Tag: MACK

Mame-Diarra Niang: Remember to Forget

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Exhibition review by Taous Dahmani

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: Mother

MoMA PS1

Exhibition review by Zahra Amiruddin

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.

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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

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Carmen Winant

The Last Safe Abortion

Book review by Gem Fletcher

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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Exteriors – Annie Ernaux and Photography

Lou Stoppard (ed.)

Book review by Peter Watkins

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.

Teju Cole

Pharmakon

Book review by Anneka French

In his third MACK title, Pharmakon — meaning poison, remedy, or scapegoat, Teju Cole explores the material of absence through images woven together with 12 short stories of post-apocalyptic or crisis scenarios, where displaced individuals, mortality, environmental threats, and bureaucratic challenges loom. An apt title, as Anneka French writes, for a book carrying significant political weight, Pharmakon indicating something that might cure, kill, or displace blame – feasibly all of these things simultaneously.

Anneka French | Book review | 14 Mar 2024

‘Time with a photobook is a wander off the beaten path…’ wrote Teju Cole in an article for The Guardian in 2020. ‘Sitting with it, you have to sit with yourself: this is a private experience in a time when those are becoming alarmingly rare, an act of analogue rebellion in an obnoxiously digital world.’

Materiality is prominent in Cole’s new title, Pharmakon, his third with MACK following Golden Apple of the Sun (2021) and Fernweh (2020). Pharmakon features a suite of highly enigmatic photographs that place emphasis on materials to signify absence. The images, taken over a four-year period, are frequently bleak, occasionally humorous, sometimes sensual. Traces of human-life are evoked, for instance, through peeling layers of paint or marks squeaked across dusty glass, through textures of weathered marble or worn concrete, sand, reflections and gentle ripples in water. Such tactile surfaces begin with Pharmakon’s cover, a thin, navy-blue leather-like buckram that lends the volume gravitas from the off. Cole, a novelist, essayist as well as a prolific photographer, has written 12 short stories that intersperse the images inside. These texts, from a few pages to a few paragraphs in length, which are complete pieces in and of themselves rather than fragments per se, open the images up to meanings beyond the initial impressions of the viewer, offering interpretations and parallel trains of thought that range from the ethereally abstract to the unequivocally political. All are unsettling to some extent, shaping the photographs that precede and follow them. There is equal weight between text and image.

The early pages of the book include pale blue skies carved up by overhead wiring and interrupted by the tops of two stone buildings – open and enigmatic but with a sense of curtailed possibility. These are followed by wooden fence panels that afford a glimpse of industrial hoardings beyond the slats. A narrow strip of sky is visible across the top and tarmac painted with yellow markings appears along the bottom section. Next comes a view of water from the window of a vehicle that overlays two pages, followed by a board printed with photographic images of the sea and sky, punctured by screws, and papers removed from a wall. Landscapes, buildings and objects are here offered just out of reach, our views of them altered or denied.

Cole’s first story comes like a punch in the gut. Visceral and shocking, it unfolds from a circular forest clearing into a scene of gunshots and attempted escape, sharp in its clarity, scale and impact. Two photographs of woodland or parkland, a public statue wrapped in brown fabric, an abundant apple tree and two views of a further tree against a building with large windows follow this, not the setting of the story exactly but something comparable, maybe even places that are closer to home. The photographs carry echoes of the story, their locations specific but non-identifiable. The last image in this sequence is a blurred view of open grass and trees, as if the photographer is moving very quickly through the landscape, running like the protagonists in the story.

Many of Cole’s photographs point towards the passage of time. Two facing plates show similar views of a high-rise building at night and in daylight. Our eyes are drawn to different areas of the two images as elements recede into darkness or slip into focus. The grid formation of the building’s windows is recalled in the braille panels that feature elsewhere in the publication and in ceramic tiles, bricks and blocks of stone that appear in several of the photographs. The tower formations are mimicked through trees and architectural structures scattered throughout – including one grand column behind which a piece of litter has been tucked – a stack of books with their spines turned away from the camera, and more loosely, in the rougher surfaces of multiple large rocks. Whole mountains, boulders, smaller rocks and sand chart an ever-diminishing sense of scale that is grounding and humbling.

