Aperture's Blog, page 5

A Shimmering Portrait of Contemporary Iran

Everything seems quiet and calm in Sara Abbaspour’s series Floating Ocean, yet quiet and calm are not words immediately associated with the image of Iran, where the photographs were made between 2019 and 2024. The absence of the usual clichés was a deliberate choice by Abbaspour, who imbued the geography of her country of birth with the aesthetics of the place where she discovered portrait photography as a way to tell her stories.

Abbaspour first experienced photography as a tool in her undergraduate program in urban planning and design in the city of Mashhad, in the northeast of Iran. It turned out she enjoyed photographing the city more than trying to plan it, and so she changed course. Her first photography degree at University of Tehran was theory heavy; seeking a practice-based education, she enrolled at the Yale School of Art in 2017.

Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (fire at sunset), 2024

In her first series, White (2015–16), Abbaspour’s training as an urban planner collides with practical constraints—it is illegal to take photographs in public spaces in Iran. In these images, she captured the remains of houses destroyed in the name of renewal in the pilgrimage city of Mashad. Unseen interior walls, once the site of private lives, become external walls, exposed to the city’s traffic. The municipality’s whitewash inadvertently turns the unsightly into the monumental. “I didn’t make portraits when I was in Iran. I thought I could work with the urban fabric metaphorically to talk about the ideas that I had,” Abbaspour says. The liminal state of these walls, pulled down but never rebuilt, provided her with the kind of poetics that many Iranian artists find useful in a country where direct statements can easily cause trouble with the authorities.

Abbaspour’s move to the US pushed her in a new direction and a new way of looking. “I was lost when I got to the US. I didn’t have any connection to the place. My English wasn’t very good at the time, so I made myself go out every day to photograph people. I started to enjoy the process of meeting and collaborating with them.” Through portraiture, she connected to her new country, and that newfound territory in turn changed the way she photographed Iran when she returned after almost six years.

She began Floating Ocean on her first visit back to Iran, but issues around her US visa stopped her from visiting again to finish the project until the summer of 2024. By this time, she had found a route away from the safety of the metaphor and was settled into the American tradition of portraiture. Influenced by the work of Judith Joy Ross, Mark Steinmetz, and Dawoud Bey, she blended her newfound confidence in photographing people up close with her idea to evade a specific geography. There is poetry here, but no conundrums. Her frames are occupied by individuals at ease with themselves in front of her camera.

Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (girl looking down from rooftop), 2024

The name of the series points to the vastness of Iran and how it and she have both changed so radically since she departed for the US. For returning expats these days, the most eye-catching change is the number of women who defy the compulsory Hijab rules, eradicating one of the easy visual markers of the country. In 2020, Iranians protested the Hijab rules after a young woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, was killed in the custody of the moral police who enforce them. Many young people were killed and maimed, and women still face punitive measures for refusal to comply.

Throughout the series, Abbaspour photographed her subjects without the mandatory cover. Without that signifier, the background is the only way to pin the geography. The subjects don’t give away many clues. The girls holding each other or the boys wrestling could be somewhere in the American Midwest. The woman washing her face with a hose could be in South America. Even where some material elements may point to the geography, it is very unspecific, the rooftop in Mashad where a young woman is leaning over the parapet could be any Middle Eastern country. Abbaspour directs our attention to the person in the frame and not their environment. To that end, she deliberately avoids color as she feels it provides too much documentary information.

Abbaspour’s use of black-and-white photography creates a sense of timeless, placeless landscape. As does her framing. Robert Capa’s famous assertion that if your photographs are not good enough, you are not close enough, takes new life in Abbaspour’s method of photographing Iran, where she proves that if you zoom in hard enough, you will discover the universal.

Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (splashing water), 2024Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (boys wrestling), 2024 Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (boy and mirror), 2024 Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (two girls in the landscape), 2024 Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (lighting cigarettes), 2024
Courtesy the artist

Sara Abbaspour is a shortlisted artist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

How the War in Ukraine Altered Life for a Lost Generation

One evening in the winter of 2022, Daria Svertilova was wandering through one of Kyiv’s central parks. Amid a months-long invasion by Russia, and plunged into darkness by a city-wide blackout, she stumbled on a statue of the archangel Michael, the patron saint of Kyiv. In the Bible, the archangel Michael acts as god’s chief prince; he often appears in dreamlike, prophetic visions of the future that promise the fall of empire. 

“It was the darkest time of the year, and I was feeling deeply sad,” she told me. “In that moment, the archangel’s presence amidst the darkness felt deeply symbolic.” 

The image she took—Protector of Kyiv—anchors her series Irreversibly Altered, which documents the grief and emptiness of the war in Ukraine. The archangel is situated against a blue-black sky in full regalia, fighting off an unseen foe. 

Daria Svertilova, Protector of Kyiv, Ukraine, 2022

When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Svertilova was in Paris, finishing her master’s degree in photography and video at École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD). Ultimately, she decided to postpone her graduation, abandon that project, and respond to the present moment—her present moment. 

In the months following the invasion, Svertilova stayed in France, reading updates about the war during the day and dreaming about it at night. The tendency toward expressive images came from her own need to excise her nightmarish visions and the realization that many other talented photographers were documenting the war in a straightforward way. She had no interest in replicating their work when she went back to Ukraine.  

The characters and scenes in Irreversibly Altered hint at dispossession and pain, but never show it directly: an empty, red-tinged street a night, portraits of exhausted youths, a still life of dying flowers, shadowy figures floating around dimly lit interiors. While many photographers around her were documenting the war in Ukraine journalistically, Svertilova chose to channel the emotional dislocation around her into impressionistic images instead. 

Daria Svertilova, Sana Shahmuradova in her studio during electricity shortages, Ukraine, 2022

Irreversibly Altered’s aesthetics are also rooted in Svertilova’s childhood training. Growing up, she took drawing classes and found inspiration in Renaissance paintings. She became interested in photography at age thirteen, experimenting with digital SLR cameras and an old Soviet Zenith camera inherited from her grandfather. She moved to Paris to become a working artist. 

“I didn’t come from an artistic family, and in Ukraine, art has never really been seen as a “real” profession—something you could do full-time.” 

Svertilova admits that while it pains her to see waning support for Ukraine abroad, she feels it’s natural to want to tune out of war, especially explicit images of war. More than ten years after the war started and with no end in sight, she is constantly asking: How can photographers speak about a war in a way that connects to people who are far from it? 

Irreversibly Altered offers answers. Rather than trying to capture a broader narrative, Svertilova focuses on her tight knit circle of friends and acquaintances: Artists working in freezing cold studios, former art curators and students who joined the army. They are all part of a lost generation who have undergone a dramatic transformation over the past three years. 

There were times when she felt like giving up, especially during constant power outages and living for days without heat and water during the dead of winter. She didn’t.  

“I realized that this work is about resistance—the resistance of Ukrainians who live through the war every day, and also my own, personal resistance,” she said. “This project taught me that you have to find strength and keep going, because in the end, the effort is worth it.” 

Daria Svertilova, Untitled, Ukraine, 2022Daria Svertilova, Untitled, Ukraine, 2023Daria Svertilova, Hostomel car cemetery , Ukraine, 2022Daria Svertilova, Roses blossoming in limbo, Ukraine, 2022Daria Svertilova, Untitled, Ukraine, 2023
Courtesy the artist

Daria Svertilova is a shortlisted artist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

Life in Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul

On August 15, 2021, Kabul was in chaos. Photographs of desperate crowds at Hamid Karzai International Airport and refugees packed onto US military planes were shared widely around the world as the Taliban encircled the city. Taken three years after the end of American occupation, Hashem Shakeri’s The Fall of Kabul is a far quieter—and ultimately more disconcerting—image: the photograph shows three young Taliban soldiers, scarcely older than teenagers, looking listless as they guard the dusty top of Wazir Akbar Khan Hill. Clad in sandals and holding Kalashnikovs, they make a pathetic picture of one of the world’s most repressive, fundamentalist regimes. These rough-shod provincials working for starvation wages are among the many Afghans betrayed by their government in Shakeri’s series Staring into the Abyss (2024). Kabul may have long since fallen, but these photographs offer a rare glimpse at how the country slides further still.

Based in Tehran, Shakeri is used to taking pictures in hard-to-reach places, but he’s not a documentary photographer in the conventional sense. Since 2019, when his eerie photographs of derelict public housing estates far from Tehran’s center were published in The New Yorker, he has mostly received international attention from art and fashion magazines. Perhaps that’s because, while Shakeri aims his lens at appalling social issues, his technique is extraordinarily refined. These are beautiful images of ugly truths, and for any photographer, that’s a very difficult needle to thread. Taken with a medium-format camera and 120 film several stops overexposed, an image of unfinished apartment blocks rising beyond mountains of industrial waste, for instance, assumes a searing atmosphere of desolation. Even the vivid, artificial colors of a child’s swing set or a group of oversized pinwheel sculptures do little to enliven the bleached and barren landscape.

