Tag: MACK

Photobook Conversations #9 | Raymond Meeks: “I’ve found it overwhelming to take in all the possibilities for a work of art, especially a book”

Photobook Conversations is edited by Ana Casas Broda (Hydra + Fotografía), Anshika Varma (Offset Projects) and Duncan Wooldridge (Manchester Metropolitan University). Sitting alongside the earlier Writer Conversations (1000 Words, 2023), edited by Lucy Soutter and Duncan Wooldridge, and Curator Conversations (1000 Words, 2021), edited by Tim Clark, it completes the series exploring the ways our understanding and experience of photography is mediated through exhibitions, writing and publishing.

Raymond Meeks | Photobook Conversations #9 | 1 May 2025

Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York, US. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections. He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Exhibitions from this commission took place at the International Center of Photography, New York, US, in 2023, and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, France, in 2024. The Inhabitants, a book made in collaboration with writer George Weld, was published by MACK in 2023.

What were the encounters which started your relationship with photobooks?

I’d begun thinking about the book form when my children were very young and my wife and I were building a small children’s book collection to read and share with my son and daughter. I was drawn to certain illustrators, like Chris van Allsburg and Lisbeth Zwerger, where a tale was heightened by provocative illustrations that contained a balance of description and ambiguity to provoke the imagination, to create suspension and leave room for the viewer’s mind to add dimension to a story. During this time, I was mostly working on advertising commissions and photo essays for magazines… raising a family. But I was also creatively challenged by assembling magazine stories to accompany the writing. The combined interests dovetailed wonderfully and sent me down the eventual path of bookmaking, considering relationships between certain types of images, how pictures activate one another to generate energy and feeling.

My bookmaking practice early on was centred around an immediacy of making. This often meant trips to the hardware store for materials such as tape, adhesives, paint, finishing sprays et cetera, and developing an idea for what I might want the book to look and feel like. In order to visualise this, I would visit one of a few used bookstores in Missoula, Montana, near the small town where I was living at the time, identifying an existing book that reflected and, perhaps, informed one possibility for a book. I would deconstruct and repurpose this book, working within the prescribed confines of the former object, merging my printed pages and pictures with the pre-existing form. These used books bore the influence of a past and, by way of a quantum tethering, provided clues for the book I would eventually construct. Direction could come from the title, graphic design, existing story, page count et cetera. I liked to work intuitively and without concern for accidents or mistakes, as either of these allowed for the possibility of recovery.

I began shifting from considering pictures in terms of their independent potential at a time when I was still heavily under the influence of the “Decisive Moment”, where each picture felt singularly complete. There were very few books that were attempting to construct in the serial manner that John Gossage envisioned with The Pond (1985), where an experience could be constructed within a contained world and was built from one page to the next, leaving space along the way for the viewer to enter and participate. I wasn’t aware of The Pond until many years after its initial release. I think, as a book, it was well ahead of its time and a break from the more traditional monograph, so the impact it had for me was quite profound. I don’t have anything to add here – it’s a nice balance of the personal, the process and the context in which you started to think about books.

How do you like to work with people?

I like to work with friends who already exist in my orbit and share some engagement in a creative process, inviting them into the fold of a collaborative project we can undertake together. There’s something surprising and gratifying in encountering signs of their contribution, suggestions and choices made; a gifted title, an inclusion of text. This said, I tend to keep the work close and not overshare or invite too much feedback, less the edit/sequence begin to feel diluted or focus-grouped. Whilst I’m in the midst of creating and compiling pictures, there’s a charged momentum and building of energy that I’m very protective of. When I’ve been more open to sharing in the past, I’ve noticed the energy and momentum begin to leak, like the releasing of a valve. I’m very careful about where I solicit feedback and try to do so only when I feel mostly resolved and understand whose insights would be especially informative and helpful.

As far back as I can recall, I’ve found it overwhelming to take in all the possibilities for a work of art, especially a book. Deciding that I’ll only make use of whatever enters my field of play, be it materials, equipment, a subject or a collaborator, has served as a tremendous relief. What at first might feel like a limitation whilst working within these constraints usually opens up as an expansive opportunity, assigning importance to encounters that might otherwise feel random, cultivating a practice of paying attention, listening, developing and nurturing curiosity.

I also believe a finished work has the potential to feel more inclusive, accessible and relevant to a larger community whilst considering the influence of those in my trusted circle. That I’m attracting, whether actively or passively, the people and the elements that will contribute towards a final expression of a book or exhibition.

What is the public for a photobook? Who do you think of as your audience?

I tend to consider fellow artists (including writers and musicians) as my audience, for better or worse. There are a handful of artists, in particular, that I like to imagine encountering a book I’m in the process of making, and then try to envision the ways in which the book speaks to them or where it fails to resonate and for what reasons. If the book succeeds, if it evokes feeling for these fellow artists, then I think it will have the capacity to connect with a broader audience on a level that regards their time, intelligence and imagination. Considering these fellow artists as my audience presents a high-water mark, one that invites risk-taking and reaching beyond my comforts or, perhaps, a level I’ve previously achieved. I value our shared book form tremendously, not just as an object, but as a communicative and relational piece that participates in a larger cultural dialogue.

I’ve gone through periods of lamenting the notion of photographers making books that mostly appeal to other book artists. But then I realise it’s no different for poets and their small audience of 10% of readers, the majority of these being fellow poets. Why should it be any different whilst charged with refining a visual language that defies verbal description, forming active relationships and sequences of images that generate ineffable feeling. We love what we love.

How important is it for photobooks to reach other continents?

I think the reception to a book is built into, and emerges organically within, the process. I personally don’t take responsibility for wanting to make a book that spans continents, nor would I assign importance to this. I think of a quote I read by Kiki Smith, where she says: ‘Just do your work. And if the world needs your work, it will come and get you. And if it doesn’t, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I am given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one’s own vision.’ Not all books can span cultures, nor should they necessarily aspire to. A photobook can have immense value without a global audience if it serves a deeply personal, local or culturally specific purpose, grounded in particular histories, communities or aesthetics that make them uniquely powerful in a localised context. On a more personal note, I can make one distinction between artists that work along a horizontal plane and those that I perceive as working the vertical. The vertical plane drills down, narrowing with each rotation. For me, I centre on the personal – an obsession or curiosity, a question – even whilst aspiring for a connection with a broader audience. To the extent I’m willing to take risks and expose myself, to become vulnerable, moment by moment, with evolving clarity and detail, there exists the possibility that the evolving experience will explore and reflect a more common, shared state.

How do you attempt to address sustainability in publishing?

By attempting to make compelling books that have the potential to contribute to the evolution of the medium, to move the book’s viability and existence in a bookstore to other sections in addition to Art & Photography. I think of applying my practice of bookmaking to “how- to” books or those that combine image and text in a less traditional manner. And with each book project, to ask, amongst other questions, what does this book want to become? The imperative in this question, for me, is: how can I approach my curiosity and deliver a book or form with some level of relevance to the current vibe, be it global or local – whilst not overtly addressing the political? How to shape an experience that will, hopefully, begin to reconcile chaos or conflict into an organised form of beauty, however fleeting? More generally, I suppose the lingering concern is what can I offer of singular significance. How can I be of “use”?

What is the place of language and writing in a book of photographs?

I suppose this would depend on the book of photographs. I personally don’t apply rules regarding writing/text with photobooks, except that the writing avoids an effort to clarify the images or to limit their reading, thus eliminating the most meaningful role for the reader – to complete the work. I prefer when writing offers subtle direction without closing down around content or subject, or resolves points of indeterminateness. It’s interesting when writing becomes an alternative to a picture, performing in a similar manner and in serial form. For example, early on in the collaboration with friend and writer George Weld on The Inhabitants (2023), I made a decision to refrain from making portraits of asylum seekers. This shifted how I began interacting with the landscape of northern France, the places of migration and provisional settlements. When choosing to photograph, I was drawn to composing around a conjured presence of refugees, partially summoned by my imagination, partially drawing from clues within the setting. The intent was to allow space for George to summon a voice for the displaced, bringing nuanced complexity and representing the immutable plight of the refugee. George’s vignettes created a voice of displacement with the potential to activate the reader’s imagination to construct a portrait. His portrayals, born of a year of research and fostering compassion, are more potent and expansive than what I might’ve made with a camera.