Cole’s stories carry significant political weight. Post-apocalyptic or crisis scenarios are either foregrounded in the action or hover more insidiously in the background. There are multiple displaced people, dead people, people threatened by the landscape, weather, ill-health, violence and bureaucracy. There are repressed histories and memories that resurface. These themes are supported and extended by the photographs, so that even a quiet, apparently innocuous image – a brick wall, boulder or spillage – becomes highly charged. A piece of paper torn from a lamppost becomes an action of resistance or suppression, fences and walls become borders of exclusion, a mound of earth becomes a grave, a dead bird becomes a dead human. Specific formal arrangements and motifs – particularly water, rock and shadow – repeat, disappearing for a while and then bobbing back up like a float pushed beneath waves.

The complexity inherent in the word pharmakon, an Ancient Greek term meaning poison, remedy or scapegoat, makes it an apt title for the book. The word is semi-familiar and multi-faceted, indicating something that might cure, kill or displace blame – feasibly all of these things simultaneously. It is political. The closing pages of the book assemble images of grids and holes, curved pipes and shadows. The last story is titled “Circle”, which returns us to Cole’s initial metaphor of the woodland clearing. In this story, Cole writes: ‘You cannot write about the circle from inside the circle. To write about the circle, you have to be outside it. No, he thinks, that’s not quite right: you could write about the circle from inside the circle. It would have to be possible, and perhaps necessary.’ This riddling is undercut with deep violence in the text’s final paragraph. The book concludes with a vapour trail in the sky, two facing plates of lilac-pink sky and an off-centre double page spread of the sea and another lilac-pink sky, calming, open and hopeful, even while this scene and all the others before it are affected, carefully and incisively, by the force of Cole’s words. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and MACK © Teju Cole

Pharmakon is published by MACK.

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

Images:

1>6-Teju Cole, from Pharmakon (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

RaMell Ross

Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body

Book review by Pelumi Odubanjo

Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, RaMell Ross’ debut book published by MACK, is a potent visual reminder of the history of black American life, a kaleidoscope of lyricism, and visual and narrative abstraction. Pelumi Odubanjo considers the gravity of what it means to carry such an archive of black visuality.

Pelumi Odubanjo | Book review | 17 Nov 2023

In his debut monograph Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer RaMell Ross reflects on the landscape and visual scope of the American South, reimagining it through a range of mediums, from large format photography and conceptual work, to film and writing. Journeying through the optical terrains of the region, Ross directs our attention through the everyday environments, bodies and structures which coalesce to form what he terms ‘Spell/Time/Practice/American/Body’. Unravelling these words through the five chapters which form his monograph, Ross invites us to reimagine the ways in which the visual may be used to disrupt our existence, in turn asking us what the black body is able to do, say and reperform when abstracted across land and time.

The monograph stretches over Ross’ interdisciplinary practice, mimicking a musical compilation album as we pace through its mystery and quotidian nature. Commencing with a pictorial account before combined with textual narrative, the story begins with the chapter “Spell”, set in South Country, Alabama, where Ross directed his Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). In the two photo series that are present in the monograph, Ross documents South County over two different periods, first from 2012 to 2014, and then from 2018 to 2022. Both capture the semi-ruralness of the land using an illuminating approach to photography, extending beyond the physical structures of the environment into intimate, multigenerational layered images of black communities in the American South.

