Category: Issue

An art of distance: Hervé Guibert’s The Only Face

French writer Hervé Guibert (1955–1991) was the author of twenty-five novels and autobiographical works, but he also took photographs. The Only Face, Guibert’s second and final collection of photographs, was originally published on the occasion of a 1984 solo exhibition at Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris and has now been reissued by Magic Hour Press. Presented in its original sequence, this new edition largely comprises images of small private interiors, revealing itself not merely as an exhibition in book form, but as a novel in its own right, one that speaks to community, friendship and the distances that both separate and sustain them, writes Thomas King.

Thomas King | Book review | 27 Nov 2025
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‘To liberate every secret, to invent them’ was, for Hervé Guibert, the stake of artistic courage and the measure of friendship. In his roman à clef To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), he introduced the character ‘Muzil,’ a thinly disguised Michel Foucault, and used him to recount previously untold stories from his friend and lover’s life. Following the book’s release, he appeared on French national television amid the furore it stirred to defend his disclosures, speaking of what he called a shared “common thanatological destiny” between the two men living with AIDS, which was to tragically end both their lives.

Some months after Foucault’s death, 6 years prior, Le Seul Visage (The Only Face) (1984) formed the basis of Guibert’s exhibition at Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris. Now reissued by Magic Hour Press, with images presented in their original sequence, the deceptively modest and slender volume of photographs reveals itself as a Guibertian novel in its own right. Characters move through and recede from its pages, and in its distinct photographic narrative mode, Guibert refuses to ground a community in a stable, constituent body, the very condition that elsewhere attests to the violence that keeps it intelligible.

This can be explained in part by Guibert and Foucault’s ways of considering homosexuality and friendship together against ‘the recognition that we are.’ Of course Foucault devoted much of his life to showing that the very idea of an ‘essential self’ must be abandoned; the task is not to uncover a hidden truth about who we are, but to renounce the search altogether, while Guibert’s ‘homosexuality’ has been described as ‘a quietly revolutionary stance in line with his particular brand of rebelliousness’.

It’s in this spirit that Guibert’s diaries anticipate a novel that will never be written, yet become novelistic through their ‘fictious’ narratives. From the moment Guibert writes ‘I’, any attempt to distinguish between figuration and the real is dismantled. By putting his body ‘at risk’ within narrations, situations, relations, as he writes, he becomes ‘his own character,’ neither seeking to return to nor magnify subjectivity. As the question is posed on the back cover of The Only Face: ‘Isn’t a book with figures and places a novel?’

The Only Face begins with bodies withheld, faces averted or obscured, silhouettes held just out of reach in the dimly lit interiors of private rooms. ‘Sienna’ recalls André Masson’s headless figure seated at a desk, slumped forward, bathed in a soft yet piercing beam of light from the open window, a thin plume of mist rising from the body. ‘The Friend,’ the first image, shows only a hand pressed firmly against the centre of a chest, establishing from the outset a tension and ambiguous relationality that resonates throughout. It is an image of distance, an art of distance.

Its rising action takes place through a series of portraits in which the characters ‘appear’ under their first names. Guibert photographs his parents and himself under the title ‘Moi’. French actress Isabelle Adjani, who haunts his writings, also enters the frame at the Jardin des Plantes. His gallerist, Agathe Gaillard, and his friend Thierry Jouno appear. So too does Mathieu Lindon, another soul who ‘shared their time, drugs, ambitions, and writings with the older Foucault,’ and the latter, famously pictured in a yukata in his Paris apartment, the meeting place for such activities.

I look at these images knowing Guibert’s refusal to be labelled a photographer meant, for him, an attention only to the relational: bearing witness, as he writes in the introduction, only to his ‘love’ for these bodies – the way they crash together or fail to, and the impermanence of presence that attends all such intimacies. Brigitte Ollier writes, ‘There was no parade, [Guibert’s] portraits were infused by simplicity, as if he were trying to conjure up, or get rid of, the mysterious link between him and his nearest and dearest.’

This ‘simplicity’ lies in what Guibert later describes as his ‘fractious, careful, and suspicious’ approach to photography, with shooting being a kind of liturgy for him. His attention to the ‘mysterious link’ and his play with narrative and framing to preserve its elusiveness recall the story behind the photograph titled ‘East Berlin.’ Lindon once recalled the outing when the image was made; later, having read Guibert’s account, Lindon told Foucault, ‘It hadn’t happened like that.’ Foucault replied: ‘Only false things happen to him.’

And yet, through the artifice of ‘falseness,’ friendship is conceived not as the affirmation of an interior ‘I,’, but its dislocation. Friendship, it has been argued, does not arise from recognising sameness or identity between subjects, but from exposure to internal dispossession, a desubjectification where the self no longer fully coincides with itself. It involves recognising one another only alongside an awareness of their finitude, the ongoing possibility of betrayal and irreconcilable strangeness; it is ‘precisely not recognising the self in the Other and not sharing common ground,’ that gives friendship its ‘particular queer, and thus activist, valence,’ writes Tom Roach. That is to say, Guibert’s portraits dwell in the nothingness at the heart of relationality. And friendship renders this nothingness (which is not the obliteration of difference, rather the opposite) tangible as proximity, and as an awareness of the singular, incommunicable death that eludes possession. There is a subtle, revealing power in these photographs, especially when they are seen as reflecting Guibert’s evolving concept of friendship – which recalls Patrick Ffrench’s musing that ‘The friend speaks to the friend already from beyond the grave, if the friend speaks to the friend at all… .’

What fascinates the young Guibert, though, is not the inventory of mortality that photography could provide, but what remains beyond its reach in the intervals, the silences and the margins. Of note is his preference for tight angles, paintings, windows; the light that enters at the side, the slanted shapes, the objects suspended as if condemned to an eternal foreground. Even the emptiest spaces seem quietly inhabited. All is relentlessly methodical.

These thoughts press harder with the images that follow, where his beloved bodies, no longer his characters, remain only as the image of absence. A pair of photographs titled ‘Writing’ shows a desk strewn with handwritten letters; the other, a figure turned away, seen from above. ‘Reading,’ taken from beneath the desk, draws depth from minimal means, with a book just about visible in the distance. The same sense of absence animates ‘Interior’ and ‘Cannes Festival,’ where one is replaced by a scattering of belongings – a blazer, a camera, a taxidermy owl, marbles in another. The titles are again sober and the images austere.

Writing in Narcissus in Bloom: An Alternative History of the Selfie, Mattie Colquhoun says, ‘Guibert loses himself in this fractal representation of atemporal non-selves, becoming alongside the objects in his possession. He makes himself hidden, emancipating from the gaze of self and other.’ As such The Only Face reminds us that community and friendship, absent among those who are there, are both an actuality and a potentiality. They are, what Maurice Blanchot describes: ‘an existence shattered through and through, composing itself only as it decomposes itself constantly, violently, and in silence.’ ♦

All images courtesy the Hervé Guibert Archive and Magic Hour Press.
© Hervé Guibert

—
Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and currently undertaking an MA in Literary Studies (Critical Theory) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Ryudai Takano’s collisions of a sensing body

Ryudai Takano’s photography, now on view at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, asks us to recognise the body not just as a subject of the image, but as an actor, agent and sense-maker within the exhibition experience. Moving through his installations across multiple visits, Duncan Wooldridge writes that Takano’s staging of seriality, surprise and fragmentary montage – spanning portraits, cityscapes, photograms, and experimental display methods – unseats fixed categories of photography to reveal a field of continuous becoming.

Duncan Wooldridge | Exhibition review | 20 Nov 2025
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In his recent exhibition at Tokyo Photographic Museum, now open at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Ryudai Takano makes tangible how bodies interact, catalyse and collide. In and around his images, the body is more than a subject matter: it is an actor, an agent, a sensor, and a sense-maker. Even though two of Takano’s most well-known motifs are his portraits and the studies of the figure, he calls upon us to take the body as more than something to be observed or placed on display.

Entering the exhibition space, open plan but with many columns and freestanding walls inserted by the artist, a wide array of work appears visible – a first play on the exhibition model of the ‘survey’, which provides a feast for the eyes. But this perception of an overview is quickly shattered: the viewer’s own body is called upon: there are no prompts nor prescriptive paths about how to begin, and the exhibition has an infinite number of routes. Seriality and surprise are held in a balance. If for a moment the display coheres in our visual field, it is fractured with only an extra step. New combinations appear, and specific sightlines, once smooth, become increasingly complex. On my first visit, I stepped to the left towards a cityscape image, to reveal a sequence of works from the series Kasubaba 2 – large studies of the city’s junk spaces and chaotic interminglings, where Takano has recorded areas of the city he initially wanted to reject or characterise as ugly or disordered, as a challenge to his own aesthetic assumptions. Such images form part of a much larger inquiry about how photography can be used to contest conventional modes of seeing.

Across from these cityscapes are studies from the related Daily Snapshots, which move between outer and inner worlds with a poetics drawing attention to the ordinary and extraordinary. From visual cues of the city (repeated views of Tokyo Tower from the artist’s apartment) to haptic impressions from the kitchen table, we’re momentarily rooted in a space that feels structured, oriented around place. With a step or two more, the exhibition is no longer so linear: in view, a monumental photogram of two bodies climbs the wall; then another photogram – this time smaller, showing a pair of hands, one in focus, the other soft – appearing close to the moment of touch (though this is an illusion: one is near and the other further away, close only on resulting the picture plane). Suddenly our own bodies become visible as shadows. Our trace is caught in a light installation which lifts our image up along the wall – speaking to Takano’s engagement with the Japanese avant-garde and the work of Jiro Takamatsu, whose shadows replaced the object in a series of paintings. Cast in front of us, our shadow is not only visible here, but is seen by a camera, which relays that image once more onto a new screen. We are suddenly multiple – what was a solitary space has become crowded.  

But let’s start over. Takano’s photography is made of prompts, catalysts and collisions. A sense of possibility is drawn out of what are sometimes recognisable visual forms. In many of his works we feel at first as though we are on stable ground: a cityscape, an observational image, a full-length portrait. This is even true of the photogram, or short video works, experiments with flatbed scanners and a concern for the installation environment. But as his projects are increasingly seen in relation, it becomes clear that Takano’s work cannot be explained through style or any of our standard visual categories. He is neither a documentarian nor chronicler, and even less does he seem to be an auteur, constructing a way of seeing with a singular sensibility. Instead, he unseats assumptions – and gives access to a distinctive and critical multiplicity that is crucial to Japanese photography but rarely foregrounded in exhibitions which tour to the West.

