Category: Issue

Mahtab Hussain’s ode to muslim communities

Mahtab Hussain’s major solo exhibition, a joint commission by Ikon and Photoworks, confronts the layered realities of community and belonging. Through portraiture, video and a suite of 160 images of Birmingham mosques, What Did You Want To See? explores how surveillance cultures including Project Champion – a counterterrorism initiative in which hundreds of covert CCTV and ANPR cameras were installed in two of the city’s predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods in 2010 – and other institutional and media-driven initiatives continue to shape the Muslim experience in the UK. The artist discusses the exhibition’s structures and meanings with Anneka French.

Anneka French | Interview | 20 March 2025

Anneka French: Your new commission by Ikon and Photoworks, What Did You Want To See?, documents 160 mosques in Birmingham, each with its own architectural style. Is that your estimation of the total number?

Mahtab Hussain: It’s an incredible number of mosques or masjids. All the masjids in Birmingham have been plotted on Google Maps, so I followed that map, cycling or driving to tick off each one. I’d say I’ve covered about 98-99%, though the number continues to grow. Some masjids are very grand with minarets and huge community funding; others are next to small, run-down shops. The variety reflects the tenacity of the community and the messy identity of Birmingham as a whole. I told myself that if I never picked up a camera in Birmingham again, it would be important to close this chapter with the city’s masjids, playing with photography’s strength within the archival.

AF: What’s the relationship as you see it between photography and the archival?

MH: The relationship between photography and the archive goes beyond mere documentation; it creates a visual record that holds space for stories that might otherwise be forgotten. Archives are not neutral; they are selective and tell us what is deemed important enough to preserve. Photography has the unique ability to shape that narrative. It provides a lens through which we can revisit, reinterpret and reflect on history. The act of photographing isn’t just about preserving the present; it’s about creating a bridge to the future in ways that words or written documents sometimes can’t.

In the context of the masjids, it’s also about questioning how history is archived and who gets to shape it. Often, communities like mine are excluded from dominant historical narratives, and photography gives us the opportunity to shape our own story. By making the masjids part of that narrative, I present an alternative archive – one defined by the experiences of the people who built and use these spaces. This kind of photography isn’t passive; it’s an active engagement with history, placing value on what has long been undervalued and overlooked.

Photography becomes an archival tool that captures the moment and resists the erasure of these communities. These images serve as a form of resistance, a statement of identity and an assertion of belonging in a city that often forgets the communities that shape it. It’s about creating an archive that is dynamic, grows, changes, and responds to the shifting realities of these communities.

AF: How has Project Champion shaped the work?

MH: The cameras are no longer there, and not all their locations are known, but there was a time when the community felt spied on. Some cameras were pointed at masjids, others directly into people’s bedrooms. For the exhibition, I’ve created a large format photograph tiled Neighbourhood Watched (2025), with a crew, which looks into my mother’s home, imagining a camera placed outside. The work features a car, a couple standing outside the home and a young boy looking through the window. I’m using a smoke machine. It’s very cinematic and hyper-staged; it explores the tension between truth and fiction. I’ve often used direction or control within my work but I’ve kept it minimal in the past. This new piece re-creates the moment of discovering surveillance, when the community’s safe spaces were breached. I wanted to transport viewers into that image so they could feel the injustice themselves, and the best way to do that was through my imagination.

AF: You’re best known for your portraits. How have you approached portraiture in other of your works for the exhibition?

MH: I’m a big fan of Richard Avedon. I fell in love with the iconic American West series when I was a student. I wanted to go back to the simplicity and the range of black and white portraits. I don’t think there’s been a series created like that relating to the Muslim South Asian experience. I wanted to have that conversation in my work and celebrate the individual.

AF: Can you share more about the sitters?

MH: I did my usual thing, stopping people in the street and going into community centres, but I also reconnected with people I’ve met over the years and photographed before – though perhaps not shown – whose stories I wanted to share. One chap, Shaf, has a tyre shop and when I used to walk the streets or cycle for shoots in Birmingham. The shop was one of my safe spaces where I would go and hang out. I wanted to celebrate Shaf. I walked around with a white backdrop and had his son or one of his friends help hold it while making the portrait.

AF: They look like studio portraits.

MH: Yes, but they’re made on the streets with natural daylight. When you work with a community its difficult to encourage someone to come to a studio. It’s easier for me to go and try to create the studio in their space. My middle brother is in one of the works, my daughter in another and my mother – she’s the lady smoking the cigarette. I want to share the room with the community and the people I know in Birmingham. I did consider including myself in the show while exploring Avedon’s self-portraits. There’s something deeply reflective and revealing about self-portraiture, and I love how his portraits express the passage of time through his own aging. Ultimately, there wasn’t enough space to include myself, but with my family featured in the series, and given that this work stems from a personal experience. I’m present in every part of it.

AF: You’re present through your family and those friendships, conversations and observations.

MH: The work comes from a deeply personal place, and while there is an intentional international conversation happening, there is also a sense of Birmingham throughout the work.

AF: What goes through your mind when you are making a portrait?

MH: When I’m making a portrait, I’m thinking about the relationship I’m building with the person in front of me. It’s not just about pressing the shutter; it’s about the conversation, the trust and the shared space we’re creating together. I want the portrait to reflect not just how they look but who they are and how they want to be seen. It’s collaboration. This isn’t just my interpretation of them, but a mutual exchange of energy and understanding. I want to celebrate the sitter in front of my lens and help them be seen, while evoking a sense of power and beauty.

AF: Can you say more about the two videos made in collaboration with journalist, filmmaker and novelist Guy Gunaratne and some of other images in the exhibition?

MH: One of the videos is a prayer sequence. The other looks at Muslim hysteria and systematic abuse, exploring what it means to use labels like “extreme” and how these are projected onto Muslim communities in the UK. The video is quite heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching at times. It’s a kind of historical mishmash of images of 9/11 and the July 7th bombings – world events and images from popular culture that I’ve grown up with and understood – interwoven with family gatherings and birthday celebrations. I hope visitors get a chance to sit with the work and begin to question what it is that we’ve been told, to start to understand each other’s pain a little.

There are also painted statements, declarations in text, framed or in vinyl, along with photographs of graffiti postcode tags displayed throughout the gallery. Some of these are from my archive, going back years. Rather than viewing these tags as gang-related symbols, I see them as connected to ideas of place – sites tagged because the person feels they belong in those spaces. It becomes, in a way, a study of semiotics.

AF: You’ve touched upon it but how are you approaching the exhibition from a curatorial and audience perspective?

MH: I’ve been thinking about how the work can be experienced as a journey, reflecting the themes explored. The installation is not just about individual pieces but about creating a space where the audience feels immersed, where stories come together and allow for deeper connections. I want visitors to feel as if they’re stepping into a living, breathing narrative, where they can look, reflect on and even challenge what they’re seeing. The exhibition’s flow is designed to guide them through different layers of complex emotions – fear, reluctance, scepticism, resentment, compassion, empathy, and hope to name a few – each section contributing a different aspect of the story I want to tell. I want the audience to feel it, both in their body and mind.

AF: In another, separate sculptural commission for The Line, Please Take a Seat (launching in East London, April 2025), developed with members of their youth collective, you further extend the invitation to connect. What does working across different media afford you?

MH: Working across different media allows me to expand the conversation and experiment with how my work can engage people – and me – in varied ways. As an artist, it’s important to experience growth and embrace the resistance that comes with it. Photography has provided me with a powerful tool to communicate and shape my practice. It has allowed me to move beyond the still image and think about how an artwork can interact with its audience. There’s something special about printing and framing a photograph – it transforms into a physical object, a presence in space – and this tactile element has opened the door for me to explore other forms.

Portraiture itself carries a sculptural quality, so it felt like a natural progression to step into this realm with sculpture and installation. With projects like Please Take a Seat – a cast-iron Victorian-style bench that creates a moment of stillness in a busy world – I can invite people into the work in a more participatory, embodied way. It was designed with the idea of inviting conversation on place and reflection. It’s about giving the audience the space to engage and interact, allowing them to become part of the narrative. By expanding my practice, I can create a deeper connection – physically, emotionally and intellectually – between the work and its viewers. Art and photography spark dialogue, enable difficult conversations and build bridges. This is a very big part of my practice.

At Ikon, I’m putting my own experience into the show. It feels quite vulnerable. I’ve always talked before about ideas of community, masculinity and hybridity – about being Pakistani or something –but never really “Muslim”. I’ve danced around this previously. There is a strong focus on that within the work at Ikon but I still find it difficult to find my own label because of how it’s been hijacked and positioned. This is my way of grappling with the uneasiness I feel about the word and the power structures surrounding it.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Ikon. © Mahtab Hussain

Mahtab Hussain: What Did You Want To See? runs at Ikon until 1 June 2025

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Mahtab Hussain is an artist whose work explores the relationship between identity, heritage and displacement. His themes develop through long-term research articulating a visual language that challenges the prevailing concepts of multiculturalism. Hussain has published four artist books, including You Get Me? (MACK, 2017), Going Back to Where I Came From (Ikon, 2017), The Quiet Town of Tipton (Dewi Lewis, 2015), and The Commonality of Strangers (New Art Exchange, 2015).

Anneka French is a writer, editor and curator based in Birmingham. She is Project Editor at publishing house Anomie and contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor among other titles.

