47 Archives | 1000 Words

Speaking to the future: Elle Pérez in New York

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

Gem Fletcher | Exhibition review | 10 July 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images:

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

2-Elle Pérez, DAINJA 730, 2013/2025

3-Elle Pérez, Flag, 2009/2025

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

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

6-Elle Pérez, Kiss, 2009/2025

7-Elle Pérez, Pedro in his garden, 2025

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

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

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

11-Elle Pérez, untitled (king), 2025

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

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

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

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

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Between history and fable: Mashid Mohadjerin at FOMU, Antwerp

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

Taous Dahmani | Exhibition/photobook review | 26 June 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Geordie beaches

Originally published 25 years ago, the revised and expanded edition of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Writing in the Sand from Dewi Lewis Publishing reintroduces the lively, eccentric spirit of Geordie beachgoers into the present. With a deft balance of nostalgia and immediacy, Michael Grieve writes that Konttinen’s photographs not only celebrate the quirky nuances and contradictions of working-class life but also reveal an awkward yet tender relationship with the beach – a place both distant and intimate.

Michael Grieve | Book review | 19 June 2025

‘The quality that we call beauty… must always grow from the realities of life.’ So wrote Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. The documentary genre embodies this and seldom are there photobooks to which I feel personally connected, but the ones that do resonate are related to my youth and the region of my hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. Tish Murtha’s photographs of the working class districts of Elswick and Benwell, where I was born, are stark reminders of the streets where I played during the 1970s; I could have been one of those scruffy kids jumping out of the window of a derelict terraced house onto a precarious pile of mattresses. Photographs by Chris Killip of The Station (2020), an anarcho punk music venue across the Tyne River in Gateshead, a space I regularly frequented from the very first day it opened back in 1981, capture those spiky haired and familiar faces; a visual portal transporting me back to the frenetic energy and pungent odorous array of hairspray, soap, glue, and sweat. And now, Writing in the Sand from Dewi Lewis Publishing: a homage to the sandy beaches of the North East of England and the people who relaxed there, by Finnish documentary photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. Photographs of places so familiar to me, inciting a myriad of archived memories including the Spanish City, an amusement park located near the seafront of Whitley Bay that I regularly escaped to while ‘nicking off’ school, eating chips and playing Space Invaders with my mates.

In 1969, before finishing her film studies at Regents Street Polytechnic in London, Konttinen moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and co-founded the Amber Film and Photography Collective, a group of concerned documentarians focused on capturing working class communities and the effects of the rapidly disintegrating industries and the distinct social and cultural identity of the North East. They believed in long-term commitments towards communities spanning years, to integrate as much as possible to achieve an honest representation. Konttinen exemplified this dedication. That said, since it opened in 1977, the collective’s adjunct Side Gallery has always had a hard time keeping afloat. But now it really is sinking into oblivion; as of this time of writing it is ‘currently closed’. The gallery is no longer supported as a National Portfolio Organisation by Arts Council England, which is a disgrace and though the commitment and hard work ingrained in the photographs will forever remain, the momentum of the Side Gallery will halt and disappear just like the communities its photographers faithfully documented, just as the writing in the sand.

There is wonderful footage from 1974 of a young Konttinen featured on the then popular BBC current affairs programme, Nationwide. The reporter is full of praise for Konttinen’s “remarkable collection of photographs” taken of Byker and the tight knit community of working class people who lived there. These Victorian houses in back to back terraces were classified as slums and demolished to make way for a new modern Scandinavian inspired urban design that culminated into the unique one-and-a-half mile long social housing block called the Byker Wall. The reporter is somewhat bemused about this middle class ‘girl’ from Finland who chose to live in Byker and who feels the warmth of the local community, describing the residents as genuine, gentle and worried that the very distinct social unity and character would be lost with people living in atomised flats of the Byker Wall. Such was the level of empathy that Sirkka felt towards the North East of England as she remained stoically dedicated to documenting the region to this day, with a remarkable level of intimacy and affection for the Geordies and their plight in an ever changing socio-political-economic environment. In an interview she told me that the collective “brought us together and served us well is our common goals. Our egalitarian constitution, self-determination, editorial control, creative freedom, sharing of resources, lasting friendships… We moved to the industrial north-east with the aim of giving voice to working class and marginalised communities.” The photobook, Byker, was published in 1983, and ranks as a seminal and important project in the humanist mode of documentary photography in the UK, and certainly on a par with Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street social documentation of the inhabitants of appallingly impoverished living conditions in Harlem during the 1960s.

Writing in the Sand was originally published twenty-five years ago. The book features black and white photographs taken between 1973 and 1998 on the beaches at Cullercoats, Whitley Bay and Tynemouth – all in close proximity to each other. The beach is a concentrated space, a hive of human activity, and these photographs celebrate the eccentricities and odd juxtapositions of engagement. Most telling, especially photographs from the 70’s, and compared to today, is how the English working classes have an awkward relationship to the beach, wearing unsuitable attire for the environment; men smoking ‘tabs’ in their regular heavy twilled suits with trousers rolled up, cardigan wearing grandmothers, mothers and aunts allowing themselves the pleasure of feeling the grains of sand through their stockinged feet. A space to break free and let one’s hair down from the confines of the ‘hoose’ and drudgery of work. This is how it was. And somehow the beach equalises people, feral children turn upside down, metamorphose into mermaids and bury their dads with sand, lovers love and dogs go barking mad. In this uncluttered space people feel the sensuality of nature that allows the potential of unhindered free expression. The sea, sand and sky democratises an experience; the beach is a theatre of improvisation.

With humorous affection Konttinen’s observations embrace the energy and actions of quirky and intimate moments with absolute humility. Her distance is polite and her closeness is honest and balanced. This is photography of the humanist kind, and in skillful hands the emphasis is about the subject, not the photographer. With eloquence she captures the joy emanating from the gravitational pull to the sea, that place from which we crawled from the primordial soup. From time to time Konttinen punctuates the flow of pictures with quiet abstractions of sand, pebbles, seaweed and rocks, as if to accentuate the movement and perpetual cycle of nature, and put bizarre human presence into humbling perspective. Konttinen has a close affinity to these beaches. A few years ago we met at her local Tynemouth beach at King Edwards Bay where, with other women, she ritualistically swims, braving the north easterly weather even in the winter. She emerged fresh out of the sea and I photographed her portrait, wrapped in a terry towelling robe on that chilly morning before heading to the warmth of her home and a cup of tea.

The majority of working class people in the North East have endured a great deal of loss. By the 1970’s the industries of ship building, coal mining and steel manufacturing were virtually extinct and by the 1990’s had gone together with the communities it supported, and so began the onset of the grim reality of there being ‘no such thing as society’ anymore. Not to be sentimental about the good ole days of the working class as for sure it was always tough, but it seems the more we have the less we have; consumerism is an instant, addictive, gratification separating humans apart. Community, as Kottinnen prophesied in the Nationwide programme will be lost, and with it a sense of identity, dignity and bonding.

This is old school, classic documentary photography. Tony Ray-Jones, Homer Sykes, Martin Parr, to name but a few, spring to mind, all of whom focused on the peculiarities of the English at play. Konttinen’s project ended in 1998, and I wonder if such images could now be taken in our protectionist self-image controlled, hyper-ethical cultural environment. How refreshing to see the total absence of mobile phones and lack of homogenous, sweatshop clothing, though only a stone’s throw away as a common sight.♦

—
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.

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