On my next visit, I entered and headed right. Presented first to the body, below waist height and laid out in vitrines, are works from the 1:1 series – which promise reality, showing as they do bodies printed to actual size. Close scrutiny of the images reveals they are made up of accumulated exposures – sheet film images stacked and printed together, so that a small black line becomes visible at the join of each frame. Lifelike in their scale, they are nevertheless fragmentary, making visible a significant photographic conundrum: to photograph the body wholly captured by the lens, with less detail, or to record its subtle, distinguishing features, but to need an image that is assembled from a series of parts?

Above the vitrine rests an image of a statue – its left hand covers its face, as if resisting its already ghostly representation – and an image of a shadow, fragmented so that its source is unclear. Around the perimeter wall, there are more spectral representations: documentation of one of Takano’s light installations, and a video of a train journey which proceeds at great speed, so that the architecture and waiting passengers appear only momentarily amongst a blur of transmission patterns. Each are works with specific contexts and signification, but here in their combinations and collisions, Takano reveals a concern to negotiate spaces around and between the categories that images inhabit. It might be tempting to ask of photography that it settle into a singular, almost fixed form – and for images to belong to discrete projects, and be shown in those established contexts – but what Takano reveals, as is apparent across a lineage of experimental Japanese photography to which he belongs, is that images themselves, like us, are continuously finding new patterns and new possibilities. What we see in Takano’s most fragmented, or seemingly disjunctive arrangements – are just such a concern to see in a way that is not reduced to a static positionality.

Let’s reset one last time. On my third visit, I headed straight ahead. I have not exhausted all of the available options, but neither is this plausible nor necessary. Between a two-body black and white photogram and a colour photograph of tree branches filling the frame, I step forward, moving into a space with two large colour figures from the series In My Room. These are portraits cut at the waist, a little larger than 1:1 scale, and one meets my eye when I enter. The works introduce Takano’s study of the ambiguities of sexuality and the fluidity of the self, collapsing bodily binaries to fold them into a wider interest in the one and the many: Takano’s earlier Caramaru, not on display, deliberately entangled the bodies of performers until their singularities were hard to reconstitute. In My Room is a series of photographs made, as the title suggests, by photographing subjects – whose relationship to the photographer remains unclear – in his room in a Tokyo apartment. Like Caramaru, the works are a type of performance made for the camera, a site for complexity and resistant ambiguities. They displace the privacy of the bedroom and place it into public view, at the same time as they gesture towards a debunking of the purity or hygiene of the studio.

In the portraits, a subtle ambiguity and mixing of masculine and feminine signifiers are held in suspension by the camera’s decisive half-body crop. Their gaze meets ours, intently and without compromise. Immediately around a corner from one of the portraits, the lower half of a body is hung at the same height in a spatial assemblage. The body is fragmented and sliced in two, and here offers a reconstruction. Only by moving do we make this visible, and here the body is rendered neither whole nor fixed, but subject to our curious, animating gaze. Takano is well known in Japan for having had his work with male and trans nudity censored: in his work the disappearance of genitalia is subversively dramatized even if it cannot be seen (doubly invisible to those of us brought up in a western context, who will recognise their absence, but perhaps fail to recognise a very different social and political friction. Takano is continually pushing at what an image can do or show. In its mix of the familiar and the experimental, continually shapeshifting, Takano proposes a photography concerned both with contact and touch, and which stages this concern in the form of a collision. What results is open-ended: this it seems, is a useful remedy to our concern for distinction and fixity.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Yumiko Chiba Associates. © Ryudai Takano

Ryudai Takano: kasbaba Living through the ordinary runs at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan, until 7 December 2025.

–
Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator, and is Reader in Photography at the School of Digital Arts, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of John Hilliard: Not Black and White (Ridinghouse, 2014), To Be Determined: Photography and the Future (SPBH Editions, 2021) and Co-Editor of Writer Conversations (1000 Words, 2023).

Images:

1>7-Installation views of Ryudai Takano: kasbaba Living through the ordinary at Tokyo Photographic Museum, 27 February – 8 June 2025.

8-Takano Ryudai, 2002.09.08.M.#b08 from the series Stand up, Kikuo!, 2002. 

9-Takano Ryudai, 2012.08.12.#b30 from the series Daily Snapshots, 2012

10-Takano Ryudai, 2015.10.28.#a28 from the series kasubaba 2,2015

11-Takano Ryudai, 2023.03.24.sc.#048 from the series CVD19, 2023

12-Takano Ryudai, 2019.12.31.P.#03 (Distance) from the series Red Room Project, 2019

13-Takano Ryudai, Wearing a purple camisole with lace (2005.01.09.L.#04) from the series In My Room, 2005 

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They were already here

Donna Gottschalk and Carla Williams make their French debut in Le Bal’s latest exhibition, We Others, accompanied by an interpretive text by Hélène Giannecchini. Bringing together first-person narrative and a wide range of photographs spanning decades of work to tell stories, explore invisibility and consider intergenerational connections, it is the nuance and fragility that stand out; a quiet yet political manifesto about absent bodies, writes Eve Hill-Agnus.

Eve Hill-Agnus | Exhibition review | 16 Oct 2025
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Nous Autres (We Others), the exhibition currently at Le Bal in Paris, featuring the work of American photographers Donna Gottschalk and Carla Williams, with an interpretive and curatorial text by art historian and writer Hélène Giannecchini, is a photo-literary space that interrogates lacunae and reimagines how we enter a text, an image, an exhibition.

Immediately, the images draw you in, as into a world of people you know or might hazily remember through one degree of removal, friends of friends: for example, the brick building and the water gathering along naked branches in the first photograph, titled ‘Oak,’ which is the name of the woman whose distant gaze seems plunged in reverie. I want to know what time of year the image was taken and what is behind her private trance, the semi-blur of her Mona Lisa smile. ‘Alphabet City, New York, 1969,’ the caption reads. Next to it: the casualness of a quartet of friends, cigarettes in hand. Here, ours is a plunging view, as though interrupting their conversation. ‘Chris, Oak, Binky and I, Baby Dykes—E. 9th Street, New York, 1969’ Donna Gottschalk’s chosen label tells us in what scans as shorthand.

It is a snatched moment of life, like the image of her in bed with a lover. In that tender moment, the self-consciousness of the self-portrait means they are aware of being seen, but by an insider, and the camera’s soft focus feels like a signifier of comfort, familiarity, affection.

The biographical/autobiographical element pulls the viewer into the story: Gottschalk’s anchoring in Manhattan’s Alphabet City, where her mother had a beauty salon and the portraits of neighbours, friends and lovers were the terrain of her first studies with the camera she bought in 1968, against a backdrop of suppression and the double violence of homophobia and poverty.

Hélène Giannecchini’s wall “essay” that accompanies and frames the images introduces the characters in a manner reminiscent of a work of fiction; she reactivates the archive and reinstates it in a narrative that fills in gaps with first-person subjectivity. Because We Others is, in part, about the possibilities of such a deliberately subjective narrative stance – its potential, counter-intuitively, to involve the viewer in greater levels of transparency, intimacy and, ultimately, truth. Such a stance aims to dissolve the boundaries between us and the images, us and the people in them.

“They are barely 20 years old and stare defiantly into the camera; up on the rooftops with cigarettes in their hands, propped against brick chimneys, or standing on the fire escape platform that runs the length of the facade…” the wall narrative begins.

With one sentence, intimacy becomes an atmosphere, the point of view into which I enter with an insider view that makes the temporal stakes palpable. More than a curator or theorist, Giannecchini is writer-participant, writing the narrative space between the images.

What emerges is the construction of a ‘we,’ a delicate, subtle, ambiguous but powerful synergy. We Others asks: Can we attempt to counter a misleading or reductive discourse centred on a monopoly of truth by unapologetically claiming and situating our point of view? “I don’t say what Donna is,” Giannecchini points out, “I speak about the Donna I meet.” This is an ‘other’ way of doing curatorship, of doing a show.

Part of the exhibition’s thrill is the unlikely and fortuitous way it came together. This is a story of female friendships and chance. Giannecchini arrived late one night at Gottschalk’s farm in Vermont, having heard about her work through a gallerist friend. “What’s amazing is that Donna very quickly trusted me,” Giannecchini told me over the phone. “And the fact that I returned. I told her, ‘I will be back,’” she recalls. “And I was back within the year.”

That Gottschalk entrusted Giannecchini with the negatives she had slowly been printing in spare moments of time over the past half century could be reminiscent of the passing of a baton, though the energy feels more womb than baton. The powerful subtleties of trust are cross-generational and co-generating.

Williams, who also kept her pioneering work to herself for years, is part of the trio of generational co-creational narrative hybridity. A friend of Giannecchini’s proposed a lunch in New York between the two. Unbeknownst to Williams herself, she had been living with Gottschalk for decades: a photocopied image from a book of a young woman holding a sign from a march (“I’m your worst fear, I’m your best fantasy”) was Gottschalk, young and radical.

They may live a similarly marginalised experience, but Gottschalk primarily turned her camera toward others while Williams turned it toward herself, two opposing solutions to carving out a visual history via bodies.

The work in Williams’ series Tender, the majority of which she made while an undergraduate student in the 80s, makes self-portraiture an intimate act of visibility and resistance. She is among both the ‘we’ and those who placed the quotation marks around ‘others.’ The way we change the history of photography is by questioning how we tell stories and whose stories we tell.

Part of the way the show traces other ground is in its inquiry into the intersections of class and identity. In Gottschalk’s photographs of Alphabet City from the late 60s and 70s, this place where broken windows signal the before and after of human life, words say something subtle about how we can hold bodies. I cannot help but notice the linguistic clues in the signs: “Ask about our lay-away plan” a flooring store window entices and “Senior Citizens Everyday Special” announces Alfred’s Beauty Salon, where a man, resting his hand on the back of a chair, looks at the camera. What they suggest is community, belonging. And the fragility of people helping each other through small gestures. Even the apostrophe in a shop name like “Johnny’s” suddenly strikes me as an intimate and therefore tentative form of claiming.

