Taous Dahmani Archives

Between history and fable: Mashid Mohadjerin at FOMU, Antwerp

Channelling the voice of a feminist naqqāl – a reciter of epic tales – Mashid Mohadjerin reweaves the fables and histories her father entrusted to her, threading memory and myth across generations as part of her new parallel book-exhibition project, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish. Through image, collage and legend, Mohadjerin rewrites inherited patriarchal narratives into a visual language of resistance; reframing memory, masculinity and the legacies of displacement against the broader landscape of Iranian politics and constructions of manhood, Taous Dahmani writes.

Taous Dahmani | Exhibition/photobook review | 26 June 2025

Once upon a time, a little boy was playing in a shallow river winding through a sunlit mountain. One day, that same boy had to hide in the river’s meagre depths to escape blazing bullets. I grew up with that story – frightened for the boy, terrified of the men with guns. It was a bedtime story, but also a way of passing down history: the lived realities of colonial occupation in Algeria. The storyteller was my father. The little boy was my father, too.

For Mashid Mohadjerin, one of the many stories she heard from her father began like this: “A firing squad waiting for the smoke of their guns to clear.” An action-packed scene – gunfire, enemies and heroes – one of whom was the artist’s great-great-great-grandfather. But beneath the drama lies a deeper truth on of wars of ideology and territory. It’s another tale where history and bedtime fable meet, where legend is used to carry the weight of lived experience. In her latest book, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish (2025), Mohadjerin remembers an exchange with her own father: ‘“Do you want me to continue reading?” he asked, his voice low, as if not wanting to break the weight of the moment. “Yes, please,” she replied, lost in the threads of history that twist and loop around us, familiar yet foreign, like a story that feels both ours and not ours.’

Displaced, Mashid Mohadjerin’s father arrived in Belgium with his family in the 1980s; by then, my own father was already telling bedtime stories of 1950s Algeria to my sisters and then me in Paris. These stories may have been crafted to captivate children, but they were also a way to share a past too heavy or too painful to be spoken plainly – so it came cloaked in a different narrative form. In both our families – and in many others that have been shaped by the silences of displacement or colonial violence – history is often passed down, wrapped in narrative: it is rendered more fantastical than the brutal realities it conceals, skirting around political, religious, or personal taboos. Yet through storytelling, these histories endure. They keep alive those who left us too soon or disappeared without trace. Stories then offer continuity to the fragmented.

In light of this, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish becomes an experimental visual family tree, an autobiography made of tales: reimagined and retold from a position that resists silence. Mashid Mohadjerin weaves together peaceful black and white landscapes taken as she retraced the places where family stories may have unfolded. These images set the stage, grounding myth in geography, and searching for ancestral traces. The narrative drifts across time and place – leaping between centuries and countries – yet always returning to the thread of memory as story. Whether encountered in book form or in an exhibition (as recently shown at FOMU, Antwerp), Mohadjerin’s characters refuse to remain confined to the frame or the page. The figures escape the constraints of their own contours, reaching toward other forms and shapes, seeking to engage across time, space, and medium. This gesture is present throughout the work, but most vividly in the collages, where fragments converge and overlap.

Whether knights, princes, mullahs, boxers – Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish is populated by characters of many forms. But it’s impossible not to notice that all these figures are men. History, like legend, has long privileged the bravery of men, casting them as the central actors of the past. And indeed, Mohadjerin’s project began with the discovery of a family manuscript from the 1850s – rich with twists, turns and dramatic episodes, but almost entirely devoid of female agency. These male-centred ancestral narratives did more than recount what happened; they shaped how the world was seen and remembered, reinforcing gendered hierarchies and social structures across generations. As Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote in her 1989 essay Grandma’s Story (recently republished by Silver Press, 2025), that kind of ‘story is either a mere practice of the art of rhetoric or a repository of obsolete customs.’ But at some point, displaced fathers began telling their stories to daughters – not simply to preserve tradition, but to offer the knowledge needed to question it.

Mohadjerin’s narrative strategies deliberately unsettle these inherited power structures. She reclaims the storyteller’s role, becoming a contemporary feminist naqqāl – a reciter of epic tales – who reimagines the myths of kings and heroes through a woman’s gaze. She doesn’t just inherit the narrative; she takes control of it. In other words ‘Diseuse, Thought-Woman, Spider-Woman, griotte, storytalker, fortune-teller, witch’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989), Mohadjerin transformed the audible into the narratable, and the narratable into the visible. She created a visual language for family stories – one that also speaks to the longer histories of Iranian politics and constructions of manhood. In Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish, metaphors of masculinity abound: rocks that stand firm, tensed muscles, men bearing arms, horsemen in motion – figures of strength, pride and endurance. But because the story is told by a woman, other images emerge too: portraits of vulnerable elders, colourfully dressed men, ageing bodies, men caught in moments of dance or struggle. These juxtapositions expand the visual vocabulary of manhood, revealing its tenderness, contradictions, and fragility alongside its inherited postures of power.

With Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish, Mashid Mohadjerin challenges not only traditional photobook narratives but also prevalent modes of storytelling. Nothing is fixed; everything is pulled apart, non-linear, and layered. By attending to the silences and gaps, knowledge about one’s family and homeland takes on new, unexpected forms. Blending poetry, essay, archival collages, portraits, and landscape photography, Mohadjerin offers a radical reimagining of how stories embody identity, history and culture. To summon Trinh T. Minh-ha again: ‘The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the responsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring.’♦

All images courtesy the artist and FOMU, Antwerp © Mashid Mohadjerin

Mashid Mohadjerin – Spiralling Outward ran at FOMU, Antwerp until 8 June 2025.

** This essay is dedicated to all the story tellers in Iran and beyond, who keep reading bedtime stories, despite it all.

—
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.

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What We’re Reading #4: Summer 2025

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

Thomas King | Resource | 12 June 2025

A Criticism Review 2.0 | Objektiv #25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—
Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and a student on BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism, Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Images:

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

2-Ariella Aïsha Azoulay © Yonatan Vinitsky

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

4-Howard Greenberg © Bastiaan Woudt

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On the evocative power of blur

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

Taous Dahmani | Exhibition review | 23 Jan 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Æther is on at Stevenson Amsterdam until 22 February 2025.

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

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• 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

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s mirror to queer and black identity

A journey to Nottingham Contemporary prompts reflection on Tina M. Campt’s method of “writing to art” in Taous R. Dahmani’s review of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Exposure. Dahmani writes to Sepuya’s introspective world, where intricate dialogues between mirrors, photography and identity unfold, challenging traditional spectatorship dynamics. Through a lens of queer and black representation, Sepuya’s work invites viewers to confront societal norms, embrace complexity, and navigate the fluid boundaries of self-presentation.

Taous R. Dahmani | Exhibition review | 14 May 2024

On a morning train to Nottingham, I decided to revisit a passage from Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze (2021). When the book came out, I had highlighted this sentence: ‘Seated cross-legged on the floor is my go-to position for writing to art.’ The statement struck a chord with me, prompting a personal vow to try Campt’s method. This visit seemed the perfect chance, but once there, I feared the invigilators might find it unconventional. Would I be allowed to sit on the floor of Nottingham Contemporary, ‘sliding down a wall and claiming the undervalued real estate of a gallery floor,’ as Campt wrote? The reason why I wanted to attempt that strategy in order to “write to” Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s exhibition was because Campt claimed it ‘minimis[ed] you as a viewer and maximis[ed] the work itself,’ adding: ‘Looking up at [the artwork] both breaks up and breaks down some of the traditional dynamics of spectatorship and visual mastery. And when the subject of that art is Black folks, challenging the dynamics of spectatorship and visual mastery is an extremely important intervention.’

I first encountered Sepuya’s work in 2020 at his solo show in London’s Modern Art, where black figuration and constructed stills through layered acts of looking were key. Four years later, upon entering Exposure at Nottingham Contemporary, I was greeted by a camera on a tripod before a black curtain held by a disembodied brown hand and bulldog clips. Facing this first photograph, I noticed my reflection in the protective glass, positioning my head’s shadow where the operator would be. At that moment, I realised that directly facing Sepuya’s work, rather than ‘looking up’ at it, might be beneficial. This exhibition wasn’t the place for Campt’s method of claiming gallery floors; Sepuya’s large-scale pieces demand that we meet them eye-to-eye.

As I approached Mirror Study (_Q5A2059) (2016), I understood that I was looking at Sepuya’s camera – meaning a mirror must have been placed between the lens and me. This apparatus, and placement of the mirror, suggests the artist is more concerned with what surrounds his camera – objects, people, himself – than with the eventual viewers. The mirror acts as a barrier, its thin reflective metal layer atop glass designed to bounce light back, prompting rumination on the idea of reflection, the image created by light and about photography. In The Mirror and the Palette (2021), Jennifer Higgie elucidated that Johannes Gutenberg opened a mirror-making business in 1438, and within just six years, he pioneered the invention of the printing press. This progression connects the concept of reflection to the notion of infinite reproduction, which ultimately lays the groundwork for photographic theory. Indeed, the coexistence of photography and mirrors has become paradigmatic. In his seminal 1978 essay, which serves as the introduction to the catalogue for his exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, John Szarkowski leveraged the metaphor of the mirror to explore the introspective and personal approaches photographers bring to their medium. Similarly, the mirror is an integral part of Sepuya’s artistic process, acting as a catalyst that facilitates layers of analysis of his surroundings. Since 2010, the artist has focused on the artist’s studio as a subject, employing a self-imposed limitation akin to the protocols of a conceptual artist. He describes this approach as a strategy to ‘limit the number of variables as the clearest way to pose a question.’

