Charlotte Jansen Archives

What We’re Reading #4: Summer 2025

Tensions resurface in different forms in our latest roundup of What We’re Reading. Criticism negotiates altered modes of circulation; imperial violence continues to determine who speaks, who is seen and under what terms; and the metaphysics of development and hierarchy remain inscribed in our institutions and imaginaries. Higher education vacillates between managerial complicity and the appearance of working for us. Meanwhile how are personal narratives, collective memory and the ontologies of works of art navigated in various spaces and public discourse? Thomas King writes.

Thomas King | Resource | 12 June 2025

A Criticism Review 2.0 | Objektiv #25

If we are to carve out new ways of working and being published, what forms must we invent – what rhythms, structures or publics might we compose or dissolve? Who is brought into the fold of a writing community? What constitutes a ‘community’ and what do we call our ‘work’ and ‘practice’?

Objektiv Press describes its 25th issue as a manifesto in which a group of writers – including Susan Bright and Travis Diehl – explore the tensions of textual production, authorship and the shifting, porous networks their work inhabits. Reissued in 2024 with two new contributions, this third and final instalment of Objektiv Editions – a publishing and project initiative in collaboration with Kunstnernes Hus – emerged from the post-pandemic moment: an invitation to reexamine the fragile ecology of writing on photography. Certainly, from our vantage point, the past decade has sharpened awareness of a broader attrition with magazines and certainly newspaper columns folding or shifting online, commissions dwindling and book publishing within photography becoming increasingly rarefied.

Still, there is a sense that through certain publishing initiatives and the communities they cohere, we glimpse not only survival, but potential in other practices, other ways of ‘working’, writing and thinking that resist the logic of scalability and exhaustion. Less a declaration than a provocation, A Criticism Review brings together poetic, precise and contemplative approaches to these questions. It is a work whose provocations are rooted in a specific historical moment, yet the questions it poses resist any easy containment within it – a timely contribution to the ever-evolving conversation about what criticism, and its modes of circulation, might yet become.

‘The Interview: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’ | ArtReview, April 2025

ArtReview Managing Editor, Yuwen Jiang, writes ahead of her interview that Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is one of today’s key proponents of, and thinkers around, the reversal of imperial violence. Cutting across any formalities, Azoulay asserts that imperial regimes, by positioning colonised peoples as epistemologically subordinate, have relied on a violent metaphysics of development and hierarchy – one that draws rigid boundaries between genres (academic, cinematic, literary, etc.), disciplines and even fundamental categories like adult and child. For Azoulay, these separations are not neutral or natural, but imperial technologies – ‘the colonial, imperial or capitalist way of imposing divisions with force – or amalgamating divisions, as with the imperial violence against diverse Jews, for example, who were forced to be identified as a singular people.’

Throughout the interview, Azoulay speaks across various subjects and phases of her work – at one point reflecting on Golden Threads, a book that draws on moments of Jewish and Muslim artisanship in Fèz, Morocco, as a counterpoint to colonial photographic practices. Confronted with the death of her parents and the birth of her first grandchild, Azoulay says that she had to reckon with her new position as an ancestor. With that, she claims the right to either passively reproduce the colonial disruption of transmission or reverse its curse.

‘Deutsche Börse prize review – Black cowboys, bonkers rock-huggers and a story of shocking loss’ | Charlotte Jansen for The Guardian, March 2025

As the title of Charlotte Jansen’s piece for The Guardian suggests, the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize shortlist spans a range of forms – documentary, performance, staged scenes, family archive – all circling questions of place, memory and inheritance, even as they pull in radically different directions. Lindokuhle Sobekwa, a worthy (and indeed eventual) winner in Jansen’s view is nominated for his book I Carry Her Photo with Me published by MACK. His turn to this project seemingly driven by a need to cope with, understand, or immortalise the pain and tragic story of his sister, who suddenly vanished and returned a decade later, ill. Rahim Fortune, shortlisted for Hardtack, a photographic meditation on the American South that, as Taous R. Dahmani observes, finds unexpected resonance with Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s album.

Shadowings, an exhibition gathering two decades of Tarrah Krajnak’s work, positions itself as an intricately structured and quietly adversarial project – perhaps the most conceptually ambitious, not least for her work with the cyanotype process. Also shortlisted is Cristina de Middel for Journey to the Centre, exhibited at last year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles, which blends documentary and surrealism to trace the polarised narratives surrounding migration from southern Mexico to California. The flattest of the lot, Jansen writes in her pointed overview of the nominees and the broader concerns shaping their work – a worthy read even following the prize announcement that took place 15 May, followed by the exhibition closing a month later.