‘Chickie in my mother’s beauty parlor,’ is the title of Gottschalk’s portrait of her short-haired friend in bellbottoms amid the older women in her mother’s salon. It shows how much class and identity are integrated in her world. What she shows us are working-class queer folk. Embodiment and participation are enmeshed, ultimately. Extraordinarily deep empathy arises for those bodies that are so often invisible. That fragility is in Gottschalk’s work and life, a sort of invisibility held at bay. And yet one senses that she and Williams are part of a community of reciprocity and care, and of ferocity beyond words. Something holds their worlds together. Maybe it’s us. What if it were?♦

Donna Gottschalk images courtesy the artist and Marcelle Alix © Donna Gottschalk / Carla Williams images courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures © Carla Williams

Nous Autres (We Others) runs at Le Bal, Paris, until 16 November 2025.

–
Eve Hill-Agnus is a Franco-American writer, editor and translator based in Paris. Her art writing has been published in Artforum, Frieze, ARTNews, Patron, and other outlets. Her literary translation of Mariette Navarro’s novel Ultramarine (Deep Vellum, 2025) was awarded the Albertine Translation Prize.

Images:

1-Donna Gottschalk, Jill, President Street, Brooklyn, New York, 1968

2-Donna Gottschalk, Oak, Robin, Binky, Chris and I, Baby Dykes, E. 9th Street, New York, 1969

3-Donna Gottschalk, Photobooth portraits, 1966–71

4-Donna Gottschalk, Marlene, E. 9th Street, New York, 1968

5-Donna Gottschalk, Chris in a taxi, New York, 1970

6-Donna Gottschalk, Chris in a taxi, New York, 1970

7-Donna Gottschalk, Marlene and Lynn, E. 9th Street, New York, 1970

8-Donna Gottschalk, Self-portrait with JEB, E. 9th Street, New York, 1970

9-Donna Gottschalk, Self-portrait during a GLF meeting, E. 9th Street, New York, 1970

10-Donna Gottschalk, Lesbians Unite, Revolutionary Women’s Conference, Limerick, Pennsylvania, October 1970

11-Donna Gottschalk, Jill, San Francisco, 1971

12-Donna Gottschalk, San Francisco, June 1972

13-Donna Gottschalk, Myla, Sausalito, California, 1972-73

14-Donna Gottschalk, Myla, 16 years old, Mission District, San Francisco, 1972

15-Carla Williams, Untitled (bra), 1987-89 (Albuquerque)

16-Carla Williams, Untitled (face in light), 1990 (Albuquerque)

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Metabolising violence: interview with J.A. Young

We speak with the winner of the OD Photo Prize 2025, J.A. Young, who turns to an ongoing body of work wrought from trauma, research and experiments in the darkroom. Between lived experience and occult inquiry, the series, Angels considers how violence, control and intuition inscribe themselves into the materiality of hand-made prints, and what it might mean to summon images from forces that, though invisible, are anything but absent. 

Thomas King | Interview | 25 Sept 2025
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Thomas King: Can you tell us about the point of departure for Angels, recently announced as the winner of OD Photo Prize 2025? How did the research first take form and what impulse or circumstances set it in motion? And what do you wish to conjure in your choice of title?

J.A. Young: My first series, Of Fire, Far Shining (2023-24), was a collection of prints I made almost entirely on a cheap laser printer. But I knew that I eventually wanted to move into hand making each print, and I was finally able to begin that process in late 2024 after getting the space to set up my current darkroom. Angels (2024-) is exclusively composed of silver gelatin prints that I’ve created over the past year, and in part, the change in series marks this shift toward a more alchemical printing process that results in unique material objects. 

My research has always been one of the primary drivers of my creative process, and it remains a consistent source of inspiration from series to series. But it’s not necessarily the source of the new title. Like any other creative urge, a word or phrase will just flash into my mind, and I will immediately recognise it as one of my titles. It then becomes a defining element of the series, in that it’s the only predetermined concept that I’m intentionally bringing with me into the creative process. By holding the title loosely in the back of my mind, I can play with all the associations it evokes.

The angels that I’ve had in mind while making the series aren’t benevolent figures of light; they’re more like the Archons of the Gnostics or the Vedic Asuras, ethereal beings that use their power to oppress and deceive. In the images I’m creating, I’m essentially positioning modern institutions as these very angels: vast, impersonal systems of control that function with a logic that is both overwhelmingly powerful and entirely indifferent to the suffering they inflict. These are the archetypes of control, judgement and power, now embodied by algorithms, corporate monopolies and the military industrial complex. So what you see playing out across the series is the visible impact of these invisible forces.

TK: You’ve said that your work draws on lived experience, on inhabiting a world not quite one’s own. How do questions, or perhaps disturbances, of selfhood root themselves in Angels? In what ways do they contour or complicate the work?

J.A.: I’ve experienced a lot of trauma in my life, and it’s made me feel very unsafe and very isolated in the world. A lot of violence has been inflicted on me, and most of it has been in response to core facets of my identity, like the fact that I’m trans and neurodivergent, among other things. This has altered how I view being in the world and human history in general, and that shows up in the atmosphere of my images. Beyond that, I can see in my images my own feelings of claustrophobia and of desperation about the all the tragedies and crises we’re facing: it’s like everything is constantly in motion; everything is speeding up; everything is swirling around us as we barrel towards so many terrible consequences of our actions.

My spiritual experiences and my research into the occult are also directly related to how I make my art. When I work, I’m trying to open myself up completely, to allow my unconscious to move through me, and to trust that process, to trust this other part of me to which I don’t normally have access, to do the work. So it feels like I’m surrendering to my intuition and letting my body act and react to the materials that I’m using, and that itself feels like a magical process. I feel the safest I’ve felt in my life when I’m making art in this way. I feel like I’m finally allowing the emotions I’ve held in my body to bubble up, and then somehow, when I make a piece of art that holds some of those feelings, it’s as if I’ve captured it and released it from my body.

TK: What are the visual sources for the images you use as foundational material? Could you expand on the process of transformation through which your multi-layered pieces come together, and the implications for the original image? How do these material encounters take shape, constrain or release the work’s possibilities?

J.A.: I use both my own negatives and images sourced from public domain digital archives as raw materials for transformation.

The first, most important, and most radical step in my alteration of the source material is creating a new composition. I deconstruct and throw away most of the image until I arrive at a very specific composition that’s often just a small detail from the original. It feels sculptural in this sense, in that I’m removing more and more of the raw material until I arrive at an object I’m satisfied with. And every single element in every composition that I make is intentional: every detail in every corner, the tonal range in the image, the textures, the shapes, the lines, everything. It’s not that I plan it ahead of time, but I know how I want it to feel, and I keep reworking it until it clicks into place. The content of the source material itself doesn’t dictate what I end up with; it’s insufficient on its own, and if I can’t create a composition that pleases me, I throw it away.

The extent of what happens next will vary depending on the image. In my darkroom, I’m experimenting with different emulsions and paper substrates, with exposure, with time, with temperature, with the chemicals I use and how I use them. After that, I might physically alter the print or rephotograph and reprocess it in some way – whatever it takes to get to the specific qualities I’m looking for. Again, I don’t plan any of the decisions I’m going to make ahead of time. It’s a process of trial and error that’s being guided by gut feelings. Either it feels right or it doesn’t.

TK: The subjects which you frame or focus on in Angels often intimate and depict violence… Are you constructing this series with a pre-visualised sense of narrative, a deliberate mapping of feeling and effect, or does it emerge more intuitively?

J.A.: My process is fundamentally intuitive and iterative. When I’m working, I’m completely absorbed in and devoted to the specific image in front of me. I’m not thinking about a broader, pre-visualised narrative. Instead, I’m following a non-verbal, often visceral pull, judging each creative decision by the way it feels in my body. It’s a process of feeling my way toward a very specific resonance. I’ve cultivated a deep trust in this somatic guidance; a trust that if I can make each individual piece as emotionally and psychically ‘correct’ as I can, the larger narrative coherence of the series will emerge organically on its own.

When I do step back to look at several finished prints together, the recurring elements of violence don’t surprise me. While the process is intuitive, my intuition isn’t drawing from a void. It’s tapping into a well filled with a lifetime of experience and research. Because I’ve experienced a significant amount of physical and systemic violence, that trauma is stored in my body, and my art is one of the primary ways I access and metabolise it. At the same time, my research is focused on the large-scale violence of state and corporate power. In the work, I’m essentially transposing my personal, embodied experience of harm onto this macro scale. 

Ultimately, I’m not trying to predetermine the content of an image, but I am trying to embed a specific feeling. I might want to create a sense of paranoia or disorientation, for example, and I will manipulate the materials until that feeling is present. I think of each piece as a tiny, emotionally charged fragment of a much larger event that is constantly unfolding. If the fragment is charged correctly, it will hopefully activate something in the viewer, and they can fill in the blanks in the narrative.

TK: Since you began this project in 2024, we increasingly find ourselves in a political landscape where mythologies are bound up in a war of images and modern society experiences an ever-growing sense of despair. What are your thoughts on the agitational relationship between photography and historiography?

J.A.: When it comes to my own art, many of the raw materials I start with are benign archival or personal photographs that don’t have any direct connection to the sociopolitical and environmental themes I’m exploring in my work. But, by reframing them in a specific way, decontextualising them, altering them, and placing them within the landscape of my series, I can give them a radically different emotional charge.

On the other hand, when I’m using raw materials that are directly connected to the themes I’m exploring (e.g., archival photographs that document a specific nuclear weapons test), I’m also deliberately removing the context, so that their meaning isn’t bound up in a single event. And I think that lack of context makes the experience of my images more confrontational and more immediate.

Many of the images I source from government archives were designed as propaganda, their basic function being to construct a state-approved reality; and part of the satisfaction I get out of altering them to the point of being unrecognisable is that I’m undoing their intended results. Being able to manipulate images in this way has given me a visceral understanding of the way that images can be used to penetrate into peoples’ subconscious and to elicit emotions and ideas about all kinds of things. I think this is a beautiful function for art, in that it allows for the possibility of a very deep connection between the work and the viewer. But in the hands of the institutions I’m critiquing, it’s weaponry, deployed on a mass scale.

TK: What’s next for Angels?

J.A.: Right now, I’m continuing to experiment in my darkroom, and I’m interested in taking more control of the physical materials themselves, for example, by hand-coating various substrates with liquid silver gelatin emulsion. I’m also exploring new ways to physically deconstruct and deteriorate the prints after they’re made.

Looking forward, I plan to incorporate additional mediums, like moving images and sound. And in the more immediate future, I’m excited to be working with OD Gallery, who will be making a selection of limited edition prints from the series available.

