passions (MACK, 2021)

Words and images are in dynamic dialogue throughout Politics & Passions; fittingly, the book’s concluding section comprises a substantive, sustained conversation between Mouffe and Ostoya marked by energy, curiosity and, it must be said, passion. It’s a welcome coda. Each is against apathy, easy answers, and consensus politics; each believes in resistance rather than resignation, and the abiding potential of change—there are always ways to fight against the hierarchical and hegemonic powers that be. They wonder, wander, and riff with each other on topics ranging from the past forty years of political terrain (in various countries) to our current contexts (including the pandemic), to the value and purpose of art, to the need for “more experimental thinking.” 

Mouffe describes herself as an “intellectual activist,” and we might likewise consider Ostoya an artistic activist. When Mouffe asks Ostoya how she would like her art to impact people, Ostoya identifies the dignity and power we embody, if only we can see clearly and passionately enough to use them. She hopes her art might make us “imagine other possibilities,” she says. “And when I say my art is a tool, I mean I hope it could help diminish violence and suffering, since I do believe that art can inspire people to realize who they are and who they want to be.” They agree this is especially crucial in the profound “social, economic and ecological” crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Mouffe asserts, we need “to awaken positive feelings and mobilise affects” as “a step towards the radicalisation of democracy.”

Politics & Passions was published by MACK in July 2021.

The Black Photographers Rethinking What History Is All About

Lebohang Kganye, Re shapa setepe sa lenyalo II, 2013

Courtesy the artist

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1952–55

Courtesy the artist and SKPEAC

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

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

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

Ming Smith, What’s It All About?, Harlem, New York, 1976
Courtesy the artist and Aperture

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 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, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Carrie Mae Weems, While Sitting upon the Ruins of Your Remains, I Pondered the Course of History, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (2020)

To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty—men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Photographed by Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard University professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, the images were rediscovered at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976.

Throughout the volume, essays by prominent scholars explore topics such as the identities and experiences of those depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race in the nineteenth century, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects, as well as the ways contemporary artists have used the daguerreotypes to critique institutional racism today. With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.

To Make Their Own Way in the World is firmly grounded in events still shaping American lives today. Instead of supporting Agassiz’s pseudoscientific notions about white supremacy and racial hierarchies (as was their original intent), the daguerreotypes now provoke wide-ranging interpretations and raise critical questions about representation and identity. “At this moment and in these divided states of America, perhaps more than at any time since their rediscovery in 1976,” Molly Rogers writes, “the daguerreotypes of Jem, Alfred, Delia, Renty, George Fassena, Drana, and Jack command our attention, demanding that we look closely, listen intently, and speak out—however difficult this may be—giving voice to all that we have learned.”

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (_2070386), 2017
Courtesy the artist and DOCUMENT, Chicago, team (gallery inc.), New York, and Vielmetter, Los Angeles

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (2020)

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

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

Nadine Ijewere, The Art of Renaissance, 2017

Courtesy the artist

Ruth Ossai, Miu Miu Babes, 2018

Courtesy the artist

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

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

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

Kwame Brathwaite, Sikolo Brathwaite wearing a headpiece designed by Carolee Prince, African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Harlem, ca. 1968
Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019)

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the ’50s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath founded the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling agency for Black women. Working with these two organizations, Brathwaite organized fashion shows featuring clothing designed by the models themselves, created stunning portraits of jazz luminaries, and captured behind-the-scenes photographs of the Black arts community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis.

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

Deana Lawson, Sons of Cush, 2016
Courtesy the artist and 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. “Outside a Deana Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Zanele Muholi, Zithulele, Worcester, South Africa, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2018)

Zanele Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases, documenting the LGBTI+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. Muholi then started to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits brought together in this 2018 monograph.

Using props and materials found in their immediate environment, Muholi crafts starkly contrasted frames that directly respond to contemporary and historical racisms—while also providing a platform for self-discovery. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without the fear of being vilified,” Muholi states. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.” One of the most powerful visual activists of our time, Muholi’s self-portraits remain radical statements of identity, race, and resistance.

Lyle Ashton Harris, Iké Udé and Lyle, Los Angeles, 1995
Courtesy the artist

Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs (2017)

In the late 1980s and ’90s, a radical cultural scene emerged in cities across the globe, finding expression in the galleries, nightclubs, and bedrooms of New York, London, Los Angeles, and Rome. As a young artist experimenting with different mediums at the time, Lyle Ashton Harris began obsessively photographing his friends, lovers, and individuals who were, or would become, figures of influence, including Nan Goldin, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Catherine Opie, and Marlon Riggs. Harris’s photographs offer a raw, authentic portrait of the cultural and political communities that defined an era and continue to resonate to this day.

In this 2017 volume, the artist’s archive of 35 mm Ektachrome images is presented alongside personal journal entries and recollections from artistic and cultural figures. It offers a unique document of what Harris has described as “ephemeral moments and emblematic figures shot in the ’80s and ’90s, against a backdrop of seismic shifts in the art world, the emergence of multiculturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and incipient globalization.” Together, Harris’s photographs and journals not only sketch his personal history and journey as an artist, but also provide an intimate look into this groundbreaking period of art and culture.

Richard Avedon, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, with his father, Martin Luther King, Baptist minister, and his son, Martin Luther King III, Atlanta, Georgia, March 22, 1963

Courtesy The Richard Avedon Foundation

Awol Erizku, Untitled (forces of Nature #1), 2014

Courtesy the artist and Condé Nast/Vogue.com

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

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

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

Mickalene Thomas, Le leçon d’amour, 2008
Courtesy the artist and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Muse by Mickalene Thomas (2015)

Mickalene Thomas’s large-scale, multitextured tableaux of domestic interiors and portraits subvert the male gaze and assert new definitions of beauty. Thomas first began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut—which became a pivotal experience in her creative expression as an artist.

Since then, throughout her practice, Thomas’s images have functioned as personal acts of deconstruction and reappropriation. Many of her photographs draw from a wide range of cultural icons, from 1970s “Black Is Beautiful” images of women, to Édouard Manet’s odalique figures, to the mise-en-scène studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, Thomas’s collection of portraits and staged scenes reflect a very personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes herself, her mother, her friends and lovers—emphasizing the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work.

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A Young Photographer’s Intimate Chronicle of Family in El Salvador and the United States

I don’t have any pictures of my family in my home. My spouse has a photograph of us and our dog, on our bookcase, I think. I don’t keep images of my parents or brother on my phone. Pictures of family are a source of terror for me because they remind me of the people I love too much, and the people I love are the most vulnerable beings I know. I am an artist and can only ease their suffering so much.

Adelante (2018–ongoing), a series by Steven Molina Contreras, who was born in El Salvador in 1999 and grew up on Long Island, chronicles his jumping-bean dynamics with his family—his mother, father, stepfather, grandparents, sisters. The images are hard to look at because so much is familiar in them. His father’s and stepfather’s hands look like mine—dark brown, thick fingers, neatly trimmed fingernails. But Molina Contreras doesn’t make hands his focus, unlike many photographers who document migrant men. He is curious about the men in his life, he asks them to reveal everything they have to show. As always, our parents tell us some things, lie out of love or self-preservation.

Steven Molina Contreras, Las Flores de Dios (The flowers of God), Mother Carmen and Mother Alma, United States, 2021

His mother, Alma, is a fantastic source of theater. She recently got her degree in ministry at a school on Long Island, Molina Contreras tells me. Sometimes she puts on her blazer and preaches on Instagram Live, even to an audience of three. Women in evangelical traditions have a familiar stage presence—a straight back, a straightening of the spine they inspire in others—and she has it in Nuestro Corazón and Abigail’s Portrait. Alma is the matriarch, posing like Tina Knowles, accepting our gratitude for giving us the artist, acknowledging her own artistic direction. She picked out her clothing, she focuses her gaze, meeting our own. Our moms’ image is always picked out. When they are working hard to make a living, they pick out clothes to feel themselves fully to be working hard to make a living. Molina Contreras’s photographs don’t pretend to return dignity to his family, or to restore broken bonds, none of that. They reveal a family’s theater of family, and a loving family’s meticulousness in their love for each other, how that fussiness is sometimes embodied in artifice or even clutter.

