“She” was Lucia Moholy, the Czech-born photographer whose mid-1920s images of the Bauhaus campus designed by Gropius in the German city of Dessau have long been regarded as archetypal depictions of the modernist aesthetic. Her precise, beautifully composed photographs of the school’s architecture, students, teachers, and their work still define our perceptions of the Bauhaus as a progressive, empowering bastion of cultural and social idealism. They swiftly became more famous than the woman who made them.

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus workshops, chess table by Heinz Nösselt with pieces by Josef Hartwig, 1924
Courtesy Galerie Derda, Berlin

László Moholy-Nagy, Head (Lucia Moholy), ca. 1926
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Lucia Moholy: Exposures, an exhibition presented in 2024 at Kunsthalle Prague, in the Czech Republic, and at Fotostiftung Schweiz, in Winterthur, Switzerland, this past spring, sought to change that by exploring the full scope of Moholy’s work in writing, editing, and documentary filmmaking as well as photography. But why was such a gifted and charismatic woman overlooked for so long? And why, for much of that time, was she not credited for her most important body of work? The answers lie in the misogyny and geopolitical turmoil of mid-twentieth-century Europe.

Born Lucie (she later changed her name to Lucia) Schulz to nonpracticing Jewish parents in Prague in 1894, she had a comfortable childhood thanks to her father’s successful law practice. As part of the first generation of European women (albeit only wealthy ones) to be encouraged to attend university, she qualified as a German and English teacher in 1912, then studied philosophy and art history at the University of Prague. After spending much of World War I in Germany, first in Wiesbaden, then Leipzig, she settled in Berlin and worked in book publishing while writing experimental literature under the male pseudonym Ulrich Steffen. By then, she was part of an avant-garde group of intellectuals, artists, and activists who were devotees of a Mazdaznan sect, which advocated meditation, strict vegetarian diets, and a bracing exercise regime of wild swimming and hiking in the countryside.

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In 1920, Schulz fell for a recent arrival to Berlin, a young Hungarian artist and activist named László Moholy-Nagy. A few months later, they married, and she changed her surname by adopting the first part of his, becoming Lucia Moholy. At the time, László was focused on applying his work in painting and collage to securing radical political change. During their country walks, he began experimenting with photography, then widely dismissed as being too sentimental and commercial to have cultural value. Lucia contributed heavily to his program for what he called a “new vision” and swiftly developed photographic concepts and techniques of her own. As well as collaborating with László to create photograms by printing images of objects, or their shadows, on photographic paper, she explored innovative ways of presenting daily life using a camera. They both believed that photography was an exciting means of documenting the speed and urgency of modern life, and its dangers.

Subsisting on her modest wages, they had so little money that they could not afford to heat their apartment in the brutally cold Berlin winter. Their fortunes changed after the success of a 1922 exhibition held at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, which included László’s “telephone pictures,” made by a sign factory in accordance with instructions he relayed by phone. Among his new admirers was Walter Gropius, who was so impressed by László’s intellectual vigor that he invited him to teach at the Bauhaus, which was then in Weimar.

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus Dessau, workshop wing from the southwest, 1926
© ProLitteris, Zurich, and courtesy the collection Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus Weimar, director’s office, 1923
© ProLitteris, Zurich, and courtesy the collection Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur

When the couple arrived in 1923, the four-year-old Bauhaus was in chaos. Under attack by conservative local politicians, who derided it as a hotbed of subversion and depravity, it was still scarred by a long-running conflict between Gropius and a charismatic teacher, Johannes Itten, who favored a mystical approach to art and design education. As Itten ran the foundation course, which was compulsory for all incoming students, he exercised considerable influence until Gropius ousted him in 1922.

Gropius hired László to replace Itten, judging correctly that he would have a very different vision for the school. László reinvented the Bauhaus in accordance with Constructivist principles by urging the students to deploy art, design, science, and technology to improve the lives of the masses. He also allowed women to study the same subjects as men, rather than being relegated to supposedly “feminine” courses, principally weaving.

Unlike many “masters’ wives” who were uninvolved with the school, Lucia played an active role at the Bauhaus, notably in her unofficial capacity as resident photographer.

As for Lucia, she began a two-year apprenticeship with the photographer Otto Eckner, who was then responsible for documenting life at the Bauhaus. When the school moved to Dessau in 1925, she enrolled in photography classes in nearby Leipzig, and set up a darkroom where they could continue their experiments in their home, one of the tellingly named “Masters’ Houses” designed for Gropius’s almost all-male teaching staff.

Unlike many “masters’ wives” who were uninvolved with the school, Lucia played an active role at the Bauhaus, notably in her unofficial capacity as resident photographer. Her still lifes of objects designed by the students—including Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel B33 chairs, Marianne Brandt’s silver and ebony teapot, and a corsage made by the Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stölzl—defined a radically new style of industrial photography. Using primarily an old plate camera for 18-by-24-centimeter glass negatives, she made the object the sole focus of the image, always positioning it against a neutral backdrop. As the design historian Robin Schuldenfrei noted in a 2013 essay, “The products’ modernity is underscored in the photographs themselves: in the shiny reflective surfaces, lit so that they gleam but do not over-reflect.”

Lucia Moholy, Set design by László Moholy-Nagy for The Tales of Hoffmann, Kroll Opera, Berlin, 1931
© ProLitteris, Zurich, and courtesy the collection Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur

Lucia Moholy, Corsage for a Bauhaus festival by Gunta Stölzl, 1926
Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Lucia applied a similar methodology when documenting the evolution of the Bauhaus Dessau, starting with its construction before focusing on each completed element, including the learning spaces, theater, canteen, student apartments, and teachers’ houses. Each of these immaculately composed photographs was taken in a painstakingly planned, seemingly dispassionate style that depicted the school as a series of stage sets, devoid of people. (Lucia also photographed the stage sets designed by László at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House.) They convey a sense of elegance, modernity, and discipline that has defined the Bauhaus, and modern glamour, ever since.

Her portraits from this period share many of those qualities, not least by tightly cropping her subjects’ faces to emphasize nuances of their characters while forging a rapport between them and the viewer. In her 1939 book A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939, Lucia cited the extreme close-ups used by Sergei Eisenstein and other avant-garde Russian filmmakers as an inspiration, despite the misgivings of some of her subjects. “They find it interesting and worth discussing,” she wrote, “but few of them wish to have their portraits taken in the same way.” Tellingly, many of her most cooperative sitters were women, often friends, such as the German photojournalist Edith Tschichold and the New York–born artist Florence Henri, who arrived at the Bauhaus as a painting student, only for László and Lucia to convert her to photography.

Equally enthusiastic were the occupants of Schwarze Erde, a feminist commune in the Rhön Mountains where Lucia often stayed. Like her, they were ambitious, highly educated Neue Frau, or New Women, who had thrived in pre-Nazi Germany. Lucia captured their strength and dynamism but also their idiosyncrasies in seemingly spontaneous photographs that contrasted sharply with her Bauhaus Dessau still lifes and architectural images. She was equally playful in a mid-1925 portrait of László dissolving into laughter while raising a hand toward the camera, as if to stop her from proceeding.

Lucia’s role as the Bauhaus’s unofficial photographer gave her a sense of purpose at a time when she felt increasingly unhappy with her life there and her marriage. “I simply can’t stand it anymore,” she wrote in her diary on May 27, 1927. “I need something that I’m not finding here.” She and László left Dessau and returned to Berlin the following year. It was a welcome change for Lucia, who relished being back in a big, culturally dynamic city. Resuming her photographic experiments, she participated in exhibitions. After she and László separated in 1929, she taught photography at a Berlin art school run by Itten.

By then, Lucia was approaching photography almost as a craft, though not in a conventional sense. She regarded industrialization as an indispensable tenet of modernism, as did her friends. As a result, most Bauhaus teachers and students were committed to designing for serial production, and succeeded in persuading like-minded German companies to mass-manufacture the furniture, ceramics, glassware, textiles, and other products developed at the school. The industrial element of photography was part of its appeal to Lucia, yet the deeply personal nature of her experiments in the darkroom, not least in devising ingenious ways of printing her photographs by hand and of producing images as photograms without recourse to a camera, evokes the intimacy and idiosyncrasy of craftsmanship.

As the Nazi Party gained power in Germany, Lucia’s position as a foreigner, a Jew, and an activist made her increasingly vulnerable. It became untenable in August 1933 when her lover Theodor Neubauer, a Communist politician, was arrested at her home and imprisoned for subversion. (They never met again, and he was executed in February 1945.) Terrified, she fled to Prague to join her family, leaving her possessions in her Berlin apartment except for her archive of prints and 560 glass-plate negatives, which she entrusted to László and his new partner, Sibyl Pietzsch, whom she had befriended.

Over the next few years, Lucia moved to Switzerland, Austria, and France before settling in London, where she combined photography with writing, culminating in 1939 with the publication of her book, A Hundred Years of Photography, one of the first histories of the medium in English. She also continued to work in portraiture by documenting politicians, academics, authors, artists, and other influential Britons, ranging from the peace activist Ruth Fry to the socialite and anti–women’s rights campaigner Margot Asquith.

It would have been easier for Lucia to forge a career in photography after leaving Germany if she’d had her Bauhaus Dessau images. When World War II began, she applied for a US visa, supported by László and Sibyl, who arranged for her to be employed at his recently opened design school in Chicago, and invited her to stay in their home. Yet her application was rejected, so she remained in London. After the war ended in 1945, she asked László to return her archive. He explained that he had given it to Gropius for safekeeping before he and Sibyl left Berlin. Unbeknownst to László, Gropius had shipped it to the United States with other Bauhaus artifacts in 1937, when he began an academic career at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

László Moholy-Nagy, László and Lucia, ca. 1923. Reproduction copy printed in 1979 by Lucia Moholy
Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus workshops, table lamps by Carl Jakob Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, ca. 1924
Courtesy Galerie Derda, Berlin
All works by Lucia Moholy © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. All László Moholy-Nagy works © Estate of László Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Given the turbulence of the time, neither man behaved unreasonably. The problem was that Gropius then used her “Bauhaus photographs” in numerous projects, without asking her permission or crediting her. He made the same omissions when releasing her images for use by others. When Lucia wrote asking him to send prints for her to screen in a lecture, he advised her to contact a British architecture journal instead. She then discovered that he was also storing her negatives, which, until then, she believed had been destroyed, and demanded their return with compensation, eventually hiring the lawyers described in Ise Gropius’s letter to help her. In 1957, after three years of fraught negotiations, Lucia recovered most but not all of them. Two years later, she left London for Switzerland, where she lived until her death in 1989, writing on art and the Bauhaus.

Plucky, resourceful, and talented, Lucia Moholy was a remarkable woman who led an extraordinary life. Why is her work better known than she is? A prime factor was misogyny. Like all gutsy Neue Frau, she faced gender discrimination at every turn. She had been lucky in marrying such an enlightened man as László, but her early photographs were routinely misattributed to him. Like him and many of their friends, she faced repeated struggles to rebuild her life in various countries during the turbulence of Nazism and World War II, but for her, those challenges were aggravated by anti-Semitism. She was also unlucky in facing such a powerful, well-connected opponent as Gropius. Lucia emerged victorious, but only after a long, painful battle. A cruel irony is that had the archive remained in his Berlin house, as László and Sibyl intended, it would have been destroyed when the building was bombed during World War II. And had Lucia kept it after leaving Berlin, it would have suffered the same fate, as her first London apartment was ravaged by fire during a 1940 air raid. In either scenario, those precious Bauhaus photographs would have been lost.

