Category: Issue

Grow It, Show It!

Museum Folkwang

Exhibition review by Song Tae Chong

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

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Paris Photo 2024

Top five fair highlights

Selected by Alessandro Merola

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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• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

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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 R. Dahmani.

The 9th Singapore International Photography Festival

In Search of Lost Time

Festival review by Kong Yen Lin

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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• 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.

Sophie Gabrielle

Worry for the Fruit the Birds Won’t Eat

Interview with Thomas King

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.

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.

Ashley Markle

The Lion and The Lamb

Essay by Gem Fletcher

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.

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.

Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer

Ein Dorf 1950–2022

Book review by Michael Grieve

Published with Hartmann Books, Ein Dorf (A Village) 1950–2022, is a photobook by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler in posthumous collaboration with their late family member Ludwig Schirmer. It allows the viewer to travel through time yet stay in the same place – Berka, a small village in Thuringia, Germany – where in recent days the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) has come top in a state election. In his review, Michael Grieve writes how photography projects that collaborate with the deceased have the potential to breathe new life and recontextualise how we understand the past, the present, and project with unease into an uncertain future.

Michael Grieve | Book review | 05 Sept 2024

Serendipity can be a major creative force and harnessing its potential has the possibility to culminate into something solid and everlasting. And so it is with the modestly titled Ein Dorf (A Village) 1950–2022 published by Hartmann Books, the latest photobook project by the acclaimed German documentary photographers, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler in posthumous collaboration with the late Ludwig Schirmer. All of them have photographed the same village at different times over a seventy year period at approximately 20 year intervals. The book is a comparative study of a specific place documented from three different perspectives over four historical periods. The story of this book is truly extraordinary, fused with many layers and chance connections that it positively feels that it was meant to come together and see the light of day. As Ute Mahler explains, the seeds of the book were sown in 2001: ‘When I discovered the pictures in my father’s estate, I was already thinking about a book. The book, At Home, with only his photographs was published in 2003. In 2019 Werner and I had the idea of taking photographs in Berka and putting all four works together.’

Ein Dorf is split into four chronological chapters; Ludwig Schirmer 1950-60, Werner Mahler 1977-78, Werner Mahler 1998 and Ute Mahler 2021-22. The ‘dorf’ in question is the small rural village of Berka, situated almost in the centre of Germany in the Thuringia district, where in recent days the far right party Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) – led by ethno-nationalist Bjorn Hocke – has come top in a state election. Thuringia is of course the place where the Nazis first won power in a German state government in 1930 before taking up the helm in Berlin three years later.

The first in this trilogy of photographers is Ludwig Schirmer who took over the family business running a mill in the village at the end of WWII. During his spare time Schirmer photographed the village over a 10 year period before moving his family to Berlin where he became a successful professional photographer. With great enthusiasm as the photographs tell, he took pictures for the most part with a medium format Primarflex 6×6 camera with great observational skill in an informal manner. His photographs are a hive of activity and always feature people, and fully embrace village life ranging from social functions and rituals to farm work, punctuated occasionally by a portrait. The slaughtering of pigs is a constant through all four projects as is the Straw Bear, a traditional character from medieval times found at carnival processions.

Photographers often used to differentiate between those with a natural or forced eye and Schirmer certainly possesses the former with an innate intuition of composing complex situations, having a measured sense of distance that is close and intimate and can only be captured with subjects who trust his presence and not question intentions. Schirmer has an unflinching visual capacity to hold still the movement and energy of the people of Berka with images that are at times reminiscent of the rural painting of Dutch Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who gives credence to the peasant population surrounded in a village context, and representing groups of people and individuals as small figures engaged in their own distinct activity. Unlike the fluffy, picturesque landscape paintings of, for example, John Constable in the 18th century, Bruegel was untainted with notions of romanticism and the sublime. In hindsight Schirmer’s pictures have a certain nostalgia, but these monochrome realist expressions convey a certain frisson of engagement and are without any agenda other than celebrating the hive of activity of village life and capturing a glimpse of an even greater sense of joy now that amongst the Berka population the horror of the WWII is behind them.