Steven Molina Contreras, We meet at the Ocean, Amy, El Salvador, 2021

A certain romance of the subject is inherent to portraiture. In Adelante, Molina Contreras showcases a family I love the way you can only love a family you encounter solely through image or text. These photographs are beautiful to me. They don’t cause me pain. But they do give me hope because they all seem to be taken in the tender moment of ongoing forgiveness. In one picture from El Salvador, the artist’s younger sister Amy, whom he has only seen for a total of three weeks in their lives, looks at him searchingly, hungrily, angrily, and her portrait seems like an offering. Molina Contreras is immortalizing her with his gift, and maybe that counts for something. We see the exaltation of generations of sacrifice in Mujeres Celestiales, a portrait of the women in his family—his older sister, little sister, mother, and grandmother. Matriarchy is important to the artist. The women sit in a white bed with a frilly white frame against a white wall, daring the viewer, or anybody, to divide them again.

Photographs we take on our phones might be too much to bear, the texts we send to our families gnaw at immediate needs. But these photographs, made with patience and taken as part of an ongoing collection of curated images of family, borders, possessions, and belonging, are art. Those of us with hurt and gifts know what it is to bring them to the table to capture something that would otherwise be forgotten. The lucky ones can save what’s lost.

Steven Molina Contreras, Mujeres Celestiales (Celestial women), United States, 2021Steven Molina Contreras, To have and to hold, Tío y Tía (Uncle and aunt), El Salvador, 2021Steven Molina Contreras, Abigail’s Portrait, United States, 2019Steven Molina Contreras, Las Flores de mi Abuelita Carmen (My Grandma Carmen’s flowers), El Salvador, 2019Steven Molina Contreras, Mother Alma #3, She’ll hold you for a lifetime, United States, 2019
All photographs courtesy the artist

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 245, “Latinx,” under the title “Adelante.”

A Seven-Volume Photobook Retells the Story of an Ancient Hindu Epic

“The Ramayana’s over and they want to know whose father Sita is.”

In India’s Hindi-speaking belt, this quip is often used to mock a listener’s inattentiveness—Sita is, in fact, the protagonist Ram’s wife and mother to their sons. Almost two and a half millennia since the Ramayana emerged, supposedly from the mouth of the bard Valmiki, references to it remain as idiomatically current as ever in most Indian languages.

Vasantha Yogananthan, Boy Playing Girl, Janakpur, Nepal, 2016, from The Promise (Chose Commune, 2017)

Vasantha Yogananthan, Boy Playing Girl, Janakpur, Nepal, 2016, from The Promise (Chose Commune, 2017)

The epic poem charts the journey of divine prince Ram of Ayodhya, his marriage to Mithila’s princess Sita, their exile in the Dandakaranya forest, Sita’s abduction by the Lankan king Ravan, and subsequent rescue by Ram and his allies (including his brother Lakshman and monkey companion Hanuman). In some tellings, the Ramayana ends with Ram and Sita’s return to Ayodhya. In others, Ram’s suspicions regarding Sita’s “purity” while she was Ravan’s prisoner cause her to leave him. She gives birth to and raises their sons on her own, ultimately reuniting the men and returning to the earth from which she is fabled to have sprung. While no summary can do justice to the scope, thematic density, and versional plurality of the Ramayana, what cannot be overstated is the ancient tale’s continued hold on the South and Southeast Asian imagination. So powerful is its influence that in Hindu-majority India it has been pressed into the service of the current government’s fascistic political agenda.

Top row, left to right: Early Times (2016), The Promise (2017), Exile (2017)
Bottom row, left to right: Dandaka (2018), Howling Winds (2019), Afterlife (2020), Amma (2021)

In a seven-part photobook series titled A Myth of Two Souls (Chose Commune, 2013–21), French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan retraces the geography of the Ramayana to interpret the story as a contemporary lyric in pictures­. Composed on color film over an eight-year period and using various camera formats befitting each of the poem’s seven episodes, Yogananthan’s project also involves collage, writing, painting, and performance. Additionally, A Myth of Two Souls includes the work of Jaykumar Shankar, a specialist in the nineteenth-century art of hand-painting photographs; Mahalaxmi and Shantanu Das, painters in the Madhubani folk-art tradition; as well as words by Ramayana scholar Arshia Sattar and writers Anjali Raghbeer and Meena Kandasamy. Interspersed with original images are found photos, press clippings, excerpts from a cult graphic novel series on Indian mythology (the source of Yogananthan’s own introduction to the story), and illustrations from Gita Press, the world’s largest publisher of Hindu religious texts. Through this multimedia assemblage, the series translates a fifth-century BCE narrative about love, war, duty, and honor into the register of twenty-first-century quotidian (Ram plays cricket, for one). It is what the poet A. K. Ramanujan described in his landmark essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” as “mapping a structure of relations onto another plane.”

Vasantha Yogananthan, The Soothsayer, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, 2015, from Early Times (Chose Commune, 2016)

A piquant aspect of the translation is Yogananthan’s collaboration with his predominantly small-town subjects—ordinary people whom he either captured in candid poses or persuaded to enact significant scenes from the epic, often with an insouciance undercutting the Ramayana’s premodern theatricality: a woman from Ayodhya with her infant on her lap juxtaposed with a Gita Press illustration of baby Ram and his mother; young jeans-clad couples in Janakpur, Bangalore, and Delhi who channel Ram and Sita falling in love through SMSes and rendezvouses. In Hampi, Ravan and his henchman lie in wait for Sita in a type of van commonly used in Indian movies to signal a kidnapping. A Dhanushkodi fisherwoman gazes at the ocean as though a captive Sita awaiting Ram; a man captioned as Valmiki peers mysteriously from the shadows in Trivandrum. Tapping into the continued resonance of the Ramayana while avoiding Orientalist romanticization, Yogananthan adjusts the aperture between actor and character to allow light in from two thousand years of an evening gone.

Spread from Dandaka by Vasantha Yogananthan (Chose Commune, 2018)

Resulting from Yogananthan’s years-long engagement with the communities at these locales, the images recall Gauri Gill’s photographs of rural masquerade. Specifically, they depict a similar mixed-media oscillation between portraiture and tableau vivant, with Yogananthan’s images overlaid with Warli artist Rajesh Vangad’s drawings titled Acts of Appearance (2015–ongoing). Unremarkable objects, everyday locations, and unwitting beasts common on Indian streets indicate characters and events from the Ramayana—roadside monkeys stand in for the simian deity Hanuman, a schoolroom stadiometer evokes Ram’s transition from childhood to manhood, and a ladder leading into a construction-site pit suggests Sita’s disappearance. The use of metaphor, visual rhythm, and allusion allows A Myth of Two Souls to capture the epical quality of the Ramayana, while its success as a photobook lies in its playful narrative arrangements. Yogananthan deploys a range of techniques—cropping and splitting images to effect enjambment, spreading them across facing pages, and superimposing through inserts and tip-ins. The movement of time and place is represented by disparate shots assembled into a unified sequence, such as Ram’s father’s funeral in the series’ third chapter, Exile, or the capture of a single moment in multiple frames—such as when Sita takes the fire test to prove her virtuousness in the sixth chapter, Afterlife.

Vasantha Yogananthan, The Crossing, Madhubani, Bihar, India, 2014, from Exile (Chose Commune, 2017)

Each book in the series has its own color palette and voice. The design team Kummer & Herrman has created a consistent framework for the books—the trim size for each publication remains the same. Yet every title employs different creative approaches in terms of the binding, paper type, and layout to underscore and support the metamorphosis at work in each chapter of the story. High-resolution and low-saturation shots of riverine, forestal, and urban landscapes similar to those in Rinko Kawauchi’s oneiric Ametsuchi (Aperture, 2013) inundate the first four titles, Early Times, The Promise, Exile, and Dandakaranya. On the other hand, the primary color scheme of the fifth chapter, Howling Winds, made along the coasts of India and Sri Lanka, harks back to Yogananthan’s previous seaside record titled Piémanson (Chose Commune, 2014). In Afterlife, the book of war, Yogananthan used an autofocus camera and flash to shoot intoxicated nocturnal revelers at Rajasthan’s Dusshera festival, who echo soldiers celebrating the victory of Ram’s goodness over Ravan’s evil. In its coverage from Nepal to Sri Lanka, from Tamil Nadu in India’s east to Rajasthan in its west, A Myth of Two Souls straddles documentary, fantasy, and travelogue. Yogananthan’s palimpsestic photographs of people, places, and animals at the sites mentioned in the Ramayana constitute not an album but an atlas of affect. In the manner of an antiquarian pilgrim map transmuting the experiential into the pictorial, these photographs condense memory, history both natural and human, lore, daily life, and contemporary religiosity into a poetics of traversal.