Images:

1-Mahtab Hussain, Faizal Islam Masjid, Birmingham, 2024

2-Mahtab Hussain, Imtiaz, 2024

3-Mahtab Hussain, Car drivers were monitored via ANPR Cameras, 2010

4-Mahtab Hussain, Eid Prayer in Birmingham, 2018

5-Mahtab Hussain, Alisha, 2024

6-Mahtab Hussain, Acts of Defiance Postcode Tag B12 Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath, 2014

7-Mahtab Hussain, Aqeel, 2024

8-Mahtab Hussain, Bilal Mosque, Birmingham, 2024

9-Mahtab Hussain, East Birmingham Central Masjid, Birmingham, 2024

10-Mahtab Hussain, Daddy Shaf, 2024

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Tate Britain’s 80s: Too much, not enough

From the gritty realism of the miners’ strike and anti-racist protests to the subversive art of staged portraits and image-text works, Tate Britain’s latest show, The 80s: Photographing Britain, attempts to bring to life a decade shaped by Thatcher-era turbulence, revealing the stark divisions within photography throughout the process. Yet, with nearly 350 images from over 70 photographers, Mark Durden asks if Tate Britain has taken on an impossible challenge?

Mark Durden | Exhibition review | 27 Feb 2025

The 80s was undoubtedly very much an important decade for photography in Britain. To a certain extent the political, economic and social turmoil during the Thatcher years was echoed in the seemingly irreconcilable divisions that characterised photography at that time. What comes across from this show is that the core contest and split was centred on the photograph’s role as a document, as the decade saw the emergence of a critical relationship to more traditional observational modes of documentary in favour of staged images, montage and/or the use of text.

For the purposes of this exhibition, the 80s are stretched back to 1976 and forward to 1994. The result is nearly 350 images by a long list of photographers, over 70. While the list is long it is still selective – there are many who are not included, Shirley Baker, Helen Chadwick, John Kippin, Fay Godwin, Susan Trangmar, Nick Waplington, Graham Smith, Hannah Collins, John Goto, Roger Palmer, Raymond Moore, Craigie Horsfield, for example.

Experiencing an image heavy show like this does raise the question as to whether photography is best served by being presented in such large quantities. What does it say about the value given to photography? Might it not suggest that there is still a problem with photography in exhibition form? Part of the agenda is to show the “multiplicities of practices” in the 1980s but what we get is an overly directed and steered “sampling” of photographic work, with lots of captioning labels and explanations, that are not always helpful and add to the informational weight of this show. 

The Tate Gallery (as it was then called, it became Tate Britain when Tate Modern opened in 2000) only collected photographs by artists in the 1980s. Even now, as Tate Britain celebrates work it basically ignored at the time, there still seems to be a certain unease about the document itself. The show begins with documentary, but in doing so uses the work of a range of photographers as an illustration of the events of the turbulent decade – including anti-racist movements, the Handsworth riots, the Miners’ strike, Greenham Common, and the 1990 Poll Tax riots. This busy display of black and white photographs presents a direct use of images as representation, a model later reconfigured or disassembled throughout the exhibition. There are however some continuities of this approach – a room entitled Reflections of the Black Experience, for example, includes powerful documentary pictures by Vanley Burke, whose work is also included in the opening room. His extensive and affiliative portrait of Black life in Birmingham is crucial, as he has said, in “writing our own history”. There are also Roy Mehta’s tender depictions of Afro-Caribean communities in North London. Despite this, I was still left feeling I’d like to see more space and presence given to such photography in this show.

The exhibition opens with David Mansell’s 1977 portrait of Jayaben Desai facing a line of police, during the second year of a strike for union representation at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories. The inclusion of this industrial dispute at the outset is a nice acknowledgment that photography itself involved worker exploitation. Mansell captures Desai’s dignified presence well – her resistance contained in her look back at the line of white policemen at kerb edge, with her arms crossed like theirs, it is as if she is inspecting them, sussing them out. Subject and content dominate our interest here. But as with pictures like Mansell’s, we are also made aware of the craft of documentary. Pogus Caesar’s pictures of the Handsworth Riots move between the observational, amidst the action, and the more reflexive: a portrait of the artist John Akomfrah reading its newspaper coverage headlined Riot of Death. Ceaser’s photographic detail of an advertising hoarding, collides the marketing slogan ‘Guinness Pure Genius’ with a message from the street scrawled beneath, informing us of an experienced reality that triggered the riots – Police Harassment on Blacks. Simple, direct, yet resonant and memorable.

The following room with fewer pictures, in part because it included photographs that were bigger and in colour, marked a shift in documentary approaches. One wall contained more traditional black and white pictures – by Don McCullin, Tish Murtha and Markéta Luskačová – while three walls were given over to larger colour works by Martin Parr, Anna Fox and Paul Graham. The room is named after the title of Parr’s book of his representation of the “comfortable classes”, The Cost of Living. But his turn to this class, his own class, was in part a consequence of his earlier well-known Last Resort, a depiction of working-class holidaymakers packed into a litter-ridden seaside resort in New Brighton, which is in Merseyside (the show’s catalogue essay gets it wrong and says the pictures were taken in Brighton). Last Resort was presented in a later room centred and themed on the impact of colour photography in the 1980s. The context and delayed presentation of this work is a problem. Class and consumerism are the issues that run through Last Resort and to separate that work out from The Cost of Living tends to downplay this.  

Parr’s flash-lit, fractured social world of middle-class garden parties and private views in The Cost of Living, offers a foil to Paul Graham’s pictures of people redundant and looking for work in the florescent-lit bleak interiors of the UK’s unemployment benefit offices (as they were known in the 1980s): the fall out of deindustrialisation and the effects of Thatcher’s embrace of an American-style market economy. Anna Fox’s portrait of a suited office worker shovelling bacon in his mouth offers a good symbol of the greed and avarice that marked certain sectors at this time. Such ironic and satirical pictures are marked by distance in contrast to the humanism underpinning so much of the photography that starts this show. Tish Murtha’s black and white pictures of unemployed youths – in states of distraction and ennui – in the estates of what were once the centre of heavy industry in the North East, offered a certain continuity from room one. It would have been good if her unemployment pictures had been given more space and presence as a counterpoint to the more familiar and bigger pictures by Graham.

Landscapes taps into another tension and opposition around photography at this time, between a more Romantic approach, exemplified by the beautifully crafted pictures of dramatic and often remote landscape formations by Thomas Joshua Cooper – an influential teacher at Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s – and a more literal disassembly of the genre by Ingrid Pollard. Her polemical multipart The Cost of the English Landscape, with pictures of the artist climbing a stile combined with signs saying PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASS, as well as postcards, maps, text, and photographs of the area of the Lake District National Park and Sellafield, informs us of the exclusions and omissions integral to the construction of an English Idyll. Topographic views by John Davies, record the social and industrial changes in British Landscapes, as he titles them. In one photograph the rocks in the foreground are daubed with the name of the pop band, Duran Duran, another layer in this rich, subtle and detailed registering of Britain’s deindustrialised and deindustrialising landscapes in the 1980s.

An entire room is given over to work that falls under the heading Image-Text and the captioning information panel rightly signals the importance and influence of Victor Burgin, who taught several of the photographers whose work is shown alongside his. But I’m not quite sure why he is represented only by part of his series UK 1976. The catalogue essay even mistakenly states that the images in this series are appropriated. They are not. He took the photographs. Burgin’s later, more intertextual and very influential work from the 1980s is absent. Was this because it was not “Photographing Britain”?     

There is much constructed, studio-based and appropriationist work in this show. A whole room is given over to work by Maud Sulter and Jo Spence. In Sulter’s Zabat, 1989, large gilt-framed colour photographic portraits celebrate Black female artists, writers, musicians, including herself, each staged as a muse from Greek mythology and counteracting their representation in Western art as white women. Jo Spence’s brilliance was that she used performance and comedy to cut to the chase, enlivening and energising a medium that did tend to be used with sobriety in the 1980s: as in Terry Dennett’s deadpan depiction of her standing topless on the doorstep of a terraced house, broom in hand, challenging and mocking photography’s reduction of women and the working class to an exotic spectacle.    

The use of colour in Grace Lau’s back-lit transparencies accents the celebratory tone of her photographs of London’s cross-dressing community. In one portrait taken out of doors in the sun, her subject poses by a soldier of the Life Guard regiment; it’s a nice interaction between them, with his flamboyant military outfit more lavish than the floral dress worn by the person smiling beside him.

Given the extraordinary nature of his rich and extensive portrayal of people in Merseyside in the 80s, it seemed odd to limit Tom Wood’s presence in this show to just four pictures from Chelsea Reach nightclub in New Brighton – exhibited as was Lau’s in the room centred on colour photography (despite Wood fluently moving between colour and black and white in the 80s). There does seem to be an unevenness about the way in which a photographer’s work is shown in this exhibition. Some “sampling” is more selective and limited than others.

In a room given over to three photographers, Black Bodyscapes, there is a strong American influence and presence. Both Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X draw upon and subvert Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black male nudes. Fani-Kayode’s colourful pictures, mixing the erotics of the Black body with sacred Yoruba rituals and Ajamu X, queering presentations of pumped-up masculinity through dress and performance as in his Body Builder in Bra. Lyle Ashton Harris’ iconic Man and Woman, a picture of the artist and a college friend, both Black and naked, wearing whiteface, evokes a history of racialised representations and also the act of passing as white, forsaking one’s ethnicity as a result of fear or duress. Harris is a US photographer but is shown here because he was included in Autograph’s first exhibition at London’s CameraWork gallery in 1990.