Shakeri began experimenting with overexposure in 2018 while shooting in Sistan and Baluchestan, a large but remote Iranian province on the border with Afghanistan. In his Book of Roads and Kingdoms, an atlas of the Muslim world, the tenth-century Persian geographer al-Istakhri described the region as a “fertile” land full of green, irrigated fields along the Helmand River. It was a cradle of ancient civilization stretching back to the settlement of Shahr-e-Sukteh around 3550 BC. Now, the ruins of the neolithic “Burnt City” sit in a drought-riddled wasteland plagued by conflicts over rights to Helmand water. The photographs in Shakeri’s An Elegy for the Death of Hamun (2018) feel appropriately parched, as the people in them wander through fields and ravines lacking any sense of warmth or moisture. Crucially, however, Shakeri gives us glimpses of humanity, like a five-year-old boy dangling from an improvised rope-swing along a dry riverbed. If they locate a certain sublimity in scenes of ecological devastation, these photographs also empathize deeply with the people—mostly members of the oppressed ethnic Hazara minority—who’ve been left behind. 

Staring into the Abyss was perhaps Shakeri’s most difficult project to date. As an independent photographer without institutional backing, he was repeatedly threatened by government agents—even as Taliban soldiers agreed to pose for him. “The situation was highly volatile, and everyone lived in uncertainty. I tried to reflect this fluidity and ambiguous, uncertain perspective in my photographs,” he says. There’s no violence on display, but scant sentimentality either. Rather, Shakeri shows the texture of daily life in a place the rest of the world has seemingly forgotten. Soldiers crack open and share a watermelon on the pavement; a boy plays with an albino pigeon in an auto body shop; an assortment of pink clothes and homewares for sale gather dust by the roadside. 

While many of the images are overexposed, the series is also a departure in terms of Shakeri’s process. In several photographs, he uses new techniques to conceal their subjects’ identities from the Taliban: a photograph of an underground girls’ school, framed so we only see its pupils’ hands, has been doubly exposed, as if shot through curtained glass. Another depicts a ten-year-old refugee charging his family’s solar panel in a Kabul park, but solarized so that only the panel itself is fully visible, shining white against a field of fire. Shakeri says the photograph inspired the series title, a reference to Nietzsche’s proclamation that “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss stares back at you.” But it seems especially true of another haunting, black-and-white image: taken with flash at twilight, it shows ruins in the shadows of the niche that once held the ancient and monumental Bamiyan buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. In the wake of violence, their absence has become a yawning void.

All photographs by Hashem Shakeri, Staring into the Abyss, Afghanistan, 2021–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Hashem Shakeri is a shortlisted artist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

A Transfixing Look at Nature at Its Most Unnatural

In environmental science, Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a concept that describes how people’s perception of what is “normal” or “natural” changes over time as ecosystems deteriorate. In other words, each generation accepts the environment they grew up with as the baseline, even if it’s already been significantly altered from its original state, leading to a gradual acceptance of environmental degradation as the memory of the original condition is lost. For Emma Ressel, this idea is central to her project Glass Eyes Stare Back, which questions the human relationship to animals and the environment during an era of increasing climate anxiety. Using museological dioramas of animals as inspiration, Ressel creates her own vibrant and layered studio constructions of flora and taxidermized fauna that veer more toward fantasy and formal experimentation than biological accuracy. “I want to think about how, collectively, we’re living in very confusing and quickly changing environments,” explains Ressel. “The pace at which species and environments are disappearing, and the rate at which natural disasters are happening is so disorienting, and I want to express that in the images.”

Emma Ressel, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, 2023

These questions of ecology and preservation have always been personal. Ressel has seen winters in her native Maine change drastically over her lifetime, and she’s begun studying the local ecosystem in New Mexico. Her relationship with photography and nature is equally longstanding—Ressel grew up helping her father, a herpetologist and professor, with his research. On his sabbaticals, the two would take trips to the desert, where she would help him catch lizards for his slides, arranging and photographing the reptiles to be recorded and shown to his classes. At Bard, where she studied photography, she was inspired by the work of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painters and began creating scenes and constructing playfully grotesque still life photographs of food.

In 2019, Ressel began making the photographs that would lead to this project in the small natural history museum that housed her dad’s office. “I was thinking about the museum and I just kind of realized that habitat dioramas are still lifes. That’s so much of the same techniques of composition and framing nature and creating a narrative.”

Since the taxidermized animals in her local museum were housed in simple, plexiglass vitrines and lacked any theatrical staging, she began to make her own backdrops from photographs that she printed at large scale. “I started playing with the false backdrop and pairing that with the animal and the scene. I was thinking about how I could start to build these layers of fiction through my constructions, and distort the setting that the animal was in,” she explains.

Emma Ressel, Deep Time Storage, 2024

Since these initial experiments, Ressel has explored the collections of natural history museums in the Northeast and Southwest, and her project has expanded to consider the ways these museums and ecological collections inform our ideas around climate and the environment. Deep Time Storage, for instance, is a behind-the-scenes moment—models of two ancient reptiles from different epochs rest amongst filing cabinets, archival boxes, and a large print of a fossil—exemplifying the banal theater of how we preserve, research, and present the history of the natural world.

 Images like Dusty Galaxy, in which a turkey’s feathers gleam prism-like against a backdrop of the night sky, or Surrender the Decomposers, in which a mantis is posed against an alien ecosystem of fungus, are more theatrical gestures that suggest imagined ecological pasts, or distant futures. Other photographs feel more immediate and sinister—in Whooping Crane Efforts, we’re grimly reminded of our ecological and political reality. As more and more species and habitats become critically endangered, the research and conservation efforts to stymie environmental degradation are equally under threat from federal funding cuts and policy changes. “I want people to care. I want people to worry with me about the environment and about animals,” urges Ressel. “I don’t want to lead with a message of outright conservation or environmentalism, because I think that we’re sort of bombarded with that day-to-day. But I hope that I can jostle something loose, or prompt a different way to think about our circumstances.”

Emma Ressel, Whooping Crane Efforts, 2024 Emma Ressel, Dusty Galaxy, 2021 Emma Ressel, Moldy Bee, 2021 Emma Ressel, Fruit for the Underworld, 2023Emma Ressel, Red Efts in the Full Moon, 2023
Courtesy the artist

Emma Ressel is a shortlisted artist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

Sakir Khader’s Portraits of Palestinian Perseverance

When Sakir Khader was a young journalist working for a Dutch newspaper in the aftermath of the ill-fated Arab Spring, he wanted to report on the civil war in Syria. His editors refused to send him, so Khader left the paper and joined the Dutch public television broadcasting network instead. There, he undertook a formidable education in the logistics and ethics of documentary filmmaking. Again, he turned his attention to Syria. This time, Khader managed to line up a trip. But the situation was volatile. The regime of Bashar al-Assad had brutally crushed a fledging revolution, setting off an unpredictable conflagration of multiple open-ended conflicts among rebels, insurgents, foreign mercenaries, and more. Things never seemed to get any better—only worse.

Sakir Khader, The shepherd and his sheep, Khattab, Northern Hama, Syria, 2025

Khader’s trip to Syria was canceled. But by that time he was no longer taking no for an answer. He decided to apply what he had learned and go anyway, on his own, as a freelancer. As soon as he arrived, Khader began looking for Abdul Baset al-Sarout, the former goalkeeper for Syria’s youth soccer team who had become a rebel commander with the Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade. Sarout was famous for popularizing revolutionary anthems. For that reason, he was hugely irritating to the Syrian regime. Government forces eventually killed him, in 2019, during a chaotic battle in the country’s northwest. Sarout was just twenty-seven years old. Khader was around the same age when he found him, a year earlier, and spent three months living with him and the men of his battalion. Khader made a film and a book and took many photographs, including a portrait of Sarout, close-up, face ablaze with an irresistible smile, tired eyes, and a crown of cherubic curls.

Sakir Khader, A friends’ gathering on the mountain, Rujib, Nablus, Palestine, March 2025Sakir Khader, The mothers of the Martyrs, Jenin refugee camp, 2023

Blurring the line between still and moving images by making extremely short films, which Khader refers to as “moving still lifes,” as well as singular photographs that play with high contrasts and the conventions of tableau vivant, Khader’s work combines the beauty of Italian neorealist cinema with the horrifying churn of contemporary warfare. He photographs and prints almost exclusively in black and white. He has won a slew of awards. He joined Magnum last summer as a nominee. His second photobook, Dying to Exist, was published last year. His “moving still lifes” add up to over fifty-five hours of footage, which he is slowly transforming into a feature-length film. His first solo museum show, focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine and titled Yawm al-firak (Farewell Day), after a line from a poem by the great eighth-century poet of the Islamic world Abu Nuwas, is currently on view at Foam in Amsterdam, accompanied by a forthcoming publication of the same name featuring handwritten notes and Polaroids, subtitled Diary of an Invisible Genocide. For Khader, who lives between the Netherlands and Palestine, his success has been both remarkably efficient and impressively assured. More so than achievements or critical acclaim, however, the story of how Khader got himself to Syria reveals how an all-consuming methodology has defined his visual style.

“I like to stay with people,” Khader says. “A lot of the real work happens when the camera is off.”

