A dwelling place for Van Der Zee’s funerary portraits, The Harlem Book of the Dead encircles the deceased with a chorus of voices: an interview between Van Der Zee and Camille Billops, who conceived the original text; poetry by Owen Dodson; and a foreword by Toni Morrison. As managing editor of the reissued edition, Bradley retained the original contributions as well as Billops’s approach to polyvocal book-making, commissioning a new afterword by Dr. Karla Holloway, who writes: “Van Der Zee is speaker for the dead. . . . These images secured the souls of Harlem’s Black folk.” As speaker and “securer,” Van Der Zee and his images attend to the belief that death is not an end, nor a terminal point, but rather a threshold, a passageway interminably open on both ends. By exhuming his elegiac photographs alongside the liturgy that cradles them, Bradley carries forward a longstanding Black tradition in which the living are called to caretake the desires of the dead.

Camille Bacon:  What was your first encounter with The Harlem Book of the Dead and Dr. Karla Holloway, who authored the facsimile edition’s afterword?

Garrett Bradley:  I was taking Professor Kevin Quashie’s class Death and Dying at Smith College, which introduced me to Karla Holloway’s book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002), which begins with her own personal experiences with grief. From there, it builds into a set of queries that brings readers into the history of Black death and dying in America over the course of a century.

Holloway contextualizes Van Der Zee’s work in particular within the early 1900s and mid 1920s as running parallel to the Red Summer of 1919, the high child-mortality rates in New York City because of the rise in tuberculosis and pneumonia, and eventually both world wars. In the same way that Van Der Zee took a radical approach to his subject matter, mourning and death, Holloway was also introducing us to a new way of understanding the personal alongside the historical. Both bodies of work—The Harlem Book of the Dead and Passed On—propose the impossibility of separating personal grief from the collective experience of grief. Our proximity to it may begin intimately, but what happens next, our journey through it, our attempts to do something with it, are a universal pursuit. I owe a great deal to Quashie for opening that door for me as a student and then introducing Karla and I years later. Karla and I have since become good friends and are in the process of adapting Passed On into a new body of work.

The process of conducting research for the adaptation of Passed On is also what brought me to The Harlem Book of the Dead. It was originally published in 1978 by Morgan & Morgan. When they closed their doors shortly after the book’s release, it quietly slipped out of circulation. That initiated a second and separate endeavor, which was to bring The Harlem Book of the Dead back and to do so in a way that retained the original approach conceived by Camille Billops. She was the glue that brought Van Der Zee, Dodson, and Morrison together. James Hoff, the executive editor at Primary Information, was immediately supportive in helping to bring the book back to life. The only modification to the facsimile edition is the addition of Holloway’s afterword. I think her perspective offers something unique and valuable for those encountering it for the first time.

Bacon: One thing that struck me about Billops’s original impulse to compile these images in a book, which is a form that can be shared widely, is it also means these images are pulled beyond their original context. From my understanding, loved ones of the deceased would commission Van Der Zee to make the photographs included in the book and thus I imagine they were originally placed on a mantelpiece in a family home, or maybe in a scrapbook or photo album. When they’re gathered in a text, they circulate in the public arena. What does that kind of contextual shift mean?

Bradley: I’m thinking about [the Studio Museum in Harlem director] Thelma Golden’s framing of Van Der Zee’s body of work as one that operates as documentation of the Harlem Renaissance but also a “family album” of Harlem as a whole. Van Der Zee talked about his hope for the images in The Harlem Book of The Dead to operate on a formal level that is well beyond documentation and exemplifies his interest and pursuit in having the images go beyond a direct read. The book itself is its own kind of universe and context.

Van der Zee was born in Massachusetts about twenty years after the Civil War. He moved to New York briefly with his father and did odd jobs. He then started a family and left New York briefly, then moved back to Newark and developed his photographic practice, where a good portion of his work was commissioned by a local church. From there, he opened his own place on 272 Lennox Avenue. His arrival in Harlem was really the beginning of the career that defines him. Owen Dodson was thirty years younger than Van Der Zee and grew up in Brooklyn. He was a playwright, a novelist, a poet, and a scholar. Camille Billops was the youngest of them all. She was around fifty years younger than both Dodson and Van Der Zee and was a sculptor, a filmmaker, an archivist, an educator, and an organizer. Billops’s works came so much from bringing people together, and she had a natural instinct that makes the collaboration in this book feel somehow inevitable. And Morrison, who wrote the foreword for the book, was actively shifting the entire literary landscape as a writer. Each of them gave themselves, and their work, permission to be articulated in as many different forms and shapes and styles as necessary.

Bacon:  What you’re saying reminds me of this quotation from Toni Morrison’s foreword where she describes Van Der Zee’s photography as “truly rare—sui generis.” What is so clear in his pictures and so marked in his words is the passion and the vision, not of the camera but of the photographer.” A central facet of Van Der Zee’s approach was his editing practice, which feels singular and not only “sui generis,” one of a kind, but also ahead of its time. In the book, he talks about smoothing someone’s wrinkles or adding inserts of angels into the frame so the subject has a companion in the afterlife.

I know you’re deeply involved with the editing of your own films and have spoken about how the editing process is where you get “closest to actually touching your own work” and how physical it can be. I’m curious to hear you speak further about how we might interpret Van Der Zee’s modification of his own images.

Bradley: We live in an elusive time. It’s very hard to touch anything in a digital era—or to be touched. But Van Der Zee was living in an analog world, and when we’re talking about “editing,” there are many ways of looking at it. There are the embellishments that come in the form of painting, collage—a layering of imagery and the photographic negative that operates as storytelling, historical clarification, or correction. [Van Der Zee’s modification of the images] also operates as transcendence and empathy visualized. It connects the personal and the collective. This is where the images exist beyond the subject matter.

There is also a strong element of glamor and of editing for “perfection.” Softening the face, removing the wrinkles, adding a twinkle to the eye. I would say a major difference that shifts the way those changes operate in, for example, a magazine, then and now, is that these images are solely for the people receiving them. The edits become an act of generosity as opposed to a rejection of the viewer or narrowing of what’s accessible.

Bacon: Absolutely. It’s almost like his edits, especially the insertion of angels or scripture into the images, become additional speculatory material that’s particularly tailored to how Van Der Zee imagined the idiosyncrasies of the subject in the frame, not just what’s “really” there.

I was also so taken by the rhythm of the book’s organizational structure. We meet James Van Der Zee by way of his language, before we meet his images. After Morrison’s foreword and Billops’s introduction, we are carried directly into Van Der Zee and Billops’s interview, then you get the lyricism of Dodson’s poetry, and then we submerge into the totality of all of those elements as Dodson’s verses are punctuated by the images. What do you make of the book’s rhythm and how the multitude of voices in this chorus—Morrison, Billops, Van Der Zee, Dodson, the images themselves, and now Holloway—are introduced to us?

Bradley: The book’s spine, so to speak—what really holds the book together—is the dialogue between Billops and Van Der Zee, which encompasses his life story and creative practice. Their discussion unfolds alongside the work, and to the left is Dodson’s writing, which I think acts kind of as an open-ended verse that is not necessarily narration or captioning but parable—something between scripture and query. They can operate as a guide, or even as something that’s contradictory to the image. There’s a lot of openness that exists there, and I think that that’s how the interview between Van Der Zee and Billops also operates in this. Going back to these questions of, What is photography? How does photography operate?, we understand it’s not just documentation because we’re not just getting descriptions of what we’re seeing. We’re in a much different place that is deeply emotional. I think even with all these elements, the book is beautifully unified while also being spacious or timeless, really.

Bacon: I’m interested in how this book resolutely differs from the stream of images of Black death that we’ve been encountering en masse for some time, especially through our phones. The work in The Harlem Book of the Dead feels contrapuntal, like a countermelody to the conditions that create those images and the velocity at which they circulate. There’s a slowness and a stilled-ness—to riff on Holloway’s afterword—to them that injects something devotional that is absent from images of Black death that are captured against our will.

Bradley: What makes this body of work really stand apart from something that we might be seeing on a regular basis or being inundated with today is that the images that are proliferating throughout the internet and that have historically existed around Black death have never been for us. These were portraits that were given to family members as mementos. They weren’t just taken and then put into a news outlet. There was a lot of care and a lot of love. It’s almost like a eulogy that has been visualized and placed into the photograph. I think that that’s where they really stand apart, and that’s a key point.

Bacon: The Harlem Book of the Dead inhabits the emotional environment of life’s limit in such a profound way. I appreciated the way that the writing and images in the book create a scaffold for others to write about bereavement, make images of mourning, and also create language and images that themselves grieve.

Bradley: I think Karla Holloway articulated it best in asking, “Where does one find grief’s conclusion?” She found a compromise with it in the process of writing and in art and in the process of making. The Harlem Book of the Dead is an apt example of that same question. To quote Marcel Proust, ideas are successors of grief, which says to me that America’s culture, aesthetic, and every innovation it has produced has come from grief, and I think this book is also a remarkable example of that.

Bacon: Each of the original collaborators dedicated the book to someone or a group of “someones.” Who or what might you dedicate this facsimile edition to?

Bradley: I think everybody in the world right now is living with grief and trying to navigate its presence. We create things out of it, and that is essentially its purpose: to build something from it, to move through it, and to continue to contribute to the world in a way that helps us continue to understand and process one of the most human and unavoidable emotions that there is. Grief will never go away. It’s a part of our experience here.

It’s also not something we always have a clear understanding of how to move through, particularly as modern people who have been predominantly separated from any original tradition or have replaced it with the idea of being an individual. I might dedicate it to this moment, an era of great global grief as a reminder of the potent and loving power that can be born from it.

Bacon: Your response, namely when you said it “will never go away,” makes me think about something specific [Smith] Professor Samuel Ng, who teaches a course called the Politics of Grief, has said about grief: Black grief is pathologized for a multitude of reasons, but especially because of the way it endures, how because a central cause of our mourning, the conditions that beget and necessitate Black death, have not ceased; our grief keeps coming back. It’s cyclical, and it refuses to end within an amount of time deemed “appropriate.” It’s those “circles and circles of sorrow” Toni Morrison describes at the end of her novel Sula. Throughout The Harlem Book of the Dead, grief and its duration are characterized not as some kind of malady but as symptomatic of a life lived on the ledge of recurring disaster—and a life that is still verdant and vibrant amidst it all. 

In our last couple of minutes, I would love to linger with one of the images together.

Bradley: Let’s turn to page fifty-three. A young woman lays in an open casket, adorned with lace and white flowers. Jesus holds a baby lamb and looks down at her on the upper right-hand corner of the frame.

It was Holloway’s work that connected the dots between Van Der Zee and Morrison. Toni Morrison’s character Dorcas in her 1992 novel Jazz was inspired by this image. In the novel, Dorcas is shot by her lover but lets him get away because she loves him. To the left of the image, Dodson’s verse further connects the four artists—Van Der Zee, Morrison, Billops, and Dodson himself—across time and story:

They lean over me and say:
“Who deathed you who,
who, who, who, who . . . .
I whisper: “Tell you presently . . .
Shortly . . . this evening . . . .
Tomorrow . . .”
Tomorrow is here
And you out there safe.
I’m safe in here, Tootsie.

Uniting Gates’s efforts is a commitment to harnessing the energy of everyday materials, as exemplified by his idea of Afro-Mingei: a fusion of African American history and identity with the Japanese philosophy of mingei, which celebrates the beauty of functional objects handcrafted by anonymous artisans. Whether making installations, ceramics, or places, Gates has refused to pit craftsmanship and conceptual art against each other. For him, the lives of ordinary things are an essential thing of life.

“Can we learn to love to do things excellently?” With this question top of mind, Gates recently spoke with the curator and writer Ekow Eshun for a conversation that ranges across the past, present, and future of his art—from the work he’s done with his Rebuild Foundation transforming distressed buildings in Chicago into affordable living spaces and cultural centers, to his founding of the Black Image Corporation, to promoting the significance of clay, to envisioning what it will take to craft new platforms and paradigms for a collective Black imaginary.

View of Theaster Gates: Le chant du centre, LUMA Arles, France, 2024. Photograph by Wyatt Conlon

Theaster Gates, Lantern Slide Pavilion (detail), 2011

Ekow Eshun: I saw you last summer at the Black artist retreat you hosted in Arles, France. You transformed the LUMA Foundation space into a site of manufacture as well as display, where you were making new clay works and then putting them on show. You talked about how you wanted to explore “the museological, political, and social possibilities of clay.” Can you elaborate on that idea of what clay represents for you?

Theaster Gates: I’ve been intentional about acknowledging the polemics of craft as a starting point for recognizing the contribution of craft to all kinds of contemporary practices, and the truth of craft within modernity. We could not have gotten to modern sculpture if it hadn’t been for someone recognizing that the same material that could be used to make a vessel for fermentation could also be used to make a torso, or a neck, or a hand. If we were to look at folk like Giacometti or Henry Moore or Barbara Chase-Riboud, if they were casting it in bronze, they were sometimes doing that from another positive, and that positive may have been directly connected to the plastic arts.

Clay has been the main stage, and artisans have not only been preoccupied with the making of the vessel, they’ve also been occupied with some notions of imaginative thought beyond the vessel. Poetry. Things done in jest in the Greek vessel. Potters making fun of each other, telling stories. Clay is as small as an art historian says it is. And if that’s the case, could I push back against the historian and say, “Oh, actually, this material is big, and it’s central to making”?

Eshun: It’s not about the finished art object. It’s the fact of making and working with the material in itself?

Gates: Yes. Rather than trying to prove that clay could do anything else, I wanted to simply represent the material and its processes, so people might draw their own opinions about the limits or the limitlessness of the idiom. The vessel is a body. It is a foot and a belly and a shoulder and a neck and a lip.

Aperture Magazine Subscription

0.00

Get a full year of Aperture—the essential source for photography since 1952. Subscribe today and save 25% off the cover price.

1Subscribe Now

In stock

Aperture Magazine Subscription

$ 0.00

–

1

+

1Subscribe Now

View cart

Description

Subscribe now and get the collectible print edition and the digital edition four times a year, plus unlimited access to Aperture’s online archive.

Eshun: Let’s go back. The first time you go to Japan is 2004. Can we talk about what you discovered there in terms of the ceramic tradition, but also how you thought your art might fit into that tradition, and in relation to what you were bringing with you?

Gates: Tokoname, this small Japanese city, birthed in me three things. The first thing was that, relative to the history of this material and great makers, I am nothing. The first thing Tokoname did was it humbled me. I was an American, naive, twenty-nine-year-old sculptor who thought he was going to share how great he was, and I arrived to a town I had never heard of, with people who have no relation to the part of the world that I’m from, and I was immediately humbled by the generations of expert skill, intuition, spirituality, discipline, intention, sociability. I was humbled at how little of a man, how little of a human I was. That I hadn’t read enough poetry. I hadn’t ever worked hard and deeply enough. I wasn’t as kind and as social as I thought I was. I was actually quite selfish. And my skill was bunk, relative to this great mountain that I was in front of. I needed that humility first, because that was the enzyme that broke me down, and that demonstrated that there was a lot to learn—and at twenty-nine, learning that there was a lot to learn. This is after I’ve gone to South Africa. I had a great experience there. I’ve come back. I’ve started my own artist collective.

The second thing Tokoname gave me was a hunger for learning and being a lifelong learner. Because I thought, There’s no way that I’m ever going to be as good as I want to, no matter what the newspapers tell me of a good or bad exhibition. The thing I’m chasing, people spend their whole lives chasing: one glaze color, one bowl form, trying to get spirit from wherever it comes from, through their hands and into a material form. I hungered for that kind of learning and that kind of engine for learning.

The third thing that it gave me was a sense of an aesthetic dimension that had nothing to do with the material world.

Eshun: Say more.

Gates: That while I was preoccupied with making a tea bowl, the making was actually not about tea bowls. That the pursuit, the aesthetic dimension could be akin to a spiritual dimension. That it’s a way of assigning aesthetic values to a branch—ikebana. To a textile. To the garden. To the creation of paper. To the assembly of your books. To the tying of a box. It was a way of understanding that the world lacked aesthetic dimensionality. The Industrial Revolution, the Romantic era, the age of Enlightenment gave us logic and intelligence, and they disrupted aesthetic dimensionality. And that I could spend my entire practice never making a new work, but simply assigning an aesthetic dimensionality to the objects that already exist in the world.

People talk about that in terms of “reclaimed” and “recycled,” it ain’t about that. It’s about recognizing the aesthetic potential within a preexisting thing. The reason I talk about Shintoism at all is because I’m interested in the possibility of the energetic life that might live within an object. How do we wake up that energetic life?

“If you’re going to make something, make it good. That’s a value that I’m trying to bring back from the past.”

Eshun: You’ve talked before about how you see your work, at least in part, as honoring the spirit within things.

Gates: Yes.

Eshun: But it’s that balance that’s so interesting. That, yes, there’s the spirit, but there’s also the thing in itself. And that seems as important as the feeling one finds within it.

Gates: You know, I’ve seen so often a woodworker make a beautiful table and then put the wrong finish on the table. It’s almost like they woke something up in the material, and then, they smothered it. The hunger for learning would be continuing to learn what the material needs in order to be its best self. If I were to care for this material fully, does it have something to say?

Those are the kinds of questions that I’m asking myself in the studio.

Still from Theaster Gates’s Art Histories, 2019, featuring deaccessioned glass slides from the art history department of the University of Chicago

Eshun: With those ideas in mind, you’ve developed your concept of Afro-Mingei, which has three elements to it. There’s the craft of Japan. There’s the artistic traditions of African America, Black America. There’s also the craft traditions of West Africa coming into play. When we speak of Afro-Mingei as a point of view, is that individual to you, or do others also speak of those same constellations?