The show closes with a room Celebrating Sub Cultures, including a reconstruction of Wolfgang Tillmans’ first installation with photos and tearsheets taped directly to the wall. He is an artist who is somewhat of an outlier to photography in 80s Britain. He is there to signal the future and a shift from much work from the 1980s, when art and the commercial realm was kept separate or treated ironically. Art’s boundaries with fashion from the 90s were no longer to be so separate – as borne out by a 1991 series by Jason Evans and stylist Simon Foxton for i-D Magazine, mixing a documentary mode and fashion as young Black men are dressed as country gents and posed in settings that evoke white middle-class suburbia. All this seems well and good, but in a show so full and so unwieldy, do we really need this addition to the narrative?  

It is probably an impossible show to do well and there was, certainly on my part, a sense of fatigue and depletion as it went on and on. But it could have been more engaging, more pleasurable. Since the 1980s was notable for its diversity and conflicts over photography, it may have been better to allow for more of the mix and collisions between differing practices, greater “multiplicities” and more surprises. Grouping like with like did not always help. Perhaps it would even have been better to let the work of the photographers recording the tumultuous “long” decade of the 1980s in the first room run throughout the show, colliding with and disrupting our encounter with many of the other works. From Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002 onwards, documentary photography has regularly played an important part in biennales and art galleries. A pity it should be so contained and underplayed here at Tate Britain.♦ 

The 80s: Photographing Britain runs at Tate Britain until 5 May 2025

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Mark Durden is an academic, writer and artist. He is Professor of Photography and the Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales. He works collaboratively as part of the artist group Common Culture and, since 2017, with João Leal, has been photographing modernist architecture in Europe.

Images:

1-Jason Evans, Simon Foxton, from the series Strictly, 1991.

2-Syd Shelton, Darcus Howe addressing the anti-racist demonstrators, Lewisham, 13 August 1977.

3-Anna Fox, Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher), 1989.

4-Chris Killip, ‘Critch’ and Sean, 1982.

5-Paul Graham, Union Jack Flag in Tree, Country Tyrone, 1985.

6-Paul Trevor, Outside police station, Bethnal Green Road, London E2, 17 July 1978. Sit down protest against police racism, 1978.

7-Melanie Friend, Greenham Common, 14 December 1985.

8-Albert Watson, Orkney Standing Stones, 1991. Courtesy Hamiltons Gallery

9-Anna Fox, Work Stations, Café, the City. Salesperson, 1988. Courtesy the Centre for British Photography

10-David Hoffman, Nidge & Laurence Kissing, 1990.

11-Ting A Ling, from Handsworth Self Portraits, 1979 © Derek Bishton, Brian Homer & John Reardon. Courtesy The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

12-Maud Sulter, Zabat, Terpsichore, 1989 from Zabat, 1989. Courtesy Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

13-Paul Reas, Hand of Pork, Caerphilly, South Wales, 1985-88.

14-Peter Fraser, Untitled, from Arnolfini Series, 1984.

15-Zak Ové, Underground Classic (John Taylor), 1986.

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Exile as a shared human experience

Spread across four floors of a Bristol townhouse, Amak Mahmoodian’s recent One Hundred and Twenty Minutes exhibition transforms the space into a chronotopia, writes Max Houghton – where many times, places and stories co-exist, and memories materialise out of nowhere. Fragments of countless lives emerge through photography, sketches and the quiet intimacy of shared dreams, all shaped by Mahmoodian’s 14-year experience of exile – a condition that continues to drive her work. Profoundly reparative, it invites us to see exile not as a marker of difference, but as a shared human experience.

Max Houghton | Exhibition review | 13 Feb 2025

Amak Mahmoodian’s recent show for Bristol Photo Festival 2024 recedes like a dream. Fragments remain … a feeling, hard to define, endures … awakening. You emerge changed. But the world is the same. The work in One Hundred and Twenty Minutes rises from below the ground. The first steps are into the unknown. Flickering light emanates from a dark cellar. This is where the dreaming begins.

Mahmoodian’s work is more experience than exhibition – a feeling more than a showing. Since 2019, she has been researching the psychological aspects of dreaming, and their connection to the condition of exile that has shaped her own life for the past 14 years. Born in Iran, unable to return due to the brutally extreme confines of its political regime, the solitude of exile bears ever more heavily. Since Mahmoodian left Shiraz, her mother is present in her life as FaceTime image on a screen, and in poems she writes to her daughter. Her physical absence in the space of the show is almost palpable as one of the many severed bonds, perhaps the most primal.

Photography transcends all its borders in this profoundly affecting work. Sketches, polaroid, poetry, video, still images, text; each forms a layer of meaning, or, (again), feeling. A spectral memory palace is constructed across four floors by Mahmoodian, in which the dreams of 16 people living in exile in the UK illuminate its walls. Over time, Mahmoodian listened to the stories of their dreams, and as first response, drew a sketch of its essence. Then, in a kind of alchemy, she constructed a photographic image; an image of an image. They appear here as offerings, rather than representations. The nature of the collaboration keeps a sense of the artist within the images, yet her role is closer to that of a conduit or a medium.

The images vibrate with texture, gesture, uncanny doublings, triplings – acts of translation in which a dreaming becomes a listening becomes a seeing. Displayed at different sizes and scales, mixing colour with black and white, they materialise from the walls as blinded statue, snake, ethereal dress, forest. And the ticking of a clock. There is no sense of unity or conformity within the images, but they are yoked together across two rooms and a set of stairs, by an unbroken line of sentences, perfectly positioned at the height of the cornice, which offer clues to the unconscious register: ‘As I go closer, I see she is losing body parts. I am scared. My belly button opens and I give birth to a fist. The stairs form a never-ending bright path. There are snakes everywhere.’

The ground floor is the grounding space. Here are vitrines displaying Mahmoodian’s sketch books – she calls them the heart of the work – polaroids, too, their instantaneity punctuating the deep time of exile. A poem, by the artist, reveals the work’s title: one hundred and twenty minutes is the time we spend in REM sleep each night. Below ground, the act of dreaming is shared too. Downstairs, in the dark, the viewer encounters a single screen, the camera trained on the face of a woman, asleep. Watching someone as they sleep is most usually a private act, occurring between a parent and a child, or between lovers. The intimacy of this spectatorship – there is room for just two people – sets the emotional tenor of the work as a whole. Dreaming eyes seem to be scanning lines, searching the archive, trying to locate the self, a place to which they can return upon waking.

During the show’s run, the space was activated for performance, and for meditation. It is as though it has been curated to animate conversation; thoughts turn to loss, and love and mourning. The four-storey town house on Midland Road has become a chronotopia, where many times, many places and many stories co-exist, and memories materialise out of nowhere (or somewhere to which you can’t return. Or someone). The making of work, the intensity of its subject, took a toll on Mahmoodian’s health a couple of years ago. She began to dream the dreams so carefully described to her, while her body kept the score. It coincided with the rise of far-right rhetoric intended to ensure that UK soil became a hostile environment for people who had crossed its borders to seek refuge. The work she has created is ultimately reparative, spiritual, even, as it seeks commonality instead of inscribing difference.

Edward Said, in his own work on the condition of exile, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), with photographs by Jean Mohr, wrote: ‘These photographs are silent; they seem saturated with a kind of inert being that outweighs anything they express, consequently they invite the embroidery of explanatory words.’ Mohr’s black and white photographs offer quiet visual testimony to the conditions that created the exile of the Palestinians. Mahmoodian’s work expands the register of the photography of exile with her luminous imagery, which seems to dwell in the realm of the unconscious. There are no explanatory words, because they are still being formed, still uncertain. Time has become non-linear, and, as the Surrealists expressed, seemingly disconnected objects and ideas appear on the same plane of seeing. Mahmoodian has tapped into the psychological and emotional power of the image to reveal the longing and the loneliness of exile, and the threat of violence that caused it and underpins it still.

The questions Mahmoodian wanted to raise in terms of whether there are similarities in the nature of the dreams of exiled people are not for me to answer. But among the achievements of One Hundred and Twenty Minutes is that the exploration of the question has conferred a sense of community among the participants, which is needed and desired by all involved. The work also expands the definition of what we understand as an image, or, rather, it throws a lifeline between a mental image and a material one. It might be that within this process is a small raft for survival. ♦

Amak Mahmoodian: One Hundred and Twenty Minutes ran until 17 November as part of Bristol Photo Festival 2024.

—
Max Houghton is a writer, curator and editor working with the photographic image as it intersects with politics and law. She runs the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where she is also co-founder of the research hub Visible Justice. Her writing appears in publications by The Photographers’ Gallery and Barbican Centre, as well press such as Granta, The Eyes, Foam, 1000 Words, British Journal of Photography and Photoworks. She is co-author, with Fiona Rogers, of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (Thames and Hudson, 2017) and her latest monograph essay appeared in Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 Voices (Steidl, 2023). She is currently undertaking doctoral research into the image and law at University College London. She was the 2023 recipient of the Royal Photographic Society award for education.

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

On the evocative power of blur

Mame-Diarra Niang’s Remember to Forget, on view until recently at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, upends traditional norms of photographic representation. Through the abstraction of Black bodies and the evocative power of blur, Niang navigates the boundaries between visibility and opacity, pulling viewers into a dreamlike space where identity is self-imagined, and complexity resists reduction. Drawing on the works of Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant, Tebogo George Mahashe, and others, Taous Dahmani reflects on her visit to the exhibition.

