Aperture's Blog, page 55

The Photographer Who Constantly Transforms

When I first tried to reach Evan Benally Atwood, their phone lay buried underneath a foot of new snow blanketing a cross-country skiing trail at Mount Hood. It was almost spring here in Oregon, so maybe, when the snow began to melt, draining out to the Hood River, past my house, down to the Columbia River Gorge, and then out to the Pacific Ocean, Benally Atwood’s phone would reappear.

A snowy mountain trail is the type of place where Benally Atwood feels compelled to take out their 35 mm rangefinder. They make work throughout the American West, often in the high desert of Central Oregon, which reminds them of where they grew up in New Mexico. They often put themself in the frame, wearing things like cowboy hats and other bits of Western wear, paired with sparkling silver heels or a tsiiyéeł, a traditional Diné (Navajo) hair bun. Sometimes, they don’t wear anything. These signifiers of identity frequently come together in unexpected ways.

Benally Atwood identifies as nádleehí, a Diné word that roughly translates to “one who constantly transforms.” They told me they journaled about what the term might mean for them when they first encountered it: “I never claimed the term two-spirit—it wasn’t something I felt inside. For me, nádleehí is that which is always becoming. I feel more masculine and more feminine today than I did when I first wrote in my journal. I feel blessed to be in my body.”

Evan Benally Atwood, family portrait, 2020

Benally Atwood describes their gender identity as an act of reclamation of Diné ancestral knowledge. “The Diné have five genders, and have had those five genders since before colonization. The gender binary was pushed on us. In a lot of Indigenous cultures, gender is psycho-spiritual rather than physiological,” said Benally Atwood. But they also noted that they weren’t taught these ideas about gender variance when they were growing up, and they don’t see it widely taught now. This process of reclamation is ongoing and embodied in their photographs.

In the beginning of our conversation, Benally Atwood told me they don’t know what they are taking pictures of most of the time. “It’s a mystery . . . in an Indigenous way,” they said. “A lot of Indigenous communities talk about Spirit as the Great Mystery—the creator of all. So I try to honor the mystery of existence. I try to honor the land that I get to be on.”

As Abaki Beck, a Blackfeet and Red River Métis writer focusing on Indigenous feminisms and revitalizing Indigenous knowledge, told me: “Many Native people, myself included, have an intimate relationship to the landscape. It is where our stories come from, where we gather our medicine, practice ceremonies, or connect with loved ones. Evan portrays this relationship to the land in a vividly intimate way, which stands in sharp contrast to typical photographs of Western landscapes as colonial, touristy, or voyeuristic.”

Evan Benally Atwood, princess bouton, 2019

Evan Benally Atwood, sunrise on chinook, 2020

Benally Atwood grew up in Farmington, New Mexico, a border town to the Navajo Nation. They describe the city as “incredibly conservative,” and left when they were eighteen, after graduating high school. They received a degree in business administration from Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, in 2015, and eventually settled on the ancestral lands of the Chinook tribe—Portland, Oregon.

Considering the way Benally Atwood’s work investigates the intersection of queerness and the legacies of colonization, I asked them if they have read Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body (2020), a genre-bending collection of essays that explores many of the same themes. “Sort of,” Benally Atwood said. They had it in front of them as we spoke, but still needed to finish it. I read to them aloud from the introduction, which was a nice experience—if you have the chance, I recommend reading a book you like (even a few lines) to a friend over the phone.

“I’m up against decades and perhaps centuries of a literary history that extracted from our declarations of pain evidence of our inability to locate joy at the center of our desire to exist,” Belcourt writes. “With you, I can rally against this parasitic way of reading, this time-worn liberal sensibility. Together we can detonate the glass walls of Canadian habit that entrap us all in compressed forms of subjectivity.”

Evan Benally Atwood, black elks peak, 2020

What Belcourt describes here applies to our reading of Indigenous images in “North America” irrespective of colonial borders. In Benally Atwood’s photographs, joy, and also pleasure, operate in a similar way. They rally against the same stifling liberal sensibility that views Native communities exclusively through the lens of pain, and more often than not, erases them entirely. But finding and documenting joy and the places where it can exist in the wrath of colonization is not easy.

“I think for me, nature is the place to access joy. The problem is that nature in the Pacific Northwest is so white-centered. Many of my friends who are trans feminine, Black, and people of color aren’t as comfortable being outside,” said Benally Atwood. As a result, Benally Atwood makes a point of creating portraits of trans feminine individuals outdoors. “I love being able to document and help them see themselves in a beautiful way. Sometimes, taking photos is literally just about going to a place where you want to feel cute and fun.”

On the surface, this intention could be read as lighthearted, but given the historical context, the stakes remain high. “Usually, the narrative of Indigenous people in the landscape is one that revolves around trauma, which gets told and retold,” said Benally Atwood. “These pictures are about creating a narrative ourselves for ourselves.”

Evan Benally Atwood, phoebe, 2020Evan Benally Atwood, a spot on the molalla river, 2019Evan Benally Atwood, tani, 2020Evan Benally Atwood, kerry, 2020Evan Benally Atwood, gay head wampanoag beach, 2019
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

Can Photographs Help Communicate the Experience of Incarceration?

Prison changes everything. This is what people who have done time understand. On July 2, 2020, my friend Rojai Fentress was released following a conditional pardon by Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam. Rojai had served twenty-four years of a fifty-three-year sentence, after being convicted at sixteen by a jury of his peers of a murder that he didn’t commit. The day he was released, he told me that he had never been higher than the second tier, prison nomenclature for the series of cells on the second level of the large warehouse-like spaces that are called “housing units.” He said that in the forty years he had been alive, there had never been occasion for him to be more than fifteen feet in the air. Fats, which is what everyone who has done time with Rojai calls him, was describing the particular kind of violence that the circumstances of confinement brought to his life—a denial of what’s possible, even something as simple as looking out over the edge of a mountain.

Baseball game, May 16, 1976
Courtesy Aperture and San Quentin State Prison

And yet I know that even within the confines of those small and cramped spaces, he found many opportunities to be free. On the basketball courts, doing pull-ups on the backs of iron stairs, developing an eye for drawing portraits, sharing a complicated meal built around fifteen-cent ramen noodles and cheese crackers. This interior life of men in prison is what is too often hidden, and this is part of what Nigel Poor has given men an opportunity to reveal through her work. When I spoke with Poor about her new book The San Quentin Project, in which men in prison reflect on and demonstrate the richness of their inner lives, she said the book started while she was teaching a class in the Prison University Project (which was an extension of Patten University and is now called Mount Tamalpais College). For Poor, and the men involved, the class was about working with “photographs as a bridge for conversations about their personal histories.”

StephenShore, El Paso Street,El Paso, Texas, July 5, 1975, mapped by anonymous
Courtesy Aperture; Photograph in work © Stephen Shore, courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York

But to fully grasp the interiority that prisoners seek to assert, it’s important to understand what they are asserting it against, particularly Black and Brown prisoners. In “Strivings of the Negro People,” an 1897 article in the Atlantic, W. E. B. Du Bois recognized that he was shut out from the world of others around him by “a vast veil.” The point is that between the world and Black folks, there seems to be something that forces them, us, to have a kind of double vision. Or as Du Bois framed it, a double consciousness, a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Prison offers a different, related but more conflicted kind of double consciousness. As philosopher and prisoner James Davis III explains, those in prison have a double- double consciousness. He argues that the Black prisoner enters his confinement with the double consciousness described by Du Bois and then, is burdened by the double consciousness that incarceration imposes—that “concrete veil that obscures his humanity . . . the lack of recognition [as a human] that threatens to alienate him from the inalienable rights with which he was born.” The prisoner understands that, after having been to prison, nothing is ever the same, and so much of the work of living (both inside prison and outside) becomes about remembering and asserting that you can have agency and a life, without either forgetting or being consumed by your memories. Put another way, you walk, handcuffed and shackled, into a prison and become someone that you hadn’t been before.