Who have been the models or templates for your own activities?

The artist James Castle, who found inspiration in the detritus of everyday life, primarily in the materials he collected from his family’s home outside of Boise, Idaho, such as envelopes, packaging, advertisements, and matchbooks. Working mostly with soot, spit and homemade tools, he created a rich, complex style that was informed by the constraints he was born into. Castle was born deaf with limited means of communication. I recall first seeing his small books fashioned out of found materials and recognising how the immediacy of making was paramount and the transformative ways in which material instructs form.

What would make a better photobook ecosystem?

I like to imagine a system where small companies or maybe fashion houses would find value in aligning with a publisher, sponsoring the printing and distribution costs, allowing proceeds from book sales to funnel back to the publisher and the artists, encouraging the commitment to the book form. This system might also allow artists and publishers to take greater risks and empower a wider diversity of voices and makers, as well as contributing to the evolution of the book form.♦

Further interviews in the Photobook Conversations series can be read here

Click here to order your copy of the book

Images:

1-Raymond Meeks © Simon Bray

2-Raymond Meeks’ work station, Hudson Valley, New York, US

3-Raymond Meeks, winter auction, broadside #3, 2023

4-Raymond Meeks, Erasure; After Nature, 2024

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

Guido Guidi: more moments, more points of view

A major Guido Guidi retrospective at MAXXI in Rome, featuring over 400 works, including rare, unpublished pieces and archival materials, demonstrates the artist’s depth of study and preference for “more moments, more points of view” in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things. Rica Cerbarano writes that the exhibition offers illuminating insights into the behind-the-scenes of ‘art-making’ and hopes young artists will take away the lesson that, for Guidi, practice is something carefully thought out and built over a lifetime.

Rica Cerbarano | Exhibition review | 10 Apr 2025

Guido Guidi’s major retrospective at MAXXI in Rome is a rare example of an artist’s decades-long body of work being presented without grandiosity, allowing for an appreciation of its true artistic and cultural significance. Structured across two interconnected planes – the vertical display of the walls and the horizontal arrangement of the display cases – Col tempo, 1956-2024 traces the evolution of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing that he is far more than just a photographer of vernacular architecture and Italy’s marginal places. This is not merely due to the variety of subjects he has captured – always with an obsessive attempt to seek a seriality of photographic procedure – but, more importantly, because of the depth of study and research that have shaped his thinking.

The exhibition – curated by ​​Simona Antonacci, Pippo Ciorra and Antonello Frongia – features over 400 works, including numerous previously unpublished pieces and archival materials, following a curatorial narrative that offers precious insight into the ‘behind the scenes’ of art-making. At its core is a concept that proves to be illuminating for curious minds: his archive, adopted as a guiding framework for exploration, is highlighted also as a physical space through the account of the role that his home in Ronta di Cesena has played, as both a living space, a studio and a meeting place for emerging artists – a space where ‘personal biography and artistic process intertwine’.

Opening the show, the Preganziol series (1983) encapsulates the essence of Guidi’s artistic inquiry. Shot in an empty room in the province of Cesena, this work comprises 16 images, all taken within the confines of four bare walls. As the external light shifts, subtle transformations within the room become visible. Through this meticulous study, Guidi explores the passage of time and the way photography both interprets and transforms its subject. This symbolic introduction seamlessly leads into an exploration of Guidi’s evolving relationship with photography through 40 photographic sequences, curated by the artist himself, a three-channel video filmed inside his home-studio-archive – and an extensive collection of archival materials displayed in centrally positioned display cases.

This third level of the exhibition is crucial in fully grasping the depth of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing how each image embodies a meditation on perception and the passage of time. The reconstruction of Guidi’s material universe begins with a selection of books from his personal library. These volumes – some of which are available for the public to browse – offer insight into the development of his research methodology. This collection extends beyond artist’s books and photobooks (including the catalogue from the Walker Evans exhibition at MoMA in New York, a pivotal reference for his practice) to encompass works on philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and a vast array of art history. Among the texts, one finds Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927) alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), John Cage’s For the Birds (1981), and Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel (1948). Essential influences such as Piero della Francesca, Giorgione and Paul Klee are also present, underscoring the diverse intellectual foundations that shape Guidi’s work.

These elements are all traces of what Guidi himself calls “eternal sonship” – an artistic practice rooted in imitation, references and citations. The study of his masters manifests as a meticulous formal investigation, a repertoire of subjects and compositions, echoes and correspondences that suggest the existence of a mental world woven from visual associations across distant epochs and disciplines. For instance, it is extremely fascinating to learn how, in his notes on two photographs by Walker Evans – prepared for a lecture on the American photographer – Guidi establishes a striking parallel between Evans’ Cottage at Ossining Camp Woods, New York, 1930 and Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. In both works, as he notes, there are ‘on the left, trees without leaves; on the right, trees with leaves,’ highlighting a shared compositional structure that bridges photography and Renaissance painting.

Walker Evans’ profound influence on Guidi’s work becomes particularly evident in his exploration of façades, or “facce vista”, as noted in one of his commentaries – often accompanied by sketches and drawings analysing the composition of the works he discusses. As we can see in the sequence of façades presented in the exhibition, spanning 1970–1983, they mark a return to the square format and a more classical serial approach after a period of freer experimentation (for instance, the Di sguincio series), where photographs were instead the result of a ‘performance of the encounter’, unrefined and ‘rude’, allowing ‘to break out of the etiquette of aesthetic rules’, as Antonello Frongia writes in the book accompanying the exhibition, published by MACK in 2024.

Yet, this ‘rude character of his photography’ – what Guidi himself describes as the ability ‘to show things as they are, without refinement’ – also emerges in his study of façades, a subject that captivates him like a lover. Using a Hasselblad 6×6, he examined the ordinary postwar architecture of Italy’s provinces, capturing subtle variations in form shaped by shifting viewpoints and light conditions. Rather than adopting a taxonomic approach in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Guidi’s method feels almost anthropological, evoking the portraiture of August Sander, as he emphasises the anthropomorphic qualities of these structures – that through the photographic frame turn into thinking entities, or more precisely, into observers.

This interest in vernacular architecture served as an entry point into Guido Guidi’s long-standing engagement with architecture, which actually began during his studies at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice. In the 1990s, his collaborations with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal marked the first major international recognition of Guidi’s work as an artist, resulting in the start of a deeper engagement with architecture – leading to a series of commissions, exhibitions and publications.

Among the series dedicated to architects’ designs is the well-known documentation of the Brion Tomb by Carlo Scarpa, who was also his teacher. Guidi returned to this site for a decade, studying the interplay of light on surfaces and architectural geometries in what can be seen as a ritual of time. In this suspension between life and death, between light and shadow, Guidi’s definition of photography as ‘a form of prayer: a way to dignify things, to grant them presence’ is what resonates. It’s a process of waiting, in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things.

Moving from one series to another hung up on the walls (from the early photographs collected here in Esercizi, Al mare and Attesa, to the research of the 1970s in Avanti e ritorno and Coincidenze; then from the works on Gibellina and the many other cities in the world, grouped here under the name “In Between Cities”, to the section dedicated to the “Officina cesenate”, his home-studio, and the study on the spaces of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, one of the schools where he taught), one can’t help but pause, observing the vitrines with curiosity and delight, where the theoretical and practical background of the artist unfolds. For example, alongside notebooks, early drawings and sketches of photographic compositions, we explore the technical aspect of his passion for photography, learning that in the early 1980s, he built several self-made prototypes of cameras using plywood. His experiments with printing are equally significant: after initially working with black-and-white photography in the darkroom and large-format techniques, over time Guidi fine-tuned his method of photographic printing and came to favour chromogenic contact prints.