In Arabic, Khader’s first name means “falcon” or “hawk.” When I spoke to him by phone during a brief stay in Paris, he joked that his name had predestined him to become a photographer. “See? Sharp-eyed,” he said, laughing. Because he was born in 1990, Khader’s first camera was, in fact, an LG Prada smartphone, which he used as a teenager to take pictures in the West Bank district of Nablus. He wanted to be able to look at them after he’d left, to summon images of the homeland in his mind whenever he was away. This was a pre-professional pursuit. By the time Khader landed at the start of his career and was finding his way through several different modes of image making all at once, it struck him that no one in the mainstream news media was paying enough attention to how, in places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, which had been destroyed by years, even decades, of chaotic yet systematic violence, people were carrying on with their daily lives. Khader’s ongoing bodies of work show people young and old, combatants and bystanders, as they fight, survive, grieve, and mourn but also dance, sing, play games, and experience quieter moments of tenderness or reprieve: men and boys resting sideways on oversize armchairs, a balloon seller eating a Popsicle, two boys waiting for a pair of bumper cars to begin, kids celebrating a holiday in absurdly matching festive dress.

Sakir Khader, On this earth we belong, Rudjib, Nablus, 2023

Khader doesn’t parachute into war zones. He doesn’t join official military embeds. Without narrative or polemic, his images create a withering critique of US foreign policy from the so-called War on Terror until today. He immerses himself in the lives of his subjects, who are people he knows or has come to know. “I like to stay with people,” he explained. “I blend in fully. I build relationships. A lot of the real work happens when the camera is off.”

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Given that he no longer considers himself (or introduces himself as) a journalist, Khader’s status as a Dutch-born, Arabic-speaking, Muslim-observant Palestinian has served him well. It has opened doors to communities that otherwise might not have been so welcoming.

But Khader is also excruciatingly careful not to instrumentalize his or his subjects’ identities. He doesn’t resort to clichés. “I don’t want to shoot olive trees and kaffiyehs,” he said, citing two well-worn symbols of Palestinian struggle. What holds his still and moving images together—and protects them from glorifying the violence that is undeniably his milieu—is Khader’s ability to find in his subjects the same pluck, charm, and relentless perseverance that brought him to Syria six years ago.

Sakir Khader, The neighborhood is no more, Darayya, Syria, 2025 Sakir Khader, Deep scars in a paradise, Darayya, Syria, 2025
All photographs © the artist/Magnum Photos Sakir Khader, Intifada in the village: The battle for Mount Sabih, Beita, Nablus, Palestine, 2021

To be sure, Khader has photographed a prodigious amount of weaponry, including slingshots, rocket launchers, hand grenades, pistols, and AK-47s. His portraits include men in balaclavas, men missing eyes and limbs, and boys who lift their shirts to show gruesome scars. Although he has, on occasion, captured groups of women joking for the camera, his image world is largely male and shattered by violence. “This is the raw reality,” Khader told me. “I can’t filter it out.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting,” under the column Viewfinder.

William Kentridge on the Excess of the Studio

This interview originally appeared in Aperture, issue 249, “Reference” (Winter 2022).

In the video artwork Drawing Lesson 47 (Interview for New York Studio School) (2010), William Kentridge stages a split-screen conversation with himself. William Kentridge stubbornly refuses to answer William Kentridge’s straightforward questions: “Can you describe your life as an artist? Can you say, rather, what it is that you did today to give us some sense of how you fill your hours?”

Speaking from his studio in Johannesburg, Kentridge tells the writer and fellow South African Jonathan Cane, in response to those same questions, that he had been in his studio collaborating with editors and artists; working on a large ink drawing for his career-spanning solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; preparing for a major presentation at the Broad, in Los Angeles; and revitalizing a nineteenth-century theatrical technique called Pepper’s Ghost. Internationally recognized for his drawings, animated films, theater and opera sets, sculptures, tapestries, and performance pieces, Kentridge is not, in fact, a photographer. Yet, as he describes, his childhood discovery of forensic photographs recording a terrible massacre, his boxes of reference pictures, and the images Instagram’s algorithm filters into his feed have all informed a photographic approach when Kentridge puts charcoal to paper.

Ian Berry, The police open fire and the crowd flees, Sharpeville, South Africa, March 21, 1960
© the artist/Magnum Photos William Kentridge, Untitled (The Shadow of a Shadow), 2010. Photogravure

Jonathan Cane: I interviewed David Goldblatt for Aperture in 2015, and I think that’s why they’ve asked me to do this.

William Kentridge: He was a real photographer. [Laughs]

Crane: Can we start with you discovering the box of photographs in your father’s office?

Kentridge: In 1961, when I was six, my father was one of the lawyers representing families at the inquest into the Sharpeville Massacre. He had his study down the corridor in the house we lived in. I went in there one afternoon, and there was a yellow box, which I thought looked like a box of chocolates. It was bright yellow and was, in fact, a box of Kodak 8-by-10 film. I opened it, expecting to find chocolates. So that was already kind of transgressive, to be stealing a chocolate in the middle of the afternoon.

But instead of chocolates, what it contained was a pile of glossy, black-and- white photographs by Ian Berry. Photographs of crowds gathering, and then of the shooting itself. The police on top of Saracens [armored vehicles], photographed from the vantage point of the crowd outside the gates of the police station. And then shots of people running. And then, also, many photographs, both close-up and wider shots, of bodies on the ground—of someone lying with what looked like a small stain on the back of their jacket, and then, in the next photograph, the body rolled over so you can see the exit wound with the whole chest blown open.

It was completely shocking, as if this was my dessert for looking. There was a huge amount of guilt. It was only many years later, when my father and I had a public conversation in Munich, organized by Okwui Enwezor as part of Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, in 2013, that I had to tell the story again. My father said that, yes, he’d heard the story, but he’d never had a chance to apologize to me for having allowed those photographs to be where a six-year-old could find them.

It was the shock of the forensic image, so much less present now, that gave me a lingering sense of the photograph holding a kind of truth, a record of the world, rather than a construction of the world. Now, Photoshop, algorithms, and filters on your phone give the sense of a photograph being something there to be altered, something not to be accepted at face value.

Crane: You aren’t, in fact, a photographer.

Kentridge: No. But I use a lot of photographs as references and, more recently, as collage elements, constructing a drawing out of things deliberately photographed, like elements of a still life—just taking them with my phone and then changing the scale and physically gluing them together. I suppose it could be done by a more skilled person in Photoshop. But it very much has to do with the physical activity of cutting and gluing them, seeing all the things at the edges that arise, which would not have been there if I’d been working in a pristine environment like Photoshop.

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Crane: Let’s talk about photogravure, because maybe that’s the closest you come to making photographs.

Kentridge: Yes. On the one hand are the series of drawings I have made, which I think of as photographs, that instead of using silver nitrate use charcoal and paper. The essential construction of the drawing is the construction of a photograph. A bird held by a clamp on a medical stand: all the effort is spent lighting and arranging and taking the photograph, knowing that it will be rendered finally as a drawing, but very close to that constructed photograph. In the end, it’s a drawing, but its language and its source is very much a photograph that is made in order to be drawn.

It was the shock of the forensic image that gave me a lingering sense of the photograph holding a kind of truth.

But photogravures are about the transformation into the etching medium through the strange alchemy—a real art form—of the degree of humidity in the room, the hardness of the gelatin, the different degrees of the acids. It’s a very complicated way of doing something which is done with the push of a button on a computer screen. But it gives the extraordinary richness of the black of an etching and aquatint, and the silveriness of it. It’s something other than the source photograph. Also, one has to adjust the source photograph because the acid and the aquatint react differently; they push the lighter parts lighter and the darker parts darker, so to find the balance in the middle is a bit like lithography. It needs a real expert to deal with the medium.

It’s also about either finding or constructing the photograph, knowing that it’s going to be turned into the photogravure print. That’s very much part of the consideration. What kind of paper, what kind of charcoal would I use if I was making a drawing? I presume that it’s like the way many photographers would have thought about which paper stock would they use, how contrasty would it be, whether it would be a slow or long exposure with the enlarger, as well as which film stock they would have chosen.

Crane: It’s also part of your broader collaboration, working in a larger studio with specialists and technicians.

Kentridge: Yes. Basic etching, you can teach someone in a morning. Photogravure, like lithography, requires someone whose métier it is. A lot of the work I do in the studio, if it can’t be done with charcoal and paper, and maybe some glue and hot wax, it needs other people.

Obviously, in the theater context, there are many, many collaborators—designers, performers, musicians—that’s normal. With prints and with sculpture also, I work with a print studio or with a foundry. There is a particular platemaker for photogravures I work with, and two printers. For drypoint, there’s a different printer.

It’s always a negotiation between the image and what’s possible in the collaboration with the particular skills or sensibility of the collaborator, and what that suggests to me, backward and forward. I wouldn’t have arrived at the images except from working with particular collaborators.

Crane: You like that?

