Aperture Archives | 1000 Words

Reclaiming women’s place in Japanese photography

I’m So Happy You Are Here, a travelling exhibition and accompanying book, showcases seminal works by Japanese women photographers from the 1950s onward, underscoring their often overlooked contributions. Published by Aperture, it features 25 portfolios, an illustrated bibliography curated by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and essays from a range of writers, including Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick. Ahead of the exhibition at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Germany, Roula Seikaly speaks with curators Lesley A. Martin, Pauline Vermare and Takeuchi Mariko about their expansive collaboration, key works that informed the project and the importance of centring individual women’s stories in Japanese photographic history.

Roula Seikaly | Interview | 7 May 2025

Once in a while,

we should look into each other’s eyes.

Otherwise we might feel lost.

I’m so glad you are here.

–Kawauchi Rinko, from the eyes, the ears

Roula Seikaly: Could you describe the state of research or scholarship addressing photography by Japanese women as you found it when this project started?

Pauline Vermare: There were projects about Japanese women photographers made before this one. The most famous is An Incomplete History: Women Photographers from Japan 1864–1997 (Traveling Exhibition Service, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, 1998) by curator Fuku Noriko. She was researching the who’s who of Japanese photography and came to the same realisation as we did; there were no women to be found in there. Noriko told me about Japanese Women Photographers from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, which was curated by Fukushima Tatsuo and Hans Fleishner and organised by Ricardo Viera at Lehigh University Art Galleries in 1986, that wasn’t well known at all. Viera organised that exhibition after cancelling another exhibition on experimental Japanese photography, when the male Japanese photographers in that show protested the inclusion of work by women. I love that this was his reaction. In Japan, a group of artists including Ishiuchi Miyako curated the all-women exhibition Hyakka ryoran (One hundred flowers in bloom) at Shimizu Gallery in Yokohama in 1974.

It’s very important to note that this project doesn’t come out of nowhere. In Japan, many curators and historians such as Kasahara Michiko and Takeuchi Mariko have written and researched extensively on the subject, and promoted the work of Japanese women photographers, as have Kelly McCormick and Carrie Cushman in the United States. That’s why Lesley and I, as editors of the book, invited them to be part of this project. We knew that the research had been done for years and years.

Lesley A. Martin: As Pauline mentioned, this project served as a catalyst for bringing together a tremendous fount of research that had already been undertaken. I think that was really one of the most rewarding aspects of this project – to be able to tap into work that people had already been doing independently and to give it a larger context. It was an act of gathering rather than discovery. We wanted to unite the many dedicated voices of scholars and gallerists and curators who had been doing this work on their own, of their own volition. This echoes, in some ways, the history of women photographers who were so committed to their own practice that they continued their work regardless of recognition or available platforms.

RS: Is it important that audiences know Japanese photo history before they experience this project?

Takeuchi Mariko: This is exactly what we talked when we started this project. We really wanted to make it open to everybody. So, this is not just for people familiar with Japanese photography.

LAM: There is a very committed audience in the West for Japanese photography, but we wanted to make sure that the book that could function as a way into all this amazing work by women, no matter how much experience one had with the history of photography in Japan. First and foremost, it is informed by the circumstances and the social situation of Japanese women – their lived experiences. What’s been really rewarding is that we’ve gotten enthusiastic responses from people who say, “I didn’t know anything about Japanese photography”, as well as from those who do really know the history.

PV: Charlotte Cotton’s Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015) was an inspiration as a playful yet serious invitation to contemporary photography – in this case Japanese photography specifically, which can be a loaded subject. We address that complexity in the essays. I’m So Happy You Are Here is layered: the essays, the illustrated bibliography that Russet Lederman and Marc Feustel put together, the portfolios, all of that combined is designed to address the depth of the subject.

RS: Why is the period 1950 to 2000 an important framing device for this book?

LAM: Originally, we had the subtitle as Japanese Women Photographers from 1880 to Now. The history begins with the medium’s introduction to Japan. We include essays and reference materials that trace women’s participation from the boom of the earliest, often family-run photo studios in Japan, through the Meiji and Taisho eras, to today. Once we started to focus on the portfolios, we realised that what we really wanted to explore began in the 1950s onward.

PV: I came to this project from Une Histoire Mondiale des Femmes Photographes (Textuel, 2020) and originally thought about a book covering the late 1880s to now. A few years prior, Lesley and Mariko had discussed a book about Japanese women photographers from the ‘90s. But we liked Lesley’s idea to articulate the book around those 25 portfolios, and these photographers had all worked from the ‘50s on. We realised that an encyclopaedic methodology would not work as well for what we wanted to achieve. But the essays do a great job laying out what came before, noting where these photographers came from. We start with Shima Ryū, the first known Japanese woman photographer.

TM: There are a lot of stories, a lot of photographers before the ‘50s, of course. But, to make the best project, the decision to pursue portfolios made the most sense.

PV: I think it did. Mariko’s essay emphasises the importance of experimentation and how these artists pushed boundaries. We needed that to be present in the portfolios as well.

We wanted to show the breadth of the styles and generations and contributions, from classic black and white documentary, like Tokiwa Toyoko, through the post-war era to today’s experimentations, like Tawada Yuki. Because those experimentations, as Mariko writes so beautifully in her essay, mean something beyond the work itself. Something psychological and sociological that needed to be conveyed as well.

TM: As we said, this is not a dictionary. This is not a book just about history. We really wanted to tell stories of individual women. This is not just about Japan. It’s really about individual lives with photography.

LAM: Pauline and I recently had a conversation with Carrie Cushman, who mentioned that as a western scholar in Japan, it has been difficult to get access to some of the research materials. And it was difficult for us to get some of the illustrations for their essay because the materials just aren’t well-digitised, it turns out. I think that also served to shift our focus: the ease of access to the images themselves.

RS: Pauline describes feminism as an incomplete construct through which to understand the book and the portfolios it contains. Has feminism been elevated sort of as a central issue by audiences you’ve experienced so far? How have you addressed that?