Towards the end of the exhibition, some additional printing materials are presented, such as contact sheets and photocopies, selected by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, revealing the significant attention Guidi gives to post-production and the organisation of images. The experience is like being momentarily in the photographer’s studio, feeling his hands on the proof prints, carefully focusing on selected photographs or portions of images to be used. Finally, a number of display cases present the meticulous work that Guidi carried out in preparation for his lessons, all focused on visual motifs central to his thinking: the idea of collimation and the logic of sequences and symbols like arrows, stains, shadows, graphemes, letters, and façades.

If this exhibition leaves a lasting impression, it is not so much due to its size (undoubtedly the largest anthological exhibition ever dedicated to Guidi) or the quality of the works on display, but rather for its ability to convey the complexity behind the artistic research of an artist who has played a hugely significant role in transforming how we perceive landscapes and approach photography today. By opening the doors to the artist’s archive – both physical and mental – the exhibition reveals to the public that photography is not a matter of moments, but of time. “There’s something about Bresson’s decisive moment that doesn’t convince me,” says Guidi in an interview, who prefers “more moments, more points of view,” clearly distancing himself from the notion of the “unrepeatable image.” His images are endlessly repeatable – always the same yet subtly different, slow, where the time that accumulates is not just that of the gaze and light, but also of thought, built over a lifetime.

Even if you have never attended a lecture by Guido Guidi, it is evident that one of the most important lessons his work offers is the value of taking time to think, develop one’s practice without haste, and observe and listen carefully, to build a web of references that ward off the danger of self-referentiality. There is hope that young artists visiting this exhibition will leave with at least a fragment of this awareness. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and MAXXI Rome. © Guido Guidi

Guido Guidi. Col tempo, 1956-2024 runs at MAXXI Rome until 27 April 2025

–
Rica Cerbarano is a curator, writer, editor, and project coordinator specialising in photography. She writes regularly for Vogue Italia and Il Giornale dell’Arte, where she is the Co-Editor of the Photography section. She has also contributed to Camera Austria, Over Journal, Hapax Magazine, and Sali & Tabacchi, amongst others. In 2017, Cerbarano co-founded Kublaiklan, a collective that has curated exhibitions at Images Vevey (Switzerland), Gibellina PhotoRoad (Sicily, Italy), Cortona On The Move (Italy) and Photoszene Festival (Cologne, Germany), amongst others. In 2022, she was a member of the Artistic Direction Committee at Photolux Festival (Lucca, Italy), where she curated Seiichi Furuya: Face to Face, 1978 – 1985 and Robin Schwartz: Amelia & the Animals.

Images:

1-Guido Guidi, Tomba Brion, 2007

2-Guido Guidi, Cervia, 1979

3-Guido Guidi, Rimini Nord, 1991

4-Guido Guidi, San Giorgio di Cesena, 1985

5-Guido Guidi, Fosso Ghiaia, 1972

6-Guido Guidi, Palazzo Abatellis, 1997

7-Guido Guidi, Preganziol, 1981

8-Guido Guidi, San Mauro in Valle, 1956

9-Guido Guidi, Porto Marghera, 1988

10-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2016

11-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2004

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

Mahtab Hussain’s ode to muslim communities

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

Anneka French | Interview | 20 March 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

AF: How has Project Champion shaped the work?

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

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

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

AF: Can you share more about the sitters?

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

AF: They look like studio portraits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All images courtesy the artist and Ikon. © Mahtab Hussain

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

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

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

Images:

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

2-Mahtab Hussain, Imtiaz, 2024

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

4-Mahtab Hussain, Eid Prayer in Birmingham, 2018

5-Mahtab Hussain, Alisha, 2024

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

7-Mahtab Hussain, Aqeel, 2024

8-Mahtab Hussain, Bilal Mosque, Birmingham, 2024

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

10-Mahtab Hussain, Daddy Shaf, 2024

1000 Words favourites

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

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

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

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

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

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

On the evocative power of blur

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

Taous Dahmani | Exhibition review | 23 Jan 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Æther is on at Stevenson Amsterdam until 22 February 2025.

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

Images:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1000 Words favourites

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

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

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

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

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

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

Sohrab Hura’s shapeshifting practice

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

Zahra Amiruddin | Exhibition review | 13 Jan 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1000 Words favourites

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

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

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

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

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

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

Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2024

Selected by Tim Clark and Thomas King

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2024 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark, with words from Editorial Assistant, Thomas King.

Tim Clark and Thomas King | Top 10 photobooks of 2024 | 05 Dec 2024 | In association with MPB

1. Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez, Anchor in the Landscape
MACK

Studied witnesses to the State of Israel’s attempt to erase a people and their history, Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez present a quiet yet forceful declaration of Palestinian resilience in Anchor in the Landscape. This striking series of 8×10 black-and-white photographs of olive trees, accompanied by a text from legal scholar and ethnographer Dr. Irus Braverman, made a bold statement at the 60th La Biennale di Venezia earlier this year. Each page of the book pairs a photograph with its precise geographical coordinates, where the olive tree – facing destruction and theft by settlers – anchors livelihoods, culture, and presence in a relentlessly seized and ravaged landscape. The result is a haunting yet beautiful rekindling of connection to Palestinian land in the occupied territories.

2. Karolina Spolniewski, Hotel of Eternal Light
BLOW UP Press

Winner of the 2022 BUP Book Award, Spolniewski’s seven-year multimedia project-turned-book – replete with holographic foil cover – details the psychological and physical scars of detention, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism and isolation. At its heart is Hohenschönhausen, the notorious Stasi prison in East Berlin, dubbed the “Hotel of Eternal Light,” where unrelenting artificial lighting twisted inmates’ sense of time. Documentary photography, scans of physical traces, inmates’ belongings, portraits, X-rays, archival imagery, and fragments of memories from conversations with former prisoners are combined through the book’s design approach to enhance meaning, one that also speaks through the inmates: one page repeats ‘everlasting interrogations,’ while another chillingly declares, ‘Every three minutes you get… blinded by the lights.’

3. Agnieszka Sosnowska, För
Trespasser

Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För (meaning journey in Icelandic), takes readers on a raw, poetic journey through the artist’s life on a beautiful stretch of unmistable wilderness. Originally from Poland, she immigrated to the United States as a child, then as a young adult spontaneously visited Iceland, met her partner and built a life there. Where nature is both a solace and an ever-present force, Sosnowska’s photography – especially self-portraiture – charts the ongoing journey of self-discovery and belonging. Against the pulse of land and community, her images invite a deeper reading, culminating in a confident yet vulnerable self-portrait of the artist. But to what end? Sosnowska doesn’t just capture her subjects and surroundings; as SFMOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes recently writes in her review, Sosnowska invites us to reconsider how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian shape our idea of home.

4. Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion
Self Publish, Be Happy

Since the re-election of the man who played a key role in overturning Roe v. Wade, Carmen Winant’s sobering photo album-style work – winner of the Author Book Award at the 2024 Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards – feels more urgent than ever. Published by SPBH Editions and MACK and designed with a bold spiral binding, Winant’s contemplative exploration of care resists the relentless efforts of anti-abortion movements and the far right to control women’s bodies. Featuring images of health clinics, Planned Parenthood locations, and abortion clinic staff whose tireless commitment sustains this fight, the book spans 50 years – from 1973, when abortion rights were federally protected, to 2022, following their dissolution. Winant reframes the struggle for care and autonomy as a testament to courage, resistance, and hope – urgently needed qualities. Read Gem Fletcher’s review here.

