Issue 51 - Contents

During the 61st Venice Biennale, Nancy Spector’s Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina functioned as America’s unofficial pavilion. The exhibition is ultimately ‘about’ America, writes Peter Watkins – its images, violences, fantasies and distortions – but that ambition is also where its problems sharpen, as the pairing of Jafa and Prince threatens to compress two complex practices into an overly neat art-world conversation.

Farren van Wyk’s first solo museum exhibition, at Fotomuseum Den Haag, turns the camera towards her own family while drawing on the visual histories of anthropological photography, portraiture and colonial representation. Born to a South African mother and Dutch father, Van Wyk was classified as ‘coloured’ before moving to the Netherlands at the age of six. In Mixedness is My Mythology, made with her parents and brothers on the family farm in Putten, her carefully staged analogue photographs explore how identity is shaped through pose, performance and the act of representation itself. Bas Blaasse writes about a body of work that examines how photography negotiates the terms of visibility, revealing how family, history and belonging are not only recorded but constructed through images.

Katherine Hubbard’s The Great Room has the makings of a modern classic, and its presentation at Vienna’s Secession marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition outside the U.S. Joining Hubbard and her circle on the opening night, Peter Watkins finds something stranger and less settled than a documentary about dementia, caregiving or the ethics of consent. Staged photographs, mirrors, bodily contact prints, and reconstructed rooms show a mother and daughter continually remaking their roles, testing who looks, who holds power, and what it costs to make grief public.

Guided by Mark Sealy’s artistic direction, the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg brings together 279 international artists across 11 exhibitions throughout the city, centred on the theme Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other. Drawing on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, bell hooks and others, the festival reimagines photography as an ethical encounter, inviting viewers to consider alterity, difference and the possibility of a shared future. Visiting the Deichtorhallen, Tim Clark notes the boldness of this approach, observing how love in art and exhibition-making risks smoothing over structural inequalities, yet done right, might prompt us to consider what photography can help us become, rather than simply what it can depict. 

Co-published by Thames & Hudson and V&A, Fiona Rogers’ Cut Out is a 240-page dive into photo collage, photomontage and assemblage, framing the cut as both a technique and a way of thinking. From Lorna Simpson’s cosmic reworking of the pin-up and Helen Chadwick’s visceral blue photocopies to the Surrealist experiments of Claude Cahun and Dora Maar, Rogers traces how artists have pulled photography apart to make it speak in new ways. Anneka French reads Cut Out as a wide-ranging account of feminist image-making, arguing that Rogers connects practices shaped by race, colonialism, climate, and digital technology to a broader challenge to photography’s claims of authority, visibility and possession.

At Fotografiska Berlin, Phillip Toledano’s Edward Trevor: Never Seen the Light appeared to offer a photographic miracle: a lost family archive, a dead father, a box of negatives, and New York in the 1930s and 40s. But Edward Trevor was no forgotten street photographer; the archive was fiction, the images AI-generated. Taking that bait-and-switch as a serious critical provocation rather than a clever gimmick, Mark Durden asks what Toledano's synthetic street scenes actually reveal about authorship, memory, beauty, deception, and the so called ‘post-photographic’ age. What they expose, he suggests, is not the richness of artificial imagination, but a frictionless, overdetermined street photography by numbers. 

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Curating & Repair

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Features

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