Kentridge: Yes. I like the possibilities. It’s a nudge of something from outside of myself to get the work going. It’s a little bit like starting a piece of theater and someone saying to me, Well, here is your space. We are offering you the armory, which is eighty-five meters wide. That’s enough of an impulse for me to say, Let’s see what can happen with that. Here’s a Greek amphitheater. Let that be your starting point. Here’s a printmaking technique. See what themes that would suggest. What is the material? It’s allowing the material and the medium to be part of the thinking. It doesn’t start with: Here’s an image I want to make. What is the best medium? Let me find somebody who can do colored linocuts. It starts with: Here is someone who does colored linocuts. What images or what themes does that suggest?

William Kentridge, Drawing for Studio Life (History on One Leg), 2020. Charcoal, paper collage, pencil and wooden ruler on paper

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Crane: What we’re talking about is the studio in an extended form.

Kentridge: Yes.

Crane: Recently, at the Whitechapel Gallery’s A Century of the Artist’s Studio, I watched your video piece Drawing Lesson 47 (Interview for New York Studio School), in which you interview yourself. I’d like to re-ask you a question that you pose but won’t answer in that work.

Kentridge: I’m sure there’s a good reason why I don’t answer it.

Crane: You ask yourself: “Can you describe your life as an artist? Can you say, rather, what it is that you did today to give us some sense of how you fill your hours?”

Kentridge: Today, it was getting ready for the Royal Academy exhibition in London. It started off with a photographer from Wallpaper magazine. Then I went on with a drawing for the Royal Academy, a large ink drawing in many sections, which has a lot of text in it. I am too messy with painting text, so there’s someone in the studio who is a champion of neat lettering. I was briefing her and projecting the lettering to the right size.

Then upstairs to the edit room, where there are four editors at work on different projects, primarily an episodic series of nine films about life in the studio, which is nearly finished; it premiers at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.

I was in town at the Centre for the Less Good Idea, where we’re doing a workshop on a particular theatrical technique called Pepper’s Ghost, which is a nineteenth-century technique using a semi-silvered mirror and lighting in front and behind the mirror, so as the light goes bright or dark, you either see what’s behind or what’s reflected in the mirror.

Then I came back to work on the drawing.

Then a Zoom call with the Athens Epidaurus Festival, a first conversation about doing a production in the Greek amphitheater. It may or may not happen.

Then back to the drawing, until our conversation now. But very often, when everybody leaves the studio, that’s the quiet time for more drawing to occur. There will be another three or four hours when I can quietly get on with that.

Crane: How will you install the Royal Academy exhibition?

Kentridge: There are nine or eleven beautiful galleries in the Royal Academy. So the exhibition was shaped around those spaces. In the largest room, we have a series of projections from the series of Soho Eckstein films called Drawings for Projection (1989–2020). There’s a room in which we hang a series of large tapestries made specifically for that space, for the scale and grandeur. There’s a room which is a forest of drawings of trees, and leading from that, a room which is related to the chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl (2019). There’s not exactly a reconstruction of the stage in that room, but it’s not simply a projection on a wall.

Each room has a shape. But the central room is a version of the studio, which is to say, an excess of different forms together— sculpture, drawing, the drawing lessons, all those expanding outward into the exhibition. Insofar as there’s a theme, it’s about the excess of the studio.

William Kentridge, Still from Carnets d’Egypte, 2010. Video, 34 minutes, 2 seconds, color, sound William Kentridge, performance of Waiting for the Sibyl, Teatro Dell’Opera di Roma, Italy, 2019
Photograph by Stella Olivier

Crane: Next to Drawing Lesson 47 at the Whitechapel were the iconic photographs and films by Hans Namuth.

Kentridge: Yes, of Jackson Pollock.

Crane: Those photographs became the way we understood what it meant to paint Abstract Expressionist works.

Kentridge: Absolutely. Then there are the photos and film of Picasso drawing with a torch. The series of films that I’ve been making, they are not copying the Namuth film, but they are about the activity of both making and making meaning in the studio. The image and the theme of the artist in his or her studio is certainly not a new one. The Namuth was a new way of seeing Jackson Pollock. There’s a later version with the Bruce Nauman films of himself in the studio, where the studio both becomes a film set but also the canvas. I still hold in my head Georges Méliès, the very early filmmaker in the 1890s, who also would paint his backdrops and then perform in front of them, in the way that you could say Jackson Pollock has his backdrop and is performing in front of it and is making it at the same time.

There are the fantastic photographs of Matisse in his studio, either in his white dentist’s smock drawing a naked lady or holding a dove in his hand and drawing the dove.

Crane: You are involved in a meticulous recording of your own work. You employ photographers to record carefully what you do, but you also stage the studio.

Kentridge: In the film series Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020–22), the studio is staged. It’s both a record of making and a construction. It’s not just a camera recording the studio. It’s taking the studio as subject matter and allowing that to expand, or be spoken about, or shown. For example, in several of these films about studio life, there’s a nighttime sequence where the old movie camera and an old sousaphone are either moving around, observing, or dancing. There are paper rats that come alive. It’s not just a record of the drawings.

We do try to take photographs of work as it is done to put in a database. Because when it comes to an exhibition like at the Royal Academy, they say, “These are the photos we need.” It’s important to have them in some order—or, it makes life easier to have them in an order.

Crane: Can we talk about drawing proper and photography proper?

Kentridge: Drawing proper and photography proper. For me, when I think of the photography of someone like David Goldblatt, for him it was the “is-ness” of what there was. It never struck him to say, to make his point, Let me take this sign, which I found somewhere, and put it in this other context. Never.

Reference pictures in Kentridge’s studio, Johannesburg, August 2022
Photograph by Lindokuhle Sobekwa for Aperture William Kentridge, Drawing for the film Other Faces (Man Holding Flash), 2011. Charcoal and colored pencil on paper

Crane: Never.

Kentridge: It would be complete anathema. It’s about finding those moments of synchronicity and relationship in the world: the fact that a woman is sitting, and there is what looks like a halo of a window behind her. It’s about saying the world is full of wonderful and strange things for us to discover.

I’ve taken photographs like that, but as references to be chopped up to be used for collage. Much in the way, say, an eighteenth-century drawer might go with his sketchbook into the woods and draw this branch and that root and that rock, but then come back into the studio and think: I’m going to make the rock bigger and move the tree across; on page seventeen, I’ve got a nice branch that can come into the top. The result is a collage, even though it’s an invisible collage. The same with John Constable’s landscapes, where the size in his sketches of houses, trees—all of this is up for grabs.

I discovered this when I was working in movies as a set designer—as a very bad set designer. “Oh, the actor is too short; put them on a box.” “The table is not at the right angle; tilt it at an angle.” I realized, Well, this is a way one can construct a drawing. It’s very much a construction rather than a discovery.

So whatever form I’m working in, whether it’s a piece of theater or a film or a documentary series, it’s with the ideas or the strategies of drawing, of something that is there to be constructed, based on fragments of the world that one has observed. Or one has a provisional coherence made by different fragments put together in different ways. And, usually, not hiding the fragmentation. In this approach, one is very aware that you’re taking fragments and making a possible coherence from them. Which is different from photography. When I think of great documentary photography, and the integrity of the photographer, one hopes not to view a lie in their photographs. I’m thinking of David [Goldblatt] here. Whereas with a visual artist making a drawing, one is aware that it is all a construction. It is all a lie.

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Crane: Do you use an iPhone to take photographs?

Kentridge: Yes, when I go to a museum, whereas before I would have taken a sketchbook. Then, when I get home, I’ll often look through and make notes—to not forget this image, this piece of pottery, that detail in that Manet painting of how he painted that gold leaf on the champagne bottles. I use it as an aide-mémoire, as a notebook. And there are family snapshots.

In fact, we used a phone for the film Oh to Believe in Another World (2022), which accompanied Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 10. That was made in cardboard models, with photostats on them of buildings, making a kind of museum. We filmed that largely with a phone since it could be pushed through the model, and then we projected it at a huge scale.

I have a decent camera for filming and for doing animation, which until the second-to-last film was all 35mm—now it’s filmed with a digital camera. I don’t own any more still cameras.

Crane: Do you intend to collect the images and references together somewhere as an archive?

Kentridge: There’s a shoebox full of photographs from the days when one sent photos to the chemist, and they came back printed. In the last years, I wish I had printed out more, not because I feel a need for them to be displayed, but just to have them. Flicking through those photos like a Rolodex is a way of activating thoughts and memories.

Do I have references? Most of them are photostats or pieces of paper stuck together. There are files of them. They don’t get thrown out, but they are not categorized or ordered.

Crane: What will happen to them?

Kentridge: Who knows? There are also 120 notebooks with lectures and notes and drawings. They’re not being thrown out.

Crane: Do you have an archival strategy?

Kentridge: No. I gave the raw film footage to the George Eastman House because they have a whole department and expertise in preserving film stock. The digital material is harder to preserve than the film material. They do all the migrating onto different hard drives and whatever is needed. I haven’t done it for two years, since COVID. I need to send them a big hard drive with the most recent stuff that just sits there and is not in the cloud. But the physical objects are all still here.

David Goldblatt, Ella and Betty Marais swimming in the dam that their father, Freek Marais, built, Gamkaskloof, Cape Province, (Western Cape), 1966
Courtesy Goldblatt Legacy Trust and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg William Kentridge, Portraits for Shostakovich No. 10 (1), 2022. Lithograph on paper
All works by William Kentridge courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery; and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Crane: Which photographers do you look at?