5. Carla Williams, Tender
TBW Books

It’s often a posthumous exercise to uncover a hidden trove of photographs, but for Carla Williams, her artistic debut has thankfully arrived during her lifetime—adding a new chapter to her distinguished career as a photo historian. At 18, while studying photography at Princeton, Williams began creating black-and-white and colour portraits using Polaroid 35mm and 4×5 Type 55 film formats. Now published by TBW Books, Tender spans photographs taken between 1984 and 1999. The collection collapses time through a body of unapologetically vivid work – playful, provocative, and present. The intimate self-portraits reveal the evolution of her gaze, reclaiming, redefining, and becoming, charting her coming-of-age as an artist and a queer Black woman. Winner of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First Photobook Prize and celebrated with a solo exhibition at Higher Pictures, Carla Williams: Circa 1985 marks the first time much of this work has been published or exhibited.

6. Magdalena Wywrot, Pestka
Deadbeat Club

When I look back on photos of myself as a child, they’re worlds apart from the grainy, high-contrast black-and-white images Magdalena Wywrot created in her project about her daughter, Barbara. These are far less sanitised and reflect the otherness of the universe Wywrot creates in Pestka – a name that means seed, shell, or kernel and is Barbara’s nickname. Accompanied by essays from David Campany and Barbara Rosemary, the series brims with a delicate intimacy yet hums with a raw, almost mystical energy. What began as a spontaneous act of documentation has become a richly layered work of magical realism and gothic narrative. Fragmentary and cinematic, the images possess a haunting poeticism that we might find in the avant-garde sensibilities of Vera Chytilová or Dušan Makavejev – full of the playful, subversive potential that Campany mentions in his text.

7. Johny Pitts, Afropean: A Journal
Mörel Books

Johny Pitts, founder of afropean.com and author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Penguin, 2020), unites his expansive work in this thoughtfully curated photobook tracing a five-month journey encompassing Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Stockholm. Pitts, in his search for a different side of the continent, collates an epic travelogue that blends striking photography with personal ephemera – tickets, diary notes, maps, postcards – offers a tactile, immersive book that flies in the face of rising populism and far-right politics across the continent. New essays by Pitts deepen the conversation on the Black European experience alongside a six-part podcast, a soundtrack, and three short films shot on location – a bold, multi-layered exploration of Afropean life.

8. Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer, Ein Dorf 1950–2022
Hartmann Books

Michael Grieve writes, ‘time, of course, is the great force here,’ in Ein Dorf 1950–2022; that force brings ‘an arbitrary photographic topography brought to reason.’ The village of Berka, Germany, has been captured over seven decades by three remarkable photographers united by a family story – coincidental or not – that ties together personal history with the sweeping political shifts from state socialism to the reunification of a divided country. Alongside essays by Jenny Erpenbeck, Steffen Mau, and Gary Van Zante, the 220 black-and-white images glimpse the subtle yet seismic moments that have redefined the village, its people, and its evolving identity. Here is a rivetting perspective, as sociological as it is a documentary, on a place that has witnessed history, and its political reality unfolding in real-time. Since we published our review, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler have deservedly been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Public of Germany (2024) for services to photography.

9. Olivia Arthur, Murmurings of the Skin
VOID

After gracing festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide, Murmurings of the Skin now emerges as a striking publication from the mighty VOID. Nealy eight years ago, Olivia Arthur began her work on physicality, capturing the energy flowing through bodies and the sensation of skin on skin. Sparked by her experience of pregnancy, the work blossomed into a vivid exploration of youth, sexuality, and touch – charged moments of intimacy. In the stillness of pandemic isolation, these themes gained new urgency. The result is a tactile, sensitive work that remedies the struggle of feeling at home in our skin.

10. Máté Bartha, Anima Mundi
The Eriskay Connection

“Our world right now operates in code. So, if we’re talking about code, isn’t everything about how the universe functions?” There’s no denying that Máté Bartha’s latest work, Anima Mundi, leans into the obscure. If we begin with the title’s translation, Anima Mundi means “world spirit,” a concept rooted in Platonic thought, reflecting an ancient idea of a universal organising principle that connects all beings. Divided into chapters exploring urban phenomena ranging from the microcosmic to the cosmic, Anima Mundi composes intricate patterns, layered grid structures, and cryptic visual codes. Its poetic and philosophical approach to the desperate act of seeking structure and meaning invites us to return to the question: how do we make sense of the universe and its code? How do we find sense in arbitrariness?

+1 Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950-Present
10×10 Photobooks

What is the relationship between visual culture and protest? Flashpoint!, both a powerful survey of activism and visual tour de force, is a meticulously curated, global collection of protest photography, zines, posters, pamphlets, and independent publications from the 1950s to the present. The latest offering from 10×10 Photobooks is born from the 2017 project AWAKE: Protest, Liberty, and Resistance collection, which organised protest photobooks by themes through an open call. Flashpoint! builds on this with seven expansive chapters, each containing multiple sub-themes. Across 500 pages, 750+ images, and a series of thought-provoking essays, the endlessly evocative collection reflects Arthur Fournier’s ‘aesthetic of urgency,’ contrasting the polished, institutional protest imagery with the raw, time-sensitive visuals of grassroots movements.♦

 

 

 

 

—
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.

Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words and Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini and Luce Lebart. He also teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Images:

1-Cover of Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez, Anchor in the Landscape (MACK, 2024). Courtesy MACK

2-Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez, Anchor in the Landscape (MACK, 2024). Courtesy MACK

3-Karolina Spolniewski, Hotel of Eternal Light (BLOW UP Press, 2024). Courtesy BLOW UP Press

4-Agnieszka Sosnowska, För (Trespasser, 2024). Courtesy Trespasser

5-Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion (Self Publish, Be Happy, 2024). Courtesy Self Publish, Be Happy

6-Carla Williams, Tender (TBW Books, 2024). Courtesy TBW Books

7-Magdalena Wywrot, Pestka (Deadbeat Club, 2024). Courtesy Deadbeat Club

8-Johny Pitts, Afropean: A Journal (Mörel Books, 2024). Courtesy Mörel Books

9-Werner Mahler, Ein Dorf, 1977-78 in Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer, Ein Dorf 1950–2022 (Hartmann Books, 2024). Courtesy Hartmann Books

10-Olivia Arthur, Murmurings of the Skin (VOID, 2024). Courtesy VOID

11-Máté Bartha, Anima Mundi (The Eriskay Collection, 2024). Courtesy The Eriskay Collection

12-Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950-Present, edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich (10×10 Photobooks, 2024). Courtesy 10×10 Photobooks

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

Luigi Ghirri: Viaggi

MASI Lugano

Interview with Curator, James Lingwood

Luigi Ghirri: Viaggi. Photographs 1970–1991 is a major exhibition dedicated to the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri running at MASI Lugano, Switzerland, until 26 January 2025. Featuring 140 colour photographs – primarily vintage prints from the 1970s and 1980s – sourced from both the artist’s estate and the CSAC collection in Parma, the exhibition underscores the role of travel in Ghirri’s oeuvre. An accompanying book, co-published with MACK, situates Ghirri’s photography within both Italian and international contexts, marking his unique relationship with image-making and visual culture. In a conversation with Editor in Chief Tim Clark, curator James Lingwood discusses the making of the exhibition, Ghirri’s playful and reflective approach to photography, his distinctive use of colour, and how his work subtly critiques the impact of mass tourism on the medium.

Tim Clark | Interview | 14 Nov 2024 

Tim Clark: Do you remember your first encounter with the work of Luigi Ghirri?

James Lingwood: Coming across Ghirri’s first book, Kodachrome published in 1978 was a revelation. It has many memorable individual images, but what is really remarkable is its orchestration, the undulating rhythms of the book. It’s not a coincidence that the very first image in the book is of a cloudy sky, with several horizontal lines running across – like a page of sheet music without the notations. Then at the Venice Biennale in 2011, there was a group of Ghirri’s photographs in the main exhibition in the Italian Pavilion, including some he made on the Adriatic coast, with a children’s swing or carousel on an otherwise empty expanse of beach and the horizon line behind. Or it may have been the other way round…

TC: Tell us about the impetus for this show at MASI following the retrospective The Map and the Territory exhibition that toured Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Museum Folkwang and Jeu de Paume from 2018–2019 that you curated. How did you want to build on that previous proposition through this notion of ‘the journey, as idea and image’ as a point of emphasis?