Angels is very much a living, expanding body of work, so my primary focus is to continue building its world.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Open Doors Gallery. © J.A. Young

—
J.A. Young is an experimental mixed media artist and photographer based in the American South. In 2025, she was selected as a Fresh Eyes x Hungry Eye Talent Award Winner, and her debut solo monograph was shortlisted for Les Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award.

Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and currently undertaking an MA in Literary Studies (Critical Theory) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Images:

1-J.A. Young, Angels no. 7, 2025

2-J.A. Young, Angels no. 8, 2025

3-J.A. Young, Angels no. 11, 2025

4-J.A. Young, Angels no. 34, 2025

5-J.A. Young, Angels no. 56, 2025

6-J.A. Young, Angels no. 66, 2025

7-J.A. Young, Angels no. 81, 2025

8-J.A. Young, Angels no. 86, 2025

9-J.A. Young, Angels no. 89, 2025

10-J.A. Young, Angels no. 95, 2025

11-J.A. Young, Angels no. 110, 2025

12-J.A. Young, Angels no. 138, 2025

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In the web of others: Mohamed Bourouissa

An exhibition at MAST, Bologna, brings together two decades of work by Mohamed Bourouissa, known for granting visibility to lives historically erased from mainstream representation. From Philadelphia’s Black cowboys to staged moments with friends and acquaintances from the French banlieues, Bourouissa explores the codes, postures and poetics of everyday existence. Rica Cerbarano reflects on the question of community itself, on the intricate webs of relationship in which we live and asks what role artistic creation can meaningfully play in society today.

Rica Cerbarano | Exhibition review | 11 Sept 2025
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When people ask me – and when I ask myself – what role culture can play in today’s sociopolitical landscape, torn between the resurgence of fascist ideologies, sweeping climate disasters and ongoing conflicts that result in the deaths of thousands of civilians across the world, one of the first words that comes to mind – despite how difficult it is to believe in culture’s tangible impact – is ‘community’. Not in the clichéd sense of “let’s all just get along,” but community as a social body, a network of people who share a way of experiencing reality. A form of collective life that implicates all of us, whether we accept it or not.

We are not only individuals. Or rather, our individuality is not a self-contained existence – it collides daily with the dense web of relationships that shape us: in our everyday lives, through gestures and interpersonal exchanges, and in history – capital-H History – which, depending on our age, gender, economic background, and ethnicity, assigns us a specific place in the social hierarchy.

Community, then, not as an abstract or spiritual idea, but as something plainly, even trivially, political. To recognise that our identity as individuals affects the existence of others, and that each of us – whether we like it or not – is part of a larger group of people, is perhaps one of the most urgent imperatives that art can take on today. To locate, examine, nurture, defend, and celebrate our communities is to begin that work. Recognising ourselves as part of a complex but cohesive organism. Developing political and civic awareness of our role in society, and understanding the forces that fracture, divide and destabilise our communities – and others. Observing them, listening to them, learning how, ultimately, everything is deeply interconnected – for better or for worse. Art must serve to highlight this pressing need.

The art of Mohamed Bourouissa, an Algerian-born artist raised in the Parisian banlieue, sets out to do this. By probing the mechanisms of power that govern society, Bourouissa tackles key contemporary themes: belonging, control, surveillance, migration, invisibility, and exclusion, thereby exposing the latent tensions that surface in both physical and social spaces of everyday life. It is no coincidence that his first major solo exhibition in Italy, at MAST Bologna, and curated by Francesco Zanot, is titled Communautés – in the plural, underscoring the multiplicity of both individual and collective experiences, as well as the diverse perspectives that shape how we interpret reality.

The exhibition retraces two decades of Bourouissa’s career through four pivotal projects focused on the concept of community: Périphérique (2005–08), the series that first brought him to prominence; Horse Day (2013–19); Shoplifters (2014); and Hands, an ongoing, previously unseen series. This is not a sweeping retrospective, but rather a ‘sampling,’ as the curator defines it – a trace or a framework that offers a lens through which to read Bourouissa’s work without overwhelming or disorienting the viewer. A wise move for an Italian audience still largely unfamiliar with artistic practices of this nature. Tracing a symbolic path around the core concept that underpins Bourouissa’s entire practice allows viewers to follow its internal logic and – hopefully – make it their own.

The show opens with a giant wallpaper installation covering the entrance wall: a repeated pattern of a poster created for Horse Day, a powerful effort to deconstruct the figure of the cowboy in American culture – an archetype historically associated with white masculinity, à la John Wayne. Although this is not part of the dominant narrative, the history of the American West is in fact full of people from varied backgrounds: Black, Mexican and Native American. Starting from this historical omission, Bourouissa builds a project that subverts the myth of the American frontier by intervening in the present and elevating his subjects to iconic status.

After discovering the existence of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club in Philadelphia through the work of photographer Martha Camarillo, Bourouissa travelled to the U.S. in 2014. Located in the working-class neighbourhood of Strawberry Mansion, the club was founded by African American horsemen and offers a training programme for local youth as well as a shelter for rescued horses. Bourouissa embedded himself in this community to observe its dynamics, document them and construct a visual narrative that would bring their stories into public view – granting visibility to lives historically erased from mainstream representation.

At the heart of the project is a performance-competition organised by the artist, in which local riders and members of the community were invited to create costumes for the horses (some of which are on display at the entrance) and to stage a parade. With its layered and multifaceted nature, Horse Day anchors the entire exhibition and encapsulates Bourouissa’s practice, highlighting the core values that drive it: the significance of process, relationship-building, creative collaboration, and a conscious reflection on observation and representation.

The social gathering created by the artist is exhibited in a two-channel film installation. On one screen, we witness the event itself; on the other, a slower, more intimate behind-the-scenes documentary that captures the collaborative process over several months, during which Philadelphia riders work with invited artists to design the costumes. Balancing between documentary and cinematic aesthetics, the video underscores Bourouissa’s commitment to non-linear storytelling – one that embraces multiple timelines and interpretations that are personal as well as collective.

Central to the project are Bourouissa’s photographic sculptures, which dominate the first rooms of MAST: these are images printed on parts of car chassis, creating a striking parallel between the elaborate horse costumes and the customised cars and pickup trucks typical of American suburban culture. These works also evoke the industrial legacy of Philadelphia, situated along the Rust Belt and surrounded by steel plants. Described as ‘oversized documents and sci-fi machines,’ these sculptural images are not only visually compelling and materially assertive – they reposition photography as a three-dimensional object with its own physical presence. At the same time, they emphasise the fragmentation and fluidity of the idea of community: ‘not as a fixed structure but as a shared, shifting space,’ as stated by the artist. They make visible the tensions embedded in human relationships. And these tensions are not abstract – they are palpable. Standing before these sculptures, one feels simultaneously drawn in and repelled, destabilised by objects that are both fractured and complete, where the texture of human skin yields to the glowing surface of metal.

The other three series in the exhibition branch out from Horse Day like pathways, each leading in a different but related direction. Périphérique, created in the wake of the 2005 uprisings in the French banlieues, presents staged tableaux featuring people from Paris’ suburban outskirts, mostly friends, acquaintances and non-professional actors. These photographs build a bridge between documentary photography, media imagery and classical Western painting, using the codes of each to highlight the disconnection between representation and reality when it comes to marginalised communities. The medium to large format prints, clearly reminiscent of Jeff Wall’s compositions, are displayed on walls and on elevated white-painted metal grids – a subtle foreshadowing of the more pronounced grid structures used later.

Indeed, the exhibition device of the grid – an emblem of urban architecture, but also a conceptual symbol of separation and control – becomes increasingly dominant. In Shoplifters, the grid structures the entire display: freestanding panels segment the gallery space like modern folding screens. In Hands, the most recent series to be shown, the grid is part of the artwork itself, interacting with the transparency of plexiglass surfaces bearing photographic prints. While in Hands the structural element risks overpowering the still-developing photographic series, in Shoplifters the work asserts itself with undeniable force.

Shoplifters consists of 19 photographs Bourouissa saw at the entrance of a Brooklyn corner store in 2014. Originally shot by the store manager using a Polaroid camera, these portraits depict individuals caught stealing, posed with the pilfered items. Displaying these images is a provocative act: a challenge to photography’s dual role as tool of surveillance and instrument of empowerment. Through appropriation and recontextualisation, Shoplifters strips the images of their original punitive intent and opens a broader consideration of the ethics of representation, questioning how images shape public perception and reinforce stereotypes.

Communautés is, in my view, a promise. A political statement. An invitation to look at ourselves as we look outward – and at the same time, to see beyond our own gaze. It is an invitation to understand ourselves as part of a web of relationships that are shaped by our everyday gestures, and by how we relate to others. It is proof that another way of engaging is possible: by stepping into someone else’s perspective, by meeting them halfway, and by disrupting the frameworks that define us. It is, perhaps, a glimmer of hope. A hope that seems to answer that fateful question: What role can artistic creation assume in today’s society? ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Mennour, Paris. © Mohamed Bourouissa ADAGP 

Mohamed Bourouissa. Communautés runs at MAST Bologna until 28 September 2025.

–
Rica Cerbarano is a curator, writer, editor, and project coordinator specialising in photography. She writes regularly for Vogue Italia and Il Giornale dell’Arte, where she is the Co-Editor of the Photography section. She has also contributed to Camera Austria, Over Journal, Hapax Magazine, and Sali & Tabacchi, amongst others. In 2017, Cerbarano co-founded Kublaiklan, a collective that has curated exhibitions at Images Vevey (Switzerland), Gibellina PhotoRoad (Sicily, Italy), Cortona On The Move (Italy) and Photoszene Festival (Cologne, Germany), amongst others. In 2022, she was a member of the Artistic Direction Committee at Photolux Festival (Lucca, Italy), where she curated Seiichi Furuya: Face to Face, 1978 – 1985 and Robin Schwartz: Amelia & the Animals.

Images:

1-Mohamed Bourouissa, Horse Day, 2014; from the Horse Day series

2-Mohamed Bourouissa, Shelby, 2018; from the Horse Day series

3-Mohamed Bourouissa, Alpha Konate; from the Horse Day series

4-Mohamed Bourouissa, Love II, 2019; from the Horse Day series

5-Mohamed Bourouissa, La République, 2006; from the Périphérique series

6-Mohamed Bourouissa, Shoplifters

7-Mohamed Bourouissa, Hands #27

8-Mohamed Bourouissa, Hands #34

9-Mohamed Bourouissa, Hands #37

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When the mask slips: Cindy Sherman

On the uninhabited island of Illa del Rei, where a former British naval hospital now houses Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Cindy Sherman’s latest exhibition and her first solo show in Spain in over two decades is on view. Spanning eight series from across her near 50-year career, The Women stages a carnival of ageing flappers, social climbers and fashion phantoms; with deadpan wit and grotesque precision, Sherman’s portraits expose the desperate contortions of femininity and the moment the mask begins to slip, writes Charlotte Jansen.