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

To devotees of the mall brand’s “vintage” 1980s aesthetic (Ivy League, Nantucket, Caucasian) referenced by these images, the choice felt like a betrayal. Here was a brand cannibalizing its own history, sloppily regurgitating it and feeding it back to consumers like some malformed lunch meat. Worse, it was a machine making a mockery of their nostalgia. Their self-styled taste was revealed to be so flat as to be replicable by algorithm.

“I think the thing that mostly annoys people about AI is it’s sometimes really good and sometimes really bad,” Charlie Engman, a photographer whose engagement with AI straddles commercial and art practices, told me. “It fails a lot, and I think the failures are actually very instructive and tell you what we care about. And then when it succeeds people get upset because then they feel manipulated.”

Screenshots of J.Crew Instagram

Screenshots of J.Crew Instagram

The debacle was similar to one a month earlier involving a Guess ad in the August edition of Vogue, a two-page spread featuring a lissome model dressed in two looks from the brand’s summer collection. Here, too, there were inconsistencies: The model’s face subtly morphed across the images, her skin giving off the plasticized matte finish native to residents of the uncanny valley. This time, though, Guess wasn’t trying to fool anyone. In small print at the top of the page appeared the words “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.”

In both these cases, the images were realistic, that is, they spoke in the language of photography—naturalistic lighting, figures that credibly read as human. Objectors (there were plenty) noted the bitter irony of billion-dollar companies undercutting skilled labor to produce something that looked like what they normally do anyway. In fact, that was less ironic than the entire point.

The idea that advertising is unscrupulous is by now well understood. Fashion advertising in particular has a well-recorded history of emotional and technical deception. More than a decade ago, Photoshop caused an epistemological crisis—suddenly the waistlines of models in advertising and consumer magazines shrank to unnatural degrees, and cheek fat dissolved with the swipe of a cursor, leaving so much body dysmorphia in the wake of the healing brush tool. Even celebrities—the already beautiful—were not immune to the retoucher’s gaze. The boundaries of visual reality were compromised. The public learned that photographs could now lie, and probably were lying.

The fashion image’s elastic relationship with truth stretches further back than the advent of Adobe software. Artifice was part of the deal from the beginning. Edward Steichen, the godfather of commercial fashion photography, introduced tricks of lighting, focus, and long exposure to manipulate the texture of fabric or flatter a face. As technology has become more sophisticated in pursuit of the same goal, AI’s total artificiality is, in many ways, more honest. Andrea Petrescu, the twenty-five-year-old cofounder of Seraphinne Vallora—the marketing agency behind the Guess ad—articulated, perhaps inadvertently, a philosophical loophole. “We don’t create unattainable looks,” she told the BBC. “Ultimately, all adverts are created to look perfect and usually have supermodels in, so what we are doing is no different.” The fashion industry, long maligned for promoting unattainable standards of beauty, would seem to reach its logical endpoint in AI: a standard of beauty that cannot be accused of being unattainable, because the beautiful people don’t exist.

The idea that advertising is unscrupulous is by now well understood. Fashion advertising in particular has a well-recorded history of emotional and technical deception.

From a world-historical view, AI is simply the latest entry in industrialized automation. The increasing accessibility of AI tools means what once took dozens of specialized roles can now be achieved (or approximated) by one person clicking around in Midjourney. Some of the most conspicuous uses of AI in advertising have been commissioned by multimillion-dollar companies, which by their nature must adhere to capital’s ruthless logic. Finn, for instance, is credited with AI imagery for mass-market apparel brands like Ugg and Skims that is, like his J.Crew work, relatively tame compared to the nightmarish stuff he’s cooked up for Alexander McQueen (gargantuan beetles) and Gucci (a psilocybin-soaked AI sequence shoehorned into last year’s The Tiger, a bizarre fever-dream-as-brand-showcase directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn and starring Demi Moore). For brands that wish to telegraph an edgy persona, AI reads like shorthand, if not compulsory.

Laura Dawes, a director at the London office of Webber Represents, a creative agency that manages photographers as well as stylists, set designers, and art directors, told me that navigating demand for AI is an evolution of what she’s always done as an agent, which is to manage expectations. “The thing about artists is that everyone is so unique,” she said. “I’ve had some really embrace it, and that’s usually in a controlled studio setting, something that’s more, say, constructed. But then in an uncontrolled environment, with natural light, that can be quite hazardous.” Dawes said she has seen clients use AI to build mockups for campaigns, which invites an intolerable level of risk: “You’re making an artificial image and using that as a guide and selling that to stakeholders on set when it’s not physically possible.”

Commercial adopters of AI are seduced less by the technology’s supposed mystique than by its labor efficiencies. It’s a short leap from fast fashion’s already algorithmic enterprise to AI’s promise of cost optimization. A recent report from the International Advertising Bureau projects that generative-AI creative will reach 40 percent of all ads beginning this year, confirming what anyone who watches YouTube videos or regularly rides the subway could already predict. It’s easy to see why AI would appeal to J.Crew, a company that filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and seems to be working through a prolonged identity crisis. “In a way, you can’t fault companies like Guess or J.Crew for doing this, because it’s just following profit models that have always existed,” Engman said. “Having worked in a lot of these jobs, you know, the creativity is very marginal. From a conceptual standpoint, it’s like, yeah, sure, make the J.Crew catalog.”

“Like it or not, this technology is here,” said Kalpesh Lathigra, who teaches in the MA commercial-photography course at London College of Communication. Lathigra, an artist and documentary photographer who also works commercially, believes that the industry will see what AI can do, but more importantly, what it cannot. “Personally, I’m not interested in AI. I would much rather get out into the world. A machine can give you millions of possibilities, but it can’t give you that elusive, intangible thing that draws us in and holds us, which has remained the same since the dawn of photography.”

Charlie Engman, AI-Generated Image for Acne Studios, 2023

Charlie Engman, AI-Generated Image for Gucci, 2023

Photographers and models, the image-industry jobs with the largest cults of personality, may be at less risk than less visible technical roles. “The people that I’m most worried about are the set designers,” Engman told me. “That’s the job that I feel is already disappearing.” Those roles are being supplanted by the elevated presence of retouchers, some of whom have cannily rebranded themselves into what Engman refers to as AI consultants, “which is a very interesting thing, because historically, retouchers were not seen as a particularly creative part of the process.”

There’s general resignation to the idea that AI is hastening entropy in a certain part of the medium. “The race to the bottom I feel will only apply to the basics of image-making—what was once referred to as ‘pack photography,’ home catalogs, basically, but today is product imagery for e-commerce,” Lathigra told me.

Dawes agrees. “When friends of mine were entering the industry, there were a lot of entry-level gigs mainly based around e-commerce, where people could do those kinds of jobs and have the ability to shoot their personal work on the side,” she said. That was only a decade ago. “Now there are brands producing all of their e-com in AI. That for me is quite scary, because that’s such a large section of the industry.” Dawes said she now routinely deals with clients whose entire catalog of product photography is AI-generated.

Engman, who has shot for Prada and Gucci, was an early AI adopter, starting to play around with AI models in 2022. He has an openness toward its possibilities that other photographers might not. It’s an openness that has made him sought-after in the fashion world as an AI oracle; he seems to talk about AI as much as he uses it. A couple of years ago, he estimated that 80 percent of his work engaged AI in some way, like a campaign for Acne that featured statues of vaguely humanoid figures who had seemed to ossify into seashells while shopping. He puts his current AI output vis-à-vis commissions much lower. Did he get bored, or is the flawlessly formed surface of AI’s bubble already deflating?

“I felt like I was participating in the bubble a few years ago, and now I think we’re in the awkward growing pains of moving out of the bubble,” he told me. Engman recalled a recent shoot with Coach, which had commissioned him based on his AI work but then realized that wasn’t actually what it was interested in. “What they wanted to do was much easier and more effective to do in CGI,” he said.

The taste of AI has already coated our mouths enough that it may not matter if it’s actually present at all. Vogue’s December 2025 cover features an image of the actor Timothée Chalamet dressed in Celine jeans, cream topcoat, and untied motorcycle boots, inexplicably posed on top of a swirling nebula. It calls to mind the kitschy roll-down backdrops of school picture day. The portrait, shot by the perennial Vogue contributor Annie Leibovitz, is not AI, but with its disproportionate scaling and goofy premise, has the same acrid aftertaste. In many ways, that’s worse. If we’ve reached the point where humans are aping machines aping humans, especially unconsciously, we’re further down the valley than we realize.

If you were Berenice Abbott, say, or Robert Frank or Stephen Shore, you might go on a road trip—cut through the country, using roads that crisscross the land, sometimes in ways that replicate how Native Americans and early European colonizers traversed it—as a way of mapping the nearly unmappable: not just the space but the place, the sum of geography and politics and culture and economy and power and history that shapes it. For Abbott, it was a trip down US Route 1 from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida, and back again, in 1954. Abbott made it with the hope of recording what she suspected would be imminently lost: namely, the small-town ways of life, and even the culture of larger cities, in the face of the expansion of the Interstate Highway System. For Frank, it was a tour across the country in 1955 and 1956 with the aim of recording every stratum in American society, where his outsider view—he was a Swiss immigrant—gave his pictures an air of critique, a refusal of romanticism and nostalgia. They registered disapproval, even, of the ways in which the harrowing class and racial disparities of American society were—and still are—papered over by the shiny optimism of the new that defines American consumer culture. And for Shore, it was a 1972 trip along Route 66 that turned into a photographic diary—“every meal I ate, every person I met, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used, every town I drove to”—shot not in black and white, but in color.

Anastasia Samoylova, Jesus Saves, Charleston, South Carolina, 2020

Anastasia Samoylova, Historic Reenactor, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2024

Like Frank, Anastasia Samoylova has an immigrant’s view of the United States, one conditioned by a life outside it. But in 2023, when she began roughly retracing Abbott’s route from the tip of Florida, her adopted state, to Maine, her status as an “outsider” documenting aspects of American life was conditioned, too, by the photographic history of the American road trip. It functioned as both an inspiration and a foil, the way, say, Walker Evans’s photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) functioned for Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958). To get in the car with a camera in hand now, not quite two hundred years since the invention of photography, is an act of looking outward, yet it’s also looking inward to the very terms of the medium and its past.

Samoylova notices these relics of the past without falling into the trap of nostalgia.

This self-referentiality shows up in the way the past bumps up against the present in Atlantic Coast. It is a comment on the way this country has never truly reckoned with the original sins of its founding—slavery and genocide above all—so that the past appears, like the return of the repressed, in many of Samoylova’s images. But it is also an engagement with photography’s development over time. One could point to Historic Reenactor, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for example—a woman whose outfit looks to be out of the 1940s, pin curls and headscarf, white collar and jolly printed apron—behind the counter of an old-fashioned sweet shop. Samoylova doesn’t underline the artificiality of the scene or give us any means to recognize it as a fiction; there is no obvious “tell” to let us know that this isn’t a historical photograph, other than the title and the technical qualities of the photograph and print themselves. Samoylova takes up the documentary approach of someone like Abbott or Frank or even Evans; she takes up the challenge of the road trip with all its historical freight, but even more, she allows her subject to occupy a time closer to those forebears than her own.