After the trauma of the war, Berka found itself as part of the German Democratic Republic, under the control of a socialist system. Thus the early stages of the GDR and Schirmer’s pictures obviously reveal little evidence of the socialist system except perhaps in one intriguing image of suited men with inappropriate fine shoes for a muddy field, observing a trench made by a tractor; conjuring perhaps a narrative of state officials making decisions about productive efficiency in the new age of forced collectivism. In some of the photographs, in an almost incidental way, can be seen a little blonde haired girl who is Ute Mahler, the daughter of Ludwig Schirmer. Here the connectedness of the stories of the Ein Dorf story of one place develops an autobiographical layer of meaning. In 2003 Ute described the process of making sense of her father’s archive: ‘I found one small black and white print – an image of a young child climbing a tree. A photograph of me. Suddenly everything came rushing back – the sweet smell of spring and summer, the gentle hilly landscape, my childhood. It felt like stumbling upon a hidden treasure. The photographs were not organised in any way; there were few prints, hardly any contact sheets, and contact sheets without any negatives. Eventually the whole family pitched in to help with the daunting task of sorting through the archive. We discovered unbelievably powerful images, dreamlike in their charisma and aesthetics. For the family the images from my father were very important. But for me they touched me not only as a daughter but, above all else, as a photographer.’

The central position of Werner Mahler’s combined projects can be understood as representing a link from one place in time to another; a personal bridge and documentary divide between Ludwig Schirmer the father, to Ute Mahler the daughter, and a historical and political bridge from communism to the reunification of a divided Germany. As a young man in the 1970’s Werner Mahler was the apprentice to the then now successful commercial photographer, Ludwig Schirmer, and at this moment Werner met and fell in love with Ute and so they married. As a student of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig, Werner documented Berka between 1977 and 1978 for his graduate exhibition. And, despite the spectre of forced socialism, village life is still very much alive with remnants of the past but now with the added, noticeable changes of fashion as well as farm machinery albeit with continued traditions and in opposition to official government policy.

In the accompanying text to Ein Dorf, Steffen Mau, Professor of Sociology describes how at this time, ‘it was not always easy to bring an entire village into line with official policy. In Berka pigs continued to be slaughtered at home, carnival was celebrated following exotic traditions, there was music in the streets and bizarre folklore traditions were maintained. Nevertheless, anyone who opposed the party line too adamantly could expect to feel the consequences, even in a village.’ 20 years later Werner was commissioned by Stern magazine to document Berka in the context of German unification which was in the process of a turbulent transformation. Werner’s photography has sharpened with experience with a more precise eye for detail and composition. This was a period referred to as the Wende, the ‘turning’ from state socialism and a controlled economy to a democratic system with a free market economy. The difference from 20 years previously is distinct in the material effects of a consumer society. Rural character and authenticity is radically being replaced with facades from home improvement stores and cars are more visible.

The most powerful first impression of Ute Mahler’s photography is the profound sense of emptiness found in the well manicured streets of Berka. The contrast of the village from the time of her father up until today is truly startling; a microcosm of the increasing genericism of our societies and disintegration of community life. Unlike Schirmer’s joy and optimism, Ute Mahler’s project exists moving towards a vacuous impasse and asks questions, detectable in the eyes and manner of those young women she portrayed, the same age as Ute when she left Berka, as to a sense of doubt of any fruitful future. Four young girls dressed in tight jeans, tops and white trainers most probably produced in China or sweatshops in Bangladesh, India or Cambodia by girls the same age if not younger. This sounds extremely despondent and a million miles away from simple village life, though not so simple, yet we know that in almost every village today, in Europe and the UK, that the supermarket has gone some way to replace the local grocer, butcher and baker, and that the plasma screen in every living room has replaced social activity, not to mention the mobile phone. As always Ute’s portraits are photographs charged with a distinct empathy and honest distance and her subjects are never victims though undoubtedly the sense of an atomised community is clearly imbued in the tone and description of her visual representations. People seem to be there but not wholeheartedly present.

Ein Dorf opens up a portal into a hitherto and seemingly insignificant place, within which this complexity and multi-layered story reveals a wonderfully unique testament to the straight documentary genre; unpretentious, deceptively simple and grounded in a sophisticated process of showing what is ‘there’, and with this exemplary example we witness the inevitable changes of a particular society over a period of time. Time, of course, is the great force here and brings the narrative of this book together; an arbitrary photographic topography brought to reason. These pictures contain many small details for us to decipher and unravel a history of seismic proportions. Ute and Werner Mahler are without sentimentality and make no judgments, possessing a skilful ability to balance a cool and measured detachment with a warm engagement to the subject due, in part, to their personal empathetic recognition to those they photograph. Photography projects that collaborate with the deceased have the potential to breathe new life and recontextualise how we understand the past, the present and project with unease into the uncertain future. Not only is society in perpetual motion but the meaning of photographs are always constantly in a state of flux.

Sociologically Ein Dorf is a significant photobook and should be on the reading lists at all sociology and history departments at universities. The book also operates on another level which is the metaphysical, evoking memory and a melancholia of the passing of time while also revealing the urge of photography to fix that time. In his book Austerlitz, the German author W.G. Sebald, writes of the central character describing how in his photographic work he was always entranced, ‘… by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on to the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.’