Charlotte Jansen | Exhibition review | 5 Sept 2025
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Cindy Sherman’s latest exhibition, The Women, can be viewed by taking a boat to the rugged, uninhabited island of Illa del Rei from the port of Mahon, Menorca. Disarming in its picturesque beauty, Illa del Rei was home to a large naval hospital from 1711 until 1964. More recently, Hauser & Wirth opened a gallery here, where currently Sherman’s works are on view until October, when the island closes to the public. A collection of the gruesome instruments and contraptions used for treatments is now housed in a neighbouring museum occupying the former hospital buildings.

The shadows of this past of physical suffering and transformation seem to be an appropriate prologue to viewing Sherman’s works, in which she contorts herself, often painfully, into embarrassing, awkward and desperate characters performed to perfection to her camera. The Women, though not intended to be comprehensive, encompasses eight series, made during different periods of Sherman’s near 50-year career, from stretched stereotypes of silver screen starlets, amalgams of fashion wannabes, to mash-ups of guffawing society women, and fading flappers. The exhibition engages head-on with Sherman’s persistent, preoccupying subject: the female figure. The women are never ‘real’ women, of course – they are pastiches of women, of women’s experiences, of women’s struggles and desperation. They are portraits about portraiture and the nature of representation, and the fallacy that being seen is the same as being understood.

Arranged in a flipped chronology, the show starts with recent-ish large-format commissions for fashion magazines: works known as Ominous Landscapes (2010-12) for Pop magazine, using clothes from the Chanel archives, and a 2016 Harper’s Bazaar commission, where the details just don’t add up: Sherman’s model character wears a Marc Jacobs coat and bag and clutches an iPhone in a sylvan scene. In another image, dressed in couture and yellow elbow-length gloves she stands in front of a mountain, but the figure almost measures up to the landscape and her stockinged feet – left out of the frame – would logically be planted in the surrounding sea. This is all part of Sherman’s trenchant humour, playing with colour and scale to unapologetically take over spaces in and out of the frame with her women, their uncanny, grotesque grandeur unavoidable. Something is always off. It is just as hilarious to me that Sherman would do these editorials with actual couture given the fact she has smashed the market, sales-wise. I can’t imagine having one of these staring at me at home.

These fashion photographs that both mock the industry that forces women to be looked at this way, and are at the same time subsumed by it, are an intriguing entry point to the exhibition and the contradictions always present in Sherman’s portrayals of women. Through their fastidious observational details, Sherman perfectly captures the attitude of a type of woman, from a moment in time – familiar enough to feel, as exhibition curator puts it “I’ve been to a party at her house.” Sherman is certainly the most astute observer of female social mores, she an ‘impersonator’ of women, as Jerry Saltz wrote. Yet to me there is a shift from her gaze towards the women she performs as in the early years – in say the bus riders, or the femme fatales of the Untitled Film Stills – to something more daring and darkly ambiguous in later works. This, after all, is how women look at each other too. Repulsion became an essential part of Sherman’s works after the 1980s and she seems to abandon herself to it. Then again, that may be the ruse – repulsion is in the eye of the beholder. I had nightmares about the Fairy Tale and clown images I saw at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019, part of Sherman’s first UK retrospective. This exhibition doesn’t include those, but does well in varying the techniques, scale and pace – though endlessly inventive within each image, Sherman’s shows can have a strangely monotonous feel as a viewing experience.

As women we all find ourselves particularly cornered in this system of images, hyper aware of our own image, hypervisible or invisible – both fates equally awful. The Women are products of our image-based environment, one shaped first by theatre, cinema, and later the intrepid influence of fashion magazines, high society and celebrity worship culture. As a woman nearing 40, it’s excruciating at times to look at say the large-scale flappers – made between 2016-2018. Flappers are the perfect Sherman subject since they themselves often emulated Hollywood stars, and were progressive, sexually liberated figures of modernity. Sherman however depicts them long after their prime, glamorous but melancholic – sad, because they’re old? Again and again, Sherman presents the twisted acts of self-contortionism society demands of us, to stay youthful, dress well, groom, smile. Ageing will ultimately betray us, and Sherman shows us, through her grinning, gargoylesque female figures, that the camera’s role in all this isn’t kind. She reveals with a dead pan wit, the hideousness of a mask that’s slipping.

As I look, I also think about Sherman herself, and what happens to women artists when they become world famous. Sherman has managed to remain quite an enigma, by today’s standards. Her work has become, if anything, less commercial, less aesthetically appealing and politically appeasing over the years. Yet as famous as Sherman is, scholarly interest in her work seems relatively unvaried – certainly compared to male counterparts of her status. I’ve come to think of this as the Cindy Sherman paradox. Sherman is undoubtedly one of the most famous ‘photographers’ (some would dispute the categorisation) alive today, one of the only artists working in photography to truly be considered a household name. She is famous for being the most expensive female photographer, and still holds the biggest ever auction sale ($3.89 million) for a single photograph by a woman. (She has held that record since 2011, which is also an indictment of how little the market has moved for women in photography in more than a decade.)

These ideas about value, both in terms of her cultural cachet and commercial gravitas, often eclipse Sherman’s work. Here, curator Tanya Barson offers a fresh look at Sherman. This is one of a spate of new Sherman shows in smaller cities in Europe of late (FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp, the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, in Switzerland at Photo Elysée, and now Hauser & Wirth, Menorca) seeking new ways to see Sherman in places she isn’t so well known. The Women is Sherman’s first exhibition in Spain in a generation (her last was at the Reina Sofia in 1996 – many of the works in The Women were not included in that show, or were made since then).

The real treat of this exhibition for me, though, were the very early series, the small black and white images known as the ‘murder mystery’ and ‘line up’ pictures made in 1976 and 1977, while still a student at Buffalo State College. Some of the images from this series were included in the National Portrait Gallery show, but here they have more space and vibrate differently. Here’s a young and unknown Sherman, aged 23, already rapt with self-staging: dressed in eclectic, everyday outfits I can imagine were thrifted on a budget, or borrowed from a friend’s or her own wardrobe, a kaftan and espadrilles, then stockings, suspenders and a bowler hat. The same belt is styled differently. Some wear masks, others are masked with heavy make-up. The bare wooden floorboards and the socket on the wall give them a looser, improvised edge – though with Sherman even then you can imagine it was all meticulously planned. They have energy, and so much to say with so little.

In the line-ups, her characters all take up the same strange pose, body turned slightly to the camera, hands spread in a typically off-kilter Sherman gesture – “Ta-da!” they seem to declare.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Menorca. © Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman. The Women runs at Hauser & Wirth Menorca until 26 October 2025.

—
Charlotte Jansen is a British Sri Lankan author, journalist and critic based in London. Jansen writes on contemporary art and photography for The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, British Vogue and ELLE, among others. She is the author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, (HACHETTE, 2017) and Photography Now (TATE, 2021). Jansen is the curator of Discovery, the section for emerging artists, at Photo London.

Images:

1-Cindy Sherman, Untitled #566, 2016

2-Cindy Sherman, Untitled #568, 2016

3-Cindy Sherman, Untitled #550, 2010/2012

4-Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6, 1977

5-Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #24, 1978

6-Cindy Sherman, Untitled #369, 1976/2000

7-Cindy Sherman, Untitled (the actress at the murder scene), 1976/2000

8-Cindy Sherman, Untitled #508, 1977/2011

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• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

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Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse

 

Ying Ang’s ecological and feminist politics

Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies, the artist’s third major book and first with Perimeter Editions, emerges from walks through inner-city parks near her Melbourne home. Thinking through the fetishisation of fertility and its impact on cultural views of womanhood, Jane Simon writes that the work offers a meditative exploration of bodies beyond reproduction, using tactile, intimate images of mushrooms to speculate on nature, personal history and ways of knowing.

Jane Simon | Book review | 31 July 2025
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Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies, published by Perimeter Editions, is a quiet, precise manifesto. It is a provocation to think about abundance beyond the frame of the reproductive body. This photobook is, in equal parts, exacting in its political and conceptual delivery while also an unhurried meditation on the promise and organic beauty of fungal forms.

The fruiting bodies of the title refer to the mushrooms that Ang photographed in Melbourne’s parks. Ang’s mushrooms are earthy, found sculptures. These are small growths we may not notice at our feet: bodies with expanses of folds, wrinkles and yearnings for darkness and light. They have stems, caps, gills, and an unseen underground pulse. Ang gives them her full attention, harnessing the close-up’s ability to experiment with scale and reorganise hierarchies of attention.

Fruiting Bodies is, in part, about the possibilities of bodies in states of transition. It is about change that is neither loss nor gain, but something vital and not-yet named. Ang generates this post-menopausal narrative without relying on the human figure. Instead, she has a singular focus on the erupting blooms of mushrooms: growths sustained from below through mycelium, that hidden system of collective exchange.

Descriptions of non-reproductive bodies often invoke the language of loss or failure. Ang gifts us another vocabulary through her detailed portraits of mushrooms and their cycles of growth, decay and regeneration. Ang pulls her viewers to the ground, holding her camera at grass level to show us the arch of the stems, the wonder of cups, these tiny architectural yet fleshy wonders. She displays their cracks, dissolves, their tears, their delicacy and brute strength. In a deliberate engagement with the links between questions of ecology and feminist politics, Ang reveals how proximity (in this case, to soil, organic matter, imperfect fungi) can recalibrate what we know and value about bodies, community and connection.

Fruiting Bodies has a slower rhythm than Ang’s last photobook The Quickening: A memoir on matrescence (2021), and her first major photobook, Gold Coast (2014).  The Quickening reckons with the joys and seismic shifts of motherhood and post-partum anxiety. The photographs in The Quickening are like gasps for air: visceral fragments of life with an infant.  Gold Coast reckons with the contradictions of a city marbled with racism, crime and bodies at leisure. Fruiting Bodies is a different type of book. This book is not a reckoning but a proposition, a firm insistence that the realm beyond fertility has paths to other possibilities, other generative modes, ones that are vital, creative, meaningful, crucial.