Anastasia Samoylova, Reflection in Black Thunderbird, Palm Beach, Florida, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, Two Cars, East Harlem, New York, 2024

Automobiles play a large role in this confusion of timelines. The massive, grumpy hog in Hog, Old Lyme, Connecticut, stands in the back of an old-timey pickup truck. A vintage blue Oldsmobile sedan looks out from a shed like garage in Brunswick, Georgia. A rusted-out jalopy is parked next to equally antiquated gas pumps at an abandoned Esso station near Lubec, Maine. (The levels of obsolescence here are myriad—the place is falling apart, and the company itself, long ago absorbed into ExxonMobil, no longer exists in the US.) Palm trees are reflected in the hood of a lovingly maintained Thunderbird in Palm Beach. An out-of-date hearse sits forlorn, “For Sale by Owner” sign in its windshield, near Orient, Maine. In East Harlem, Samoylova picks out two old cars parked nose to tail—Cutlasses, I think—whose colors (cream and copper brown) echo the depressing, small-windowed, low-income housing aesthetics of the brick apartment blocks behind them. Even in her photograph of a diner in Raleigh, North Carolina, the view is dominated by the pictures on the wall rather than the work going on in the kitchen, which is seen through a framed cutout on the lower left. Of those pictures, the most prominent is a painting of a man posing proudly by his 1950s-era blue truck.

Blue Corvette

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Collect this limited edition by Anastasia Samoylova, which retraces Berenice Abbott’s 1954 photographic journey along the Eastern Seaboard, documenting dislocation, loss, and a shifting American dream.

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Blue Corvette

Collect this exclusive limited-edition print by Anastasia Samoylova.

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Description

In Atlantic Coast, Anastasia Samoylova retraces Berenice Abbott’s 1954 photographic journey along the Eastern Seaboard, documenting dislocation, loss, and a shifting American dream.

Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations on life along US Route 1 and on the seventieth anniversary of her project, the Florida-based photographer ventures on her own journey to revisit those communities forever transformed by the interstate. In this photograph, Samoylova turns her eye to a medley of roadside Americana: the undulating American flag, the bald eagle, a powder-blue Corvette, and their eccentric juxtaposition. A nearly shadowless light lends the scene a timeless quality, one punctuated by a stark reminder of nostalgia’s bewildering allure.

Details

Anastasia Samoylova
Blue Corvette
Archival pigment print
12 x 15 in.
Edition of 15
Signed and numbered by the artist

About the Artist

Anastasia Samoylova (born in Moscow, 1984) is a Miami-based photographer who explores the intersections of environmentalism, consumerism, politics, and the picturesque. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; C/O Berlin; Victoria and Albert Museum, Dundee, Scotland; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid and Barcelona; Amerikahaus Munich; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; and Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna. She has published four critically acclaimed books: FloodZone (2019); Floridas (2022); Image Cities (2023), published in conjunction with her winning the inaugural KBr Photo Award; and Adaptation (2024).

It’s not that there weren’t lots of late-model cars to photograph—Samoylova’s eye was caught by them, too, but in fewer numbers. Rather, she seems to have been interested not in the relentless sameness of American consumer culture that she was inevitably confronted with during her travels (a feature that Ed Ruscha pushed to the extreme in his 1963 photobook Twentysix Gasoline Stations) but on the singular detail. She notices these relics of the past without falling into the trap of nostalgia. Yes, the repetition of old cars, old churches, old movie theaters, old houses throws us back to the 1950s. This is more or less the heyday of what we now imagine as Americana. But in Samoylova’s hands Americana is portrayed not so much as a golden age but as a ruin.

Anastasia Samoylova, Fifth-Generation Farmer, Garysburg, North Carolina, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, House by Water, Lubec, Maine, 2024

Ruination is not simply the entropic erosion of the past but a condition of life in the present, according to the photographs in Atlantic Coast. Witness the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, a shocking failure of infrastructure that caused havoc for weeks in 2024 near the I-95 corridor (a successor to US Route 1), and among the most heavily trafficked interstates in the country. Or a wire clothes hanger that has been twisted to read “Affordable Healthcare,” dangling from a metal pole against a twilit sky in Miami. Or denim jeans drying on a fence in Fort Lauderdale, in a yard that has been flooded knee-high due to climate change. Or a leaflet taped to a pole near a marina in Bar Harbor, Maine, that reads: “LOOKING FOR WORK.” “Healthy, Hard Worker, Sober,” it continues. All of these are records of the insupportability of daily existence in the now.

Anastasia Samoylova, House Flag, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, Sculpted Hanger, Miami, Florida, 2025

We are living in a state of collapse. We also live among ghosts. We are haunted. A wall in West Palm Beach shows the barely visible remnants of decals that have been removed: “Sell New & Used Guns Ammo.” In Charleston, we see the removal of a statue of John C. Calhoun, vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832, slaveholder, and ardent defender of the institution of slavery. A church spire in Savannah, viewed through an elevator window, is blurred, made inchoate, like an imperfect memory, by layers of dirt and peeling, weathered glass coating. If these are manifestations of history at large welling up in the present, there are moments when art history does, too, most strikingly in House Flag, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where a figure is partially obscured by an American flag and backlit, so that we see only their silhouette. The image is a subtle echo of one of the most famous images from Frank’s Americans in which two women watch an unseen parade from adjacent apartment windows, one of their faces obscured by a large flag floating across the facade.

Anastasia Samoylova, Ruin, Barboursville, Virginia, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, Civil War Reenactor, Fort Knox, Prospect, Maine, 2024

I’ve emphasized the bleakness that Atlantic Coast portrays, and perhaps that is because of my own experience of this country as a person of color. I am uneasy, even low-key terrified, when I look at the stained glass window in a church in Pooler, Georgia. Three bomber planes roar above an angry—perhaps even vengeful—Jesus; a coat of arms for the 448th Bomb Group sits at the top of the composition, in tribute to its actions during World War II. Below the armorial, their motto reads “Destroy.” I feel the same sense of unease when I see a close-up of a woman’s hand resting on her woven American flag shawl. Her wrist is adorned with friendship bead bracelets, and her index finger sports a ring in the form of a rhinestone-encrusted gun. I feel it again when I meet the steely, suspicious gaze of the Civil War reenactor whom Samoylova encountered in Fort Knox, in Prospect, Maine. This is the America that I fear—the one that cannot let go of the idealization of war, whether wars of the past or an imagined war of enemies within. In the face of these encounters, unlike Frank’s, Samoylova’s point of view is not explicitly critical or judgmental—but ironically, this makes her pictures all the more troubling. While Frank took stealthy snapshots of people going about their business (showing us, in effect, what they were doing when they thought they weren’t being observed), Samoylova photographs people who are active participants in their self-presentation. They want to be seen this way.

Anastasia Samoylova, Woman in Pink Hat, Homestead, Florida, 2025

Anastasia Samoylova, Fireworks, Fort Knox, Prospect, Maine, 2024
All photographs © the artist

But there is vividness too—reminders that life persists in the United States, that joy persists, that pleasure persists. An extravagantly flowering wisteria tree growing from inside an abandoned blue brick building in Baltimore, reaching out from a broken window. A young man, shirtless, soaking up the sun in front of the White House, and in another image, an older woman in a Barbie-pink Western getup—suede cowboy hat, satin shirt fringed with beads and sequins—doing the same in Homestead, Florida. And then there are two women, both Black, one in Darien, Georgia, and the other in Miami. The woman from Georgia looks up to the sky, eyes fringed by press-on lashes and a mouth in a wide smile as she shows off her utterly fabulous sweater with an appliquéd design of a nineteenth-century Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcut print. We see the Florida woman only from behind, as she poses in a sexy contrapposto, wearing a shimmering, formfitting dress cinched at the waist by a wide belt. The color here is sublime, equal parts heaven and hell: the crimson of her garment, the indigo of the shadows framing and defining her figure, the orangey yellows and teals and greens seen further afield, and over her shoulder, the deep darkness of silhouettes of fellow partiers; her Afro is like a halo. If so many of the images in Atlantic Coast make me painfully aware of the America I live in, these crucial few offer a picture of what America could be—a place that celebrates uniqueness, individuality, and the pursuit of happiness.

This essay originally appeared in Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast (Aperture, 2025).

Koo, a slim, gregarious man in his early seventies, traces his impulse to observe and collect to his childhood. The self-described shy one in a family of six children, his introversion drew him to become a diligent gleaner while growing up in Seoul, excavating shards of porcelain, pocketing peculiar rocks, pieces of colored paper, boxes, and other street detritus. He would assemble small collections of castaway treasure only to have his mother, concerned about space in the crowded family home, toss them into the trash bin. One acquisition, though, points to when his twin arts of collecting and photography first became intertwined. A 1964 brochure for the Tokyo Olympic Games—acquired by his father, who frequently traveled for his job in the textile industry—made an early impression about the allure of visual storytelling and, perhaps, Korea’s fraught relationship with its nearby island neighbor.

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Although Koo studied business administration at Yonsei University, in Korea, he moved to Germany in 1979 to pursue art at the Hamburg Fachhochschule für Gestaltung (University of Applied Sciences for Design). He thought he might become a painter, maybe a graphic designer. A life as a photographer hadn’t yet occurred to him, nor had the idea that anyone might pursue this as an occupation. Even so, he picked up the camera and began capturing, in both color and black and white, the abstracted textures of European cities. His professors, in response, encouraged him to bring more of himself, his own background and subjectivity, into the work. When he returned to Seoul in 1985, having encountered the work of Joseph Beuys, Irving Penn, Josef Sudek, and others, he embarked on projects that rejected the then-dominant style of social documentary. He experimented with photograms, Polaroids, and photo collage, stitching images together into elaborate tactile patchworks that emphasized the physicality of images and their capacity for personal expression.

In 1988, he organized an exhibition at Seoul’s Walker Hill Art Center titled The New Wave of Photography, participating as one of the artists. “It was considered a decisive turning point in the history of Korean photography,” said Hee Jean Han, curator at the Photography Seoul Museum of Art, who recently organized a retrospective of Koo’s work and credits him with fostering experimentation in the Korean photography scene. “Amid the politically repressive 1980s under Korea’s military dictatorship and the rapidly transforming city of Seoul, Koo’s personal feelings of anxiety and alienation became a catalyst for his exploration of self and society. It was ultimately a journey that established him as a pioneer bridging photography and contemporary art in Korea,” Han explained. Although Koo only taught for around two years at Kaywon University of Art & Design, his expanded notion of photography would serve as a model for younger generations.

Bohnchang Koo’s studio, Seoul, 2025

Bohnchang Koo, Yeouido Hangang Park, Seoul, ca. 1985

Koo’s penchant for formal experimentation, however, didn’t mark a complete abandonment of an observational way of working. He made a body of work on Seoul, rendered in saturated color, around the time of the 1988 Olympic Games. The city’s multibillion-dollar civic project saw the construction of new highways, subways, stadiums, and the cleanup of the Han River. This was an era also marked by political change and street protests, as the country evolved from dictatorship to democracy. Koo’s read of urban space in this transitional time, despite the punchy Ektachrome and Kodachrome colors, is melancholic. Six years abroad afforded critical distance. Missing the calm gray days in Germany, all he saw was color, sometimes in garish expressions. Picnickers find refuge on a solitary patch of green grass in an expanse of dirt; a family poses in front of the river with a partly constructed bridge in the background; pedestrians pass under a monolithic elevated highway; a rack of women’s shoes is left abandoned. The air of optimism is deflated by an undercurrent of uncertainty. Koo recalls this period in Seoul as one of change and chaos; it was not uncommon to hear tear gas being fired onto the streets somewhere off in the distance.

South Korea would chart a future of economic ascent, realized in the ubiquitous clusters of high-rises that today dominate Seoul’s skyline. As his city transformed into shimmering glass and steel, Koo began to look closely at what older surfaces transmitted, seeking trapdoors to the metaphysical in the everyday. A series on his terminally ill father, Breath (1995), a kind of memento mori, homes in on textures and details: his father’s leathery skin, a stopped pocket watch, a decaying bird—among inky images of nature suggestive of temporal ebb and flow.