Gates: If we go back to mingei: A team of Japanese intellectuals coined a term in the early twentieth century that would try to articulate the importance of how we used to be. That intellectual proposal and propaganda that they were perpetuating through essays, circulars, exhibitions feels a lot like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Is Beautiful movement, or the Kamoinge Workshop, in Harlem, along with the FESTAC project of 1977, the important work that a young Isaac Julien and a slightly older John Akomfrah were engaged in during the ’70s and ’80s, when they were looking at Black British sound, forming audio and visual collectives. Mingei felt aligned because it was working against a white imperialistic overtaking of a regional or national way of thinking.

Afro-Mingei is first the commingling of ideological resistance, even before you get to anything aesthetic. It was, Oh, they don’t want me to wear an Afro? They want me to press my hair? I’m going to grow my Afro, and I’m going to wear the symbolic clothes of my people, even though they don’t even wear that no more. I’m going to learn the dances of my people. I’m going to learn Kiswahili. You know what I’m saying? So you’ve got this ideological alignment around a people’s resistance to an impeding Western canon. Even though you’re already co-opted into the canon, it’s a co-option and resistance. It’s like C. L. R. James: If we’re going to play cricket, we should beat their ass.

Then there’s an investment in craft excellence without a preoccupation with being the best. So it’s: If you’re going to make something, make it good. That’s a value that I’m trying to bring back from the past. Not even from whiteness to Blackness, from Japaneseness to Blackness. It’s from the past. Can we learn to love to do things excellently?

And then, you have what I would call synchronicity, or syncretism. In the same way we think about the evolution of voodoo and the orishas and Ifa, could we think about a syncretism of an aesthetic nature?

Eshun: It’s a really fascinating tension between politics and aesthetics.

Gates: Yes.

Eshun: Often these are imagined as polarities. But actually, what you do holds a certain tension the entire time.

Gates: I’m tired of either/or. That’s not a truth that I was born into in 1973. I was already an amalgam. I was already speaking English. And then, after a couple trips to Tokoname, my Japanese ceramic literacy was more advanced as a language than my American education. So, it’s like, Oh, with my hands, I’m speaking Japanese. Art gives me permission to use the languages, filtered through my body and my set of political and ideological positions, and then the output of that is what it is.

Theaster Gates, Black Ads, 2025, billboards conceived by the Black Image Corporation and drawn from the archives of Haruhi Ishitani, the University of Chicago, and the Johnson Publishing Company

Eshun: I want to talk about When Clouds Roll Away, which took place at the Stony Island Arts Bank, in Chicago. You curated and crafted fifteen thousand objects from the Johnson Publishing Company archive—objects such as office furniture and gym equipment that would historically not have been treasured, alongside photographs from Ebony and Jet magazines, which the company published from their office in Chicago. Can you talk through your thinking in terms of crafting the space as a whole set of ideas?

Gates: Frantz Fanon would say that mimicry happens in the first wave of arrival. So we would want our museums to look like their museums. We would want our houses to look like their houses. So we put some columns up. If they got columns, we got columns. But how do you get to a second and third wave of postcolonial thinking?

For me, what it meant was, could I come to love myself through my things, through our things? Rather than trying to convince the world that I created the most contemporary of contemporary museums, the same way contemporary museums act. So first, the bank was trying to answer that question. Is there a moment where we could shrug off the need to act like other institutions?

With the Johnson Publishing Company, it was the perfect opportunity. Very few people saw value in protecting the office things, and they didn’t see value in the carpet, and they didn’t see value in the maintenance of the legacy of the building of the largest Black-owned public corporation in the world at one point—the kind of largest signifier of the

future of Black dignity, Black aesthetics, Black beauty. I have made it my personal charge, in a somewhat obsessive-compulsive manner, to love those things for myself, and try to create platforms where others might come to love them as well.

Eshun: Where did the title come from?

Gates: The announcement of the bankruptcy of Johnson Publishing created so much smoke. It was, you know, “Look at this dinosaur that wasn’t able to save itself,” and so on. I thought: Okay, when all of those clouds roll away, they’re still one of the most important Black American legacies that will ever exist. And I’m proud of it. I want to put that alongside the over 350 million images sold to Getty, because it’s not just about their photographic archive. It’s about the entire being of that corporation. In 1942 when it was founded, we’re still in Jim Crow. There’s still lynching in the South. And this couple decides that they will take Black imagery and that they would share the progress. Almost like W. E. B. Du Bois. They’re going to share Negro progress with Black people all over the world, so that these Negroes know that they are not alone. That’s the kind of propaganda I’m interested in.

Eshun: The objects become a way both of marking space, but also marking how Black people move through space. Objects. Colors. Fabrics. All of these are markers of how one is comporting oneself.

Gates: When you look at some of the Ebony and Jet images from the 1950s, the sister looks like the photograph of her could have been taken yesterday. You look at the couture fashions that the company bought because they weren’t able to borrow the clothes from the Italian and French houses. When you look at these dresses, they’re timeless. I created a company called the Black Image Corporation. My goal was to try to continue the work that John Johnson, the company’s founder, had started, and the work started by his wife, Eunice, with the Ebony Fashion Fair and these fashion shows that they would send all over the country so that Black women could see themselves.

Eshun: There’s a great line you have in relation to both the Johnson Publishing Company archive, but also to so many other things that you’ve been collecting: “I’ve learned to see the value in gross accumulation.”

Gates: [Laughs.]

Eshun: What’s the thinking?

Gates: We’ve gone to the flea markets, and we’ve marveled at the discoveries we can find. But part of the marveling is that the things that you see at the flea market aren’t from Ikea. They’re from another time. The problem isn’t that history accumulates. The problem is that we don’t always know what the fuck to do with that accumulation. So should there be other things besides the bazaar and the flea market? I would say the museum is one of the other places that holds history for us. I restored a hardware store. In my hardware store, there are objects that hadn’t been touched from the 1960s, when the store opened, and you could see the yellowing of the plastic as an indicator of its age. There’s something in me that believes that my job is to create the form for historical accumulation, and that is as important as the creation of a new work of art for me.

Ca. 1960s photographs by Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton, from the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, in Theaster Gates’s studio, July 2025. Photograph by Dana Scruggs for Aperture

A Listening Space at Currency Exchange Café, Chicago, 2025. Photograph by Ryan Stefan
Courtesy Rebuild Foundation

Eshun: You just opened a listening space in the former Currency Exchange Café, in Chicago.

Gates: Yeah, that’s right.

Eshun: It has eight thousand vinyl records from a personal collection, the Dinh Nguyen Collection. Do you look at that space as an homage to craft and recordings? There is a tea parlor as well. What’s the balance between listening to music and sitting, sharing, gathering, even solitariness?

Gates: First, let’s imagine that this project is a demonstration of a platform for the discovery of historical accumulation. We could call it a café. We could call it a listening space. But it’s an attempt at making public someone else’s prized possession. This was this man’s life, his legacy. At the listening space, there’s nothing to buy. There’s nothing to sell. You can order genmaicha, hojicha, or matcha. You can get free teas, and you can listen to the music of this collection. That’s it. People come, and they use their computers. They sit in silence. They come on their first dates. They renew their vows. They scope out the space for a wedding and funeral repast.

I’m trying to help the Black imaginary. We need spaces that are not about selling shit, where we could go and we could heal, and we could be quiet, and we could reflect. We need spaces where we could pay attention to someone else’s accumulated treasures and not be charged an arm and a leg. We need Black museums that don’t have the burden of acting like other people’s museums. They just have the burden of being really themselves.

Eshun: It’s the indivisibility of image, object, craft, music, race, collective memory—all of these things together and not apart.

Gates: When I buy a music collection of over fourteen thousand objects of vinyl, its flirtation is its scale. That’s the first thing. It compels me to then want a second encounter, where I play something from the collection. I play something, and then right next to it, the next something is something utterly different. It goes from Beethoven to Brahms to Bacharach. Wait! How did we get to show tunes from a heavy, dark E-flat minor? That’s seduction for me. I never tire of it. But contemporary art? I don’t always want to make objects all day long, every day. If I’m going to get to my best objects, I need to be engaged with other things. The collections function as a kind of ongoing fuel in refuge. It’s a fuel and a refuge.

Eshun: Blackness seems to me, in your terms, a collective project that moves in solidarity, moves in resistance, moves in memory, moves in consciousness. I don’t even know if that’s a question.

Gates: I understand.

Eshun: It’s an observation about the strategy.

Gates: I think about the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and that being an organization that Malcolm X started after leaving the Nation of Islam. All of these projects were shaped by an individual, and because of that individual’s deep belief in a set of values, they turned into grand projects that others could believe in. My first company that I registered in the state of Illinois was called CLAY. The Center for Linking Artistic Youth. I was twenty-five, and I started a company that didn’t make any money. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to try to propose something. After the Center for Linking Artistic Youth, I go to Japan, I come back, I create the Yamaguchi Institute. The Yamaguchi Institute is not a legally recognized organization by the state of Illinois. It’s an idea that a Japanese potter goes to the United States, learns of the civil rights movement, marries a Black woman, and they commit their lives in Mississippi to teaching Black kids how to make pots. I basically reversed my story.

Eshun: You create spaces that let people approach art and art-making, old and new objects in ways that reject traditional commercial exchanges.

Gates: I think, in a way, like a farmer. At some point, you just got too many apples. Sometimes, I have a lot of excess, and I need vehicles by which I might share that excess. The collectivism is a way of encouraging form or participating in pre-existing forms, which I also love. So, we practice selling the apples and giving the apples away, preserving the apples to make a jelly, making a compote, and then hopefully, we’re passing on those ways of making apples, preserving them, distributing them. I feel this is in direct connection to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the NAACP. I feel like I’m the child of all of these affirmative action measures, and that those affirmative action measures, no matter what people fucking say, were very important. I really think that contemporary art is in a conundrum because people no longer have purpose or passion. Capitalism has created a new hollow. I don’t want to live like that. So the return to craft is a return to purpose. It’s putting functionality alongside the beauty of abstraction. I want to make a train track, and I want to go off the fucking tracks.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue.”

The late curator Okwui Enwezor, who cofounded Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, once said that publishing is a space “in which thinking could be elaborated.” Enwezor produced some of the era’s totemic exhibitions and catalogs, while the curators Bisi Silva and Koyo Kouoh built institutions for contemporary art—Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Lagos and RAW Material Company in Dakar, respectively—influencing a new generation including Oluremi C. Onabanjo, now a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Onabanjo’s new exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination returns to a critical era of photographic history, linking the postcolonial transformations of the 1960s and 1970s to the US civil rights movement through works by photographers such as James Barnor, Kwame Brathwaite, Samuel Fosso, and Sanlé Sory. Photobooks, Onabanjo explained in this recent conversation, are at the center of the exhibition, encouraging viewers to see how publishing has been vital to the production of artistic knowledge.

Malick Sidibé, Regardez-moi! (Look at Me!), 1962
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Oumar Ka, Untitled (Two Women with Thatched Roof House), 1959–68
© Oumar Ka Estate and courtesy Axis Gallery, NY

Brendan Embser: Your exhibition at MoMA references the 1994 book by V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa. But I gather from the plurality of your title, Ideas of Africa, that you’re indicating that there’s going to be multiple points of entry both to history and photographic style.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo: I wanted to entice people to consider a show of midcentury Western and Central African portrait photography, in and out of the studio, through the vector of imagination—and to grapple with the form’s ongoing legacy and force as a creative mechanism.

The potential of political imagination has been somewhat effaced from contemporary discourse around portrait photography on the continent, even though it’s a crucial point for comprehending the genre. The so-called golden age of African photographic portraiture takes root during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s—a moment of significant upheaval on the continent and across the globe.

I particularly wanted viewers who are informed by a history of the US civil rights movement to recognize that those forms of resistance were built on internationalist modes of solidarity.

Installation view of Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2025. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Installation view of Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2025. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Embser: There’s a reading room as part of the exhibition. How do photobooks fit into the project?

Onabanjo: The reading room came out of an encounter during a studio visit in Paris with the artistic collective Air Afrique, whose name pays homage to the defunct Pan African Airlines that ran from 1961 until 2002 and had service throughout Francophone West Africa, also with routes to London, Paris, and New York. The airline produced an in-flight magazine throughout its entire run titled Balafon—a place where political ideas circulated through coverage of film, arts festivals, and profiles of Malick Sidibé on the front cover.

Being mobile was such a key point around an internationalist claim for people in Africa during the ’60s and onward; to be in relation to liberatory ideas that exceeded the nation state, you needed to be able to envision exceeding it yourself.

I’m trying to embrace that spirit of the Air Afrique collective. They’ve now produced two issues of their own magazine, which will be available in the reading room alongside books that have informed the entire structure of this exhibition.

Embser: We’re in an era of republishing the classics, you could say, from Aperture’s reissue of Ernest Cole’s 1967 House of Bondage to Steidl’s reissues of books by the late South African photographer David Goldblatt. For a long time, House of Bondage was nearly impossible to find. You’ve called it a “fugitive” book. What did you mean by that?

Onabanjo: For almost seven years, Cole furtively took the pictures that formed the photographic base of the project—relentlessly documenting every aspect of life under apartheid in South Africa. In 1966, he fled the country at the age of twenty-six under the guise of a pilgrimage to Lourdes—prints and layout sheets in hand. He knew that a book with this kind of undeniable force could only be made in exile.

My own first edition of House of Bondage is fugitive. I pinched a copy from my father’s library when we were living in Johannesburg in the 2000s, which he had gotten from a secondhand bookstore in the city’s central business district. For decades prior, Cole’s work was banned in the country, and many South African photographers could only encounter that book in David Goldblatt’s library.

I like this idea of knowledge production being something fugitive that exceeds linear or expected routes of transmission, and I think that’s extremely important to photography in its history, and particularly photography’s history on the continent.

Cover and spread from Ernest Cole, House of Bondage (Aperture, 2022)

Embser: House of Bondage was published for a foreign audience and meant as an activist document, right?

Onabanjo: Absolutely. The idea was to open the eyes of the world to the horrors of apartheid within South Africa. I think the book continues to resonate today, well beyond its intended or expected recipient or moment. The second edition really makes proof of that.

Aperture Magazine Subscription

0.00

Get a full year of Aperture—the essential source for photography since 1952. Subscribe today and save 25% off the cover price.

1Subscribe Now

In stock

Aperture Magazine Subscription

$ 0.00

–

1

+

1Subscribe Now

View cart

Description

Subscribe now and get the collectible print edition and the digital edition four times a year, plus unlimited access to Aperture’s online archive.

Embser: Goldblatt’s first books were published in the 1970s and ’80s. They have the appearance of beautiful photography books but not necessarily artist books. On the Mines included an essay by Nadine Gordimer, the novelist who would go on to win the Nobel Prize. They’re like a record of Goldblatt’s work as a documentarian who was narrating a particular experience through words and pictures. Now, the books are republished by Steidl and marketed as art books and seen in a much more contemporary art-publishing space.

Onabanjo: Histories of circulation tell you a great deal about what the photographer’s existing universe was. Goldblatt’s early books were published in apartheid-era South Africa. But by 2003, when he publishes Particulars, he was represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, and his work had already been the subject of a solo exhibition at MoMA, organized by Susan Kismaric, in 1998, so his photography was circulating in fine-art contexts internationally.

Silvia Rosi, Sposa italiana disintegrata (Disintegrated Italian Wife), 2024
© the artist

Sanlé Sory, Le Voyageur (The Traveler), 1970–85
© the artist and courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Embser: Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950 (2012) is also an important book, and a record of a slideshow first shown at the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. In that respect, the book is like Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in that it’s a record of an installation experience—a slideshow—that would otherwise be evanescent.

Onabanjo: It’s profoundly important. The Black Photo Album includes eighty slides, a combination of text and studio portraits of South Africans drawn mostly from private family collections. It’s a watershed work for a history of conceptual photography—it anticipates the archival turn in some ways. Unfortunately, it’s currently out of print, but hopefully not for long.

It’s just as important to think from Dakar as it is to think of Dakar.

Embser: Steidl later published Stories (2019), an enormous compendium of Mofokeng’s photography comprising eighteen books and clocking in at 1,046 pages—and with an equally large price tag at $385.

Onabanjo: Yes, it’s an amazing set of booklets that speaks to this photographer’s intrepid vision, his risk-taking sensibilities, the expansiveness of his approach. It’s so beautifully printed, and it has incredible writing from Santu. But again, one thinks around limits of circulation for something of that form: Who’s going to see this? Who can afford this? How are they going to get ahold of it? How are they going to benefit from this vision?

Cover of Mama Casset (Revue Noire, 2011)

Cover of Jean Depara, Day & Night in Kinshasa (Revue Noire, 2010)

Embser: I want to get your perspective about publishing platforms focused on African art and photography. Revue Noire, based in Paris, was instrumental in publishing small, accessible books like the famous Photo Poche series, which provided excellent ways of learning about Samuel Fosso, Jean Depara, Mama Casset, and others. For a long time, Revue Noire’s Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (1999) was like the white pages—if you needed to find anything about someone, probably it was going to be in that book.

Onabanjo: Yes, absolutely true. It was about capacity building. You have these beautiful plates, but you also have artist biographies, you have listings, you have all these contributors. From Deborah Willis to Emanoel Araújo, the Revue Noire team was uniquely gifted in identifying key figures across the globe who could give the reader an entry point for a bevy of photographers who you must know in every corner of space surrounding the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Embser: Its utility function was massive.

Onabanjo: Totally.

Embser: RAW Material, CCA, and Fourthwall Books in South Africa have all published photobooks and critical readers on art and photography, each in their own style. Again, they were celebrating artists but filling an important space for criticism and art history.

Onabanjo: I feel like the subtheme of our entire conversation has been the importance of building capacity and setting up important foundations for people to continue to work. People such as Bisi Silva at CCA and Koyo Kouoh at RAW Material embodied what it meant to put these commitments into practice on an infrastructural level. For her Condition Report symposia, Kouoh had these amazing events where she would bring together a number of different intellectuals, arts administrators, and curators from across the continent underneath one specific theme, idea, or set of positions for people to talk about what they were facing.