The shadows of Ein Dorf have managed to be fixed by virtue of having been shared and the preservation of certain memories for the photographers themselves remains the enduring task of serious photography. Both collective and personal memory builds our identities and without it, as W.G. Sebald postulates ‘we would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past.’ ♦

All images courtesy of the artists and Hartmann Books. © Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer

Ein Dorf 1950–2022 is published by Hartmann Books.

—
Michael Grieve is a photographer, Director of ArtFotoMode, Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie (HWF) and lecturer at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. In 1997 he graduated from the MA Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster and then proceeded to work as a photojournalist and portrait photographer for publications internationally. He was Deputy Editor of 1000 Words and a writer for the British Journal of Photography. Since 2011 he has been Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, Akademia Fotografie Warsaw and the University of Art and Design, Berlin, and currently teaches at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin. He is currently working on Procession, a project documenting the peripheral space between Athens and Elifsina, Greece.

Images:

1>3-Ludwig Schirmer, Ein Dorf, 1950-1960

4>6-Werner Mahler, Ein Dorf, 1977-78

7>9-Werner Mahler, Ein Dorf, 1998

10>12-Ute Mahler, Ein Dorf, 2021-22

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• 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.

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined

Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Exhibition review by Anneka French

Co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined features works by eight photographers who reframe official and personal archives to explore the abuses of organised religion and colonialism. As Anneka French writes, the exhibition’s diversity of influences underscores the role and value of the archive and, more crucially, the importance of radical approaches towards its reuse and interrogation.

Anneka French | Exhibition review | 1 August 2024

A statue of the Virgin Mary repeated across two photographs is a potent signifier of the power structures and abuses that inform and then I ran (2023). This suite of photographs, in which experiences of Emi O’Connell’s grandmother are re-enacted, is hung formally, with a central diptych of a blurred, brooding landscape flanked by figures in this same location. Described as ‘performative self-portraiture’, O’Connell re-tells parts of her grandmother’s story of escape from an Irish Catholic mother and baby home – often referred to as the Magdalene Laundries, institutions in which the devastating treatment of those confined is still coming to light – when she climbed from a window aged 16 and heavily pregnant with O’Connell’s father, who was subsequently forcefully adopted. O’Connell can be seen tenderly holding a sprig of cow parsley in one photograph. She can further be seen running, falling and twisting, her head bent and body crouched in distress, in images that are as strangely still, sensitive and beautiful as they are full of trauma.

The visible shutter release cable in O’Connell’s photographs is evidence of the reconstruction taking place and indeed, and then I ran embodies many of the core subjects presented in the wide-ranging and complex group exhibition Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined at Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition asks questions about the impacts of ‘official’ archives, be these institutional or familial, on (but not limited to) communities, bodies, memories and identities. Eight photographers here disrupt, re-make, re-present or reinterpret these narratives, finding meaning of their own and revealing new ways of looking at difficult things.

As with O’Connell’s photographs, the unfathomable impacts of and abuses by organised religion also occupy key roles in works by Alba Zari and Jermaine Francis. Zari’s Occult (2019-23) offers a partial picture of her own mother and grandmother’s life as members of a Christian fundamentalist sect now titled The Family International, in India, Nepal and Thailand. This is revealed through archival photographs, and comic strip-like drawings and text that highlight ways the sect drew in recruits through practices of sexual exploitation very much at odds with the smiling family photographs that Zari has layered on top of and tacked-up alongside these.

Francis’ Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time (2024-ongoing) is shown in and on vitrines arranged in the shape of a cross. The work itself is focused upon Anglian Church archives held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, pertaining to historic missionary initiatives in the Caribbean. Underscoring the abuses of black people under colonialism and its continuing reverberations, Francis’ work, elements of which are placed beneath magnifying sheets, and including grey archive boxes, bibles and layered prints made up of collaged archival imagery and text, asks viewers to lean over, look closely and implicate themselves within the work and its contexts.

Also working with found archival imagery, Amin Yousefi’s Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth (2022) uses protest photographs from the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 in Iran. Specifically searching out people from the crowd who look (or seem to look) directly at the camera, these isolated individuals form a newly reassembled archive of gazes photographed through a loupe. Extracting individual people from the crowd, the work presented features a cluster of small prints alongside one very large photograph that centres the wary face of a young child, pinpointing his smallness and his humanity among the protesting throng.

Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash (2019-23) by Odette England is comprised of a large paste-up and a series of glossy prints. On the left, the photographs are of male photographers, prominent camera lenses and flashbulbs standing in place of eyes as their cameras obscure their faces. On the right are photographs of women refusing to be photographed, their hands in front of their faces and heads turned away. England’s work flags the potential abuses of photography itself – how it takes, snaps, shoots and captures through the violence of vocabulary hidden in plain sight – and of the subject’s own limited power in this dynamic. England’s work assembles vernacular images, forming a new archive of resistance that speaks to contemporary feminist dialogue and ongoing challenges to patriarchal perspectives that seek to control women in body and in image.

Eleonora Agostini’s and Tarrah Krajnak’s works touch upon further feminist concerns in connection with personal identity. While Agostini’s collection of photographs A Study on Waitressing (2020-24) pays homage to her waitress mother, her sore feet and the dual performances of in/visibility necessary to her role, Krajnak’s SISMOS79 (2014) explores her identity as an Indigenous transracial person who has experienced adoption and generational trauma. Composed of five large prints, Krajnak’s work combines broken mirrors photographed in conjunction with political and pornographic magazine pages from the year of her birth, offering a highly fragmentary personal and social perspective of this window in time.

Of all the eight photographers featured, Laura Chen’s work sits rather differently. Employing a dark sense of humour, Being Framed (2022) uses the rudimentary tropes of old-fashioned, analogue criminal investigations by police or private detectives popularised in film noir to develop a fictional case lead by avatar DCI Dean Wilson. Newspaper clippings, mocked-up case files, crime scene tape and a missing rabbit poster feature in Chen’s new archive. An image of a CCTV camera is positioned high up on the wall, while a footprint is playfully glued to the floor. Since Being Framed overtly refers to imagined or fictional events, it lacks the emotional and psychological force of other works on display.

The exhibition, which draws upon multiple international contexts and inputs, is co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, where it showed along with other projects and exhibitions in southeast London earlier this year. In Bradford, the exhibition’s diversity of influence, approach and subject makes for a challenging and, at times, uneven viewing experience but nonetheless it is one that serves as a useful reminder of the importance of the archive and, more crucially, of the importance of radical approaches towards it. ♦

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined runs at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, until 31 August

—
Anneka French is a Curator at Coventry Biennial and Project Editor for Anomie, an international publishing house for the arts. She contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor, and has written and had editorial commissions from Turner Prize, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, TACO!, Grain Projects and Photoworks+. French served as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands, Editorial Manager at this is tomorrow and has worked at galleries including Tate Modern, London, and Ikon, Birmingham.

Images:

1-Untitled from Occult, 2019-23. © Alba Zari

2-Untitled from A Study in Waitressing, 2020-24. © Eleonora Agostini

3-Emi O’Connell, and then I ran, 2023. 

4-Untitled from Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time, 2024-ongoing. © Jermaine Francis 

5-Untitled, from the series Eyes Dazzle as they Search for The Truth, 2022. © Amin Yousefi

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.

Agnieszka Sosnowska

För

Book review by Shana Lopes

Published by Trespasser, Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För, is a coming-of-age story about relocating a remote corner of Iceland, which introduces us to her students, showcases her farm, and captures the passage of time as she and her husband age over two decades. As SFMOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes writes, Sosnowska invites us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home.

Shana Lopes | Book review | 18 July 2024

A reindeer decomposing on the ground; white sheets hanging outside to dry; a man bathing in an outdoor tub: moments of quiet flow through Agnieszka Sosnowska’s pictures in her sumptuous first book, För, recently published by Trespasser. By virtue of their objecthood, all photographs are inherently silent, yet many evoke the sounds of whoever or whatever is pictured. Sosnowska’s vision offers a distinctive sonic experience of blustery winds careening through a rural landscape, bitterly cold water pouring down a cliff face, hushed conversations between people who have known each other for decades. And while many of her photographs point to stillness, the sequencing of the book, though nonlinear, is rhythmic, its cadence at once brooding and hypnotic, rapturous and meditative. Self-portraits form the chorus to this poignant ballad in black and white, bridged by stark, dramatic landscapes, unpretentious domestic still lifes, and pictures of students, friends, and family at ease. We may think we listen only with our ears and look solely with our eyes, yet we also sense with our bodies, and these Icelandic scenes exude the briskness of their unforgiving environment. Even the book’s exterior adds to the overall experience. It is bound in a cool bluish-gray cloth, the colour I imagine Iceland’s sky and water look like. It depicts a world of raw beauty that asks us to be present and attuned with all our senses.

Much of the power of Sosnowska’s photographs, the majority taken with a large-format film camera, resides in their uncluttered simplicity. Clean lines guide our eye, but the scenes are neither immaculate nor pristine. They are lived in, revealing signs of aging, even decay: a rusted car door, the well-worn cushions of a couch, a pile of old, used tires. Every one was captured near the artist’s home in eastern Iceland, where she has lived and worked as an elementary school teacher for more than two decades. Originally from Poland, she immigrated to the United States as a child, then as a young adult visited Iceland on a whim and fell in love there.