W. H. Woodside, CO [Correctional Officer] fight, April 8, 1961
Courtesy Aperture and San Quentin State Prison

ID crew, n.d.
Courtesy Aperture and San Quentin State Prison

As a child, I read several memoirs about prison, including Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994), and a book I had randomly found at the house of an aunt, Albert Race Sample’s Racehoss: Big Emma’s Boy (1984). But these books didn’t prepare me. The philosopher L. A. Paul writes in her book Transformative Experience (2014) about events that substantially revise “how you experience being yourself.” Paul defines an experience as epistemically transformative when the only way to know what the experience is like is to have it yourself. This is why there was no way that Brown, Malcolm X, McCall, Sample, or any of the countless other authors who have written of prison—or even the films that depict life there—can make you know the experience of incarceration. Maybe the point is that these books ultimately aren’t about making you know prison, but rather providing a glimpse of what cannot be understood.

I’ve known the expansiveness and the deep solitude that prisons create. The frustration, the fear. But also the gifts: laughter, grit, possibility. The dilemma of the writer narrating the prison experience is that despite their best efforts, there is always something about incarceration that cannot be fully conveyed. And given this, there is a need for metaphor. The notion that a picture is worth a thousand words is suddenly true when I remember the contraption a man built with wires and a pair of nail clippers to heat water. Prison gives the people who have done time a new way of seeing, a different way to understand the world, which is both a gift and a curse. The San Quentin Project reveals something of that double vision, that sight and insight.

Prison rock band, June 26, 1975
Courtesy Aperture and San Quentin State Prison

What this book establishes, first, is that incarceration does not dim the desire to be full. These photographs—probably taken by correctional officers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, while some may have been taken by men who were incarcerated at the time—tell a different story of prison. By bringing these photographs to the world, Poor makes an argument for the capaciousness of both the lives that incarcerated men experience and the loss that ripples through their days. One image, Mother’s Day, May 9, 1976, depicts a family reconnecting while visiting San Quentin. Everyone has on a version of their Sunday best, and it is impossible to tell who, if any of them, is incarcerated. In another photo, a group of men pose behind a drum set, with one cat leaning on a guitar that reminds me of the one Prince threw into the sky as he walked offstage after a performance. The image of a Native American, in full regalia in a prison yard, is arresting and makes us pause. What men do to avoid the erasure of prison is as unpredictable as it is vital. Images of men together on a football field, in uniforms and helmets, men lifting weights, even a man whose eye is stitched and swollen closed, are reminders of what the living do. It is only when you see the bars, the narrow corridors of violence, when the angle of the image brings to mind Michel Foucault’s criticisms of the panopticon—where prisoners are controlled by constant observation—that the constraints of prison become part of the point. What is left out of the images reminds us of how much of life in prison remains undocumented.

Powwow, n.d., mapped by George Mesro Coles-El
© George Mesro Coles-El, courtesy Aperture; Archival image courtesy San Quentin State Prison

Most poignantly, this project allows men inside to begin contemplating—through their stories, annotations, and conversations—the moments that the photographs leave out. The students in Poor’s class not only reflect on their lives or on lives adjacent to theirs but also provide insight into the iconic works of well-known photographers. How do you begin to interpret moments you haven’t begun to live? The San Quentin Project gives us a chance to witness this process of close reading. “That distinct voice,” as Poor says of the guys inside, “is really beautifully communicated to somebody who doesn’t necessarily have the experience.” These voices and these stories create a space of compassion for us all to rest in. And yet, Poor’s project is far more significant than just bringing images that haven’t been seen before to the public. By allowing men on the inside to annotate photographs, she forces readers to become witnesses to how deprivation changes how we see. And the stories, frequently, become a meditation on loss. A man describes a stabbed body as a “once proud castle.” The point becomes a revelation, not just of the stories that this particular photograph might contain but of all the stories that have been buried by prison.

This essay and images were originally published in The San Quentin Project (Aperture, 2021).

A portion of the sales from The San Quentin Project are being donated to Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin State Prison. This publication is also part of the Million Book Project, which will create curated libraries of five hundred books to be distributed to one thousand prisons and juvenile detention centers in the United States.

Peter Hujar, Moyra Davey, and the Performance of Honesty

While browsing The Shabbiness of Beauty (MACK, 2121), in which the artist and writer Moyra Davey places her images among those by the late photographer Peter Hujar (“a risky act,” as she puts it), I thought of a line from Davey’s 2008 essay “Notes on Photography & Accident”—written in an attempt “to rekindle a desire to make images,” and included in her recent collection of essays Index Cards (2020). The essay wanders wonderfully, but circles back to four authors: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Janet Malcolm, and Susan Sontag. “Malcolm’s perceptions thrill because they signal ‘truth’ in the way that strange, eccentric details nearly always do,” Davey writes.

Peter Hujar, Diana and John McClellan, 1981
Courtesy the Peter Hujar Archive LLC

One can apply this notion to photographs. “Strange, eccentric details” help conjure a sense of honesty, of the oppressive mask of polite life slipping, and of a conspiratorial association between the viewer, whoever is revealing something in the photo, and whoever saw fit to capture it, to celebrate it. The warped or broken or peculiar elicits a tenderness—a greater awareness of the act of looking than when one skims the beautiful or the glossy. “Strange, eccentric details” suggests a breaking of some code; a sense of speaking up, shrugging off, being oneself. Hujar’s photographs, both the iconic and the lesser known, which Davey focused on for this project, are full of such details: a mustached artist posing with what looks like two bloody human stumps (it’s Paul Thek, Hujar’s once-boyfriend, preparing his 1967 work Death of a Hippie); or a body of water that looks somehow human—a face, a mouth, appearing in the waves.

Hujar presents his subjects with dignity, showing them both as they are (maybe young and gorgeous, maybe dying) and as they could be (sexual, weird, base, pensive) on a whim. Perhaps this is why Hujar is so great at photographing animals, capturing both the often amusing reality and the majestic possibility of the creature without making the image fetishist or twee. One is simply getting a good, honest look at a chicken. Truth, again. “Animals don’t hold still, except for Hujar,” writes Davey.

Moyra Davey, Plymouth Rock, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Davey’s work is also about truth. Her long focus on the everyday has, to me, read as a desire to get to the bottom of things, to leave nothing as small as a stone unturned. It’s about paying attention. Her images in this book are interspersed, with no captions until the end, meaning one sometimes struggles to separate one artist’s work from the other’s, which is the whole point. Davey defers to Hujar’s preferred genres—animals, water, New York City, bodies, babies—and her pictures are rich with the same notes of incongruity or deviation. A dog looks oddly pensive, friends flex their unique forms, dark armpit hair curls elegantly.

The Shabbiness of Beauty, the result of a show at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, is about discussion and dialogue, which makes sense for Davey, an artist who works across writing and photography, often using one to elaborate or spark the other. And yet, it is also about being present; about things (real things, things that are happening before the camera), perhaps more than it is about ideas. It is about consumption (which, as Sontag reminds us, photography always is), and about how we look at images to feed and nurture ourselves.

Moyra Davey, Armpit, 1984
Courtesy the artist

In mining the Hujar archives, Davey shows us how we all build a sense of who we are through adulation and imitation (through feeling in step with our heroes), and that our past selves can be found as much in the worlds of others (their pictures, writings, notes, songs) as among the memorabilia of our own acts of creation: “Dipping into the archive is always an interesting, if sometimes unsettling, proposition,” Davey writes in “Notes on Photography & Accident.” “It often begins with anxiety, with the fear that the thing you want won’t surface. But ultimately the process is a little like tapping into the unconscious, and can bring with it the ambivalent gratification of rediscovering forgotten selves.” Clearly, various selves also emerged in her trip through Hujar’s history.

The Shabbiness of Beauty is about intimacy and the politics of reflection, which makes sense given the various critiques Davey has made about the contemporary mood for photographs that are giant, egotistical. (“So much of what we see in galleries is responding to the imperative to overproduce, overenlarge, overconsume,” she writes in “Notes on Photography & Accident.”) The Shabbiness of Beauty is quiet, deliberately; it invites speculation, time. As Eileen Myles writes in an essay in the book, “It makes sense that Moyra Davey would wind up expanding into writing—out here in art everything is given (supposedly) but in writing you can’t see the intention. Visual art is mapped on the out there. Writing’s like a cat. I would say Moyra’s a cat photographer.”