These events allowed people to come together and learn from each other, but they also pushed the discourse forward and affirmed that, in fact, institutions can and do exist on the African continent and are important for people in the world to learn from. It’s not just putting Africa in the receiving position or in the object position where one has people in the diaspora or working out of New York, London, Paris. It’s just as important to think from Dakar as it is to think of Dakar; it’s just as important to think from Lagos as it is to think about Lagos. They set such strong foundations. But of course, it’s precarious, right? It’s difficult because material conditions continue to inform what is possible. Not being romantic about it is healthy and necessary.

Embser: When you were working with Marilyn Nance on her book Last Day in Lagos (2022)—about an American photographer looking back at her exhilarating chronicle of FESTAC ’77 in Nigeria—was it important that the book was copublished by Fourthwall Books, a South African publisher?

Onabanjo: One thousand percent. We had to make sure that we were working with a publishing house on the continent. That was the most important thing. When I talk about precarity and longevity, being strategic and committed to the long view, it’s the fact that Last Day in Lagos was one of the last publications produced by Fourthwall Books, the fantastic publishing house in Johannesburg run by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen and Terry Kurgan. It was also one of the first books that the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), in New York, brought into existence. An international collaboration, I think, made the most fundamental sense, and it worked in terms of what the book needed. But if not for Fourthwall Books, I don’t think that book would’ve happened.

Jean Depara, Un Jazzeur (Jazzman), 1960
© the artist and Estate of Jean Depara

Samuel Fosso, Untitled, from the series African Spirits, 2008
© the artist

Embser: Okwui Enwezor has said that the goal of In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to the Present, his landmark 1996 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition, was very basic, to introduce a conception of African photography from the point of view of the auteur. Thirty years later, how would you describe your own goal for Ideas of Africa?

Onabanjo: Mine would be a slight transposition, as I remain a student of Okwui’s. My goal is to learn from an existing conception of African photography—which he shaped in tandem with Bisi Silva, N’Goné Fall, Simon Njami, Koyo Kouoh, and many others. Due to their collective work, the foundation has been set. Now it’s time to build, to take things to exciting different directions, and to recognize that the auteur is always working in collaboration.

Embser: And maybe books are one part of that.

Onabanjo: They’re a huge starting point. I think it’s the beginning and the open end. Because it’s not going to finish. We’re not done yet.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue,” in The PhotoBook Review.

Michael Famighetti: Why did you decide to create The Humid?

Mark Steinmetz: Well, when we got married, Irina had a job in Boston at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. But I was struggling a bit in Boston, with winter in particular, and I just had left this nice empire in warmer Athens, Georgia . . .

Famighetti: An empire?

Steinmetz: A modest empire—a darkroom, a workspace, ample storage space for prints and negatives, a great community. Nothing I could duplicate in the big city.

Irina Rozovsky: My life was in Boston—college teaching job, friends, family, but in 2017 I thought, Okay, start over in Georgia and build something of our own. When we got down there, I didn’t know anyone, just Mark and our baby daughter. But for the first time I had space—mental and physical. We got a big studio where I could spread out my work, and create this photography outpost center we’d been envisioning. The first thing we did was try to name it—nothing lens-, light-, or camera-related like—I’m sorry—Aperture. We landed on The Humid. It’s weird and true to where we are. People hear “The Human.”

Famighetti: What values around making photographs are baked into the mission of The Humid? You invite many great photographers there to teach.

Steinmetz: Well, if Baldwin Lee is there conducting a workshop, he is just being Baldwin Lee, and he’s offering his point of view. We’ve had Barbara Bosworth. We’ve had Mike Smith, Matt Connors, Curran Hatleberg, Robert Lyons. We’ve had a lot of other visiting lecturers.

Rozovsky: And we conceived of The Humid at a time when straight photography had gone dark in the art world. Everything being shown or celebrated seemed to have a conceptual lean. We’re interested in every kind of image, but we’re proponents of realism and making work in and with the world. It felt important to defend that old idea that life is stranger than fiction. The Humid is our way to share a particular vision and ideology. It’s a casual but very serious outlet for like-minded photographers looking to better understand their own work. It’s become a network, both international and also very local. We teach abroad, host virtual artist talks and students from many different countries, and organize portfolio reviews across time zones. But we also want to be a local resource and organize shows and talks to the community in our physical space.

Steinmetz: And the students who come want to be with us, they seek us out. They travel to Athens. We’ve had many in their twenties, but mostly, they’re older, in their thirties and forties and fifties. It’s for people who might want to go to grad school or, rather, don’t want to go to grad school and yet want to get some graduate-school-level critiques. Sometimes, they’ve already been to graduate school and just want to come in for a tune-up.

Rozovsky: In undergrad especially, you have some talented nineteen- or twenty-year-olds, but everyone’s living out the same chapter of life, more or less. In these workshops, age and life experiences really vary. We’ve had people who are wildly successful professionals in surprising fields, but on the side, they’ve also been developing an incredible body of work alone. They just come out of nowhere with this secret love affair with photography and blow us away.

Aperture Magazine Subscription

0.00

Get a full year of Aperture—the essential source for photography since 1952. Subscribe today and save 25% off the cover price.

1Subscribe Now

In stock

Aperture Magazine Subscription

$ 0.00

–

1

+

1Subscribe Now

View cart

Description

Subscribe now and get the collectible print edition and the digital edition four times a year, plus unlimited access to Aperture’s online archive.

Famighetti: Do you each have a philosophy for teaching, or an approach to making pictures, that you try to impart?

Steinmetz: I look at students’ work, and I think I can tell when they’re really interested in what they’re doing, when they’re being authentic, and when they’re more or less imitating someone else or just have a kind of set idea about how a photograph should be. I think I help students connect to the moment when they’re really surprised, fully reacting to something. Students can trip themselves up by overthinking. We try to help them to get clearer.

Rozovsky: Yes, Mark asks tough questions that shake people up. In a good way. My hope is to find what’s very specific and unique to each student—their particular way of seeing and being in the world. And to help them shape words into a sentence—the way unrelated photographs gravitate to each other and create meaning, narrative, a nest. People come with pictures that they’ve separated into distinct projects, and they might be very strict about it, but I might start putting them all together, moving things around, and it’s like alchemy—pictures start to speak to each other and everyone gets excited. It’s powerful to witness someone’s moment of clarity or inspiration. People might come in thinking their work was one way but leave knowing it’s more.

Famighetti: There is a strong emphasis on darkroom technique, too, and the craft of printing.

Steinmetz: I’ve offered several darkroom workshops in my own darkroom. It’s intended for people who are serious about doing black-and-white photography, to help provide some shortcuts and demonstrate how I work. I show how I make an archival print, how I burn and dodge, how I evaluate a print, and the setup I’ve got.

Irina Rozovsky, Untitled, 2019

Mark Steinmetz, Kilbourne Little League Practice, Chicago, 1989

Famighetti: You’ve spoken before about how labor-intensive this process can be.

Steinmetz: Anybody who says photography is just mechanical reproduction—that’s ridiculous. It’s all so athletic and physical. I love shotmaking, and to me, playing tennis serves up some of the same thrills.

Rozovsky: You love games in general.

Steinmetz: If you’re being sluggish, you’re not going to execute the picture well. Your body’s got to be able to swoop in and strike quickly. Sometimes, you don’t even know what’s happening.

Printing is arduous. You’ve got to be able to focus. You don’t want to be crazy when you’re printing, where everything one day turns out to be too contrasty or pale the next day. The baths, moving the print from here to there—there’s so much to it, especially if you want to maintain your darkroom’s cleanliness so there’s no fixer contamination, so that your prints are indeed archival. There’s a lot to think about all the time. It’s very strenuous. It’s especially true for black-and-white photography, and there’s a lot to consider with film development. What’s causing air bubbles on the film? In winter, for instance, there are more air bubbles because the water’s going through the water heater. I’ve thought about air bubbles and how to eradicate them to an embarrassing degree.

We conceived of The Humid at a time when straight photography had gone dark in the art world.

Rozovsky: Inkjet printing is definitely less physical—also less magical and romantic—but it’s still a labyrinthian process to make a print “right.” There are a million ways a photograph can look on paper—maybe too many options. And you need to make many prints to land on the iteration that feels right, because when it has to do with atmosphere, time of day, light, skin, color, et cetera, you really need to sense what the picture is meant to express, and any exaggeration of tone can kill its spirit.

Famighetti: Mark, do you exclusively work in analog?

Steinmetz: I use a tiny bit of digital for fashion work. But yeah, I don’t think I can get what I want on an inkjet print. Nick Nixon once said to me, “Digital is great. It’s 98 percent there,” which meant that it wasn’t good enough for him. There’s this tremendous pressure now because the price of silver-gelatin darkroom paper is so high, and the cost of film is so high, and the chemicals have gone up in price. There’s the water. Once you start, you’ve got your water running. You don’t want to waste it. You’ve got your chemicals that are to some extent oxidizing. It’s like Mission Impossible. The timer is going off. You just can’t cut out for two hours. You’ve got to have everything planned. You’ve eaten, you’re ready, you go in, and you just keep at it.

Famighetti: You must be completely present and dialed in.

Steinmetz: You’ve got to be completely present. You don’t want to wash your prints for too long, especially because there’s optical brightener in there. We filter our water for the whole house, so the chlorine and lead are removed, and other heavy metals and sediment. But still, there might be stuff in the water, so you don’t want to wash it for too long. With every sheet of paper, you’re kind of trembling. I will make blood-curdling screams if I bring a sheet of paper over to the enlarger and I haven’t stopped down the lens, if it’s at f/4 instead of f/8, and I’ve wasted a sheet of paper—it’s just like, AAARGH!

Famighetti: Are the students you attract coming to you to learn what is now a very specialized skill?

Steinmetz: Yes, but often I’m seeing very poor print quality. I don’t think they’re inside the process. Most photographers don’t work in silver prints anymore. A lot of the digital prints just kind of come out of the machine, received . . . I always say that with digital prints, it’s like every object has been oversharpened. Every object in the frame seems estranged from every other object. There’s not this kind of harmonizing, settling in that you find in older versions of darkroom photography. Not everybody feels this way.

Rozovsky: I feel so lucky that when I started shooting color, analog printing was still the thing. C-printing was totally revelatory, I’m sorry people don’t get to learn color that way any more. In grad school, the darkroom was on one end of a very long hallway and the processor was at the other end. Walking the exposed sheet in a light-proof box took forever; I was so impatient to see the results that I got roller skates to speed things up. Those C-prints, as faded as they are now, were fundamental to my understanding of color, and inform how I work. There’s something sort of twisted about shooting film only to digitize its output, but it’s where we are now. I know I need to work with and somehow against the technology, so it doesn’t take over creatively. It can do anything you want, really, but you need to be the boss.

Famighetti: You have a dedicated meditation practice, Mark, and the way you described printing and a rigorous concentration on air bubbles seems to reflect that. How has meditation influenced your practice? I’m thinking about that Eugen Herrigel book Zen in the Art of Archery (1948), which is important to many photographers.

Steinmetz: That’s a great book, one I recommend to students. There’s also that once-popular book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s the same thing. People think they can spend tons of money on equipment and somehow avoid grief. But gosh, everything is physical and everything can break down. You can’t take it for granted.

I would say that meditation is very helpful in giving you the ability to pause. The pause can be when you’re taking photographs. I want to be the one responsible for the picture I’m taking. I don’t want to just go click, click, click, click, click, and then select the best one. I want to really be present and to click at the right time. There’s a lot to meditation that I think helps with your intuition, and I think anticipation is a big deal in photography. Why are you all of a sudden moving toward this direction? What is this about? I’m not really talking about the “decisive moment,” because that’s sort of an obvious crescendo. All moments are kind of decisive. You’re moving toward something that, as Robert Adams says, there’s an “inexplicable rightness” to.

Rozovsky: Do you think meditation helps you move?

Steinmetz: I think it helps you to inhabit your body and to be present in the moment and to be able to know: I was really here when I took the picture. The photograph is not an accident. I mean, you can say that it’s lucky; it’s like a chance encounter. But on another level, maybe luck doesn’t have much to do with it. For you, too, Irina, the taking of the picture is very physical, especially with your iPhone photographs. You’re moving the camera around.

Rozovsky: True, I love iPhone acrobatics. I call it the microwave dinner of photography: inherently crappy but so fast and easy, and because I’m hungry for pictures, it hits the spot. I do think that with it I am sort of less present than what Mark is referring to in that I shoot a lot of the same scene, maybe too much, and hope something sticks—like throwing a bucket of darts at the board and waiting for one to touch close to the target. When I have twelve shots on film, each dart is on a precious, intentional mission. So, while I’m not at war with the air bubble, the struggle is the ever-shifting target.

Famighetti: Irina, how do you view that idea of anticipation Mark mentioned earlier?

Rozovsky: For me, anticipation wraps around surprise. They work in tandem and need each other. I’ve been photographing at the supermarket. It’s rich material for me, both anonymous and intimate seeing what people take home to feed their families. I anticipate a photograph at this entrance, by this display, the light hits from the window, and the cans of whatever are glowing. But it’s not until someone I didn’t anticipate passes through and blows away my expectation of a real photograph. Picture making is like a strange maze, and there’s a frustration and euphoria to it. Frustration in not quite knowing if and when a photograph is going to announce itself and then the pure joy when it shouts, “Over here!”

Famighetti: That’s always the uncomfortable thing to sit with, the not knowing. Is there an exercise you like to have students do, involving constraint or something?

Rozovsky: We used to always start off with influences. One time, everyone was like, “Oh, Ansel Adams is what got me into photography.” Then I just got so tired of looking at Ansel Adams. The last workshop we did, I wanted a change and asked students, “What photography do you hate?” Or, “One image that you love and one that you hate?” And everyone brought in Ansel Adams.

Mark Steinmetz, Bent Tree, Athens, Georgia, 1995
All photographs courtesy the artists

Famighetti: The love-hate relationship with Ansel! Do you want to distance the students from influences?

Steinmetz: I think they’re key: “Who got you into photography in the first place?” “What made you want to be a photographer?” Ansel Adams is a big reference for people maybe starting in the 1950s and 1960s, and Cartier-Bresson certainly. We have a lot of students coming to us who cite Eggleston. I think Sally Mann, the tonality of her prints, was important to many.

Rozovsky: It helps to see where someone is coming from, not just in the photographs they make, but what got them going. It’s like a mother tongue or a sort of DNA.

Famighetti: How would you describe The Humid as related to location? The geography is so specific, and as you noted at the start of this conversation, connects back to the name, a strong sense of place.

Steinmetz: There are railroad tracks running right alongside us at The Humid. The street we’re on in Athens is a long, mysterious street. There’s overgrown vegetation everywhere, old mill-worker housing. The street is close to downtown and leads to it. One thing we’ve been thinking was organizing a festival one day in Athens, probably when the students from the University of Georgia are off, because it’s very walkable. There are all these great bars and restaurants and all these places that could be wonderful venues for artists’ presentations. There’s a mill building right across from The Humid, across the street on Pulaski, that’s eye-opening, just a huge, crazy vaulting space when you’re inside there. It would be a real treat. America is lacking a walkable photography festival in the vein of Arles. One in Athens would, of course, be much smaller. It would be a nice place where people could meet and talk about photography.

Rozovsky: It’s a bit of a destination. We’re here to ask if you’d like to be chairman of the board.

Famighetti: Count me in. In moments of technological change, as with the digital ascendence over recent decades, we see photographers turning toward more traditional, or hand-oriented, techniques—photograms and other process-based work, for example. We’re now at another inflection point with the rise of AI and its ability to generate images. Do you see this influencing the students who seek you out, in part, because of your attention to a black-and-white darkroom process?

Steinmetz: Well, hopefully as people become familiar with AI, they’ll be able to recognize it wherever it appears, feel it out, and then come to know what is unique about our human experience and human creativity. I think there’s a lot of photography that might as well be AI. It’s trying to satisfy formulas and expectations. What’s something that’s unique and authentic and deeply human? If AI starts presenting to us what the human experience is, that could lead to us devaluing our human experience.

Rozovsky: But do we know entirely what the human experience is? I mean, maybe AI is part of the scope of human experience. Not that I like it.

Steinmetz: I made all this work on Little League baseball. There’s one picture that I usually show, which I call my Guernica. It’s with a short telephoto, and you’ve got five kids, their hands are clenching, their eyes are shut. They’re trying to catch a ball. The ball’s halfway in a mitt. But there’s one kid who’s missing a tooth, and there’s Kleenex sticking out of a pocket. Maybe AI can figure that out. But AI would never, ever get the string that’s coming down from this coat, because it’s just too wacky, you know? And it would never know . . .

Rozovsky: Be careful. It’s listening.

Steinmetz: I know. But it would never know what it’s like. Because on your baseball mitt, which is made of leather, there’s always a strap down, and it would never know what it’s like to chew on that leather strap. It will never have that experience, which most every kid playing baseball has. It will never have any human experience. It’s just probabilities. And it’s great for that. But we have to have the self-esteem that, yes, we are indeed the boss. We’re having these experiences, and these experiences really matter. This is a great ride, this life.

Rozovsky: I agree, there’s nothing like it. Here’s to anticipating what’s next.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue.”

Arnold isn’t shy to admit failure or shame. He wears as a badge of honor his lack of technical prowess when he first started photography. This was more than ten years ago, when he abruptly dropped his career as a writer to begin a quixotic quest of self-realization. In this way, the camera that has brought him recognition on the street can be seen as a talisman: the bijou in which he gathers evidence of the primordial, those fleeting instances in public life that speak to not only love or heartbreak, but also his own dogged searching.

On the eve of the publication of You Are What You Do (Loose Joints, 2025), I talked with Arnold about Sichuan peppercorns, authenticity, and his second monograph.