The book’s title – För – translates as “trip” in Icelandic, and so signifies a journey and the physical imprints one leaves behind. The word also connotes a vessel that delivers things from one location to another. So, what are these photographs transporting? What kind of trip is Sosnowska taking us on, and what traces has she left behind for us to follow?

This is certainly a journey of belonging, of making a home, and it is raw, authentic, and unpretentious. Sometimes intensely intimate. Consider, for example, the photographs of the artist and her husband. In one, he stands behind her, his hand inside her button-front dress, as she stares unabashedly at the camera. In another sublime moment, they pose before a misty waterscape like a modern Caspar David Friedrich painting, the view so awe-inspiring and powerful that their presence becomes secondary to the terrain. These pictures are not about tourism. Rather, they take us on an expedition of Sosnowska’s life. We meet her students; we see her farm; we watch her and her husband, whom she calls her Viking in the acknowledgments, age over the course of 20 years. I find myself wondering why she is publishing her first photobook now, if she has been shooting for this long and her photographs are this incredible. Indeed, her training harks back to the 1990s, when she studied at the Massachusetts College of Art with professors such as Barbara Bosworth, Nicholas Nixon, Frank Gohlke, and Abe Morell. But that is a story for another time. För centers the artist’s Icelandic journey and asks us to reflect on our own paths and the imprints we leave.

A spellbinding landscape framed by a jigsaw-puzzle web of trees opens the book. Soft grasses line the foreground, and beyond the arboreal lattice we see a seemingly boundless terrain. The photograph is a literal and metaphorical entrance to our trip as well as a portal into Sosnowska’s mind. It is also a landscape shaped by humans, which seems to be a key theme running through the publication: human versus nature, or perhaps more aptly, with nature. The photographs in För often depict coexistence and interaction between humans and the natural environment, highlighting the beauty and fragility of this relationship.

What truly stands out in this beautifully edited grouping (a hallmark of Trespasser’s publications) are the self-portraits. Vulnerable and unapologetically authentic, they function like punctuation, little reminders to pause and remember whose journey this is. Sometimes Sosnowska is alone, other times she is accompanied by her husband. In watching them grow older, we witness them undergoing life’s most humbling experience. The artist’s face and body change, as does her relationship with the camera, as she moves from performing for it to collaborating with it. These self-portraits are a testament to the artist’s personal evolution and its reflection in her work.

Together, the pictures show us what home means to Sosnowska: the people, the place, the architecture, the small details. She notes, ‘By taking these pictures, I belong. I am part of something greater than myself. These photographs are both my myths and truth. They are my love, hopes, fears, and strength.’ Home, for her, is not singular or fixed. We sometimes have the privilege of choosing a new home, and that place changes us. A trip to Iceland more than 20 years ago forever changed Sosnowska’s path, bringing with it a new language, an intense love, a teaching career, and a rural way of life. Ultimately, this book is a vessel detailing one artist’s search for a sense of belonging, inviting us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home. It is a journey that resonates with our own quests for connection. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Trespasser. © Agnieszka Sosnowska

För is published by Trespasser.

—
Shana Lopes is an Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Born and raised in San Francisco, she earned her doctorate in art history from Rutgers University with a focus on the history of photography. Over the past fifteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Sea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming 2024 SECA Art Award.  

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

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Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024

Beneath The Surface

Festival review by Mark Durden

For the 55th time, Arles, the historic Roman city in southern France, hosts the prestigious Les Rencontres d’Arles, where municipal buildings are transformed to showcase the visual legacies of photographers and artists worldwide. This year’s theme, Beneath the Surface, explores narratives that uncover divergent paths, often revealing vulnerabilities in seemingly impermeable facades. As expected, the festival boasts its usual grandeur, meticulous organisation, and impressive works by renowned artists. Yet, as Mark Durden writes, it is the traditional photographic approaches that retain a profound impact amidst the festival’s exploration of new directions in the medium.

Mark Durden | Festival review | 11 July 2024 | In association with MPB

Sophie Calle’s exhibition of some of her own artworks and possessions are left to rot in the subterranean Cryptoporticus in Arles, offering a great contrast to the clamouring image spectacle of the very festival of which it is part. On discovering one of her favourite works, The Blind, had become toxic through mould spores after her studio was damaged in a storm, and refusing to follow the restorer’s suggestion that it should be destroyed, Calle decided to exhibit it (together with other works that had been contaminated and objects from her life that she no longer had any use for but could not throw away) in a humid and underground place where its degradation could continue. Calle’s show, in this respect, offers a mini retrospective, a darkly comic counterpoint to the grandiosity of more spectacular displays above ground, and a reminder of the ultimate and inevitable mortality of art and the artist. When I viewed her exhibition, water was constantly dripping upon large framed black-and-white prints of graves, laid on the floor.