Peter Hujar, Sophie Mgcina and Thuli Dumakude – South African Play “Poppie Nongena,” 1983
Courtesy the Peter Hujar Archive LLC

Hujar never clamored for attention by serving up the obvious (a reason many critics have given for why Robert Mapplethorpe, not Hujar, got the buzz in his lifetime). Hujar never victimized his subjects by feeding the urge to capture their victimization. There is too much respect. These are his friends, his world; him, partly. “We’re here, I’m here,” his pictures seem to say. As Davey writes: “In the 1960s and early 70s, Hujar sometimes preserved the black frame line around his pictures, and said: ‘to print the film frame [implied]: this is not a painting, this is photography. This negative has an edge . . . [it’s] an honesty thing . . .’” The implication: this photograph is something that was made, as well as something that happened. There are two distinct timelines—the one captured in the image, and the one that led to the image’s creation. Such a note from Davey suggests that this is a project about the process of things, about the act of making; the “behind the scenes,” a phrase that has so successfully transcended into marketing speak that it has lost its inference of “truth”—to go back to Malcolm.

But that is what’s at play in The Shabbiness of Beauty, a project first and foremost about truth, about honesty and, to a lesser but equally important extent, the performance of that honesty (not always an oxymoron); the attempt to show the progress, the influence, the relevant factors. Indeed, writing on her style, and that of some of the figures who cross between her and Hujar’s worlds, Davey says, “we are all self-consciously trying to signal that what’s going on behind the camera—the emotional register, the labor register, the thinking register, the mechanical register, the risk factor—is to us as important as the image itself.”

Peter Hujar, Wave, Sperlonga, 1978
Courtesy the Peter Hujar Archive LLC

Davey continues by claiming that Hujar was “the opposite. Without self-regard, he gifted it all to the subject and the image through patience, framing, razor-sharp focus and crystalline lighting. He apparently gave no direction. . . . He waited for them to give to him whatever it was they were going to give, and then he took it—and after the wizardry of the darkroom, gave it back.” But to me, Hujar’s presence pervades his images. They are palpably sensitive. They summon the spirit of the author; his life, politics, and process; the specter of someone generous outside the frame. That presence is summarized by the title of Nan Goldin’s 1989 curated show Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space in New York, which featured Hujar, alongside close peers such as David Wojnarowicz, and which Davey once visited. This book is another gesture against vanishing, against the idea that Hujar’s work will only be a statement on its own time. In making the images into something new, Davey highlights how Hujar’s work continues to morph, to comment, and to be seen afresh.

The Shabbiness of Beauty: Moyra Davey & Peter Hujar was published by MACK in April 2021.

Announcing the 2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Shortlist

Aperture’s support of emerging photographers and other lens-based artists is a vital part of our mission. 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, Aperture’s editors reviewed over 1,200 submissions, and we are thrilled to announce the shortlisted artists for the 2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize:

William Camargo
Chance DeVille
Jarod Lew
Anouchka Renaud-Eck
Donavon Smallwood

These artists join the ranks of illustrious artists shortlisted for the Portfolio Prize in past years, including Dannielle Bowman, Jessica Chou, Eli Durst, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Natalie Krick, Jack Latham, Daniel Jack Lyons, Mark McKnight, Drew Nikonowicz, Sarah Palmer, Bryan Schutmaat, Ka-Man Tse, and Guanyu Xu.

The 2021 Portfolio Prize winner, to be announced on Friday, May 14, will be published in Aperture magazine, receive a $3,000 cash prize, and present an exhibition at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York. Each runner-up will receive an online feature.

This year, alongside the five shortlisted artists, Aperture’s editors selected twenty finalists. The finalists and shortlisted artists will each receive a virtual portfolio review session with an Aperture editor, providing thoughtful and constructive feedback on their work.

The twenty finalists are:

Bryan Anselm, Rachelle Bussières, Amarise Carreras, Ronghui Chen, Golden, Jon Henry, Wing Ka Ho, Kovi Konowiecki, Michal Luczak, Spandita Malik, Steven Molina Contreras, Laura Pannack, Miraj J Patel, Ginevra Shay, C. Rose Smith, Elliott Verdier, Marianne & Katarzyna Wasowska, Wei Zihan, Amani Willett, and Zhidong Zhang.

William Camargo, We Gonna Have to Move Out Soon Fam!, 2019, from the series Origins & Displacements: Making Sense of Place, Histories & PossibilitiesChance DeVille, Mom in a Dream, 2020, from the series David’s MarkJarod Lew, The Tethers of Love (Eugene, Miyi, and Qun), 2020, from the series Please Take Off Your ShoesAnouchka Renaud-Eck, Girls Surrounded by Boys, 2020, from the series ArdhanarishvaraDonavon Smallwood, Untitled, 2020, from the series Languor
All images courtesy the artists

Why We Must See Asian Americans in US History

She looks ahead with a steadfast, determined gaze. Perched on a chair beside a small table, she rests one hand on her lap, her bangle grazing a package. She cradles an open daguerreotype case in the other, her fingers wrapped around one portrait in what seems to be a small gesture of longing for absent loved ones. 

We do not know who she is. We do not know her name. It is not often that an Asian woman—an immigrant, a worker, perhaps a mother—is pictured, or even rendered visible, especially in nineteenth-century America. What makes this image extraordinary is that it’s most likely from 1850s California: it tells the story of Chinese immigrants who came to America during the California Gold Rush (1848–65).

The portrait was part of an exhibition of daguerreotypes slated to open in April 2020 at the Peabody Essex Museum, but was canceled on the eve of its installation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition, Gold Rush: Daguerreotypes of Early California was organized by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Jane Aspinwall was the curator of the exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins; I was the coordinating curator at PEM.

We planned to include this daguerreotype and its story in the exhibition to show that Asian Americans have been in this country for a long time. They were just excluded by those who recorded history. Race, class, and gender, alongside a legal status subject to changes in US foreign policy, make photographs like this extremely rare. The only other daguerreotypes of Chinese women I have encountered are the photographs of Miss Pwan Ye-Koo and Lum-Akum, part of P.T. Barnum’s “Living Chinese Family,” at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Made by Lorenzo G. Chase between 1844 and 1856, they were discovered over a century later in the same attic trunk as the Zealy daguerreotypes of enslaved people of African descent. The images were presumably part of the same Louis Agassiz project that used photography to support pseudo-scientific theories of race.

So what can we learn from the daguerreotype of this woman? What does she want us to see? 

Head of Auburn Ravine, 1852. Daguerreotype
Courtesy California State Library, Sacramento, California

She was judged by her appearance and perceived as a temptation to white men before she even stepped foot on American shores. Her plaid headscarf, long-sleeved tunic, and pants mark her as part of the shuishangren (Boat Dwellers), an ethnic minority that mainlanders in southern China looked down upon for their contact with British and American opium traders. They were part of the service industry, providing offshore food, water, laundry, transport, and sex to the foreign merchants who made their fortunes in China. Idealized in Euro-American art and literature as free-spirited and coquettish beauties, shuishangren women moved through the world as objects of desire and subjects of global capital. 

Stereotype and stigma followed Chinesewomen to America, shaping their experience and that of generations to follow. In the 1850s, most Chinese women arrived in California with their husbands as part of a large wave of migration in which thousands of people, free and enslaved, journeyed to the new state in the pursuit of gold. These newcomers—arriving from as far as Chile to the south, Australia and Hawaii to the west, and Europe to the east—joined Native, Sonoran Mexican, and other groups already living in the gold region to create one of the most ethnically diverse populations on the continent. Yet racist stereotypes shaped public perceptions and fueled violence against non-white residents as competition over land and resources grew. Images of Chinese women and toiling Chinese men cast them as moral threats to a white society steeped in beliefs of manifest destiny. Newspapers spread rumors about rampant prostitution in Chinatown and the threat of the “coolie” trade, referring to a racialized system of indentured servitude and forced migration used elsewhere in the Americas, despite little evidence that it existed in California at the time.

Photograph taken after the ceremonial Golden Spike was driven into the ground in Promontory, Utah, in celebration of connecting the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, May 10, 1869
Courtesy the National Archives

Over the next three decades, the bureaucratic regulation of Chinese bodies laid the groundwork for our modern-day immigration system. Early California laws and legal statutes identified any East Asian woman entering the state as a suspected prostitute until proven otherwise. On the federal level, the Page Act of 1875 barred the entry of immigrants deemed “undesirable,” targeting contract laborers and prostitutes from East Asia. Chinese women were the first immigrant group required to carry and produce identification photographs to prove their character, subjecting them to a new form of visual policing. While the Page Act effectively ended the immigration of Chinese women, racially motivated fears about Chinese labor led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the only law to date in American history that specifically prohibits one ethnic group from immigrating to the United States.