Freddy Martinez: You start your editorial photoshoots with playful icebreakers. I’d like to do the same. I read that you called Lee Friedlander a Sichuan peppercorn.

Daniel Arnold: Did I? That sounds like me. I back that. I don’t remember it, but I believe it, and I think it’s right.

Martinez: How does Friedlander’s work remind you of a Sichuan peppercorn?

Arnold: I do a lot of archive review, a lot of editing. It’s my nighttime activity. I’m such a junkie for pictures. And there are times when your mind gets deadened to what’s in front of you, especially when it’s your own output. There are times when I’ve been stumped and really over it, and I’ll flip through that big yellow MoMA retrospective of Friedlander’s, or it’s any Friedlander sequence, and I’ll experience that flavor-tripping phenomenon: When I go back to my work, it looks completely different to me. I can apply his brilliant formality to my own sloppy world and make new sense of it.

Martinez: Does that comparison ever feel troubling to you?

Arnold: You mean, does it make me feel insecure?

Martinez: Yes.

Arnold: If you’re going to struggle with insecurity, you’re probably in the wrong business. Insecurity is formative. It’s helpful, early on, but if I saw myself in competition with the rest of the photographers, I’d be cooked. I wouldn’t be able to go outside. There’s a tendency, especially in academia, to put everything in a lineage and see how moments in history speak to each other, how different voices compare. That’s for somebody else to do. For me, I deal with the world. I deal with my own little habit and keep it at that.

Martinez: You announced yourself in the early 2010s on Instagram. Looking back more than ten years ago, now at age forty-five, how would you describe your place in life right now?

Arnold: There was more ambitious ego at play in that first public push between 2012 and 2014. But I was very lucky to put a lot of that first desirous, ambitious energy into the writing chapter of my career. By the time photography presented itself to me, I had already moved past that New York thing of seeking glamour. I started photography in touch with the necessity to make a mess and fail. I didn’t even know how to use a camera properly then. I just knew I loved pictures. So I pointed the simplest camera that I could and crossed my fingers and made a lot of mistakes. But anyway, forty-five. Looking back, it has been an insanely consequential ten years. I think I’m now much more rooted in—not to be a downer—but in grief and alienation. There’s still heavy curiosity and clinging respect for naivety. I try to find that and cultivate it wherever I can. But now and then are different worlds. I definitely don’t work with the same energy that I used to, which is not to say that I’m tired. It’s just that my priorities have changed. My appetites have changed.

Martinez: You mentioned grief and naivety. It brings to mind vulnerability as an artist. What do you think about the idea of nakedness? This idea that a person may have no pretense. How do you think people reach that? How do you think people can—

Arnold: Aspire to nudity?

Martinez: [laughs] Yes.

Arnold: I think I operate from shame, and shame is obviously the number one enemy of nudity. But I aspire to it. What you call nakedness I find it in those glimpses, in flashes of insight. I find it through relentless practice.

Martinez: Is shame tied to the grief that you mentioned?

Arnold: Oh, for sure. Good eye. My father died last summer. And my clearest memory of his funeral is flopping on a joke I attempted to make in his eulogy. The joke was, “I’m really smart.” I have a weird, dry sense of humor that takes for granted that people are actually paying attention and thinking about everything I say, and everybody there just took it straight, like I was using my dad’s funeral as an opportunity to promote myself. Laugh, it’s fine. That’s the right response. But the possibility that somebody could think that I was celebrating myself so horrifies me—that this is the lone souvenir I take away from losing the great male lead of my life. All I can really remember is when I looked smug and embarrassed myself.

Martinez: I think it’s insightful to know that a photographer is not just their camera, not just their eye: There’s also heart. You said that the guiding light of finding photographs that “double as a proof of magic” no longer compels you. What is guiding you right now?

Arnold: That statement comes across more definitive than I meant it. Do you know Wings of Desire? That film’s depiction of magic—the angel with a notepad noticing when the wind blows up someone’s jacket or when someone is crying alone in a parking lot—that breeze that blows through your life is still a guiding light. I mean, if not guiding, at least one of the great pleasures.

What I was referring to when I said that was this feedback-driven appetite for knockout, punch-line pictures—ones with bold and direct communication. Those work great on Instagram, or at least, they did for me early on. I spent a lot of time, whether I meant to or not, oiling my gears for making those pictures. It just got to a point where even landing thirty-six of them felt kind of boring and contrived. It was like I was imitating myself.

Martinez: Driven by an algorithm in a feedback loop—did you feel like you were being used by a machine in a way?

Arnold: Not exactly. But I was definitely being corrupted by social media. I can’t say my departure was as calculated as it now feels. I mean, it was COVID and the George Floyd protests were raging, and I couldn’t stand to use any aspect of that moment to draw attention to myself or to advertise my cute little insights. It felt disgusting. I stepped away from Instagram and almost immediately had no idea how to get back. I had a week, maybe a day, of disoriented panic about that, but it was really liberating. Leaving definitely stirs up more insecurity than staying, because when you’re checking in with an audience you have this confidence about whether you’re getting it right or wrong. Now, it’s hard to tell if it’s good anymore, but I don’t think it matters. I’m not swinging for the fences. I’m trying to do that Wings of Desire ritual every day and just be open to noticing the breeze on my cheek.

Martinez: The writer Denis Johnson would describe it as seeing mystery wink at us. Photographers are pointing at something and saying, “Look this way. I want you to see this.”

Arnold: I think that’s the structure of the game. Any game you play by yourself, exhaustively, every day of your life, you get to have an impish relationship with it. Now, I take great pleasure in missing a great picture. Like if I had taken one big step to the right and lifted the camera a little higher, you would see that there was this great thing happening, but I shoot from the wrong spot, so it’s loaded with dramatic irony that only I feel. It’s like a puzzle box. There’s some pleasure in that, dumb pleasure probably. But how do I keep the game entertaining for myself? I mean, there’s still that very basic caveman thing, “Oh, look at that. That’s funny. That makes me sad.”

For better or for worse, I’ve tried to make myself a world where I can work without the disruptive noise of my brain, one in which I can be a servant of my instincts, and then I can bring intention and analysis back to work at night in the edit. I’ve talked for a long time about a Jekyll and Hyde relationship with the editor within me, and I stand by it. The guy who’s deciding what the pictures are is different than the guy who’s taking them.

Martinez: Would you say the editor is the driving force of your work ethic?

Arnold: I don’t think you can really separate the two. The edit work that I do at night is bringing reason to a mostly unconscious part of my brain. But I also learn about the daytime guy’s shortcomings, and I’m able to carry those lessons into the next day, like little Post-It reminders for my automatic brain, “Hey, maybe you need to get a little bit closer today, or maybe you should pay a little bit more attention to framing. Maybe don’t be so loose about shooting from your belly and having everything be way too far to the left.” It’s kind of self-contradictory now that I’m hearing myself say it out loud, but on one hand, the rigor enables this mindless kind of work, and on the other hand, it also infuses that mindlessness with a gut discipline.

Martinez: You’ve spoken about storytelling. Looking through your work, I imagined what folklore could look like in New York City.

Arnold: Music to my ears.

Martinez: There’s an idea that folklore is a slow, traditional type of narrative that forms over centuries. I think it’s also tied to moments when somebody shows us that the past is still present now. I was wondering what you think about folklore as it relates to your photography?

Arnold: The title You Are What You Do comes from one of the pictures. It’s written in yellow chalk on a red wall where some girls are playing hide-and-seek. It’s also a phrase from Carl Jung. I bought myself a particular edition of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces because, although Loose Joints has their hands on the reins of production, I wanted to make a bootleg T-shirt with the Thousand Faces cover, so that I could give it away on the side when they’re not looking. What do you do when you empower your unconsciousness to create a document of your emotional experience? It’s archetype, it’s all archetype, and when it comes to storytelling, I think that becomes observable and distinct in any street picture, no matter who’s making it. You see a cop, a kiss. There are all these things that are shortcuts, or signifiers, that if you just point your camera in that direction—even if you have no idea what else is going on—you dramatically increase the odds that a story is there.

I haven’t had this conversation before. Nobody has put it to me that way, but I aspire to folklore and that outsider, practical documentation. Sometimes I feel like a sculptor, like time is a procession of constantly changing surfaces that I peel off and stick on a cave wall to make my own extra peculiar, inverted world. There’s primordial energy. That’s why I try to work without ego or ambition. Aspiring to success just leads to homogeneity and imitation, and there’s something interesting there, for sure, but I don’t know. Maybe the most moving, thought-provoking art experience I ever had was going to the Vatican.

I don’t have any religious affiliation there, but it’s a masterpiece. The whole thing. Not just the Sistine Chapel, because the Sistine Chapel, you know who did it. For the rest of the place, so many nameless people who put their heart into work that they didn’t start and didn’t finish. It took generations of devotion. And the driving force of it all was—fingers crossed—the existence of “God,” you know, this screaming into the void: “Just in case you’re there, this is how much I love you.” Of that sentiment, I can’t imagine anything more worthy of my energy.

Martinez: That’s beautiful. I’m thinking of family now. Because like those artists who generation after generation say, “In case you can hear me, I love you,” our ancestors might say the same to their descendants—each generation, moving forward, doing its own small part, so that the next one can feel some connection to the past or love. Your father passed away, and you were close.

Arnold: Yes, and I just got home from a very close uncle’s funeral this past weekend, and my little brother before that and my grandpa and my beautiful cat. It’s been all in the past three years. I mean, whatever, this is not an era for, I don’t know, comparing tragedy. There’s so much. I just mean to say that I have some intimacy with death these days.

Martinez: Is that in any way a motivating factor for the book, or was it incidental?

Arnold: It’s there. You Are What You Do is an interesting marker of the moment. Because in my own rambling, messy way, I tried to articulate where I was with Loose Joints. I made them an edit of probably three thousand photos to show the scope of what’s there from my current point of view: Here’s my trajectory from those very crude photographs when I couldn’t use a camera to now trying to work without my brain noticing.

I told them that I had no interest in greatest hits, or “The wide world of Daniel Arnold.” I gave them a loose indication that I’m doing things differently lately, that different things are important to me. I mean, ideally, what I wanted to do was a Rosalind Fox Solomon–type book, where twenty years of puzzle pieces are decontextualized and rearranged to say something new, and I still like that idea, but that’s for me to do alone. And I think that Sarah Chaplin Espenon, who did the editing for the most part, saw that there was this more romantic, more wounded thing happening in my work that offered an alternative to what people usually think of me, and she stubbornly stuck to that as her thesis. She wanted another side.

Martinez: Do you have any feelings or intuitions for what lies ahead?

Arnold: I don’t, but I preordered Jeff Mermelstein’s What If Jeff Were a Butterfly? I have a new appreciation for that title after talking through this with you for a couple hours. I don’t really know Jeff at all, but I so admire his curiosity. What a free and special brain to have the insight, so many years deep in obsessive work, to say, What if I don’t even know what I am yet? I would hate to predict tomorrow because anything I guess will hem me in. I don’t want a goal. I think that life is scary and stressful, and we’re in hard times. I would love to stay loose and stay open and, more than anything, keep surprising myself. But what will come next? I have no idea.

Martinez: That’s okay.

Arnold: Yeah, it’s better that way.

For twenty years, Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, has sought to give a platform to young artists—and explore what defines their generation’s artistic output—first with the exhibition ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow in 2005 and, most recently, with Gen-Z: Shaping a New Gaze, which opened in September and brings together sixty-six image makers from around the world. Curators Nathalie Herschdorfer, Julie Dayer, and Hannah Pröbsting decided to shape the show in collaboration with the photographers, allowing each to include a statement that is showcased alongside their work. It was important, Pröbsting says, to create a show that includes the artists’ perspectives, rather than leaving them outside the process, which might have resulted in an anthropological approach. Instead, distinctive themes emerge from the photographers’ words as much as from their images. 

What connects this group of emerging artists is their use of the camera as a tool for self-expression. Not much traditional documentary work is found on the walls; instead, interiority abounds. But this is not a study in myopia. Rather, the exhibition provides insight into how young artists are using photography to grapple with self-understanding and rebelling against the crushing weight of conformity imposed by various cultural norms and expectations. I recently spoke with artists Isabella Madrid (Colombia), Fatimazohra Serri (Morocco), Ben Hubert (United Kingdom), and exhibition curator Hannah Pröbsting to discuss this new generation of image makers, how growing up in a digital landscape has shaped their work, and their outspoken approach to identity.

Christina Cacouris: Self-portraiture was a predominant motif of the exhibition; the word identity came up a lot in the artistic statements. What role do you see identity playing within your work?

Isabella Madrid: Self-portraiture has been a tool since I was thirteen years old. It’s the window that allowed me to begin making art. It shaped how I understand my identity. It’s this combination of so many stories that are mine but also don’t only belong to me—this whole universe of Colombian women, how my mother’s identity has been shaped by her upbringing, my grandma’s, my friends’—how all of these stories come together. I take little pieces from everything and make the image and make my own identity. I think that plays into my relationship with social media and building these characters, storylines, plays where you have all these elements coming from so many different places.

Fatimazohra Serri: I grew up in a conservative community in Morocco. I was forced to wear a hijab at the age of fourteen. I grew up in that community not having my whole freedom, so photography was the thing that helped me to express myself, my struggles, and the women that were in the same community as me. I didn’t study art; I was an autodidact. I started with my phone at first. I tried to express my anger and my denial for my situation in pictures and turn them into a narrative that speaks for itself.

Ben Hubert: The project that I’ve been doing recently is an observation on social shifts. It’s still quite personal to me. Self-portraiture also just lends itself to the way that I work. I go into a studio without much of an idea of what I’m aiming to get out of it.

Hannah Pröbsting: I think that identity is always at the center of an awful lot of people’s work. What I think was really different about this generation of work was the strong number of artists in particular presenting their work as self-portraiture in a very performative way. There is this very performative nature of not just saying this work is about identity, but this work is a self portrait, and I am completely in control of how I am reappropriating something. 

Cacouris: Building off the theme of performance, the concept of gender as a type of performance felt inherent in a lot of the work. How do you see gender in terms of a performance? How did you want to relate that in your work? 

Madrid: In this project specifically, I was looking into what being a woman in Colombia meant. And that’s a whole universe that I had to really dissect and translate into visual codes and have a reading of gender in Colombia. It was very tied into how you look physically, what your body is supposed to look like, what your role in society is supposed to be, and tied into religion, into violence with your own body, subjecting your body to very violent procedures like plastic surgery. 

Serri: As I mentioned before, my work is centered around women, especially in the conservative community. Ironically, when I wanted to work with males, I couldn’t; in my city, you can’t go into an apartment or somewhere with a man and do that. Someone would call the police. So I was limited to shooting on the roof of my house with my sister. Even when I wanted to talk about women and how they are oppressed, I couldn’t include men to express those things. I was even oppressed in speaking about these women. 

This generation, they are not afraid of anything. They are more courageous, they are more bold, more creative.

Hubert: Initially, there was some part of me that wanted to fight or at least push in the right direction for a general representation of men in terms of their ability to be vulnerable, to be comfortable and confident with what their sexualities are. The work took more of a quiet observatory approach on that subject, but within that, I was definitely using history in art as a way to try and tackle gender.

In a sense of sculptures of the male form throughout history—if you’re looking maybe at the Renaissance period or even ancient Greek—there’s this femininity and vulnerability that you see in some of these sculptures, and I’ve always found it interesting how idolized they are and how people look up to those. But in the present day, where I’m from, people have something against the idea of a naked man, predominantly straight men, that is probably homophobic. Photography for me was a way to bridge the gap between the male form within art and the actual male form, and find a space for it to exist comfortably.

Cacouris: How did your upbringings in a digital world impact your decisions to make photographs as an artistic practice? 

Madrid: For me, there’s no photography without social media. Around eleven or twelve I started getting access to digital devices, and all I was doing was looking at images. I had already tried drawing, I had tried painting, but it never felt interesting because it was a kind of replication. And I think it was missing a subject, a person. I wanted a face, I wanted an expression, I wanted a character from the beginning. And I wanted to play into these social media websites, like Tumblr, where my visual collective was born. So it’s completely connected, and I’ve been sharing my self-portraits from when I was thirteen. 

Serri: I was introduced to photography by friends. I had a lot of Moroccan friends who were doing photography online. I grabbed my phone, and I started shooting street photography for a few months just with my phone, and I was posting them on Instagram. Then I thought about experimenting in conceptual photography. And I didn’t think about it as art; I didn’t say I was doing something artistic. I was just posting on social media. Then people started liking my work. The algorithm was boosting pictures and art, so it reached a lot of people. 

Cacouris: Something I found interesting in your work was the idea of the masks we wear. Ben, in one of your images you’re holding a plaster mask in front of your face; Isabella, you’ve painted your face in gold; and Fatimazohra, you’re concealing your face with the camera. I’d love to know more about the interplay between revealing yourself through self-portraiture and simultaneously obscuring a part of yourself.

Hubert: With a lot of the images that I’ve taken, I’m avoiding my face being in the work. I wanted a sense of it being about more than just myself, with the subjects that I’m tackling. Putting the mask into it, because it’s molded on my face, it empowered me slightly while also giving me a space personally within the project, which I don’t think otherwise would have been there. There’s something theatrical about it as well—the performance aspect—it feels like the old theater masks, in some ways. Also, a little bit like a death mask. The material has sculptural qualities, in a decaying way, and a level of that idea of the man crumbling.

Madrid: For me, it started with gold as a material because I wanted to think of different representations of Colombian bodies in history, and then my mind went to pre-Columbian Indigenous artifacts, and how we are known for these sculptures and masks made in gold, which were stolen through colonization. But it’s still a big part of our culture, this material and what it represents, also this shiny object to be commercialized—that was the starting point to turn it into this mask, this way of commercializing my own body, and then it became this drag thing. In each photo I wanted to have these drag characters, and that helped me understand what each mask was doing for each character. But it started with the material itself.