As I progressed to the next set of images, the initially elusive figure of the photographer gradually emerged. Sepuya skilfully navigates the frame, either concealing or unveiling fragments of his undressed body, and thus, his identity. He delicately reveals details of his anatomy, including the hairs on his neck and arms, and close-ups of his back and torso. Photograph after photograph, his progressive apparition transforms the studio into a stage. We are witnessing the documentation of a performance, a play with characters and, of course, a message. The photographs or the mirror – in Sepuya’s world they are in constant dialogue – predominantly depict self-portraits or portraits of close friends and lovers. Beyond mere self-recognition through self-representation, there is a definitive act of self-presentation; a celebration of the artist’s freedom and agency. The performed gestures subvert gender binaries and reclaim their fluidities, so much so that Sepuya quite literally blurs surfaces and thus boundaries. We observe the movement of bodies on a stage, enacting intimacy and at the same time rendering a political identity that is both queer and black. Sepuya’s photographs recall the words of Judith Butler, who noted in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) that the performative aspect of gender enables subversive actions capable of challenging and destabilising conventional norms. By inviting his friends to act for the mirror-camera in his studio-stage, Sepuya creates an experimental sanctuary for the development of a queer visual language. Engaging with Sepuya’s photographs is not straightforward; they challenge us to interpret and decode, but, at the same time, the repeated frameworks facilitate a steady understanding of his visual strategy. If, indeed, the mirror is not just a reflection but a boundary, then viewers are mere welcomed spectators. The exhibition feels like an invitation to partake in the acknowledgment of too often marginalised queer black and brown individuals. Viewers are brought into their proximity, invited to stand alongside them, yet rightfully kept at bay.

Sepuya’s work draws from a rich history of queer imagery, from the kouros figures of Ancient Greece to Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Snap Shot (1987) and Caravaggio’s ephebes. These motifs have come to symbolise queer identity, thus raising the question: how can we interpret the revival of these motifs in today’s photographic production? As Sepuya bestowed, as an invitation to think complexly, ‘representation is not an agenda,’ and indeed his visual language strives for something more, something that revived, for me, José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Here, Muñoz discusses a process in which individuals tactically interact with societal norms to forge a self that critically diverges from mainstream culture. He emphasises behaviours and gestures as crucial to the identity formation of queers of colour, beginning his book with the statement: ‘There is a certain lure to the spectacle of one queer standing onstage alone, with or without props, bent on the project of opening up a world of queer language, lyricism, perceptions, dreams, visions, aesthetics and politics.” It leads one to question whether Muñoz is actually describing Sepuya’s own photographs some 20-odd-years before their creations.

The studio and its “inhabitants” are constants in Sepuya’s work, existing in a fluid space where time seems relative and ideas and iterations evolve and transform. In the second gallery, elements such as mobile mirror flats from the studio transition into exhibition structures showcasing his latest photographs. Unlike the first room where close examination was encouraged, here Sepuya invites viewers to navigate the photographs, guided by their spatial arrangement. He transforms the space by bridging the private theatricality of the studio with the shared communality of the gallery. Leaving the exhibition, and tucking away my copy with Campt’s book, I was reassured that sitting wasn’t necessary, as Sepuya himself ‘maximises’ his work. He shifts spectator dynamics, elevating and redefining engagement by challenging traditional approaches. On the train back to London, I was left with the feeling that visitors ought to stand in the gallery, embracing homoerotic pleasure, whilst also striving to become accustomed to nuanced discomfort and grappling with complex ideas about image-making. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich/Paris © Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Exposure ran at Nottingham Contemporary until 5 May 2024.

—
Taous R. 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. Since 2019, she has been the editorial director of The Eyes, an annual publication that explores the links between photography and societal issues. 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). Dahmani is set to curate two exhibitions at Jaou Tunis, Tunisia (2024).

Images:

1-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Twilight Studio (0X5A4176), 2022.

2-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Model Study (0X5A7126), 2021.

3-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Daylight Studio Camera Lesson (0X5A2613), 2022.

4-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Pedestal (0X5A8997), 2022.

5-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Studio Mirror (_DSF6207), 2023.

Through the heart of the American South

In his new book, Hardtack, Rahim Fortune compiles nearly a decade of work, blending documentary with personal history within the context of post-emancipation America. Through coming-of-age portraits that traverse survivalism and land migration, Fortune illustrates African American and Chickasaw Nation communities. As Taous R. Dahmani observes, the iconography of the American South is drawn between Fortune’s Hardtack and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, released only a few days after — both of which raise questions that serve to redefine ‘Americana’.

Taous R. Dahmani | Book review | 17 Apr 2024

At the end of March, something very odd happened: Loose Joints dropped Rahim Fortune’s second photobook Hardtack, and, a few days later, Beyoncé released her eighth album Cowboy Carter. I can almost hear you – yes, you, reader – wondering, what’s the connection? Well, there are several. Firstly, it serves as the perfect soundtrack to look at Fortune’s photographs. As if sound was taking form. Beyoncé’s extensive 27-track list echoes Fortune’s 72 photographs; her lyrics resonating with his visual language. Both artists delve into the iconography and sound of cowboys, churches, southern mothers and daughters, rodeo, sashes and Fortune even closes his book with a “Queen Coronation”. Besides this serendipitous overlap, both artists also actively reclaim, redefine and adjust the notion of “Americana”. Wrapped in a denim-like cover, Hardtack speaks of a specific geography and moment: Texas today, the USA in the 2020s.