Ang’s fruiting bodies are sometimes ruffled and plump, others are slender and reaching. A notebook held at ground level becomes an in-situ studio, a backdrop to highlight the dirt clinging to a stem or the impressive force of a mushroom that has pushed through earth and risen with a wood chip delicately balanced on its cap.

Photography has played a fundamental role in valuing some bodies more than others, in rendering some invisible, unnoticed, and others too closely surveyed. This awareness is embedded in Fruiting Bodies. Ang’s studies of foraged mushrooms photographed simply on a white background are reminders of how photography has been used to collect, identify and fetishise, but this is not Ang’s project.  

Ang’s visual language relies on seeing the mushrooms in a variety of ways. Ang mostly photographs the mushrooms in black and white. But the photobook has bursts of warm, earthy colour amongst its black and white pages. Some pages of the book reveal red eruptions, and bees forage near some of these fleshy forms. Others are fragile, almost transparent. Sometimes Ang’s mushrooms are at home in a tangle of woodchips, grass and dew. Other times, the mushrooms have been plucked and photographed later. Some of these mushrooms are dried and shrivelled. Some are palpably full and fleshy.

Ang’s mushrooms make me think about Simryn Gill’s series, Weeds in my Parents’ Garden (2018). In that series, Gill also photographs down near the ground, focusing on weeds in detail. Like Ang’s mushrooms, Gill’s weeds are personal (it is her parents’ garden) but also about a wider politics of attention to the unwanted or the devalued. Both Ang and Gill share a respect for the anti-monumental, and a speculative approach to thinking about nature, personal history and ways of knowing.

Ang’s curious eyes show us growth, decomposition, repair, and wonder. These are photographs to pore over. I recognise one mushroom as a shaggy mane mushroom, I look it up and learn that it matures fast, and as it does so, its gills liquify into an inky disintegration: a dissolving that releases and spreads spores. These fruiting bodies sometimes echo the human form. A pair of caps looks like breasts; the ruptures, splits and openings of several mushrooms are equally suggestive. But the point is not to anthropomorphise the fungal world, but rather to place those bodies in conversation with our own.

The figures of women are evoked directly in Fruiting Bodies through Ang’s exacting use of text. Ang is a photographer, but also a deft writer. The perspective here is born from the personal, but this is also about a collective experience of how women’s bodies are labelled, classified and devalued over a lifetime. Some things, Ang and her mushrooms tell us, are beyond the material body, outside anatomy. One page of text begins a list with mood and cognition and ends with hair and bones. Uterus sits in the middle of the list. I read the word and think of medical drawings and the persistent cultural imaginings of the uterus as a void or receptacle rather than the dense, powerful muscle it is. Just one misrecognition among many.

Opposite the list, a full page is dedicated to just two words: Kin Keeper. This role, so often undertaken by women, is, like the mushroom’s underground mycelium, part of a collective chain of reciprocity and care, shared stories, advice and memories. Ang references this type of work earlier in the book: ‘The quiet labour of what holds the world together.’

Fruiting Bodies has a line about a woman in the kitchen ‘peeling an orange, considering the weight of her own survival.’ Ang reminds us that ‘This, too, is a kind of freedom.’ It is the certainty of this felt freedom that knits together Ang’s beautiful, detailed mushroom portraits in this quiet force of a photobook. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Perimeter Editions. © Ying Ang

—
Jane Simon is an academic and writer based in Sydney, Australia. She is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, where she researches and teaches in the areas of photography, screen media and visual culture. She is the author of The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2024). Her research examines photography’s role in the imagination and construction of housing and intimate home life.

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse

 

Arles 2025: staging radicality within safe limits?

Is the art world willing to take real political risks, or does it perform radicality within safe limits? What to make of aesthetic gestures of dissent without institutional accountability and without any attempts at broader movement building? Peter Watkins probes these questions and more in the context of Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025, arguing that a familiar absence remains despite this year’s theme of ‘disobedient’ images. Elsewhere, festival highlights include Nan Goldin’s recurring interventions, intergenerational collaboration between Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, a guerilla poster campaign by NO-PHOTO, and the deeply personal work of Diana Markosian.

Peter Watkins | Festival report | 24 July 2025
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The notion that images and their makers can be ‘disobedient’ implies that they hold the power to disrupt, to rebel and to resist the status quo. It suggests that they might serve as an outlet towards a more progressive politics – a means of confronting and reflecting on the systems of power that shape both cultural and political life, and a means to propose critical and aesthetic alternatives in response to the world around us.

In this moment of collective urgency, when the systems that govern us are becoming increasingly repressive and authoritarian, the idea of disobedience takes on an increased importance and risk. The current climate in Europe and the United States is marked by the widespread institutional cancellations of artists, slashing of cultural budgets, silencing of academics and student protests, increased state violence, and the suppression of free and open political and creative expression. Against the rise of “nationalism, nihilism and environmental crises,” as the festival put it in their opening gambit, we might do well to ask how seriously Les Rencontres d’Arles takes the artistic and political freedoms of those presented in this year’s edition, and address what has been left unsaid in the process. 

In a statement issued during the 2022 edition, Les Rencontres d’Arles declared its unilateral support for the Ukrainian people in their “fight for freedom,” dedicating the opening week to honouring the “artists and photographers whose lives are threatened by Russia’s aggression.” Fast forward three years, and while the war in Ukraine rages on, this year’s edition includes neither mention nor representation of Ukrainian artists, institutions or direct geopolitical issues related to the region.

While this year is marked by the inclusion of historically marginalised communities, issues surrounding colonial legacies and is notable for its work of inclusion and politics of representation, there remains a colossal elephant in the room. For a festival – and an industry – that has spent years championing diversity, flirting with decolonial discourse and sexual politics, the absence of any tangible mention of the political realities we find ourselves in the present is both deeply disappointing and troubling.

It was left to Nan Goldin, once again – leveraging her considerable artistic and cultural influence – to say what the festival would not. To kick off proceedings, her film Memory Lost (2019-21), underscored by answering machine recordings, seminal photographs of her and her friends, and revolving around abuse, friendship, love, deprivation, and loss, was accompanied by a live piano performance by Eliza McCarthy. It played out to the vast imposing Théâtre Romain, which was full to the brim with approximately 2500 people, comprising those from every corner of  the photography community. Goldin was presented with the Women in Motion award, which she accepted graciously, joking that Les Rencontres had shown bravery in honouring her at such a politically charged moment, and promised the audience a surprise at the end.

In the conversation that followed, she chose to speak out against the growing repression of trans and LGBTQIA+ communities, particularly in the context of increasingly draconian policies in the United States that have eroded decades of progress in terms of policy and rights. This was accompanied by a slideshow depicting her early photographs of drag queens, starting out with a portrait of David Armstrong depicted here as a young man dressed as a woman. “He wasn’t a queen himself,” she reflected, “he was just so androgynous and beautiful that men would divorce their wives when they saw him.”

As the moon shone brightly in the night sky, a spotlit Nan Goldin told the audience that “we need silence now.” The word Gaza appeared across the screen. The film was composed of video clips compiled from social media. It started like this: Children playing, laughing, bustling food markets, panoramas of cosmopolitan life. People congregating, families on the beach, kids flying kites, a birthday party, a father throwing his child into the air. Then, plumes of smoke, citizens evacuating, explosions, dead bodies, a man shaking uncontrollably with fear, people running, people dying, neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, dead journalists surrounded by living journalists, a man comforting a child. A child holding the head of a dead parent. And the unmistakable look of horror in the eyes of the children. Towards the end we see desperate unarmed Palestinians running for aid. A child no older than eight years old says: “we are tired of this darkness. We are tired of this life.” 

The video was silent, there was no audio, but for the wind catching the giant projection screen. What followed was a powerful speech by Goldin standing alongside writer Edouard Louis who shared the burden. At 71 years old, Goldin struggled at some points to stand, but her voice remained steady and erudite. Some of the audience left in a steady stream, but most stayed, and when one woman heckled passionately screaming about hostages, the palpable tension that had filled the air bubbled over, with Goldin moving off script, and addressing the woman directly, but keeping her cool. Free Palestine chants rang out in solidarity and Goldin completed what she had come to say. When she returned to her seat near to where I was sitting, she said in typical Nan Goldin style: “get me outta here,” to her youthful entourage. 

A wide range of UN bodies, the International Court of Justice, judicial panels, investigation committees as well as most major human rights NGO’s and experts, have characterised Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as Genocide, warning that it meets the criteria as defined by the Genocide Convention. More than 50,000 children have been killed or injured by one of the most sophisticated war machines on the planet. Food and aid is being used as a weapon of war. Genocide is occurring in Gaza, but also in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Congo. Our complicity in the West and in our industry is marked by the silence of our institutions, and the gatekeepers at their helms, prioritising corporate sponsorship above moral clarity. 

Change can only occur through lifting this silence, practicing disobedience and risking something of ourselves in what we believe in. It should not have to fall squarely on the shoulders of Nan Goldin to be the mouthpiece for an industry’s failures. We speak of care, inclusivity, decolonialism and progress, yet this festival has been unable to acknowledge the horrors of the present moment, nor create any tangible platform for them to be discussed. We have a collective duty to do more, and we must do so much more. 

NO-PHOTO, a collective of artists and activists, were notable for their powerful campaign of posters plastered up on walls around Arles. Made up of textual descriptions of photographs from Gaza, the collective called for “cultural institutions to align their visual language with ethical clarity and action.” The power of these political works lies in their conceptual premise: a deliberate refusal to include photography. The image is replaced by a void, a black rectangle, representing a conscious rejection of resharing photographs of Palestinian suffering as tokens to evoke compassion, but rather referring back to the ubiquity of those images through their absence.

An accompanying newsprint featuring an essay from 2023 by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues that genocide cannot be captured in a single image, but must be traced across a body of images and actions over time. It asserts that Israel is a settler colonial regime built on the systematic displacement and elimination of Palestinians, using strategies such as expulsion, incarceration and militarised control, especially in Gaza. She talks about how the normalisation of Palestinian suffering through images frames their lives as disposable. She concludes by stating that we must acknowledge this genocide, our complicity, not only for the sake of the Palestinian cause, but for the sake of humanity, pluralism and justice. 

Carole Newhouse and Carmen Winant’s collaborative exhibition simply titled Double was quietly one of the highlights of the festival. Thoughtful, tender, their collaboration marks an intergenerational feminist alliance which looks to reclaim and amplify feminist strategies from the past and bring them to the present. Through the simple gesture of double-exposure, the two women collaborated on a series of works that were an aesthetic pleasure to behold. The exhibition invites us to consider the transformative potential of a radical reinvention and reclamation of the self. Neatly curated by Nina Strand, it is well executed, intelligent work.