Serri: For me, it was for protection. As in most of my earliest works, you can see that the face is always hidden under the burka, or the camera, because back then I was only shooting myself, my sister, or some friends. I was living in Nador, and taking a picture of yourself and posting it online was a terrifying idea. My family had no idea I was doing that, and I couldn’t risk putting my friends’ faces online. It was a way to protect me, my sister, my friends, from the society, because the pictures were a bit controversial in my community. But since I moved from Nador—I’m in Marrakesh—I have more freedom to work with male, female models, I’m free to show faces. The situation has changed a lot, but back then it was for protection.

Cacouris: I understand. It makes sense why you were making pictures, and what it did for you, but why do you think your sister and friends wanted to participate? What do you think being photographed offered them?

Serri: I’ve never thought about it, but I think my sister did it because it was an exciting idea; maybe she wanted to support me. I assured them their faces were not going to be online, and they felt it was safe, but I appreciated that from them. Maybe because they wanted to do something new, something different. They believed in what I was doing.

Cacouris: I noticed that remote releases are prevalent in a lot of the work in the exhibition, including yours, Isabella. It almost feels like an anachronism to see them in photographs today. I’m curious why you decided to include it.

Madrid: I had always done digital photography, and I had also used a digital remote control. But I hid it. I was always trying to hide it and to contort my body so you wouldn’t see it. And then starting to study photography and studying photographers who actively reveal the device gave me another layer of understanding of what it means to build a self-portrait. 

Pröbsting: So many of the projects that are in the exhibition are about reappropriating different things. Some are reappropriating words that have been used as slurs against them or reappropriating expectations that have been forced upon people. This is about saying, I am in complete control of this. No one is making me take this picture. I’m in this position. And this is me putting myself in this position to tell you something.

Cacouris: In response to the title of the exhibition, how would you each define the “new gaze” this generation is creating? 

Madrid: It’s just so honest. I love the honesty and the rawness of it all. We’re not afraid to be greedy anymore. We’re not afraid of anything, really. Because the situation right now feels so hopeless, in a way, it’s like, we have nothing else to lose. 

Hubert: Thinking about the future, there are so many common goals and topics being tackled across so many cultures and so many countries. The world’s never been as connected as it is now, online and in real life. 

Serri: I agree with Isabella. This generation, I think they are not afraid of anything. They are more courageous, they are more bold, more creative. 

Pröbsting: Photography has offered this generation a platform to speak for themselves, and maybe that comes from platforms like Instagram, maybe it comes from the fact that many, many young people even from an early age have a camera with them. But no longer are we relying on people from the outside to go in and represent different cultures, different communities, different voices. Through photography, this generation is able to advocate for themselves and have their own voice.

 Gen Z: Shaping a New Gaze is on view at Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland, through January 2, 2026.

Alejandro Cartagena does a lot. He is a photographer. He is a publisher at Studio Cartagena and a copublisher, with Carlos Loret de Mola, at Los Sumergidos, a small independent bookmaker based in New York and Mexico. He self-publishes some of his own books; others are published by the likes of Skinnerboox, in Italy, and Gato Negro Ediciones, in Mexico. And sometimes he is just the author. He is an in-demand photobook editor and, most recently, as a cofounder of the NFT organization Fellowship, is deeply involved with the NFTs scene. Cartagena’s overall practice as an indefatigable bookmaker—thirty-three books and counting—has produced a compelling network of inquiries about social, urban, and environmental issues related to Monterrey, Mexico, where he lives, and to Latin America in general. His work is at once geospecific and universal, methodical and loose, empirical and poetic. One morning in 2022, during Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair in New York, the publisher Bruno Ceschel met with Cartagena to try to make sense of it all.

Alejandro Cartagena, from the series Suburbia Mexicana: People of Suburbia, 2009–10

Alejandro Cartagena, Fragmented Cities, Juarez #2, from the series Suburbia Mexicana, 2007

Bruno Ceschel: I want to start with your practice as a photographer. It looks to me that the methodology you adopt in your work bears a relationship to anthropological fieldwork—in your case, manifesting a structured way of analyzing complex social themes related to your own environment via the close observation of various, but specific, phenomena.

Alejandro Cartagena: I think it comes from my training in visual studies, the idea of understanding an issue by visualizing the causes and effects of it. I would call my methodology a Google-era understanding of photography: if you pose one question to Google, it’ll give you a hundred thousand ways of understanding what you have asked about. I thought that was an interesting way to develop my practice. Yes, I photograph housing developments, but how did those houses get there? What is the bureaucracy behind it, both public and private? After getting those houses, how do people then deal with transportation? What does it look like when you are using public transportation? What does it look like when you are using private transportation? What are the problems that stem from building those houses? There are environmental implications, effects on the waterways, et cetera. I felt this was an interesting proposition for documentary photography, to look at an issue by looking at all the other issues around it, even if they contradict the initial starting point. That vulnerability is very important for documentary photography, because it’s not about truth—it’s about an opinion. It is about making visible different ways of thinking about the same issue.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules

65.00

The first definitive survey of the Mexican photographer’s prolific career.

$65.0011Add to cart

In stock

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules

Photographs by Alejandro Cartagena. Contributions by Tatiana Bilbao, Álvaro Enrigue, Horacio Fernández, Charlotte Kent, and Shana Lopes.

$ 65.00

–

1

+

$65.0011Add to cart

View cart

Description

A comprehensive survey of a prolific photographer who fearlessly charts the dreams and dystopias of Mexico today.

Ground Rules is the first comprehensive, fully bilingual survey charting the career of the prolific photographer Alejandro Cartagena. Celebrated for his photobooks Carpoolers (2014) and A Small Guide to Homeownership (2020), Cartagena is known for his formally engaging and socially incisive images that span the politics of the US-Mexico border, suburban sprawl, and the increasing wealth disparities in North America. Ground Rules deploys a diverse array of photographic formats, from documentary and collage to the appropriation of vernacular photographs and AI-generated imagery, all unified by Cartagena’s commitment to addressing Mexico’s most pressing social and environmental issues with humor and pathos.

Published to coincide with a mid-career solo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on view from November 2025 through May 2026.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 284
Number of images: 213
Publication date: 2025-11-11
Measurements: 6.69 x 9.21 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115728

Contributors

Alejandro Cartagena (born in 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) is an artist and editor whose projects employ landscape and portraiture to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where his mid-career survey, Ground Rules, is presented in 2025; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Patricia Conde Galería, Mexico City; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. His work is in the collections of museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; George Eastman Museum; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California.
Tatiana Bilbao is a Mexico City–based architect and founder of Tatiana Bilbao Estudio.
Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer based in New York and an associate professor of romance languages and literatures at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York.
Horacio Fernández is a photo-historian, curator, and author of numerous books, including Fotografía Pública: Photography in Print, 1919–1939 (1999) and The Latin American Photobook (Aperture, 2011).
Charlotte Kent is associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University, New Jersey.
Shana Lopes is assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curator of Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules.

Related Content

Reviews

An Exhibition in Tucson Looks at the Things We Leave Behind

Portfolios

What Happens When the American Dream of Homeownership Reaches Mexico?

Ceschel: What’s the main issue in your work, then, if you are able to describe it?

Cartagena: In most of my work, I would say homeownership.

Ceschel: But in a specific location, right?

Cartagena: Totally. It’s concentrated in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, which is where I live. I’ve seen the changes to the city caused by suburbanization. It’s a case study of what I was reading about urban theory at that time—how cities grow and decay and grow and decay constantly. It was, I guess, a coincidence that I was reading that kind of literature and seeing it play out in the real world. It was theory being made visible to me in my city.

Ceschel: With a speed that is probably specific to our times.

Cartagena: Exactly. It’s suburbanization on drugs, literally.

Alejandro Cartagena, from the series What We Fight For: Chiapas, 2010–20

Ferando Gallegos and Alejandro Cartagena in Cartagena’s studio, Monterrey, Mexico, 2021

Ceschel: While you talk about producing according to a methodology, and being prompted by academic discourse, your work reads to me as an art practice.

Cartagena: I think of my practice as visual poetry—photographs of dying rivers alongside images of people in the bed of a truck; pictures of people renting houses next to images of high-rises and empty lots in downtown Monterrey. The poetry comes from impromptu and open relationships that would be hard to justify in an academic context. In our culture, we have discrete, determined realms where things are supposed to happen. Art is the space where people can let go and do things that don’t make any sense.

I think of my practice as visual poetry—photographs of dying rivers alongside images of people in the bed of a truck.

Ceschel: Or where people can feel, instead of understand.

Cartagena: Feel is important . . . and having no purpose aside from just an escape from order, escape from the idea of the known. It doesn’t mean that all art is that way. But that’s one of the things that I really love about art: I can propose ideas that in other fields would be rejected.

Ceschel: Do you see a sort of chaos as part of the strategy here?

Cartagena: Yes. I remember my first portfolio review, in 2004. One of the reviewers saw my work and said it looked like shit. The photos were really badly printed. He also said, “But there’s a flavor to that. There’s this organic-ness. The ideas are really good, but there’s this unfinished nature to them.” That comment stuck with me for a long time. I am conscious of the organic-ness of a narrative that is never finished in my work, which speaks of how I see Latin America—always in process, never finished.

Alejandro Cartagena, from the series Carpoolers, 2011–12

Alejandro Cartagena, from the series Carpoolers, 2011–12

Ceschel: Some threads in your practice are ongoing: The Carpoolers series is in its fourth volume, for example. And you have often used a book format drawn from various how-to guides—A Small Guide to Homeownership (2020), Guía presidencial de selfies (Guide to presidential selfies, 2018), and A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption (2017).

Cartagena: The nod to the guide format is important to me because it’s aligned with what photography is supposed to do: document, comment upon, and explain visually. But most of those books are an antithesis of a guide. They are complicated and nonsensical at times. After my master’s in visual studies, I did the first volume of Carpoolers in 2014, followed by the Infrastructure and Corruption book, and a lot of subprojects that were never really completed. The idea of repetition is vital to my practice, not only in the representation but in ideas of themes and design. There’s a big narrative arc that continues through each new publication, sometimes using the same images in different contexts, in different ways.

Ceschel: On your website landing page, there is a list of titles in chronological order. There are your self-published books. There are books of which you are the author, but you’re not the publisher. And then there are books that you edited, which sometimes you publish or others publish. But you present them as a whole. Can you talk about the relationship between your own practice as an image maker and a bookmaker?

Cartagena: The idea of authorship is very interesting to me. When does authorship get fixed in photography? Does it get fixed when you take the photograph? Or does it get fixed when you edit and sequence a book? My website reflects that; I have authorship in all those books even if I might not be the photographer. Editing as authorship is part of my
art practice.

Spread from Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers #4 (Los Sumergidos, 2021)

Spread from Alejandro Cartagena, Enrique (Gato Negro, 2018)
All photographs courtesy the artist

Ceschel: Finally, how does your work in digital spaces, Web 3.0 and NFTs specifically, sit within your practice?

Cartagena: Web 3.0 and the digital space, for me, are a continuation of the idea of expanding photographic distribution. Photography is a medium that needs distribution. It needs to connect with people. And so, what really attracts me to NFTs and the digital realm is the expansion of a collector base. It’s a place to educate, and a new source of people who can get excited about photography. That is something that photography in the NFT world does really well. What changes is the idea of ownership. That’s why, also, I think photobooks work really well, and why there is a bigger market for photobooks than prints, and why there’s a bigger market for NFTs than photobooks. Each offers the opportunity for ownership, but, each time, it’s a broader opportunity. Prints are owned by just a few collectors, books have a little bit of a larger group of collectors, and with NFTs there are even more.

Ceschel: Earlier you said that editing and sequencing are fundamental parts of your work, but with NFTs, all of that is basically irrelevant, as images often circulate on their own and without context.

Cartagena: With the first two platforms for photography, the print and the book, we understand how those outputs work. With a print, we understand the idea of texture, scale, the quality of the paper, the tonal range—you can tell a good print from a bad print. With photobooks, it’s the idea of design, sequence, editing, the materials used. With NFTs, we’re still developing the code for this new mode of output, an understanding of what makes it a unique iteration of the medium—what will make photographers excited to use it in their practice. It’s inspiring to be at the forefront of trying to figure it out.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture, Spring 2023, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” in The PhotoBook Review.

Working for publications such as Essence, Unique New York, and The Village Voice, from the late 1970s onward, Simpson covered New York’s art and fashion scenes, producing portraits of a wide range of Black artists, literary figures, and celebrities. Her iconic jewelry, the Black Cameo, has been worn by everyone from the model Iman to civil-rights leader Rosa Parks. 

The second title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series, created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, Coreen Simpson: A Monograph showcases the luminous, wide-ranging contributions of an essential artist. This long-awaited volume, Simpson’s first, features her celebrated B-Boys series—portraits of young people coming of age during the early years of hip-hop—as well as her experiments with collage and other formal interventions. An assortment of essays and an extended interview offer powerful reflections on Simpson’s unique blend of portraiture, sartorial politics, and her riveting story of an intrepid life in journalism, art, and fashion. Below, read a conversation from the volume between Simpson and Willis.

Deborah Willis: Thank you for this opportunity to discuss your work for our Vision & Justice project as we remember the impact photography had on our lives as young girls until now. I recall us living as neighbors on the Upper West Side in the 1980s when we would run into each other going to events, shopping, and participating fully in the arts movements around New York. We always respected each other and our work.

I also remember the time we took our first trip together to Detroit, Michigan, for an exhibition I curated in 1982 with Dan Dawson, Photography: Image and Imagination, held at the Jazzonia Gallery. George N’Namdi and Rosalind Reed were the owners. It was a long road trip, but it was an exciting time as we began to reshape ideas about photography and its meaning to social justice, migration, and art. The photographers included Joan Byrd, Dawoud Bey, Albert Chong, Frank Stewart, Adger Cowans, Jules Allen, Bob Fletcher, and John Pinderhughes, naming only a few of the twenty artists. We were committed to bringing diverse stories to the exhibition. I remember with great fondness being inspired by your work because they were large-scale images of women, strikingly beautiful, and you painted on the photographs.

I also will never forget the time we spent on the 1989 artists’ trip that included David Avalos and Yong Soon Min, among many other artists, to Palestine, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Gaza, particularly the difficult moments when the men didn’t understand our focus as women. Geno Rodriguez, then director of the Alternative Museum in New York, organized it with the invitation of Palestinian and Israeli artists. We visited these and other cities for the exhibition Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the Intifada, which was on display at the Alternative Museum, in 1990. Some of the people in the group challenged us because we took photographs of items and objects that were of interest to us: We focused our cameras on the land, interiors of homes, and I searched for Black Palestinians and children in hospitals. Some thought our work was apolitical because we were looking at the land in a totally different way. We saw Molotov cocktails on window ledges and photographed them.

Coreen Simpson: On that trip, we thought as mothers because we were also mothers. We saw how the Palestinian women lived under adversity and yet kept a home filled with color, and domesticity, despite lack of finances. This was truly inspiring.

Coreen Simpson, My Sister Is Dead, Palestine, 1989

Coreen Simpson, Egypt, 1989

Willis: In New York, we spent days and nights attending openings in the Village and on the West Side, and, of course, at Just Above Midtown gallery. The 1980s were, indeed, an exciting time, especially for Black artists. We were all together—photographers, painters, sculptors, writers, performance artists, musicians. Getting to know you affirmed my interest in imagining a biographical narrative in your portraits.

Simpson: That was a great time.

Willis: It was.

Simpson: We didn’t know that we were living in such a great time. We were just going with the flow.

Willis: It was normal. Everything was just love.

Simpson: That’s right.

Willis: You were recognized as a photographer and jewelry designer. If you agree that is the case, and I’m leaving it to you to decide if it is, what would you say has been your lifelong quest?

Simpson: I think my quest was to really be independent and just to do something that I would enjoy. I worked as an executive secretary. I always had good jobs. But I was tired of that. And I realized one day—Coreen, you’ve got to get a career, this is not working.

So, I interviewed myself: “Well, what do you like to do?” I was freelancing, writing little lifestyle articles for Unique NY and stuff like that. But I wanted to do something that I enjoyed doing, where I could be free to do what I wanted to do. That is my lifelong quest. I haven’t worked for anybody in many, many years. I can’t believe I pulled that off.

Willis: How did your interest in visual culture and photography begin?

Simpson: I was doing freelance writing, and I didn’t like the photographs that people were sending in or taking of my subjects. I just thought, My articles would look better if I could photograph the way I see my subjects. So when I told Vy Higginsen that I wanted to take my own pictures, she replied, “We didn’t know you took photographs.” I called up Walter Johnson, who became one of my mentors, and I said, “Show me how to use this 35mm camera.” He came over, loaned me a Canon 35mm, and showed me how to use the light meter inside the camera. That’s how I started, just like that. And then I liked taking pictures better than writing. To me, it was more interesting.

Coreen Simpson, Street Preacher, Harlem, 1979

Coreen Simpson, Think Positive, Harlem, 1980

Willis: Tell us more about Vy Higginsen.

Simpson: Vy Higginsen was a Broadway producer at this point. But she was a very well-known New York DJ on the radio, with Frankie Crocker on WBLS. And she had a magazine called Unique NY. I loved the magazine. It was a long vertical magazine, very thin, and it had little articles about the uniqueness of New York.

I called her up one day. I didn’t even know Vy at the time. I said, “I have an idea for an article.” Because I was dating a bartender at the time—he was an actor, a very handsome guy—I told her, “I’ve met a lot of bartenders. Why don’t you do an article about bartenders? I could do it. I could interview four bartenders for you.” So she said, “Oh, that sounds great. Can you make it three typewritten pages?” So that’s how I started writing for her. That’s when I decided I didn’t like the photographs. The next time they called me to do an article, I told them, “I want to take the pictures; I will do the article only if you use my photographs.” That’s how I got started.

Willis: Sounds like you created your first photographic assignment, do you agree?

