Russet Lederman Archives

Reclaiming women’s place in Japanese photography

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

Roula Seikaly | Interview | 7 May 2025

Once in a while,

we should look into each other’s eyes.

Otherwise we might feel lost.

I’m so glad you are here.

–Kawauchi Rinko, from the eyes, the ears

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 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

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• 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 2021

Selected by Alessandro Merola and Tim Clark

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

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

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

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

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

3. Hoda Afshar, Speak The Wind
MACK

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

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

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

5. Catherine Opie
Phaidon

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

6. Raymond Meeks, Somersault
MACK

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

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

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

8. Massao Mascaro, Sub Sole
Chose Commune

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

9. Frida Orupabo
Sternberg Press and Kunsthall Trondheim

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

10. Alexis Cordesse, Talashi
Atelier EXB

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

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

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

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

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

Images:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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