JL: The Map and the Territory exhibition was put together to foreground Ghirri’s singular way of thinking about his work, to show how reflective, poetic and also playful it is. I decided to work with the structure of the most important exhibition of his work in his lifetime, Vera Fotografia which was presented in Parma in 1979. Ghirri presented 14 different groups of photographs in the exhibition. It’s important to say that Ghirri considered the group as a work; he used the words interchangeably. Some works had a tight conceptual framework, such as Atlante, a series of photos of close-up details of pages from his atlas, or ‘∞’ Infinito, a grid of 365 photos of the sky, taken every day through 1974. Other groups, (or works!) such as Kodachrome, Diaframma 11, 1/125, Luce Naturale, or Vedute were much more open. The Map and the Territory reprised this structure, and its focus on the first decade of Ghirri’s photography, up to 1979.

Viaggi grew out of the earlier exhibition and develops some of its themes through the prism of the journey. The journey resonates throughout his work; not only because almost all his photographs were made on trips of various kinds, but also because he considered photography to be a ‘journey through images’. It’s implicit in The Map and the Territory, and made more explicit in Viaggi. For example, the selection of photographs from his series Paesaggi di Cartone and Kodachrome concentrates on images of travel and tourism ‘found’ in the urban landscape. There are important groups of photographs from other series such as Diaframma and Vedute which are central to Ghirri’s exploration of the act of the viewing. 

In both shows, it was impossible not to give a prominent space to two important works, to the speculative journeys prompted by the close-up images of details of his atlas in Atlante, and Identikit, Ghirri’s take on Xavier Le Maistre’s novella A Journey around my Room, a group of photographs of the books, LPs, maps and mementoes in his home.

The selection for Viaggi ranges widely across his work from the 1970s and 1980s, and extends to groups of photographs made on Ghirri’s travels to different parts of Italy, both to tourist destinations like Rome, Venice, Naples and Capri, but also to places off the beaten-track, small towns and cities in Puglia or Emilia Romagna. It is more open than the earlier exhibition.

TC: One thing that is clear about the curation here is the fairly fluid layout as opposed to a fixed structure. This allows visitors to seek out connections and consider how travel guided Ghirri to subjects and places. How did you approach this creative aspect of putting together the show? It seems very redolent of Ghirri’s adage that ‘if photography is a journey, it is not so in the classic sense suggested by this word; it is rather an itinerary that is drawn, yet with many diversions and returns, randomness and improvisation, a zigzag line.’

JL: If photography is a journey, so is an exhibition. I love the idea of the zig-zag line, with different routes through the work rather than one prescribed route. I don’t think it helps to present Ghirri in too linear a way, with extended sequences of images on long walls. So we broke up the space at MASI with a smaller walls to create a more open structure, and to offer different pathways through the work. When you reach the ‘end’ of the exhibition, you need to move back through the same spaces, seeing different perspectives and making different connections.    

TC: In your catalogue essay, you summon the words of Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Ghirri’s friend and interlocutor – who himself was so instrumental to building discourse around photography in Italy from the 1970s onwards – from a small text that accompanied Ghirri’s images in La gita from Enciclopedia pratica per fotografare (1979): ‘The photographic ritual is the ritual of the trip, there is no trip without photography, without adjusting the aperture and recording [the scene … Ghirri’s] research begins with planning, with a trip seen in images, with the map of mountain paths in perspective, and gradually follows different familiar routes, in the mountains, at the seaside, at lakes, and in the city.’

This particular framing of Ghirri’s work suggests a critical reflection on photography’s vital contribution to industrial societies becoming “image junkies” or “modern” (in Susan Sontag’s sense of the word), where consumption and excess built a status for the photographic image beyond that of mere document. How does Ghirri’s work represent a profound shift in the culture of his time, and ours now?

JL: Ghirri sensed the shift and in some of his work, he consciously pictured it. He could see that as the activity of taking photographs, especially on holiday, was becoming commonplace, it was having a profound effect on the experience of the places people travelled to. He thought a lot about the impact this was having on modern culture. However it’s a big jump to today’s “image junkies”.  The consumption of images in Ghirri’s time was moderate compared to today’s excesses. He was critical, but he was not harsh.

TC: You’ve also previously mentioned that Ghirri intentionally positioned his work in ‘proximity to the amateur’ through his distinctive use of tonal range and colour. How would you describe the way colour functions and matters in his photographs?

JL: Ghirri did to some extent side his work closer to the amateur, and to popular and vernacular culture, and away from the approach and look of the photography professional.

Certainly most ‘serious’ photographers in the 1970s favoured bravura black-and-white prints of their landscapes, portraits or still lives. Documentary photography was predominantly black-and-white. Colour was for advertising, for popular magazines. It was at the margins of the serious photography world whilst in the late 60s and early 70s, but at the same time it was of interest to  artists like Ed Ruscha. John Baldessari or Dan Graham, or closer to home Franco Vaccari who embraced the vernacular.

Working in colour was a key decision that Ghirri made right at the beginning, in 1970. In his first piece of published writing, he stated: ‘I photograph in colour because the world is in colour, and because colour film has been invented.’ The film he used through the 1970s was almost always Kodachrome – the same film millions of people would take to be processed in a lab when they got back from their trip. Ghirri did the same, taking his films to a processing lab in Modena. But there is a difference, an important one, both in the type of images he took and their colour. He wasn’t interested in eye-catching effects, whether through dynamic framing, dramatic incident or sharp colour. He was interested in a quieter, more reflective image and he worked closely with Arrigo Ghi, who made the prints in Modena, to develop a tonal range which was in keeping with the quietness of his images. Ghirri’s skies are instructive. The light is often even and flat, and the blue is rarely vivid.

TC: To what extent does Ghirri adopt or eschew the iconic tourist photo?

JL: There are a few if any photos that Ghirri made that simply adopt the iconic tourist view. But he’s very aware of the types of photos that tourists were taking, the stereotypes of postcards, advertising and the like. In 1973 he wrote that when he travelled, he took two kinds of photographs; ‘the typical ones that everyone takes… and then the other ones, the ones I really care about, and the only ones that I really consider “my own.”’ Whereas the tourist image tends to conform to type, Ghirri’s photographs both recognise and diverge from it.

TC: In what ways do you feel Ghirri harnesses and pushes back against the ‘decisive moment’ across some of his different series, let’s say if we compare the overarching concerns of Diaframma 11, 1/125, luce naturale with Vedute?

JL: Decisive moments in photography generally need people and they need movement. There is very rarely any movement or incident in Ghirri’s photographs, and there aren’t many people. When they are present, they are seen from a distance, or from behind, quietly looking at something (a map, a painting, a display in a shop window) or taking in the view. What was important for Ghirri was not so much a moment in time as its distillation.

TC: Can you say something about your own personal journey through Ghirri’s archive? For example, are there any particular pairings of individual images and their resonances that you relished either putting together or recreating in the show?

JL: Spending time with Ghirri’s work feels like being in a story by Calvino which never ends, and which leads you to many different places, some recognisable, and others new. Ghirri delighted in playing with the vast repertoire of possibilities his archive offered and I feel his sense of adventure through a world of images gave me the licence to work in the same spirit, discovering new resonances as well as revisiting familiar. Some of the pairings in Viaggi are straight out of the pages of Kodachrome, like the photo of a tourist from Paris holding a little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower paired with the model Eiffel Tower in a theme park in Rimini. Others were improvised whilst installing the show. Hopefully this makes the journey full of discoveries, diversions and returns…♦

All images courtesy Estate of Luigi Ghirri, MACK and MASI Lugano © Estate of Luigi Ghirri

Luigi Ghirri:Viaggi. Photographs 1970–1991 runs at MASI Lugano, Switzerland, from 8 September 2024 – 26 January 2025, with an accompanying catalogue published by MACK.