Taous Dahmani | Exhibition review | 23 Jan 2025

In recent years, as I meandered through the labyrinthine corridors of contemporary art fairs, I found myself consistently drawn to the vibrant, blurred compositions of Mame-Diarra Niang. Within the abstraction, laid the fleeting hint of portraits, only just discernible, prompting me to wonder what drove the French visual artist to craft images that deliberately resist representation. As I resumed my roving, the increasing power of the fog stayed with me: rising like an ocean within the growing tide of figuration. Haunted by the haze, I wondered about the spectacle of figuration and the capabilities of its refusal. Mame-Diarra Niang’s blurring of black bodies functions as both an interpellation and an abstention – a diffuse energy and a dilution of sight; an exhaustion of the need to render muffled in a scream conveyed as a dream. The blur operates like a frequency, the capture of a spirit, the idea of magic. ‘We are after the absolute presence of blur. Blueblackblur is our concern.’ wrote African American poet and theorist Fred Moten (Black and Blur, 2017). The blur functions like an eclipse, a shadow that alters clarity but leaves a luminous obscuration. The aesthetic strategies of Remember to Forget seem to enact a claiming of opacity.

During a grey November visit to Paris late last year, I had the opportunity to see Mame-Diarra Niang’s first institutional exhibition in France, hosted at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. If you missed it, its footprint can be found in a rather unique artist book, of the same name, published by MACK, and a selection of Niang’s works are also currently on display in Stevenson’s Amsterdam gallery in an exhibition titled Æther. As you stepped into the gallery, the bustling streets of Paris faded away, leaving Rue des Archives behind as you enter an exhibition space wished by Cartier-Bresson, which opened a year before his death in 2004. 20 years later, Niang’s exhibition, curated by Clément Chéroux, unfolded across three spaces: a preliminary area that introduced the origins of the project and its initial experimental renditions, followed by the main gallery, where large-scale blurred portraits dominated. Finally, you entered a third room, its walls painted black, showcasing red, green, and blue stain-shaped photographic busts: the atmospheric condition of black by way of blur. The visit is an experiential journey through the intensification of abstraction, culminating in the vivid presence of what could be described as breathing auras. As you navigated these three spaces, the tetralogy, you venture to the edge of representation, encountering the blur as both a reverberation and a shield. In Mame-Diarra Niang’s work, the surfaces of the photographic paper bear the traces of smudged ink, extending to the periphery of the print.

The visit triggers a lingering sensation, a sensory response. If the viewer’s eye struggles to see clearly – not due to an irregularly shaped cornea – the exhibition invites us to engage other senses. What is absent from the image can instead be imagined, experienced or felt. Mame-Diarra Niang resists narration, not out of a lack of interest in storytelling – the poems scattered throughout the galleries attest to this – but as a defiance of explanation. I think: given the lasting damage photography has inflicted on the depiction of Black and Brown people, it’s no wonder that the only solution is to reclaim it from any oppressive grasp or gaze. In the current global context, the spectacle of otherness is no solution. I remember: Édouard Glissant’s chapter “For Opacity” in Poetics of Relation (1990).

Since the 1980s, and more so in the 1990s, French Caribbean (“Martiniquais”) writer, poet, philosopher, and theorist Édouard Glissant articulated how for the West to understand those who is “different” to itself, it must grant the Other full transparency in order to then grant recognition of its existence. Glissant wrote that one not only has to agree ‘to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity,’ adding ‘to understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.’

Singularity is indeed at the core of Mame-Diarra Niang’s Remember to Forget project, which can also be considered as self-portraits as noted the artist: “This series feels like the abstract idea that I have of myself.” But the right to opacity is not a claim of silence, but a right to complexity against oversimplification, assumption, categorisation, ‘reduction’ to use another of Glissant’s phrase. The bright vibration that make the multi-chromatic “portraits” state, via their texture, polymorphous identities, multiple, poetic and self-imagined selves. ‘As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence,’ wrote Glissant; whose words strike a chord in the context of France’s imposition of universality and its refusal of difference, all under the banner of the French Revolution’s motto: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.

Drawing partly on Glissant, South African researcher and artist Tebogo George Mahashe frames this process of refusal as a challenge to the colonial fetishism of sight-based knowledge. Instead, he embraces the guidance of dreams’ instruction, where their narrative remains open to interpretation. Finding the space of dreams more generative for understanding and representing the self, Tebogo George Mahashe also claims Glissant’s opacity and explained: ‘to insist on dreams and its practice as opaque texts – knowable only to the person who experienced the dream and practiced dreaming – is to refuse and reject colonialism’s insistence on seizing every detail’ (2020). The deformation of content, resulting from the blur, allows for an escape from the rigidity of the real, from the imposition of any authority. The blur is a dream that belongs only to the dreamer. One of the chapters of Mame-Diarra Niang’s project is titled “Sama Guent Guii”, which, translating from Wolof (Niang was raised across Senegal, the Ivory Coast and France), means : “this dream that I had.” Remember to Forget then evokes an introspective journey, offering a dissolute form for the design of an inner landscape.

The contours of a dream are not photographic, yet if they were to be rendered through the medium of photography, they would undoubtedly be blurry, much like the dream itself and its lingering presence throughout the rest of our day. In one of Mame-Diarra Niang’s report-poems, she states: ‘We are never the same when we wake up.’ Perhaps that’s the sensation captured on the surface of Niang’s photographs: a sfumato, a soft, gradual transition between the world of the sleepers and that of the awake. It is a hazy, smoky effect that functions both as mood and stance. As Moten once wrote. ‘B is for blurr, for the seriality of an extra r, dividing movements like a fantasy, like Theaster Monk’s mood.’♦

Mame-Diarra Niang: Remember to Forget ran at Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation until 5 January 2025.

Æther is on at Stevenson Amsterdam until 22 February 2025.

—
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.

Images:

1-Mame-Diarra Niang, Turn #2, from the series Call Me When You Get There. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

2-Mame-Diarra Niang, Continue #35, from the series Call Me When You Get There. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

3-Mame-Diarra Niang, Continue #22, from the series Call Me When You Get There. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

4-Mame-Diarra Niang, Ce qui monte, from the series Léthé. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

5-Mame-Diarra Niang, Figure le moment qui précède, from the series Léthé. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

6-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #3, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

7-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #4, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

8-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #6, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

9-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #23, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

10-Mame-Diarra Niang, Æther. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

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

Sohrab Hura’s shapeshifting practice

Mother, Sohrab Hura’s first US survey, presents over 50 works spanning two decades of the artist’s shapeshifting practice. The exhibition at MoMa PS1 brings together photography, film, sound, drawing, painting, and text – shown together for the first time – to confront colonially imposed borders, the trauma of partition, changing ecosystems of the Indian subcontinent, and more. Zahra Amiruddin reflects on the fluidity of Hura’s experimental work, where memories, metaphors and histories blend to reveal the complex and multifaceted lives of images.

Zahra Amiruddin | Exhibition review | 13 Jan 2025

While sitting at my writing desk in Bombay, India, the room is engulfed by multiple musical notes resounding from videos emanating from photographer, filmmaker, and now, painter, Sohrab Hura’s digital walkthrough in New York. In this moment, the two concrete metropolises have converged via my laptop screen, as he guides the viewer through his first US survey show titled, Mother, at MoMa PS1.

The voices from the videos in the gallery space are barely discernible, but act as background scores to elongated thoughts finding a language through multiple forms. Spread across five rooms, Hura has carefully brought together the “many lives of images” that often arrive because of the existence of another. Spanning two decades of experimental practice, the viewer is invited to immerse themselves into the artist’s mind, to navigate between personal and political introspections. Even with a deeply intimate title such as Mother, Hura addresses colonially imposed borders, the trauma of the partition and the changing ecosystem of the Indian subcontinent. Here, the word Mother becomes a blanket under which harsh realities, lived experiences, vapour dreams, turmoil, humour, and history find comfort; caressed by thoughts of a resilient caregiver, blurring the lines between the artist’s and one’s own.

The viewer is first greeted by Hura’s photographic practice that laid the foundation of his future musings, making me contemplate the infinite nature of photography. Through a mere visit to the show, we are suddenly building a relationship with the artist, acutely aware of his changing styles as the years progress. For instance, the journalistic side of Hura is visible in his photographic work Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–6) and the film Pati (2010/2020) which is based on a small, rural region of connected self-governing villages in Madhya Pradesh (Central India) which he visited on a bus tour in 2005. Over 15 years of visits, Hura’s interpersonal relationships, interactions and strong presence is felt in the visuals, as the arid, and piercing heat emits from the distant frames. What was once a lush forest, is now cracked land, desperately ploughed by its inhabitants. The protagonists are aware of Hura’s lens, coyly smiling and exchanging looks of joy – a phenomenon that is popular in a country like India, where the camera is often treated as a tool of ‘fame.’

As the years progress, in video works like Bittersweet (2019) and The Coast (2020), the awareness of the lens sheds, and Hura almost becomes incidental during the unravelling of moments. The narrative is still his, but the viewer is transfixed by the people in the visuals, often forgetting the presence of the one holding the camera. We see glimpses of Hura’s shadow in the sea or in reflective surfaces, and much like the photographer who moves through these moments like air, our eyes glide and settle on his disjointed memories. Hura’s own mother who lives with schizophrenia, emerges from the screen as if she were in the room, unperturbed by the resounding presence that a camera usually brings.

In the single-channel video from The Coast work, thousands of people sway with the rhythm of the waves, anticipating it crashing against their bodies, as they fling forward into its vastness. The film is slowed down, as if time has stretched through the eyes of the observer, who stands fixated in the crests and troughs of a dramatic sea. The animate water holds space for both, fact and fiction, as Hura emphasises the coastline as “a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.”

Through the show, we share secrets with the artist, who guides us through his urgent recollections, desires and humorous encounters in framed soft pastels and gouache paintings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing) and Ghosts in My Sleep (2023–ongoing). They remind me of puzzles that we used to engage with as children, where we had to find an object often hidden in plain sight. Hura seems to be recording a memory but adding his own masala (spice) either in anticipation, or for sheer entertainment. Interestingly, the tactility of these memories can be felt while moving your fingers along the bookcover of Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed published by MACK which is soft, and gooey, much-like Hura’s paintings, that aren’t rigidly structured, and meander between experimentative geometries and compositions.