Beyond the anecdote of their shared Texas origins, both explore the history of the American South – one through music, the other through photography – connecting its past with its present. 2024 is a pivotal election year, with the southern states bearing a significant responsibility in shaping the country’s future (and, arguably, the world’s). Therefore, there is an urgent need to disseminate an alternative understanding or narrative of what the US might be. After all, the title of Fortune’s book, Hardtack, refers to an emergency survival food, made from flour, water and salt, signalling that we are in the midst of a critical juncture. At a time when states are banning books to erase chapters of US history, Hardtack feels like a welcomed defiance.

In her proudly made-in-America “country” album, Beyoncé embraces the soundscape of the southern states and her Black musical heritage, blending blues, soul, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel. Similarly, an incredible living encyclopaedia of American photography, Fortune quotes – or samples – his ancestors, from Walker Evans’s depictions of southern architecture to Roy DeCarava’s intimate portraits of Black life. Just as Beyoncé pays homage to Linda Martell, the first commercially successful Black female artist in country music, Fortune channels the social documentary style of Milton Rogovin, his portrayal of African-American communities akin to Earlie Hudnall Jr, and mirrors the political consciousness embodied by Consuelo Kanaga. Furthermore, Fortune examines Arthur Rothstein’s documentation of African-American families in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, originally captured for the Farm Security Administration and later featured in Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941). With Hardtack, Fortune engages in a self-conscious dialogue with photography’s history.

The parallel between music and photography transcends mere coincidence; its potency lies in their shared democratic practice and dissemination, but it also resonates with what Tina M. Campt described in A Black Gaze (2021) as a ‘broader commitment to understanding visual culture through its entanglement with sound, and highlighting the centrality of sonic and visual frequency to the work of Black contemporary artists.’ Already, in 2017, Campt beckoned us to listen to images, and more recently, she revisited the idea employing the concept of frequency to challenge ‘how we see’, adding that ‘the physical and emotional labour required to see these images gives us profound insights into the everyday experiences of Black folks as racialised subjects.’ Listening to Fortune’s Hardtack is to pick up on various stories and histories such as the legacy of Gee’s Bend quilts, crafted by descendants of enslaved individuals who toiled on cotton plantations. These local women united to establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, a worker’s cooperative that enabled crucial economic opportunities and offered political empowerment. As Imani Perry eloquently states in the book’s concluding essay: ‘What we know as Black Texas was birthed through captivity. This land has been a bounty; and also a burden.’ Fortune captures the architecture of past power and oppression – the grand plantation houses alongside the slaves’ huts –and the remnants of this legacy, showcasing what barely survives in the wake of US history. Beyoncé’ sings in “YA YA” (2024): “My family lived and died in America, hm / Whole lotta red in that white and blue, huh / History can’t be erased, oh-oh / Are you lookin’ for a new America? (America).” In “Night Ride Tracks, Archer, Florida” (2020), Fortune kneels down to capture the sunlight beaming on the old train tracks, which bear witness to the 1928 Rosewood massacre during the era of Jim Crow laws. In “AMEN” (2024), Beyoncé’s reminds her listener: “This house was built with blood and bone / And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled.”

On the following page, Fortune presents a captivating portrait of his partner, Miranda, underscoring that his documentation of the American South is as personal as it is political. With roots in both the African-American and Chickasaw Nation communities, Fortune traverses rural towns that are close to his heart, pausing to engage in conversations with friends. Fortune embraces the formal conventions of documentary traditions whilst ushering us into novel sensations and uncharted emotional territories. Opening the book, we can almost grasp the wind, and, as we delve deeper, we feel the humidity of the Mississippi enveloping us, the scorching sun on the road casting its light upon each image. His photographs record what stands proud, what is forced to break, what disappeared but can still be traced. In Fortune’s photographs, people are praying, watching, playing, waiting, celebrating, caring and driving; leading an unremarkable life because ‘attending to the infraordinary and the quotidian reveals why the trivial, the mundane, or the banal are in fact essential to the lives of the dispossessed and the possibility of black futurity.”’ Texas also serves as the backdrop for Fortune’s personal grief – as depicted in his first book I can’t stand to see you Cry (2021) – and serves as a place where remembrance holds paramount importance, as evidenced by the tattooed dates of key life moments on his friend’s skin. Fortune’s Hardtack is a poignant tribute, both a requiem for those lost and a homage to those whose actions altered the course of history. Yet, it is also a celebration, capturing the essence of joy found in everyday moments and special occasions alike. It is this unique and delicate coexistence of remembrance and revelry that imbues Hardtack with its profound resonance, showcasing the depth of Fortune’s artistic maturity.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Loose Joints. © Rahim Fortune

Hardtack is published by Loose Joints.