Spread from Afterlife by Vasantha Yogananthan (Chose Commune, 2020)

Following a corrective trend of countering the Ramayana’s traditional emphasis on Ram’s perspective, Sita, Lakshman, and Ravan get to tell their story in Yogananthan’s series. For example, the book of the jungle, Dandakaranya, is reminiscent of Jim Goldberg’s work in its diaristic annotations by Lakshman and Ravan. The accompanying texts, all by women, two of whom are not upper-caste Hindu, challenge conservative notions of who gets to narrate and expound upon the Ramayana. To appreciate these authors’ contributions, it is necessary to understand that in present-day India, efforts are on to purge the canon of all but one reading of the Ramayana—a Brahminical one that legitimizes the abuse of a citizenry. There is a strong argument that the Ramayanais part of a syncretic, even problematic cultural heritage rather than a religious one—Jain, Buddhist, Indigenous, Mughal-era Persian versions co-exist alongside critiques from Dalit thinkers. But this understanding is not acceptable to fundamentalist rulers: the old story of Ram has become the basis of a fresh hell.

Purporting to turn India into Ram Rajya (Ram’s kingdom), the country’s far-right ruling establishment and its affiliates weaponize tropes and subtexts in the Ramayana to pit the most powerful class of India’s citizens against its most vulnerable ones. Since the 1980s, there has been a movement to radicalize the Hindu population against oppressed caste groups and minorities, mainly Muslims. The Ram Janmabhoomi (birthplace) campaign, fueled by motorcades across the nation, was aimed at mobilizing support for a temple to replace Ayodhya’s sixteenth-century Babri mosque. In 1992, the mosque was demolished by a Hindutva mob, leading to a lawsuit. In 2019, India’s Supreme Court awarded the disputed land to the Hindu plaintiffs. In 2021, it is thus impossible to receive the Ramayana in any form without acknowledging that the cries of those being lynched, shot, and butchered in pogroms are being drowned out by murderous roars of “Jai Shree Ram!” (“All hail Ram!”).

Vasantha Yogananthan, An Ocean of Uncertainty, Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, India, 2013, from Amma (Chose Commune, 2021)
All images courtesy the artist and Chose Commune

Absent in A Myth of Two Souls is a direct confrontation with the Ramayana’s appropriation to justify state-supported religious barbarity, which might bother secularists. However, it’s possible to view the photobook’s staging of the tension between reality and make-believe, truth and fiction, as a comment on Hindutva propaganda. There is at least one instance when Yogananthan explicitly recognizes the Ramayana’s misuse. In the final episode, Amma, there is a photograph of a wall constructed using bricks embossed with the words “Shree Ram.” The caption reads, “Where A Mosque Once Stood.” In Yogananthan’s narrative, which concludes with a mistreated Sita’s departure from Ram’s rajya forever, the image is a poignant reminder that in an unjust realm, there are no happy endings.

This article originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review, issue 020, under the title “A Myth of Two Souls.”

How Can Historical Photographs Preserve Latinx Culture?

The history of Latinx people in photography is sordid. Often, we are the subject of suspect representation: grotesque stereotypes and racialized images that pathologize Latinx bodies as hypersexualized, criminalized, diseased, derelict, or dead. For the most part, the camera hasn’t been good to us. As photographic technologies developed from the mid-nineteenth into the twentieth century, so too did the ease with which depictions of Latinx people could be produced in photography and film, and imprinted on the cultural imagination. To this very day, we still encounter Latinx stereotypes that first appeared in early forms of photography

A nuanced account of Latinx photography is also difficult to discover.  It takes searching family holdings, scouring library collections, and chasing fugitive archives to bring Latinx people into the story of photography in a way that captures the complexities of our lives without recirculating distorted and harmful images.

Ken Gonzales-Day, the Los Angeles–based visual artist best known for his Erased Lynching photographic series (2002–ongoing) and the related 2006 book, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935, has been researching and collecting Latinx photography spanning from the 1850s to the 1950s. That one-hundred-year period, during which the technologies of photography developed rapidly, was a crucial, disorienting century for Mexican Americans in California, many of whom had to learn to live in the United States as tenuous citizens under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

This was an era of dispossession, displacement, and diaspora for Mexican America and also a century marked by violence, deportation, and large-scale erasure that sought to disappear Latinx people from history. It’s an era when Latinx people were “always on the edge of erasure,” as Gonzales-Day puts it, though the photographic archive he’s collected promises to keep us from oblivion.

Photographer unknown, Francisco Gomez and unidentified companion, Arizona, November 28, 1940
Collection of Ken Gonzales-Day

Jesse Alemán: Tell us about the archives and collections you researched to find early Latinx images.

Ken Gonzales-Day: When I was invited to put together a group of images for this issue, I went through my personal archive, which is not really an archive. It’s a bunch of boxes I have in my garage and in my closet, and pictures on my computer compiled while I was working on my own research. It’s a very impromptu collection. I’ve written a bit on the history of lynching in the West, but I actually started out wanting to do a history of Latinx portraiture in California from 1850 to 1900. As someone native to California, I was interested in early California families whose traces can still be found around Los Angeles in street names and other locations. I wanted to learn more about my city, and California in general, so I spent a year researching. A number of the images that I’ve collected came from local archives and university libraries, such as the Bancroft at University of California, Berkeley, the Seaver Center for Western History Research at the Natural History Museum, and the Los Angeles Public Library, but some images come from my research on the history of lynching in the West. I’ve also collected some from my own family history to have a range of images and historical periods represented.

Josefa and Del Valle family group, ca. 1890
Courtesy the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Foundation

Alemán: Your initial research was focused on 1850 to 1900, but you’ve broadened it to span 1850 to 1950. Looking at Latinx images over that century, what strikes you about the photographic record you’ve seen? What are the images, trends, or themes in Latinx portraiture?

Gonzales-Day: I’m a professor of art and I teach photography. I have looked at a lot of art history books on the history of photography, and one of the things that struck me in the teaching of the history of photography in the United States—and globally—is that there are almost no Latinx people included. When thinking about what we think of as Chicano, Mexican American, Latinx here in the United States, there are just so few images. So, that’s how I started. I thought, Well, there must be portraits that were taken. There must be people who had the resources to document themselves, and they must have valued these pictures. As we all know and are familiar with in our own families, there is always a picture of the grandparents or some other old photograph of someone somewhere in the house. I very quickly found the traditional studio portraiture, but there were also a lot of commercial images, meaning those done for sideshows, theatrical performances, businesses, or calling cards. There were themes of the Wild West, California as the land of opportunity, or manifest destiny and U.S. expansion. You see images of Native Americans, crumbling missions, and the idea of the “decline” of people of Spanish blood, known as Californios, which, of course, was a racist trope that was very popular and still is in some circles.

Alemán: Given the span of your research focus, how have the changes in image technologies impacted, transformed, or influenced Latinx representation? How do these different technologies circulate or recirculate racialization of Latinx people?

Gonzales-Day: That’s a complicated question. One of the things we certainly see is the idea of the “type.” In the history of racial formation, this idea was a way of grouping people that lead to racial categories. In the case of Latinx people, we have a very complicated history within the United States’ racial categories, and in California, in particular, we find two threads that move through early photography. The first is the Californio, lighter-skinned landowners asserting their middle-class standing through formal studio photography, through their clothing, and all of the trappings of Western, European-style portraiture. The second is the Indigenous, the mixed race, and the outlaw, known as the bandido. These two themes reappear throughout photographic images, in scenes of the wealthy at leisure, having picnics, days in the outdoors, and wearing lovely outfits versus images of the less prosperous at labor, in a field, or in front of a crumbling mission or collapsing building, often with some kind of tool in hand. These are the images of cultural difference within Latinx people.

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Alemán: Definitely—the studio portraits shore up the class standing that some Latinx families enjoyed, especially in California, and particularly in Los Angeles, where there was a demonstrable elite Latinx middle class throughout the nineteenth century. This raises the question of access: Who has access to photographic studio portraits? And what’s the difference between studio portraits and other images you’ve encountered that are not produced in the studio?