The art historian Sarah Lewis writes that American citizenship has long been a project of vision and justice. The absence of photographs of the Chinese men and women who helped build California speaks to contested ideas of place, identity, and belonging that continue to shape our collective image of America today. The consequences of this erasure is clear: immigrants have experienced nearly a century of citizenship denied, and Asians who identify as American still live with a deep sense of not belonging. Though the Chinese Exclusion Act was officially repealed in 1943, when the US and China became World War II allies, stringent quotas for Chinese immigration remained in place until 1965. Many Gen X and millennial Asian Americans, myself included, are the first in their families born in America. How do we engage with the democratic ideals of American society when we don’t even see ourselves represented in it? 

Corky Lee, Reenactment of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, 2014
© the artist and courtesy John Lee

We need to revisit the stories that lie within, and just outside, our picture of American history. Black artists, writers, and curators have paved the way, showing us the power of image-making to expand our worldview beyond stereotypes and demonstrating how deep looking within historical images can reveal the most mundane, everyday acts of resistance. The late Corky Lee knew this as he worked toward what he called “photographic justice.” A chronicler of the joy, grief, and outrage seen in New York City’s Chinatowns, Lee was troubled by the lack of Chinese faces in the 1869 photograph celebrating the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Utah’s Promontory Summit. His 2014 project to recreate the image with the Asian American descendants of the thousands of Chinese migrant laborers who built the railroad was an act of restoration and acknowledgment of their belonging in this history.

The portrait of a Chinese woman holding a daguerreotype is a testament to her presence in America. And yet, she did not endure in the public memory. The daguerreotype is the earliest form of photography, and as such, each exists as a brilliant, one-of-a-kind image. A ghost in the mirror-like surface, her portrait is small and intimate; it must be held and cherished in one’s hands in order to truly be seen. I can only speculate about her adamant gaze, asking us not to forget her. She was here and is still here. 

Naomi Rosenblum Broadened the Horizon for World Photography

With Naomi Rosenblum’s death at the age of ninety-six this past February, an era came to a close. Historian, author, educator, and curator, she was a touchstone for many in the field of photography—so deeply embedded in the fabric of it, indeed, that some may be unaware of how their world has been shaped by her. Rosenblum’s research was disseminated primarily via her teachings, at such institutions as Brooklyn College, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, and City University of New York’s Graduate Center; through her lectures; and through her writings, most notably two encyclopedic works: A World History of Photography (1984) and A History of Women Photographers (1994), both published by Abbeville.

Rosenblum was a New Yorker to the bone, complete with a warm lilt in her accent and the deep cultural moxie with which the city imbues many of its longtime residents. She received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1948; three decades later, she earned a PhD from CUNY’s Graduate Center, with a dissertation on the early work of Paul Strand, with whom she was good friends. It was at Brooklyn College that she met the photographer Walter Rosenblum, much-decorated army combat cameraman and a key figure at the Photo League; they were married in 1949. Among many other accolades, she was a Getty Scholar in Residence in 1990; both Rosenblums were honored with the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1998; and Aperture Foundation celebrated her life of accomplishments at its 2020 Gala.

I met Naomi in 2018, when I was invited by Abbeville to contribute a new final chapter to the expanded fifth edition of A World History of Photography. As one of the countless for whom that book had been a valued resource for years, I knew her to be a probing and dauntless scholar. With A World History, Naomi had succeeded in deftly revising a set of commandments that had seemed immovable: the dogmatic, North American–Western European, white, mostly straight, almost totally male-of-a-certain-class Canon of Canons in which so many of us had long been immersed. “I wanted,” she explained simply, “to broaden the horizon.” And so she turned her lens purposefully to the wider world—geographically speaking, yes, but also by investigating the medium’s diverse engines and purposes: from mugshots to cartes de visite to industrial scapes to propaganda to advertising to war reportage to Sotheby’s superstars. It takes a mind of a certain fertility and curiosity to take all that on. Not only did Naomi have such a mind, she was, as her friend Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art, says, “a great organizer, a brilliant synthesizer. That gave her perspective.” She had the historian’s most valuable skill: the ability to clearly see the big picture.

Naomi Rosenblum painting a decoration for the Photo League at the Hotel Albert, New York, 1949

A decade after the first publication of A World History, Naomi broadened our horizon in another way. It was during her research for that book that she saw the need to bring focus to the women who had played central roles in the life of the medium, but whose names had been underrecognized (or completely overlooked). It might be said that with her 1994 History of Women Photographers, Naomi was formulating a new canon almost entirely from scratch. The book came out at a moment that also saw a flush of dialogue about second- and third-wave feminism. Was there really a need for cultural institutions and publications devoted exclusively to women artists—or were such efforts ultimately marginalizing? Was work being elevated that didn’t deserve elevation, in the name of gender parity? Why publish an encyclopedia on women photographers?

In the book’s introduction, Naomi makes the answer clear: “Research suggests,” she offers in a wry understatement, “that until fairly recent times women’s work in photography did not receive its due consideration.” She goes on to lay out some of that research in the form of disheartening statistics: the paltry percentage of women photographers represented in authoritative publications, in museum collections, in the overall market. A few years later, she elaborated on her reason for undertaking the project: “It’s not that I want to separate out women and say they’re better or worse. It’s because the history was getting lost.” At the same time, of course, new history was being made: she was an early advocate of up-and-coming names like Susan Meiselas and Carrie Mae Weems. As Naomi understood, the world, in forward motion though it might be, needed such a dedicated investigation. (And it may still: many projects continue to be devoted to the study of women photographers, including the exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera, organized by the National Gallery of Art and slated to open later this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) 

It bears mentioning that many of the key curators, editors, and scholars working in photography today are women: Naomi took early steps on a path that is still being blazed. I communicated via email and Zoom with several of them—some of whom knew Naomi Rosenblum well, and others who never met her but whose careers were touched by her work.

Barbara Tannenbaum collaborated with Naomi on the exhibition of A History of Women Photographers, which opened at the New York Public Library in 1996 and from there toured institutions across the United States, including the Akron Art Museum, where Tannenbaum was then a curator. The two women became friends over the course of an adventurous couple of years leading up to the show, traveling regularly to photography institutions and archives far and wide—on a museum-tight budget, which often meant sharing hotel rooms, and sometimes even meals. Their common quest, says Tannenbaum, was “to show that these women were really good photographers”; to do that, they sought out the best images and the finest prints available. Fortunately, Rosenblum and Tannenbaum (“Everyone thought we sounded like a law firm”) had a similar work style: they were “fast lookers” and speedy decision makers. Tannenbaum recalls that when a museum archivist would gingerly offer to pull out only a box or two of holdings for the women’s inspection, they were amused: “‘Please bring them all—we’ll be done with these before lunch.’ . . . We knew what we were looking for. We knew what we wanted.” Over their long friendship, Tannenbaum says, she came to appreciate Naomi’s layered comprehension of photography: “She had a close understanding of the complicated network of how knowledge is transmitted, and how photography’s impact is complicated.”  

Rebecca Senf, chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography, credits Naomi with helping to make a welcoming space for women in the field. When she was in graduate school at Boston University in the early 2000s, she says, she was part of a large cohort of PhD students. “As with so many fields, photography was defined in its early years by men,” Senf says. “Those men stated what and who was important, how it would be discussed and organized, and did it with a voice of unwavering authority. But in our field, that baton was picked up and carried forth by Naomi Rosenblum. Her many contributions leave a lasting legacy of how we think about photography and photographers.”      

Eva Respini, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, has long been a champion of contemporary photography and photo-based art. Like Senf, she recognizes that Naomi was a pathfinder: until recently, she says, “there were very few models for thinking about a multivalent history of photography that included women, as well as other methodologies. She was one such scholar leading the way—really one of the only ones.”