PV: As a French woman who grew up in Japan, now living in New York, I struggled with the fact that ‘feminism’ means different things in each of these countries. France and Japan might be closer, in terms of societal structures and gender roles. I felt that our analysis would be too limited, not inclusive enough, if we only looked at the work of these photographers through an American feminist lens. I quote a few photographers in my introduction. Someone like Nagashima Yurie, who studied abroad at some point, in LA, was very interested in the notion of feminism and worked around it in her own way. For others, especially of the generation of Ishiuchi or Sugiura, women who are now in their 70s or 80s, feminism wasn’t the focus. They didn’t want to talk about it. It was a bit of a rejection, at least of the word ‘feminism’. I love what Mariko said, that it’s about individual lives. I think that angle is much more open and fruitful than an approach that would be theoretically or sociologically locking their work in a box.

LAM: We came from very different perspectives on this as an editorial committee. (The editorial committee being myself, Pauline, Mariko, Carrie and Kelly.) Carrie and Kelly would describe their practice as adamantly driven by feminist ideas around the retelling of history. Each of us occupy a different position on how feminism intersects with the act of writing a restorative history. From my personal perspective, I would also argue that it’s unavoidably feminist.

RS: Where did this project start? Was it a collaboration from the beginning?

PV: On my end, it started with a masterclass on Japanese women photographers that the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris invited me to give, which was prompted by a few articles I had contributed to Luce Lebart and Marie Robert’s book published by Textuel in 2020. The Textuel team, whom I had been discussing this project with, knew that Lesley had been working with Mariko on a project focusing on the 1990s, and kindly connected us.

LAM: That’s how I learned that Pauline had been researching this topic. She and I both lived in Japan at different times in our lives. I was there from ‘92-95 after finishing my undergraduate degree and very attuned to dialogues around feminism and culture at the time. I was very impressed by some of the work that I had seen emerging in Tokyo, in particular Nagashima Yurie, Ninagawa Mika, Hiromix. These three artists represented a watershed moment when Japanese women were really coming to the forefront. That stayed with me.

I met Mariko in 2005 or 2006. When I could finally turn my focus to this project, I knew that she was a great resource and someone that I wanted to work with. In 2017, we began a conversation around a book that would just focus on women in the 1990s. Another important collaborator to that conversation was the photographer Nagashima Yurie, who asked all the right questions. I came to realise that the ‘90s is a very important time period, but also really complicated. Making a book that introduced that one historical moment came to feel like releasing a tiny slice of something into the vacuum around a much larger history. Mariko, Yurie and I spent a lot of time talking about what was missing. And it’s thanks to those conversations that the multivalency of the project really crystallised. COVID slowed everything down, but it also gave us time to find Pauline!

Mariko, is that an accurate description? Because you did a lot of work on that earlier project.

TM: The three of us were on different paths but realised that we were running in the same direction. It was very natural process. I researched women photographers in Japan for a long time. I wrote texts and gave lectures and did shows with some women photographers. After doing the work alone, I feel so fortunate to work with these two. It’s a kind of a miracle for me to realise this.

RS: The care you have for one another as colleagues, as friends, as people invested in this topic really comes through in the book, as does the care for the artists and the work in this project. The world is a terrible place and has been for a long time. For me, spending time with the book and speaking with all of you, it’s very heartening. The book is unapologetically welcoming and driven by love and appreciation, things that we seem collectively low in our reserves right now.

PV: Thank you, Roula, this is so good to hear. This project was driven by a desire to counterbalance what you’re talking about, everything we’ve been going through, and photography is very much a way to do that. The title, I’m So Happy You Are Here, is from a poem by photographer Kawauchi Rinko (published in the eyes, the ears, 2010). Last year, at the Gordon Parks Foundation gala, Colin Kaepernick was being honoured, and he gave a deeply inspiring speech, saying that we all needed to “open the windows”. And I thought, this is the most beautiful thing to say. And that’s what I think we wanted to do with the project.

RS: Why was Aperture the right publisher for this project? Did their participation signal institutional approval or support for projects like this?

PV: Lesley was Aperture’s creative director at the time and had been working with Japanese photographers for many years. I would say it was a mission for her, a personal commitment she was carrying through. And Aperture, as we know, has always been on the forefront of groundbreaking projects like this one, including Photography is Magic, The Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion (2019) and The Chinese Photobook (2015). It was clear that this is where this book belonged, in that group.

RS: Readers are likely to be interested in seeing more work by the artists featured in the portfolios and the illustrated bibliography. Are there websites – artist websites, museum and exhibition websites, archives, translated books – that readers can refer to?

PV: Kelly Midori McCormick and Carrie Cushman’s online platform Behind the Camera is a very impressive and important history of Japanese women’s photographers. You could spend hours on it, going through all the bios and chronology. It is a fascinating and extremely valuable resource.

There are also the hundreds of photobooks made by Japanese women, including the ones that Marc and Russet gathered in their bibliography. I am thinking also of a few books made recently by Chose Commune, the French publisher, including Kawauchi, Hara Mikiko and Kodama Kusako.

And we are hoping the project will trigger other publications, including a translation of Nagashima Yurie’s very important book “Bokura” no “onna no ko shashin” kara watashitachi no girlie photo e Yurie Nagashima (Daifuku Shorin, 2020) that is partially translated in our book for the first time.

RS: If there were any challenges in realising this project, what were they and how did you address them?

TM: Ah, so many challenges. I always think that the challenge is good, though.

As you know, I’m based in Japan. And I am so familiar with a so-called Japanese mentality and idea of photography. I was aware that I needed to push the boundaries. I’ve been working on Japanese photography abroad a lot, and feel like I’ve always worked in between, like I have to explain it to both sides. But I enjoy it. I do it because I believe in it.

PV: The main challenge I would say was cultural. How to approach this subject in the most universal way. Nagashima Yurie was asking important questions, about gender and social class in Japan. What does it mean to be Japanese, what does it mean to be a woman, what is “a Japanese woman”? But we knew where we were going, and we were all going in the same direction, with the same intention. That fed the whole project and drove it to its destination.

RS: Thinking about the medium’s historiography, how it’s taught, and about the blind spots that you’ve spoken to throughout this interview, how would you like this book to be used? Do you see it as a textbook? How would you like the work of these artists incorporated into the wider photo canon, if at all?

MT: This book is open, welcoming everyone from different approaches. It can be used in any way. Not just in classrooms, but as a visual source for historians and for students. My wish is to hand it to everyone, that’s all.