In the opening series South County, AL (A Hale County), Ross plays on the idea of the undetected as he obscures place and person through various visual tricks; with some subjects facing away from the camera with their hoodies acting as figurative silhouettes, some using the parts of cars to fragment their bodies and others tactfully using light and shadow to allude to a slow unveiling of face and body. The series simultaneously inhabits pastoral and urban spaces as Ross repeatedly searches for new ways to abstract his subjects within the American landscape. In one image, titled “Yellow”, we see a young girl crouched down, the bend of her body mirroring the outline of the foliage that surrounds her. The rose bush that occupies the closest point to the camera obscures the girl, refusing to let her be shown in totality, the red petals slowly fading into the image, appearing as small glimmers of red paint flicked across the photograph. The young girl acts as a mediator to the image’s green hues, her small yellow dress delicately draped alongside the cut grass of the meadow, her small white hairclip and yellow hair accessories appearing as if extended parts of the rose bush closest to the camera’s eye. The image intends to draw the viewer directly towards one place: our young subject who rests in a state of adolescence and wonder. The viewer’s vision becomes purposely pixelated as the young girl’s body both fades away into the landscape and is illuminated through the camera’s unquestionable focus on her. This action is mirrored in Ross’ later image “Giving Tree”, where we see another young character with their body bent, facing downwards as they hang from an isolated tree. Again, Ross purposefully dissembles the young body, fragmenting and splintering it as a large branch passes through her abdominal area. The young girl folds herself across the bough, dressed in a loud red shirt that pronounces her against the natural palette of the surroundings. Her draped body appears lifeless, both contrasting and echoing the “still life” of the ongoing scene. This image awakens brutal memories of black bodies in the American South’s past, one where, in Alabama alone, it has been recorded that over 300 black people were lynched from 1877 to 1943 during the Jim Crow era. By draping herself from this tree, this young girl becomes one of the strange fruits as sung by Billie Holiday, forming a peculiar sight in a yet all too familiar setting.

With this latter image, Ross reminds us that, in its simplest form, a tree is not a symbol of terror. And in this scene, this girl is arguably creating her own sense of joy through play. As with the girl in the previous image, she is simply existing, a state that Ross is able to permit through his lens. It is in her imagination and desire to play that Ross captures what it means to reproduce images of black bodies within such landscapes. Ross creates an unease in his photographs that touches on racial history and violence through a blunt approach to image-making. In these ways, Ross positions his characters in an ontological plurality that so much of black life exists within, between past, present and future, living in an abstraction that lends itself to an inverted understanding of documentation. Ross forces his viewers to question the production of images that they are used to observing of the American South, and defends his right to abstraction, creating an expressiveness and lyricism that goes beyond documentation.

Moving towards various mixed-media and writings, Ross’ poetic works are scattered throughout the book. In Ross’ later poem, titled “Slangness”, we observe the interplay between what is textual and what is visual, his words becoming beacons of speech, yielding to the sling of his dialect, stripped to its bare rhythm. Ross’ playful words mirror the writing of poet and theorist Fred Moten, whose poetic verse and approach to black radical theory reopens wounds of blackness in its ontological form, allowing readers to consider what it means to strip blackness to its barest form. This creates space for transformation and transition, as something which exists in between various co-existing spaces and places.

Similarly to Moten’s style of poetic languaging of black social and cultural contexts, Ross uses his images and words to question what it means to exist in both the past and present as a black Southern body. Much of Moten’s work around the making of blackness is concerned with the specific conditions that form what we know as the black body. Looking into and beyond ideas around blackness in its bodily form, Moten is a writer concerned with the ways in which form and formlessness may be co-opted as tools to suggest alternative ways of viewing and understanding black life as it exists in the present. In this, Moten uses a form of voice composed of fragments, scattered across long sequences and varying shapes, a purposely abstracted form. His words draw you in, and ask you to read through the lines, with language serving as a means to both disrupt and resist expectation.