Bohnchang Koo, Concrete Gwanghwamun 01, 2010

Bohnchang Koo, Horse Riding Kkokdu 02, 1998, from the collection of the Ockrang Cultural Foundation, Seoul

Koo continued to shift toward still life, isolating objects he viewed as messengers from the past. After encountering, in the late 1980s, a photograph of the Austrian Anglo ceramicist Lucie Rie posing with a Korean moon jar, he became preoccupied with ceramics, especially white porcelain, as conduits of history. “The vessel seemed to me as if it was waiting to be rescued and yearning for its hometown,” he said. Years later, an encounter in a Japanese women’s magazine with images of Joseon dynasty– era porcelains inspired a similar feeling. Why were these pieces so far from home, residing in collections abroad? Koo began to seek out and photograph vessels displaced from Korea in museum collections in Japan, Europe, and the United States. In 2006, he photographed the moon jar, now held in the British Museum, in London, with which Rie had posed. Widely exhibited and published, his photographs would popularize white ceramics that had previously been overlooked as pedestrian, fueling a revival of interest among artists and collectors.

Bohnchang Koo, Gobdol JM-GD 14-2, 2006, from the collection of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum

Bohnchang Koo, Vessel OSK 22-2, 2005, from the collection of the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka

In the recently collected compendium of essays The Beauty of Everyday Things, the Japanese art historian and poet Soetsu Yanagi, a leading thinker behind the mingei (often translated as “arts for common people”) movement, praises humble everyday objects made by anonymous producers for their marriage of aesthetics and functionality. Yanagi founded the Korean Folk Art Museum in Seoul in 1924, and the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo in 1936. His essays ponder and celebrate the aura of patina, pattern, embroidery, and clay, invoking Zen expressions such as “the inelegant is also the elegant.” In 1920, in response to Japan’s ongoing occupation of Korea, which began in 1910 and lasted for thirty-five years, and its repression of the March First Movement in 1919, he penned “A Letter to My Korean Friends,” an earnest, heartbroken apology in epistolary form, which appeared, albeit as a censored version, in the Japanese magazine Kaizo. Among his calls for spiritual and cultural common ground to resist a cult of imperial conquest, Yanagi praised the character of Korean ceramics of the Goryeo Kingdom (918–1392) and the utilitarian forms of the Joseon era (1392–1897), describing them as “sorrowful objects” of the everyday that offered comfort. (His conflation of Korean ceramics and “sorrow” would later be critiqued as a colonial read.) For Yanagi, the form of an object was imbued with meaning. “It is line,” he wrote, in reference to Korean porcelain, “that vividly chronicles the pathos of life and the trials and tribulations of history.”

This observation might be applied to Koo’s photography. He became interested in Yanagi’s writing in the early aughts and appreciated how he had praised less ornate Korean ceramic traditions that were superseded by celadon porcelain, revered for its lustrous green glazes. However, Koo’s interest exceeds aesthetic appreciation. He sees his still lifes, or portraits, of vessels as a reclamation effort, a way of bringing these works back together, “a reunion through photographs.” These frontal, shadowless images, photographed against rice paper and printed large-scale, monumentalize the delicate forms. They appear vividly charged, leaning toward abstraction with the otherworldly presence of a Constantin Brancusi sculpture and the softness of a Giorgio Morandi painting. The curator Alejandro Castellote has observed that “several types of aura overlap in this series: the aura of beauty, the aura of polyphony emanating from its minimalist forms, the aura of Taoist spirituality, the aura that pertains to the assertion of Korean cultural identity, and the aura of coloniality.”

Bohnchang Koo, Mask Gangneung Gwanno 03-2, 2002

Bohnchang Koo, DMZ, 2010
All works courtesy the artist

Koo acknowledges the politics at play in his work. “I chased the collections of the most important museums in Japan,” he said. “As an artist, I am proud that I have brought their images and spirits into my negatives. Not using weapons, like guns and swords, but with my camera.” He would chase objects close to home as well. A 2010 series on the Gwanghwamun Gate of the sprawling landmark Gyeongbokgung Palace, originally built in 1395, shows the broken remains, propped with metal beams, of an ornately decorated structure that has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times over the centuries due to fires, wars, and colonial dictates. The sections photographed by Koo are from the 1960s reconstruction, after the gate was destroyed during the Korean War. A series called DMZ (2010) is less ambiguous, looking, with forensic precision, at the legacy of the war through items at the War Memorial of Korea. Other series, on traditions of mask making and performance, wooden funereal figures called kkokdu, and golden royal crowns, extend his desire to elevate and preserve elements of Korean history. “His images do not simply document cultural heritage,” noted Sujong Song, of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. “They reanimate it, inviting viewers to reconsider the resonance of history in the here and now.”

On a more workaday level, Koo has photographed the colorful oval nubs of his almost finished soap bars, presenting them as typological grids, marking his own passage of time. Most he retrieved from his own bathroom, but, as a preternatural collector, he acquired others from café restrooms around town. “I am very interested in surface texture,” he said. “Photography and objects both keep time.” Lately, Koo is thinking about photographing Roman and medieval armor helmets: “They attract me a lot. I would like to catch the sweat and the agony of the soldiers who wore them.” He is also at work on a new book, revisiting those early pictures made in Europe at the start of his career, when he roamed the streets of Venice, London, Hamburg, and other cities with a 35mm camera. This editing process has been a means of conversing with his past self, and he has been pleased to discover the continuity, across half a century, of his search for the hidden and quietly surreal in the everyday.

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

A couple of years ago, a friend with unimpeachable taste gifted me Keaton’s first photobook, Reservations, published in 1980 by Knopf, and I’ve treasured it ever since. Like all great photobooks, it seems endowed with talismanic powers. Clad in a flamingo-pink cover, the monograph consists of forty-five black-and-white photographs of deserted lobbies and banquet halls in luxury hotels across the United States, taken during the 1970s—presumably as Keaton traveled around the country promoting New Hollywood classics like The Godfather, Annie Hall, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Reds, which had begun production in 1979.

When trying to describe the nervy warmth of Keaton’s performances, people often resort to “lived-in,” that film-criticism cliché. Her photographs are seemingly the opposite: unpeopled, icily observed interiors that announce a “strong, direct photographer with a cool and deadly eye,” as the jacket copy puts it. The book makes no mention of her acting credits, and why should it? No mere vanity project, Reservations is an angular meditation on American emptiness, the kind Todd Hido would thematize to enormous success two decades later. Keaton locates a wry, forlorn comedy in awkward furniture, plastic plants, florid wallpaper, ersatz backdrops, quirky light fixtures, and conspicuous cables snaking down white walls, all shot deadpan (a word coined in the 1920s for that other Keaton, Buster) and gilded with a harsh flash that renders surfaces slightly unreal.

Certainly, the other Diane looms large in the perturbing directness of these photographs. Like Arbus, Keaton favored Rolleiflex cameras, though she was probably less fussy about film type. One especially Arbus-like image finds two cheerless Christmas trees installed atop a pair of tables at the Ambassador, a hotel whose demolition Keaton fought passionately against as a member of the Los Angeles Conservancy. That several of these hotels have since met the wrecking ball or changed to overseas ownership lends the photographs an elegiac air. This quality finds its fullest expression in a phalanx of stacked chairs in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, or perhaps in a photograph of a small dining table, marooned in a sea of plush carpet at what was then the Fontainebleau Hilton in Miami Beach.

Keaton’s interest in photography was wide-ranging. In the late 1970s, she struck up a friendship with the curator and writer Marvin Heiferman, who was then working at Castelli Graphics gallery in New York. They went on to collaborate on several books and exhibitions, including Still Life: Hollywood Photographs (1983), Local News: Tabloid Pictures from the Los Angeles Herald Express (1999), and Bill Wood’s Business (2008), which features the work of a Fort Worth studio photographer whose negatives—all ten thousand of them—had sat in Keaton’s closet for twenty years.

“She was so smart about pictures,” Heiferman told me. “We would go into archives and sit there and be elbowing each other, laughing, pointing at things, going, ‘Oh wow, isn’t this weird?’” Her taste, he said, helped spur a wave of interest in commercial and vernacular photography. She was an obsessive collector and a habitué of flea markets on both coasts. Her ultimate fantasy, she once told an interviewer, was to purchase every photography book ever published. “My mission is to buy an old warehouse I can transform into a massive library of image-driven books and open it to the public.”

In 2007, Keaton’s friend Larry McMurtry wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books calling attention to her writing on photography. In a letter to the editor, none other than Janet Malcolm chided the Lonesome Dove author for failing to note Keaton’s own work as a photographer. Malcolm praised the “mordant melancholy” of her Reservations images, arguing that they “established her place in contemporary photography” and “form the pendant to Keaton’s wonderful acting career.” Diane Keaton’s place in the photographic canon is hardly assured, of course. She probably wouldn’t mind. Long out of print, Reservations and her other photobooks endure nonetheless, as yet another testament to the compulsive creativity and liberated spirit of an artist who inhabited many different roles in life, all of them herself.

I encountered Lee and her art for the first time through a part-time job. In 2013, as an undergraduate art history student, I worked as a gallery guide at one of her solo exhibitions in Seoul, where she has long been based. Day after day, I stood among her large-scale prints, reciting information to visitors while observing how they responded—some with recognition, some with confusion, and others with quiet reverence. By then, series such as Projects, Parts (2002–5), and Layers (2008) had already cemented Lee’s reputation. For Korean students of photography and visual art, she was foundational. Unlike many contemporaries whose imagery was geared toward geopolitical history, political activism, or typical national narratives, Lee’s gaze turned inward, exploring identity as something performative, fluid, and unresolved. Her reputation as an artist who was even more famous overseas made her career particularly fascinating.

Nikki S. Lee, The Ohio Project (6), 1999

Nikki S. Lee, The Punk Project (1), 1997

When I met Lee again this past spring at her studio in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood, over a decade later, she was radiant and quietly reflective, generous with her stories but never indulgent. Our conversation stretched across a long afternoon in her studio, touching on her singular practice, her relationship with identity, and her enduring desire to remain in motion, always chasing the present while never quite escaping the past. Her father was a photographer, and Lee, who was born in 1970, grew up surrounded by images. “I was ambitious, driven,” she said. “I wasn’t afraid to throw myself into whatever I wanted to do. But at the same time, I had a strong literary sensibility. Even as I chased my goals, I often felt a deep emptiness about life. There was always this quiet sadness inside me—a tenderness, maybe.” Still, she never really thought of picking up the camera herself until she decided to study photography at Seoul’s Chung-Ang University, where the curriculum was highly technical and traditional. She grew curious about other creative fields and, after graduating, moved to the United States and enrolled at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where she took fashion-design classes alongside her photography studies. It was the era of supermodels and grunge, and the line between art and commerce, and art and life, was becoming harder to find. Lee had hopes of becoming a fashion photographer, and she needed an English name. One day, flipping through an issue of Vogue while applying for an assistant position with David LaChapelle (a job she would get), she came across the model Niki Taylor. For some reason, the name spoke to her.

Lee subjected the New York art world’s newfound ideals of inclusivity to an ambiguous acid test.

During her graduate studies in photography at New York University, Lee’s practice took a sharp turn. At NYU she was given space to step away from commercial work and focus on defining her own language as a fine artist. But more than any institution, the city itself changed her. “I lived in the East Village. It was rough but also magical,” she said. “From 1994 to around 2009, I think New York had this golden period. There was a balance between freedom and safety, between chaos and creativity. There was energy in the streets, a sense that anything was possible. You could live however you wanted and invent your own rules. It was a place where fixed ideas didn’t really exist. It felt like the right place for someone like me, who didn’t want to follow convention.”