Gonzales-Day: It varies by time because the technologies vary by time, but, certainly, by the 1870s and 1880s, the camera is lighter and easier to move, and so we begin to see some of these outdoor images—impromptu shots at picnics or large family outings—that are made possible by a photographer with relatively quick, light-sensitive material. Charles Lummis, for example, who in 1884 began walking across the United States and ended up in California, came to admire Spanish Mexican Californios. In the late nineteenth century, Lummis often traveled with his camera and made many cyanotypes. He could have an exposure and a print on the same day. His images represent the front edge of highly portable photographic technology for that period. Studio photographers, who made their living doing formal portraits, were also able to go out and photograph banquets, events, and sideshows, and then make pictures to sell to tourists. Postcards, view cards, and cartes de visite also become more prevalent at the time. So, there’s a wide range of uses for the photograph by the end of the century.

Photographer unknown, Lynched by a mob of about 300: William Null, Garland Stemler, Louis Moreno, Laurence H. Johnson, Yreka, California, 1895. From Ken Gonzales-Day, Erased Lynching Series, 2002–ongoing
Courtesy the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

Alemán: On that last point, can you talk about your own use of the photograph for the Erased Lynching project? You photographed pictures or postcards of lynching scenes and then digitally removed the lynched body, foregrounding instead the faces of white violence. Explain that process and then, perhaps, situate your own photographic art in the trajectory of Latinx photographic technologies you just described?

Gonzales-Day: The Erased Lynching Series, which began around 2002, came about as a result of increased vigilante violence on the U.S.–Mexico border. We see basically a groundswell of anti-immigration rhetoric happening at the turn of this century. I just found myself startled by news of people crossing the border being shot by landowners, and there was this general sentiment that it was okay to shoot migrant people. As someone whose family has been here for several hundred years, I found myself thinking that it seems so wrong, and that it’s still ongoing, and the anti-immigrant rhetoric is still being used. So, with that in mind, I wanted to look at the history of racialized violence against Latinx bodies in California and the West, which is something I felt had been overlooked. The “erasure” was meant to say that Latinx bodies had been erased from our national history and, really, are still to this day not included. We are all familiar with the history of lynching in the United States, which is a history of racial terror against African Americans. Black Lives Matter, the George Floyd protests, and other current events have raised our awareness around the power of representing racialized bodies. This raises larger questions for me: Why are Latinx bodies still seen as different from other bodies? Why is their incarceration or death not registered in the same way that it’s registered with other bodies? As a Mexican American, I’m deeply troubled by this.  

The arc of Latinx representation asks us to consider how we go from invisible, to visible, to invisible again. We’re always on the edge of erasure.

So, as a visual artist, my job is to try to create an object that reflects my feelings in the world. A poet looks at the world, has experiences, and then writes a poem. The artist’s job is the same: we experience the world, just as anyone else does, and then we produce something that will hopefully invite further investigation. That something is called an artwork. The Erased Lynching Series began as a way to invite people to think about the social dynamics that made these histories possible, and the social dynamics that made these histories visible or invisible. It’s an idea. Art is an idea. For me, the removing of the body in different lynching scenes was to not revictimize those killed.

To get to the last part of your question: How does this all fit into the larger history of Latinx representation? What can we learn from our past, and how does it help us connect and understand what it means to be Latinx now? Well, the arc of Latinx representation asks us to consider how we go from invisible, to visible, to invisible again. We’re always on the edge of erasure.

C. Golsh, Plaza Photograph Gallery, Three daughters from the Ybarra-Lopez family in celebration of Mexican Independence Day, Los Angeles, 1886
Collection of Darlene Bailey

Alemán: As a relatively new term, the x in Latinx marks the absence of something, but in doing so, the x also makes something present. Your project is doing something similar: it is bringing to the forefront what has been erased and simultaneously engaging erasure itself as an artistic act. So, let me ask you to reverse your creative process: Who, or what,  would you add into your collection of Latinx images?

Gonzales-Day: In some of my other projects, I’ve worked on issues of the x. What is the x?  It connects to gender roles, the question of gender formation, and also the overlap with Indigenous cultures. The x brings us to all of the different ways of being that many of us have, at least in part, in our ancestry. We need to add in the different gender and cultural expressions of the x. You think about the x as this slippery space where loss happens, but if you turn the x a little bit, it can become a plus (+). So, it’s a matter also of how  the x multiplies or transforms the state that we’re in now to empower rather than reduce us.

Alemán: That’s a great point because the x doesn’t mark out something as much as mark that something is there. In this sense, what kind of record does the Latinx photographic archive capture?

Gonzales-Day: In all cases, the photograph is a way of marking, and particularly for us, looking back. Once the vernacular image comes out of the memory book and into the archive, then the language and meaning of that image change. So, one of the things Latinx people have to do is to collect and gather all of that information and history. There has been no place to collect our histories and no place to put them, and so many of them have been lost.

Hippodrome Studio, Three unidentified young men, Los Angeles, ca. 1923
Collection of Ken Gonzales-Day

Alemán: One of the themes seen in your collection is that of the bandido—the Mexican bandit. Whether it be images of Joaquín Murieta, Tiburcio Vásquez, Pancho Villa, or nameless others, the bandido has been a mainstay over the one hundred years of photography you’ve collected. But one image in your archive stands out: it appears to be a Latinx man striking an outlaw pose with nothing much on except for a hat, cowboy boots, and black underwear six shooters out, so to speak. Tell us more about this image: Where does it fit in the longer history of the bandido figure?

Gonzales-Day: It looks like a 1940s or 1950s image, and, to me, it looks like what was very popular in the Los Angeles area: an early gay male culture of physical-fitness magazines that catered to men. Not necessary queer or gay, but they had that flavor to them, with young men flexing and changing from ninety-pound weaklings to musclemen. Some of it was about masculinity and not simply about sexuality, and some of it was about lifestyles where ideas of masculinity were performed. This image is very much in that style. It appears to have a fabric background, so it’s probably a studio shot, and it’s very much a beefcake model. He’s just got the cowboy boots on, a western-style belt, and then his guns out. It’s not even very well focused, but it seems to me like it’s both selling an idea of masculinity and fitness, along with an idea of the sexy bandit. He’s reinhabiting that bandit mythology, which we find in many parts of popular culture as well as in Latinx culture, too, where we might have to macho up or have to perform different elements of masculinity. This image, in particular, is a great example in the sense that we don’t see many brown bodies in that photographic history. Historically, the photograph of the bandit is taken once he is captured and in custody: he’s being held by police, and the photograph would be sold up to the day of his public execution. The trope of the criminal continued under President Trump, who used it to help secure his election and to further divide our nation. But in this particular image, we find it being used differently: Is it ambivalent? Is it simply that the guy needs a paycheck? Is he a victim? Is he empowered? I don’t know these answers, but this image definitely fits within the complex history of portraying the bandido.

Photographer unknown, Unidentified man with cowboy hat, ca. 1950
Courtesy the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Alemán: Finally, what do these images tell us as artifacts of Latinx history as opposed to just illustrations of it? What sets the Latinx archive apart from, say, the photographic histories of Anglo America, or of Indigenous, Asian, or Black people in the United States?

Gonzales-Day: First, I should say that there are shared elements of the camera for all of us. There’s a performative component for all photography that cuts across cultures and people because it’s used as a way to mark an event: a birthday or a wedding, for example. Since its origins, photography was a special thing, something done on purpose, and I think that’s universal. You can certainly see universal themes come through in Latinx photographs that are marking specific moments. Then, there are others that capture a Latinx cultural performance clothing, ranges of class difference, complexion, style, images of the dandy. There are so many things to find in the Latinx photographic archive that are part of a performative notion of culture. What is it to be Latinx? How much of it has to be recognized by others? Much of our identities require community, acknowledgment, consensus. The importance of the past, the importance of ancestors, the question of our connection to an “other” are tied to the idea of our being diasporic. Are we displaced? Are we where we should be? Are we a new identity? I believe Latinx people are very much part of U.S. history, yet we continue to be underrepresented at every level.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 245, “Latinx,” under the title “Always in Resistance.”

A Photographer Casts Her Parents in a Story about Intimacy

In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic enveloped New York City, the photographer Ashley Markle got in a rental car and drove to Stow, Ohio, where she lugged her camera equipment and bags inside her mother and stepfather’s house, dropping them on the floor of her temporary bedroom. Looking around, she felt drained; she drove the eight hours from New York alone. That night, she slept in a narrow twin bed. “I felt like I was thrown back into my teenage body,” she told me in a conversation over Zoom. “Those same fights that I used to have with my mom started happening again. I was reverting back into this younger version of myself that I had tried so desperately to escape.”