At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, photography curator Roxana Marcoci organized the landmark 2010–11 show Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography. She notes that Naomi shone light on the formative hand of women in the evolution of photography itself. “For much of photography’s 180-year history, women have expanded its roles by experimenting with every aspect of the medium.” Naomi’s research had an impact, Marcoci says, on her Pictures by Women project: “It made me realize that women’s early engagement with and access to photography, gained by virtue of the medium’s own marginality within the arts, underscore a more democratic relationship between progressive politics and progressive aesthetics and an expanded concept of what an artist can be.”

Deborah Willis is the chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where Naomi taught for many years; the department has recently instituted the Rosenblum Scholarship in her name. Willis remembers her friend as “an honorable woman, a mentor to many—she definitely was mine, because she taught the world how to see the possibilities of women both behind and in front of the camera.”

Naomi Rosenblum receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the ICP Infinity Awards Ceremony, New York, 1998

To state the obvious: ground is still being broken in this part of the field. A recent successor to Naomi’s 1994 volume is Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Textuel, 2020), compiled by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert: a compendium of work by some three hundred female photographers, spanning the medium’s first days to the twenty-first century. Lebart says that when Naomi’s book came out twenty-five years ago, women photographers were viewed in much of Europe as something of “an oddity”—and that even today, her own undertaking was seen by some as “a little strange.” But as she and Robert were putting the volume together, “each time we had doubts we would think of Naomi Rosenblum’s early book on the subject. She gave us strength and courage. She gave us a model and showed us a way.”

Even as Naomi broadened the horizon of photography for Western eyes with A World History, she played a consequential role in bringing aspects of Western photography to other parts of the planet (not least through the many editions of that book, which was published in several languages). She traveled to Beijing in 1980 to oversee the installation of a major Lewis Hine retrospective, a show she had helped to organize for the Brooklyn Museum in 1977; it was the first official loan from an American museum to the newly reopened People’s Republic of China. Her friend Zhao Yingxin, head of the China Photography Publishing House (which produced the Chinese edition of A World History), recalls that seeing the work of one of America’s most eminent social documentarians was an epiphany for many in China, who Zhao says were experiencing a deep “thirst for art.”

In 2001, with Italian curator and historian Enrica Viganò, Naomi organized the exhibition Photo League: New York, 1936–1951, which traveled throughout Europe. Viganò says the show and its accompanying catalogue were revelatory: “No one here knew much about the Photo League, this amazing association—Naomi really opened that door for many of us in Europe.” Viganò collaborated with Naomi on many other projects and considers her a mentor, from whose sharp mind she benefited for many years. Another Italian colleague, photo editor and curator Manuela Fugenzi, befriended Naomi as she compiled the 2014–15 exhibition and book They Fight with Cameras, about Walter Rosenblum’s photographs from World War II. Fugenzi marvels at the breadth of Naomi’s knowledge: “She was good at history, she was good at art, she was good at sociology. And this gave her the ability to move across disciplines—which is really what photography does.”

Photographer Pierpaolo Mittica has devoted much of his career to social-documentary projects, with particular focus on the environment. He met both Rosenblums as a young man, in 1997, and remained close friends with them for years—they were, he says, people of “extraordinary humanity . . . they were like another pair of parents for me.” Naomi firmly believed that an understanding of the medium’s full story is beneficial to the artist: Mittica says that she taught him that a practitioner must “know the history of photography to be a true photographer. She taught me everything I know about photography, guiding me hand-in-hand in my career.”

Naomi Rosenblum at Foto Arts Festival, Bielsko-Biała, Poland, 2007

A true intellectual, Rosenblum remained curious and incisive to the end; she seemed to be always nurtured by new knowledge. In 2018, as I worked on the final chapter for A World History, Naomi was extraordinarily generous, and she helped me as I waded through the tumultuous waters of early twenty-first century photography—occasionally pinpointing, gently but with laserlike precision, vagueness or extravagance or other crimes in my chapter. She was interested in the great everything: I recall a beautiful dinner at her home in Long Island City with her two daughters, Nina and Lisa, at which our conversation ranged musically from modernist architecture to Italy to cuisine to Black Mountain College to films to philosophy—always touching back, somehow, on the life and gossip of the world of photography, past and present.

Certainly to interact with Naomi was to travel meaningfully across the globe and through time—even if some of that interaction and experience transpired via the internet. In the spring of 2019, after sending the final draft of my chapter for A World History off to Abbeville, I set out on a camping trip to Canada with my son. As I wrote in an email to Naomi, we were headed for the Gaspé Peninsula. With its cragged townscapes, stark yet lush, it was an area I felt I knew intimately from the photographs of Paul Strand, although in fact I’d never actually been there. Shortly before I set out, Naomi sent me a note: “I spent a week or more in the Gaspé (driving Strand’s car) back in 1949. VERY PRIMITIVE.”

I never had a chance to ask Naomi how she happened to be driving her friend Strand’s car—by then he had moved to France for good. But she and he were with me in spirit through that trip. (It was primitive, and perfect.) What a privilege, then and forever, to have such traveling companions.

How One Photographer Covered the Unfolding of the Pandemic

In March 2020, within weeks of the first diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in New York, Philip Montgomery began documenting the health-care workers and staff in nine of the city’s hospitals. On his first day, 1,162 new patients had been hospitalized with the disease, and 349 had died. By April 6, his last day, 19,177 people had been hospitalized with the virus in New York, and 3,202 had died. As the story shifted to how New Yorkers would mourn an unimaginable loss, Montgomery chronicled a funeral home in the Bronx, where two undertakers strove to provide services with dignity in a time of isolation. Montgomery hoped his images would “galvanize” the country—and testify to the scale of the tragedy.

One of the most accomplished photojournalists of his generation, Montgomery has covered major U.S. stories from the aftermath of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, to the flooding after Hurricane Harvey in Houston, in 2017. Faces of an Epidemic, his account of the devastating effects of the opioid-addiction crisis in Ohio, earned a 2018 National Magazine Award. Last fall, Montgomery spoke with Kathy Ryan about covering New York as the city became the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, publishing powerful photographic essays in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, where Ryan is the director of photography. As Montgomery recalls, “It was like a movie being played out in front of me in real life.”

Philip Montgomery, Manhattan’s financial district as New York began its shutdown at the start of the global pandemic, March 2020, for The New Yorker

Kathy Ryan: What was it like to be in the epicenter of the pandemic, photographing in New York’s hospitals during this crisis? How do you prepare for something like that?

Philip Montgomery: I’m not sure there was a way to really prepare. I wasn’t necessarily in panic mode, but it was a feeling of all-hands-on-deck in thinking about how we were going to cover this in the city. You and I had discussed it: “Well, let’s do ride-alongs with paramedics.” “Let’s look at the USNS Comfort.” But I think we both knew that this story was best told inside the hospitals. That was priority number one.

Ryan: Yes.

Montgomery: When we ended up getting access to nine of the eleven of New York’s public hospitals, which was a breakthrough moment, I don’t think we really knew what to expect. We were following the statistics, but you have no way of knowing how that’s going to look. So in terms of preparation, I didn’t really know what to prepare for, emotionally or visually. On the safety front, we were so terrified that we went above and beyond with the PPE, and I’m happy we did, but thinking back on it, maybe some things were a little bit unnecessary.

But what we weren’t prepared for was the sheer volume of patients at the peak of the pandemic in New York. As I talk to you now, I have the contact sheet of the shoot at Queens Hospital Center in front of me, and I’m looking through the images, frame by frame, of walking in there, from the first picture to the middle of the take. I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by what we were seeing. I remember feeling really emotional and, at times, was even in tears.

Philip Montgomery, A passenger on an uptown F train wears a makeshift mask, New York, March 2020, for The New Yorker

Philip Montgomery, EMT Atma Degeyndt after treating a patient who was suffering from symptoms of COVID-19 in an apartment complex in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, March 2020, for The New York Times Magazine

Ryan: Why did you choose to use a handheld strobe to illuminate the scenes you were documenting?

Montgomery: It was pretty immediately clear that was what needed to be done. The light within hospitals is really clinical and flat, and there is so much going on in the space, so the way that I used the light was to enable me to isolate certain scenes and moments. I had to set up parameters within the hospital. HIPAA law dictates that only individuals who had consented to photography could be photographed. And using that light actually helped me to isolate those individuals and frame out the other elements that weren’t supposed to be seen in the photographs—unconsenting patients, or patients who were on ventilators, or patients who were being admitted into the ER.