Kentridge: Santu Mofokeng’s photographs of the caves. David, of course, but that’s kind of an obvious one—I spent a lot of time talking to him about his photographs and looking very closely at them.

Crane: Do you have any of David’s photographs in your house or in your studio?

Kentridge: Yes. We have, I think, four or five.

Crane: The 1978 photograph The garden of Felicia and Sydney Kentridge, Houghton?

Kentridge: My father has a photo of that. We were given one after David died; Steven, his son, gave us a print. The photograph of two women at Die Hel at the concrete dam. And one of the landscapes, and one of the mining photographs, and another of a building, I think His Majesty’s Building in Johannesburg.

I also have a set of Rodchenko photographs, a portfolio from his negatives, not printed during his lifetime—printed by his son or his family. So not crazy expensive. Also, a similar thing with August Sander photos of artists from People of the Twentieth Century. A small Kertész photograph and a larger one of Kiki of Montparnasse.

Crane: Your studio is on Instagram. Do you ever go on Instagram?

Kentridge: Yes. I do. I go down that rabbit hole. Starting at breakfast, paging through and seeing both people I follow and then whatever the algorithm has decided I need to watch. For some reason, I am shown a lot of woodworking feeds, and I see a lot about large-scale ships at sea, and parkour. The algorithm has decided this is what I need to see.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture, issue 249, “Reference.”

Consuelo Kanaga’s Restless Eye

Over six decades, Consuelo Kanaga, born in 1894, forged a career defined by an avant-garde, collaborative spirit and a photographic practice tied to social justice. In her home cities of San Francisco and New York, she was at the heart of close-knit circles of artists and writers, namely the California Camera Club, Group f.64, and The Photo League. She was an ardent documentarian of the Worker-Photography and New Negro movements of the 1920s and ’30s and the civil rights movement two decades later. It’s therefore confounding that in the years since her death, in 1978, Kanaga’s name and legacy, compared to those of her celebrated friends and contemporaries—Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe—have fallen into obscurity.

Consuelo Kanaga, Clapboard Schoolhouse, ca. 1935 Consuelo Kanaga, Untitled (New York), ca. 1940

A retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit, endeavors to introduce the photographer to a new generation and reestablish her place in the canon of modern American art history. Organized by Drew Sawyer, a curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition first appeared at the Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona and Madrid, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With organizational support from Pauline Vermare, the show concludes its run at the Brooklyn Museum, the institutional home to some five hundred prints by the artist as well as many more negatives. Catch the Spirit generally follows the chronology of Kanaga’s life and career, but Sawyer groups the nearly two hundred photographs and contextual pieces of ephemera by style and subject, so that the viewer can sense the artist’s creative restlessness, exceptional versatility, and recurring preoccupations.

Kanaga’s practice began when she was working as a young reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, an unconventional profession for women in the 1920s, and she discovered a penchant for directing the photographs that accompanied her articles. Encouraged by her editor, she began hauling the large-format view cameras of the day out to the field and shadowing colleagues in the darkroom. In the Brooklyn Museum installation, this photojournalism—penetrating scenes of poverty and tragedy in the twentieth-century American city—appears alongside portraits of wealthy clients and fellow artists that she made on the side. These are daring exercises in straight photography, made hauntingly beautiful by the almost surgical application of cropping and chiaroscuro.

Consuelo Kanaga, Untitled, ca. 1925 Consuelo Kanaga, The Widow Watson, 1922–24

Kanaga favors dramatic closeups. Her gaze captures the piercing blue eyes and supple lips of an androgynous blonde studio model in Untitled (ca. 1925) and the dark, imploring eyes and sunken cheeks of a poor little boy, a recurring journalistic subject, in Malnutrition (1928) with the same devotional intensity. It takes a delicate boldness to get that close to a subject, and an impish curiosity. Kanaga wants to know them, through their faces and hands. Hers is a necessary violation, a shedding of the external signifiers binding her subjects to the realities they suffer. At times, her composition and framing are in service of sly allusions to the biblical and art historical, as in the deprived Madonna and Child of Untitled (New York) (1922–24) and the three mourning Fates of Fire, New York (1922), finely rendering the human experience specific and universal.

In the late 1920s, Kanaga made a sojourn through Europe and North Africa that shifted her work from documentary photography to liberated image making. She took inspiration from French and Italian painting, like the Pictorialists before her, and even tried her hand in watercolor. She felt challenged by photomontage, which was all the rage in Germany and Austria. In Tunisia, she was struck by otherworldly light and towering minarets. In portraits of the Kairouan locals, she eschewed anthropological and orientalist trappings, capturing them as she did the people back home, in their candid fullness. A smile or a glint in the subject’s eyes, as in those of the young woman in Young African, North Africa (1928), tell of an intimacy that has been broached and kindled.

Consuelo Kanaga, Hands, 1930

“I would sacrifice resemblance any day to get the inner feelings of a person,” Kanaga wrote home to her friend and patron Albert Bender. “It seems so much more of one than our face which is so often just a mask.” In the darkroom, she mixed formulas to achieve specific tones, experimented with burning and overexposure. She traced lines over a printed image with graphite, or smudged them altogether. She cropped prints and negatives with equal ferocity. All of this, a calibration of drama with dignity, or the feeling of connection to the subject with implication and self-awareness on the part of the viewer.

Time blurs magnificently at the midpoint of the show, a delightful interlude of Americana still lifes, landscapes, and abstract nature studies, showcasing Kanaga’s compulsion to push her medium to its limits. Mostly devoid of human subjects, the pictures are charged with her wit and worldview. The lipped porcelain pitcher in Untitled (1925) is a reclamation of the libido from the exploitation of capital, represented here by the hard-edged bar of Ivory soap. The Abstraction and Untitled series (1948), snapshots of the reflective surface of the pond by the Yorktown Heights home Kanaga shared with her husband, the painter Wallace B. Putnam, like Monet’s water lilies, occupy the threshold between the material world and the divine.

Consuelo Kanaga, Kenneth Spencer, 1933 Consuelo Kanaga, She Is a Tree of Life, 1950

Among Kanaga’s most important works is She Is a Tree of Life, II, Florida (1950), which she made during a visit to the mucklands of Florida, where migrants worked the fields, picking lettuce and other vegetables. She had spent the day with her subjects, a mother and her family, learning about their life and toil, taking several pictures. This composition, practically sculptural, arrived in their parting moments when the light was just right. It would be immortalized in Edward Steichen’s landmark Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1955. “This woman has been drawing her children to her, protecting them, for thousands of years against hurt and discrimination,” Steichen captioned the photograph. The image is a technical study of contrasts, epitomizing Kanaga’s trademark blend of social documentary and expressive pictorialism.

Kanaga’s early descriptions of her affinity for Black subjects can sound naive, paternalistic, or overly romantic. Yet, in a time when discrimination was law and racial terror was ever-present, she aligned her work with Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals, celebrating Black beauty and self-expression while pushing for progressive reform. Many of these portraits were collaborations with the subjects, not only in the studio, but in life as close personal relationships. Kenneth Spencer (1933) is a tight close-up on the actor and singer. His head is lifted, soaking in the warmth of what appears almost like stage lighting. If you were to zoom out of the frame, he could be, blissfully, mid-pirouette. The poet is in repose on a méridienne in Langston Hughes (ca. 1934), Olympia in a smart suit, a playful assertion of the freedom to move between the worlds of desirability and respectability. Eluard Luchell McDaniel (1931) cradles Kanaga’s family friend and constant muse (the San Francisco police once detained them for driving in a car together). Eluard rests his head on the grass, hands pressed against his cheeks, eyes closed in unburdened tranquility. In these final rooms of Catch the Spirit, there is a surge of both fiery passion and gentle uplift.

Consuelo Kanaga, After Years of Hard Work (Tennessee), 1948
All photographs © Brooklyn Museum Consuelo Kanaga, Untitled, 1936

Kanaga’s final assignment as a photojournalist, a favor for her friend, the poet Barbara Deming, was to document the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace, a series of marches, from 1963 to 1964, for Black liberation and in protest of the Vietnam War. The photographs, some of which Deming later published in Prison Notes, harken back to Kanaga’s early days of straight photography. Yet, even at this late stage, she could not resist the application of painterly flourishes. Dramatic shadow throws the smiling titular figure of Ray Robinson, Albany, Georgia (1963) into stark relief. While his more solemn comrade holds out an open palm, curved and questioning, Robinson’s arm grips with assurance a suitcase with the acronym “CORE,” for the Congress for Racial Equality, and the phrase “LOVE FORGIVES,” from Corinthians. The image is taken from a low angle, so the figures are elevated. Behind them are bare trees, leafless tendrils reaching to the sky.

Catch the Spirit arrives in a season of diminished public welfare, deportations of lawful residents, and criminalization of dissent, all government sanctioned. Kanaga’s creativity and conviction, therefore, feel especially timely, and the exhibition a call to action, as well as a case for beauty in the face of adversity. “I don’t feel I’m young enough to stand the rigors of peace walks,” Kanaga, who was almost seventy and suffering from emphysema, said about marching with the coalition of young people in Georgia, Black and white together. “But I’m heart and soul for peace and integration and if my camera can be of help, I want to use it to the fullest.”

Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through August 3, 2025.

A Photographer Who Built a Career Through Listening

Sarker Protick found photography through music. Growing up in Dhaka in the 1990s, he remembers his mother’s fondness for singing and his father’s love of the Doors, Leonard Cohen, and the Beatles. “My father wasn’t a musician,” he recalls. “But he was a very good listener.” In college, Protick learned to play guitar and then the piano, formed a band, and began writing his own music.

Photography was merely a hobby then, a way of documenting life in college, his friends, and his city. After some encouragement from an uncle who saw his pictures, Protick decided to enroll in night classes at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in 2009. Established in 1998 by the photographer and activist Shahidul Alam, Pathshala was (and still is) unlike any other institution in South Asia, founded with a strong documentary focus. When Protick arrived, he was surrounded by photojournalists from the region, but it wasn’t until he saw the work of Robert Adams and William Eggleston, another photographer-musician, that he felt a deep resonance. “This is what photography can also be,” he recalls thinking. “This is what I wanted to create.”

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing

Protick splits music and images as two distinct parts of his journey as an artist, but over the last fifteen years—and across projects spanning photography, video, and sound—he’s built a career out of listening. His work uses historical frameworks rooted in Bangladesh and the wider Bengal region to unpack questions about photography’s relationship to time and memory. Combining deep research, a patient eye, and an intuition for visual rhythm, his approach negotiates the impulses of the photojournalist with those of the musician. “Musical composition is such an editorial process; you build a logic through it,” he says. “That selectiveness is vital, and it came to me naturally as a photographer.”

Protick’s compositions are quiet and spacious, inviting a wide field for association despite their highly specific context. In one of his earliest series, Leen (Of River and Lost Lands) (2011–ongoing), he photographs the Padma River that cuts through Bangladesh. Waterways dominate the country’s topography, and the river is embedded into its national and cultural story. In college, Protick read the novel Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman of the Padma) by prolific Bengali writer Manik Bandopadhyay, which exposed him to the narrative potential of the river, an artery signaling both life and destruction.

Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. & Mrs. Das, 2012–16 Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. & Mrs. Das, 2012–16

He later drew a connection to the American highway, and the work of Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, and Stephen Shore from the 1950s to ’70s. “In the US, the entire country is road,” Protick says. “But it’s not the same here. The traveling mode is the river, and it’s always been the lifeblood.” On the riverbanks, land and livelihoods are at perpetual risk of being swallowed up by flooding. Over multiple trips, Protick observed the Padma’s eroding embankments with great care, using a subdued photographic palette to represent the calm yet alarming ticking of a geological clock.

In the series Mr. & Mrs. Das (2012–16), Protick telescopes into a single apartment in Dhaka, where Protick photographs his aging grandparents in their final days. His images of sparse interiors contrast with archival imagery of his subjects’ life as a young couple. The whitened, near-clinical palette reappears, isolating seemingly nondescript objects—telephones, vases, frames, loose wires, suitcases—to tell a larger story through fragments. As on the river, Protick attempts to grasp time’s pervasive crawl, and from this stillness honors the ordinary, intimate details that furnish a shared life.

Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21

Nature, memory, and time gradually became thematic tentpoles for Protick. His video work Raśmi (2017–20) projects these ideas onto a cosmic scale. A montage of images creates a constellation of flashing associations between light and dark, abstract and figurative scenes, and planetary and microscopic degrees—all layered over music composed by Protick himself. We move from lightspeed to the lumbered march of historical time in the series Jirno (2016–ongoing), meaning “ruins” in Bangla. Here, Protick uses serene, long-exposure compositions to depict abandoned feudal estates, once owned by Hindu landlords from pre-Partition Bengal, now decayed and returning to the landscape.

Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21 Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21

The images, shot in black-and-white and often in hazy conditions, force dense greenery to flatten against the buildings’ architectural contours. “There’s always an extra thing happening, even in a very static, still moment,” Protick says of his approach. “Nature becomes more present in the photograph.” The colonial-era buildings stand as frozen testaments of the region’s transformation (or lack thereof), and the place of the past in the present. If the story of Bengal over the twentieth century is in some ways the story of migration, Protick mines for what is left behind.

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing Sarker Protick, from the series Ishpather Poth (Crossing), 2019–23

The marks of movement reemerge as a theme in Ishpather Poth (Crossing) (2017–23), which traces the built legacy of the Bangladesh Railway, once part of the sprawling train network that traversed the historical Bengal region. Following two partitions—of India in 1947 and Pakistan in 1971—many lines on the railway were severed from their ends. As in Jirno, Protick expresses historical time through the stoic language of the built form; industrial remnants of colonial rail workshops and power stations, abandoned offices and bungalows, and aging railway towns.

In one image, the steel mouth of the Hardinge Bridge opens into a mile of track over the Padma. The bridge—which evokes the twin legacies of colonial engineering and the Bangladesh Liberation War—also appears in the Leen series, this time from the perspective of the Padma below. Both projects brought Protick back to the Pabna District in central Bangladesh, home to one of the largest railway junctions in the country, and to the Padma. “Every time I finish a project, I somehow find a layer for another,” he says.

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Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24 Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24

Take a step back and a greater tapestry emerges. The river, the ruin, and the railway become interconnected protagonists in a story spanning centuries and national borders. Protick’s latest series, Awngar (Ash to Ash) (2024), recently exhibited at C/O Berlin, adds another layer. Made across modern-day India and Bangladesh, the series explores the linked development of railways and the coal mining industry under British rule. Its images and video works are characteristic of Protick’s style, atmospheric and rich in allusion. Landscape views of marred coal mines and videos of explosions juxtapose more meditative scenes of mining offices and coal-black surfaces. Predatory capitalist and colonial extraction have mercilessly shaped Bangladesh’s ecological reality, the series argues. “Awngar” is the Bengali word for coal in a red-hot state, ready to combust, and the series associates this catastrophic, latent energy with imperial and industrial ambitions in the region.

Installation view of Sarker Protick: Awngar at C/O Berlin, 2025
Photograph by David von Becker Installation view of Sarker Protick: Awngar at Crespo Open Space, Frankfurt, 2025
Photograph by Jens Gerber

Memory is difficult source material. While many of these explorations are historically embedded, they raise universal questions about the power of the image to illuminate a place. These questions do not end behind the camera for Protick, who has been on the faculty of Pathshala since 2013 and acts as the co-curator of Asia’s longest-running international photography festival, Chobi Mela, which will return for its eleventh edition this December, in Dhaka. Across his work, Protick frames the past with the present, where looking constitutes both remembering and recomposing. Robert Adams once said of his forty years of work on the American West, that, “by looking closely at specifics in life, you discover a wider view.” In his stillness and attention, Protick composes his own.

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24 Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

Bruce Weber’s All-American Obsessions

Prague is a place shot through with satire. Kafka is considered a sort of mascot and the sculptures of David Černý—two men pissing onto a Czech Republic–shaped fountain’s basin, King Wenceslas riding his horse upside down, Sigmund Freud hanging from a flagpole—remain some of the city’s most visited attractions. Bruce Weber’s art, such as the pieces in his first retrospective My Education, which was on view last fall at Prague City Gallery (GHMP), is decidedly not satirical. A photograph titled The Duchess of Devonshire Feeding Her Chickens at Chatsworth (1995), for example, isn’t meant as social commentary, even if the duchess, Deborah Cavendish—whom Weber met through her granddaughter, the fashion model Stella Tennant—is feeding said chickens from a dented tin bucket while wearing diamonds and pearls. Taking in the 250-plus photographs and videos at GHMP’s Stone Bell House, I wondered: Why here? And, considering Weber currently occupies a gray area of that graying concept of “cancellation,” why now?

Bruce Weber, On Leave in Waikiki, 1982

Born in 1946, Weber left a Pennsylvania farm town to study film at New York University, and with help from his sister Barbara (then head of publicity for United Artists Records), found himself snapping photos of famous musicians: David Bowie, Ike and Tina Turner, Frank Zappa, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith. Next, a move to Paris, then back to New York to study at the New School under Lisette Model, whom he’d met through Diane Arbus. On a go-see in 1973—he modeled, too—Weber met Francesco Scavullo’s studio manager, Nan Bush, who became his agent, getting him his first fashion photography jobs: Dillard’s, GQ, and Ralph Lauren, with whom he would work closely for forty years.

In 1978, Weber shot a Calvin Klein jeans campaign, and in 1982, the brand’s first underwear ads. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, his billboards caused a sensation, putting Waspy Adonises in blatantly seductive poses at massive scale. He developed an eye for interpreting artifice through the hallmarks of authenticity—imagine Dust Bowl documentary as Italian Neorealism, behind-the-scenes of pageantry, serious jocks goofing off. His photographs made up, in large part, the infamous plastic-wrapped Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly (1997–2007)—a commercial catalogue that people actually paid for, with a peak circulation of over a million—which, depending on the critic, was an ingenious marketing tool or camouflaged pornography. 