–
James Lingwood is a curator, producer and writer, based in London. From 1991–2023 he was Co-director of Artangel with Michael Morris, producing over 150 new projects by artists, choreographers, composers, filmmakers, and writers.

Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words and Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini and Luce Lebart. He also teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Images:

1-Luigi Ghirri, Rimini, 1977. 

2-Luigi Ghirri, Alpe de Siusi, 1979. 

3-Luigi Ghirri, Marina di Ravenna, 1986.

4-Luigi Ghirri, Rifugio Grosté, 1983.

5-Luigi Ghirri, Scandiano, presso la Rocca di Boiardo, 1985.

6-Luigi Ghirri, Modena, 1973.

7-Luigi Ghirri, Versailles, 1985.

8-Luigi Ghirri, Capri, 1981.

9-Luigi Ghirri, Marina di Ravenna, 1972.

10-Luigi Ghirri, Arles, 1979.

11-Luigi Ghirri, Lago Maggiore, 1984.

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

What we’re reading #2: Autumn 2024

For the second instalment of What we’re reading the focus sharpens on both the urgency of our deepening political crises and the symbolic power of messianic imagery. Thomas King spotlights Yanis Varoufakis’ ongoing analysis of big tech, insights into the current U.S. election campaigns courtesy of David Levi Strauss, an eagerly anticipated book from Ekow Eshun that offers a form of literary portraiture of five black men, and more, presenting an overview of recent reflections at the intersection of politics, technology, and visual culture.

Thomas King | Resource | 12 Sep 2024

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism Penguin Books, June 2024

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, popular economist and ex-Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis details the ascendancy of big tech oligarchs to the status of modern feudal overlords. He argues that the traditional capitalist engine – ‘private profit fuelled by central bank money’ – has been supplanted. In its stead, digital fiefdoms orchestrated by tech platforms extract value and ‘cloud capital’ from the masses, the purpose of which is to ‘train us, to train it, to train us’ while consolidating power within a diminutive oligarchy. Taking the form of a letter addressed to his recently deceased father, Varoufakis charts the evolution of capitalism from the 1960s into the present era. Here, Varoufakis contends that capitalism’s unchecked triumph has led to its latest grotesque mutation.

Varoufakis argues that the likes of Amazon and Facebook embody a new techno-order where digital platforms with a single algorithm dictates what is sold, who sees it, and how much ‘cloud rent’ is siphoned from vassal (or traditional) capitalists. Economic power is then seen to be shifting from traditional markets to digital spheres of operation controlled by small groups of unimaginably wealthy and powerful individuals. Within this hierarchy, vassal capitalists are squeezed by platform overlords, cloud proletarians (Amazon warehouse workers) are surveilled and managed by algorithms, and cloud serfs – everyday users – unwittingly contribute free labour, enhancing big tech’s capital stock. As wealth extraction has moved beyond traditional profit to a more insidious form of rent, Varoufakis describes the masses as ‘unpaid producers, toiling the landlords’ digital estates,’ much like feudal peasants who viewed their labour as integral to their identity. He warns that while today’s tech barons ‘treat their users however they like’ and are seemingly impervious to resistance, a ‘cloud rebellion’ offers hope. Varoufakis insists that ‘unless we band together, we shall never civilise or socialise cloud capital,’ nor will we reclaim our autonomy from its pervasive control.

‘This Is Not Just an Image’ | David Levi Strauss for The Brooklyn Rail, July 2024

‘Dying to make an image?’: this is the question David Levi Strauss, writer, poet, cultural critic asks of America’s deepening political crisis in a series of dispatches published in The Brooklyn Rail. Across numerous instalments Strauss delves into the polarising campaign period, refining his concept of ‘iconopolitics’ – where words and images become disconnected from reality. His analysis begins with the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which despite its apparent failure, baptised him ‘in blood and in the image’ and arrived at an opportune moment to reinforce his messianic image – further amplified at the Republican National Convention shortly thereafter. Strauss’s inquiry has since extended to Trump’s choice of J.D Vance as his running mate – ‘an absolutely malleable subservient Vice President’ – and to Joe Biden’s passing of the torch to Kamala Harris, where ‘the old feeble man in the race is now Donald Trump.’

Although his 2020 book, Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication, predates Trump’s iconic mug shot and the subsequent assassination attempt image, it crucially outlines the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Here, Strauss reveals the underlying decay in American exceptionalism and the evolving nature of how words and images are produced and perceived to make the current surreality possible. Strauss then delineates the latest iconic political image – more than just an image, as he contends – that has pierced the social psyche. The photograph of Trump that we all know, with his fist raised and face bloodied, is noted for its powerful, pyramid-like composition. Strauss concludes that this evocative frame distils a complex moment and, with its messianic overtones, will serve to reinforce belief, where both ‘images and politics are primarily about belief.’

‘How They Fell’ | Max Pinckers for De Standaard, July 2024

If Strauss argues that images rely on belief, Max Pinckers posits that ‘most iconic pictures are shrouded in controversy that alludes to their mythical powers.’ In his essay How They Fall, Pinckers critically examines the mythic significance of such images. Commissioned by Flemish newspaper De Standaard to write about a photograph that defines his life, Pinckers chose instead to focus on an image of death – or the illusion of it: Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier, purportedly capturing the precise moment a Libertarian Youth soldier is shot during the Spanish Civil War. Pinckers challenges the authenticity of this image, which has been the subject of intense debate since the 1970s. He speculates on the photograph’s origins, writing that ‘most iconic photographs stand in for an event that they do not literally represent,’ suggesting that images are ‘experienced collectively and cannot claim a singular truth.’ Regarding The Falling Soldier, Pinckers notes that we often choose to believe the more compelling or dramatic narrative – that this image captures the split second when a man’s life ends. What does this reveal about our society? In a world increasingly mediated by social media, iconic images serve as ‘monuments’ to the histories that sustain them, encapsulating entire worlds in a single frame. These images, Pinckers suggests, are less about documenting reality and more about the widespread beliefs and master narratives we impose upon them.

Ekow Eshun, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them, Penguin Books, September 2024

Writer, curator, and broadcaster Ekow Eshun presents The Stranger published by Penguin, an incisive study of five Black men – Ira Aldridge, Matthew Henson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Justin Fashanu – all of whom grapple with the pervasive experience of exile and estrangement. Eshun approaches these figures, in his own words, not through the lens of ‘conventional biography’, but as a form of literary portraiture – intimate, impressionistic and acutely observed. Eshun’s objective is clear: “I wanted to give voice to the inner lives of these men. To explore what it feels like to be made Other, while also giving subjective lens to the ideas and dreams that sustained them.” His prose, both precise and evocative, renders these individuals not as mere subjects of historical scrutiny, but as complex persons navigating a world that relentlessly marginalises. By charting their trajectories within the wider framework of Black history and culture, Eshun reveals the intricate interplay of alienation, identity, and the unyielding quest for dignity. The Stranger is more than a historical account; it is a critical intervention that restores agency to its subjects, offering a profound meditation on the intricacies of belonging and the lasting impact of othering.

Ex-Machina, A24, Screenplay Book, MACK, July 2024

Ex-Machina is the first title in the Screenplay Collection by MACK and A24, ‘the first of its kind between a studio and a publishing house.’ Each Screenplay Book focuses on an individual film and includes the entire script as well as original essays, director-selected frames, behind-the-scenes content and other extras. This edition features Alex Garland’s celebrated sci-fi script, essays by queer theorist Jack Halberstam and AI expert Murray Shanahan, and concept art by Jock. Shanahan, a cognitive robotics expert who consulted on the film, warns of the dangers of creating human-like AI and questions whether we should craft beings ‘capable of both empathy and suffering.’ Whether we engineer AI from scratch or emulate the human brain, his cautionary message remains critically relevant a decade after the film’s release.