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After finishing her MFA at NYU, Lee rose to prominence with Projects, her now-iconic series documenting her immersion into various demimondes: skateboarders, punks, yuppies, lesbians, hip-hop fans, high-school students, seniors, and more. Like the New York–based artists Cindy Sherman and Adrian Piper, Lee used performance to negotiate the construction of gender, race, and the self. Yet unlike them, Lee didn’t emerge from the context of American second-wave feminism, and her images, which at first glance resemble candid snapshots, were, in fact, the result of monthslong embedding and assimilation. Lee would adopt the clothing, gestures, slang, and social rituals of each group, documenting her transformations with the help of a friend or stranger who would release the shutter. Lee began Projects in 1997, at a time of reckoning around issues of representation and identity within the US art world, and her chameleonic provocations, teetering between irony and sincerity, seemed to subject its newfound ideals of multiculturalism and inclusivity to an ambiguous acid test.

One of the most physically grueling chapters of the series was The Skateboarders Project (2000). “I fell so many times,” Lee said. “My body was sore the entire time. I had to wear patches on my arms and legs. Physically, it was exhausting. I remember skating near the East River—there were a lot of makeshift skate parks there. Usually, my projects last about three or four months, but this one took a real toll on me.” Another challenging chapter was The Exotic Dancers Project (2000), for which Lee worked at a strip club on the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut, and undertook a strict dietary and training regimen. “That one was so lonely,” she remembered. “I stayed in a motel near a highway, in this desolate, isolated place. The motel was in the middle of nowhere. Every night, I went out to the clubs, and during the day, I was alone. That solitude really got to me.”

Nikki S. Lee, The Exotic Dancers Project (20), 2000

Nikki S. Lee, The Yuppie Project (19), 1998

With Projects, Lee became a star almost overnight. “My very first work was reviewed by The New York Times,” she recalled. “Honestly, I didn’t even know I was going to become an artist. I was just doing a school project. Suddenly, everyone was calling me an artist.”

The attention, though thrilling, was disorienting. The pressure was less about being in the spotlight than about the fear of being a one-hit wonder. “I remember thinking, If I don’t do well with my next project, maybe I was just lucky. Maybe it’ll all fade away. I didn’t want to be that kind of artist—the kind who peaks early and disappears.”

Lee’s embrace of stereotypes, especially in Projects, has drawn accusations of cultural appropriation, and she could sometimes resort to racist caricature, as in The Hip Hop Project, for which she appeared in blackface. Such photographs reveal less about the limits of assimilation than they do about the limits of Lee’s own series, whose often nuanced commentary on power dynamics and liberal visibility politics could, without a sense of emotional authenticity, succumb to empty farce. But Lee remains unfazed. “Projects is timeless,” she said, laughing. “I think I did well. Depending on the political climate, sure, it could be controversial. But that’s not the point. The point is, people are still talking about it twenty, twenty-five years later. That’s what matters.” There’s a saying in Korea: What’s scarier than criticism is silence. In other words, indifference is more humiliating than disapproval.

That pressure led to Parts, a series in which Lee photographed herself with various male partners, later cropping the men out of the frame so that only fragments of their bodies remained. The gesture underscored the idea that identity, especially in intimate relationships, is shaped relationally, sometimes even erased in the process. She followed that line of inquiry with Layers, made the year Lee moved from New York back to Seoul. For Layers, Lee traveled to various cities around the world, asking local street artists to draw her portrait. She then superimposed three of these interpretations in a single light box, creating a hybrid image that was at once hers and not hers—a visual echo of the mutability she has always explored.

While many critics and curators have framed her work as an inquiry into Asian American identity, Lee resists that reading. “People always say my work is about identity,” she said. “But I’ve never questioned my own identity. I was born in Korea. I grew up Korean. That’s never been in doubt. My sense of self has always been fluid but not uncertain. I wasn’t searching for an identity—I was just trying to show that identity is something you can perform, mold, and play with. It wasn’t about proving anything. It was about saying, ‘Look—I can do this too.’”

Nikki S. Lee, Part (3), 2003

Nikki S. Lee, Wedding (8), 2005
All photographs © the artist and courtesy Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York

Though best known for her photographic series, Lee was never entirely comfortable with the label of photographer. “I’ve never once dreamed of being a photographer,” she stated. “To me, photography was just one medium I happened to use. I never saw it as the end goal.” This is probably why Lee took a break from still photography for a while, turning instead to video and painting. An emblematic 2006 video piece, a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee, is a pseudodocumentary in which she plays herself—or rather, several versions of herself, blurring the line between fiction and reality. More recently, she has returned to painting, a medium she rarely discusses publicly. “The paintings I’m working on now are totally different in character from my earlier works,” she said. “They’re not even related, really. But I’m following my instincts.”

This year, Lee will release a new video, exhibit in a group show, and publish a book cowritten with the essayist Im Ji-eun, a close friend. “We meet almost every day,” Lee said. “We start with lunch and end up talking until dinner. One day, we joked about starting a podcast, but then we thought, Why not turn these conversations into a book?” The result is about artificial beauty, a meditation on aesthetics, artifice, and the human-made. “People always talk about the beauty of nature,” Lee said. “But I love artificial beauty. Art is human. It’s artificial by definition. And I think there’s something really beautiful about that.” Seoul—a site of ceaseless reinvention, and now a viable candidate for the plastic surgery capital of the world—is perhaps a fitting home for an artist so invested in the malleability of the self.

Recently, Lee founded a creative management agency called Beatnik in the city. Currently, Beatnik manages one actor—her partner, Teo Yoo—and is preparing to sign a young actress. “It’s not a separate thing from my art,” Lee said. “It’s just another way of being in the world creatively.” Lee and Yoo married in 2007, and Yoo’s recent success with films such as Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023) has rekindled interest in Lee’s work locally, though her art has long been circulating in Korea, and was featured in the 1999 Gwangju Biennale.

When I asked what her long-term goals are, she laughed. “I don’t usually set big goals. I focus on short-term things . . . I just want to make sure I’m enjoying the moment. If I don’t want to do something, I won’t do it.” She added, “But there is one big goal. When I’m on my deathbed, I want to be able to say: ‘I lived as an artist.’ If I can say that, I think I’ll be at peace.”

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

For the 2002 installation Without Ground, the Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais transferred dozens of small photographic self-portraits to the white walls of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. The full-length likenesses were posed in the ICA’s Ramp Space, as if they were searching the empty expanse for something hidden from both artist and viewer. By cleverly using scale and gently fading some of the photo transfers, Metchewais, who went by his stepfather’s surname, McLain, at the time, created the illusion of figures receding into space. Treating the walls of the museum as the “ribcage of a living animal,” he felt that his photographs were like “tattoos etched onto the bones of the beast,” anticipating their burial within the institution’s architectural memory, covered by future layers of accumulated paint.

Over a decade later, in 2014, the Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater meticulously scraped away layers of paint from the ICA’s walls, creating stratified craters in search of the installation. The effort to uncover these photographic traces was akin to a search for Metchewais himself, an attempt to connect with the artist who had passed away only a few years earlier, in 2011. The hunt for evidence was forensic, replicating the investigatory nature of Metchewais’s wandering figures. “I think North America is a crime scene,” Metchewais said of Without Ground in 2006. “Something was lost and it needed to be found. The figures were detectives, a search party. I wanted them to be looking for the crime itself. . . . I hate to say it, but what happened to the land and people here was/is a crime. People today don’t see that. They understand it, they know it, but it doesn’t seem to mean that much to them. To me, it means a lot, in many ways.”

Without Ground lacks perspectival space or a defined horizon line, evoking the Pueblo watercolors of the Studio style—which typically favored depicting costumed dancers on neutral grounds—that developed out of the Santa Fe Indian School in the early twentieth century. Metchewais, however, insisted that the land in these paintings was not actually absent but rather “unseen,” a symbolic denial of ground taught to the Studio painters that corresponded with the historic displacement of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. His installation at the ICA was thus about seeking an invisible landscape and the crime behind its loss and continued absence. The white museum wall, rather than a neutral ground, became a site at which to consider the theft of Indigenous land, underscored by the installation’s title, an example of the ways in which Metchewais rearticulates colonial memory through photography. “I am concerned about how people see the landscape of North America,” Metchewais said while speaking about Without Ground. “I want the land to be omniscient.” In this statement lies the breadth of his practice, which moved between perception, representation, and understanding the capacity of the land to sense and speak for itself. His work explores the ground, aesthetic and territorial, on which contemporary Native art and communities might stand, and his images propose a new intellectual space that exceeds the mere subversion of stereotypical representation.

Kimowan Metchewais, Raincloud Over-the-Head, Masque Collection, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, ca. 2010

Kimowan Metchewais, Lucky Strike/Green, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, ca. 2002

Consider Metchewais’s most lauded work: the Cold Lake series (2004–6). It consists of photographs of children and other community members from the artist’s homeland of Cold Lake First Nations, a Cree and Dene reservation in Alberta, Canada, pictured in the style of straight photography on the street or wading in the namesake Cold Lake. Metchewais returned repeatedly to his home to take thousands of photographs of Indigenous children, who he sought to depict as a youthful and emergent force. These works form the bulk of the sub-series that the artist titled Child Nation. Notes in Metchewais’s sketchbooks from about 2000 also propose what he called “post-Curtis portraits,” works that are empty of ethnographic baggage and instead emote “reclamation” and “a desperate, pathetic attempt to restore” and “elevate human status. It seeks to be heroic. It wants to be owned.”

This label is a reference to and an attempt to move beyond the outsize influence of the photographer Edward Curtis, whose staged and romanticized portraits from the twenty-volume anthropological series The North American Indian (1907–30) have permeated the visual imaginary. The post-Curtis portrait is also about community, place, and belonging. “To be Indian, Inuit,” Metchewais writes, “that is in the heart.” In Young Mothers at Cold Lake (2005), four women gather knee-deep in the water, smiling and laughing together; one looks backward to keep an eye on her children, who are outside the frame. Other images from the series are taken on the streets of Edmonton and at powwows. But the artist’s attention was mainly reserved for creating striking three-quarter length or closely cropped portraits of children in the lake waters.

His most well-known image from the series, Cold Lake Venus (2005), features a young girl facing the camera, hip-deep in water that stretches behind her to meet the sky at the horizon. The photograph is saturated with what Metchewais calls “divine beauty,” which emanates from the girl like the ripples in the lake water. “Look at us emerge. We are beautiful, standing in a magical place, just back from the Wal-Mart [sic],” Metchewais writes of the work. His wry superstore reference dispels the tendency in the popular imagination to take Indigenous communities out of time when romanticizing their ties to the landscape. He succeeds in picturing new image worlds to express a fundamental connection to home and place while evoking Indigenous and Greek creation myths.

Born in 1963, in Oxbow, Saskatchewan, Metchewais adopted his mother’s maiden name in the latter part of his life. He began his career making political cartoons and graphics for Windspeaker, Canada’s most widely distributed Indigenous-content newspaper, before receiving a BFA from the University of Alberta in 1996. His early work tackled the legal and cultural frameworks of Indigenous identity and tribal membership, questioning the means by which identity is defined and challenging the demand, still present today, for Indigenous artists to perform a so-called authentic connection to land, language, and community. His 1989 painting A Guide to Doing Contemporary Indian Art pokes fun at the collage aesthetic prevalent in the work of First Nations contemporary artists in the 1980s, such as George Longfish, Jane Ash Poitras, and Joane Cardinal-Schubert (who was a mentor and purchased the piece). Handwritten penciled text on a red-painted rectangle instructs: “Place images below . . .” “old photographs,” “some modern stuff for contrast,” “syllabics,” “buffalo(s),” “a few tipis,” and so forth.