The balancing act between fictitious encounters and truth linger in undertones throughout Hura’s oeuvre. It almost feels like he’s playing a game of hide-and-seek with the viewer, who may or may not take his bait. Like in his video work The Lost Head and the Bird (2019), the jarring and uncomfortable images act as a parable that reflects the frenzied speed at which information –  whether real or fake – circulates on social media. The music by Hannes d’Hoine and Sjoerd creates an atmosphere of unease, and I find my breath stuck in my throat for quite a while before I remember to gulp. The video ends with a white screen, but the tension almost makes the viewer believe that there is more to come.

The mind is never quiet as we move through the exhibition, and a range of emotions find home in the recurring sound. In between silent imagery of winter-laden doorways and hidden snowballs in gentle palms, the viewer bears witness to the conflict and violence that exists in the northernmost part of the India Subcontinent- Kashmir. Despite struggles, protests, and powerful activism by its inhabitants, the land which is often referred to as Jannat (Heaven) finds itself battling for its freedom from the clutches of India, Pakistan and China since the dissolution of the British Raj in 1947. Using the melting snow as a metaphor, Hura moves away from the romanticised and highly picturesque, tourist-friendly imagery that is associated with Kashmir and instead documents the people’s gentleness, resilience and simultaneous struggle for existence. In fact I met Hura during one of his long stints in the Chillai Kalan (harsh cold) of 2018, and noticed that his approach is characterised by being present and mindful, whether with or without the camera.

Hura is a photographer who is on a quest to record, but simultaneously gets tired by the static nature of the medium. In his recent ongoing work Timelines, acrylic gesso drawings adorn each part of corrugated cardboard boxes. Much-like the show which is a labyrinth of the artist’s fragmented contemplations, the boxes change their narratives dependent on how they are placed – unfolding and revealing whispers each time. Hura isn’t interested in linear narratives, which also speaks to the elastic propensity of thought.

If the viewer is familiar with Hura’s photographs, they will notice the recurring character of The Mother – Hura’s mother – appearing and disappearing across the walls. One might even argue that this survey is truly an extension of their relationship, which has also been delicately explored in the pages of his books Life Is Elsewhere (2015) and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside (2018). Anchored by a familial thread that would assumingly shape a lot of his contemplations, in Mother, the artist is vulnerable as well as aware. The works in the survey are suspended between past, present and an unravelling future, ensuring that while we visit Hura’s world, we are acutely aware of our own. ♦

Sohrab Hura: Mother runs at MoMA PS1 until 17 February 2025. 

—
Zahra Amiruddin is an independent writer, photographer and lecturer of photography. Her areas of interest include ethnographic studies, astronomy, personal narratives, and family histories. She is part of 8.30, a photography collective of nine women working with the visual medium across India.

Images:

1-Sohrab Hura, The Lost Head and the Bird, 2019. Video (colour, sound). 10:13 min. Photo: Steven Panecassio

2>6-Installation views of Sohrab Hura: Mother. Photo: Steven Paneccasio 

7&8-Sohrab Hura, Bittersweet, 2019. Video (colour, sound), 13:48 min

9-Sohrab Hura, The green dress, 2022. Soft pastel on paper. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

10-Sohrab Hura, Untitled from the series Snow, 2015–ongoing. Inkjet print. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

11-Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2020. Video: colour, 17:27 min. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

12-Sohrab Hura, Remains of the day, 2024. Soft pastel on paper. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

13>15-Sohrab Hura, Untitled from The Songs of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer, 2013–ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

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

How can hair be a political symbol?

At Museum Folkwang, GROW IT, SHOW IT! investigates the relationship between hair, identity and gender performance across cultures. Spanning 150 years of photographic history, from Victorian cartes de visite to TikTok screenshots, the exhibition presents hair as both personal expression and a political symbol. Drawing on lived experience and cultural movements – feminism, queer identity, civil rights, and post-colonial struggles – Song Tae Chong charts the shifting significance of hair over the course of time.

Song Tae Chong | Exhibition review | 28 Nov 2024

One of my favourite sets of childhood memories is of my grandmother and I. Every morning before I went to school, she would carefully sit me down in front of the fire that she had built in our living room. My socks would be hanging on the smoke screen, warmed for my always too cold feet. Out came her comb, and she would carefully part my hair down the middle, quickly putting my hair into one of three hairstyles: a ponytail, two long braids down my back, or my personal favourite, one long braid starting at the nape of my neck done in the traditional Korean style for young girls. She would either adorn my hair with a ribbon or barrettes, but would always tie up my long strands with hair elastics that had big plastic balls attached. They would sit on my head, like a crown of precious plastic gems. The daily ritual that my grandmother and I had ended once I entered my preteen years and embarked on my own path of hair self-discovery.

When I braid my own hair now, although it is never as neatly and symmetrically arranged as when she did, I think of her and these moments we had, ones that I knew she had with her own grandmother. It was those memories that came flooding back as I opened the pages of the sprawling catalogue produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, GROW IT, SHOW IT! A Look at Hair from Arbus to TikTok by Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.

Early on in the exhibition, Hoda Afshar’s triptych of images from the series Turn (2022) depicting women both braiding and holding hair, the braids both ordered and fragile as tendrils escape their pattern and are blown by the wind, speaks to its prevailing themes: connection and community. The subject of hair is explored through a variety of media, from art photographs to images from fashion and advertising as well as anonymous vernacular photographs. These images speak to the ways in which every day people use hair as a means of identity formation and assertion, cultural and social connection, whether for personal, social and political reasons and, of course, for aesthetics.

Spanning approximately 150 years of photographic activity, the catalogue also situates hair within historical contexts. Highlighting queer, feminist, post-colonial, and oppositional politics as well as conventional beauty standards and representations, the photographs assembled show how all of these movements have shaped and reshaped our understanding of hair as visual culture. The catalogue and exhibition serve as both an overview of hair as style and as political and cultural communication. Led by Thomas Seelig and Miriam Bettin, it is an ambitious and expansive curatorial endeavour utilising a wide array of representations of hair. Cartes de visite showing flowing locks of Victorian era hair and screenshots from TikTok refer to the long-standing relationship between hair as the subject of photography and image culture.

Punctuating a diverse and extensive survey of images are critical essays, placing these works within discourses that help to anchor them within a critical context. Lori L. Tharps’ essay “Hair I am” speaks to the legacy of disruption as well as cultural erasure via hair within the history of African people, both as colonised in situ as well as in the forced diaspora of the circum-Atlantic slave trade. Broken lineages, broken cultures, erasure of community building and status symbols, all of this played out in the politics of hair. She writes, ‘For better or worse, the hairstyles worn by African American people, from the 18th century through modern times, continued to signal a person’s status in society. From their politics to their profession, Black hairstyles supposedly said it all.’ Many of the featured works help to illustrate this idea. In a photograph from the archives of The Awa Women’s Group at the Bopp Social Center, a group of women are shown reading and laughing together, each with a unique head wrap as adornment and personal expression of style. A photograph of Angela Davis, with her afro, show how the disruption of attempts to control and tame Blackness played a pivotal role in political movements. The series by Nakeya Brown Sof-m-Free, Afro Curls, X-Possessions: Black Beauty Still Lives (2020/2024) depict objects of self-care, the material culture of black beauty and the symbolic codes understood and shared amongst black women as well as the impact that these products and their packaging had on beauty standards.

GROW IT, SHOW IT! also looks at the importance of hair and its relationship to identity and gender performance across different cultures. Paul Kookier’s Untitled 2020 is both a photographic abstraction and stark depiction of male body hair, to be viewed as a symmetrical form while at the same time challenging the visual culture of male body representation. Images from Satomi Niyoung’s ’70s Tokyo LONG HAIR INVERTED, itself a study on the typology of the hairstyles of the time, suggests the disappearing self, in silhouette or as the inverted image, only distinguished by the outline and shape of hair.

GROW IT, SHOW IT!  with its various points of emphasis invites the viewer to think again at the photographs that they have looked at, providing essential frameworks for interpretation. The project obliges viewers to read the semiotics of hair with renewed perspectives, across contexts and time. Viewers are invited, even nudged, to look closer, to probe deeper, to survey the wide array of photographs presented. The images also invite nostalgia and moments of levity. As historical and social and cultural indicators and signifiers, these representations of hair or even its absence within certain visual cultures ask us to reconsider its place in our own lives and how we construct meaning. ♦

GROW IT, SHOW IT! A Look at Hair from Arbus to TikTok runs at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, until 12 January 2025

—
Song Tae Chong is a Berlin and New York based photography curator, advisor, and writer. Her research focus is on postcolonial visual culture, epistemologies of memory and documentary photography. She is currently a Trustee of the Martin Parr Foundation and teaches photography and theory at UE Berlin. 