Ryan: The light is obviously part of your signature. In our editing, we also spent a lot of time dealing with privacy issues. It was an overwhelming part of this particular project. It’s so unusual to have that kind of access in a hospital, and we wanted to be respectful of patient privacy.

At one point, you photographed fire department paramedics who were resuscitating a coronavirus patient who had gone into cardiac arrest when he stopped breathing. What was that like for you? There you are, you’re making pictures, and now you’re seeing a life-and-death moment.

Montgomery: It was like a movie being played out in front of me in real life. There were beds and beds and beds. There was barely any walking space within the emergency department at that time, and the room was already high-intensity. Much like you’d see in a television show like ER, these paramedics rushed in with the gurney and didn’t really have time to station a man in a specific spot, and they were working to save his life in the middle of the unit. It had to be done right there. I watched the two paramedics taking turns, administering chest compressions to the point where I’m pretty sure they had broken the man’s chest plate. It was this profound, cinematic moment—you just couldn’t believe it was really happening. But for those working in the ER, this sort of thing happened all day, especially in the time of COVID.

Philip Montgomery, Dr. Sherry Melton (center) moves a gurney after transferring a COVID-19 patient from the emergency department to the intensive care unit, Lincoln Medical Center, Bronx, New York, April, 2020, for The New York Times Magazine

Ryan: What was your interaction like with the health-care workers? How do you communicate when there’s that kind of chaos unfolding?

Montgomery: I would try to read the room. Everybody was in N95 masks and face shields. I could see through the shield, and so if someone’s eyes locked on me, I could nod. I could sense how they were feeling, and how busy they were. A lot of the time, I was just trying to stay the hell out of the way.

The set of questions I always asked was: “What do you want us to see? What is important for the public to see?” Given the moment with COVID, a lot of doctors were pretty clear about what they wanted to convey to the world, and they largely wanted to reinforce how serious the situation was.

Ryan: In addition to documenting the news and capturing the first visual draft of history unfolding, many photojournalists hope and think and believe that the work they do will provoke some kind of change. What were you hoping the photographs in the hospitals would do in terms of provoking change?

Montgomery: After all that I had seen, I was hoping they would terrify and galvanize the public into taking preventive measures recommended by scientists, namely social distancing and mask wearing. I was hoping the photographs would spark a collective show of respect for the severity of the disease and the sacrifices by the frontline workers combating it.

How did you feel, as the director of photography at the magazine, receiving those pictures?

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Ryan: I was shocked. When the pictures came in, it was worse than I could even have imagined—the amount of people crowded into the rooms in the hospital, and the number of health-care workers who were there. It was literally like nothing I’d seen. The project was so emotionally wrenching, partly because of what we were seeing in the hospitals, the speed we were working at, the risks you were taking, and the fact that it was in our own city. Honestly, that did make it different.

We had all just left our lives as we knew them. We’ve vacated our offices. We’re working from home. And we’re producing this photo-essay that’s going to be extremely important, and hopefully have exactly the impact you were hoping for—which would be to get people to change their behavior and wear masks. This was in March, when there was still a lot of trying to convince people how serious COVID was and how important it was to wear masks and social distance. I felt acutely the unusual experience of producing and editing the photographs while, at the same time, living through this heartrending moment in our city’s history. When this issue came out, the response was huge. It was the first, I think, really major moment when a photo essay kind of showed what it was like, showed everything.

As you were working in the hospitals, it sadly became clear that the next part of your coverage of the pandemic in New York would be to photograph how New Yorkers are mourning their dead. In April, we arranged for you to spend time at the Farenga Brothers Funeral Home in the Bronx. The idea was that you would photograph the Farenga brothers as they guided families through the mourning process, and you would photograph the families mourning their lost loved ones. One of the first things you did was photograph Nick Farenga retrieving one of those bodies out of a trailer outside a hospital. How did you find the strength to make pictures witnessing that?

Philip Montgomery, Gurmit Kaur, left, with her five daughters at the small service held for Paramjit Singh Purewal at the Farenga Brothers Funeral Home, Bronx, New York, April 2020, for The New York Times Magazine

Montgomery: I never quite know how to answer that question. The responsibility of the task at hand far outweighs any sort of internal conflict I may have. When I’m working on stories of this significance, there’s not much consideration for myself. There’s no question of, Can I do this or can I not? I absolutely must.

When I was photographing in the hospitals, the refrigerated trucks being used as temporary morgues were a dark reality, but they were also a mystery. In order to convey the urgency of the pandemic, the public needed to see inside these hidden places. So when we gained access to a funeral home, I thought it was an imperative piece of the story.

The scene inside the funeral home was the evidence. There were bodies stacked on top of bodies. Nick, one of the funeral directors, had to retrieve a body for a family, and he had to move multiple bodies from the shelves to do so. It was completely surreal. He was professional, and at that point he’d done this countless times. For him, it was just work. For me, being there was work as well, but it required another level of focus and sensitivity.

Ryan: I felt you showed a tenderness on the part of Nick and Sal Farenga. That is difficult, harsh stuff, lifting a body bag off the shelf. The moment that you captured, there’s a tenderness to the way that he’s holding it, and his head is bent down. I only wanted to mention that because you’ve got to make pictures that people can bear to look at.

At the time, New York was becoming totally unbearable for everyone—for the people who were losing people, for the people who were trying desperately to save lives. It was just a difficult, difficult time. And you want people to be able to look at this picture. And a lot of people think, Oh, I can’t look at that picture inside that trailer, with all the bodies stacked up on the shelves. We never would have thought we’d see something like that in the city.

I felt something similar in your photograph of Sal preparing a body for the embalming procedure, a close-up of his gloved hand as he’s washing the hand of the body. There’s something about it that feels almost religious. What is your memory of that one?

Montgomery: Sal and Nick are tough men. But when they were doing their work, they implemented a sensitivity that was really surprising and beautiful. I say surprising just because of their demeanors. They’re from the Bronx. They’re a little rough around the edges. So that juxtaposition was striking.

In the photograph that you’re describing, while Sal’s embalming a body, he’s carrying on a conversation with one of his staff members, and it’s like how you or I would talk to a colleague in the office, but he’s also still, at the same time, displaying this great respect for the process. I think that’s why the picture presented itself to me. His hands were so delicate in handling the hands of the deceased.

I’m sure, in your job at the magazine, you have to ask, How do you show bodies of the deceased? Does that change if they are Americans or foreigners? You must have had this conversation many times throughout your career. It’s harder for an American readership to see stories close to home. What were the internal discussions around that, especially considering this story was in our backyard?

Philip Montgomery, Gurmit Kaur at a viewing for her husband, Paramjit Singh Purewal, Farenga Brothers Funeral Home, Bronx, New York, April 2020, for The New York Times Magazine

Ryan: We approached it with tremendous care, and every step of the way we were extremely careful to protect the privacy of the patients. It was hard to do the story without showing bodies, and we were committed to making sure that with every picture we showed one could see that the body was being treated with dignity.

The Purewal family agreed to give you full access to document the funeral service of Paramjit Singh Purewal. Mr. Purewal’s wife had just recovered from COVID herself and been released from the hospital in time to mourn her husband. For the cover of that issue, we decided to go with the picture of Mr. Purewal lying in the casket, and his wife is stroking his head, and her hand is gloved. So the gloved hand indicates this moment in time, this year of 2020, with COVID, and the fact that she had to wear gloves to touch her deceased husband one of the last times she’s going to see his body.

Right up until the end, I was very nervous and concerned and hopeful that the Purewal family would be okay with this decision. We don’t seek approval for how we’re going to use the pictures in the magazine. It’s understood that they know they’re being photographed for The New York Times Magazine and that, ultimately, we’ll decide which images to use. But in this particular photo-essay, I remember wanting to be confident that the family members would feel good about the picture because it was very courageous of the Purewal family to agree to this project. You managed to make brutally honest documentary pictures of the horrendous loss of lives and, at the same time, incredibly honest pictures of tender love, just gentle enough that the people who were pictured in them were accepting of the images.

Montgomery: In each of those scenes, and in other stories I’ve worked on where I’m meeting someone on arguably the toughest day of their life, whether that’s an opioid overdose or a funeral in the wake of COVID, I ask myself, What if that were my father or my mother?