‘The Cowardice of Elites’ | Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs, April 2025

Harvard’s recent stand against Trump’s mounting demands – which initially included changes to the university’s governance, tighter oversight of international students and increased ‘viewpoint diversity’ in curriculum and hiring – may seem unexpectedly defiant. However, this vaunted ‘show of backbone’ seems little more than a strained performance that can’t quite hide its complicit teeth. The institution had already cancelled programmes on Palestine and adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. As Nathan J. Robinson writes in Current Affairs, up to this point Harvard had struck a markedly compliant tone, raising fears it might follow Columbia’s path of appeasement to Trump’s orders.

It’s true that in earlier court filings, the university touted ‘meaningful discipline’ for protestors and promoted new efforts to enforce ‘ideological diversity’ and civil discourse in response to ‘erupting protests’. It quietly dismissed the faculty leads of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer, and remained silent on the detention of Kseniia Petrova, leaving international students increasingly fearful for their lives and futures in the U.S. Robinson warns of America’s drift toward dictatorship, expressing concern about a fading reputation overseas – a gesture that feels beside the point in view of history. At this stage, the state’s lawlessness is not an aberration but a function of the order itself. Rights have been recoded as instruments of control and depoliticisation. Can the university be anything other than one of its quiet managers?

AIPAD New York: The photographers, collectors, and dealers who grew the art market, Subtext and Discourse | Art World Podcast

In the third episode of Subtext and Discourse’s special seven-part podcast – produced in collaboration with AIPAD and The Photography Show – Michael Dooney speaks with Howard Greenberg, the influential dealer who helped push photography into the heat of the contemporary art market. Founder of the Center for Photography in Woodstock (1977) and Howard Greenberg Gallery (1981), Greenberg has spent decades forging a cultural and commercial footing for photography equal to that of the so-called major arts.

He reflects on his passage from photographer to gallerist, recalling the generous reception extended by New York’s close-knit photographic community upon the founding of his space – a time when the medium’s institutional footprint was modest enough that “every exhibition could be seen in a single afternoon.” Asked to reflect on a turning point in the recognition of photography as a serious collectible, Greenberg recalls the Getty Museum’s 1984 acquisition of photographs for $30 million, a move that shifted capital, and with it, credibility, into the field. The moment was amplified by coverage in The Wall Street Journal, and the years that followed saw a steady quickening with rising valuations, growing institutional interest and landmark exhibitions, including William Klein’s first solo show at Greenberg’s gallery. Amid the rush, it was discovery – not just market heat – that sustained him. The thrill, he says, was always in uncovering someone new to show. ♦

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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.

Images:

1-Cover for A Criticism Review 2.0 (Objectiv, 2024)

2-Ariella Aïsha Azoulay © Yonatan Vinitsky

3-Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Khumalo street where accident happened, Thokoza, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2023; from the series I Carry Her Photo with Me

4-Howard Greenberg © Bastiaan Woudt

1000 Words favourites

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

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

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

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

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

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

Expressions for unity: The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography

From visions of splintered cities to the hidden recesses of the physical and metaphysical, the four winners of The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography offer distinct approaches to this year’s theme of unity. Writer and curator Charlotte Jansen reflects on the works that were recently on display at Copeland Gallery as part of Peckham 24 – their forms, the politics that shape them and the varying degrees to which their subtle and poetic gestures succeed.

Charlotte Jansen | Exhibition review | 29 May 2025

The dazzling intricacies of Spandita Malik’s mixed-media, photo-based works instantly pull you in. Yet, until I closely encountered three works from her series Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance, I had not fully appreciated how transporting they are. She is one of four winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography and is one quarter of the exhibition at Copeland Gallery as part of Peckham 24. Standing there, it was as if I was standing right in the room next to the woman, in her work, who in turn gazes upon her image reflected in the mirror – a clever and rehearsed classical device drawn from a history of painting – often used to create a sense of hushed intimacy, making the viewer think about the gaze and agency. The curtain seems to be moved by a breeze outside the hot light coming in from the window.

Malik has worked with women in rural Indian communities for years, photographing their portraits and printing them on cloth. Here, those photographs are printed onto khadi, a handspun, handwoven cotton cloth, thick and resistant, made using a charkha. Inscribed into the history of this material is the struggle for Indian independence and freedom: it was promoted by Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement as a tool for self-reliance, and to signal a resolute, political return to Indian-made produce. Khadi is coarse and rough, and the slightly fissured surface of these pieces appear almost reptilian. Printing the portrait photographs on the material allows for incredible texture and depth – that portal-like effect. The tactility is heightened by embroidered embellishments – tracing a stitched language of self-reliance. Once the khadi is printed, each of Malik’s collaborators complete the image with their own craft, allowing them to control what of their image is revealed. One subject completely covers her portrait in thread, rendering her figure a crass, simple stand-in. It is a mysterious act of erasure that creates a necessary tension between the photographed and photographer, now equal agents in the image. This silent refusal to be seen is another kind of resistance. I think of Arundahti Roy’s famous lines in The God of Small Things (1997): ‘she wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one.’ In the background, a teddy bear sits on the shelf, holding a heart that reads: someone special.