Images:

1-Rahim Fortune, Windmill House, Hutto, Texas, 2022.

2-Rahim Fortune, Praise Dancers, Edna, Texas, 2022.

3-Rahim Fortune, Willies Chapel, Austin, Texas, 2021.

4-Rahim Fortune, Hardware, Granger, Texas, 2018.

5-Rahim Fortune, Highway I-244 (Greenwood), Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2021.

6-Rahim Fortune, Gas Pump, Selma, Alabama, 2023.

7-Rahim Fortune, Deonte, New Sweden, Texas, 2022.

8-Rahim Fortune, Ace (Miss Juneteenth), Galveston, Texas, 2022.

9-Rahim Fortune, Night Ride Tracks, Archer, Florida, 2020.

10-Rahim Fortune, Tinnie Pettway, Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 2023.

11-Rahim Fortune, VHS Television, Dallas, Texas, 2021.

12-Rahim Fortune, Abandoned Church, Otter Creek, Florida, 2020.

Glitched videocalls from Gaza

Disruptions, a new book from Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji published by Loose Joints, collates two years of glitched video calls with his family in Gaza while living in Paris. In solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people during the latest act of devastating destruction and erasure by the state of Israel, all proceeds will go towards the NGO Medical Aid Palestine providing critical medical care and support on the ground. Elisa Medde considers this evocation of the emotional and physical separation that occurs across borders.

Elisa Medde | Book review | 5 Feb 2024

The lives and paths of images are often elusive. We perhaps should approach them suspiciously, certainly with hesitation, wary of what they could be carrying: power, meaning, even truth of their own. Evidence. The understanding that they actually contain none of these in themselves, but rather tend to reflect, expose and manifest the contexts, meanings and evidences that we build and consign into and about them is sometimes liberating, sometimes confusing and most regularly confronting. Confronting is an apt word: it implies reflection, which is something images are very good at. They reflect well, and they reflect back.

Between 2015 and 2017, Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji assembled a series of images titled Disruptions. Forced in a condition of displacement because of the difficulties in travelling to besieged Gaza from his Parisian residency, Batniji maintained contact with his mother and other family members via video calls on WhatsApp, which were constantly disrupted and interrupted by poor and shaky line connections. Network issues would destructure and dismantle faces, streets and rooms into clusters of pixels, blurred lines or solid blocks of colour. Initially interested in the formal phenomenon, Batniji started taking screenshots on his mobile device. Curious about these glitchy, seemingly random effects, he transformed them into an archive, noting their dates and ordering them as an inventory.

Being displaced, being exiled, being far away means, first and foremost, being absent. This condition carries a shift in time, in how the flow of life is experienced. One’s life is split in two, between the lived space, which flows through the present tense, and the other, distant space, which flows through the narrated tense. Life happening in the latter is mediated by accounts and recounts, filtered by phones, letters and screens. It depends on a means of communication, and is deferred from real time, compressed into clusters of time and forced into synthesis, fragmented in interrupted flows. In Batniji’s long-distance relations, one end lives a life in waiting, split between two conditions while the other lies in an occupied and besieged land in which communication infrastructure is itself subjugated to dynamics of power, apartheid and retaliation. The mere existence of such infrastructure is just one of the fragilities excruciatingly trying to keep together life itself in spite of all, in spite of the constant attempt to erase it altogether. The very idea of real time communication feels like an impossible privilege, with the present tense constantly postponed and prevented.

Disruption became a series of 86 screenshots, taken between 24 April 2015 and 23 June 2017. In 2019, it was exhibited at MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine in the group exhibition Lifelines – an Exhibition of Legends, which proposed reflections on identities and their processes of construction and legitimation. Installed as a chronology-based grid of 16 x 24 cm ink-jet prints, their impact was described by curator Frank Lamy: ‘A possible connection is established between the disturbed conversation and the violent events taking place simultaneously in Gaza. The artist thus delivers a part of this common intimacy that stretches between two territories.’

The series has now been published in photobook form by Loose Joints, representing an act of solidarity with the struggle of Palestinian people during the latest act of devastating destruction and erasure by the state of Israel, which has produced, at the moment of writing, about 26,700 Palestinian victims, of whom an estimated 40% are children. Approximately 70% of homes in Gaza have been demolished, and its complete education and health system has been wiped out. The surviving population in Gaza remains with no access to basic survival level of food, water, electricity, health care or shelter, all while the silence and connivence of larger part of the international community threatens the very existence of human rights, and of the agencies and systems created for its protection and guarantee. Batniji’s family itself, as we learn from the book dedication, has been decimated by Israeli bombings, together with all who sought refuge in their family home in the Al-Shijaya neighbourhood of Gaza. All proceeds from the book will go towards the NGO Medical Aid Palestine, which provides medical care and support on the ground.