PV: I see this book is a conduit. It would be wonderful to see it being used in classrooms, to trigger optimism and creativity in students, to empower them. As a student, you want to be pushed in a direction that’s new, that will open something inside of you. That could become a lifelong thing. I would love for Japanese and Asian studies programs in the US and France to use it. I feel like people would know and understand so much more about Japan just by looking at the work of those photographers and reading about their experiences.

I open my essay with this quote by Annie Ernaux: ‘My story as a woman is not only a woman’s story’. This project is about adding vantage points and perspectives to the story. I think it is fundamental to open the field of vision, to see the reverse shots, the counter views. We go back to opening the windows. Sometimes, we fail to look at, or to even think that there’s another way of looking at the story. And for me, this is the goal of this project: to say, let’s look at these other perspectives.

TM: That’s a very crucial point. And that reminds me of our conversation, Pauline. When we started, you asked me what I would want to prioritise for this project, and I replied that I just want to break the cliche stereotype of Japanese women – always smiling, soft, nice, and never saying no. I’m really fed up with this. As you can see in the book, each of us are brave, individual and independent.♦

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now runs at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Germany, from 24 May–7 September 2025 and is published by Aperture.

—
Lesley A. Martin is Executive Director of Printed Matter and former Creative Director of Aperture.

Takeuchi Mariko is a writer, critic and curator of photography, and head of the art studies programmme at Kyoto University of the Arts.

Roula Seikaly is a curator, writer and co-founder of Print Study for All. Seikaly’s curatorial projects have been hosted at venues across the US, including Berkeley Art Center, Colorado Photographic Arts Center and SF Camerawork. Her writing has been published through KQED Arts, Hyperallergic and Photograph.

Pauline Vermare is the Philip and Edith Lenonian Curator of Photography at Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Images:

1-Asako Narahashi, Kawaguchiko, 2003; from the series half awake and half asleep in the water. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

2-Eiko Yamazawa, What I Am Doing No. 77, 1986. Courtesy Third Gallery Aya, Osaka, and Aperture

3-Hitomi Watanabe, Untitled, 1968–69; from the series Tōdai Zenkyōtō. Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

4-Michiko Kon, Inada + Bōshi (Yellowtail and hat), 1986. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

5-Lieko Shiga, Mother’s Gentle Hands; from the series Rasen Kaigan, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

6-Mikiko Hara, Untitled, 1996. Courtesy Osiris Co., Ltd., Tokyo, and Aperture

7-Miwa Yanagi, Elevator Girl House 1F, 1997; from the series Elevator Girl. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

8-Miyako Ishiuchi, mother’s #39, 2002. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

9-Momo Okabe, Untitled, 2020; from the series Ilmatar. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

10-Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2004; from the series the eyes, the ears. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

11-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled, 1997; from the series Hiroki. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

12-Tamiko Nishimura, Mitaka, Tokyo, 1978; from the series Zoku (My Journey II). Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

13-Tokuko Ushioda, Untitled, 1983; from the series My Husband. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

14-Yurie Nagashima, Full-figured, yet not full-term, 2001. Courtesy the artist, Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

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Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2021

Selected by Alessandro Merola and Tim Clark

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2021 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark, with words from Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.

1. Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
Steidl

What Gilles Peress has achieved with Whatever You Say, Say Nothing – unsurprisingly shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022 – is astonishing, and surely must rank amongst the highest feats in photobook history. In some 2,000 pages, sprawled across two volumes as well as an almanac entitled Annals of the North, the esteemed French photographer embarks on a visual and philosophical exploration of the ethno-nationalist conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998. With no beginning, middle or end, Peress’ tale defies the orthodoxies of linear narrative by orchestrating 22 semi-fictional “days”: days that recycle, over and over, the rituals of violence, protest and grieving; days in which the carnage becomes inseparable from the quotidian. That said, whilst Peress exploits photography’s “reality effect” to register the material specifics of the Troubles, it’s in the work’s accumulation that the strife operates synecdochically. For it expresses – like a photographic Finnegans Wake (1939) – what is elsewhere – or, rather, everywhere: the simultaneity of good and evil; the push and pull of power; the helicoidal unravelling of time. That this work speaks to such profound, ineffable ideas is a testament to the potential of the photobook when it finds its upper limits. And, indeed, few could have executed this unison between content, structure and form so flawlessly as Gerhard Steidl has: a book of all books, unlike anything that has come before.

2. Gregory Eddi Jones, Promise Land
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions

With the mounting complexities which define our times requiring increasingly sophisticated modes of storytelling, it is exciting to witness an artist invent something so utterly imaginative that it makes us see the world anew. Promise Land, by Gregory Eddi Jones, is one such example. In this whirling, poetic mashup, Jones riffs off T. S. Eliot’s apocalyptic epic, The Waste Land (1922), of course penned in the wake of the First World War and influenza pandemic. Aligned with Eliotean tactics of appropriation, Jones’ sequences are comprised of stock photographs: consumerist fantasies which, for the artist, not only bespeak the excesses of contemporary culture, but represent photography in its most hollow, debased and regurgitative state. Through a profusion of détournements – cropping, compositing, inverting, inkjet hacking and digital retouching – Jones makes implicit values explicit, inviting readers to re-evaluate the relationship between photography and truth, or sever their ties altogether. Here is a work that is bold, irreverent and oftentimes chilling, not least for the bookending displays of a composer waving his wand before a spell-bound audience; suggestions that there may be as much method as madness in this heap of broken images.

3. Hoda Afshar, Speak The Wind
MACK

From start to close – and vice versa – Hoda Afshar’s Speak The Wind entrances with its eloquent rendition of zār: the wind spirits which, for millennia, have shaped the topography and traditions of the islanders of the Strait of Hormuz, an oil passageway joining the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. They are said to inflict disease, placated only through ritual dialogues conducted with the gusts themselves. Situated somewhere between the sacred and the baleful, Afshar’s incantatory, cinematically-paced photographs do not so much conjure a people but channel their psychic entanglement with place. Punctuating the book are bound pages depicting wind-sculpted mountains; they form pockets that conceal islanders’ drawings and writings describing their experiences of being possessed by zār. Afshar’s dimensional switches cleverly rupture photography’s predispositions for certainties; those which can be clutched, seen. It’s easy to get swept up by these pages, to concede to forces greater than us, yet Afshar also empowers readers like she does her subjects. Setting foot on twinkling black sands, or setting sail through seas as red as blood, we are ultimately met by a crossroads: between reality and fiction; between this world and another.