Simpson: Yes. That taught me a lesson. Don’t wait for anyone to give you an assignment. Never wait. Just do what you want to do, then sell it. That’s what I’ve always done.

Willis: Did you continue writing?

Simpson: A little bit here and there. The Village Voice asked me to do little things.

Willis: But you did a lot of lifestyle and fashion stories?

Simpson: Style things and lifestyle pieces. I’m very curious about how people live.

Coreen Simpson, Untitled, 1979

Coreen Simpson, Cooking Is My Game (Lady Chef), Velma James, Hotel Roosevelt, New York, 1977

Willis: But during that time, did the photography of the civil rights movement and the activists from the Black Arts movement change your perception of how you wanted to see Black people in print? Your portraits reveal identities that had not been seen.

Simpson: I just didn’t want to see Black people all downtrodden. I was very inspired by Richard Avedon when I saw his work, his fabulous work. He made a big impression on me. I said, I want to do this with Black people. Because that’s how I always saw my own people. I was raised in a foster home, two foster homes, but really there was the main one later on that raised us. I always saw Black people, my people, as heroic in many ways. The women that I met were fabulous, and I just always wanted to take pictures to show the beauty, the grace, the dignity. I always wanted to put that in my pictures.

Willis: You described in an interview recently that you sat on the stoop in Brooklyn when your mother combed your hair.

Simpson: Yes.

Willis: As if the stoop was your auditorium seating.

Simpson: It was like the theater. And it was up a little high. She would part my hair. And other neighbors would sit on the stoop in Brooklyn. As a young kid, I would see these fabulous people walking by, dressed so beautifully. I said, Oh, did I just see that? I saw a man one time in an orange suit. I mean, can you imagine?

Willis: You still remember that.

Simpson: I still remember that, and the swagger. I just wanted to capture it. But I didn’t know how because I knew nothing about photography. I have no pictures of myself as a baby, as a young kid, my brother and I—because we were in an orphanage and then in foster homes. So the camera was very important to me. I would love to see a picture of my parents, my biological parents. I have none. So the value of the photograph . . . I always think it’s so important, the document that you have. And I wish I had that.

Coreen Simpson, The Three Greats, James Van Der Zee (seated), Gordon Parks (left), and P. H. Polk (right), 1980

Coreen Simpson, Grace Jones, 1980s, from the series Nitebirds/Nightlife

Willis: I love that story of thinking about how you viewed the world and your desire to document and change the visual experience of how Black people have been portrayed. What other photographers influenced you?

Simpson: Gordon Parks. James Van Der Zee, of course.

When I was studying at the Studio Museum, in Frank Stewart’s darkroom classes, he would always come to me and say, “Oh, have you seen this book?” He did it so casually. He planted the seed in me that we must study the history of what we’re doing. Then I learned about Baron de Meyer, and I loved the lighting techniques. Cartier-Bresson. All those I learned. And I started collecting my own books.
I have quite a big library of photobooks.

Willis: It’s amazing, because when I think of your work, I always connected it to Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Simpson: Capturing the moment!

Willis: Moments at night.

Simpson: Oh, I love it.

Willis: How to rethink joy and pleasure. It’s not just everyday night moments, but the way that you visualize how women dress. Can you talk about how you began to think about fashion and photography?

Simpson: Well, fashion has always been something I was interested in. I remember as a teenager, I worked for a camera store, never realizing one day I would be a photographer. I never had a really good wardrobe. So I saved my money and bought clothes for my junior year. No one really paid me any attention until I had these nice clothes that I saved for. I remember going out one day in my neighborhood, and I had a fake pink leather jacket on, and I just remember how people were looking at me. I thought, Oh, that’s powerful. Fashion is a powerful thing.

Willis: What made you decide to take a class at the Studio Museum in Harlem?

Simpson: Because I was taking pictures, taking them to the lab, but I didn’t know how to develop my pictures. Frank was teaching that class in the late ’70s. Carrie Mae Weems was in my class. Isn’t that amazing?

Willis: In 1970, I took my first class at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and I studied with the filmmaker Randy Abbott. He led filmmaking and editing workshops there, and Toni Cade Bambara was one of the student-participants at Studio then. I wanted to make films. Studio Museum has been a core for many of us. Did you have any early exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem during that time?

Simpson: I had a show there in the late 1970s with John Pinderhughes, a two-person show, Encounters. I remember showing at the Urban League’s Gallery 62. They gave me a one-woman show.

Willis: I remember that show and another exhibition Photographs: Coreen Simpson and Jacqueline LaVetta Patten (1980). The Urban League supported artists by hosting exhibitions in the lobby gallery.

Simpson: Yeah. So long ago. I had those big photographs up. I showed the Nitebirds/Nightlife because I liked a lot of night stuff, parties and stuff like that. I blew up pictures of the characters that I met at night.

Willis: Where did you go out then?

Simpson: All those clubs. I can’t even remember. The Mudd Club was one. Different little clubs. When I would go to the clubs, I would see a lot of different people and just click, click, click, click, you know.

Coreen Simpson, Man with Curl, 1990s, from the series B-Boys

Coreen Simpson, Helene, Roxy Club, 1985, from the series B-Boys

Willis: One of the points of your work is that directness of the gaze. People posing, wanting to be seen, and you see them!

Simpson: I always tell people to look right in the camera lens. Like when I did the B-Boys series in the 1980s, I would just pull people off to the side that I thought looked fabulous and put them into the studio that I set up. I always had to give them a little pep talk. I would say, “You look so fantastic and I want to photograph you,” then very briefly tell them what I’m trying to do, and have them sign releases. I would tell them that this is for posterity.

Willis: Why the title B-Boys? There are girls in there as well.

Simpson: Well, the girls came later. I was really focusing on the hip-hop scene, the breakdancers. That’s why I called them B-Boys. I saw a guy on the train. I gave him my card and said, “Come to my apartment,” because I wanted to photograph him. Richard. That was my first B-boy. Then he brought his friend with him, and he was gorgeous.

I showed the pictures to my daughter and asked, “Where do I find more?” She said, “Oh, go to the Roxy, Mommy, because that’s where they hang out—at the Roxy.” I went to the owner of the club and told him what I was trying to do. “I want to do this as a project. Would you help me do this as a project? Can I set up a studio here?” They went along with it. Everybody liked to be photographed. People go out at night, and they look great. They want to be documented.

Willis: You had the camera and the backdrop, and the studio was set up at the club?

Simpson: I had a big backdrop for the portraits that I did at the Roxy. The Roxy was huge. So they gave me a space, and I just put the backdrop up real quick, the lights and everything, the tripod and all that. But people like that attention. So I had no problem. And then a man came over to me one day, and he said, “These photographs are going to be very important one day.” He told me that. This was the early part of hip-hop, and I wasn’t really that interested in the music. I was more interested in the style. I like jazz.

Willis: I love how some of the kids use style from the ’50s in terms of dress.

Simpson: They had their own unique style.

Coreen Simpson, Ntozake Shange, 1997/2021, from the series Aboutface

Coreen Simpson, Alva with Clock, 1992/2021, from the series Aboutface

Willis: I see your portraits as stories. They’re storytelling in the most profound ways. It is fascinating that you moved toward enhancing your stories, from direct portraits to collage work. What led you to enhance the images?

Simpson: In the early 1990s, I wanted to do some new work, and I was looking at old photographs in my archives, just looking through things. Some were extras from test prints. They weren’t the prints that I really liked because it takes a while to get the print that you like when you’re printing in the darkroom. I had kept the test prints, and then I wondered, What am I going to do with them? So I began to fool around. At one time, I was doing actual collages. I got very caught up in it.

As a photographer, you want your own language. And it took me years to come to my own language. When I was fooling around with those test prints, little did I know I was creating my own language with the AboutFace series (1991–ongoing). I was just having a little fun. I think I wasn’t feeling so good at one time, maybe it was the wintertime, and I wanted to photograph, but I didn’t want to go out, or I couldn’t go out. So I said, Well, I’ll create a new body of work—I’ll do some collages with these test prints.

Willis: Did you look at Romare Bearden, at his collages as inspiration?

Simpson: Of course. But his were more stories. They were linear.

Coreen Simpson: A Monograph

65.00

The comprehensive survey of a singular, creative force who interweaves photography, design, and explorations of identity.

$65.0011Add to cart

In stock

Coreen Simpson: A Monograph

Photographs by Coreen Simpson. Edited by Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis. Text by Bridget R. Cooks, Awol Erizku, Doreen St. Félix, Rujeko Hockley, Sarah Lewis, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Jonathan Michael Square, and Salamishah Tillet. Interviewer Deborah Willis.

$ 65.00

–

1

+

$65.0011Add to cart

View cart

Description

The second title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series, created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, showcases the luminous, wide-ranging contributions of an essential artist.

Coreen Simpson—photographer, writer, jeweler—has done it all. Working for publications such as Essence, Unique New York, and The Village Voice, from the late 1970s onward, Simpson covered New York’s art and fashion scenes, producing portraits of a wide range of Black artists, literary figures, and celebrities. Her iconic jewelry, the Black Cameo, has been worn by everyone from the model Iman to civil-rights leader Rosa Parks.

This long-awaited volume, Simpson’s first, features her celebrated B-Boys series—portraits of young people coming of age during the early years of hip-hop—as well as her experiments with collage and other formal interventions. An assortment of essays and an extended interview offer powerful reflections on Simpson’s unique blend of portraiture, sartorial politics, and her riveting story of an intrepid life in journalism, art, and fashion.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 236
Number of images: 179
Publication date: 2025-10-14
Measurements: 8.5 x 10.75 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115858

Press

“It is her first major monograph—long overdue. A must-have!”—All About Photo

“Now, at age eighty-three, she is finally getting her due in Coreen Simpson: A Monograph, the first book devoted to her oeuvre.”—Vanity Fair

“The book examines Simpson’s creative impact and affinity for entrepreneurship.”—T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“What’s revelatory, besides Simpson’s attraction to the stylish and suave, is how the book captures a project that might have otherwise been lost to photographic history.”—Art in America

“Aperture fills a long-standing gap for those who know her and those discovering her for the first time.”—Blind

“Her portraits capture the heart and soul of the people she photographs, from those on the streets of Harlem to iconic figures such as James Baldwin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, as well as the nightlife at clubs in New York City.”—The Guardian

“A multi-layered portrait that invites readers to rediscover her eclectic work.”—GQ

Contributors

Coreen Simpson (born in New York, 1942) is a celebrated photographer and jewelry designer from Brooklyn, whose career has spanned more than five decades. Her work has been featured in Essence, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Vogue, among other publications. Her photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bronx Museum; Le Musée de la Photographie, Belgium; and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, among others.

Sarah Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University and the founder of Vision & Justice. She is an award-winning art and cultural historian whose books and edited volumes include The Rise (2014), the “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine (2016), Carrie Mae Weems (2021), The Unseen Truth (2024), and Vision & Justice (2025).

Deborah Willis is an author and curator whose pioneering research focuses on cultural histories, the Black body, women, and gender. She is a celebrated photographer, acclaimed historian of photography, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, and university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Willis is also a coeditor of the Vision & Justice Book Series.

Bridget R. Cooks is professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She is author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011) and her writing can be found in dozens of art exhibition catalogs and academic publications such as Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly.

Awol Erizku’s multimedia work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Gagosian, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong; Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Aperture published his first major monograph, Mystic Parallax, in 2023. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Doreen St. Félix is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is a winner of a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.

Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she cocurated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Amy Sherald: American Sublime (2025), Inheritance (2023), and Julie Mehretu (2021). In 2017, she cocurated We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and traveled to three additional US venues in 2017–18.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. From 2000 to 2017, she was at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) where she was senior curator. Prior to her tenure at CAMH, she was the director of the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jonathan Michael Square is an assistant professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He is the founder of the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom. He most recently curated the exhibition Almost Unknown: Afric-American Picture Gallery at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Delaware.

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, writer, and feminist activist. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark, where she also directs the New Arts Justice Initiative.

Related Content

Interviews

These Radical Black Women Changed the Art World

Featured

12 Photobooks That Celebrate Black Voices and History

Willis: And your collages are from your own photographs.

Simpson: Yes.

Willis: So that detail that you’re exploring, like the image with the clock that you made in the 1990s. What does that mean when we think about those braids?

Simpson: I’ll let you think about what it means. It just worked.

Willis: Because it became timeless. Braids have become timeless in discussions about Black women and hair.

Simpson: The original picture is of my godchild Alva. Later, it was published in The Village Voice when Lisa Jones wrote an article on Black hair, and they used that picture to illustrate what she was talking about. Then for the collage, I used one of those test prints.

I cut the head out, and I just would go through fashion magazines and pull out anything that interested me. I laid on the clock, and I said, “Oh, I like that,” and I rephotographed the photograph. Because we didn’t have Photoshop then and all that.

Coreen Simpson, The Fun House, New York, 1979, from the series Nitebirds/Nightlife

Coreen Simpson, Man with Rings (Arthur Smith Project, Master Silversmith, for the Hatch-Billops Collection), 1987, from the series B-Boys

Willis: One can see the layers that you created by hand and the shadow within the collages. With the color photographs in Sky Portraits from the early 1980s, when did you decide you wanted to begin experimenting with adding texture, color, or sparkles?

Simpson: That was just an experiment. But I did like painting on the color photographs because of the saturation. When I would get a print back from the lab, I might say, That watermelon isn’t red enough; that watermelon should be red. So I would take the fingernail polish and color it in.

Willis: As you said, you were creating your own language. But then, these were also becoming ways to create new identities. That’s something that you explored, in my mind, in the work that you were making—that these people were reimagining their identities, and they had a little sparkle in them—just to have those moments.

Simpson: Dazzle, yes.

Willis: To me, they were dazzling.

Simpson: That’s why I called the one series Nitebirds. Birds of the night.

Willis: Here again, you’re creating your own terminology, your own language in that work.

When I think about your role during that era, a creative time for us, you were acknowledging that we walk the talk of self and beauty. That’s something I was encouraged by when looking at your work. You transformed the Black body, you posed new questions. Like your directing of the poses in the B-Boys series: You tell them to turn away from the camera, but at the same time, you are seeing them—because they’ve not been seen. These are kids who have struggled but they found a way to shine. How did they respond to you?

Simpson: They responded very well. I always want people to say, “Damn, where’s Coreen going?” It’s an adventure. The camera gave me license to see the world. When I have my camera with me, I’m not afraid of anybody. I always feel like I can just do anything if I have my camera with me.

Willis: The camera gave you security.

Simpson: It did. I love that feeling.

Catalog cover for Black Cameo Collection, 1990s

Coreen Simpson, Gail Pilgrim Wearing a Black Cameo Collection Crown by Coreen Simpson, 1990s

Willis: What I see in the photographs that you create is not only that you’re helping them create their identity, but you are documenting their identity. I think about identity and about how art and social practice come hand in hand, specifically with your photographs, jewelry, and cameos. Did the Black Cameo start with a photograph? Or with a drawing?

Simpson: I had never even thought of doing a cameo until one of my clients asked. She was editor in chief of a magazine. It was a white magazine, and she was a Black woman. One day she asked me, “Oh, Chanel came out with a new cameo. I love it. But I don’t feel like I should wear a cameo of a white woman, Coreen. Can you make a cameo for me?” I told her, “I don’t make cameos. But I’ll look around and see if I can find one for you.” I went to the diamond district, and no one had a cameo of a Black woman. They were all white cameos. Then I asked a lot of Black women, elderly Black women, and they said, “No, I never saw it.” Although there were Black cameos in Europe, of course. There are famous ones, including cameo habillé. I went to the library to do research and saw some from the 1800s. And they were beautiful. But I wanted to do a modern cameo of a modern Black woman.

Willis: Whose profile is that?

Simpson: I found a model maker, a Black model maker, and I showed him a picture of one of my subjects. I said, “I want it to look like her profile.” Jewelry is very similar to photography, in a way. It’s a visual. That’s all.

When my business took off, I had a studio on Thirty-Seventh Street off Fifth Avenue, and a Black woman wrote to me and asked, “Can you make an angel for me? A little Black angel pin? I see all these little white angels. But I want a Black angel.” And

I sat down with my factory, and we designed the Black Angel pin. That was a phenomenal success.

Willis: That’s amazing. You and I have similar interests, because that’s also why I like going to Florence, Italy, looking for those cameos. I remember my mother had one of those Black cameos that they had. They had a lot of lamps and figurines that focused on the Black female body.

Simpson: Well, when George Mingo went to Italy, he went to visit David Hammons. David won the Prix de Rome and invited George to visit him. I said, “I want a cameo that’s a Black woman.” I still have it, but it’s not a Black woman. It’s a white woman in black. That’s what I was always seeing.

Willis: Yes. And that’s the same thing that my mom had. It wasn’t a Black woman. It was in black.

Simpson: So when I was creating the cameo, I was doing well financially, so I went to a scarf company, one of the major scarf companies, and told them I wanted to do a scarf like an Hermès scarf but for Black women. I designed the scarf for the Avon company. They sat me down with their designer, and I would tell them: “I want it like this.” I designed umbrellas, jewelry. I did a cameo for Avon that was different than mine. That was their cameo. They signed me and Elizabeth Taylor at the same time. They had an Elizabeth Taylor jewelry collection, and they had the Coreen Simpson Regal Beauty Collection.

Willis: I was just thinking about Avon when we were kids, because my mom had a beauty shop, as you know, and we grew up in the beauty shop. Women would come in, and they’d pay Mom. So I’m thinking about how entrepreneurial women were during that time, in the 1950s, during the civil rights and human rights activist period.

Simpson: Right.

Willis: But beauty was consistent.

Simpson: Always.

Willis: Always consistent. And I see that’s something that has been consistent with your work. Hank [Deborah Willis’s son, the artist Hank Willis Thomas] has been creating public monuments, and I see that you’re also creating public monuments with your jewelry in a way.