Bruce Weber, Peter Johnson at the Chop Suey Club Studio, New York, 1999

For generations, magazine readers, mallgoers, and the habitues of galleries and museums encountered Weber’s singular but widely imitated style. Then, in 2017, he was accused by a male model of unwanted sexual advances. Others soon voiced similar sentiments, and most of his contracts promptly ended. Today, his vision remains ubiquitous, even as his name is decreasingly evoked in advertising and editorial meetings. Newer fashion brands are publishing campaigns that directly reference A&F’s homoerotic preppy handbook, perhaps most notably Raimundo Langlois, who has said of his own denim- and khaki-centric label, “It’s perversion of the familiar. It’s memory reconstruction.”            

“What I love about Bruce Weber’s work is the possibility of being subversive within the most mainstream of channels,” said Matthew Leifheit, a visual artist who has appropriated A&F merchandising in his own photography. Leifheit discovered Weber’s work in the mall when he was growing up in Wisconsin. “I was seduced by the matter-of-factness of his photographs, thinking I wanted to be these guys, when truly I wanted to have them. Later, I recognized the pictures were transparently referencing a lineage of setups for ‘physique photography’ as well as the history of more formal gay erotica including George Platt Lynes and Wilhelm von Gloeden.”

Bruce Weber, Rugby players in Van Cortland Park, Bronx, New York, 2003

Weber’s dozens of monographs may amount to hundreds if we are to include catalogues and a self-published semiannual, All-American, now on its twenty-first issue, but a forthcoming book from Taschen, Bruce Weber: My Education, will mark the seventy-eight-year-old’s first official career survey. The book’s title refers to Weber’s own creative maturation, but the work provides so many markers of a zeitgeist, it naturally reflects our education as well. Beyond fashion callbacks, all the super-staged spontaneity, smiling bodybuilders, and rural stars-in-waiting now found on our social media feeds feel at times derived from that same bizarro America that Weber started to dream up about four decades ago.

Weber is attributed as an originator of what we now call lifestyle branding, a way of generating desire through imagery that isn’t product-oriented yet results in product sales. The ads for which Weber became in demand sold people and places, not clothing. How could a catalogue of nearly or naked youths horseplaying in the woods translate to a successful sportswear company? Ask anyone who couldn’t stay away from A&F stores as a teen. How did Calvin Klein, with its decidedly plain underwear line, become the essential logo on an elastic waistband? That arguably had much to do with Weber’s photograph of an Olympic pole-vaulter, which froze traffic when it appeared on a billboard in Times Square in 1983.

Bruce Weber, Stella Tennant and Valeria Mazza with friends at the nightclub, Punta del Este, Uruguay, 1998, for Vogue Italia Bruce Weber, Naomi Campbell and her fan club, New York, for Vogue Italia, 1994

To see these images now is to recognize them from an earlier, non-art context, and to recall their impact: a stirring of sexuality, a seed of aspiration. I didn’t know he did this is something the curators—Nathaniel Kilcer, a creative director who has worked with Weber for decades, and Helena Musilová, director at GHMP—say they hear often. The first picture in the exhibition was one of those early Calvin Klein shots, from 1988, for the fragrance Obsession: A nude man facing a nude woman, both standing on a rope swing and arching their backs. Maybe you remember it from a magazine. Nearby was a wall-sized print of a nude Peter Johnson, the protagonist of Weber’s film Chop Suey (2001), and a portrait of four golden retrievers collared with signs that read “Dogs for Peace,” a still from Weber’s tribute to one of them, A Letter to True (2003). The 1990 music video he directed for the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” was projected behind that first room’s Gothic archway, sound on. At the end of the exhibition’s suggested route: the video for their “Se a vida é (That’s the Way Life Is)” (1996). 

Bruce Weber, Jason, Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, New York, 1989 Bruce Weber, Ric and Natalie, Villa Tejas, Montecito, California, 1987

The embedded editorializing in Weber’s work served a challenge when curating the show, Kilcer told me. “So many times, you need the story to inform. In the fashion imagery, he is such a cinematic photographer, so it’s like you’re lifting these pictures out.” Though they were not as present in My Education, words—quotes, diary entries, lyrics, poetry—are usually everywhere in Weber’s work. Certainly, the choice of opening and closing numbers is not without intention. “I came across a cache of old photos,” begins “Being Boring,” a reminiscence of youth. It is also a song about death, written by singer Neil Tennant for a friend who suffered from AIDS in the ’80s. 

To see these images now is to recognize them from an earlier, non-art context, and to recall their impact: a stirring of sexuality, a seed of aspiration.

What at first appears as pure joy is more accurately the tension between innocence and adulthood, life and its drive toward expiration. Haphazard collage is used as palimpsest, a way of seeing the dimensions of a moment—serious sentiment met with frolicking animals, just as, in life, a dog may sense despair and offer, bewilderingly, an expression like happiness. On a wall facing that first projection was Weber’s scribbled dedication “to my friends here,” listing first names of collaborators and subjects who attended the opening, mentioning “my dogs say Hi (Barking)” over a signature: “Bruce Weber + my wife Nan Bush.” (Yes: Commonly described as a preeminent gay artist, Weber has been happily married to a woman for nearly half a century.) Seeing this inscription facing the music video, I was reminded of Tennant’s repeated laments about publicly coming out, maybe best said in Hot Press: “I can’t see any reason to define gay people by their sexuality.” 

Bruce Weber, Boys at Butterfly Beach, Santa Barbra, California, 1982

Weber hears music in his head when he looks at photography. Irving Penn, he told me, is classical, but “in Broadway terms, he’s strictly George Gershwin.” Whereas Richard Avedon is more “Harold Arlen, you know, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’” And what would soundtrack Weber’s work? “I’d have to say, maybe, Chet Baker.” 

No surprise there. Weber directed the Oscar-nominated documentary feature Let’s Get Lost (1988), which follows the heroin-addled jazz trumpeter and singer during his forlorn final months. Mention of the name sent Weber into a reverie, not about that intense, sustained, ’80s interaction but a time of initial discovery, in the early ’60s: “I thought, Oh, god, it would be so much fun to be that guy.” A funny thing to say about a man he essentially watched deteriorate, I think. I mentioned the videos from the exhibition. “I like the Pet Shop Boys, too,” he said, “because their music was so exciting, and I was really shy.” 

Bruce Weber, Pedro Almodóvar, Madrid, Spain 2000 Bruce Weber, Louise Bourgeois, New York, 1996

This is a man who isn’t afraid to meet his idols—who meets them all the time. As a child, he was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor. He later befriended her while she sat for him. A room in My Education is dedicated to his portraits of some artist heroes: Andrew Wyeth, Paul Bowles, Sheila Hicks, Joan Didion, Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Campion, Francis Ford Coppola, Purvis Young, Louise Bourgeois, Helmut Newton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Allen Ginsberg. 

Other rooms displayed stars of film, fashion, music, sport, and society, many of whom Weber he counts as close friends. Always present, though, is a calculated distance between photographer and subject, including street-cast models and pets. Everyone poses, sometimes in a paper crown or on a pedestal, propped up with the dizzy angles of fandom or an unrequited crush. 

Such meditations on idolatry are ironically situated within the circa mid-fourteenth-century Stone Bell House, part of Prague’s long history of iconoclasm. When I arrived and met the exhibition’s creative and executive producers, Milosh Harajda and Markéta Tomková, I asked why we’re here, of all places, instead of, say, Weber’s Miami Beach HQ during that city’s Art Basel week? The two took this on as a pet project, they said, suggesting that their city would be the perfect jumping-off point for an international tour. After the allegations, the lost commercial clients, and then the pandemic, the studio needed a soft place to land—somewhere everyone in their inner circle might visit for an opening but sheltered from the unforgiving art or fashion world stages. 

Installation view of Bruce Weber: My Education, Prague City Gallery, Stone Bell House, 2024
Photograph by Noe DeWittInstallation view of Bruce Weber: My Education, Prague City Gallery, Stone Bell House, 2024
Photograph by Noe DeWitt

That My Education premiered in a city defined for centuries by its anti-establishment preachers gives it a sheen of Gothic agnosticism. Weber’s work might pray at the altars of the Bible Belt and Appalachia—athletes, beauty queens, and purebreds—but a larger story weighs the value of such dedication, juxtaposing all that religion with other tragic icons, such as those in show business. Hang on to the fantasy, it says, because facing reality won’t be what brings salvation. 

In January 2018, Weber responded to his situation via Instagram, denying all charges. “I have spent my career capturing the human spirit through photographs and am confident, that, in due time, the truth will prevail,” he wrote. His legal battles concerning the misconduct allegations ended in 2021, after one model’s claim was dropped and a lawsuit involving a joint complaint made by five others was settled out of court. At a time when many fashion photographers (Mario Testino, Greg Kadel, Patrick Demarchelier, David Bellemere, and Terry Richardson, to name a few) were being cut off by editors and brands due to accusations of inappropriate behavior on set, the mass cancellation prompted broader consideration of the industry itself. What sells, after all? Would modeling be forever changed with the advent of the intimacy coach? How much doting, on the part of a photographer, crosses a line into flirtation, or harassment? 