4. Tarrah Krajnak, El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan
Dais Books

The breakthrough of Tarrah Krajnak has been one of the most significant of the year, and the artist’s nuanced handling of archival material is on full view in this precious book. Borrowing the title and parable blueprint of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), it plays a deep concern with the circumstances surrounding her birth: amidst the terror of Peru’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, Krajnak’s biological mother travelled to Lima to work as a maid; she was raped, and gave birth to Krajnak in 1979, ‘the year of the orphans’. Instead of attempting to resolve these personal and political narratives, Krajnak invents mothers, imagines lineages and initiates what she calls ‘misremembrance’. The asymmetrical sequences pull our attention in fractured ways, moving through re-photographed images from political magazines, oral testimonies of women born in 1979 and the artist’s interactions with projections in which temporalities enmesh like palimpsests. Krajnak’s sharp prose and deliberate mistranslations bestow an added intensity to this book’s reckoning with subjectivity as much as history, all the while collapsing the boundaries between them. With El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan, Krajnak shows that affinity can be innate, even historical, persisting in the psyches of those separated by space and time yet linked by collective knowledge, memory and trauma. Theirs is a storied history, seen through a glass, darkly.

5. Catherine Opie
Phaidon

Boasting lavish printing and impeccable production values, Phaidon’s survey of Catherine Opie’s prodigious output is of the highest order and entirely befitting of one of the great chroniclers of this century. There is much to be praised for the ways in which over 300 photographs, spanning 40 years, have been mapped, not chronologically, but thematically across three chapters: People, Place and Politics. Yet, the lines which delineate them are almost non-existent. One spread pairs a headshot of Pig Pen (Opie’s long-time friend and subject) donning a fake moustache with a photograph of a lesbian couple seated in their backyard with arms interlocked; another the iconic ‘Self-Portrait/Cutting’ (1993) with a literal manifestation of the domestic scene carved-out on Opie’s back. They are juxtapositions that steer us towards the central paradox of Opie’s oeuvre: for all its supposed extremity in staging the queer body as a site of self-actualisation, there is, at its heart, a yearning for the fundamental. Because, whether documenting human, ecological or architectural subjects, she never strays far from home, hence the tome’s modest, perfectly-judged cover, which displays the young artist photographing herself in the mirror alongside potted plants and a wood burning stove. Opie’s work feels vital; it always did.

6. Raymond Meeks, Somersault
MACK

Raymond Meeks’ very beautiful and affecting ode to his daughter, Abigail, is a charged companion piece to his much admired aubade, ciprian honey cathedral (2020). Through imperceptible yet tenderly convicted narrative shifts, Meeks unveils the inner-world of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood and leaving home. He coaxes out Abigail’s emotional subtleties in a way perhaps only a parent could; she is alternately timid, whimsical, inquisitive and fearless. However, Meeks honours the guarded mysteries of adolescence, too. Abigail becomes, for her father, a horizon where intimacy and loneliness converge, as mirrored by Meeks’ sublime evocation of the wilderness that envelops their home, delicately tethered by train tracks, telephone wires and wilting daisies. His impossibly lucid visions crackle with longing throughout until we reach the parting words of Abigail herself, who recalls the innocent daydream of her younger self: ‘She wants to climb on a train and go where it takes her.’ The grace of Somersault is to measure distance whilst recognising that few distances are ever fixed.

7. Zora J Murff, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)
Aperture

Where Zora J Murff ’s previous book, At No Point in Between (2019), takes as its subject the historically Black neighbourhood of North Omaha, Nebraska, his new book is nation-wide in scope. Beneath the swirling surface of True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) – currently displayed in exhibition form at Webber Gallery, London – lies a provocative meditation on America: its fragile bonds, elective affinities and colonial legacies. From police brutality and lynching to redlining and economic oppression, violence – fast and slow – runs through the veins of this book, so arresting in its dense web of image types: vernacular photography, newspaper clippings, Internet screenshots, video stills, landscapes, portraiture and more. Murff’s dexterous use of juxtaposition – often contextualising his own photographs alongside found and appropriated material – brings into focus the medium’s complicity in creating and maintaining racial hierarchies through the spectacle, commodification or erasure of Black bodies. This book serves as not only a complicated, oft-impenetrable ‘manual’ for coming to terms with the country’s past and navigating its present, but – true to its title – an autobiographical retelling of the epiphanies of a young Black artist finding his voice. And it’s emphatic.

8. Massao Mascaro, Sub Sole
Chose Commune

Sub Sole – a classical, richly-layered piece of narrative work which was recently exhibited in an elegant show curated by Fannie Escoulen at Fondation A Stichting, Brussels – follows after Homer’s The Odyssey (c.750 BC), traversing the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Its waters have, since time immemorial, been a crucible for voyages: some mythical and heroic; some real and tragic. Against the backdrop of such tense, intersecting contexts, Massao Mascaro furnishes our gaze across relics, architecture and the gestural relations between those who have sought refuge in Europe. These passing impressions are loosely arranged through nine visual poems, each introduced by a literary fragment which rolls along the bottom edges. The clarity of Mascaro’s frames; the lyricism of his sequences; the mesmerising gradations of Mediterranean light: all of them are a function of the casual grandeur of the world he has crafted. Yet, there is also a deeply disturbing cycle to this book, which ultimately feels suspended in time – timeless even – as intimated by the dialless clock that decorates its front cover, or the line from which its title derives: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes, 1:10).