Meanwhile the skyline dominating LUMA presents the work of late photographer David Armstrong, with a retrospective exhibition handled with the utmost care and precision by artist Wade Guyton and curator Matthieu Humery. Two rooms separate black and white and colour, with vast vitrines of contact sheets quietly footnoting the first room. Armstrong’s signature devil-may-care portraits of friends, lovers and fellow artists predominantly from the East Village in New York in the 1970’s through to the 90’s seduce with effortless cool and sexiness. He was a life-long friend of Nan Goldin, photographing people such as Cookie Mueller, Greer Lankton, Mark Morrisroe, and other members of the queer scene. The exhibition is handled beautifully, allowing for a kind of escapism from the visual noise dominating Arles over the opening week. 

Escaping the midday heat of the festival, Batia Suter’s exhibition Octahydra curated by Francesca Marcaccio Hitzeman took us beneath the ancient Forum, into the Cryptoportiques and the bowels of the earth. In the cool, damp air, and dripping wet walls, two powerful projectors face each other from opposite ends of the cavernous corridor, separated by sheer fabric projection screens and smaller intermediary screens that catch fragments of the images as they pass through. Moving between them, the images dissolve and recombine, decontextualising and abstracting the architectural typologies first presented on the main screens. This is very much a bodily and sensory experience, one that demonstrates both restraint and a precise response to the unique nature of the space. Her work, which I had only experienced in book form until now, translates wonderfully into exhibition form – creating a new register of experience. Many photographers and exhibiting artists at the festival could learn from this kind of thoughtful translation. Too often, the visual and material strategies on display relied on a too-similar, now-familiar material language which permeates the photography world as distinct from the contemporary art world, often resulting in a total flattening of affect and experience. I was left wondering just how many of these exhibitions might have taken another, more appropriate form. Just as not every body of work needs to become a book, not every body of work should become an exhibition.

A notable mention goes to Keisha Scarville, whose work predominantly comprises self-portraiture, reappropriating and embodying the clothing and fabrics left behind by her late mother. We are told that she takes inspiration from Egúngún, also known as Ará Ọ̀run (‘The collective dead’), a masked or costumed figure, of the Yoruba people. Her work is playful, graphic, and working through the processes of grief and absence that so often permeate the material remains of the departed, but with the kind of energy that also takes the work outside of that register. She approximates the absence of the mother, through the positioning of herself in the frame, inhabiting the clothing of her mother, and moving between classical and more experimental forms. A pleasurably graphic mode of self-presentation and exploration.

Meanwhile, Brandon Gercara’s exhibition draws on the volcanic landscape of La Réunion – specifically the Piton de la Fournaise – to forge a poetic and political language of resistance. Inspired by the geological formation of hyaloclastites, their art crystallises new, sustainable spaces for marginalised communities, particularly through the lens of Kwir identity, a Creole reimagining of ‘queer.’ In the films Playback de la pensée Kwir and Conversations and Lip sync de la pensée, Gercara uses drag to transmute personal and collective trauma into spectral, extraterrestrial figures that defy normative social structures. Their practice weaves together activism and art to expose and destabilise the lingering forces of colonialism – gender, racial and class-based oppression – suggesting an emancipatory territory rooted in intersectionality and resistance.

Finally, the talk of the town was undoubtedly Diana Markosian’s exhibition, tucked away upstairs in the Monoprix supermarket near the railway station. Markosian was just seven when her mother took her and her brother from Moscow to the United States in 1996, leaving their father behind without saying goodbye. He returned to an empty apartment and spent years searching for his missing children, desperately writing letters to authorities and strangers alike. In California, their mother cut him from family photographs, erasing his presence entirely. Markosian revisited this deeply personal history in her 2020 monograph Santa Barbara, which reconstructs their migration and her mother’s determination to start a new life. Fifteen years later, she travelled to Armenia in search of her father, an emotional reunion that became the foundation for Father, a project weaving together photography, archival documents and video to explore absence, reconciliation and the painful legacy of their estrangement. 

Markosian draws on every tool at her disposal to elicit an emotional response – at times, perhaps too insistently, as with the piano soundtrack that borders on instructive. But the music urges us to experience the work cinematically, inviting us to be swept up in the narrative and given space to dream. This cinematic quality makes the reunion feel as if it is both happening and not happening. On the day I saw it, like many others, I wept – moved by the simplicity of a black-and-white photograph of her father’s shirt, hanging in plastic after being laundered – perhaps reminded of my own photograph of my mother’s dress. There is a moment in the film where Markosian sits across from her father, and they briefly hold hands while staring into each other’s eyes. There is a flicker of pain and relief and love and awkwardness in the eyes of her father in this moment, and this felt direct, poignant and universal. This moment had me totally floored. 

When art and culture is at its very best it doesn’t rest on its laurels; it provokes us, it unsettles us, it carves out the space for renewal and reimagining, and it provides us with forms of collective empathy. Despite eternal precarity, art carries with it these responsibilities: to keep asking difficult questions, to do the hard work in the good times and the bad, and to offer a safe environment outside of the banalities and disappointments of everyday lived experience. 

That two of the most powerful moments at this year’s festival came not from the official programming – Nan Goldin after the award ceremony, and NO-PHOTO on the fringes – but from artists turning their work back onto the institution and the industry itself, is telling. It reveals the limits of representation without accountability, and of inclusion without political engagement. And yet, these moments also point towards a very different possibility – one where festivals like Les Rencontres d’Arles not only platform voices but also respond to the urgencies those voices name. A transformed festival would not just celebrate disobedience as a theme, but give more space to it as a practice: by refusing neutrality in the face of violence and divesting from oppressive structures, all the while creating meaningful space for dissent, dialogue and action.♦

Les Rencontres d’Arles runs until 5 October 2025.

—
Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.

Images:

1-Nan Goldin. Young Love, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

2&3-NO-PHOTO 2025 poster campaign. Courtesy Double Dummy.

4-Carol Newhouse. Self-portrait made during an Art and Photography workshop, WomanShare, Summer 1975. Courtesy the artist.

5-Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

6-David Armstrong, Cookie at Bleecker St., NYC, 1977. Courtesy the estate of David Armstrong.

7-David Armstrong, George in the Water, Provincetown, 1977. Courtesy the estate of David Armstrong.

8&9-Installation views of David Armstrong, 2025, LUMA Arles. Courtesy the estate of David Armstrong. © Victor&Simon – Grégoire D’Ablon

10&11-Batia Suter, excerpt from Octahydra, video, 2024. Out of the Metropolis project, NŌUA, Bodø. Courtesy the artist.

12&13-Installation views of Batia Suter: Octahydra, 2025. Courtesy Out of the Metropolis.

14-Keisha Scarville, Untitled #18, Alma / Mama’s Clothes series, 2017. Courtesy the artist.

15-Brandon Gercara. Joseph 83; from the Conversations series, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

16-Diana Markosian, The Cut Out; from the Father series, 2014-24. Courtesy the artist.

17-Diana Markosian, Mornings with You; from the Father series, 2014-24. Courtesy the artist.

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse

 

Speaking to the future: Elle Pérez in New York

A constellation of images, films, collage, and poetry – over fifteen years in the making – comes to life at New York’s American Academy of Arts and Letters in Elle Pérez’s latest exhibition, The World Is Already Again Beginning, History with the Present. From the raw pulse of punk in Bronx basements to a tender reckoning with history and memory woven through Puerto Rican gardens, Pérez questions our image-world and, in this conceptually disruptive presentation, draws a line of undeniability through acts of feeling, witnessing and remembering, writes Gem Fletcher.

Gem Fletcher | Exhibition review | 10 July 2025
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In 2005, Elle Pérez began making photographs at The Bronx Underground, an all-ages music project where young Black and Latino punk bands could play their first show in the basement of the First Lutheran Church of Throgs Neck. The New York artist – a teenager at the time – found the scene through whispers and rebellious friends and wanted in, cunningly negotiating free entry in return for designing the ‘BXUG’ flyers.

The Bronx’s punk scene was different from its white, suburban counterparts. As Pérez puts it, “The protest culture of punk here isn’t about rebelling against going to college, getting a job, and being boring. It’s about survival. It’s about experiencing visceral life. It’s about getting away from your voucher housing and throwing down. It’s about showing how much you hate the government for messing up your mother’s WIC payments and making her take a three-hour round trip on public transit so that your baby sister can eat.”

Taken by the scenes’ urgency, passion and physicality, a sacred space they co-created with and for each other, Pérez began chasing a desire to approximate experience. To somehow imprint the scene’s ineffable shared energy and euphoria into an image. After every event, they would rush home to frantically edit and upload the photos online, eagerly awaiting the audience’s response. This rhythm of making and sharing pictures of BXUG continued every month for a decade, resulting in an archive of over 30,000 photographs. The scene concluded in 2015, and that energy moved in different directions.

It’s these cycles of life and culture that Pérez unravels in their latest exhibition, The World Is Already Again Beginning, History with the Present, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Curated by Jenny Jaskey in collaboration with the artist, the show offers a constellation of images, films, collage and poetry traversing bodies of work created between 2009 and 2025. In one read, the exhibit gestures towards an abridged retrospective – bringing together slices of Pérez’s ever-expanding archive that honour the relationships and places that continue to shape their artistic vision from BXUG and the Empire Pro Wrestling troupe, to the fragile tendrils of family life and history in Puerto Rico and the Bronx. The exhibition hinges on a reflection of time; thinking about power and politics of presence, impermanence, remembering, continuity, and the role photography can play in these gestures.

This comes to the fore in new works like La Despedida [The Farewell], which sequences photographs of Pérez’s grandfather’s [Pedro] backyard in Puerto Real, a small village in the southwest of Puerto Rico with Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. Pedro’s yard is lined by large trees of quenepas and starfruit and filled with a pink outdoor bathroom, the shell of a Toyota Tercel and a beached boat named the Mona Lisa. In Giverny, Monet’s pink house is abundant with sprawling wildflowers, rich foliage and the infamous lily pond connected by a network of narrow shingle paths. The intention to cultivate and care for a wild, open, free space unites both men across time. Pérez recalls being struck by the garden as an artistic strategy: “I realised Monet had set up a studio paradigm for himself. By creating a garden that changed daily, Monet gave himself endless possibilities to see.” The potential born from a life dedicated to looking, listening and feeling through pictures and what that can reveal or open up is the beating heart of the exhibition.