Markle’s parents divorced when she was four years old. Her mother, Michele, was her only constant parental figure in those early years, and as a result, the two are very close. Her current stepfather, John, came into the picture when Markle was in high school, but Markle always relied most heavily on her mother. “For a large portion of my life, it was just me and my mom,” she recalled. “We leaned on each other a lot.” In recent years, Markle has come to recognize the unique “intensity” (and “sometimes the burden”) of being an only child. 

Ashley Markle, Glimpse of Intimacy, March 2020

Markle lived in Ohio through December 2020, and over the course of those ten months, she created a compelling (and occasionally suggestive) series called Weekends with My Mother and Her Lover. The project came about in response to a prompt from an online class hosted by New York’s International Center of Photography. Every week, Markle needed to present new work, and as the days in Ohio dragged into weeks, she started casting about for new subjects. It didn’t take long before her eyes fell on her housemates. 

For their initial collaboration, Markle arranged her mother and stepfather in their side yard and photographed them through a misty garage window. That image would become Glimpse of Intimacy, the first photo in the series. Right away, Markle realized that the photo conjured something, but she “wasn’t sure yet what that feeling was”—its meaning stayed slippery in her mind. Everything clicked when Markle started taking a more “psychological” approach to the project. She started thinking about how individual experiences—her own, her mother’s, her stepfather’s—informed and shaped their one-on-one and combined relationships. 

Many of the photographs in the series include all three people in the frame, while others feature them in pairs. For an outsider thumbing through Markle’s photographs, it’s clear that they nudge at dynamics between the two partners as well as their relationships with their adult child. In one photograph, Unaccompanied Attention, Markle stands in the yard holding a white sheet in front of her body. Her figure is tiny and off-center; we’re looking down from an upstairs window. Two sets of hands—dark, veined—rest on the sill. “That image is my childhood,” she explained. “Me playing by myself, and my mom (or my parents) watching me. I’ve always been watched. I always felt like I was under a microscope.” Markle’s series is intensely personal, with the complexities of her relationships with her parents as its focus. 

Ashley Markle, Unaccompanied Attention, June 2020

Communication is another thread running through Markle’s work. Unspoken dynamics reveal themselves while other connections remain opaque. As a viewer, it’s easy to imagine that Markle holds the power in these situations: some of the photographs are tacitly, if not explicitly, sensual in nature. When asked if her parents were conscious of the themes in her work, Markle paused to consider the question. She didn’t directly approach them about creating photographs with implicitly sexual themes, she said, but the message hasn’t escaped them. In Offering, her mother’s face confronts voluptuous vegetables held by John. “I never brought it up to them, but my mom was recently going through the photos, and she told John she wanted to put that one in the dining room. He didn’t want to—he said, ‘It’s too sexual!’” At certain moments during their shoots, Markle could feel John’s discomfort, but he went along with it, and she would adjust her approach in order to mitigate his unease. “I think he knew the project would be good,” she observed. And, she said, smiling a little, “he also wanted to make me happy.”

While many families are seemingly allergic to discussing sex openly, Markle felt that approaching the topic would be a key part of her series. “I’ve never really understood why it’s so taboo,” she commented. “Because families are literally created through sex! So I felt that it was an important thing to show and explore when it comes to family work.” 

For their part, Markle and her mother have always had an open dialogue around sex. As such, Weekends with My Mother and Her Lover was a concrete way for Markle to excavate their tight relationship. I asked if the project tightened their bond. She shifted from side to side, thinking. “I can’t say that it really brought us closer, because we were already so close,” she responded slowly. “But I think it brought up some of the intricacies of our relationship that I didn’t really understand but I knew were there. It brought them to life.”

Ashley Markle, Upskirt, July 2020Ashley Markle, Isosceles, July 2020

Ashley Markle, Constructed Embrace, June 2020

Ashley Markle, Mother’s Image, March 2020

Ashley Markle, Play Date, August 2020Ashley Markle, Offering, July 2020

Ashley Markle, Upshirt, June 2020

Ashley Markle, Breakfast, July 2020

Ashley Markle, Us, March 2020. All photographs from the series Weekends with My Mother and Her Lover
Courtesy the artist

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

How Claudia Gordillo Documented the Realities of Life in Nicaragua

In the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution’s triumph in 1979, the Nicaraguan photographer Claudia Gordillo Castellón began documenting her country’s urban and rural landscape. She observed rapidly transforming social and political realities during the 1980s and 1990s, producing an important body of documentary work while remaining committed to aesthetic experimentation. As a correspondent for the Sandinista daily Barricada from 1982 to 1984, she was assigned to the war photographers’ division and charged with documenting the controversial US-funded Contra war.

Even on the frontlines, Gordillo sought to document the context around the armed conflict, focusing on the lives of civilians caught in the cross fire. This interest in capturing the minutiae of everyday life, in the midst of dramatic and difficult historical events, characterizes her entire body of work through and through; this is ultimately what sets it apart. Whether in the barrios of Managua or the most remote regions of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, Gordillo sought to privilege the photographic subject, observing Nicaraguan society, habits, and daily rituals from a close yet critical distance. A persistent defender of freedom of expression, she argued that a certain degree of autonomy was necessary and that, ultimately, documentary work should not be made to serve an ideological agenda. This autonomous position nonetheless proved difficult to sustain within a context of heated ideological debate; her work still draws toward the unexpected, accidental, and even uncanny, revealing the absurdity of life, regardless of outside demands.

Claudia Gordillo, Quinceañera celebration on the slopes of the Mombacho volcano, 1995

The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was one of the most photographed political movements of the late twentieth century. Photographers from around the world, including across Latin America, converged upon the small Central American nation to witness and document what was seen as an ideological conflict between post–Cuban revolutionary movements and an emerging global neoliberal regime. Gordillo documented encounters and social realities that often took place alongside the most celebrated, decisive, or so-called iconic moments of that struggle. This is a crucial distinction that has to do with decolonizing the very notion of what constitutes a political, or revolutionary, act. Inherited notions about Latin American photography maintain that a “local” documentary tradition emerged in direct response to political circumstances, which demanded taking a position. As Gordillo’s practice demonstrates, notwithstanding the photographer’s commitment to social justice, her stance was nonetheless informed by an awareness of contemporary photographic practices in conversation with Euro-American and Latin American counterparts.

I met Claudia Gordillo in 2011 in Managua, while conducting research on photography in Nicaragua. In this interview, which took place online in January 2022, we discuss the span of her career from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and address her approach to documentary photography. Gordillo speaks about how her work responded to the pressing issues of the time, and foregrounded aesthetics while seeking to avoid cliché and ideological bias. She also reflects on her archives and how the transition from analog to digital has impacted her current perception of her body of work.

Claudia Gordillo, Francisco Sambola, garifuna leader from Orinoco, and sailors, Pearl Lagoon, 1990

Ileana L. Selejan: At the beginning of your career, you had returned from Italy in the immediate aftermath of the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in July 1979. What was that experience like? And how did you perceive your work within that context? 

Claudia Gordillo: I left Nicaragua for Europe and Italy in 1977 without a clear plan, searching for a design school. After about a year, I visited the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome. However, as this was the best school in the field, there were no places available, except for two in the photography course. I decided to enroll immediately, so as not to lose this opportunity.

When I returned to Nicaragua after more or less two years, having completed my course, I got disappointed and began watching the outside reality through TV. I closed myself indoors, not having a sense of purpose, without a direction for my work, until I started driving around Managua in my father’s car. I was observing the changes left by the war and the earthquake that had destroyed our city. I repeated these outings many times and discovered thus the [ruins of the old] cathedral where I made a series of photographs, which later ended up stirring an entire debate about the role of the arts in the revolution. 

Claudia Gordillo, Old Cathedral, Managua, 1981

Selejan: Could you talk about the controversy surrounding your first exhibition in Managua, where you showed that series from the old cathedral? I know it was a very difficult moment in your career.

Gordillo: The exhibition of the cathedral series created a debate against freedom of expression. Because, according to one of the nine Sandinista commanders [from the National Directorate] who gave an interview at the time, the arts were to serve the revolution, nothing else.

Selejan: At the start of the 1980s, you worked for the newspaper Barricada, which was the official publication of the FSLN [Sandinista National Liberation Front]. How would you describe the work environment at the newspaper? Was there great interest in photographic reportage? 

Gordillo: Yes, there was interest in reportage, however, only if favorable to the party. This was, after all, the official outlet for the FSLN.