This year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles is marked by a schism between those who work against photography, those who deploy it through montage in installations and those who less ostentatiously explore its intrinsic properties. Calle works against photography, but knowingly and comedically, clearly relishing the correspondence between her decaying pictures and their sepulchral and funerary setting.

In the impressive interior of the 15th century century Gothic Église des Frères Prêcheurs, Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel’s flagship show’s magical realist response to the migration route across Mexico to the US, with its overblown and enigmatic combinations of pictorial elements, objects, archival material and Mexican lotería card imagery (this game of chance, presumably there to bring in an iconography related to Mexico and imply the journey of migrants is a lottery and up to fate) muddles the clarity of reportage and seemingly relishes the resultant ambiguity. The US’ brutal migrant policy and murderous exploitation by cartels through both people and drug trafficking (nothing to do with chance) becomes a cue to a fantastical tale, modelled on Jules Verne’s science fiction Journey to the Centre of the World (1864). The problem with such a spectacular display is that it is hard to engage and relate to what is going on as images collide and compete for attention. If montage was originally intended to be critically dialectical and produce new meaning, the danger here is that things become all too uncertain.

Mary Ellen Mark, who is given a significant and engaging retrospective at Espace Van Gogh, valorises an older, humanist documentary tradition; her 1987 portrait of the Damm family in the car in which they were living at the time, is in some ways her “Migrant Mother”. Perhaps it is not so obsolete as de Middel’s pop documentary display might suggest. The real goes beyond our imagination, and is always full of surprises. Photographers like Mark are attuned to this and bring it out again and again in many of their extraordinary pictures. In her powerful, colourful, somewhat voyeuristic depictions of sex workers in Mumbai, she may be outside but the sense is that she pictures more from the inside and in affinity with these women.                                                                                                                                                   At the Palais de L’Archevêché, I’m So Happy You Are Here, Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare, was a welcome change and far cry from the continued celebration of such male Japanese photographers as Daido Moriyama and their fixation on women as subject. But with so many photographers on show, 26, it only functions as a taster. I would have liked to have seen more work by Mari Katayama. Born with tibial hemimelia, which caused the bones in her lower legs and left hand to be undeveloped, and having decided to amputate her legs at the age of nine, the young artist sees herself as ‘one of the raw materials to use in my work’ in extraordinary self-portraits with hand-sewn prostheses.

Ishiuchi Miyako, recipient of the Women in Motion Award, as well as showing in I’m So Happy, is given a solo show at the Salle Henri-Comte, presenting photographs of objects and possessions remaining after death: her mother’s used lipstick, her lingerie, her hairbrush tangled with her hair, her dentures. There is also a picture of her mother’s scarred skin. For Miyako, ‘things touched by my mother were like part of her skin.’ The intimacy and poignancy of such photographs is continued in other pictures: the clothing and personal objects of Atomic bomb victims, from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and Frida Kahlo’s belongings, her nail varnish, decorated corsets and casts, through which one can sense the presence and strength of the artist. Miyako is responsive to the intrinsic properties and resonances of photography as an auratic medium. In contrast to Calle’s funereal retrospective, for Miyako, objects from the past, through photography, are ‘revived in the present moment.’

In many ways, New Farmer (2024) by Bruce Eesly offers a bright, jaunty and comic interlude to the festival; an AI generated mock documentary, consisting of photographs and texts presented as if from the 1960s, parodying the Green Revolution’s goal of intensified agricultural yields, by showing farmers, fields and smiling kids replete with oversized vegetables. Such absurdity and fakery serves as a fictional counterpoint to the reality of what increasing farming yields has led to, as the artist says: ‘giant fields of monocultures, fertiliser run-off, pesticide pollution and a major loss of genetic plant diversity.’

The revelation of Nicolas Floc’h’s exhibition is that there is a rainbow of colours in water. His epic quasi-scientific project, Rivers Ocean. The Landscape of Mississippi’s Colors (2024), a dazzling array of different blocks of pure colour prints, the result of photographs taken underwater at different depths, presented together with black-and-white photographs of the land, nevertheless remained baffling. While the descriptive detail in some of the captioning texts might help explain what causes the colours – ‘In Minneapolis, the Mississippi gets its colour from the tanins of northern forests… At the surface, a bright luminous orange turns bright red at one to two meters in depth’ – in the end, I was left pondering the gulf between these beautiful and seductive colour fields and the pollution and ecological disaster they presumably are indexing.