Simpson: It’s so funny. I was talking to Lorna Simpson several years ago, and she gave me a really big compliment. She said, “Coreen, your photographs. . . . You have your photography. But you created that cameo. I see it all over.” But you know what? I always wanted to make money aside from photography. Jewelry sustained my photography, because I could always buy what I wanted to buy. I didn’t have to go get a grant or something like that. I have to always give the jewelry business a big thank you because it underwrote my photography. Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe [the photographer] told me, “I saw you in The New York Times when you first came out with that cameo.” I don’t know if she knew I was doing jewelry. But she saw that, and she was very impressed.

Willis: That’s what I mean. You have created a monument.

Simpson: It was totally unplanned.

Willis: But that’s how most things are. I see pride in the photographs of the people who have worn your jewelry, like Celia Cruz.

Simpson: Yes. She loved it. Her hairdresser was a friend of mine, Ruth Sanchez. I was doing these sparkly eyeglasses. I was selling them. I told the company, “I want you to design it like this for me.” I did a pair of leopard sunglasses, all crystal. I showed it to Ruth.

She said, “I got to have this for Celia. Celia is going to really love this.” And when she got it, Celia went crazy. Then she asked, “Well, what else do you do?” That’s how I met Celia Cruz. People couldn’t believe that she was at my apartment. She came with her husband. I went to her house. She was fabulous. She wore my jewelry on a couple of her album covers.

Coreen Simpson, Ebony, 1989/90, from the series B-Boys

Coreen Simpson, William and Sam, Roxy Club, 1985, from the series B-Boys

Willis: Thinking about your earlier mention that you don’t have photographs of your birth parents, do you think this shaped your work in any way, specifically of photographing younger people? Do you think that has any kind of silent message, why you want to make sure some of these younger people see themselves?

Simpson: When I’m taking their picture, I’m thinking, I wish I had had my picture taken when I was growing up. Although I did have a beautiful picture from when someone took me and my brother to get our picture taken. I love that picture. But that’s the earliest.

Willis: But that’s the love I see in the photographs you’re making. I see a sense of reflection.

Simpson: I’m glad you see that.

Willis: That’s what I see with the young people that you’ve photographed over time. Yes, the breakdancing, the B-boys. But the way that they look at you, the way they look at the camera and they see you past the camera, they see us today. I just get chills when I think about it.

You traveled to Europe and the Middle East during your early years. I’m curious how those experiences influenced you?

Simpson: I had a job at a marketing company on Madison Avenue called Patents International Affiliates. A small Iranian company. They were all preparing to go to Iran for a marketing convention or something. I didn’t think I was going, but the president that I was working for, I was his assistant, he said, “Coreen, you have a passport? You’re coming with us.” I was like, “Oh my God, I never would imagine . . .”

Willis: And you already had your passport, so you were ready.

Simpson: The shah of Iran was still in power then. That’s how long ago it was. And after I left, that’s when he was toppled. We were all invited to a nightclub, which I think was owned by one of his brothers. It was called La Cheminée. I don’t know how I remember that club. It was fabulous. You know, Iranians, they were in the oil business, and the people that worked with my company at the time were very, very wealthy. I met so many Arab princes that were there. It was a conference of the Arab Emirates, formerly the small Trucial States, Dubai and all, and they were all in their long, fabulous robes. It was such a fabulous experience. But I wasn’t even a photographer then.

Willis: But did seeing those robes affect some of the things that you experienced when you began covering fashion?

Simpson: Oh, it was so beautiful and inspiring. But I wasn’t even thinking of being a photographer then. I was a young working woman. My kids were little at the time, like five or six or something, and my mother kept them while I was in Iran for a month.

Coreen Simpson with her children, Suzanne and Andrew, 1970s. Photograph by Ernie Washington

Coreen Simpson, Paris, 1983

Willis: Tell us about the photographer Bill Cunningham guiding you through the fashion world.

Simpson: I met Bill Cunningham because he covered the collections, and he was one of the star photographers. Everyone respected Bill Cunningham so much. In New York, I would always see him on his bicycle covering his street fashion stuff, and he would say, “Come here, child. Stand over there.” So he photographed me and put me in The New York Times a couple of times. I got to be friends with Bill. When I went to Paris, they were kicking my ass, all the photographers. First of all, there were very few women. There might have been two or three women at the most. And there were so many men, and they would always push me out of the way. I would be too far back. Because at that time, you could sit on the runway. They don’t do that anymore. That was the best. When the women would walk by, you could feel the fabric. That’s how close you were to the models. It was so fabulous. But I could never get to the runway. And Bill saw that I was struggling. He reached out to me and extended his arm and pushed me forward. No one ever bothered me after that.

Willis: You remind the world about Black beauty, and what it means to walk out of the house feeling that you’ve fashioned yourself. The idea of self-fashioning was important, from slavery to the present. So when I share your work, when I give my talks, when I think about your practice in the art, I acknowledge that you are always thinking about social justice. Social justice has many frames of entry, forms of entry. You have created something that I really appreciate—the love and respect that you show to us.

Simpson: I see that we are kings and queens. So with my photographs, I want to show the royalty that I see in Black people—and other people too. I want to show the regalness. That’s what’s behind what I’m doing.

This interview originally appeared in Coreen Simpson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2025).

Don McCullin is the acknowledged dean of those photographers who have repeatedly witnessed the horrors of war. Working since the 1960s in Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Vietnam, among other places, his imagery of exhausted and wounded troops, of civilians and soldiers struck with madness, of people starving and ill, reveal in intimate detail many of the agonizing ways in which atrocity can be visited.

Today, McCullin rebels against the moniker “war photographer.” He is not content with the impact of his decades’ worth of images, particularly their insufficient role in diminishing the very violence they depict. The ambiguous position of the image in society is a preoccupation that he has had for a long time, as evidenced by the title of one of his books on the Vietnam War, Is Anyone Taking Any Notice?, published in 1973.

In conversation McCullin speaks passionately, with enormous lyricism, of the revulsion and guilt that remain after years of navigating various borderlines with hell, of his lifelong fascination with photography, of his impoverished youth in a rough North London neighborhood, and of his attempts to heal himself. Recently, he has been photographing landscapes in his native England as well as depicting the remains of the Roman Empire for a large-scale documentary project. While expanding his range as a photographer, he has been editing and printing his previous work, and simultaneously attempting to find some semblance of serenity. —Fred Ritchin

Don McCullin, Fishermen playing during their lunch break, Scarborough, Yorkshire, 1967, from Don McCullin (Aperture, 2015)

Don McCullin, The battlefields of the Somme, France, 2000, from Don McCullin (Aperture, 2015)

Fred Ritchin: Today we’re going to talk about you being a photographer, a larger career than that of a war photographer.

Don McCullin: I’d like to get away from the awful reputation of being a war photographer. I think, in a way, it’s parallel to calling me a kind of abattoir worker, somebody who works with the dead, or an undertaker or something. I’m none of those things. I went to war to photograph it in a compassionate way, and I came to the conclusion that it was a filthy, vile business. War—it was tragic, and it was awful, and I was witness to murder and terrible cruelty.

So do I need a title for that? The answer is no, I don’t. I hate being called a war photographer. It’s almost an insult. I wasn’t trying to pick up the Robert Capa mantle; I went to war because I felt I was suited to do it. I was young and ambitious, but the ambition started to fade away when I saw people coming toward me carrying dead children, or wounded people coming toward me holding their entrails . . . things like that. Things the average man in the street simply wouldn’t understand, because he’s never been there, thank God.

Ritchin: In the work you’re doing now, the Roman work and the landscapes, it’s as if life has more to offer than simply death. Your sense of time is different. You’re working much more slowly. The time passes over thousands of years. These are traces of things. Before, it was quick, instantaneous, news.

McCullin: It was like what we would call a head-butt. It was about butting somebody in the head and showing them my images. Now I’m behaving in a much more dignified way. Naturally, I’m getting older and coming to the end of my life, so I’ve slowed down. I’ve reinvented myself. The reason I am doing these new landscapes, this new Roman project, is because it’s a form of healing. I’m kind of healing myself. I don’t have those bad dreams. But you can never run away from what you’ve seen. I have a house full of negatives of all those hideous moments in my life in the past.

So now my challenge is the landscape, the archaeological landscape of Rome . . . it’s very challenging and it’s very beautiful. When I can get into the pariah nations—Syria and Lebanon, they’ve eased up a bit, though Syria is a notorious police state—but when I’m there, I am totally safe and alone. I am constantly pushing the barriers, simply for the privilege of getting my cameras out and taking beautiful photographs.

Ritchin: Of stuff that happened two thousand years ago.

McCullin: Yes. Because it’s not as if I’m trying to photograph today’s political struggles. In a way, I am trying to do justice to the culture of these historical sites.

Ritchin: But it seems to me you’re also trying to find a meaning in life, what’s good in life or what’s important, or, as you say, dignified. The war itself is the abattoir. War itself is the meaninglessness of life, and somehow that is there, even in your landscapes and the Roman work. You’re finding something else, something spiritual, some other kinds of answers in life.

McCullin: My landscapes are dark. People say: “Your landscapes are almost bordering on warscapes.” I’m still trying to escape the darkness that’s inside me. There’s a lot of darkness in me. I can be quite jovial and jokey and things like that, but when it comes down to the serious business of humanity, I cannot squander other people’s lives.

Ritchin: Is that because of what you’ve seen in life, or because of where you’ve come from in life? Are you talking about your life as a war photographer, or are you talking about the neighborhood where you grew up—a sense of fairness or fair play?

McCullin: Well, there wasn’t any of that where I grew up. The boys I grew up with were determined to become criminals. I never really wanted to be incarcerated in prison. I spent a few days in prisons in Uganda, and got beaten by the soldiers. Freedom was paramount to my dreams. And in England we have this class structure. It’s very much there—though it’s being exchanged for new racial structures and religious structures that have come in. England is quite a racial country: it was never really on your side if you didn’t have white skin.

So I grew up with all those things, and I’m still living with them, even though I live in the countryside. There are many hurdles in my country; you’re never really going to be free of the hurdles.

Don McCullin, Former Roman city of Palmyra, Syria, 2008

Don McCullin, The Somerset Levels near Glastonbury, England, 1994

Ritchin: But in a way, then, maybe you’ve turned to a kind of poetry of the image, or a kind of lyrical photography, with tonal ranges that are different, more studious, larger formats . . . In other words, you talk about it as informational, the “Roman Empire,” but you’re doing something else. You’re showing the light and the beauty, the metaphors. You’re working in a broader way. It’s like you have a bigger palette now.

McCullin: Yes, it is a bigger palette. The Roman Empire as it was, was extraordinary, apart from the fact that it was based on cruelty and horror . . . You know, when I’m in these great Roman cities, which earthquakes and time have destroyed, I like the fact that I am there, I am enjoying the challenge—but all the time I feel as if I can hear the screams of pain of the people who built these cities. It doesn’t go away. The Roman slaves were paid nothing. All they probably expected was a bowl of food. So when you’re in these remarkable cities, you’re not comfortable really.

You could say: “Well, why are you doing this?” I’m doing it because I have never collectively seen several Roman cities in the Middle East. What I’m getting at is that when I first started as a photographer, I thought: “This is going to be good. I’ll get behind this camera and I won’t have to worry about academia. I’ll just take pictures. It will be easy. And of course, there’s no politics involved!” I’ve done nothing but political assignments in my life. Even going back to ancient Rome, it was steeped in politics and evil.

I feel comfortable doing landscapes in England. I don’t have any apologies, I don’t have problems. And I never do landscapes in England when it’s sunny. I always do them in the winter when the trees are naked. It’s more Wagnerian. I don’t know . . . I like drama and I like darkness.

When it comes down to the serious business of humanity, I cannot squander other people’s lives.

Ritchin: Eugene Smith used to listen to Wagner when he was printing. That’s how he’d stay up for nights in a row, listening to Wagner, and he’d get those deep prints, like yours—deep skies, your dark skies.

McCullin: Well, I was influenced by Eugene Smith, as much as I was by Bill Brandt. I like the great prints that Steichen made. I really studied photography in depth. [I brought a stack of books] home to where I lived, in a Hampstead Garden suburb, and they were as tall as this table—and my God, they were full of information. I used to sit nightly when my children went to bed, studying those books. They became my university. I taught myself everything in photography that I know. Don’t get me wrong about this, I still take a stand—but I am still a student of photography. The moment I think that I have arrived, I’ve had it. I am never going to arrive.

Ritchin: So your life as a photographer, then . . . it’s almost like Crime and Punishment. It’s almost like you’ve created a novel with all these images, from Vietnam, Biafra, landscapes, Rome. There’s something that hangs together. It’s a human struggle.

McCullin: I’ve always been imprisoned in my own struggles. I’ve never known freedom in my life. I suppose most photographers haven’t, really. Life has always been a terrible struggle, even my private life—my marriages, my children, my behavior. So in a way, human struggle has been my biggest factor. I’ve never really found freedom. If I did, I’d probably feel incredibly uncomfortable. Maybe I’m one of those people who is better off in life with someone always tormenting me with the sharp end of a blade.

Don McCullin

75.00

A retrospective survey offering an examination of Don McCullin’s photographic career and a record of half a century of international conflict.

$75.0011Add to cart

In stock

Don McCullin

Photographs by Don McCullin. Text by Harold Evans and Susan Sontag.

$ 75.00

–

1

+

$75.0011Add to cart

View cart

Description

First published in 2001, this retrospective survey offers both an examination of Don McCullin’s photographic career as well as a record of half a century of international conflict. Coinciding with the photographer’s eightieth birthday, this expanded edition of Don McCullin serves as fitting homage to a photographer who dedicated his life to the front line in order to deliver compassionate visual testament to human suffering. With texts by Mark Holborn, Harold Evans and Susan Sontag, and photographs taken by McCullin in England, Cyprus, Vietnam, the Congo, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Beirut, this is an essential volume on one of the legendary photographers of the 20th century. I have long admired Don McCullin’s heroic journey through some of the most appalling zones of suffering in the last third of the 20th century, Sontag wrote in her essay. We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 352
Number of images: 0
Publication date: 2015-08-25
Measurements: 11.7 x 12.3 x 1.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597113427

Press

The artistry of his compositions and the compassion with which he approached his subjects gave his work accessibility—and for years it was his photographs that connected British people to the reality of wars and natural disasters in faraway places. – CNN

One of his great skills as a photojournalist was being able to shoot an image of something people find hard to look at and transform it into something they can’t look away from. – CNN

With his visceral frontline images, he brought intense, gut wrenching moments of combat into the homes of millions. – Mother Jones

Contributors

Don McCullin grew up in north London. He worked for the Sunday Times for eighteen years and covered every major conflict during his adult lifetime, until the Falklands War. He has received many honors and awards, including being named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Since the original publication of this definitive retrospective book in 2001, Mcullin has continued to take photographs, publishing Don McCullin in Africa (2005), In England (2007), Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire (2010), and Shaped by War (2010). He lives in Somerset, UK.
Sir Harold Evans was editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. He lives in New York.
Susan Sontag was an influential writer, director, and activist. She was awarded many honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1977), and was a MacArthur Fellow between 1990 and 1994.

Ritchin: So in your earlier work, you did try to make a difference, with, let’s say, the photographs of war or starvation or illness. Is Anyone Taking Any Notice?, The Destruction Business (1971). And so on. You were very frustrated that not enough people took notice.

McCullin: Absolutely.

Ritchin: I remember you once said that Eddie Adams was the only photographer in the Vietnam War who actually made a difference.

McCullin: It still took seven years for the war to end. But Eddie’s was the ultimate statement. The most famous picture in the war, along with Eddie’s, was [Huynh Cong Ut’s 1972 photograph of] the girl running down the road, burning. These pictures eventually helped to turn public opinion here in America against the war, but it still took years. And if you mount up the casualties in those seven years they would run into the thousands.

So do we make a difference? I have now become seriously doubtful. Because after me came James Nachtwey and others, and then we had Rwanda—and there we go again. There was nothing more horrendous than the massacres in Rwanda. So I say to myself: “No, it didn’t work. We didn’t make any difference.”

Ritchin: But do you think that sometimes people are grateful that you’re there, that somebody does pay attention?

McCullin: No, not really. If you were a fallen man or woman, would you want to be looked upon as documentary material? You’re down here, they’re up there. It’s taking advantage.

Now, I’m really talking to you in a very open, honest way: we [photographers] know we’re doing this. Let’s not make any mistake. We know we’re doing it. It’s not a matter of just happening upon [these scenes]. We sometimes go out premeditating it: we will find these people. We know that we can become well known in photography. We know we can be celebrated in photography.

Ritchin: So there is a mercenary aspect.

McCullin: There is a mercenary aspect. So when I do these things, I am taking along a whole briefcase of psychology up here, knowing that I am on a very fine line. So there is a guilt. It’s like shame.

Don McCullin, Palestinians fleeing the Christian Phalangist massacre at the Quarantina refugee camp, Beirut, Lebanon, January 1976

Don McCullin, Vietnamese family after a grenade-attack on their bunker, Hue, 1968, from Don McCullin (Aperture, 2015)

Ritchin: If you turn to the war in Iraq today, there’s no imagery coming out that’s impacting people in any sense the way that it did in Vietnam.

McCullin: Well, we know why. We had so much freedom in Vietnam. We could do anything we wanted, go anywhere, do anything, photograph anything. [In Iraq,] you can’t photograph a dying soldier as you could in Vietnam, because you have to be “embedded” now. And being embedded is basically like being somebody’s dog who is being taken out to Central Park for a walk with a collar on. So therefore you’ve got censorship, really. That’s what it comes down to.

Ritchin: Young war photographers today become part of a system. And you were trying to disrupt the system. Is it still possible to disrupt the system? Are there other strategies as a photographer? Can you photograph war differently?