9. Frida Orupabo
Sternberg Press and Kunsthall Trondheim

Although the subversive strategies of Frida Orupabo are best experienced via her Instagram feed, @nemiepeba, and on the gallery wall, this debut monograph affords a persuasive translation of her work in book form. The opening black pages (preceding incisive essays by Stefanie Hessler, Lola Olufemi and Legacy Russell) showcase Orupabo’s social media images, offering flashes of the artist’s extraordinary online archive – a ‘voluptuous trail of black continuity’, as Arthur Jafa called it – which she uses as a laboratory to make her paper collages. Whilst the inclusion of installation views here attests to the uneasy transitions these physical pieces undergo when they enter the gallery’s white space, it also evinces the manifold ways of seeing Black bodies that Orupabo compels. W. E. B. Du Bois’ notion of ‘double consciousness’ – that is, viewing oneself through the coloniser’s eyes – is undeniable, but so too is bell hooks’ ‘oppositional gaze’. Orupabo’s greatest triumph might be in the transmission of a wholly new consciousness, found in the unforgettable, searing stares of her feminine protagonists. Their pasts are fraught, but, in Orupabo’s curative hands, they embody the spirit of resistance that literally underpins them.

10. Alexis Cordesse, Talashi
Atelier EXB

The catalytic inquiry of Alexis Cordesse’s subtle entry into the vernacular genre is this: how does one evoke a tragedy that is paradoxically made invisible through too many images? The tragedy in question is the Syrian civil war, an ongoing conflict that has displaced over half the country’s population since 2011. Seeking an alternative to the sentimental dramatisations of war all too often circulated by mainstream media, Cordesse performs an act of collective remembrance by collating personal photographs belonging to those living in exile in Turkey, Germany and France; those who entrusted him enough to share the memories they hold dear. These artefacts have, like their owners, survived perilous journeys, for, if they had been seized as pieces of evidence at the borders, they might not have made it – and, indeed, many didn’t. Such is the precarity of Talashi, whose title translates from Arabic to Fragmentation, Erosion or Disappearance. Slowly weaving what ultimately becomes an ever-vanishing tapestry of home, this book quakes with a quiet, mournful energy: a reminder that though all photographs are silent, some are more silent than others.

+1. What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999
10×10 Photobooks

The advent of photobook history – a still relatively new field of study – set in motion the books-on-photobooks. Although doing much to further our understanding of the medium, they have failed to redress the canon’s long-standing male biases. Enter What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999. In the foreword to this important anthology, editors Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich stress the issues of access and funding or lack thereof; ergo their necessary expansion of what constitutes a “photobook” via the inclusion of albums, scrapbooks and maquettes. Indeed, marginalised histories are not just a question of gender, but of class and race too, hence the scarcity of, for example, African photobooks as opposed to books-on-Africa. The anthology countervails these factors through its signature turn: an interwoven, parallel timeline that charts publishing, magazine and small press events which might not have realised “photobooks” in the narrow, Western sense, but certainly influenced history. Many of these notations are incomplete, acting more like leads. Of course, one wishes that such a sole dedication to female authors did not have to exist. However, until it doesn’t, it prevails as a critical resource for discovering forgotten parts of photobook history: a history that is longstanding, forever rich yet still being written.♦

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words, and a writer, curator and lecturer at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University. He lives and works in London.

Images:

1-Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Steidl.

2-From the chapter ‘The Last Night’ in Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Gilles Peress Studio.

3-‘Betterland’ (2019) from Gregory Eddi Jones, Promise Land (Self Publish, Be Happy Editions, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Self Publish, Be Happy Editions.

4-‘Untitled’ from Hoda Afshar, Speak The Wind (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

5-‘Dead Ringer/Self-Portrait as Found Photograph (1979 Lima, Peru)’ (2018) from Tarrah Krajnak, El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (Dais Books, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Dais Books.

6-‘Joanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York’ (1998) from Catherine Opie (Phaidon, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York/Hong Kong/Seoul/London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples and Peder Lund, Oslo.

7-‘Untitled’ from Raymond Meeks, Somersault (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

8-‘Stole-On (or, I wanna be a world star)’ (2021) from Zora J. Murff, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London.

9-‘Untitled’ from Massao Mascaro, Sub Sole (Chose Commune, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Chose Commune.

10-‘Untitled’ (2017) from Frida Orupabo (Sternberg Press and Kunsthall Trondheim, 2021). Courtesy the artist, Sternberg Press and Kunsthall Trondheim.

11-‘Untitled’ from Alexis Cordesse, Talashi (Atelier EXB, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Atelier EXB.

12-Spread from Christina Broom and Isabel Marion Seymour, Women’s Social and Political Union Postcards Album (self-published, 1908–14). Courtesy Museum of London.

Top 10

Photobooks of 2020

Selected by 1000 Words

An annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from the tumultuous year that was 2020 – selected by 1000 Words.

1. Andy Sewell, Known and Strange Things Pass
Skinnerboox

Readers of 1000 Words will recall last year’s feature on Known and Strange Things Pass. Now published in book form by Skinnerboox, Andy Sewell’s meditation on the complex entanglement between technology and contemporary life seems more apposite than ever given the socially-distanced times in which we exist – not to mention the illusory propinquity of screen-based connection. Within a kinetic, non-linear sequence of images that aptly push and pull, ebb and flow, cables – carries of immeasurable quantities of data – weave across the Atlantic Ocean’s bed, and resurface on either side in alien concrete facilities; so rarely seen, these are the material infrastructures that both literally and metaphorically underpin our hyper-connected world. Ambitious, understated and fleeting, Known and Strange Things Pass explores the ways in which the ocean and the Internet speak to each other and speak to us, whilst probing photography’s ability to render visible such unknowable entities, infinitely vaster than we are.

2. Poulomi Basu, Centralia
Dewi Lewis

It has been quite the year for Poulomi Basu, whose docu-fictional book Centralia has earnt the artist the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award Jury Prize, and a place on the shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021. Beneath its blood-red, sandpaper-rough cover, Basu takes us through the dense jungles of central India, where a brutal war between the Indian state and Maoist insurgents over land and resources has waged for fifty years, in turn casting light on the woefully-underreported horrors of environmental degradation, indigenous and female rights violations and the state’s suppression of voices of resistance. Embracing a disorientating amalgam of staged photography, crime scenes, police records and first-person testimonies – all punctuated by horizontally-cut pages and loose documents – Centralia traces the contours of a conflict in which half-truths reign over facts. Though not for the faint-hearted, this open-ended account of an ongoing war affords us space to reflect on what we have seen, and to choose what we believe.