Back then, there was hope that the revolution could be defended against attacks from the Contra, and the type of photography Barricada commissioned reflected this triumphalist stance with regard to the war. When I got to the San Juan River [in the south of Nicaragua] on an assignment, volunteer battalions were still present in the barracks at San Carlos. We’re talking about 1983, a high point in the Contra war. I felt very good there, away from directives and with more freedom of movement. I ended up staying for around three months, and every now and then, they would send me [collaborating] journalists, film, and money. Since they were most interested in photographs of the war, I decided to move to the headquarters in the area, with permission from the regional army chief. This was my best assignment as a correspondent, and Barricada liked it.

Claudia Gordillo, Relocation of rural communities from the war zone to Los Chiles, Río San Juan, 1983

Selejan: Several of your trips to the war zone led to you witnessing dramatic events, such as the relocation of local communities. Were those images controversial at the time? I see them as contradicting the official narrative of the revolution.

Gordillo: I only witnessed relocations in the area around the San Juan River, precisely where previous errors in such campaigns were taken into account. That is to say, they allowed the transfer of animals and crops with the help of Sandinista militias. It was different, even if mandatory, because they helped people to evacuate. I was myself part of the well-seasoned brigade of militiamen, peasants, and militants that carried out the operation. This was a unique experience, since I was living at the San Carlos headquarters, sleeping in a hammock in front of the San Juan River. My story was published, with Barricada selecting the photographs. 

Claudia Gordillo, Rainforest in Río Grande de Matagalpa, 1987

Selejan: Some of the work from this period you returned to later, reconsidered as the series Fragmentos de una revolución [Fragments of a revolution]. What does a retrospective view add to your reading of the work? And how has that changed throughout the almost four decades since? 

Gordillo: Learning to scan negatives was what changed my perspective. I was always looking at my contact sheets, marking the shots to be printed. Because I was working, I never really had enough time to do proper lab work. For instance, the San Juan River story took up many film rolls and contained many frames that I had actually never seen. It was only when I started to scan them that I could properly appreciate many of the negatives that were stored away for over thirty years. My work focused on the people, rather than on politics and leaders.

Even with Barricada, I went on several assignments where, say, one of the commanders would give the main speech, but even then, it wasn’t the most interesting part for me. I wasn’t that inspired, beyond my duty toward the newspaper and managing to get the images they requested. Neither did I have any sentimental attachment to anyone, because I thought that would negatively impact my observation. I needed to have freedom of thought—I was always very clear about that. It was always very present in my mind. As the years passed, I realized this was the most adequate stance, given my status as a reporter or photographer. And I was dedicated to searching for images that somewhat questioned the system.

Claudia Gordillo, Presidential elections in San Carlos de Río Coco, North Carribean, 1990

Selejan: The 1980s were a tumultuous decade in the history of Nicaragua, to say the least. You documented the sociocultural changes taking place with great interest, yet chose to focus on everyday life instead of heroic deeds and history with a capital H, always with an eye for the extraordinary in the ordinary. This strikes me as greatly contrasting to the work of other photographers who were working in the country at the time, including those coming from abroad. Is this the case?

Gordillo: What happened was that I was living here, and so the political discourses sounded hollow to me. The Sandinistas talked a lot about the “achievements of the revolution,” while we were living right in the middle of this tremendous poverty, with shortages of all kinds. Many of those coming from abroad believed this discourse. Not all, it must be said. But I wasn’t paying much attention to this. I wanted to get to know, and to understand, Nicaragua from the perspective of the [popular] markets, how people lived here. I wanted to understand how traditions functioned, their logic and origins, things that were not [necessarily] related to contemporary politics. My intention was to continue discovering those elements I identified with.  

Claudia Gordillo, Jovita Knight, from the Ulwa community of Karawala, Río Grande de Matagalpa, 1990

Claudia Gordillo, Billiards in La Libertad, Chontales, 1982

Selejan: After leaving Barricada, quite early on you started working with CIDCA [Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast] on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. At the time, the FSLN government was seeking to expand its influence in that region, while being quite ignorant of local dynamics among the primarily Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. A significant body of work ensued from that experience. How do you perceive it now, several decades later? 

Gordillo: The outcome of my work on the Caribbean coast is quite anthropological, without a doubt due to the influence of [anthropologist] Galio Gurdián, who was then director of CIDCA, and who set out to research local cultures, ethnic groups, and their traditions. I thought it was interesting to photograph life in the Caribbean, approaching significant details, although you couldn’t speak about other subjects—it was already a challenge to do so without falling into the usual clichés. Also, there was not enough information about the political issues between the Pacific and the Caribbean. That was a confidential topic. Still, at CIDCA we had a lot of freedom in pursuing our work, even if within certain limits.

Claudia Gordillo, Easter vigil in La Concha, 1998

Selejan: In the early 2000s, you published the book Estampas del Caribe nicaragüense: Portraits of the Nicaraguan Caribbean with filmmaker and photographer María José Alvarez. It brought together documentary work that you produced over a significant time frame while traveling across vast Indigenous territories. The Caribbean coast is often stereotyped, perceived as exotic and extremely remote, peripheral to most of what goes on in the rest of Nicaragua. By contrast, your work portrays a highly relatable, albeit singular world, one that lives according to its own rules and logic. What was it like to make that work, and how do you perceive it now? 

Gordillo: Some exoticism pervades in at least some of the photographs from the Caribbean. It was hard to avoid, given the monumental beauty of the region. Galio Gurdián always gave me a lot of license in my work to document the coast, despite his ties to the FSLN. CIDCA’s commissions were always concerned with the different ethnic groups, their ways of life, fishing, and all that concerned the organization of the various communities. A bit of politics slipped in there, although discreetly.

I can see now that I stuck to the rules, an outcome that is visible in some of the photographs. You needed a special permit to go into the Caribbean region, a type of passport, nationals and foreigners alike, which was why I always thought there were serious long-term issues that were deliberately hidden. CIDCA’s task was to generate historical documentation of the region. A lot of things were achieved, such as the publication of the first grammar of the Rama language, something that had never been done before.

Claudia Gordillo, Fiesta of Torovenado in Masaya, 1996

Selejan: Here, I’d like to return to a project that you started even earlier in your career, after returning to Nicaragua, Memoria Oculta de Mestizajes [The hidden memory of mestizajes]. I feel like you approached this subject from an anthropological angle, something that ultimately characterizes the majority of your work. Yet I would say that your analytical perspective shines forth powerfully. I remember many years ago, you mentioned how your photography was a means to learn about Nicaraguan identities, what made the country tick. Is that part of what’s happening? 

Gordillo: Yes, it’s part of the same. Identities are important, especially in a multiethnic and pluricultural country.

Claudia Gordillo, Fisherwoman, Rama Cay island, 1990
All photographs courtesy the artist

Selejan: You have spent over twenty years working as a curator, conservator, and archivist caring for the photography collection at the IHNCA [Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America] in Managua. We are both tragically aware of the extent to which neglect and lack of funding has led to the destruction of a lot of the photographic heritage in the country. You have been looking at those fascinating materials while going through your own archive. How has this process of revision impacted the way you look at your own work? 

Gordillo: Archives are always a fascinating resource for books, documents, and historical images. With time, I learned a lot about the conservation and proper handling of such materials. Digital technology taught me to look at my work in ways I never considered before. In the analog era, you had to first print out a contact sheet, and then print a [selected] frame as a small or medium-sized print, before finally choosing a negative. Learning to scan film was a great discovery for me, seeing my photographs on the screen, many of which I had never printed before and, therefore, wasn’t familiar with. I was very curious to see certain photographs, and the digital allowed me to get to know my own archive better.

How Have Photography Curators Responded to Demands for Diversity?

In summer 2020, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with many museums in between, were rightly criticized for their responses to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others at the hands of police and to the protests sparked by those tragedies. Several institutions searched their collections and used artworks by Black artists, without permission, in social media posts. Some paired images with statements that did not directly condemn the killings or adequately acknowledge the pain in their communities

As Kimberly Drew, a writer and formerly the social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum, put it on Twitter, “I understand firsthand that finding something to say can be hard work. I am also saying that I would like to see you do that work.”

For decades, museums have embraced some artists whose work reveals and criticizes the inequities and violence that characterize North American societies. One lesson of 2020, however, was that too often the dialogue surrounding their work, especially conversations about race, had only haltingly led to meaningful institutional change. Major museums appeared ill prepared for the scale and the force of demands to decolonize their practices. How could museums create programming to welcome all audiences and, at the same time, increase diversity, equity, and inclusion among their staffs? More than a year later, what has been the result in the arts of a national reckoning? What steps have museums taken to catch up to a vastly changed social landscape?