Images:

1-Hoda Afshar, “Untitled #4”, from In Turn, 2022. Courtesy Milani Gallery, Meeanjin/Brisbane © Hoda Afshar 

2-Chaumont-Zaerpour, Untitled, 2023. Published in The Gentlewoman

3-Dorothea von der Osten, Untitled, 1950s

4-Anna Ehrenstein, Western Girl, 2017

5-Suffo Moncloa, Gucci / The Face Issue 9, 2021

6-Graciela Iturbide, Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, Mexico, 1979

7-Viviane Sassen, “Kine”, 2011, from Parasomnia. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery © Viviane Sassen

8-Paul Kooiker, Untitled (Hercules), 2020. Courtesy tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam © Paul Kooiker

9-Nakeya Brown, “Sof-n-Free” from X-Pressions: Black Beauty Still Lifes, 2020

10-Torbjørn Rødland, Legs and Tail, 2020

11-August Sander, Secretary at Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, 1931/1982. © The Photographic Collection/SK Foundation for Art and Culture – August Sander Archive, Cologne; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 

12-Tessica Brown, Gorilla Glue Girl, 2021. TikTok Reel, 59 seconds

13-Thandiwe Muriu, Camo 2.0 4415, 2018

14-Helmut Newton, Courrèges, French Vogue, 1970. © Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin

15-Rineke Dijkstra, Almerisa, Wormer, the Netherlands February 21, 1998

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 R. Dahmani.

Paris Photo 2024’s standout displays

Paris Photo, the photography world’s “north star” event, has returned to mark its territory under the vaulted dome of the Grand Palais. It opens a new chapter in the fair’s history, boasting a revised layout, expanded sections, smart curatorial interventions and fresh visual branding. Amidst a growing emphasis on contemporary practice, not to mention multiple Surrealist nods to celebrate the art movement’s 100th birthday, works inspired by the land and city provide much contemplation. Here are five standout displays from the fair’s 27th edition – selected by 1000 Words Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.

Alessandro Merola | Fair highlights | 07 Nov 2024 | In association with MPB

1. Mark Ruwedel, Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies
Large Glass Gallery

Orchestrating selections from Mark Ruwedel’s conceptually ambitious and ongoing four-part epic, this installation by Large Glass Gallery delivers an impactful meditation on the fraught relationship between the natural environment and economic expansion, the inevitable consequences of which are never far from view. Various vantage points onto Los Angeles are offered here – from its rivers and canyons to the desert and Western edge – revealing not only the places nature and humanity intersect, but where the artist encounters history. Although Ruwedel is very much committed to, and working through the lineage of, the American New Topographic aesthetic (Ed Ruscha’s gasoline stations and Lewis Baltz’s industrial parks are amongst the seminal works at this edition), his work is not derivative nor daunted by the past (even if it is haunted by it). Seizing in their austere, elemental beauty, these hand-printed pictures quietly draw you in, inviting you to find evidence of human traces on the landscape, whether through a discarded water bottle or old train track that hisses at you as the wind sweeps through its bended edges. There are the blazed trees of Burnt too, a small portfolio Ruwedel made in the aftermath of the 2022 fires. They are as much onlookers to the contesting of wildness as we are.

2. Ester Vonplon, I See Darkness
Galerie S.

The narratives contained within the land are also startlingly evoked in Ester Vonplon’s display with Galerie S., which offers one of the most unique viewing experiences in the reinvented Emergence section upstairs. It comprises new and eye-catching experiments from the series I See Darkness, for which the Swiss artist turned a disused tunnel, once the entrance to the Safien Valley in Switzerland, into a darkroom of sorts, utilising light-sensitive paper to transcribe the alchemical rhythms of darkness, nature and time. Developed across days, sometimes months, the resultant images bear an irresistible range of shapes, colours, textures and moods. Shown here in an appropriately black booth, separated by a 10-metre-long unique piece produced in the tunnel, they appear frail, fleeting yet also lucid, bearing a dreamy density and layering of elements which seems to embolden nature – a nature which Vonplon has indeed let back in. Thus commendable are the ways in which the artist has submitted herself to a collaborative and unpredictable practice that is deeply rooted in her relationship with her local environment. Vonplon sees through it, listens to it, learns from it. Vonplon reminds us to follow suit.

3. Sakiko Nomura, Träumerei
Galerie Écho 119

Galerie Écho 119’s representation of the Sakiko Nomura continues to impress at this small but special solo presentation. It marks the first time the Träumerei series has been exhibited in its entirety outside the Japanese artist’s native country, albeit with selected prints only viewable upon request. There is also the opportunity to experience a delectable portfolio of collotypes, rich in grayscale and deep in jet-black, printed by Benrido this summer. The allure of this work lies in the fact one can enter it at any point, and follow it in any direction, in turn attempting to thread together a loose story through Nomura’s spliced images of skylines, landscapes, flowers, animals and sitters in repose. The combinations tease out tensions between interiority and exteriority, nature and artifice, reality and illusion, yet simultaneously resist any clarity on where the lines are drawn. Nomura’s is a multifaceted world, lit by a pale moon, a dreamwork. No matter how close you get, these vestiges feel somehow distant, wrapped in thought, clouded in a state of reverie. They are the last witnesses of moments that would otherwise be lost forever; or never happened at all.

4. Antony Cairns, E-ink Screens
Intervalle

Making a star turn at Intervalle is Antony Cairns, who, too, probes the realm of (science) fiction. One must crane one’s neck to view the artist’s latest so called “e-ink” works, which are encased in individual Perspex boxes. Here, Cairns has hacked into, and uploaded images onto, e-readers, subsequently fixing ink – or, indeed, trapping time – on the screens. They record urban scenes – architecture, tunnels, signs et cetera – from cities including Shanghai, Tokyo, Los Angeles and London. Although the captions indicate where each image was taken, experienced as a whole, any distinctions between locales collapse under the grimy, gloomy glow of megapolis sky. They turn into the same cities, unknown cities and on-the-brink-of-becoming bygone cities. Whilst Cairns’ practice has a strong affinity with digital technology (he is also launching two limited-edition books at the fair, produced using a RISO machine and Sony’s discontinued Mavica camera, respectively), these images, with their etch-like aesthetic, seem to stretch even further back in time. One feels that the artist is almost stealing from the past to give to the future. There is, of course, something very cynical about his decision to encase the screens behind glass, like remnants, or fossils. Cairns asks: whose utopia now?

5. Denis Malartre, Les Objectales
Bigaignon

Despite the irony of viewing them in a commercial setting, given the ethos of France’s late 1960s Supports/Surfaces school which the late Denis Malartre riffed off, the clinical approaches of the late Parisian photographer make the Bigaignon booth – located in the dynamic Prismes section – a succinct, sensual statement on materiality. Borne out of ‘exasperation’, these 50 pared-down prints from the 1986–88 series Les Objectales, elegantly mounted in white-wooden frames, depict bits of paper affixed to the corners of a Parisian apartment, as well as strips hanging from the ceiling. The depth of field is shallow and the focus is minimal, bringing to attention the interplay and paradoxes of light and shadow – that is, the latter existing only in the presence of the former, yet defined by its complete absence. They are, simply and deconstructed, a set of formal orientations across surfaces, revealing not only the medium’s physicality and fabrication, but also, somehow, its aura. With these highly portable, repeatable image-objects implying infinite reiterations, we find Malartre’s fixation with photography above all else. ♦

Paris Photo runs at the Grand Palais until 10 November 2024.

 

 

 

 

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Images:

1- Mark Ruwedel, “Sunken City” (2017), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery

2-Mark Ruwedel, “Big Tujunga Wash #15” (2018), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery

3>5-Ester Vonplon, “Untitled” (2024), from I See Darkness. Courtesy Galerie S.

6>7-Sakiko Nomura, “Untitled” (2017), from Träumerei. Courtesy Akio Nagasawa Gallery and Galerie Écho 119

8-Antony Cairns, “LDN4 #20” (2024), from E-ink Screens. Courtesy Intervalle

9-Antony Cairns, “TYO2, MAVICA #107” (2024), from MaViCa CTY (Mörel Books, 2024). Courtesy Mörel Books

10>11-Denis Malartre, “Untitled” (1988), from Les Objectales. Courtesy Bigaignon

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• 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

The 9th Singapore International Photography Festival

Loosely inspired by Marcel Proust’s epic modernist classic, The 9th Singapore International Photography Festival, under the title In Search of Lost Time, considers photography as a carrier of both personal and national identities. Featuring FX Harsono’s Keeping the Dream, which confronts ethnic subjugation in Indonesia through archival portraits of Chinese Indonesian children; Liu Bolin’s Seeing the Invisible, presenting staged self-portraits that merge him with urban landscapes; and Mingalaba: A Journey Through the Myanmar Photo Archive, curated by Kirti Upadhyaya, which intertwines public and private narratives of Burmese life through family portraits and civilian records. The festival surfaces involuntary gaps in history, memory and documentation, holding a mirror up to the process of self-examination itself, Kong Yen Lin writes.

Kong Yen Lin | Festival review | 31 Oct 2024

Interposed between physical reality and representation, photographs are often carriers of biographies, be it the self or the nation, which germinate in varying social contexts bearing new meanings for their beholders. The biennial Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) is an intensification of this capacity for introspection. In surfacing photography’s layered possibilities vis-à-vis the medium’s manifestations as photobook, research data, archival records, and vernacular keepsakes, it prompts deeper thought about the sociocultural fabric of Singapore and our ever-changing identities in an age where visibility, memory, time and space are constantly being redefined.

Framed by a curatorial direction loosely inspired by Marcel Proust’s epic modernist classic In Search of Lost Time (1913), bodies of works presented similarly grappled with the protean nature of memory as frozen or compressible, allowing revisiting and reflection, or fluid and meandering, changing and reshaping as new interpretations are added to them.

A fitting primer to the festival is Keeping the Dream, a festival commission featuring Indonesian contemporary artist FX Harsono, which asserted the inherent violence in photography when being deployed as an apparatus for ethnic profiling and subjugation. Known for his politically charged works which examine identity through a personal lens, Harsono critiques the long-standing institutional discrimination and oppression of the Chinese minority community in Indonesia (of which he is a member). Taking centerstage is a typology of over 100 archival facial portraits showing anonymous Chinese Indonesian children, ranging from toddlers to pre-teens, extracted from official identification documents dating from early to late 1990s which he had been salvaging since a decade ago. They allude to state policies during Former President Suharto’s New Order regime that required ethnic Chinese Indonesians to undergo onerous proof of citizenship, as well as measures which suppressed the expression of Chinese identity, such as banning the public use of Chinese names and forcing civilians to adopt Indonesian ones.