3. Buck Ellison, Living Trust
Loose Joints

A worthy winner in the First PhotoBook category for the 2020 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Awards, Buck Ellison’s Living Trust, published by Loose Joints, requires us to study the visual iconography of privilege as embodied by white, upper-middle class lives – or W.A.S.P. – in the United States. In these carefully constructed and performative photographs, insignia such as wooden cheeseboards, organic vegetables, acupuncture bruises, car stickers, lacrosse gear and even family Christmas card portraits examine how whiteness is exhibited and ultimately sustained through everyday structures, internalised logic and economic prowess. Deftly drawing on the language of advertising and commercial photography, Ellison conjures an uneasy world where the “whiteness project” manifests itself over and over again all the while perpetuating deadly inequality both in material and ideological terms.

4. Antoine d’Agata, VIRUS
Studio Vortex

As the title suggests, this book squares up to our present moment amidst the global health crisis with an unflinching intensity characteristic of the famed Magnum photographer. As soon as Paris entered a lock-down in March, Antoine d’Agata took to the emptied streets with his thermal camera. Here, civilians, medical workers and hospital patients are rendered as spectral, flame-tinged figures that flash across the pages. With temperature the only marker differentiating each pulsating body from the next, d’Agata proffers a haunting yet visceral mood piece laden with an existential dread that is befitting of our times. Beyond the limits of reportage, VIRUS is ultimately borne out of an impulse to get to the heart of things, to make sense of the incomprehensible and to visualise what the naked eye cannot: an invisible enemy, at once everywhere and nowhere. A dystopian masterpiece, these images refuse to be shaken off quickly.

5. Lina Iris Viktor, Some Are Born To Endless Night – Dark Matter
Autograph

Although there is no equivalent experience to witnessing the allure and intricacy of Lina Iris Viktor’s paintings up close, her debut monograph more than makes up for it through its fittingly-regal design. Published to accompany her solo show at Autograph in London earlier in 2020, it takes us into the British-Liberian artist’s singular world, embellished with luminescent golds, ultramarine blues and the deepest of blacks. Drawing from a plethora of representational tropes that range from classical mythology to European portraiture and beyond, Viktor’s practice playfully and provocatively employs her solitary body as a vehicle through which the politics of refusal are staged, and the multivalent notions of blackness – blackness as colour, as material, as socio-political awareness – come to the fore. Some Are Born To Endless Night – Dark Matter is a spelling-binding survey of an artist who is paving the way for new and unruly re-imaginings of black beauty and brilliance.

6. Antoinette de Jong and Robert Knoth, Tree and Soil
Hartmann Books

The intrinsic splendour of the natural world takes centre stage in Antoinette de Jong and Robert Knoth’s first book since their highly-acclaimed Poppy: Trails of Afghan Heroin (2012). Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, the Dutch duo set out on a five-year-long project to examine the devastation wrought on the region’s biosphere. Expertly edited by curator Iris Sikking, Tree and Soil combines photographs depicting nature’s reclaiming of the deserted spaces with repurposed material from the archive of German explorer, Philipp Franz von Siebold, which includes a collection of botanical illustrations, animal specimens and woodblock prints amassed during his trips to Dejima, a Dutch trading post, in the early 19^th century. The result is an enigmatic yet radical dialogue between two distinct histories – the post-colonial and the post-nuclear, respectively – which speaks of the hubris of humankind and the value of nature, in the process ruminating on the disturbed relationship between the two.

7. Amani Willett, A Parallel Road
Overlapse

Another book of first-rate investment in narrative forms of photography comes from artist Amani Willett. Chronicling the oft-overlooked history of black Americans road-tripping, A Parallel Road deconstructs the time-worn myth of the ‘American road’ as a site in which freedom, self-discovery and, ultimately, whiteness manifests. The book’s direct point of reference is Victor Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936), a guide which provided newly-roving black road-trippers tips on safe spots to eat, sleep and re-fuel at a time when Jim Crow laws subjected them to heightened oppression, hostility and fear of death. Whilst maintaining the original’s scrapbook details – from hand-held dimensions to sewn binding – Willett has adroitly juxtaposed archival material with photography, media reproductions and Internet screenshots from the present day to lay bare the ongoing realities of systemic racism in the United States. A harrowing yet urgent title in a year in which the dangers posed to black people when out-and-about have been undeniable.

8. Diana Markosian, Santa Barbara
Aperture

In yet another dazzling year for Aperture’s publishing arm, with Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures and Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph amongst notable releases, perhaps the standout is Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara. Here, the Armenian-American photographer reimagines her mother’s leap of faith as she abandoned her husband in post-Soviet Russia to start a new life in the United States with her children. Family snapshots, film stills and re-enactments by actors play out alongside a script written by the original screenwriter of the 1980s soap opera Santa Barbara, which, for a generation of regime-weary Russians tuning in through their television sets, embodied the promises of the American dream. For all its experimental edge – rigorously merging fact and fiction – this book retains its deeply intimate take on the themes of migration, memory and personal sacrifice. With the project slated to show at the SFMOMA in early 2021, Markosian’s work continues to enthral audiences.

9. Yukari Chikura, Zaido
Steidl

Also excavating personal histories is Yukari Chikura in this strong contribution to the year’s offerings. Shortly after his sudden passing, Chikura’s father appeared to her from the afterlife, imparting the words: “Go to the village hidden deep in the snow where I lived a long time ago.” Committed to honouring this wish, Chikura embarked on a voyage to the remote, winter-white terrains of north-eastern Japan. The resulting publication documents what she found: Zaido, a good fortune festival dating back to the 8^th century. Printed across an exquisite array of papers under the direction of Gerhard Steidl, images imbued with magical realism reveal costumed villagers gathering before shrines and performing sacred dances. Whilst the accompanying ancient map and folkloric parables lend this book an ethnographic feel, there is something more incisive at work too. Intertwining the villagers’ spiritual quests with Chikura’s own journey through the darkness that pervades mourning, Zaido is a tale of collective soul-searching that seamlessly traverses cultures as well as centuries.