In Perez’s life and practice, images transform into gestures of love and togetherness, representing something beyond their material reality. In March 2024, Pedro passed quietly at home and never had a funeral. La Despedida is both an audacious disassembly of hierarchy and more poignantly exists as a memorial to Pedro; Pérez honouring his passing with flowers from Monet’s garden. A fragment of nearby wall text reads: ‘The world is always ending and always again beginning. So, we tell stories to survive it.’

Throughout the exhibit, Pérez’s subversive and multivalent use of text attempts to create a new context to experience their work – an exercise made possible by the artist-first approach of the American Academy. Founded in 1898 for the ‘advancement of art and literature,’ the Academy has the look and somatic qualities of a museum but is more akin to a contemporary art space. With a deep commitment to centring new artistic visions, they empower artists to present new projects and reimagine their work’s spatial encounter. Like a wrestler who works things out on the mat, Pérez used the exhibit to play and develop new curatorial strategies that reverberate long after visitors leave the space. Firstly, there is no curatorial text upon entry. Instead, each visitor is handed a small white zine titled How the Sea Meets the Sky and advised to take it home and read it later. The first text you encounter is an invitation; ‘Please feel free to take a chair.’ 

Through absence, Pérez gives the audience presence, opening space for the transformative effects of inhabiting our individual feelings and responses to the work. From there, the orientation across three galleries and a screening room is entirely personal, punctuated only by short poetic aberrations which riff off the artist’s reflections on time and practice. The viewers don’t encounter any such statement about the show until they reach an interstitial space, and by then, they are already fully immersed in Pérez’s world. Likewise, captions exist as brief meta documents offering titles and elongated timestamps illuminating how bodies of work keep evolving, gaining new meanings as time shifts and the world changes. In gallery three, you encounter a large collage containing hundreds of images, texts, personal notes, references, and ephemera – a combination of aspiration, inspiration and juxtaposition. Affectionately known by the artist as “context backpacks,” the piece takes what happens in the studio and transplants it into the gallery. Now artworks in their own right, the collage becomes a wayfinding device conjuring a dynamic and visceral route into the impulses of the artist’s mind.

The World Is Already Again Beginning, History with the Present embodies Pérez’s unwavering pursuit of intimate moments, emotional exchanges and visceral details, and how these form a photographic expression of the ephemeral condition of living. And yet, it’s their side quest to reckon with the ever-mutating complexity of our image-world through a rallying call of optimism that proves most provocative about the show.

We live between two image worlds: the one we think we know and the one that actually exists. The former was organised by truth, fact and information – a society built upon the premise of the image as evidence. The new image world, catalysed by social media and AI’s unsettling ability to conjure realness untethered from reality, operates differently. A compelling image matters more than any indexical truth. In our current moment, photography is perhaps more consequential than ever. In riposte, Pérez’s work is about preserving history and the profound political implications of creating a line of undeniability in an era where collective memory is clouded by constant crisis, and the tools of power are weaponised to erase. At its core, the show is a blueprint for living, to slow down, feel and remember. As Pérez puts it, “the archives we each make allow us to speak to the future, to tell others we were here, to say we were alive.” ♦

All images courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York. © Elle Pérez

Elle Pérez: The World Is Already Again Beginning, History with the Present ran at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, until 3 July 2025.

—
Gem Fletcher is a writer, consultant and podcaster. Her work has been published in Foam, Aperture, Dazed, Creative Review and The British Journal of Photography. She also hosts The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today.

Images:

1-Elle Pérez, Avvon V.S. Tank, 2013/2025

2-Elle Pérez, DAINJA 730, 2013/2025

3-Elle Pérez, Flag, 2009/2025

4-Elle Pérez, In memory of Critic, Rest in peace John, 2009/2025

5-Elle Pérez, Kirsten at Orchard, 2009/2025

6-Elle Pérez, Kiss, 2009/2025

7-Elle Pérez, Pedro in his garden, 2025

8-Elle Pérez, The World Is Always Again Beginning, History with the Present, 2025

9-Elle Pérez, untitled (break shore), 2025

10-Elle Pérez, untitled (car body), 2025

11-Elle Pérez, untitled (king), 2025

12-Elle Pérez, untitled (plantain grove view), 2025

13-Elle Pérez, untitled (the world is always again beginning), 2025

14-Elle Pérez, untitled (water-lily view), 2025

15-Elle Pérez, untitled (wet and tired flowers), 2025

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

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Between history and fable: Mashid Mohadjerin at FOMU, Antwerp

Channelling the voice of a feminist naqqāl – a reciter of epic tales – Mashid Mohadjerin reweaves the fables and histories her father entrusted to her, threading memory and myth across generations as part of her new parallel book-exhibition project, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish. Through image, collage and legend, Mohadjerin rewrites inherited patriarchal narratives into a visual language of resistance; reframing memory, masculinity and the legacies of displacement against the broader landscape of Iranian politics and constructions of manhood, Taous Dahmani writes.

Taous Dahmani | Exhibition/photobook review | 26 June 2025
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Once upon a time, a little boy was playing in a shallow river winding through a sunlit mountain. One day, that same boy had to hide in the river’s meagre depths to escape blazing bullets. I grew up with that story – frightened for the boy, terrified of the men with guns. It was a bedtime story, but also a way of passing down history: the lived realities of colonial occupation in Algeria. The storyteller was my father. The little boy was my father, too.

For Mashid Mohadjerin, one of the many stories she heard from her father began like this: “A firing squad waiting for the smoke of their guns to clear.” An action-packed scene – gunfire, enemies and heroes – one of whom was the artist’s great-great-great-grandfather. But beneath the drama lies a deeper truth on of wars of ideology and territory. It’s another tale where history and bedtime fable meet, where legend is used to carry the weight of lived experience. In her latest book, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish (2025), Mohadjerin remembers an exchange with her own father: ‘“Do you want me to continue reading?” he asked, his voice low, as if not wanting to break the weight of the moment. “Yes, please,” she replied, lost in the threads of history that twist and loop around us, familiar yet foreign, like a story that feels both ours and not ours.’

Displaced, Mashid Mohadjerin’s father arrived in Belgium with his family in the 1980s; by then, my own father was already telling bedtime stories of 1950s Algeria to my sisters and then me in Paris. These stories may have been crafted to captivate children, but they were also a way to share a past too heavy or too painful to be spoken plainly – so it came cloaked in a different narrative form. In both our families – and in many others that have been shaped by the silences of displacement or colonial violence – history is often passed down, wrapped in narrative: it is rendered more fantastical than the brutal realities it conceals, skirting around political, religious, or personal taboos. Yet through storytelling, these histories endure. They keep alive those who left us too soon or disappeared without trace. Stories then offer continuity to the fragmented.

In light of this, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish becomes an experimental visual family tree, an autobiography made of tales: reimagined and retold from a position that resists silence. Mashid Mohadjerin weaves together peaceful black and white landscapes taken as she retraced the places where family stories may have unfolded. These images set the stage, grounding myth in geography, and searching for ancestral traces. The narrative drifts across time and place – leaping between centuries and countries – yet always returning to the thread of memory as story. Whether encountered in book form or in an exhibition (as recently shown at FOMU, Antwerp), Mohadjerin’s characters refuse to remain confined to the frame or the page. The figures escape the constraints of their own contours, reaching toward other forms and shapes, seeking to engage across time, space, and medium. This gesture is present throughout the work, but most vividly in the collages, where fragments converge and overlap.

Whether knights, princes, mullahs, boxers – Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish is populated by characters of many forms. But it’s impossible not to notice that all these figures are men. History, like legend, has long privileged the bravery of men, casting them as the central actors of the past. And indeed, Mohadjerin’s project began with the discovery of a family manuscript from the 1850s – rich with twists, turns and dramatic episodes, but almost entirely devoid of female agency. These male-centred ancestral narratives did more than recount what happened; they shaped how the world was seen and remembered, reinforcing gendered hierarchies and social structures across generations. As Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote in her 1989 essay Grandma’s Story (recently republished by Silver Press, 2025), that kind of ‘story is either a mere practice of the art of rhetoric or a repository of obsolete customs.’ But at some point, displaced fathers began telling their stories to daughters – not simply to preserve tradition, but to offer the knowledge needed to question it.

Mohadjerin’s narrative strategies deliberately unsettle these inherited power structures. She reclaims the storyteller’s role, becoming a contemporary feminist naqqāl – a reciter of epic tales – who reimagines the myths of kings and heroes through a woman’s gaze. She doesn’t just inherit the narrative; she takes control of it. In other words ‘Diseuse, Thought-Woman, Spider-Woman, griotte, storytalker, fortune-teller, witch’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989), Mohadjerin transformed the audible into the narratable, and the narratable into the visible. She created a visual language for family stories – one that also speaks to the longer histories of Iranian politics and constructions of manhood. In Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish, metaphors of masculinity abound: rocks that stand firm, tensed muscles, men bearing arms, horsemen in motion – figures of strength, pride and endurance. But because the story is told by a woman, other images emerge too: portraits of vulnerable elders, colourfully dressed men, ageing bodies, men caught in moments of dance or struggle. These juxtapositions expand the visual vocabulary of manhood, revealing its tenderness, contradictions, and fragility alongside its inherited postures of power.

With Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish, Mashid Mohadjerin challenges not only traditional photobook narratives but also prevalent modes of storytelling. Nothing is fixed; everything is pulled apart, non-linear, and layered. By attending to the silences and gaps, knowledge about one’s family and homeland takes on new, unexpected forms. Blending poetry, essay, archival collages, portraits, and landscape photography, Mohadjerin offers a radical reimagining of how stories embody identity, history and culture. To summon Trinh T. Minh-ha again: ‘The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the responsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring.’♦

All images courtesy the artist and FOMU, Antwerp © Mashid Mohadjerin

Mashid Mohadjerin – Spiralling Outward ran at FOMU, Antwerp until 8 June 2025. 

Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish is self-published and available through Idea Books.

** This essay is dedicated to all the story tellers in Iran and beyond, who keep reading bedtime stories, despite it all.

—
Taous Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator. Her expertise centres around the intricate relationship between photography and politics, a theme that permeates her various projects. She is an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Dahmani’s curatorial work was showcased at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, where she curated the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2022). In 2024 Dahmani curated exhibitions at Jaou Tunis, Tunisia; NŌUA, Norway; and Saatchi Gallery, London.

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