Metchewais received his MFA from the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1999. He was attracted by the school’s well-regarded photography and Native American art history programs, and found there a network of Indigenous classmates including Larry McNeil, Will Wilson, and Rosalie Favell. While at UNM he began to rigorously develop the photographic and mixed-media practice he is known for today. He challenged the authority of fixed representation while pursuing answers to the question of authenticity that he asked of himself and his work: “What makes Indian people Indian?” His mixed-media compositions and elaborate photo collages incorporate references to Native art history: winter counts, ledger paper, and parfleche designs juxtaposed with images of urban and natural landscapes in Sandias (1998); portraits of Plains elders mined from archives and popular culture, and those taken with his own lens, in The Origin of Tobacco (2000). His 1999 installation After, first exhibited in his MFA thesis show at UNM’s John Sommers Gallery, featured illusionistic photo transfers depicting birds, insects, and bowls on the gallery walls, a process Metchewais called “photographic gallery tattoos.” It was an antecedent to the later ICA installation Without Ground and exemplified his “search of elegant solutions to challenges of narrative in space.”

Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer

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A Kind of Prayer presents the first-ever survey dedicated to the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais and his singular body of work on Indigenous identity, community, and colonial memory.

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Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer

Photographs by Kimowan Metchewais. Text by Christopher T. Green, Kimowan Metchewais, Emily Moazami, and Jeff Whetstone. Designed by A2/SW/HK, London.

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A Kind of Prayer presents the first-ever survey dedicated to the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais and his singular body of work on Indigenous identity, community, and colonial memory.

After his untimely death at age forty-seven in 2011, Metchewais left behind a wholly original and expansive body of photographic and mixed-media work. At the center of his practice is an extensive Polaroid archive, which addresses a range of themes—including the artist’s body, performative self-portraiture, language, landscapes, and everyday subjects—and served as the source material for works in other media, such as painting and collage. Metchewais’s exquisitely layered works offer a poetic meditation on his connection to home and land, while challenging conventional narratives and representations of Indigeneity.

Metchewais was a contemporary artist of stunning originality, and until now, his work has been woefully understudied and underexposed. A Kind of Prayer is a comprehensive overview that showcases this essential artist’s astonishing vision.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 268
Number of images: 150
Publication date: 2023-01-10
Measurements: 7.75 x 10.55 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115322

Press

“Kimowan is a gift – an important voice for Native artists and the contemporary art world. He left us before he got the recognition he so deserved, but we can continue to learn and gain inspiration from the work he left behind.” —Wendy Red Star, The New York Times.

“A Kind of Prayer presents the first-ever survey dedicated to the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais and his singular body of work on Indigenous identity, community, and colonial memory.” —Photo London

“The Photographer 2000, a mixed-media artwork by Kimowan Metchewais, whose monograph A Kind of Prayer was published in January by Aperture. Metchewais’s work is on view this month as part of the exhibition Native America: In Translation at the Milwaukee Art Museum.” —Laena Wilder, Harper’s Magazine

“A Kind of Prayer is an exploration of Indigenous identity and community, as seen through photography and multi-media work of the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais.” —International Center of Photography

“A monograph that is both a photobook and a scholarly publication but, as its subtitle suggests, also an expression of something that lies beyond analysis of the physical world.” —Maymanah Farhat, The Brooklyn Rail

Contributors

Kimowan Metchewais (1963–2011; born in Oxbow, Saskatchewan, Canada) was a multidisciplinary Cree artist who began his artistic career working as an illustrator and editor at the Native newspaper Windspeaker. He later received his bachelor of fine arts at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, before completing his master of fine arts at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In 1995, Metchewais received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to spend the summer at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and in 1996, a national award from the Canadian Native Arts Foundation. At the time of his death, he was associate professor in the art department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Christopher Green is a writer and art historian whose research focuses on modern and contemporary Native American art and material culture. His work has appeared in Aperture, Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze, among other publications.

Emily Moazami is assistant head archivist at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC.
Jeff Whetstone is professor and head of photography at Princeton University, New Jersey.

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The Polaroid was core to Metchewais’s process, and while at UNM he began amassing an extensive personal archive, meticulously organized during his lifetime by subject and alphabetized in boxes. He used these photographs as references for his paintings and embedded them in his mixed-media collages and as transfers to large-scale works on paper. He cut up, rearranged, and taped them back together before rephotographing and reentering them into the collection as a shifting and circulating living archive. The tactility of the cut-up photographs, with conspicuous scratches, creases, and Scotch tape fastenings, distinguishes them from digital images, and Metchewais sought to maintain these qualities even when he rephotographed his Polaroids and digitally printed them. He commented at the 2009 conference Visual Sovereignty at the University of California, Davis, that “few things compare to the silky touch of a newly developed print in the palm of one’s hand.” His Polaroids also freed him from a reliance on archival images from outside sources. Instead, Metchewais’s use of personal imagery avoided the need for intervention, interrogation, and reinscription that weighs down some work by contemporary Native photographers who explore museum and institutional archives as sites of privileged access, subjugation, and colonial violence.

Kimowan Metchewais, Storyteller, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2000

Kimowan Metchewais, Structure 07, New Mexico, 1997

Metchewais’s Polaroids contain many series: toy buildings and animals shot in a studio; smokestacks and mountain ranges; flowers, cars, and other quotidian objects. Many are portraits depicting family, friends, classmates, and colleagues, and being from many periods of his life they serve as both an essential precursor to and extension of the deep exploration of community seen in the Cold Lake series. Portraits include his brothers, Hans and Luther; Archie Seelkoke, an Alaska Native man that Metchewais met in Albuquerque; fellow photographer and friend Laena Wilder; and many more faces from his home, his time at UNM, and his later colleagues in North Carolina. These individual portraits are an archive of stories, personalities, and bodies, occasionally cut up, rearranged, and accompanied by biographic annotations in Metchewais’s notebooks.

The artist frequently includes his own body in this archive. In one undated set of Polaroids, he photographed his own hand in a series of gestures, some of which were later modified and digitally printed under the title Indian Handsign. Loosely held poses of fingers and arm recall anatomical studies, while distinct hand shapes suggest a form of sign language. On these Polaroids, Metchewais penciled labels directly below the images: a trigger-finger pose is labeled “GO”; an upward-facing palm is labeled “OPEN.” The hand signs function as study and reference materials while also triangulating a relationship between body, language, and image. The signs do not appear to be based on American Sign Language but rather obliquely reference Plains Sign Talk, a historical sign language used by Indigenous peoples across central North America in trade and oratory. Purported manuals for Plains Indian Sign Language were published throughout the twentieth century, and the language was widely appropriated by the Boy Scouts and other non-Native summer camps and societies. The images also recall the hand signals from the rapidly paced Cree handgame (or “stick game”) that Metchewais played with his uncles on Cold Lake First Nations. Eraser smudges on the Polaroids suggest that Metchewais wrote and rewrote the labels, drafting his own language for this series of universal gestures, countering appropriations with a new baseline of bodily signs. In some instances, he printed multiple photographs on single sheets of paper in three-by-four arrangements of hand gestures, forming a kind of visual dictionary or record.

Metchewais images propose a new intellectual space that exceeds the mere subversion of stereotypical representation.

Metchewais circulated language throughout his work, often in deeply personal ways. Images of his grandmother’s Cree-language Bible recur in his oeuvre, including in works that reproduce its worn leather cover and front matter, namely a page of the Cree syllabic alphabet with French phonetic translations. Metchewais often signed his name Kimowan in Western Cree syllabics, ᑭᒧᐘᐣ, which means “it is raining.” In several versions of his 2004 photo collage Cold Lake, the Cree name for the lake, atakamew-sakihikan, appears in syllabics underneath the English. These works are examples of what he called his “paper walls,” photographs printed on paper sheets taped together into wall-size constructions. Emulating Plains parfleches, Metchewais designed such works to be mobile, foldable into transportable packets that can be tucked under one’s arm as a carry-on until unfurled into nearly room-size installations. They also make clear why Metchewais identified himself not as a photographer but rather as “a sculptor of flat, rectangular objects of various textures and tone.” Some of the pieces of tape are in fact photographic images of paper taped together, such that the simulation of texture blurs reality with representation. The papers were dipped in water colored by rust and tobacco, “baptized,” in the artist’s words, as a ritual act. Because tobacco is a sacred substance among many Indigenous peoples, the material of the work might be considered animate. “Tobacco is a handshake. It signals honesty and honorable intention. Cold Lake is a kind of prayer,” Metchewais said.

Kimowan Metchewais, Cold Lake, Cold Lake First Nations, Alberta, Canada, 2006

Kimowan Metchewais, Goodwill, 118 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2005

That prayer is about home, family, and memory. Cold Lake includes multiple iterations of a scene of Metchewais and his cousin Conrad wading below the long horizon line of the lake. It combines several snapshots taken from shore by the artist’s mother. The photographs are “a record of family love,” binding Metchewais, his family members, and the lake and sky in kinship relations. Given the installation’s wall-size scale, the close viewer becomes wrapped in the experience and memory of that place. These works are less about the recovery or performance of memory than a living relation to the land. They also situate home and place as terms that escape essentialism. In Goodwill, 118 Avenue, Edmonton (2005), Metchewais captured a scene of furniture donations awaiting pickup along a wall in an urban Native neighborhood. The orderly rectangles evoke modernist compositions in what Metchewais called “a Mondrian and serendipitous scene.” For the artist, they also stand in as one of many incarnations of home, both territorial and adopted. His shadow appears on the right edge of the photograph, an index of his presence in the Edmonton neighborhood that he called “an unofficial reservation in the city.”

Kimowan Metchewais, Striped Man, Brother Luther McLain, Albuquerque, 1998

Kimowan Metchewais, The Marlboro Man/ A Man Named Lucky, The Origin of Tobacco, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2000

Metchewais was ever conscious of the pitfalls of representation and stereotypes. In 1999 he began a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taught in the studio art program there until 2011, reaching the rank of associate professor. When he arrived in North Carolina, the birthplace of his white stepfather, he began to more regularly go by his mother’s maiden name, Metchewais, reflecting his difficult relationship with Mr. McLain. His course-planning notes include outlines of the histories of depicting Native America, from the trope of the noble savage to the erroneous notion of the vanishing race. His sketchbooks contain drawings based on art-historical representations, such as copies of the famous portraits of Native American delegates and visitors to Washington, DC, drawn by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, from 1804–7.

Yet Metchewais’s fully realized works show little of the typically overwhelming concern among Native American photographers of his generation with debunking and overturning such stereotypes. Instead, his self-portraits pursue the kind of “self-made Native imagery” he saw in online culture, as he wrote on Facebook in 2009. He fashioned a host of such characters as the Marlboro Indian smoking a cigarette in a cowboy hat (Marlboro Indian, 2000). In a series of self-portraits from 2000, Metchewais’s shirtless upper body, painted dark blue from the chin down, sparkles with starry points of light like the cosmological images from the late nineteenth-century ledger art of the Itázipčho Lakota artist and visionary Čhetáŋ Sápa’ (Black Hawk). Several photographs from Metchewais’s graduate-school period, Ghostdancer (1998) and Striped Man 02 (1998), depict his brother, Luther, wrapped head to toe in a black-and-white striped textile—a body that, while abstracted, evokes the heavily romanticized image of the Plains Indian wrapped in a chief’s blanket and the loaded history of disease-laden trade blankets.