Ross’ words and imagery are activated through a vortex of abstraction, both in its formlessness and its form, as he allows words to take on new meanings within readings of his work. Similarly to Ming Smith and Roy DeCavara, photographers who leaned into abstraction to create images that enact the constellation of black life that surrounded them, and much like Moten in his writing, Ross uses language to create an inseparable dialogue that meditates our understanding of blackness in the American South. Most aptly seen in his “Black Dictionary (aka RaMell’s Dictionary)”, Ross uses abstraction to resist the system of capture, both linguistically and visually, recognising the role of the linguistic historical subjugation, and freeing them through a lively interplay of idiolect and dialect.

What is it that a black object does? What is blackness able to do in its abstraction? In Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, Ross testifies that it can reclaim and free you. Occupying the chapter “Practice” is a documentation of Ross’ film Return to Origin (2021), a remarkable conceptual work in which the artist freight ships himself into a 4 x 8 ft box, a reference to Henry Brown who shipped himself to freedom in 1849. In this re-enactment, Ross uses historical references and filmmaking to create a conjunction between the past and present. In turn, Ross challenges us to reorient our understanding of “black objects”, and how through material, method and ways of being in the world, we may build our paths to freedom.

There is an argument that the mass volume of works included in this book causes it to wander at points, and in places risks losing its sense of narrative. However, it is through this abundance of material that we see the gravity of what it means to carry such an archive of black visuality. Ross’ work positions itself as a vital visual reminder of the history of black American life, a kaleidoscope of lyricism, and visual and narrative abstraction. ♦

All images courtesy the artist © RaMell Ross.

Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body is published by MACK.

—
Pelumi Odubanjo is a curator, writer and researcher based between London and Glasgow. She currently works as the Assistant Curator for Glasgow International, having previously held positions as a Curatorial Assistant at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and as Studio and Programmes Assistant at V.O Curations, London. Odubanjo has curated for festivals and institutions including Photo50 at the London Art Fair, Photo Oxford, Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, London, Brighton Photo Fringe and the Black Cultural Archives, amongst others. Her writing on contemporary photography, art and culture has appeared in Magnum Photos, New Contemporaries, Artillery Magazine, Photoworks and Photo Fringe.

Images:

1-RaMell Ross, “Open”, from South County, AL (A Hale County) (2012–14), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

2-RaMell Ross, “Man”, from South County, AL (A Hale County) (2018–22), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

3-RaMell Ross, “Ladrewya and Michelangelo”, from South County, AL (A Hale County) (2012–14), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

4-RaMell Ross, “Tomb 76: Catch”, from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

5-RaMell Ross, “Here”, from South County, AL (A Hale County) (2012–14), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

6-RaMell Ross, “Light in the Attic”, from Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land (2021), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

7-RaMell Ross, still from Return to Origin (2021), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

8-RaMell Ross, still from Return to Origin (2021), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

9-RaMell Ross, “Flag Case Black”, from Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land (2021), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

10-RaMell Ross, “Dakesha and Marquise”, from South County, AL (A Hale County) (2012–14), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Top 10

Photobooks of 2022

Selected by Alex Merola

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases that caught our eye during 2022 – selected by Assistant Editor, Alex Merola.

1. Carmen Winant, Arrangements
Self Publish, Be Happy / Images Vevey

The book – as both medium and as subject – is probed to its expansive potential in Carmen Winant’s latest. Large, elegant but always “DIY” in feel, with its rough, naked spine, Arrangements is one of those books that is both specific and sweeping at the same time. For the once discrete and disparate tearsheets that bound it together – depicting Bikram yoga classes, beauty pageants, moonwalks, childbirth, tantric sex and the young Malcolm X – have been decontextualised to conjure wonderfully capacious constellations which, as a whole, wrestle with, and trouble, the notion of “theme”. Most admirable is Winant’s insistence on labour; inherent not only in the (ever-visible) tears of each page, but also in the collaborative networks that enable the making and sharing of a book, foregrounded through the detailing of the designer, printer, distributor and, of course, publishers Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey on the graceful front-cover. Whilst this is a book that could have been subject to an infinite number of rearrangements still, the strength of the “arrangement” Winant lies in its courage: the courage to put something out into the world; something confounding and generous in equal measure.