Jo Ractliffe, Raising the flag, Riemvasmaak, 2013, from the series The Borderlands
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

The Art Institute of Chicago seems to have been among those better poised to respond. In 1994, the museum created a Leadership Advisory Committee composed of African American community members. The museum’s current director, James Rondeau, has accelerated similar efforts. When Matthew Witkovsky, head of the museum’s photography and media department, arrived in Chicago in 2009, he spent three-and-a-half years surveying the department’s photographic holdings and found them overwhelmingly composed of works from Western Europe and the United States, mostly by white men from about 1910 to 1960. Looking to expand that perspective, in 2012, he mounted Dawoud Bey: Harlem U.S.A. and arranged for twenty supporters, led by Leadership Advisory Committee members, to acquire for the museum vintage prints of the full series. Since then, Witkovsky and his colleagues have acquired more works from the artists they exhibit, including Deana Lawson and David Hartt; shown permanent collection pieces by lesser-known African American artists in exhibitions such as Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980 (2018); presented exhibitions on African artists, including Jo Ractliffe and Mimi Cherono Ng’ok; and hired specialists in African and Black photography.

Witkovsky makes a distinction between working with the collection, which proceeds from the art, and rethinking how the institution functions, which “is absolutely about redressing wrongs and thinking categorically.” These two “different sets of concerns can converge, and it’s best when they do converge so that all the audiences you want to reach, not least your own staff, see things that excite them.”

Photographer unknown, Martinique Woman, ca. 1890
Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, Art Gallery of Ontario

Julie Crooks, who last fall was appointed to lead the department of arts of global Africa and the diaspora at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), had been a curator in the photography department since 2017. Accepting the museum’s job offer partly stemmed, she says, from a conversation with the AGO photography curator Sophie Hackett about “the importance of building a more diverse collection that reflects the character of Toronto.” Hackett had made major acquisitions of queer photography, along with a huge archive of Diane Arbus prints. Crooks’s most significant acquisition was of the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, more than 3,500 historical images from thirty-four countries, which is billed as perhaps the largest compendium of Caribbean photography in a museum outside that region.

How could museums create programming to welcome all audiences? More than a year later, what has been the result in the arts of a national reckoning?

How Crooks and her colleagues acquired the Montgomery Collection is remarkable; it chimes with the Bey acquisition in Chicago and suggests a path forward. Rather than find one wealthy supporter to cover the cost, the AGO built a coalition of twenty-seven donors who contributed to the effort. Many are from Toronto’s Black and Caribbean communities; many are first-time donors to the museum. “It was important for us that there were feelings of ownership and legacy attached to this acquisition,” Crooks says. “Many of the supporters are adamant that these photographs won’t sit in a vault; they’re advocates for the collection being accessible.” The AGO’s 2021 exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory features selections from the Montgomery Collection.

Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Untitled, 1959–61
Courtesy the New Orleans Museum of Art

At the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), the photography curator Russell Lord performed his own collection audit on his arrival in 2011 and found that the overwhelming bulk of the holdings, as in Chicago, was “canonical: white, American and European, male.” Lord knew he wanted to fill in the gaps. The department has recently acquired historical works from Japan and contemporary works by Chinese artists. It is building a Latin American collection. But Lord is also trying to find ways to suggest “diverse perspectives within the United States,” as with a 2021 collection-based exhibition of images by Ishimoto Yasuhiro, the American-born Japanese photographer whose feeling of being an outsider led him to immigrate to Tokyo in 1961.

In 2020, NOMA devoted all its available acquisition funds to buying art by BIPOC artists, more than half of whom call New Orleans home. Lord’s department acquired works by local artists Eric Waters and Akasha Rabut, among others. “It was important for the museum to make a visible commitment to the local community and to the diversity of its collection,” he says. “That was one result of a practice we’ve been moving toward over the past decade.”

Leslie Hewitt, Riffs on Real Time (6 of 10), 2006–9
Courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion have been particularly prominent around the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, since 2019, when Chaédria LaBouvier, a Black independent curator, accused the museum of racism in how it handled her exhibition on Jean-Michel Basquiat. After identifying omissions in the collection while organizing a major collection exhibition in 2010, Jennifer Blessing, senior curator of photography, has worked deliberately to make the museum more global, “especially in terms of African and African diaspora artists.” Blessing notes that while the 1996 exhibition In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, organized for the Guggenheim primarily by guest curators, including Okwui Enwezor, was a significant moment, that effort was “not fully recognized as part of our institutional history.”

It took a 2001 gift from the Bohen Foundation of over two hundred works to bring photography by African artists, such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, into the Guggenheim’s collection. Blessing and her colleagues have supplemented this representation with purchases of photography by the South African artist Zanele Muholi, along with those of African American peers including Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, and Leslie Hewitt. “When people talk about diversity and how we measure it, there is a tendency to focus on the number of artists or the number of objects,” Blessing says. “I think we should also consider how much money is being spent on artworks by artists of color.”

Installation view of Off the Record, with works by Tomashi Jackson and Sara Cwynar, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2021. Photograph by David Heald
© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Ashley James joined the Guggenheim as an associate curator in 2019 and immediately organized Off the Record (2021), an exhibition—with works by Simpson, Thomas, Hewitt, and others—about what’s left out of mainstream narratives. Like Crooks’s acquisition in Toronto, Off the Record created a gravitational force—the museum acquired the one piece in the show that was not previously in the collection: Tomashi Jackson’s Ecology of Fear (Gillum for Governor of Florida) (Freedom Riders bus bombed by KKK) (2020). According to James, “Off the Record has offered a bridge to people who can see their own visions reflected in the Guggenheim’s holdings.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 245, “Latinx,” under the column “Backstory.”

The Radiant Intimacy of Jarod Lew’s Family Portraits

All those clichés that steer the movement of light tend toward revelation: the light bathes, washes, or pools—but rarely does it obscure. In photographer Jarod Lew’s latest body of work, In Between You and Your Shadow (2021), light is both a literal and figurative source of occlusion. A woman in a floral shirt side-eyes the camera, while the gauzy rounds of a lens flare blot out her face; elsewhere, her arms are crossed in repose on a couch, head clouded by a pale blur, as if overexposed into anonymity. This figure is Lew’s mother, both the series’s inspiration and, along with his family, its reluctant subject. She does not like being seen, Lew tells me, which was the project’s core obstacle: “How do you photograph your mother without photographing your mother?” 

In the stray refractions of a blazing sun and other such tricks of light, Lew has found a way into his project’s central paradox of visibility: In 2012, he discovered that his mother had been engaged to Vincent Chin, the Chinese American draftsman murdered in 1982 by two Detroit autoworkers days before his wedding to Lew’s mother, a turning point in the history of Asian American civil rights. “I kept coming back to this thought about who my mother evolved into after the killing,” Lew says. “What part of her died when she had to be thrown into the spotlight of the national news?”

Four years elapsed before Lew could confront the weight of this personal and juridical trauma, which led to Please Take Off Your Shoes (2016–20), a project made in the homes of various Asian American strangers in Metro Detroit. For In Between You and Your Shadow, Lew turned to his parents’ home, also in the Detroit area, at first stifled by the etiolated blandness of suburbia, but soon attentive to the narrative possibilities in its banal geometry—a bathroom mirror turned nested frame for his mother’s half-hidden face, or a frosted glass door smudging her familiar features. These corners of the home are vectors as much as props for partial obscuration, as if making a display of her withholding. 

At other times, white walls become backdrops for a different form of spectacle. One picture shows arcing lamplight as it pierces the silhouette of Lew’s bearded father, luminous yellow pouring into his shadow. Another contains a glossy Buddha figurine, once owned by Lew’s late grandmother, sitting in a dim corner and dwarfed by its own strangely doubled shadow. I’m struck by the thematic precision of this particular image and its making. Before a happy accident with LED stickers cast these dark and voluptuous shapes, Lew had used a full-on flash but found the image uninteresting. Excess light had stolen its depth. 