McCullin: Well, you know, Philip Jones Griffiths photographed the Vietnam War in a totally antiwar way. His book Vietnam Inc. (1971) was a totally different kind of presentation. Philip spent three or four years there. His book wasn’t about, you know, the Hollywood image of war. It was the real image, the truth of war. So, yes, there’s always another way. There are many ways of photographing war. And you don’t have only military wars. There are wars of poverty, there are wars of degradation, there are wars of hunger, there are wars about crops . . . All these things can be seen as wars, in my mind.

Ritchin: They’re just not as glamorous as the military war.

McCullin: Yeah. But the fact is, we’ve had enough of that anyway. There are so many people now against the war in Iraq. The irony is that [the United States] just signed a contract with the Chinese for oil . . . So there I am talking about politics, which I’ve always tried to keep away from. But in the old days, I didn’t just rush into these areas and get my camera out and have a go. I did the research before I went. For somebody who couldn’t read properly—I’m horribly dyslexic, even to this day—I managed to do it. I managed to get there, and I brought things back. There were always barriers, even in those days, but one got around them.

Don McCullin, Poor neighborhood in Liverpool, England, 1961
All photographs © Don McCullin/Contact Press Images

Ritchin: What about digital photography? That’s a whole different process.

McCullin: I don’t do it.

Ritchin: You feel that film says something different?

McCullin: Well, I process all the film as well. I don’t rush things: I wait, I don’t tear the lid off the film-processing tank when it’s being processed, to look at it. I bring it out in a very gentle way, I treat it with great care, and I am very calm. Whereas with the digital camera, you can see what you’ve got from the moment you’ve taken it. I go around the world now, and see people doing that all the time—and I don’t belong there at the moment. I’m interested in film and paper.

Ritchin: But also, I think you’re interested in intuition. Because when you work with film, since you don’t see it immediately, you don’t know if you did a good job or a bad job immediately on the screen.

McCullin: I think I do, sometimes. If you don’t mind me sounding slightly conceited by saying this: you know when you’ve shot a picture whether there’s a good chance of it being the way that you want it to be. If you use a digital camera, it can be that way. But with film, I leave my house, I go all the way across to the other side of the world, I come back with the image, process the film, and wait and wait . . .

I have enormous patience, as I can testify in my landscape work. Sometimes I stay out for two or three hours in the same place, waiting for the sun to go behind those dark clouds. Patience is one of my virtues. Many times I go home without a picture, because at the last minute, the clouds go somewhere else, the sun is beating in my face—I get nothing. You know, it’s like somebody who sits on a riverbank fishing. It’s not about catching fish or getting negatives. It’s about being there, having the privilege to be there and be in command of your own joy. And mind.

Ritchin: It’s a kind of meditation in its way.

McCullin: I suppose. Yes, that’s a better way of putting it. There’s nothing nicer than finding peace of mind, because then it allows you to broaden your mind and then do something better the next time.

Ritchin: Henri Cartier-Bresson thought of a photojournalist as somebody who was keeping a journal with a camera. He was keeping a diary with a camera. It was very personal for him.

McCullin: People would say to me: “Did you ever keep journals?” I’d say: “No. My journals are my negatives. Why would I want to keep journals?” But I can see the point of it. Because when I went to Africa I did start keeping journals. The photograph is not the be-all and end-all. There are other dimensions in life. Lucian Freud is a great painter; that doesn’t mean he has to be a great writer.

Ritchin: What about your autobiography (Unreasonable Behavior, 1990)?

McCullin: That was me talking, really.

Ritchin: It’s well articulated. There’s a lot there, too.

McCullin: I had a good tutor in life. And it was the way I grew up. I grew up with no luxury, no guidance. There was only bigotry and ignorance where I lived—and fists. I could not have had a better start in life! Not that I enjoyed it. But it was the very best start. Because if I’d gone to a university, say, I would never have come out with the same compassion and understanding.

I saw my own father die when he was forty, and nothing hurt me more. So I know about misery and unhappiness: the loss of my father taught me a lot. So here I am. I’ve got slightly further down the road than my father did, but I feel sad that he couldn’t see that I’ve tried to honor his name—by trying to overcome the misery and the poverty and the ignorance. I’ve kind of extended his life, I hope.

Well, that’s just a way of trying to explain to people who might see this that really it’s not just about photography. It’s about being a human being. That’s what it’s about.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture, Summer 2009, as “Don McCullin: Dark Landscapes,” and was published in Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018).

Oh’s early work was informed by his ambition to become a filmmaker and his years living and traveling in the United States. Equally influential was his experience growing up in Itaewon, a neighborhood in Seoul that was once a roiling tenderloin whose nightclubs and brothels catered to US soldiers. Today, it is one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods, with bustling cafés, chic boutiques, and roaming influencers. Oh’s breakthrough series, Itaewon Story (1993), is a pregentrification tale, capturing the vivid underground characters who once defined the area. He has described Itaewon as a kind of in-between zone, a space “where people exist between cultures—neither fully one thing nor another.” It is a description that could be applied to Oh’s work as well, where his subjects often reside in liminal states: between the mainstream and the margins, childhood and adulthood, the individual and the collective, fiction and reality.

Heinkuhn Oh, Love Cupid Bar, on the Hill of Lucky Club, March 1993, from the series Itaewon Story

Heinkuhn Oh, Two Ajummas 1, March 26, 1997, from the series Ajumma

Hyunjung Son: For readers new to your work, could you tell us about your background and what drew you to photography?

Heinkuhn Oh: Originally, my dream was to become a film director. I went to the United States to study filmmaking, but along the way, I fell in love with photography—more precisely, with documentary photography. I ended up going to graduate school and majoring in photography, but near the end, I still felt something was missing, so I added film as a second major. However, I ultimately received my final degree only in photography. I became so absorbed in my thesis project, Americans Them, that I didn’t have the time or energy to complete a film thesis. My mind was filled with the work of Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. Honestly, it was far more exciting to me than anything from Scorsese or Coppola.

From 1989 to 1991, I spent three crazy years traveling across cities in Ohio, West Virginia, and Illinois for Americans Them. Eventually, I made my way south to New Orleans. The camera I used back then was a fifty-year-old secondhand Speed Graphic, which I bought from a used-camera shop in Columbus. I attached a Metz flash to it and shot with 4-by-5-inch Type 55 Polaroid film. I felt like I had become Weegee. Initially, I used the camera’s range finder, but later, I started shooting everything by eye measurement. Although many shots came out of focus, not using the viewfinder made me look at my subjects with my naked eyes. It was a wonderful thing. These days, as I’m reprinting Americans Them, I realize just how much I learned about people and their gazes through that project.

Son: This word gaze comes up often when describing your work. You’ve said you discover, rather than create, these gazes.

Oh: In the late 1990s, I wanted to document the anxiety and social isolation experienced by middle-aged women in Korea, which was very much a country of ajeossi [middle-aged men]. This led me to photograph ajumma [middle-aged women]. Instead of taking the documentary approach I might have used earlier, I went directly to portraits. I had realized that if I could capture the narrative in their gazes and expressions, no further explanation was needed.

Creating a multilayered gaze artificially is impossible. These layers accumulate naturally through lived experience, visible in people’s expressions. The process of finding such gazes is time intensive. For my series Ajumma (1997), while the actual photography took less than two months, the casting period took over a year. I’ve done a lot of movie poster work as well, so I’ve sometimes been asked questions about the gaze of celebrities versus ordinary people. One question I received was, “What is the difference between the gaze of actors and that of ordinary people in your work?” With actors, I work to create layers in their gazes, while with ordinary people, I discover the layers already present in their expressions.

It was the same with my Cosmetic Girls (2005–8) project. From 2005 to 2007, I cast around five hundred heavily made-up teenage girls directly from the streets. Over the course of three years, I photographed one or two of them each day, and from those portraits, I looked for the gazes that carried the deepest layers of anxiety. This is because I believed that for these girls, makeup was an act of concealing their anxiety.

Aperture Magazine Subscription

0.00

Get a full year of Aperture—the essential source for photography since 1952. Subscribe today and save 25% off the cover price.

1Subscribe Now

In stock

Aperture Magazine Subscription

$ 0.00

–

1

+

1Subscribe Now

View cart

Description

Subscribe now and get the collectible print edition and the digital edition four times a year, plus unlimited access to Aperture’s online archive.

Son: Your use of the term casting is interesting, coming from your film background. How do you actually find and photograph your subjects?

Oh: My approach mirrors film casting because I believe great directors don’t so much direct actors as find the right people for each role. Once cast properly, actors naturally embody their characters. Similarly, I don’t try to create complex gazes—I find people who naturally possess them. My role then becomes creating the trust needed for them to reveal their authentic selves to the camera. That’s often the most challenging part.

Son: You’ve done a lot of commercial photography, including the movie posters you mentioned. How did you start this work?

Oh: In fact, all of my early black-and-white works are closely tied to my film background. Even Americans Them was fundamentally about capturing Americans as they appeared to be performing their lives as if in films—playing out cinematic storytelling or role-playing characters from movies. It seemed to me that they dressed, posed, and even joked as if they were in a film. It often reminded me of the movies by the Coen brothers. Itaewon Story was like an autobiographical film for me, capturing the images of celebrities I grew up watching in Itaewon during my childhood.

Heinkuhn Oh, A T-50A training jet with its pilot in the cockpit, July 2010, from the series Middlemen

Heinkuhn Oh, Two honor guards wearing black formal dress, July 2010, from the series Middlemen

Son: Your series Middlemen (2010–13) features military portraits, but I heard it was originally titled Absurd Play. Why did you change it?

Oh: In Korea, there is a mandatory system where most men serve in the military for a certain period. I, too, went to the military through this system when I was young, and after time passed, I came to look at that space again through photography. I completed my military service about thirty years ago. As a young man, my view of military service was straight-forward—it was about patriotism and duty. Returning to photograph the military in my fifties, everything appeared strange and awkward. The experience felt like watching an absurd play unfold, which inspired the original title. However, two months before the exhibition, our cultural liaison officer at the Ministry of National Defense privately expressed concern. The higher-ups had reacted negatively to the word absurd, interpreting it as suggesting something dysfunctional or improper. To protect our helpful liaison, I changed the title to Middlemen.

The work became subtitled Portraits of Young Korean Soldiers. During my two years observing these men, I recognized how they existed in a liminal state—neither fully civilian nor completely military. This realization led to the title Middlemen. It also sparked my broader interest in exploring these in-between states in society and, by extension, the nature of absurdity itself.

I don’t try to create complex gazes—I find people who naturally possess them.

Son: Would you share how you created works like the fighter pilot photographs?

Oh: For most of the photographs in my Middlemen project, the shooting process wasn’t particularly difficult. I didn’t try to capture or request any scenes that the military might find sensitive or uncomfortable. However, there was always a cultural liaison officer monitoring the images on a laptop connected to my camera—essentially conducting censorship. They said it was to prevent any accidental capture of military secrets, but I think they were really worried I might show something negative about the military. After a while, the officer even joked, “Why are you taking such boring pictures?”

But the fighter pilot shot was one that gave me a lot of trouble, even with this kindhearted liaison officer. The problem arose when I asked them to briefly halt a fighter jet during an operation. I thought they could simply stop it on the runway for a moment, not realizing that a fighter jet isn’t an automobile and costs tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, this was a military operational area, and stopping on the runway required approval from multiple levels of command. Eventually, the approval came through, and they did stop the jet, but the photography session took longer than expected. The officer kept pressuring me to hurry because the operation was ongoing, and the pilot was becoming increasingly irritated. What I found most interesting in this photograph, though, wasn’t the huge fighter jet or the pilot—it was the transparent canopy, stretching wide and open into the sky.

There was an incident that I couldn’t capture in a photograph, but even now, it remains with me like a trauma. During a shoot, I suddenly heard a sharp, piercing scream from behind me. When I quickly turned around, I saw something wrapped in a white cloth falling through the air. A soldier had jumped from an open window, from about the fifth floor of a building behind me. Tragically, I later heard that he had died. Military officials told me that the soldier had been suffering from severe depression, and that such incidents, while uncommon, did occur in the military.

Son: Your exhibition prints, including the Middlemen series, are often very large in scale. Why?

Oh: Starting with my Cosmetic Girls series, which I released in 2008, the scale of my work began to expand. There are two techniques in typological photography that can shift the subject toward abstraction: One is repetition, and the other is scale.

Cosmetic Girls was a portrait project that presented heavily made-up teenage girls in a format resembling a social report. The expressionless gazes of different girls were captured under identical lighting and with consistent framing, repeated again and again. At first, it may seem like each girl is being presented individually and concretely, but ultimately, through repetition, the images dissolve into abstraction.

I believe that when a photograph becomes excessively large, the subject itself begins to feel unfamiliar. This is one of the great ironies of large-scale photography. Especially in portraiture, the bigger the print, the more anonymous the subject becomes. I wanted the girls I photographed to appear anonymous and estranged. Because, for me, the series is ultimately about the underlying anxiety surrounding identity in Korean society that stems from feelings of anonymity, estrangement, disappearance, and abstraction.

In my more recent series, Left Face (2020–ongoing), the prints are also relatively large. But this time, the reason is slightly different. Lately, I’ve gotten interested in how large photographs create abstraction through their very obviousness. I think big photographs have this interesting thing where they switch between being clear and abstract. Having spent many years working in photography, I’ve started to feel that photography isn’t really about representation—it’s about abstraction, simply because it’s too obvious and straightforward.

Son: You’ve contrasted your philosophy with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous idea of the “decisive moment” by telling your students, “Don’t be decisive.”

Oh: Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” refers to visual rather than conceptual decisiveness. However, I’ve come to believe that our contemporary world resists such clean distinctions. If photography reflects society, and society increasingly defies logical categorization, then perhaps photography should embrace this ambiguity. That’s why I tell my students, “Don’t be decisive.” Definitive statements and clear conclusions feel increasingly out of step with reality. When everything exists in shades of gray, why chase decisive moments? Even Cartier-Bresson often captured scenes that highlighted life’s fundamental absurdity.

Son: You have taught photography for many years. How has this shaped your thinking on image making?

Oh: Well, I’ve always tried to approach my students as an artist rather than as an educator. Observing the younger generation of photographers today, I feel they have highly developed visual sensibilities. But perhaps that’s only natural, as they consume so many more images than previous generations. During critique sessions, I often tell my students, “You are image addicts!” It’s as if they confuse reality and images. Today’s students look at reality and capture it as images, then look at images and discuss them as reality. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, I wish they could distinguish between the two.

Heinkuhn Oh, Huh jung, 20080428, 2022, from the series Left Face

Heinkuhn Oh, JU, 20160716, 2022, from the series Left Face

Son: Your early 1990s series Itaewon Story continues to resonate today. What makes it significant to you?

Oh: Itaewon has been my home since I was six years old. During my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s, Itaewon was dominated by the US Eighth Army presence and was known as a “camp town.” The alley near the fire station where my family lived was specifically designated as a “red-light district” under special administrative management. Because of that, there were lots of nightclubs and bars catering to American soldiers, and US goods smuggled out of the military base were everywhere. From an early age, I was exposed to drunken American GIs and Korean women working in the entertainment districts. I also got along well with waiters and waitresses who worked in the clubs and bars. Later, when I entered middle and high school and met friends who had more typical, ordinary childhoods, I realized that I had grown up in a very different environment. For a time, those early experiences became a kind of trauma for me, and a major source of insecurity. Itaewon Story explores these memories and the characters who populated them, including entertainers like Twist Kim and Shin Canaria, who were either familiar faces or local legends during my childhood.

Related Stories

Portfolios

Heinkuhn Oh’s Vivacious Portrait of Seoul in the 1990s

Though the US Eighth Army has relocated, Itaewon remains a unique cultural space. The Seoul Central Mosque, situated at the neighborhood’s highest point, has drawn a significant Arab community, adding to the area’s diverse mix of residents. Yet calling Itaewon truly multicultural might be an overstatement. Different groups coexist physically but rarely truly integrate. This makes it a place where people exist between cultures—neither fully one thing nor another. It’s fitting that Itaewon sits geographically at Seoul’s center, embodying this in-betweenness. Sometimes I wonder if this fascination with in-between states is my destiny—the space between cultures, between definitions, between artistic forms.

Son: Photography seems to be gaining more recognition in Korea’s art world. What changes have you observed? And what concerns you as a photographer?

Oh: The landscape has definitely improved. More exhibition opportunities exist now, and major institutions increasingly embrace photography as contemporary art. We’re seeing more photography exhibitions in prestigious venues and more international exchange. However, I still maintain that there’s a distinction between photography within art and photography as its own medium. While this might seem like an outdated view in today’s cross-disciplinary art world, I believe photography maintains its own singular territory. We have plenty of discussions about photography in terms of aesthetics and social impact, but I miss deeper conversations about the fundamental elements that make photography unique as a medium.

Son: What directions are you exploring now? And what’s next for your work?

Oh: My immediate focus is completing Left Face, a project that has occupied the past five years. Its scope has grown beyond my initial expectations, and I’m still working to bring all the elements together.

I’m currently exploring the intersection of photography and text, but not in the usual documentary sense. I’m exploring how combining highly specific text with portraits can create a new kind of abstraction. I’m also planning to return to Itaewon for a new portrait series. The title is already decided—it’s Lucky Club. It will probably be work about various people living together in an old building in Itaewon. There, I need to find gazes that contain stories once again.

Son: Seoul is changing rapidly today. What’s your attitude toward the city’s development?

Oh: It’s absurd. This was a title I couldn’t use for the Middlemen project, but if I were to address Seoul as a subject, I would want to use it—a massive “absurd play” is unfolding here. Some describe Seoul’s transformation as diverse and dynamic, but I find it contextless and absurd. Yet photographically, I feel that’s what makes Seoul fascinating. Sometimes I find myself wondering if I should pick up my Speed Graphic again and head back out to the streets to shoot a documentary like Americans Them. I’ll need to think about whether it would become Koreans Them or Koreans We . . .

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue.”