2. Collier Schorr, August
MACK

As strong as the taboos it touches, Collier Schorr’s third chapter in the Forests and Fields series is over a decade in the making and well worth the wait. Her many revisions have resulted in an unnerving book, extending Schorr’s investigations into ancestral responsibility through the mythos of the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd, a synecdoche for German history. A finely-calibrated blend of history and fiction, the sequencing moves through Polaroids picturing crucifixes, flora and androgynous boys, at their moment of ripening, in and out of Nazi uniform. Invoking the performative history of fetishism and uniform – with references to Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) as well as August Sander’s portrait of Hitler’s guard – Schorr is clearly working with the reactions the young men portray when they are confronted with artifacts of the Third Reich. Her anachronisms are provocative and transgressive, but also intimate and cathartic, resonating further given that Schorr is of Jewish descent, while most of her subjects are not. It is commendable how Schorr has sought to uncover the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of traumatic history, inherited and imagined. Ultimately, this book does not lose itself to nostalgia, even if it is hinged to it. For the fleeting Polaroid frames land on the now, shedding light a war whose ripple effects persist.

3. Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River
Hatje Cantz

Intended as a companion, rather than a catalogue, to its coinciding exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River is a real tour de force and totally befitting of this most ambitious body of work. Comprised of 2,000 kilometres worth of photographs, the first volume follows the Rio Grande / Río Bravo along the US-Mexico border through a nuanced weave of abstractions of whirling water, iPhone shots of digital surveillance imagery and documents of Leonard’s own path. Countering the mass media’s sensationalist portrayals of a natural river that is made to perform a political task, all the while exposing the topographical indistinguishability of its demarcations, Leonard’s “half-pictures” inconspicuously shift through different ground-level vantage points, geographical times, tempos and tones. The arrangements of photographs – alternating between standalones to groups of two, four or more – invoke a multiplicity that is perfectly reverberated in the second volume, wherein writers, artists and other thinkers ruminate on the fraught history of the river from their respective fields. The book is an anti-monument, developed through its repetitions and refractions: its emphasis instead is on subjectivity and embodiment; on the notion that taking a photograph is taking a position. After all, Leonard’s preserved black frames do not carry the weight of the world, but the weight of her vision, which in turn becomes ours.

4. Kikuji Kawada, Vortex
Akaaka

Evidence of Kikuji Kawada’s ability to make a masterful book has increased spectacularly with his aptly-titled tome. There are clearly elements of his great opus The Map (1965) contained within the DNA of Vortex, not least for the cover’s chilling allusions to the scars of war left on urban environs. Yet, Kawada’s extractions of the zeitgeist carved into the depths of Tokyo have taken on a fundamentally twisted form here, resulting in surely one of the most bewildering books in some time. Spending time in its company is an intense experience; with extraordinary energy and stamina, the claustrophobic, seemingly never-ending full-bleeds, packed with immense colours, contrasts and textures, plunge us into a strange catastrophe. Pulled predominantly from his vast Instagram archive – which, as curator Pauline Vermare notes in her accompanying essay “Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt”, feels like a “timeless conversation with a man of outstanding depth, soul and modernity” – Kawada’s visions have been augmented on matte paper, thereby summoning the impression of coming into contact with another’s memories – or indeed nightmares. The book feels like, in many ways, a culmination of Kawada’s lifelong mental-mapping, through which he has strived to find the “clues to the future and the whereabouts of my spirit.” Yet, one also feels his quest into the darkness of a sky from which the sun has fallen is but over yet.

5. Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well
Steidl / Moderna Museet

There are few experiences as ecstatic as encountering a Nan Goldin slideshow in its intended form. With that said, since her breakthrough The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), Goldin has produced several books-on-films which have both eschewed and embraced the artist’s original vision for her slideshows. This Will Not End Well is a stunning culmination of all of them, and the first time we can truly appreciate, in one place, the breadth and depth of her work as a filmmaker. The book’s exquisitely-paced sequences are true to their sources; flickering glimpses of light, sinking deeper into the night. Whilst its filmic debt is obviously strong, the black spaces of the pages also remind us that Goldin’s slideshows are, too, films made out of stills. The statis of each frame is heightened here on the page, the result being a reinforcement of the artist’s use of photography as memoir, as preservation, as a talisman against loss. And now, in place of the soundtracks, one hears whirring, whistling and voices. They are different voices, all telling the same story: of passages in and out of addiction; of families lost and found; of romantic obsession until death. There is much pain and heartache to be found here – but also, when it is most needed, love, tenderness and strength.

6. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Byker
Dewi Lewis

Dewi Lewis’ republishing of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Byker (1983), a very distinct and authentic snapshot of British cultural life during the 1970s, feels timely in this moment of heightened social inequality and reflection. It is of course a testament to the incredible depth and power of this body of work, which documents the Finish photographer’s deeply-lived encounters with the terraced, working-class suburb of Newcastle; it was amongst the steep cobbled streets and smoking chimney pots that Konttinen found home. Whilst Byker was destined for redevelopment and eventually bulldozed (along with Konttinen’s own house) to make way for the Byker Wall estate, the photographs do not actively court the reader’s sentimental responses. Instead, they bear an intensity of living and loving, of struggle, resilience and, above all, community. The photographs have been handled with tremendous respect, exemplarily reproduced in tritones and re-sequenced alongside local anecdotes, many of which are published for the first time. Although Konttinen’s introductory text yields wonderful insightfulness, sensitivity and wit, it is her eye that exhibits the greatest empathy. It is perhaps an empathy that only photography, with its ability to, even decades later, relay and multiply a human consciousness, could elicit.

7. Sayuri Ichida, Absentee
the(M) éditions / IBASHO

Looking for the ties that connect the photographs contained within Sayuri Ichida’s Absentee is like groping for Ariadne’s mythical thread, until one realises that the seeking is essentially its point. Though oftentimes elaborate, the book does not feel overproduced or too precious; it is a consummate piece of bookmaking, ranking amongst the finest and most memorable of the collaborations between the(M) éditions and IBASHO. Ichida has reworked the traditional category of elegy (in this case, in honour of her mother) to impressive effect, inviting a variety of viewpoints which can only be gained through act – or process – of feeling. Feather-light in one’s palm, the book is comprised of multiple Japanese bound gatefolds that house four-image sequences. They reveal urban structures, scenes from nature and Ichida’s own body, inverted in silver inks on black matte paper, eliciting an elemental, even ritualistic, experience. For all of Ichida’s emphasis on touch and surface, the book’s dualities – between positive and negative, exteriority and interiority – seem to constantly point, in a very visceral way, to something much deeper. In the strange, tense symmetries of worlds Ichida has sketched, what really comes through is the power of their being in a book: frail but immovable.

8. Samuel Fosso, African Spirits
Sébastien Girard

The latest gem to emerge from the printing workshop of Sébastien Girard is African Spirits by Samuel Fosso, a most enigmatic artist who, since his early experimentations in performative self-portraiture in his Bangui studio in the 1970s, has never stood still. Although it is, in design terms, a comparatively restrained follow-up to the dashing Studio Photo Nationale (2021), Girard’s decision to print Fosso’s legendary series as a newspaper-format risograph publication is characteristically wise, for here is a work concerned with the media, celebrity and the history of representation. Fosso references and restages (or moreover parodies) famous photographs – including mugshots, press images and studio portraits – of prominent personalities of 20th century Black liberation movements, the most iconic of which is Carl Fischer’s 1968 Esquire cover showing Muhammad Ali impaled by arrows, martyred as St. Sebastian. We also find Fosso self-styled as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, two principal thinkers of Négritude. Indeed, the posture of revolt – a voice of raising up, a voice of freedom, a voice for the retrieved spirit – propels these performances. What’s more, through his extension of photography’s role in the construction of myths – this book only the latest chapter – Fosso reminds us that what’s past is always prologue.