Together with a series of photo assemblages juxtaposing ID documents with found images of familial bliss, Harsono projects his imagination of a childhood unfettered by prejudice and surveillance that might have elided most children of that generation. The absence of textual labels providing translation support for the documents rendered in Dutch or Bahasa Indonesia, echo the silences of a community facing erasure. Yet the artist’s act of resurfacing these records and reinterpreting them with personal interventions stood in defiance of this painful period in history from being forgotten. Reflecting on the Singaporean context, a city state with a population comprising 76 percent ethnic Chinese, the governance of Chinese identity, language and culture had also been instrumentalised and calibrated to balance delicate geopolitics of its position within the Malay Archipelago, and the need to remain connected to China’s economic success.

The exploration of identity as a sociopolitical construct continues in Seeing the Invisible, a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Liu Bolin featuring 11 works from his ongoing Hiding in the City and Target series. Conceived using painting, performance and photography, these staged self-portraits depict Bolin literally blending into the backdrops of selected landscapes. Adopting the visual metaphor of invisibility, they provoke thought on the marginality of identity and memory arising from tensions between insider and outsider, individualism and collectivism. While Bolin’s impetus to begin Hiding in the City originated in 2005 as personal protest sparked by the government’s forced demolition of his artist studio in preparations for the Beijing Olympics, over the years, his choice of canvases and collaborators have come to reflect a far-ranging humanistic concern. For one, Cancer Village (2013) involved the artist collaborating with over 20 villagers in Shandong province facing the threat of downstream industrial pollution, to stage an act of camouflage against a desolate wheat field, with the aim of raising awareness around the social costs of economic progress. As part of a festival commission, Bolin had also created two new site-specific artworks in Singapore, poised against the touristic landmark of the Merlion Park and a bustling Hawker Center in Chinatown.  

The latter was particularly meaningful for Bolin, who felt it “embodied the historical lineage of Chinese migration across the world” [1]. His profile as a Chinese artist intermingles with the cultural politics of Singapore’s Chinatown, which is an anomaly from most Chinatowns in the world typically catered for the Chinese minority of the populace. During 19th to mid-20th Century British colonial rule, Chinatown was a self-sustaining ethnic enclave demarcated for incoming Chinese immigrants. However, in post-colonial Singapore, its significance evolved to embrace the nation’s multicultural outlook, and developed into a site of active discourse on gentrification and heritage preservation. With globalisation, complexities of identity, memory, and integration came into sharp relief when Chinatown relived its role as a point of congregation for the post-1990 wave of new Chinese immigrants to Singapore [2]. Furthermore, hawker centres are also unique social spaces in Singapore that stand for the melting pot of diverse food cultures.

Expanding this dialogue with the cultural politics of space was Mingalaba: A Journey Through the Myanmar Photo Archive  / မင်္ဂလာပါ: မြန်မာ့ဓာတ်ပုံမော်ကွန်း၏ဖြတ်သန်းခြင်းခရီး , a photographic display curated by Kirti Upadhyaya. Inserted into shop displays, advertisement niches and restaurant walls across a cluster of malls in the city’s central district, doubling up as bustling enclaves for the sizeable Burmese community in Singapore, the archival images represent a historical counterpoint against the flux of activities in the spaces. The mix of images ranging from mid to late 20th Century vernacular snapshots, family photos, studio portraits, and civilian records of national milestones such as the first independence speech in Yangon in 1948, not only crisscross terrains of personal and social memory, but also blur boundaries between the private and public. Collections by two of the earliest local photographers U Than Maung and U Aung San were especially captivating, offering a rare glimpse into identity formation and self-fashioning in post-colonial Myanmar.

The Myanmar Photo Archive was founded almost a decade ago by Austrian photographer Lukas Birk when Myanmar was loosening up from decades of oppressive military rule, with the aim of creating a repository of social and personal memory. The display posits deeper contemplation on the photograph as a construct of contextual interpretation, and its role in historical imagination and retelling. Within Yangon’s highly restricted and fraught media landscape, it entails greater democratic access to the past, though navigating with silences, absences and information gaps remains a perennial challenge.

This atomising of the stream of life into discrete, manageable elements to be collected, saved and shared, extends beyond traditional archives into the virtual multiverse of social media, as examined in Pierfrancesco Celada’s solo exhibition. It comprised three bodies of works When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley, One a Day and Instagrampier, which were executed in tandem during the time he lived in Hong Kong from 2014 to 2022. Bearing witness to recent momentous events in the city such as the Umbrella Movement and the global pandemic, Celada poses an observation into psychosocial realities of one of the world’s most densely populated urban metropolises. His approach is gently curious and non-didactic. Images seized from spontaneous moments on the streets, appear enigmatic and open-ended, inviting audiences to project their own interpretations. Instagrampier (2016-2021), a series which unfolded within a cargo pier on the west side of Hong Kong island, stood out in particular for its wry take on how the gaze of content sharing platforms such as Instagram, imposes a visual logic to the world of images through approval metrics. While initially setting out to document the constant streams of Instagrammers posing for selfies at sunset with similar stances and antics, Celada soon found himself caught in the loop of repeating the same ritual of recording others record themselves. “My works are self-portraitures of how I lived,” he said in an interview [3]. This calls to mind theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s remark of the social photo as ‘a documentary consciousness that turns users into a tourist of their own experience’ [4].

The power of the photographic gaze to objectify, possess, and turn life into something relatable and consumable is explored through Garden City: Remix Edition, a collaborative project by DECK and ArtSpace LUMOS that features four photographers – Woong Soak Teng and Marvin Tang from Singapore as well as Kim Sunik and Lee Jin Kyung from South Korea. The exhibition appraises the dialectics between humans and nature in urban living environments, and the many contestations and contradictions that arise from our ambition to document, tame, and co-exist with the natural world. Dialogues that arise between the works ultimately point towards the embodied experience of nature and the inseparability between nature and culture. By contemplating how ecological relationships are in fact socially constituted, the show summons deeper consideration on the types of attachment and values that undergird the relations one has with the self and with others.

Collectively, the festival surfaces involuntary gaps in history, memory and documentation, holding a mirror up to the process of self-examination itself. It reinforces the ever-critical role of art and photography to liberate from the buried world of spent consciousness, the many alternate pathways to the future to which habit has made us blind. ♦

Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) runs until 24 November 2024.

—
Kong Yen Lin is Assistant Curator, the National Museum of Singapore. Aside from her professional practice, she is a researcher and writer focusing on Singapore’s modern photography history from the 1950s to 80s, with an interest in examining the wider systemic frameworks governing the development of visual culture.

References:

[1] Interview with the author, 16 October 2024.

[2] Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Lily Kong, “Singapore’s Chinatown: Nation building and heritage tourism in a multiracial city” in Localities, Volume 2, 2012. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2250, [accessed 27 October 2024].

[3] Interview with the author, 25 October 2024.

[4] Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London & New York: Verso, 2020).

Images:

1-FX Harsono, Keeping the Dream No.3, 2024.

2- Installation view of FX Harsono,  Keeping the Dream No.3. © Toni Cuhadi. Courtesy Singapore International Photography Festival and DECK. 

3-Liu Bolin, Chinatown. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

4-Liu Bolin, Chinatown Complex Hawker Centre. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

5>7-Liu Bolin, Merlion Park. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

8>10-The Myanmar Photo Archive

11>12-Pierfrancesco Celada, Instagrampier, 2021.

13-Pierfrancesco Celada, When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley, 2014-2022.

14-Marvin Tang, A Guide to Tree Planting.

15-Kim Sunik, Temporary Garden.

16-Woong Soak Teng, Some Pictures of Representation, 2018.

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• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

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The unseen effects of illness

Worry for the Fruit the Birds Won’t Eat is Sophie Gabrielle’s visual investigation into the unseen effects of illness. Responding to the emotional toll of all the male members of their family being diagnosed with stage IV cancer over two years, the artist employs optics, chemical interactions and investigative photography to render the invisible. Thomas King speaks with the winner of OD Photo Prize 2024 about the project and its deeply personal starting point.

Thomas King | Interview | 17 Oct 2024

Thomas King: Worry for the Fruit the Birds Won’t Eat, recently announced as the winner of OD Photo Prize 2024, features various images of early phototherapy practices, such as UV light exposure and ‘light baths’ used on children, alongside early X-ray experiments. How would you discuss your relationship with the archive in the context of this project? And what was the motivation to create a dialogue between the historical and the personal?

Sophie Gabrielle: I have always been a collector of images. From a young age I would cut pictures out in magazines for safekeeping. The use of scientific archive photography in my work began in university when I based the series BL_NK SP_CE on an MRI scan. Using archive photography relating to X-ray and UV exposure started during a period of research into my father’s stage IV cancer diagnosis. Wanting to understand what was happening, I came across an initial X-ray image and the collection began.

I felt drawn to these archive images after discovering that many of these initial experiments into ionising radiation (x-rays) and UV light baths were cancer-causing. There was this duality to them, experimentation into science that would eventually help treat my family and the initial causation of illness for those in the photographs themselves. During this period of time, I was documenting my family, photographing our lives as we went through this sudden upheaval. However, the images felt too personal to show, they became my secret garden. Using the archive, with its scientific detachment, allowed me to create a public dialogue about my experience while still maintaining a sense of privacy for my family. This project has let others share their own experiences of cancer with me, creating deep felt connection of both loss and joy.