The film of course stars Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, a programmer who wins a week at the secluded estate of tech CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac), and explores ideas of artificial intelligence, consciousness and ethics. Caleb’s task is to determine whether Ava (Alicia Vikander), an advanced humanoid robot, possesses AI. Nathan’s creation of Ava is more than a scientific achievement; it asserts control over nature, positioning himself as a god-like figure. In a telling moment from the film, Nathan reveals to Caleb that his competitors thought search engines were “a map of what people were thinking. Actually, they were a map of how people were thinking. Impulse, response. Fluid, imperfect. Patterned, chaotic.” However, despite this warning, Ex Machina becomes concerned with Ava’s personal liberation and manipulation of the humans around her. She challenges perceptions of consciousness and autonomy as she becomes the ‘God’ of her own story – a true deus ex machina. While the book explores the layers of authorship behind the film, Garland’s script and the book as a whole stand as a complex, multifaceted work, engaging readers in a dialogue about reality, perception and control in the age of AI.♦

—
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 Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Penguin Books, 2024)

2-Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

3-Robert Capa, The Falling Soldier, 1936. © International Center of Photography, New York / Magnum Photos

4-Cover for Ekow Eshun, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them (Penguin Books, 2024)

5-Still from Ex-Machina

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

Carmen Winant’s fight for reproductive justice

Carmen Winant works to counter the ways anti-abortion movements and the far right have made punishing attempts to control and dominate women’s bodies and reproductive rights. The Last Safe Abortion, published by SPBH Editions and MACK, focuses on the near 50-year period in which abortion was legal in the US (1973–2022), and presents a selection of photographs that employ Winant’s signature strategies of proximity and volume with radical effect, Gem Fletcher writes.

Gem Fletcher | Book review | 6 June 2024

On 30 April 1965, Lennart Nilsson’s portrait of an 18-week-old human foetus appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in a story called “Drama of Life Before Birth”. Over 18 pages, the Swedish photographer, often credited as the first person to photograph embryos, presented a sequence of foetuses at various stages of development, floating in a constellation of amniotic fluid. The actual drama of this ‘unprecedented feat’ in photography was that Nilsson’s images were operating under the pretence that the foetuses were alive when, in fact, they were not. His foetal pictures, posed and backlit, were only made possible because the pregnancies had been terminated to save women’s lives. 

This irony is lost on the anti-abortion movement who, since the 1980s, has weaponised Nilsson’s photographs in our cultural imagination – not as feats of science as he intended, but as visual propaganda – pushing a fiction that embryos are autonomous entities, independent from the birthing bodies that made them. What is missing from both Nilsson’s images – the mothers likely never gave their permission for their lost children to be imaged or reproduced – and the visual tactics of the far right is care. In their punishing attempts to control and dominate, there is no care for ethics, no care for the truth, and most pertinently, no care for women.

It’s this visually inculcated misinformation campaign that Carmen Winant sought to interrogate in her new title, The Last Safe Abortion, published by SPBH Editions and MACK. Focusing on the near 50-year period in which abortion was legal in the US (1973–2022), the book presents care as an agent of change, told through the advocacy and community building of abortion providers across the American Midwest. Building upon similar strategies in her previous books, My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019) and A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (2022), Winant intends to fill a void in our visual lexicon whilst inviting the viewer to think about how pictures can function, not as documents, but as tools for social change.

Winant is an artist who has had a stake in the fight for reproductive justice long before the overturning of Roe. As a teenager, she volunteered as a clinic escort, started a pro-choice club in high school and was an active agent in advocacy work in Philadelphia. Returning to the subject in her practice, the challenge was if and how she could transmute these political commitments into art-making. What did the intersection of photography and abortion care look like? And what potential could looking yield?

The project started slowly in Cleveland after Winant made the two-hour drive from her home in Ohio to Pre-Term, one of the longest abortion care providers in the state. Upon arrival, she discovered the clinic’s archive of photographs, slides and negatives living in banker boxes, piled high in cupboards and stacked on shelves. The images – many of which had gone undisturbed for decades – show clinic staff sterilising medical equipment, answering phones, re-enacting procedures and attending fundraising events. These women harnessed image-making as an educational tool to demystify reproductive health and put patients at ease with no step deemed too small or unworthy to photograph. After Pre-Term, the work began to expand as Winant interacted with dozens of personal, organisational and institutional archives across the Midwest, many of which she visited multiple times, building relationships with staff and tracing their histories. Between 2019 and 2023, she scanned and collected thousands of 4×6 images, each playing an incremental role in the struggle. In addition, for the first time in decades, Winant made pictures herself, determined that the inventory of care she was collating reflected the contemporary moment, as clinics fight to survive and serve their communities post-Roe. 

As an object, The Last Safe Abortion feels more akin to a family album than a typical photobook: spiral bound, softback and accessible. Images are mounted on bright coloured hues mimicking the vibrancy of community notice boards and the librarian’s preferred process of archival scanning. Whilst the material quality of the book is simple and pared back, proximity and volume – Winant’s signature strategies – are employed with radical effect. Over an abundant 170 pages, we experience an uninterrupted flow of this visual material, only sporadically breaking pace to present multiple frames of the same moment to slow the viewer down and encourage them to linger. The result is a disarming and profound encounter with care and solidarity en masse – a powerful antidote to the endless violence that dominates our visual lexicon. 

What does care look like? It’s a difficult question to answer because we feel it more than we see it, and care work is quiet and incremental. In the context of the abortion care work, care happens behind closed doors, in waiting rooms, on the phone, around the bed in the operating theatre and in the recovery room. It is remarkably undramatic and visually mundane, yet both life-changing and life-saving. This dissonance gives the project its potency, not just within its context of the women who have dedicated their lives to the work of reproductive justice but as a critical probing of photography and its values.

Unlike photography’s tradition of one revered author, the visuality of this work is the sum of many people, including but not limited to Francine, Chrisse, Sri, Colleen, Deb, Beth, Gayle, Tammi, Barb, Jackie, Carol, Theresa, Harriet, Marge, Jennifer, Karen, Adele, Sunita, Terel, Gina, and Brenda, Gwenne, Dorothy, Cynthia Doleres and Jean. Their unseen labour, made visible by Winant, builds upon a legacy of feminist movement strategy, disseminating information and care for women by women, made possible by a deep commitment to intergenerational interdependence. 

The role of artmaking as a political tool is something Winant makes clear she is still grappling with in her essay at the book’s close.  She writes: ‘It occurred to me that building relationships was the point of the work rather than its subject. What if my work was reciprocal rather than extractive?’ Like the body of work at large, these ruminations sound simple yet offer urgent perspectives about how pictures are made, who gets to make them and how we assign cultural value to photography. The Last Safe Abortion leaves you wondering what would the world look and feel like if the images of violence and trauma being circulated at great velocity were replaced with models of care, collaboration and tenderness? ♦

All images courtesy the artist, SPBH Editions and MACK. © Carmen Winant

The Last Safe Abortion is published by SPBH Editions and MACK.

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

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Seeing through time with Annie Ernaux

Curator and writer Lou Stoppard adds visual repertoire to Annie Ernaux’s iconic Exteriors, originally published in 1993, through a new publication and exhibition titled Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography — co-published by MACK and Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris. Recognising Ernaux’s iconic literary style – unapologetic, brave, and tender, inherently political and dedicated to amplifying marginalised voices – Stoppard sifted through 24,000 photographs, resulting in a photo-book that captures the rituals of everyday life, in a way not so mundane, as Peter Watkins writes.