Kimowan Metchewais, Self-portrait with long hair, Albuquerque, 1998

Kimowan Metchewais, Self-portrait with long hair, Albuquerque, 1998

In 1993, Metchewais was diagnosed with a brain tumor that chased him for the rest of his life. Surgery and subsequent treatments left him with a permanent bald spot on the back of his head. In a series of Polaroid self-portraits, Metchewais, in a white tank top and faded jeans, dons a hairpiece that stretches to the floor. In two Polaroids that he took to fully capture the length, he drapes the hair over one arm and allows it to drag along the floor beside his bare feet. In another Polaroid, the hairpiece is pictured lying snakelike on the floor. Long hair was a sign of Indianness to Metchewais, and he incorporated his own hair into some of his sculptural installations. In a 1984 comic for Windspeaker, a cartoonish Native man with long braided hair, perhaps representing the artist, asks, “Tell me . . . what is the true essence of being an Indian?!” A guru on a mountaintop replies, “That all depends . . . on if your mother married off the reserve before or after 1950 . . . how long yer hair is . . . how much pure blood you have.” Visual markers and the “poetics of identity”—hair, tobacco, place—were of great interest to Metchewais, who noted in the proposal for his University of North Carolina postdoc that it would be worthwhile to “question what it is to be an Indian with a white father.” The exaggerated length of the hairpiece and its visible artificiality compose an ironic take on this sign of Native identity while highlighting what was both a vulnerable feature for the artist and a site, as he explained, to investigate his “bi-racial identity and the ensuing ambiguity [that] falls in line with my interest in contradiction.”

Kimowan Metchewais, Indian Handsign, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1997

Following complications from one such surgery, in 2007, Metchewais lost the capacity for movement and feeling in the left side of his body. One notices that his hand-sign Polaroids are almost exclusively of his right hand. Many of the words labeling the Polaroids—“TOUCH,” “FLIGHT,” “RECALL,” “CHANGE”—took on a different valence in the wake of his partial paralysis. Metchewais called his studio “a laboratory” where he conducted an “archeology of the self,” and in the years following his surgery, he seemed to come to terms with his body, identity, and artistic practice. As curator Lois Taylor Biggs adeptly observes, “Metchewais blurred the boundaries of the body and the archive for the purpose of healing,” and his practice as personal archive served as medicine, both a “site of healing” and “a living body.”

Grow All Over Again (2008), a short film by Christina Wegs, intimately documents Metchewais discussing this process and his return to the studio after a hospital stay and period of rehabilitation. In the film, he describes a desire to revisit his old works and “to paint white and black rectangles over all the shit that I don’t like, and then go from there.” In a mixed-media work, Self-Portrait with Peach Brain Tumor (ca. 2006) the upper right and lower left sides of his face are split between two cut Polaroids that cast his skin color in different tones, one pink and the other bronze. Amid the Scotch tape is a series of inked black and beige rectangles that spread across the artist’s face but don’t mask his features. The original Polaroids were taken in 2000, prior to his 2007 surgery, but the modifications suggest he continued to explore his body as a site of the etched cultural markers of ethnic and corporeal identity.

As Metchewais rehabilitated and worked his way back into the physical studio, he began to transition his attention from analog photographic processes to the digital space, which he understood as a natural site for Indigenous subjectivity. “It turns out the thing in the modern world that most matches the Indian psyche is the web,” he wrote in 2009. His personal website and blog, “Images & Other Curios,” became a space to share his work, personal reflections on art and the artistic process, updates on his health, and other musings. He often gave his website background the texture of his folded paper works, bringing his love of photography’s tactility to the screen. He began a vibrant experimental video practice on YouTube, including kaleidoscopic treatments of his own face and banal videos of him shaving, and used Facebook and his blog as galleries for found images, not unlike his self-made Polaroid archive. The Facebook image portfolio labeled “Cree beadwork and modern color tactics” provocatively juxtaposes intricate abstract beadwork designs with artworks by the likes of Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, and Fernand Léger. The internet, Metchewais astutely observed, could be a site where one could collide modernist and Indigenous histories to sovereign visual ends. “Indians exist in impossible spaces,” he noted, “and [the web] has given us a purchase on the power of our space.”

In the composition Hymn over Water (2000), syllabics hover over the horizon line of Cold Lake, and above them is the phrase “Air: Vole au plus tôt” (Fly as soon as possible). The French phrase and syllabics are sourced from a Dene hymnal; the receding water, slightly out of focus, is sourced from one of the many trips Metchewais took back home. In this portrait of Cold Lake, there are no figures bathing in its waters, only the hymn, which hangs like a caption, an ode to the land. Language and the translation of word to image are central themes of Metchewais’s work, and here the French and Dene texts transition into the rhythmic pattern of the waves, an attempt by Metchewais, perhaps, to translate words into the omniscient language of the land.

In early 2009, Metchewais posted an image of Self-portrait with Peach Brain Tumor to his online blog alongside a text addressing the return of symptoms from his brain tumor. “Now that it’s been confirmed with a brain scan that my brain tumor has changed its shape, I can stop playing games of self-denial. . . . Things move quickly now. My brain surgeon already called this morning to set up a consult this coming Tuesday morning. My main questions are these: Can I decide not to have surgery? And, if I opt out of surgery, what then happens? I noticed that I saw a prism rainbow on the wall and felt a little delight, which leads me to believe that my good spirit is still intact, not to mention my artistic vision.”

In July 2011, Metchewais passed away at his mother’s home in Alberta. The artist gifted his personal collection and archive to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which finalized the accession in 2015. In addition to this legacy, traces of his presence remain online. The photographer and scholar Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie said shortly after the artist’s passing that “Kimowan’s creative spirit did not hesitate about living with death, and it was with a genuine thoughtfulness he has bequeathed his digital presence so that we may consider our own existence.” Metchewais’s final works move between digital, photographic, and earthly spaces, like the hymnal syllabics hovering between celestial and watery realms. In a July 2008 YouTube video diary, “tellytwoface returns from the rez,” Metchewais recounts a recent trip to Cold Lake following his recovery from surgery. He describes in near baptismal terms a full-bodied plunge into its cool waters, dipping his body as a kind of prayer. “To go in the water and come back out, and see that view. That’s good medicine. . . . I’m back and I feel full. I’m really full.”

This essay originally originally appeared in Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer (Aperture, 2023).

Thirty years ago, an old-school, Magnum photographer came for a visit. He showed me a copy of his latest book. It was his first foray into color photography. Up to that point, he had been shooting in black and white professionally for four decades. I immediately noticed that every photograph had something red in it. It was as though he thought that if he loaded his camera with Kodachrome, he had to photograph something red. I also noticed that all of the reds in his pictures were, inexplicably, the exact same shade of red.

Since I began working in color in 1971, I’ve been aware of technical and formal issues with the color red. Red objects sometimes appeared flat, monochromatic, without tonal gradation. They lacked the appearance of three-dimensionality. Without the tonal gradation that we read as dimensionality, they didn’t “sit” in the spatial illusion of an image. In a sense, they floated up to the surface of the picture. The formal issue red presented was that since red attracts attention in a unique way, it can disrupt the structure of the image. A painter can choose the shade of red they want. They can choose not to use the color at all. They can place it where they want on the canvas and in relation to the other colors they have chosen. If a painter were to see a red door and want it to turn black, they would have that option. A photographer wouldn’t. We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us. If Fred Herzog, who made the below left in Vancouver, had instead taken it in Seattle, the Canada Post red mailbox would have been United States Postal Service dark blue.

Fred Herzog, Man with Bandage, 1968
Courtesy Equinox Gallery and the Estate of Fred Herzog

Version of Man with Bandage digitally altered by the author, 2025

Knowing this, whenever possible I avoided red unless it was central to the image, unless it accorded with the image’s structure. Otherwise, it was obvious and problematic.

When William Eggleston was quoted about the difficulty of red, he was discussing his famous picture of the red ceiling.

So, when I looked through the Magnum photographer’s color book, I had for two decades understood the issues red presented. What caught my attention, leafing through the book, was the similarity of the reds. I intuited that this similarity was key to the behavior of the color.

Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

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Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers.

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Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

Photographs by Stephen Shore. By Stephen Shore. Text by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and Lynne Tillman.

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Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary “Uncommon Places” has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape inaugurated a vital photographic tradition. “Uncommon Places: The Complete Works,” published by Aperture in 2005, presented a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added nearly 20 rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a classic series. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore retains precise systems of gestures in composition and light through which a hotel bedroom or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. An essay by critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation with Shore by writer Lynne Tillman examine his methodology and elucidate his roots in Pop and Conceptual art. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shore’s earlier series “American Surfaces” and “Amarillo: Tall in Texas.”

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 208
Number of images: 176
Publication date: 2015-02-24
Measurements: 12.8 x 10.3 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597113038

Contributors

At age fourteen, Stephen Shore had his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At seventeen, Shore was a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, producing an important photographic document of the scene, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-three, he became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz forty years earlier to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has had numerous one-man shows, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. He has received two NEA grants and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. Since 1982 he has been director of the photography program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen was born in 1951 in Witten/ Germany. He works as an art theoretician and director of the art academy Akademie der bildenden KA1/4nste in Vienna/Austria.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fiction includes the novels Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Tillman’s art and literary criticism has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, the Village Voice, The Guardian, Bomb, and The New York Times Book Review. She has written stories for the artists’ books and catalogues of a variety of contemporary artists, including Kiki Smith, Juan Munoz, Jessica Stockholder, Barbara Kruger, Roni Horn, and Vik Muniz. Her most recent story collection, This Is Not It, appeared in 2002. Tillman’s new novel, American Genius, A Comedy, will be published in October by Soft Skull Press.

I had recently attended a workshop on the use of Adobe Photoshop. This was in the days of Photoshop 3 (as I write this, Photoshop is up to version 26). The workshop was taught by Richard Benson, a true master of photomechanical reproduction and a professor at Yale, and an engineer from Adobe, whose business card listed his position as “Digital Evangelist.” In that workshop, I learned about “gamut,” the range of colors that film or a digital sensor can record, and that gamut is always more circumscribed than what our eyes can see.

When a shade of red falls outside the gamut of a particular device, it is typically mapped to the closest reproducible red at the edge of the gamut. This process, known as “clipping,” substitutes the nearest available color, which can lead to distortions in tonal gradation and saturation.

Stephen Shore, Pueblo Bonito, New Mexico, June 1972
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Stephen Shore, Amarillo, Texas, July 1972
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

This clipping effect explains why certain red objects in photographs may appear flat and lack shading or tonal variations. Since the out-of-gamut red is replaced by a single reproducible red, subtle differences in brightness or hue are lost, resulting in a uniform appearance that diminishes three-dimensionality.

In essence, a pie-shaped wedge of different shades of red lying outside a material’s gamut are all assigned the same red at the edge of the gamut. These issues stem from the spectral sensitivities of dyes in color films and design constraints of digital sensors. Color negative film has a larger color space than transparency film; and transparency film, in turn, has a larger color space than digital sensors. The larger the color space, the less clipping.

We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us.

I can use Photoshop to turn Herzog’s red Canadian mailbox dark blue, but I can’t restore the tonal gradation and modeling that was lost to clipping on his original transparency. It will always appear two-dimensional.

While red is the color most vulnerable to clipping, clipping is not unique to it. The blue of skies, for example, experiences clipping. But the rendering of sky is not dependent on three-dimensional modeling.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1971–74
© Eggleston Artistic Trust and courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1971–74
© Eggleston Artistic Trust and courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

Clipping can be clearly seen in two photographs by Bill Eggleston.