At La Mécaniqué Générale, there is more colour, not so much in the photography, which is predominantly black-and-white, but on the walls that animate and resist the potential stasis of ordered clusters of photographs in Urs Stahel’s beautifully curated show, When Images Learn to Speak, drawn from the collection of Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall. Since the collector has been buying up whole series rather than individual photographs, Stahel pursues the conceptual implications of serial groups of images, beginning with Harry Callahan’s street portraits and Walker Evans’ worker portraits. The show is very much about the formal richness, the subtleties and lasting fascination with what are mostly now classic photographs. There are also some nice surprises, including Max Regenberg’s billboards, for example, in both colour and black-and-white, taken over two decades, a simple register of fortuitous collisions and relations between the imagery of billboards and their settings: the crumpled rear end of a car appearing as if trampled by giant feet on the advertising beside it. Is there not a lesson for Arles here? Maybe we do not need the fireworks. Straight(-forward) photography can still be very engaging and lasting.  

Stahel’s curation links well with Lee Friedlander’s small survey show at LUMA. Friedlander was also in Stahel’s show and some of his TV pictures appear in both exhibitions. An outlier to the festival, the Friedlander exhibition nevertheless was a vital and refreshing addition. Selected and curated by filmmaker Joel Coen, the show underscores the enduring richness of his work and brilliant understanding of the possibilities of photographic form. Coen is skilled in picking out the compositional play of elements in well-known and lesser-known Friedlanders. The point made by Friedlander in the 1960s was that montage effects can already be found in the world; it is a question of framing. He is a picture-maker who made a virtue out of the limits of photography. A pity there are so few new contemporary photographers on show at Arles that come close.♦

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024 runs until 29 September 2024.

 

 

 

 

—
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-Sophie Calle, Finir en Beauté, 2024. Courtesy Anne Fourès

2-Cristina de Middel, An Obstacle in the Way [Una Piedra en el Camino], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

3-Cristina de Middel, The One That Left [La que se Fue], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

4-Cristina de Middel, The Black Door [La Puerta Negra], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

5-Mary Ellen Mark, Rekha with beads in her mouth, Falkland Road, Mumbai, India, 1978. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

6-Mary Ellen Mark, Vashira and Tashira Hargrove, Suffolk, New York, 1993. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

7-Mary Ellen Mark, The Damm family in their car, Los Angeles, California, 1987. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

8-Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled. From the eyes, the ears series, 2002-04. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

9-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled, 1997 from the Hiroki series. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

10-Hitomi Watanabe, Untitled from the Tōdai Zenkyōtō series, 1968-69. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation.

11-Ishiuchi Miyako. Mother’s #35. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

12-Ishiuchi Miyako. ひろしま / hiroshima #37F donor: Harada A. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

13-Bruce Eesly, Peter Trimmel wins first prize for his UHY fennel at the Kooma Giants Show in Limburg, 1956. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

14-Bruce Eesly, Selected potato varieties are rated in sixteen categories according to the LURCH Desirable Traits Checklist, 1952. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

15-Bruce Eesly, Farm table in Dengen, 1955. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

16-Nicolas Floc’h, White River, Badlands, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

17-Nicolas Floc’h, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

18-Nicolas Floc’h, Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

19-Nicolas Floc’h, Mississippi River, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

20-Moyra Davey, Subway Writers III, 2011. Courtesy the artist

21-Martha Rosler, Photo-Op, photomontage. From the House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, 2004. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne/Munich

22-Judith Joy Ross, Annie Hasz, Easton, Pennsylvania, Protesting the Iraq War, Living With War. From the Portraits series, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

23>24-Courtesy Lee Friedlander and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York.

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Silvia Rosi

Disintegrata

Exhibition review by Mariacarla Molè

Silvia Rosi’s exhibition at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia showcases 34 artworks across four rooms, unified by the theme of vanishing identity and fractured representation. The collection features photographs from families of African descent in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy that portray the vitality and resilience of the diaspora community. Through her art Rosi serves as a conduit to this history as she connects to the story contained in her family album, reports Mariacarla Molè.

Mariacarla Molè | Exhibition review | 20 June 2024

As a viewer of Silvia Rosi’s Disintegrata at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, you become aware of the urge to piece together parts of a whole. The 34 artworks displayed in the four rooms appear to tell four distinct stories, yet they all share a common concept: the disappearance of a clear-cut representation of identity, which in turn becomes disintegrated, as implied by the title. Consequently, the exhibition presents photographic and video works that, despite being united by the word ‘disintegrata’, have a strong fragmented quality that is dispersed throughout the four rooms.