Batniji is an artist who has kneaded his own story with the histories of his motherland, Palestine, constantly shifting back and forth between private and public, pointing his sharp eye towards the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of dominance, control and survival in the face of colonial violence. His work ultimately revolves around consequences: he detaches himself from the narration of events to look at the effects they produce and force – on bodies, souls, landscapes, memories, connections and communications. His whole artistic production functions as an inventory of traces, a testament to the irreversibility of events and their remains. The dates, stretches of time and recurrences become crucial elements of a life and an artistic production that also takes the shape of a ‘chronology of displacement’, as writer Taous R. Dahmani powerfully describes in her essay, included in the book in English, French and Arabic.

The book sequences the images chronologically, with the dates setting the pace of the narration into sections. The almost unreadable photographs initially confuse and frustrate the viewer into searching for visual anchors and understanding, forcing one to slow down, to go back and forth. The sequence powerfully transmits a growing, helpless tension, with the pace of looking increasing as the pages turn, compelling the eye to almost frantically search for something that is not there – anymore.

These images inevitably resonate differently today than they did in 2019. Whilst war and destruction and disruption were always the backdrop and the filter through which we experience them, they assume a different weight, a different meaning, a different evidence in early 2024. Our visual context has changed: we now see them after having spent the past four months helplessly watching the sheer horror live streaming from Gaza, witnessing the real time destruction of an entire city: houses, bodies, cars, trees, animals, streets and children. Looking at Disruptions today even more powerfully recalls what is behind these interrupted conversations: these glitched images scream shattered buildings, torn bodies, disintegrated lives, missed last goodbyes. They are images of war. To quote Dahmani: ‘Digital tension grips his attention – a screenshot would have been a mere portrait a few minutes earlier. Glitches are errors, defects that shatter the quality of an image. The pixelated screenshots engage our mental images of what war does: images of destruction, the ruins left by combat zones, the elimination of persons, and disappeared loved ones.’

The images in this necessary, urgent book leave their latent imprint in our brains and keep haunting us, as probably Gaza will. Their abstract nature feels like the only way to fathom the unspeakable, to make sense of the unbearable. They arrest us, confront us and reflect on us our responsibility in all of this – the passive spectatorship we all will have to reckon with. ♦

Disruptions is published by Loose Joints.

—
Elisa Medde is a photography editor, curator and writer. She has a background in Art History, Iconology and Photographic Studies, and currently serves as a lecturer for the Photography MA at ECAL, Lausanne, Switzerland. Medde has nominated for prizes and chaired juries, including the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award, Prix Elysée and MAST Photography Grant on Industry and Work, and her writing has appeared in FlashArt, PhotoEye, Time Magazine, Foam Magazine, Something We Africans Got, Vogue Italia / L’Uomo Vogue, YET Magazine, the Aperture PhotoBook Review and artists’ books. Between 2012–23, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Foam Magazine, twice the recipient of a Lucie Award for Best Photography Magazine. She is the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Award for Photography Publishing 2023.

Ming Smith

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

Book review by Taous R. Dahmani

Taous R. Dahmani contemplates the ways in which Ming Smith’s self-portraits – their heterogeneity and transformability – constitute a practice of affirming her kaleidoscopic being to the world.

Several years ago, in the hope of discovering early photographs by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, I opened, for the first time, the pages of The Black Photographers Annual (1973). While Moutoussamy-Ashe’s work does not appear in the first volume – but only from the second – starting my reading with the first issue meant I came across the name of Ming Smith and what was apparently her very first publication. Launched in 1973, on the initiative of the Kamoinge Workshop, the periodical operated as a unique space for African-American photographers to determine independently both the content and conditions of publication and give them control over words and images: something that had been denied to the vast majority of them up until then. In her Aperture monograph (2020), Smith – who was the first female member of the collective – recalled: “this group of Black male photographers wanted to take control of their own images – their humanity.” The empowering agency necessary for the implementation of such an editorial project is an effective way for photographers to come into existence as authors of their images. In the introduction to the first volume, Clayton Riley suggested that The Black Photographers Annual enabled an “awareness of self”. At the time, I understood this phrase in line with consciousness-raising practices in the broader political context of 1970s America and its possible links with the affirmation of the African-American photographers’ “photographic identity”.

Of the forty-nine photographers published in The Black Photographers Annual, I remember being struck by Smith’s portfolio. More specifically, the second photograph piqued my interest when I realised that the silhouette in the lower left corner could be the reflection of the photographer holding her camera with both hands. Through a game of reflections, that can sometimes make us lose our spatial cues, the figure of – what I still hope is – Smith comes into being. The relationship between the photographic process and that of the construction of an identity was asserted by Smith as early as 1973 as quoted in her bio from The Black Photographers Annual: “My photographs attempt to open the passageway to my understanding of myself.” A passage Smith would take throughout her career, making her self-portraits some of the most interesting aspects of her work. Seeing herself, beyond imposed images.