Another reason Malik carefully chose khadi for her works might be that it has become a symbol of unity in an India fractured by the colonial regime. And unity is the theme of this year’s prize, which was established in 2022 to support and sustain the work of women and non-binary artists – acknowledging the skew of statistics that still show the lack of gender equality in the medium and industry at large. Each year four winners are selected by a committee – this year, artist Gillian Wearing, Tate curator, Dr Charmaine Toh, and Instituto Moreira Salles’ Thyago Nogueira.

The notion of unity in the contemporary context is fragile and fraught, a frail and distant hope. This selection of work tempers this gently, subtly. Like Malik, the American artist Morgan Levy also finds expressions of unity in a collaborative process of image-making, and in the materials she uses to present them. Levy’s collaborators are women and non-binary labourers and construction workers, seldom represented, little appreciated, as far as visual culture goes. Spark of a Nail is a cool, imaginative, ongoing series of staged pictures where real workers perform and re-enact labour. Levy finds in these poetic, Beckettian scenes a way of disrupting the hyper-masculine status quo of these environments, revealing the building site as a site of transformation, not only in a literal, physical sense. It made me think about who builds the spaces we inhabit, how their bodies contribute, inform and physically shape our movements and interactions. Levy’s works are installed, too, like a working building site – a work suspended from the ceiling, mimicking a breezeblock dangling from a crane. Another rests on the floor, like an abandoned slab of concrete. It’s a work in progress, all this, Levy seems to say. How might we all participate, in fitting these pieces together?

From this body-rooted, physical understanding of uniting, to the unconscious, unseen world of hidden universes – Tshepiso Moropa’s scissored dreamscapes of archival and personal photographs create delicate dioramas, staging her dreams as epic adventures. Moropa’s dreamscapes very closely echo the surreal collages of Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo, and also seems to bear the influence of South African artist Lebohang Kganye’s staged sets of archival and family images. I am not quite convinced by the floating figures in their colonial-era dresses, seemingly out of time or place – like a dream, but as vague as one too. Winged pigs fly in through a window towards a nude female dreamer asleep in bed. What to make of these fragmented visions, outside of the personal resonances? The installation is stylish in its deconstruction/reconstruction technique – aligning with the methods of all the projects of this year’s winning cohort – but doesn’t push the idea of unity further.

The final artist selected for this year’s prize is Tanya Traboulsi, whose documentary accounts for her birthplace, Beirut – new pictures and vintage ones, from the family albums are pasted directly as vinyls onto the wall for this presentation, flattened and layered onto each other, creating non-linear conversations between them, across generations. There’s a lyrical, melancholic tenor to Traboulsi’s images, seeing a city that has had to constantly contend with bombing and destruction, but where joy persists as much as the saltiness of the Mediterranean Sea. These images blend Traboulsi’s meandering, fading childhood memories of the place – where she was raised until the family decided to leave in the 1980s – and her confrontation with the city as she found it, returning thirteen years later, in 1995. In terms of unity, it feels like seeking some kind of bond between past, present, and future, to bring generations displaced and those who remain back together, in one place, the photograph. They are pictures that evoke sounds, noisy and nostalgic, bustling cafes on the seafront, young boys after a swim. A man puffs shisha on the beach, the smoke covering his face as the water laps his ankles. In searching outside between these contradictory and fractured glimpses of a city in constant chaos and motion, building and rebuilding, perhaps the best we can hope for is moments like these – fleeting feelings of unity with a wider force beyond.

The four winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography each address this year’s theme of unity in subtle and poetic ways, and with varying success – moving between visions of splintered cities, reconstructed through memory and photographs, to quiet contemplations of emancipation and freedom, to the hidden recesses of the physical and metaphysical worlds. Each finds iterative expressions for unity by deconstructing and rebuilding images, seeking unity in a tangible sense.♦

The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography ran until 25 May as part of Peckham 24 2025.

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

Images:

1-Morgan Levy, Jess Shimmering; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

2-Morgan Levy, Raquel; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

3-Morgan Levy, Rest Unquestioned; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

4-Morgan Levy, River’s Breath; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

5-Morgan Levy, Thirty-nine Moved by Hand; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

6-Spandita Malik, Meena II, 2023. Courtesy the artist and V&A

7-Spandita Malik, Parween Devi III, 2023. Courtesy the artist and V&A

8>11-Tanya Traboulsi, Beirut, Recurring Dream, 2021. Courtesy the artist and V&A

12-Tshepiso Moropa, Ke Go Beile Leitlho, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A

13-Tshepiso Moropa, Stranger Fruit, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A

14-Tshepiso Moropa, Who Knows Where The Time Goes, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A

15-Tshepiso Moropa, Your Worst Nightmare, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A