At first glance, the landscape photos in the initial room may leave you feeling disoriented, since the overall exhibition is billed as a project featuring archival photographs of the African diaspora in Italy, which the artist collected between 2023 and 2024. In fact, the first room is predominantly filled with black and white as well as coloured landscape photos, alongside videos, all from the series titled Disintegrata nel Paesaggio. These works mostly consist of images of Rosi’s figure crossing deserted green landscapes from the edge of time. The green colours are vibrant in the giclee prints, while the videos remain silent. In this scenario, the human figure seems unable to assert itself on the landscape; it can only pass through it. However, even when the human figure is caught posing, it appears to blend into the landscape: in one image, a figure with their back turned stands against a grassy landscape, and the texture of their coat merges with that of the grass. In another image, Rosi lies on the grass in the same coat, seemingly completely engulfed by it.

The desire to explore the landscape is new in Silvia Rosi’s practice and can be traced back to the theme of Fotografia Europea 2024, of which Disintegrata is a part: La natura ama nascondersi (Nature loves to hide), quoting Heraclitus, which assembles a series of solo and group exhibitions that thematise the sense of interdependence of every life form on Earth as part of a larger living organism. Some other elements resonate with those familiar with Rosi’s work, such as the tension of removing disturbing elements from the background, the coexistence of colour and black-and-white and her own presence, even if it is particularly elusive here, as if to underline the frustration towards self-portraiture and self-representation which becomes more and more slippery. Perhaps a clue to the direction her work is taking?

In the second room, it is easier to recognise Rosi’s work as it can be traced back to her analogue studio portraiture, which she then digitises, not to mention the clearly visible self-timer cable which is another characteristic element of her self-portraiture. The images constructed in the studio make use of single-colour drapes or essential decorations with geometric black-and-white patterns on the floor, such as checkered rhombuses and dots, and elegant outfits. In one image, Rosi shows off a wedding dress, in another a wig, and in another an elegant trouser suit. These are all meant to demonstrate adherence to specific historical periods – the first: the 1990s when her parents moved from Togo to Italy, and the second: studio portrait photography of 60s post-colonial West Africa. The environment of each image is bare, inhabited only by Rosi and individual objects such as a bike, a wedding dress, bedside tables loaded with framed family photos, an old hairdresser’s helmet and two old suitcases. All of these elements were extracted from Rosi’s family album to be reactivated with a stage-like quality. Reading the captions pays off as each self-portrait is a version of her ‘disintegrated’ presence. When translated, the titles read ‘Disintegrated with Family Photos’, ‘Italian Bride Disintegrated’ and ‘Disintegrated in Profile’, which represent splinters of possible worlds. Her figure, although omnipresent, seems to want to escape from the camera, often with her back turned or her face hidden behind objects like a flower, a shoulder, a helmet or a pack of Agfa photographic paper. The reference to Malick Sidibé’s photography is clear. However, unlike the photographer who used objects to reveal the pride of his portrayed subjects, Rosi uses them as a portal through which to connect to the story contained in her family archive. This allows her to pose in her parents’ clothes, so as to discover the history of her family, starting from the photographs in her album, through her body and the history of the diaspora, which was kept silent for a long time. She only experienced the aftermath of this history.

The interest in family albums is reignited in a collection of photographs from the 90s that Rosi, along with a team of researchers, gathered from families of African descent in the Emilia Romagna area, where she hails from. Palpable is the desire to create a disintegrated archive in a national territory that comes together via an openness to share and donate personal images. As someone who grew up in the early 90s, these poses and scenarios are very familiar: scenes of trips out of town, standing and posing in front of a landscape, in the centre of a square, or leaning against a car. Moments of celebration or simple daily life. The vitality is feverish, and they seem to say: “We are here and we are fine.” From the collection of work that Rosi amassed with the researchers, it emerged that these photos were often sent to relatives in Africa, accompanied by audio cassettes in which they recounted their stories. And this element seems to spill over into the video housed in the last room, where a three-part split screen shows a tape recorder on one side, with Rosi listening to the recorded voice through the headphones on the opposite side, while in the middle, the voice transcription of four different letters written between 1982 and 2000, read by the people who received them, telling stories of diaspora. You can sense their discomfort in speaking French, since it is not their first language. As a result, the communication might not be very fluent, but it is always sincere. They express gratitude, poverty, determination and worry. At this point, you feel conscious of being invited to assemble pieces, like an interpreter in photographs and a listener in videos, as Rosi seems to be doing to the world around her. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Collezione Maramotti. © Silvia Rosi

Disintegrata runs at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, until 28 July.

—
Mariacarla Molè is an art writer based in Turin.

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

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.