As Neelika Jayawardane wrote: “When Smith picks up her camera and photographs the intimacy of her face and body in a multitude of situations and places, it is a response to her own beautiful aliveness, her situatedness within a moving world.” Framing herself at the bottom of the picture is something she would do again in the 1989 self-portrait with her Canon camera, where, against the backdrop of a floral wallpaper, she contorts her torso in order to aim at a mirror, the reflected image revealing the upper part of her face, the skin of her back and her hand, once again, holding her camera. This image ought to be considered in line with the long and popular tradition of women photographers’ self-portraits-with-their-cameras, as exemplified by one of Smith’s friends and influences, Lisette Model – from the 1955 half-naked bathroom picture to the 1982 Paris hotel room photograph.

In one of the interviews published in her monograph, Smith stated: “being a photographer was a journey that was about my conversation with my camera.” Smith’s photographic practice is undoubtedly marked by experimentation, offering several departures and different arrivals around her identity as a photographer, a woman, an African-American, a dancer, a music-lover, etc. – an idea echoed by Trinh T. Minh-ha in When the Moon Waxes Red (1991): “Since identity can very well speak its plurality without suppressing its singularity, heterologies of knowledge give all practices of the self a festively vertiginous dimension.” Time and time again, Smith dared to turn her lens towards herself because of the urgency of affirming her kaleidoscopic being to the world. For being the first African-American female photographer to be collected by MoMA did not, according to her, make much of a difference in her life, and certainly did not interrupt the process of her own recognition and self-affirmation as a photographer.

As a model, dancer and jazz-enthusiast, performativity played a central role in Smith’s self-portraits, as exemplified in Me as Marilyn (1991) or Self-Portrait as Josephine (1986), the latter serving as a clear homage to Josephine Baker but perhaps also to Katherine Dunham, whose “Technique” Smith learnt when she arrived in New York from Ohio. In his book In the Break (2003), Fred Moten pointed out that “black performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus – invagination, rupture, collision, augmentation.” A quality we can also easily find in Smith’s 1990s Ellen Gallagher-esque collage of a 1972 self-portrait. The multitude of her self-portraits – their heterogeneity and transformability – work as an emancipatory practice. Not published in the book, and yet essential in the construction of the self through the image, is her 1986 self-portrait as she is breast-feeding her son – an image taken ten years after Deborah Willis’ triptych, I Made Space for a Good Man (1975-76), entitled after a Philadelphia College of Art professor told then-art student Willis that “a good man could have been in [her] seat.” Performing maternity for their cameras states something about female photographic experiences, disobeying traditional considerations about the constructed image of The Photographer as male and White. As bell hooks wrote in Art on My Mind (1995): “to transgress we must return to the body.” We could also mention Diane Arbus’ 1945 self-portrait with her daughter, Doon, where, once again, the maternal body is at the centre of an experimentation with the photographic medium and still asserts desire and reflexivity.

I could write many more words on Smith’s self-portraits; I could also write about Smith’s photographic walks into the night, her spirituality, the blurs, the paint, the poetic titles, the light and the darkness, the phonic substance and the auratic nature of her photographs – and a lot of people have been very good at doing just that. But when reading the interviews Smith gave about her practice, I am struck by the lexicon of sensuality used by the photographer to describe her relationship to image-making. The inexpressible in the expressed. Smith often states that she “follow[s] [her] impulses”, or that photographic discovery is “a turn-on for [her]”. Yxta Maya Murray even wrote that “she picked up her Canon and held it to her face as if it were a lover.”

So I wonder, should we not start considering Smith through the prism of the erotic? Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation (1966) and Trinh (1991) argued for “an erotics of art”; Moten too, speaking of Duke Ellington’s music (2003), spoke of an “erotics of the cut”. As such, should we not consider an erotics of Smith’s practice? After all, the cover of Smith’s monograph is her photograph entitled Male Nude, New York (1977). But what inspires me the most to make this point is Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, published in Sister Outsider (1984). For the African-American writer, poet, feminist and civil rights activist, the erotic needs to be understood as a creative power: “We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.” And she added: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” Perhaps all that is left here for me is to invite you to have a look at Smith’s monograph, as an introduction to her work and an invitation to read between the lines, with Lorde’s words in mind.♦

Taous R. Dahmani is a photography historian, PhD researcher and critic, working between Paris and London. She is interested in the links between photography and politics. She regularly gives talks at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Paris Photo and Tate Modern. She is on the editorial board of MAI:Visual Culture and Feminism and co-editor of The Eyes magazine.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

One Wall a Web

Book review by Taous R. Dahmani

The photograph on the cover of One Wall a Web is a close up of a brick wall. If it seems to block access, as an attempt to establish a border, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s book quickly turns out to be an invitation to deconstruct, brick by brick. He invites us to observe the physical and mental dismantling of racial and gendered violence as it is expressed and experienced in United States society today. Driven by the author’s impulse to tear down this wall so that, once the book is finished and closed, we find ourselves facing two abandoned bricks. Taking the metaphoric nature of these bricks as a point of departure, we might explore the forms of Wolukau-Wanambwa’s discourse through the prism of the poetics and politics of a renewed and contemporary western tradition of scrapbooking.