Bruce Weber, Shalom Harlow and friends, Paris, for Vogue, 1995

Weber is soft-spoken, a white-bearded man with twinkling eyes. When we met, he was wearing a brown Carhartt canvas jacket over a denim Bode shirt, mentioning that the designer duo are his friends. He told stories he’s likely repeated many times, such as the one about when he and model Kate Moss visited an orphanage in Vietnam and had to pull themselves away from those poor smiling kids for their shoot, towing a tractor-sized trunk for a single John Galliano gown. It was Christmastime and he apologized for cutting our conversation short: He was already behind writing his holiday cards. I couldn’t quite bring myself to mention sex. 

“If you asked him, he would say he is a gay man,” said Eva Lindemann-Sánchez, a film producer who has worked with Weber for decades. “But no one asks him. It is also true that he is married to a woman who he adores and greatly admires and respects and has been with for almost fifty years.” Kilcer added that one of Weber’s own adages says, “Photography is about having a crush. On a man, a woman—” Lindemann-Sánchez nodded. They said, in unison, “a dog.” I brought up the “queer artist” descriptor, to which Lindemann-Sánchez answered, “There’d be a part of him that would take ownership over that, but it would simultaneously surprise him.” “He leads with emotion,” Kilcer said. “He embraces the awkwardness of that, the disappointment that comes from that, the spontaneity, but also the vulnerability.” 

“To answer the question,” Lindemann-Sánchez chimed in again, “he does not identify as a queer photographer. People want to put him there.” 

Bruce Weber, Ray, John and Eric, Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, New York, 1990 Bruce Weber, Jason, Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, New York, 1989

Weber’s well-documented live-laugh-loving home life doesn’t totally contradict the raw sensuality seen in his portfolios of male nudes, such as the much-coveted photographs in the book Bear Pond (1990), shot around his and Bush’s home in the Adirondacks. More often, heteronormative tropes, such as Hamptons luncheons and movie-star romances, are intertwined with homoerotic scenes, suggesting a world in which these ideas live in harmony. 

In a small theater attached to the coat room of the exhibition, a few of Weber’s shorts, including Backyard Movie (1991), played on a loop. Via handwriting and voiceover, we learn that as a child, Weber didn’t play sports, preferring to practice showtunes in his sister’s bedroom and snuggle with the family French poodle, Coquette. He recalls his mother asking him, “Which way are you swinging?” 

“I told her,” the text continues, overlayed on black-and-white home video clips spliced with a nude young man emerging from a swimming pool and dogs running on a beach, “that the night before I carried a drunken Tennessee Williams up the stairs of a restaurant and as I put him into a taxi he turned to me gently putting a hand to my cheek and just said ‘oh, beauty.’” The footage jumps into color, showing children walking through a flower garden. Animated handwriting details a trip to the famous gay bar Stonewall Inn, where a man asks young Weber to dance. Scared, he sits in a corner and watches the room morph into a salon of actors and authors. “Being lucky I can just close my eyes and transport myself to another time and place,” he writes. “A lot of people think having a big fantasy life is dangerous. That’s why people have tried to take it away from me.” 

Bruce Weber, Self-portrait with Peter Johnson, during the last day of filming “Chop Suey,” Golden Beach, Florida, 1999

In Chop Suey, Weber invokes Clive Bell describing to Virginia Woolf the feeling of anticipating a visit from a friend. “That sense of longing was what I wanted to put in my early pictures of him,” Weber continued, referring to his muse Peter Johnson. “When I was filming Peter and his friends in the shower, I remembered myself at that age. In that fantasy, I would have been one of those kids, clowning around without a care in the world, but back in my hometown of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, it was a different story. I’d be swimming all day at the country club and my mom would tell me to shower and dress for dinner. I’d tell her I couldn’t, because the locker room would be too crowded at that hour. It seemed to me that every guy in the whole Midwest would be in that locker room, showering. We sometimes photograph things we can never be.” 

Love is mostly projection, idealization. We revisit our first crushes for the rest of our lives, wherein unattainability was paramount. For a gay youth in the 1950s and ’60s, this exciting period of discovery is twisted with shame, the other side of which is yearning for a heterosexual lifestyle so extremely romantic it could counterbalance any natural lust for the socially unaccepted. Weber’s work has spurred intense desire, but it is essentially an exploration of that desire, the wanting and the wanting to want. 

The first and only other time Weber had been to the Czech Republic was in 2000 for a Vanity Fair cover story with Heath Ledger, who was filming A Knight’s Tale and who later died from a drug overdose at age twenty-eight. Jeff Buckley, who, Weber reminds me, drowned in the Mississippi River at thirty, is featured in My Education as well, as is Stella Tennant, who committed suicide at fifty, and Dash Snow and River Phoenix, who overdosed and died at twenty-seven and twenty-three, respectively. I asked about youth and tragedy, as a theme. 

Bruce Weber, Madonna, New York, 1986Bruce Weber, Eton Boys at Chiswick House, London, 1984
All photographs © the artist

“I had amazing encounters with these people,” Weber said, the focus leaving his eyes. “They were so alive for me. I believed so much in what they thought, what they were doing, how much they loved doing things. They had that romance, that kind of honesty. Photographers and filmmakers are always trying to find that. Sometimes, if you look too hard, you’ll never find it, and it comes out as something else.” “People who are interesting defy the buckets you’re trying to put them in,” said Kilcer, of Weber. And Weber’s work rearticulates those very buckets: The impossible standards of masculinity and femininity, of innocence and stardom, the people who epitomize them. A room in My Education exclusively featured statuesque nude men, some printed as partitions and arrayed atop a mirrored floor like classical fountains. Gazing at an image of Madonna kissing her own reflection, one can almost hear the crowd’s hush that leaves a pop star lonely. Another room of documentary photography showed citizens in war-torn countries and post-industrial America. Inner-city kids, veterans, and orphans beam for the camera, just as the fashion models do.

Announcing the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize Shortlist

Founded in 2006, the annual Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography—identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This year, over one thousand artists submitted entries from sixty-five countries, representing a broad and exciting range of styles in photography today.

Aperture invited a jury of cross-disciplinary creatives to judge the 2025 prize: Noelle Flores Théard, senior digital photo-editor, The New Yorker; Lucy Gallun, curator, Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, MoMA; Zack Hatfield, managing editor, Aperture magazine; and Mark Armijo McKnight, artist and 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize winner.

“We were drawn to how these five photographers approach expansive stories—whether of political upheaval, war, climate breakdown, or grief—with an intimate attention to the poetics of everyday life,” says Hatfield. “I was especially struck by how these artists manage to locate beauty even within experiences of deep uncertainty, and to do so without sacrificing formal inventiveness or conceptual depth.”

The shortlisted artists for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize are:

Sara Abbaspour, Untitled (splashing water), 2024

Sara Abbaspour counters conventional media portrayals of Iran by conjuring a poetic portrait of a society amid a wavering political landscape. Her series floating ocean considers both inner and exterior worlds in states of transition.

Alana Perino, Madi’s Hair, 2022

Alana Perino’s Pictures of Birds constructs a mesmeric evocation of familial memory and mortality. Photographing in their parents’ home in Longboat Key, Florida, Perino tells a story of preservation as an act of representation and remembrance.

Emma Ressel, Fruit for the Underworld, 2023

Emma Ressel arranges taxidermized animals in still life tableaux to consider the precarity of damaged ecosystems. Glass Eyes Stare Back contends with the space between life and death, nature and artifice, exploring humanity’s destructive desire to possess the natural world.

Hashem Shakeri, Staring into the Abyss, Afghanistan, 2021–ongoing

Hashem Shakeri bears witness to daily life in Afghanistan as the country adapts to the return of the Taliban. Staring into the Abyss acts as both a testament to the irrepressible spirit of the country’s women and marginalized groups, and a vivid call to action.

Daria Svertilova, Protector of Kyiv, Ukraine, 2022

Daria Svertilova offers a generational, quietly searing portrait of present-day Ukraine. Her series Irreversibly Altered invokes a feeling of absence and displacement through dreamlike photographs of what has been left behind.

These photographers join the ranks of illustrious winners and shortlisted artists for the Portfolio Prize in past years, including Felipe Romero Beltrán, Dannielle Bowman, Alejandro Cartagena, Jessica Chou, River Claure, Eli Durst, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Janna Ireland, Abhishek Khedekar, Natalie Krick, Daniel Jack Lyons, Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Drew Nikonowicz, Sarah Palmer, Avion Pearce, RaMell Ross, Bryan Schutmaat, Donavon Smallwood, Laila Stevens, Ka-Man Tse, and Guanyu Xu.

Selections of work by the five shortlisted artists will be presented at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), April 23–27, with an opening reception on Wednesday, April 23.

The 2025 Portfolio Prize winner, to be announced on May 13, 2025, will be published in the Summer issue of Aperture magazine, receive a $5,000 cash prize and a $1,000 gift card to shop for gear at MPB.com, and have a presentation organized by Aperture in New York City. The four shortlisted artists will each receive a $1,000 cash prize and an editorial feature on Aperture.org.

Production for the presentation on view at AIPAD in 2025 is made possible by Laumont Editions.