10. Raymond Meeks, ciprian honey cathedral
MACK

No annual ‘best of’ book list seems complete without a monograph from skilled book-maker, Raymond Meeks. Characteristically poetic and perceptive, his new release with MACK invites readers into the domestic world shared between he and his wife, Adrianna, during a period in which they were packing up their home. Opening with a flurry of photographs which depict Adrianna asleep, bathing in the soft, early morning light, both the tone of imagery and its rhythms sets forth an experience that is akin to a waking dream. What follows is an intercourse of image and verse that pairs the quiet, quotidian rituals that populate each passing day with topographical observations of a house laid bare: mounted stacks of dishes, cracked walls and overgrown tendrils. Herein lies the melancholic undercurrent which vibrates throughout ciprian honey cathedral, a bittersweet evocation of the things memories cling to, and the things we leave in our wake. ♦

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words, and a writer, curator and lecturer at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University. He lives and works in London.

Curator Conversations #12 | Thyago Nogueira: “The history of art is not always the history of creativity but also a history of economic power and erasure.”

Thyago Nogueira is the Head of the Contemporary Photography Department at Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil and editor of ZUM photography magazine. He has curated exhibitions such as Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle (currently at Fondation Cartier pour L’Art Contemporain, Paris); William Eggleston: The American Color (IMS, 2015); and Body Against Body: the dispute of images, from photography to live transmission (IMS, 2017), among others. He has also guest edited Aperture issue dedicated to São Paulo photography (2014), chaired the 2020 Hasselblad Award, and curated the Offside project with Magnum during Brazil’s World Cup (2014).

What is it that attracts you to the exhibition form?

The fact that it is a spatialised way of thinking, of presenting ideas through the articulation of objects, architecture and their relation to our vision and body. I am also stimulated by the fact that it is a collective endeavour and shared experience, like cinema or a music concert. It is a chance to put objects to the public and see if they reverberate. I see exhibitions as breathing hearts, as an injection of flesh and blood into art museums in order to avoid the risk of them becoming mausoleums of good taste.

What does it mean to be a curator in an age of image and information excess?

It is like being a biologist in the Amazonian rainforest, constantly excited by the diversity of things. You have to work hard. I don’t feel there is an excess of images, as I don’t feel there is an excess of words, sounds or languages. The more the better. It is always a matter of stopping, slowing down, looking and thinking carefully about what you are seeing. And inviting people to do the same. As Luigi Ghirri said about the famous photo of the Earth seen from the space, taken in 1969: “One single image may contain all others, the entire world.”

What is the most invaluable skill required for a curator?

A serious voyeuristic drive, a true interest for the all types of images, regardless of their sources.

What was your route into curating?

It was very winding. It probably started unconsciously during childhood with my parent’s obsession to photograph our routine night and day, and organise volumes of family photo albums. As for the conscious part, I remember deciding to study cinema or photography right after graduating from Law School. So I went back to study art, which I did for 2 years while working as an editorial photographer. But art school had a monotonous interest in photography, and the editorial work as photographer was depressing. I then found an escape in reading and books, so I jumped from art school to literature school, and applied for a job as a proof-reader in a big publishing house. I read, and read, and read, and became a full time editor of literature and non-fiction, with a special interest in art and photography. Years later, I was able to unite the interest for books, editing, and photography when I was invited to create the editorial project of ZUM photography magazine at Instituto Moreira Salles. And then to expand that experience into curating when given the task to build an entire department of Contemporary Photography at the same institution, where I work now. I must say I am still driving that route.

What is the most memorable exhibition that you’ve visited?

Even a bad exhibition can give you a memorable idea. But the 24^th São Paulo Bienal in 1998, when I was 22 years old, was mind blowing. Based on the concept of cannibalism and anthropophagy, it brought together hundreds of artists, from Albert Eckout to Cildo Meireles, also including Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Lygia Clark, Jeff Wall, Louise Bourgeois, Helio Oiticica, Sigmar Polke, and many others. I visited it a dozen times, notebook in hand, trying to absorb what I could. It gave me that expansive feeling of learning a new language, and I am always trying to revive that. But I also like to think of the world we live in as a memorable, ever-changing and ongoing exhibition. Every single day, I am astonished by the images that come my way, from the moment I open the newspaper in the morning to the encounters I have on the streets, from the scenes on my phone or computer to the images I encounter when travelling, spending time in nature or just dreaming. I am constantly trying to connect them, trying to make sense.

What constitutes curatorial responsibility in the context within which you work?

It means supporting the artists so they can take risks, studying and sharing new ideas about their work with as many people as possible, and also preserving these works for future generations. I also feel a responsibility to look at the politics of what I do: how do I increase diversity? How do I adapt to the artists and not the opposite? How do I avoid an authoritarian view? The history of art is not always the history of creativity but also a history of economic power and erasure, so working from Brazil in a globalised field imposes extra responsibilities. How do I do justice to Brazilian artists? How do I challenge the entrenched and excluding Euro-American narrative? On the top of all that, right now Brazil is under a right-wing government that rejects culture, so I have to ask myself: how can we use institutions to safeguard people’s diversity, experimentation and freedom of expression? How can we use our collection to learn about the errors of our past and prevent them from happening again? I have more questions than answers, but asking is also part of my responsibilities.

What is the one myth that you would like to dispel around being a curator?

We don’t dispel myths, we study, dissect, interpret them.

What advice would you give to aspiring curators?

Try to work for art, not for the system of art.♦

Further interviews in the Curator Conversations series can be read here.

Click here to order your copy of the book

—
Curator Conversations is part of a collaborative set of activities on photography curation and scholarship initiated by Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University), Christopher Stewart (London College of Communication, University of the Arts London) and Esther Teichmann (Royal College of Art) that has included the symposium, Encounters: Photography and Curation, in 2018 and a ten week course, Photography and Curation, hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2018-19.

Images:

1-Thyago Nogueira

2-Installation view of Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle at Fondation Cartier pour L’Art Contemporain, Paris, 2020. © Luc Boegly

3- Installation view of Body against Body: The battle of images from photography to live streaming at Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, 2017. © Pedro Vannucchi

Curator Conversations #8 | Charlotte Cotton: “Curating is relational, situational and collaborative. That’s the joy of it for me.”