TK: This series involves an intricate process of capturing and re-photographing images under glass plates. What challenges or unexpected discoveries did you encounter during this process, and can you comment on the way they influenced the final outcomes of your work?

SG: There were two main challenging points – touch and light. Handling the plates of glass was always tricky. Initially, I was focused on trying to only capture dust but my fingerprints, hair and fibre would interfere. Over time though I began to appreciate their presence in the works. They were uncontrollable parts of human existence, and ultimately that was a large part of the work.

Light was the other, the most controlled part of the works. Angling both flash and continuous light on specific parts of the photographs was laborious. This control was so important to the works, freezing time for a moment – something I could decide when, how and what it was doing in a time that felt so opposite. The interplay of control and accident in both light and touch ultimately shaped the tone of the final images.

TK: You’ve previously described the investigative processes involved in photographing worlds invisible to the naked eye. In your work, light seems to dissolve and mystify reality – what did you intend to conjure?

SG: In all my work, I aim to convey the tension between visibility and invisibility and the power of the photograph as an object with a duality of truth and lie. They seek to represent the complexity of something deeply felt yet difficult to fully articulate. Through abstraction, I create space for viewers to engage with the work on their own terms. By distorting the clarity of the image, I invite a more nuanced and subjective reading of illness and existential fragility. This approach allows my audience to explore the emotional landscape in ways that reflect their own experiences, emphasising the ambiguity and intricacies of human vulnerability. I’m particularly interested in what is missing in a photograph, what is left out and what we ultimately search for. What makes an image relatable, is what draws us in and creates tension.

TK: In your artist statement, you refer to the project as a form of self-portraiture through abstraction. How do you view the role of aesthetics in conveying personal trauma or existential themes?

SG: We live in a time where there’s an expectation to share our lives and identities in a digital, public way. I see art as fulfilling two essential roles: expressing the artist’s experience while also allowing space for the viewer to connect and interpret it in their own way. Aesthetics play a crucial part in this and through my methids I can engage with personal trauma without being overly literal, which mirrors the non-linear, fragmented nature of emotional processing. Rather than just communicating one perspective, the visual language in my work creates room for reflection on resilience, growth, and the inevitable changes we all undergo. It’s about offering both the artist and the viewer a way to connect deeply, yet individually.

The dust, made up of skin particles, connects the body and environment in a subtle way, entwining living presence with historical materials. This layering of dust and re-photographing became meditative and allowed me to reflect on the inevitable impact of time. It also connected these experiments to the people who would eventually be helped by them in the future. In this way it became self-portraiture, as I was a part of this process, my presence being the creator. I started this work in 2018 so it has been a long process and progression from where I first began. Speaking about this work now, both my grandfathers have passed and I have lost friends from cancer and it still feels just important to share this work, to hold open dialogue and openly grieve.

TK: Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’ suggests a detached, often objectifying perspective on the body in medical contexts. In what ways does your work confront or complicate this idea, and how does the integration of personal bodily traces affect the perceived objectivity of medical imaging?

SG: I aim to reintroduce subjectivity and emotional resonance, emphasising the personal stories that exist beneath medical images. By transforming archival medical images into personal, poetic narratives, my practice directly engages with the relationship between the body, illness and the scientific gaze. Combining historical photographic processes with environmental interventions complicates this gaze, allowing me to reclaim the narrative of the body and illness. I integrate memory, grief and environmental decay to create something that resonates beyond the clinical sphere, inviting a deeper exploration of what these experiences mean on a personal level. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Open Doors Gallery. © Sophie Gabrielle

Explore the full shortlist from OD Photo Prize 2024 via Open Doors Gallery.

—
Sophie Gabrielle is a photographer living and working on the lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri people (Canberra, Australia). Their work uses biomaterials, photographic archives and the human body to investigate the connection between photography, history, memory and psychology. Gabrielle has exhibited in Australia, Malaysia, The Netherlands, France, Germany, South Korea, the USA and the UK. Recent commissions and collaborations include The New Yorker: cover art for The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and UK musician Seabuckthron’s album Through a Vulnerable Occur. They are a Foam Talent recipient (2018) and a finalist for the Lens Culture Emerging Talent Awards (2016).

Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and a student on BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism, Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

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Columbia University’s wrestling ring

In The Lion and the Lamb, Ashley Markle reframes wrestling as a nuanced art form where the search for safe havens, male community and psychological safety reveals the subtle evolution of ‘bro culture’ in competitive sports. By capturing the young men in Columbia University’s wrestling ring, Markle aligns herself with a lineage of artists who, as Gem Fletcher writes, challenge the perception of masculinity as fixed and immutable.

Gem Fletcher | Essay | 09 Oct 2024

In The Lion and The Lamb, New York photographer Ashley Markle posits how the arena of sports, particularly the locker room, once heralded as the pinnacle of toxic masculinity, is reconfiguring itself as a site of homosociality. The work follows Columbia University’s wrestling team and charts a brotherhood where masculinity is not a monolith but a complex array of nuanced traits. Strength and competition exist alongside intimacy and innocence as she presents a group of young men seeking kinship through sport.

While the work doesn’t dismiss the male instinct to battle, there’s an ordinariness to what Markle captures. Her wrestlers rarely perform for the camera or attempt to uphold the archetype of athleticism – power, dominance, ruthlessly competitive, etc. – instead, their demeanour is open and relatable, a sharp contrast to the prevailing discourse around toxic masculinity and young men.

At odds with the typical heroic visual lexicon of athletes, Markle’s storytelling thrives on her impulse to centre relational incongruities. She doesn’t chase a decisive moment. Instead, the success of her explorations rests on a continuum of frames juxtaposed to disrupt and reflect our preconceptions back to us while simultaneously reaching for the ineffable.

Markle admits she was “nervous” when making the project, unsure how the team would receive her artistic intentions. “Wrestlers are really in tune with their emotions,” Markle said about her experience with the team over the last two years. “It’s such a mental sport, and this group truly supports each other.”

Markle is not the only female photographer who has been apprehensive about entering the domain of the young male athlete. “These are the people us Queers feared in high school,” Catherine Opie has remarked about the young male athletes she photographed for High School Football (2007-09). In Opie’s portraits, we see young men like Devin, Robby, and Rusty who cannot quite embody the athletic prowess of their heroes emblazoned on the pages of GQ and ESPN magazines. Instead, their protective armature is ill-fitting, and their crotch grabs are too self-aware. In Markle’s images, the wrestlers seemingly resist performing, unlike Opie’s football players, who unsteadily attempt to live up to the archetype of athleticism, but their naivety prevails.

At the same time as Opie was exploring the landscape of football, Collier Schorr also began photographing high school wrestlers in New Jersey captivated by the friction between the sport’s macho aggression and its graceful choreography. While Opie’s work is steeped in context and reflected a sense of fragility as the young men traverse the precarious moment between youth and adulthood, Schorr’s wrestlers are untethered from their environment, drawing our attention to the potential of the corporeal both as totems of strength and seduction. There is a distinct awe of the masculine physique as warm-ups and grapples become homoerotic gestures. If Opie’s mission was to better understand young men in the early 2000s, Schorr’s impulse was imagining what it might be like to be one.

During this period, ‘bro culture’ marked a critical moment in shaping the imaginations of young men in the West. Sex comedies like American Pie, reckless prank shows such as Jackass, and the aggressive chaos stoked by nu-metal bands like Slipknot and Limp Bizkit dominated popular culture. At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg made Facemash, a precursor to Facebook, where he invited male students at Harvard to rate the attractiveness of their female classmates. The decade was defined by the popularity of transgressive rule-breaking by young men, bolstered by a pack mentality where chugging beer, casual misogyny, destruction and dominance ruled. Bro Culture was so pervasive – self-branded as counter-culture, a subversive attempt to go against the status quo – it went under interrogation, seen as a cultural moment rather than endemic of toxic masculinity.

In retrospect, bro culture now feels like the tame precursor to today’s “manosphere,” the internet ecosystem that combines self-improvement advice for young men with casual and sometimes violent misogyny. Rooted in incel communities and led by alpha male influencers [Andrew Tate, Kanye West, Joe Rogen and so on], this rising ideology centres on male supremacy and aggressive anti-feminist rhetoric that attracts young males in search of meaning, community and power. Embodying Michael Kimmel’s idea of aggrieved entitlement – a term he coined to describe how, over the last thirty years, the world has decentred young white men ­ – the manosphere was born online with offline consequences. Responding to the rise of equal rights, incels uphold a form of masculinity that is contingent on the oppression of others.

While at one end of the spectrum, the appetite for extremism continues to rise amongst young men, there is another cohort in search of safe havens, something made apparent to Markle while making The Lion and The Lamb. “I tried to photograph the boys outside the wrestling rooms, but I quickly realised it was key,” she comments. “These rooms were incubators for the boys to form bonds and communicate freely. As soon as they stepped out of them, they entered the real world full of judgments and narrow views of masculinity.” Markle’s project points to the significance of place in the context of masculinity while also describing the subtle evolution of competitive sports, once deemed responsible for upholding toxic traits, has now shifted in some cases to embody genuine male community and psychological safety.

It’s hard to resist Markle’s low-key optimism right now. Through her super-saturated and keenly observant pictures, she sits within a lineage of artists intent on debunking the idea that masculinity is fixed and immutable. Like Opie and Schorr before her, Markle illuminates the precociousness of her wrestlers’ inner lives as they attempt to navigate the dominant social structures that hold ideas about masculinity in place. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Ashley Markle

—
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.

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