9. JH Engström, The Frame
Pierre von Kleist

Believing in man today is complicated; what is left to admire, desire or envy? There has been no shortage of meditations on masculinity in recent years, but JH Engström’s, which is entitled The Frame, stands out for its scope and sincerity. The daunting exterior of this black, almost bible-like, book belies what lies inside: three-decades-worth of portraits of the men in Engström’s life; trans and cis, naked and bruised, desperate and vulnerable, sometimes violent but never fantasy (someone else’s, theirs, his). Divided into roughly-edged chapters, which either begin or end with a portrait of the artist himself, the rhythmic sequencing is, whilst skilfully sustained and indeed thematised, totally unconcerned with the language or logic of a single, sovereign gender. On the contrary, these broken faces find themselves mirrored by the frost-shattered, ice-aged rocks of Engström’s native region of Värmland in Sweden, which bracket – or frame – this book, which is really more like a refracted self-portrait. The effect is startlingly existential. What Engström invites us to find is the anima within. This is, after all, what makes us human.

10. Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice
Radius Books / Yossi Milo

Volatility, tactility, mercurial, the sublime: these are the words that come to mind when perusing Meghann Riepenhoff’s exquisite Ice. Although it is delivered with an immaculate blind debossed cover bearing frosted imprints, the imagery within is anything but. By producing cyanotypes through an unpredictable process of physically tracing ice – in varied temperature degrees, water types and crystalline structures – onto photographic paper, Riepenhoff has clearly conducted herself with great integrity, putting herself at the mercy of natural forces in an era when human urges to contain the environment have caused unprecedented destruction to our planet. Because her prints are left unfixed – in a state of flux from the point of their conception – their being reproduced on the page naturally limits their inherent drama. Nevertheless, it is by way of the book’s cumulative effect that Riepenhoff successfully evokes the fluidity in the frozen. These are the words which title the beautiful text by Rebecca Solnit, who writes: ‘… there was the yearning of blue, which is itself the colour of yearning because it is the colour of distant things…’ Riepenhoff reminds us that they are also the blues that kicked off the photobook in 1843: the blues of Anna Atkins. How wonderful it is to see her legacy live on in such spellbinding ways.♦

—
Alex Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words. 

Images:

1-Cover of Carmen Winant, Arrangements (Self Publish, Be Happy/Images Vevey, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey.

2-Tearsheet from Carmen Winant, Arrangements (Self Publish, Be Happy/Images Vevey, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey.

3-‘Mattias. Study for The Night Porter (1974)’ from Collier Schorr, August (MACK, 2022). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

4-Detail from Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (Hatje Cantz, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Hauser & Wirth.

5-From Kikuji Kawada, Vortex (Akaaka, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Akaaka.

6-From ‘The Other Side’ (1992–2021) in Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well (Steidl/Moderna Museet, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Steidl and Moderna Museet.

7-‘Kids with Collected Junk Near Byker Bridge, Byker’ (1971) from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Byker (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

8-‘#207’ (2021) from Sayuri Ichida, Absentee (the(M) éditions/IBASHO, 2022). Courtesy the artist, the(M) éditions and IBASHO.

9-‘Self-Portrait (Muhammad Ali)’ (2008) from Samuel Fosso, African Spirits (Sébastien Girard, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Sébastien Girard.

10-From JH Engström, The Frame (Pierre von Kleist, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jean-Kenta Gauthier.

11-From Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice (Radius Books/Yossi Milo, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Radius Books and Yossi Milo.