Many of the photographs in this series bear the stark, flattening clarity of flash for a different reason. “The momentum of this project really started with specific memories I had as a child,” Lew says, “so I recreated them to get my family comfortable with the camera, but also to lead into newer pictures of them that were maybe less staged.” His process began as a kind of conjuring, the studio setup lighting a way into the unspoken densities of his familial past. Some of the earliest shots were images gleaned from the vivid archive of Lew’s childhood: his gym-going father flexing in the mirror; his red-manicured mother’s hand shaving his father’s head. Any other start would’ve made the project impossible, Lew explains. It’s a neat workaround, invoking these unstable fantasias of personal memory, pocked by elisions and revisions, like so much immigrant history. Between a taciturn parent and a cultural identity long patchworked from state-authored illusions, traveling through fiction might be the best way to chance on something like truth. 

Lew’s routine dramatizations, in which his brother and Lew himself also make appearances, were enough to coax a certain ease from his parents, their slow-blooming candor opening up a more spontaneous practice. “There are moments when I see light, see how it cuts through things,” Lew says. “I’ve lived in this house my whole life, so I know where to wait.” Most of these impromptu images are marked by honeyed slants of daylight, the sun sneaking through half-shut blinds onto a tiny snapshot of Lew’s mother as a teen, or striating a tender close-up on his parents at dusk. But these radiant intimacies belie one of the project’s thornier realizations.

“Making these photographs revealed this disconnect I have with my parents,” Lew says. “Though we are becoming closer, because we’re playing with one another, there’s still this performance that’s happening, this constant guard between us that I don’t think they’ll ever drop.” Across these staged and mutable frames, Lew has built a way of seeing that centers contradiction, moving past the hypervisibility of racial injury to ask: what does this ubiquity obscure? Necessary mysteries, maybe, or something like gratitude for shadows.

Jarod Lew’s photographs were created using a FUJIFILM GFX100S with a FUJINON GF 80mm F1.7 R WR lens.

All photographs by Jarod Lew from the series In Between You and Your Shadow, 2021, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

A Syrian Documentary Photographer Teaches Children to Capture Their Lives

Since 2012, in the village of Mardin, Turkey, close to the Syrian border, a community center called Her Yerde Sanat-Sirkhane has been organizing workshops in the circus arts and photography for local children affected by war. “Children have the opportunity to collaborate and form friendships with one another, beyond gender, social and cultural differences,” reads Sirhkane’s mission statement. “In doing so, they manifest peace, harmony, open mindedness and cheerfulness in their local and global communities.” Syrian documentary photographer Serbest Salih leads the photography workshops, encouraging local kids—many of them fellow refugees—to capture their surroundings, developing the black-and-white film and printing the photos themselves in a mobile darkroom. Yet the photographs the kids make are seldom as grim as the ongoing war that has surrounded them for most of their young lives; instead, they capture their friends playing outside, their families at home, and the local goats wandering the village. A new book, I Saw the Air Fly, collects more than one hundred of these images, all made and chosen by the kids themselves—with some help and guidance from Salih.

Photograph by Bilal, 13 years old, from Alhaske, Syria

Elena Goukassian: Tell me about the Sirkhane Darkroom. How did it start, how did you get involved, and where did the idea for a mobile darkroom come from? 

Serbest Salih: I’m originally from Kobanî, a Syrian city on the Turkish border. In 2014, when ISIS attacked my city, I fled to Turkey and started working with some NGOs as a photographer. When I moved to Mardin, I started working as a volunteer with Sirkhane, a social circus group for vulnerable children and children who are affected by war. One day, me and my friend went to an area where we saw people who are Syrian, Turkish, Arab, Syrian Kurdish, Syrian Arabs—they are in the same neighborhood, but there’s never been good communication with each other, they don’t know each other. So, we got the idea to use photography as the language to let their children express themselves. After ten months, the project got support from a German NGO called Welthungerhilfe.

In 2019, we were talking about transportation issues. We take children from the area where they live to Sirkhane, which is very hard sometimes, especially for parents, because they don’t know us and they usually tell children to never trust anyone. So, I thought we could use a mobile program. We had a container belonging to Sirkhane, and I changed it into a darkroom, and every two months, I change my location. 

When COVID-19 started, I changed my program into mobile, online workshops. It was hard, because most of the children cannot access the internet, or they don’t have a smartphone. Luckily, we started face-to-face workshops again, as the situation in terms of coronavirus is getting better here in Turkey. It’s been four months since we started face-to-face workshops again. And now we are using a caravan, which we got with money from our fundraising. I turned the caravan into a darkroom, and we are traveling from village to village and doing workshops with the children.

Photograph by Ilava, 10 years old, from Kobanî, Syria

Goukassian: How involved are the parents in these workshops? How do you make sure they trust you enough to send their kids there?

Salih: In the beginning of the workshops, we invite the families to see the stuff we are doing. They might think it’s just sending their children to spend a little bit of time outside, but we invite them to Sirkhane, and they see our communication with the children and how we take children seriously. In terms of communication with their child, they also start taking children very seriously. So, yeah. They trust us.

Goukassian: What does a typical workshop look like?

Salih: We do an orientation week first. In the beginning, most of the children are very shy, so we make a circle to let them introduce themselves. In the circle, they are all equals. I explain to them why I chose analog photography—because if you want to learn photography, you should start from zero. And after that, I show them all different types of cameras—some of them are pinhole, analog, digital cameras. After that, I show them compositional photography, and explain that compositional photography doesn’t have rules, and I add with compositional photography awareness of subjects such as child brides, child marriage, gender, and bullying. Then we go outside in the yard, shooting without film, just to practice how to use a camera, and after that, we come back and I show them pictures by the best female and male photographers, to show them that gender is not a basis for anything. After that, I give them cameras with film. I’m not telling them what to shoot; I tell them they can select whatever they want; it’s just that you have to feel it when you shoot a photo. After two or three weeks, I show them how to develop film inside the darkroom, and after that, we print all the negatives inside the darkroom. After they’ve done all these courses, I let them do it themselves. I’m just watching them after that. We scan negatives together, and we discuss their photos. 

In the beginning of the workshop, the children are very shy, but then they are participating, speaking about their life, and when we develop their film, they start speaking about their photos when they shoot them. The results are mostly the children sharing moments inside the house, outside, with their families, eating breakfast or lunch or playing with their friends. In the beginning of the project, we used to get more reactions from adults and parents, who always thought the pictures would be about sadness, because these are children who are affected by war and vulnerable children. But mostly, in the workshops we talk about happiness.

Photograph by Zeynao, 13 years old, from Nusaybin, Turkey

Photograph by Sultan, 14 years old, from Nusaybin, Turkey

Goukassian: What kinds of cameras do you have the kids use? 

Salih: They’re very simple compact cameras. Mostly, I get second-hand cameras. Kodak, Fujifilm, Canon. Many different brands. All auto-focus. 

Goukassian: What languages do you teach in? 

Salih: Turkish, Arabic, and Kurdish, mostly. 

Goukassian: Do you teach in all three languages at once, because the kids come from different backgrounds? Or do you have, for example, a Turkish-language class and then a separate Kurdish-language class? 

Salih: My goal is to integrate the community, so I’m trying to not do any separate groups according to language. Sometimes, our common language is Turkish, sometimes it’s Kurdish, sometimes it’s Arabic. Most of the time, it’s Turkish. The main aim of this project is to integrate the children. Most of the children grew up here, in Turkey, so now they are speaking Turkish. 

Goukassian: Where are you now? Do you currently have a class? How many kids are in it?

Salih: Three weeks ago, I finished a workshop. Next week, I’m planning to start workshops in a village called Karakuyu. Five days of the week, I’m planning to do workshops every day with two groups, with eight to ten children in each group. Every day it’s two groups: one from 10 a.m., and the second group starts at 2 or 3 p.m.

Photograph by Muhammed, 17 years old, from Raqqa, Syria
All photographs from the book I Saw the Air Fly (MACK, 2021)

Goukassian: What are your plans for the future? How can the larger photography community support your workshops?

Salih: I’ll continue doing workshops with the caravan. Right now, we are in need of photography materials, especially black-and-white film and compact cameras. We have a donation page, where people can support us or send us second-hand cameras. 

Goukassian: Have you shown the book I Saw the Air Fly to any of the kids whose pictures are featured in it? What were their reactions? 

Salih: I showed photos and the photobook to some of the children. Their reaction was amazing. They were very happy, because in the beginning, when we decided we would create a photobook, I gathered up all the children and I put the photos on the table so they could select photos for the book themselves, and when they saw the result in the photobook, they were very happy. They still don’t believe that it’s published worldwide. 

Goukassian: What about your own reaction to the book?

Salih: I see this photobook as a celebration of childhood.

I Saw the Air Fly was published by MACK in August 2021.