Peter Watkins | Book review | 21 Mar 2024 

Annie Ernaux’s intimately autobiographical writing is much like the dull ache of an old injury, reminding the body, through its persistence, of its entanglement in the world over time. She writes for the sake of memory and forgetting, and has been prolific in her output since the mid-1970s, earning a Nobel Prize for Literature along the way. Her writing is unapologetic, unembarrassed and tender in its bravery. She has spoken of her work as being inherently political, driven by a genuine desire to give voice to the underrepresented, namely the working class, in acutely observed reflections from her everyday encounters. Her work is paired back, unadorned, with no room for hyperbole. A pioneer of autofiction, she doesn’t seem to suffer from the indulgences and excesses that sometimes accompany the genre. 

Ernaux has spoken of photography as acting as a catalyst for her writing, but it’s ordinary, as opposed to extraordinary, photographs of people that are meaningful to her. She uses photographs as an aide de memoire, and has suggested that: ‘The photograph is nothing other than stopped time. But the photograph does not save. Because it is mute. I believe on the contrary that photography increases the pain of passing time. Writing saves, and cinema.’ In her book The Years (2008), the opening passages come to us like abrupt flashes of memory; fragmentary, and incomplete, but bright and image-like. These lines reveal perhaps most clearly, both her directness and the umbilical bond between photography, memory and language, as well as the existential fear of forgetting and being forgotten: ‘All the images will disappear. […] Everything will be erased in a second. […] We will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.’

Upon reading Exteriors (1996), Lou Stoppard contacted Simon Baker, Director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, surprised that there hadn’t previously been a major institutional collaboration between Ernaux’s writing and photography, particularly given the building attention around her life’s work, not to mention the photographic claims her writing has made, as so explicit in Exteriors. Stoppard was promptly invited to spend a month going through some 24,000 photographs and 36,000 photobooks that make up the MEP’s collection. Her selections represent some of major names in documentary photography such as William Klein, Luighi Ghirri, Ursula Schulz-Dornberg, Claude Dityvon and Daido Moriyama. The photographs were made in the mid-20th century onwards and depict almost always people, built-up environments and ephemeral encounters in the city. 

Post-war photography of this kind moved us away from a prescribed reading of the image to a multi-layered, subjective and ultimately equivocal vision of the world – uncertain images for uncertain times – and, in that sense, the pairings seem apt, if sometimes a little on the nose. Stoppard herself concedes these ‘moments of visual coincidence’ of course occur, a near-impossibility to avoid perhaps, given the familiarity of the imagery evoked in Ernaux’s writing. She also didn’t want to focus on the grand boulevards of Paris, on Eugène Atget, or the traditional idea of the flâneur, but, rather, on a more universal vision of the everyday, the language of advertising and the rituals of life. Indeed, to do otherwise wouldn’t have made sense, given Ernaux’s politics and focus. As Stoppard points out: ‘To compare Ernaux’s writing to photography is a project that is impossible to divorce from questions of class. Seeing is a privilege. Photographing is even more of a privilege.’

The inference of pairing Ernaux’s originally slim 74-page Exteriors with this curated selection of photographs from the MEP’s collection is to cement some of the photographic associations we already hold dear to her work, but perhaps also to examine this lesser-known publication in photographic terms – extending readings, teasing out connections and re-examining the question of how literature and photography can coexist, and to what end. Stoppard makes headway in this regard in her accompanying essay “Writing Images”, found at the end of Exteriors – Annie Ernaux and Photography, jointly published by MACK. Here, she attempts to contextualise Ernaux’s photographic intentions not only by examining Exteriors, but also by reaching back within the wider context of her work. 

Over the decades, Ernaux’s writing has fearlessly examined, amongst others, themes such as the interior life, identity, women and the body, shame, nascent sexuality, illegal abortion, female sexuality, relationships, grief and the perception of time. Unwavering in her pursuit, these themes have played out somewhere between Ernaux’s subjective personal experiences, read within the wider societal and political movements of the times. 

If Ernaux’s work often leans towards the exploration of interiority, a pursuit nearing claustrophobia in its intensity, then Exteriors, in some respects, represents a literal break, turning itself outwards to the surface of things. The book, in its original form, is made up of journal entries written over the course of seven years, between 1985 and 1992, and mostly in-and-around Cergy-Pontoise, one of five suburban “new towns” surrounding Paris built up in the 1960s, a place she has vehemently rejected as being simply categorised as a non-lieux or non-place. This is where she has written much of her work, a place that is integral to her writing, a place she calls home: ‘A place suddenly sprung up from nowhere, a place bereft of memories […] A place with undefined boundaries.’

These are observations from Ernaux’s adopted home, the neighbourhoods she moves through, from the dentist’s waiting room to the RER suburban train or visits to the Hypermarket. These are the banal spaces of the everyday, observed matter-of-factly, sharply. This is a real, visceral vision of the periphery, away from the charm and clichés of Paris. For Ernaux, these everyday spaces are imbued with sociological and psychological substance, with ‘as much meaning and human truth as the concert hall.’

The images serve to punctuate what is about a third of Ernaux’s book, which is broken up chronologically, and slipped formally between the photographs, inevitably encouraging associations through juxtaposition. The text and images evoke one another, but are not intended as captions or illustrations. Rather, they are offered equal weighting on the page. The images weave between eras and geographies, almost all depicting people, or signs of humanity, pointing towards the universal experience of the city, where, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population currently dwells. The photographs, as well as the text, attest to the observational faculties of their authors, captivating and complicating our attention, without ever really being too prescriptive or dogmatic in their associations.

In her interview with the Louisiana Channel, Ernaux describes her work as factual, and restrained of feeling. She writes in Exteriors: ‘I have sought to describe reality as though through the eyes of a photographer… To preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.’ But with that comes a tireless curiosity, presented to us by an omnipresent Ernaux, who has the imagination to transform these all too familiar encounters from daily life into something of real vibrancy and fortitude, and, of course, there’s plenty of feeling built into that act. The same could be said of many of the photographers whose work make up the pages of this book. The people encountered come to us as protagonists of their own stories which we glimpse, move through and then beyond, perhaps inviting us to consider the increasingly unequal social hierarchies pronounced and laid bare in the shared urban environments that we presently occupy, in turn allowing us to reflect on how they might be reimagined. ♦

All images courtesy the artists, MACK and MEP.

Exteriors – Annie Ernaux and Photography runs at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France, until 26 May 2024. The accompanying book is published by MACK.

—
Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.

Images:

1-Claude Dityvon, 18 hears, Post de Bercy, Paris (18 hours, Bridge of Bercy, Paris), 1979. Gelatin silver print, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 1979. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

2-Dolorès Marat, La femme aux Gants (Woman with gloves), 1987. Fresson four-colour pigment print, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 2006. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

3-Dolorès Marat, Neige à Paris (Snow in Paris), 1997. Fresson four-colour pigment print, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 2001. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy of the artist, MACK and MEP.

4-Hiro, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, 1962. Gelatin silverprints, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of the Elsa Peretti Foundation in 2008. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy The Estate of Y. Hiro Wakabayashi, MACK and MEP.

5-Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Ploshchad Vosstaniya – Uprising Square, 2005. Photogravure, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of the artist in 2020. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

6-Janine Niepce, H.L.M. à Vitry. Une mère et son enfant (Council estate in Vitry. A mother and her child), 1965. Gelatin silver prints. MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 1983. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

7-Marie-Paule Nègre, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris (Luxembourg Garden, Paris), 1979. Pigment inkjet print, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of the artist in 2014. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

8-William Klein, Finale de l’élection de Miss France, entourée de Jean-Pierre Foucault et Mme de Fontenay (Final of Miss France contest, surrounded by Jean-Pierre Foucault and Mrs de Fontenay), 2001, from the series PARIS + KLEIN. C-type prints, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 2002. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy William Klein Estate, MACK and MEP.

9-Bernard Pierre Wolff, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 1981. Gelatin silver print, MEP Collection, Paris. Bequest from the artist in 1985. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

10-Daido Moriyama, Untitled, 1969. Gelatin silver print, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. in 1995. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Akio Nagasawa Gallery, MACK and MEP.