At first glance unsettling as a result of the multiplicity of narrative strata, leafing through One Wall a Web makes it possible to understand that the story is told both through the photographic image and by the text. Though designed in collaboration with graphic designer Roger Willems, the reader is clearly invited into Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s thoughts and state of mind. Professor in the English department of New Jersey City University and historian of the scrapbook, Ellen Gruber Garvey wrote in her 2015 article Homemade Archives: ‘Each scrapbook is a window into the life and thoughts of its maker — and into his or her reading habits.’ Reflections, judgments, positions, observations, speculations and imagination form a complex stream of consciousness. The narrative is constructed using associative jumps and analogies. Various chapters punctuate the work but do not break the flow of reverberations and resonances. Such a juxtaposition of sequences of images and texts recalls the rhythm of the films by American film maker Arthur Jafa and in particular his video APEX.

As such, Wolukau-Wanambwa orchestrates an erudite back and forth between quotes from the fascist website breitbart.com, excerpts from Allen Ginsberg’s poems Howl and America, quotations from a Donald Trump interview published in The New York Times and stanzas from Breaking Open and The Speed of Darkness by poet Muriel Rukeyser. These authors, alongside the original and appropriated photographs, are mobilised by the photographer as a network of collaborators and evoke the Rhizome theory as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (1980), 1987. Texts and images being put on the same level, the work then becomes an evolutionary device that can extend in all directions. Arborescent thinking is opposed to the line of subordination, rooted and taking form, in this case, in the history of structural racism and sexism in the United States. Polymorphic, the rhizome is thus sometimes chaotic, not in its negative sense, but for its capacity of interconnectedness, as Édouard Glissant had it. Linearity and continuum are discarded in favor of fragmentary power.

Successor to commonplace books, popular during Early Modern Europe, where authors could compile their knowledge, usually by writing information in existing books, the scrapbook is a method of textual and visual conservation, presentation and classification that usually offers a meeting point between history and personal narrative. In One Wall a Web, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa plays around with the possible interweaving between history and current events, in particular by linking his own photographs taken in recent years in Virginia, Alabama, New Jersey and New York, and appropriated archival negatives collected online, printed as positive and displayed as equals to his own images. The range of references used by the photographer-author shows his acute awareness of how history is written and told; regularly shaped by popular culture, journalists, experts, politicians and of course the Internet.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s publication aligns with Pero Gaglo Dagbovie’s statement in Reclaiming the Black Past: ‘Black history is a vital part of contemporary black culture.’ Once he had arrived in the United States, British-born Wolukau-Wanambwa lived and observed the brutality of a society against the black body and inherited the deep scar that is the violent history of African-Americans. Free, radical and sometimes brutal, the verdict proposed by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is irrevocable.

Mobilising the tradition of scrapbooks has allowed me to include the photographer in North American storytelling dating back to the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance. Many pioneering figures must be mentioned: L.S. Alexander Gumby, a queer African-American man, who kept scrapbooks on a wide range of subjects, focusing on black history and black-run newspapers whose critical muscle against the white press is groundbreaking. In his close circle, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Puerto Rican of African and German descent, also made scrapbooks which would become, among other things, the basis for the collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Another seminal person, Frederick Douglass, known to be the most photographed American man of the 19th century, also kept scrapbooks in order to create a corrective image of race representation. If today this practice seems extremely gendered and depoliticised, for the African-American community, and for these three men, scrapbooks were spaces of the expression of their liberties and their opinions, notably made with cut out newspaper photographs or family albums. Scrapbooks then became volumes that told stories, allowed sharing knowledge widely and as such became a kind of handcrafted archive, validating Jacques Derrida’s statement: ‘There is no political power without the control of the archive.’

Whether in history, or in contemporary proposals, such as that of Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s or Clarissa Sligh’s photobook entitled It Wasn’t Little Rock, the meaning of the scrapbook, its poetic range and its political force is thus, in the act of montage and juxtaposition. The cut-up technique, developed by dada artists, and popularised by William S. Burroughs, is based on the idea of making a text from fragments of all kinds. This technique was also used by Burroughs in his scrapbooks, which were visual and textual collages, and tools for prefiguring new ideas for future work. If for Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Roger Willems the scrapbook was not a direct source of inspiration for the design of the book, Wolukau-Wanambwa has confided to me the fact that he had been keeping red-fabric scrapbooks for many years. Definitively not a work in progress but a finished object, One Wall a Web, by the combination of his own texts, borrowed words and phrases, his photographs and found images is Wolukau-Wanambwa’s way of recomposing American and African-American history. ♦

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Taous R. Dahmani is a photography historian, working between Paris and London. She is a PhD fellow at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University Paris, where she teaches 20th century photography history. In 2019-20, Taous will be a researcher attached to the Maison Française in Oxford. Her thesis project is built around the representation of struggles and the struggle for representation. Her writings and her talks always tackle politics and its relations to the photographic medium.