Charlotte Cotton is a curator, writer and creative consultant who has explored photographic culture for over twenty years. She has held positions including Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Head of Programming at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, and Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at LACMA | Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her books include Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture/International Center of Photography, 2018); Photography is Magic (Aperture, 2015); This Place (MACK, 2014); Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010) and The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004), which has been published in ten languages and is a key text in charting the rise of photography as an undisputed art form in the 21st century. The fourth edition will be published in September 2020. She is also the co-founder of eitherand.org.

What is it that attracts you to the exhibition form?

For me, it’s the scope of possibilities within the exhibition form that is enticing. I return to exhibition-making when a physical orchestration – a spatially-led staging – is the form that an idea needs to take. I think about where in the body an experience is held – in the gut, the throat, fingertips, or immediately laid out for the mind’s eye. I think about the shift in the tonality of conversations from bedrooms, kitchens, and formal dining rooms and how that translates into exhibition design – the meaning of thresholds, acoustics, vantage points, enclosures, and twists and turns that you build into an exhibition’s narrative, embedded into the architecture of the space. I absolutely love the process of making exhibitions – from the openness of an idea in gestation, the critique and testing of a concept, through to the coming together of the exhibition form. My favourite part is the exhibition installation when all eyes are on the job and everyone is aiming for the same idea of excellence, and responding to the planned and unexpected of giving form.

What does it mean to be a curator in an age of image and information excess?

I don’t think that the vocation of being a curator is fundamentally changed by our present day image environment. Curating remains an act of creating (experiences and exchanges) for other people – of “taking care”. I prefer the verb version of “curate” (and also “photograph”) to their noun definitions – I like both to be acknowledged as metabolic action, and that levelling of the hierarchies of who has claim to what can be done in the name of photography – or its curation – is well overdue and called forth in this age of data excess, fake news, and hyper-surveillance. I don’t confuse curating with image editing or connoisseurship, or with the roles of impresarios, A&R’s, taste-makers, or academics. On a bad day, when I suspect that I’m in a situation where “curator” means something I am not comfortable with, because it’s too elite or co-opted in the given context, I’ll shift to being an interlocutor – “someone who is involved in a conversation”.

What is the most invaluable skill required for a curator?

Rigorous yet open curiosity.

What was your route into curating?

The earliest memories I have from childhood are pretty formative of my chosen path. Through the 1970s, my parents were antique furniture restorers, working with pre-factory production “vernacular” furniture (it was “country” furniture back in the day), from across the British Isles. They supplied antiques dealers, interior designers, and collectors, mainly in London and across the West Coast of America. Container loads of furniture would arrive for restoration and it was a total thrill for me and my sister to touch, open, and choose our favourite pieces, play, and invent stories about where the furniture came from. To watch the furniture transformed with care, and my parents’ subsequent research and writing of the first history of British regional, working class furniture-making – their articulate empathy for where creativity lies – was undoubtedly my curatorial education. We also met amazing, glamorous, charismatic people who would come to do business. Our 1979 family road trip along the Pacific Highway and my first trip to Portobello Road have pretty much defined where and how I like to live and who I am close to. This visceral training is something that I am thinking about during COVID-19 lockdown. You might be able to tell that I’ve returned to the town where I was born! I’m walking in the woods and lanes with my 17-month-old nephew and watching him experience the feel of moss, look up into the tree canopies with amazement, give hugs to beautiful trees, and his sheer joy at aesthetic experience, and it is the best part of my day. When I was a teenager, photography became my passion because of the aesthetic experience it gives me, its embedded-ness in lived experience, and the kindnesses, fellowship and joy of its interlocutors. Which leads me on to your next question.

What is the most memorable exhibition that you’ve visited?

There are many exhibition experiences that I can recall a visual memory of where I was standing, and what I felt. But one of my first memorable experiences was just after I graduated from my BA (Hons) Art History and I went to an exhibition spearheaded by David Elliott at Modern Art Oxford called Photography in Russia: 1840-1940. The constellation of photographs from a century of photographic practice was dense (in a good way), and overwhelming – perhaps some of the characteristics that can still impress me in classic exhibition making. In retrospect, I think I was responding to the way that the exhibition made me move in and out – step back and assess, peer in and engage. There was an autochrome self-portrait by the playwright and novelist Leonid Andreyev from about 1910. I’d never seen an autochrome before, and there was this beautiful man, depicted unexpectedly in colour. I encountered him. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I adore exhibitions that just glide you into paying attention – especially those where you get to think that it is constructed just for you.

What constitutes curatorial responsibility in the context within which you work?

I’ve never shaken off (nor wanted to) the abbreviated top line of my job descriptions for the twelve years that I worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum – “to increase the physical and intellectual access to photography”. That’s still a divining rod for when I commit to a curatorial project; whether I have faith that the situation and the team perceive that as the ultimate end goal. I feel great responsibility to the artists who participate in the curatorial projects I create and that they feel well-represented and understood, and I go deeply into channelling and animating historical archives and oeuvres in ways that resonate with contemporary viewership. I actively enjoy the responsibility of understanding, nurturing, publicly acknowledging the teams in which I work. On all levels, I recognise that my curatorial life has been supported, encouraged and allowed to roam by others, and being collegiate in a true sense is one of the last vestiges of why I try to not entirely give up on now-historic frameworks for our labour. Like everyone, I am responsible for acknowledging my inner biases and shortcomings and that’s only possible if you invite in wise counsel and fellowship that calls you out and helps you restructure your thinking. And, finally, (this is a long list of responsibilities, you may be able to tell that I started my career as a museum curator in an age when that meant you were a public servant) you have a responsibility to yourself – I respect my craft, my purpose, my processes, the merits of urgent curiosity, shifting my vantage point, and having something to say.

What is the one myth that you would like to dispel around being a curator?

That it’s a solitary form of creativity that merits recognition through single authorship. Curating is relational, situational, and collaborative. That’s the joy of it for me.

What advice would you give to aspiring curators?

Try it! Hold your vision and your ideal viewer in close communion, and you will find that right form. And let me know if I can help.♦

Further interviews in the Curator Conversations series can be read here.

Click here to order your copy of the book

Images:

2-Installation view of Public, Private, Secret, International Center of Photography, New York, 2016-17.

3-Installation view of Public, Private, Secret, International Center of Photography, New York, 2016-17.