I thought that cover image spoke to how our process of mourning, and our process of engaging death in the time of COVID, has dramatically changed, and how traumatic that could be for a family, from New York, where the funeral homes were completely overwhelmed, funerals were limited and socially distanced, and a lot of New Yorkers were begging funeral homes to help them retrieve loved ones whose bodies had been stored in these trailers for days or weeks.

Ryan: Being denied the chance to even attend the funerals of their loved ones.

Montgomery: Exactly.

Ryan: I also think the cover image, because of the light that you brought to it, gave it a little bit of a celestial feel. Without that deft lighting, the picture might not have transcended to the degree that it does, where it feels spiritual.

Montgomery: At the magazine, news moves at a different cadence. But when you have these moments, 9/11, or the peak of the pandemic in New York, where does your mind go as a photography director, when a story is dominating the whole world? What was your headspace at the beginning of the pandemic?

Philip Montgomery, Members of the Sharks in director Ivo van Hove’s reimagining of West Side Story, Manhattan, New York, December 2019, for The New York Times Magazine

Ryan: I would say it all started with Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine, literally on the night before we vacated the New York Times building for what’s now turned out to be at least a year. Who knew? We thought we’d be back in weeks. The COVID crisis was huge at that point in Italy, and it was really just starting to become the issue that it became in New York. Jake said that the story was going to be huge, and be with us for months, and that he wanted to cover it in a big way photographically.

So I knew what I needed to do. I said we should put you on assignment for a month. When I first reached out to you, we didn’t even know what we were going to be covering. The likelihood was it would be the hospitals. Clearly that was at the top of the list. But at that point, we didn’t have an actual assignment, to say, “We’d like you to go to the hospitals tomorrow and the day after.” We weren’t there yet. But it was very clear that major things were happening, and happening in our city, and I desperately wanted us to be able to document it.

Your pictures make people slow down. They make me think of the sort of golden era of Life magazine, when people really stared at a picture. It’s so hard now, with everybody looking on their phones, and pictures go by so quickly. Before the COVID crisis took hold, the last assignment you had done for us, in January, was to go into the studio on a big theatrical shoot. We were doing a cover story coming up on the remake of West Side Story on Broadway, and literally the weekend before it was due to go into previews, we got permission and access for you to photograph the whole cast of dancers and singers in the studio. The producer of West Side Story arranged for them to go there on a Sunday, and theyspent a long day with you.

You got them dancing, singing, reenacting scenes from the musical, doing their own thing—a little bit of everything. It was an extraordinarily joyous day. The youthful energy and enthusiasm and excitement was bouncing off the walls, because for the majority, I think about thirty of these actors, it was their first Broadway role. It just was magical.

In a way, it’s almost like I still cannot believe that none of us that day, none of us, could have anticipated that within two months all Broadway shows would be shut down, theaters would go dark. These poor actors are out of a job. This iconic picture of them, which I thought just defined youth and vitality, ends up being ancient history within two months.

Montgomery: I don’t know about you, but that was the last time I had fun with the craft of photography. The last photographs I made before the pandemic were during a studio shoot with Matthew McConaughey in LA. Since then, I’ve photographed New York’s empty streets, COVID testing sites, Wall Street as the stock market crashed, John F. Kennedy Airport as it shuttered. Last year, two days before Thanksgiving, I photographed the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center. The initial excitement at seeing the skyline quickly gave way to sadness. Being up there, I began to unpack the profound transformation both our city and our nation had experienced.

Philip Montgomery, The Rainbow Room, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, two days before Thanksgiving, November 2020, for Aperture
All photographs courtesy the artist

Ryan: The first couple of months of the pandemic, when I would look at this picture of the West Side Story cast, so happy and full of excitement about their future, it would make me sad. Now, I look at it and have a different reaction—it’s a picture about faith. You’ve got to have faith in New York.

Montgomery: Absolutely. What I’m so proud of in this city is the collective understanding of what we all experience as one. Since those photoshoots, I’ve traveled a bit throughout the country, and nowhere else is operating like New York in terms of being cautious and considering thy neighbor. That gives me optimism in our path forward. At the beginning, we would see people flee the city—at the first sign of trouble, folks were out. For you and me, people who are over the-top in our love for New York, it’s like, What? Are you crazy? We go down with the ship.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the title “Life and Death in an American City.”

Philip Montgomery’s first monograph, American Mirror, will be published by Aperture in fall 2021.

Picturing One Brooklyn Family’s Life and Love

Too much weight is often placed on the value of an outsider’s vision, presumed to be clear and unfettered. But what of the insider? He who can witness more intimately what the outsider cannot. That has long been Rafael Rios’s prerogative. The New York–based photographer’s images center on his extended Puerto Rican family, many of whom have lived in the same Fort Greene house since his aunt and uncle bought it in the early 1980s. Growing up, he and his parents lived on the top floor, his cousins on the second, and his aunt and uncle on the ground floor. His work tells the story of this house as much as it does that of his family members. And both are memorialized in his aptly titled 2018 book, Family, which contains images taken over an eight-year period, from 1999 to 2007.

Multigenerational living is common among Latinx and other immigrant families in New York, driven by economic necessity and tight-knit family values. In the mountainside village, in the Dominican Republic, where my family is from, relatives often live in clusters—small, multihued houses built near enough to each other that one can easily pop in for coffee or make lunch a neighborhood affair.

Rafael Rios, Getting ready for the party, 2004

In New York, driven by necessity, my extended family replicated that communal living. We grew up in two- or three-bedroom apartments where every second at home was a shared one, every space communal. My father bought his own home when I was a teenager, and we all moved in there, separated only by wooden beams and drywall. This sort of setup is becoming more common in the United States. A 2016 analysis of census data indicated that 20 percent of the population, or sixty-four million people, were living with multiple generations in a home—particularly in Latinx and Asian households. Rios documents the intimacy of this arrangement in his photographs.

Rafael Rios, Marcus on Thanksgiving, 2002

Over the years, Rios has captured his family at play and at rest, braiding one another’s hair or lying twisted in an embrace. When his aunt got sick, he took his camera to the hospital and photographed her cackling into a ventilator and later, at home, family members crowding into bed with her. “Families gather for parties, or when something bad is happening,” Rios says. He shows his family in various states of gathering, for both quotidian and special occasions. Rios also presents the same people in different contexts, and across time.

Rafael Rios, Mom sanitizing her hands, 2020

Gathering is much more difficult and dangerous now, during the pandemic, and the focus of Rios’s camera has necessarily narrowed, homing in on his partner, Jassine, and his daughter, René, who was born in June of 2020. “All of René’s life has been in quarantine,” Rios tells me. He returned to the family home and took a photograph of his mother standing in front of a framed portrait of herself from Family, wearing a mask and sanitizer in hand, seemingly mid-pump. She held René for the first time only recently. In another image, Jassine sits on a park bench with René, a black mask pulled down underneath her chin.

Rafael Rios, Mom in her room, 2003. All 2020 photographs for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

These photographs reflect how the pandemic is forcing us all into isolation, testing our bonds. When I got COVID 19 in late November, many family members dropped medicinal teas and food at my doorstep. One night, my aunt came by. She left tearfully saying, “I love you,” and “I can’t be with you.” As if trying to reconcile the two statements. There is joy in gathering, but perhaps there is a different sort of connection to be found in our new reality, a renegotiation of family love—an air kiss rather than a physical one, a delayed reunion rather than a tragic one.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the title “Family.”

In New York’s Parks, Images That Make Us Long for Connection

I happened to be reading Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977) when these photographs by Widline Cadet landed in my in-box. Although, Cadet’s photographs might have a more likely kinship with Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), his highly personal study, in which he writes that “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.”

Eyes closed, I tried to re-create my own version of these images, which would remain with me long after they were out of sight. What persisted was their coupling and twinning, what in a mix of Haitian Creole and English (Crenglish) one might call their marasa-ness.

In a section on “figures” in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes, “A figure is established if at least someone can say: ‘That’s so true! I recognize that scene of language.’” It is those types of scenes and unspoken languages that keep bringing me back to Cadet’s photographs.

Widline Cadet, Untitled (Marsha and Tashae), 2020

Here is an unseen hand offering a blessing to an openly receptive face peacefully receiving it, with eyes closed. The hand might belong to a healer, and the gesture a type of prayer. Here is the elder who’s accepting her own blessing, through embrace, while both she and the person embracing her are out in the cold. Here they are, these same two Black women of different generations meeting, or reuniting. Was one lost and is now found? Here are two young women, near mirror images of each other, almost, but not quite, marasa, or twins. Are they sisters? Lovers? Friends? Sister friends?

These scenes, made in New York parks and collected in a series Cadet calls Soft (2017–20), capture figures who also seem like memories or dreams. Here I can’t help but see my mother and me, my daughters and me. Among a series of recollections that these photographs sparked, this particular memory lingers.

Widline Cadet, Untitled (Ebony and Gail), 2017

When my oldest daughter was six years old, we took my mother to the airport so she could return to her home in Brooklyn, after a long visit with us in Miami. We waited for Manman, as I called her—my daughter called her Grann—to clear security and wave goodbye to us before disappearing into a crowd of other travelers. As an adult, taking Manman to the airport and watching her leave was one of the most recurrently painful moments involving my mother and me. Each time we had to experience this particular ritual, I wanted to scream because these moments reminded me of my first concrete childhood memory, which was of being separated from my mother on the day she left Haiti for the United States when I was four years old. No one had told me that she was leaving without me, and that we would only be reunited in Brooklyn when I was twelve. When it came time for her to walk toward the plane, my body had to be peeled off of hers. Mysteriously, or perhaps not mysteriously, that day, as my six-year-old daughter and I watched my mother merge into the crowd heading toward her gate at the airport in Miami, my daughter screamed, “Manman!” I was too concerned with consoling her to ask her why she let out that particular cry, at that particular moment—years later she does not remember this at all—but it felt as though the part of me that was inside of my daughter had gone back in time to help me scream.

“Absence persists—I must endure it,” Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse. This cross-generational absence persisted in my daughter, and persists, too, in these striking and moving photographs by my fellow Haitian, who moved to New York in 2002, when she was ten years old. I felt somewhat vindicated in what seemed like an overreach in imposing my own absences on Cadet’s photographs when I read some words she shared in a 2019 interview with Zora J Murff of the Strange Fire artist collective. “My mother’s parents, for example, died before I was born and there aren’t any pictures of them anywhere that I could find. The same thing could be said about my siblings and I, of when we were growing up in Haiti,” Cadet stated. “I feel more desperate to have an image of them as a point of reference and remembrance when memories start to fail. In addition to that, I honestly just get fed up with the way people produce and distribute images of Black bodies.”

Widline Cadet, Untitled (Nene and Beryl), 2020. All photographs from the series Soft
Courtesy the artist

Entering Cadet’s world makes me long for a type of physical contact and familial intimacy that for now has been put on hold. Here are Black bodies that have not yet become the battlefields of a deadly virus. Here are maskless people lovingly touching one another, intergenerationally. “Here we are,” Cadet’s subjects seem to be telling us with their tender gazes and gestures. Absence persists, but we will endure. Nou la toujou. Each photograph is an amulet and a memorial, and a welcome breath of fresh air.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the title “Absence Persists.”

Zoe Leonard’s Elegiac Images of Downtown New York

Zoe Leonard made the twenty-one photographs that compose her series Downtown (for Douglas) on the occasion of her friend, the late art critic and curator Douglas Crimp’s much-loved publication Before Pictures (2016). Leonard’s photographs depict the various residences and neighborhoods Crimp called his own during his first decade in New York City—between 1967, the year he moved from his home state of Idaho to an apartment in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem, and 1976, the year before he curated the groundbreaking Pictures exhibition, moving downtown into a loft apartment in the landmark Bennett Building, “pretending,” he writes in the book, “to be an office tenant.”

Leonard’s series appears as double-page spreads before each discrete section of Crimp’s book, as would establishing shots in the sequence of frames that constitute the narrative flow of film, introducing Crimp’s readers to the writer by taking us to his doorstep—where Crimp would go before and after work, or ballet class, or a night dancing at Crisco Disco or the Cock Ring. If being queer, as Crimp defines in the preface, “is a matter of a world you inhabit, not something you simply are,” then we might read Leonard’s unpeopled, site-specific photographs as queer, in that they only indirectly suggest the various possibilities of what they define: not the sex, for instance, but the temporality of fantasy that leads up to it—the erotic activity we could call “waiting.”

Zoe Leonard, Downtown (for Douglas), 2016

One image depicts a waiting area near a turnstile in Fulton Street station (a central transit hub in Manhattan’s Financial District, recently refashioned as a food hall and mini-mall). Leonard provides a layered composite of surfaces—grimy tiles, placards, and serif fonts; light fixtures and floors—emblematic to the subway system’s design and the elements of our peripheral attention that are likely to linger in the short-term memory of an actively commuting New Yorker, as Crimp once was. In framing this leitmotif, Leonard’s photograph asks the viewer to reinterpret the principles that organize our sense of the familiar. I find something similar at work in Crimp’s memoir, which resurfaces primary documents from the writer’s past—for example, a “cringe-worthy” notation from a Moroccan cookbook he cowrote, or the lengthy excerpts of art criticism reproduced across the volume—without too much hand-holding. As in Leonard’s photograph, Crimp captures the amalgam of discourses imminent to the emergence of “downtown” as it gained purchase as a cultural touchstone. What did downtown mean before 1977? What does it mean now—and for whom?

In her 4Columns review of Survey, Leonard’s 2018 retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, the critic Johanna Fateman points out the “poetic measure of time” one may glean from Leonard’s sculptural works, as from her photographs; their framing of the quotidian having the powerful effect, Fateman writes, of an “impersonal particularity.” The photographs in Downtown (for Douglas), for example—of the exteriors of apartment buildings and interiors of subway stations—are all of spaces that are public; their crisp registration in Leonard’s photographs details the striking features of the banal spaces we share. I’m reminded of fellow downtowner Joe Brainard’s incantatory memoir from the same era, I Remember (1975), in which a procedural conceit (to reconstruct a memory in writing starting with the phrase “I remember”) is used to catalogue impressions, encounters, and misapprehensions. Personality is sieved out as pithy insight or charm, and readers get a sense of the various social systems to which Brainard belonged.“[I Remember] is about everybody else as much as it is about me,” writes Brainard in a letter to the poet Anne Waldman. “And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can.”

Zoe Leonard, Downtown (for Douglas), 2016

As part of Before Pictures: New York City 1967–1977 at Galerie Buccholz in New York, curated by Crimp in 2016, Leonard’s Downtown prints hung at eye level in the front corridor alongside photos from Alvin Baltrop’s striking piers series and archival prints made for George Balanchine’s production of Igor Stravinsky’s Agon (1957). The only contemporary artist included in the show, Leonard’s images of New York produced, if memory serves, a kind of strobing effect. When hung in a row, the dark canals of the subway stations interspersed with reflective abstractions that appear in the windows of Crimp’s homes (in one window is the reflection of a Subway fast-food restaurant) generate a visual equivalent to the glamorous nightlife Crimp writes about.

Looking at Leonard’s photographs now, more than four harrowing years after this exhibition, they seem to ask other questions about how mobility works within, and beyond, the art world. I’ve always read Before Pictures as a book that is not only about jobs but also the kinds of access and mobility—both geographic and social—a job in the arts afforded one specific writer. But what happens next?

Zoe Leonard, Downtown (for Douglas), 2016
All photographs courtesy the artist; Galerie Capitain, Cologne; and Hauser & Wirth, New York

Leonard’s black-and-white images of empty subway stations reflect an underfunded and mismanaged municipal institution whose ridership dropped catastrophically in the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. Its passengers were essential workers only, for the first few months—until the summer came, and the George Floyd uprisings found the city’s populous rioting on foot, across the streets of every borough; we learned how to move again. As the artist and writer Hannah Black wrote in her adieu to 2020 for Artforum, “A riot can’t resurrect the dead, but it can resurrect the dead spaces of cities.” New York City had, meanwhile, responded with perverse enthusiasm to the conditions brought about by the public health crisis, repopulating the vacant subways with a battery of newly hired, idling, armed police officers to persecute the thousands of New Yorkers left homeless by their attempt to survive winter in a pandemic. I see in Leonard’s images the curious, uncompromising qualifier one must accept if one wants to survive in America: get to work, or else.

Read more about New York City in Aperture, issue 242, “New York.”