Not only are the ketchup bottles and the painted wall rendered the same red, but the lack of gradation and shading makes the bottles appear flat. All the reds run together.

The car door’s embossing in the shade shows gradation of tone, but in the direct sunlight, the reds are clipped. The embossing disappears. The shaded part appears three-dimensional; the sunlit part is flat.

One final example.

In this picture of my wife, Ginger, the red of the shirt lacks the tonal modeling that I see on her skin. To be honest, it was years before I really noticed the problem with the red in this picture. I couldn’t take my eyes off the intensity and intelligence of Ginger’s face. This may be proof that love is blind.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” under the column Notebook.

Yet somehow this triad forms the doctrinal basis for one of the most impactful and controversial sets of rules that body has promulgated in years: its guidance on how and when it will grant copyright registrations for works (including photographs) containing material generated by artificial intelligence. Wherever you might come out on that charged moral and policy question—the Copyright Office, incredibly, received more than ten thousand comments in response to its public inquiry in 2023—surprisingly little has been said of the strange, almost mystical legal precedents that the Copyright Office has relied on to develop its current position. 

At its core, the question is one of authorship, and it is constitutional. The same foundational text that gave us the separation of powers allows Congress to grant intellectual property protection to “authors.” For almost one hundred and fifty years, the Supreme Court has interpreted that weighty term to limit copyright to works that “owe their origin” to the mental conceptions of a person as opposed to the mechanical reproductions of a machine. 

In a leading early case from 1884, the photographer Napoleon Sarony succeeded in asserting copyright in his 1882 portrait of Oscar Wilde—but only because the photograph evidenced Sarony’s “intellectual invention.” Sarony had, according to the court, posed “Wilde in front of the camera, selecting and arranging the costume, draperies, and . . . arranging the subject so as to present graceful outlines, arranging and disposing the light and shade, suggesting and evoking the desired expression.” The court was clear, however, that this was no “ordinary” photograph, which in the usual case (without Sarony’s aesthetic sense behind it) might have remained a purely mechanical process meriting no copyright protection. Copyright, in other words, must come from the photographer and not the camera. 

Despite the many decades that have passed since the obsolescence of the glass-plate negative, the case continues to speak to many of the core issues in the AI copyrightability debate. Is generative AI, like Sarony’s camera, simply a tool in the service of an artist’s skill and vision—a brush or burin for the 2020s—or is it, instead, the creator? 

This leads us to the Copyright Office’s current legal test, shaped in no small part by Sarony’s precedent. When an applicant seeks to register a work containing some AI-generated material, the applicant must disclose which aspects were contributed by humans and which were not. The examiner will then decide whether the work is “basically one of human authorship, with the computer . . . merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work . . . were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.’’ If the former, the Copyright Office will grant a copyright; if the latter, the work will be in the public domain for anyone to copy for any purpose. 

When we call AI a black box, how different is that really from assigning agency to a spirit or the occult?

Sarony’s case is not the only precedent shaping this test. And that is where things start to get stranger. In justifying its current rules, the Copyright Office has also repeatedly pointed to a series of twentieth-century precedents involving claims over works created neither by man nor machine but by divine spirits. The leading citation here is Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, an enigmatic case from the 1990s in which both the copyright claimant and the defendant agreed that The Urantia Book—a two-thousand-page religious text that emerged in the early twentieth century—had been written by “non-human spiritual beings” including “the Divine Counselor, the Chief of the Corps of Superuniverse Personalities, and the Chief of the Archangels of Nebadon.” Despite this spiritual baggage, the court recognized a valid copyright. While the teachings may have been divine, the court observed, a group of human interlocutors prompted the spirits to reveal those lessons and arranged the answers in a minimally creative way. 

The Urantia court opinion pointed to a contrary holding from the 1940s in which the copyright claimant characterized himself as merely the amanuensis to whom a text was dictated by “Phylos, the Thibetan, a spirit.” That copyright assertion, unlike the one in Urantia, was rejected because the human scribe had claimed protection in the divine revelations themselves as opposed to any human arrangement of them. You can prompt the cosmos and remain a copyright author, it would seem, but straight transcription damns the work for all eternity.

Better known than Urantia, but equally esoteric in its facts, is Naruto v. Slater, a litigation literally brought by a seven-year-old crested macaque against the wildlife photographer David Slater. Naruto the monkey, who had taken a few selfies with a camera left around by Slater, naturally took umbrage at seeing copies of his work reproduced without permission and saw fit (with a little help from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to sue Slater for copyright infringement. Suffice it to say, the monkey’s case was thrown out of federal court because copyright infringement remains a claim viable only to humans.

To be clear, these are not incidental, one-off citations by the Copyright Office. The government relied on Urantian revelations to support its position on AI-generated content in, for instance, its official statement of policy in its formal federal regulations, every one of its four published registration decisions in the AI section of its website, its official compendium of registration practices, its recent extended report on Copyright and AI, and its extensive appellate briefing on the leading case in this area, Thaler v. Perlmutter.

At this point, you may be wondering how exactly the Copyright Office is applying these extraordinary precedents to everyday copyright claims in the AI space. Take as an example the recent attempt by Ankit Sahni to register SURYAST (ca. 2021), a work that was essentially a mash-up of a source photograph taken by Sahni of a sunset with Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889). Sahni inputted into an AI-powered tool known as RAGHAV a base image (his original sunset photograph), a style image (The Starry Night, which is in the public domain), and a value to determine the strength of the style transfer for the tool to use. RAGHAV then generated the final work without, we are told, further modification or input from Sahni.

The Copyright Office rejected the application. Despite the fact that the source photograph was taken by Sahni (and likely copyrightable on its own), it concluded that “the RAGHAV app, not Mr. Sahni, was responsible for determining how to interpolate the base and style images in accordance with the style transfer value. The fact that the Work contains sunset, clouds, and a building are the result of using an AI tool.” On what legal authority? It turned, naturally, to our cases on Oscar Wilde, the chief of the archangels of Nebadon, and a crested macaque.

What should we make of the fact that in setting critical policies for a truly paradigm-shifting technology, the Copyright Office is comparing generative artificial intelligence to a nineteenth-century albumen-silver print, revelatory channeling, and monkey selfies? Analogic legal reasoning, the core process by which common law develops through the selection and analysis of like precedents, inevitably involves some leaps. The rules governing digital music distribution were derived from cases on flea markets, the Sony Betamax, and the player piano before that. 

We will naturally see this methodology at work soon as US courts start deciding the so-called ingestion photography cases (the negative, if you will, of the copyright registration authorship debate described above). Take, for instance, the photographer Jingna Zhang’s 2024 suit against Google, now consolidated into an even larger litigation, accusing the company of directly copying her photographs, without permission, for use in training Google’s Imagen text-to-image diffusion model. Or look to the recently refiled version of the case Getty Images v. Stability AI, in which Getty has accused Stability AI of not only copying twelve million Getty images to train its original Stable Diffusion model but allowing for the regeneration (in a somewhat grotesque form) of modified versions of those images as outputs. 

Barring any settlement, both claims are likely to hinge on the fair use defense, with key precedents ranging from Lynn Goldsmith’s victory over the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 2023 to Google’s own successful assertion of fair use in defense of its Google Books initiative ten years ago. As we have seen in a handful of issued opinions this summer in AI cases involving the ingestion of books, these suits might turn on a simple choice between two metaphors: Is ingesting countless copyright-protected photographs into a dataset, and using that set to train Imagen or Stable Diffusion, more like the Warhol Foundation’s commercialization of unlicensed derivative illustrations to compete in the same market as Goldsmith’s original artist reference photograph (not fair use), or more like the volume scanning of every book ever to create a searchable corpus of the world’s literature (fair use)? 

Still, there needs to be a core logic to any legal metaphor, particularly when the stakes are as high as they are: a technology poised to overtake so much creation. We can intuit why a court in these ingestion cases might compare the training of text-to-image AI software to either using a photograph without permission to create competing works or to the digitization of millions of books. 

But the Copyright Office precedents on copyright authorship look to far more distant realms. Although the otherwise staid body would certainly deny it, there is something bordering on mystical in the government’s position. By relying on supernatural precedents, it is inherently assigning a spiritual ineffability to the AI-generative process. It is effectively stating that when photographers upload a source image to a generative AI program such as Midjourney, they are closer to animal or medium than artist. 

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Not that this mysticism is necessarily unfounded. Almost every thoughtful account of generative artificial intelligence concedes, at a certain point, that its own developers really cannot explain or account for any given output from the tool. When we call AI a black box, how different is that really from assigning agency to a spirit or the occult? Aren’t we effectively attributing authorship to the ghost in the machine either way? The human is merely prompting the unknown in both cases, in every sense of that verb. 

Andrew Ventimiglia, the author of an exemplary study of the Urantia cases, pushes the analogy even further, arguing that such precedents show how the physical objects of intellectual property—the hard-copy Urantia Book or Naruto’s, Sarony’s, or Sahni’s photographs—themselves “assert a kind of ghostly ontology.” That is, they are imbued by virtue of their litigation histories with the aura and spirit of law and the almost supernatural threat of copyright enforcement should one reproduce them. 

However compelling these metaphysical analogies, though, copyright policy has real consequences on the ground. Whether and how we grant century-long monopolies in content has tangible stakes for countless people (including the many photographers reading this) and entire industries. It seems borderline absurd that we would build such monumental AI policy choices on a foundation of arcane precedents adjudicating the copyrightability of the aesthetics of Victorian photography, divine revelations, and the standing of monkeys. 

I don’t mean to suggest that the Copyright Office has acted improperly here. That body is not empowered simply to create new rules out of whole cloth. It can only weave together the collection of opinions it has been handed by the federal courts, however crazy a quilt might result. 

What this instead reveals is another limitation of the slow, rear-facing, and too-often nonrational development of our copyright doctrine. Confronted with a groundbreaking technology our copyright administrators are left divining old, mystic texts rather than asking straightforwardly what the best rule would be to incentivize some desirable outcome. 

All that said, it remains fair to request, at the very least, that the Copyright Office shape its guidance on generative AI with a view more toward this world than the next.

A version of this article originally appeared in Aperture No. 257 “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI.”

Taken mostly between the late 1940s and 1960s, Keïta’s portraits are master classes in texture and composition. His studio—located on land his father gave him behind a prison in the Malian capital city of Bamako—welcomed a diverse range of visitors after its 1948 opening, from government officials, traders, and intellectuals to artists and everyday members of Mali’s rising middle class. Some went to the studio for professional pictures; others went to record their growing status and personal achievements in ways that could be hung on the walls of their homes, stored in family albums, or given away as gifts. Much like the highlife music that would soon become the rage across West Africa—a genre blending traditional African elements with Western influences, creating the aspirational soundtrack to African independence—Keïta captured not just the aesthetics of an era but the ambitions of a people. His process was meticulous. Known for his patient, precise use of a large-format camera, he favored natural over artificial light. His signature use of shallow depth of field ensured that attention remained on his subjects and their attire, creating an intimacy that distinguished his work from more conventional studio photography of the time.

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1953–57

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1952–55

Moreover, as the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor—one of Keïta’s foremost champions and exegetes—has noted, the photographer conceived of his studio as a porous site, forgoing the late-Victorian device of painted, idealized backdrops for quotidian, ever-changing textiles that allowed him the flexibility to make work in various settings. “Any space could become a studio for Keïta,” Enwezor wrote in 2010.

Born in Bamako in 1921, Keïta began his journey with photography in 1935 at the age of fourteen when his uncle gave him a Kodak camera. He would eventually work with Mountaga Dembélé, a former schoolteacher who shifted careers to become one of Mali’s first professional photographers. At one point, Dembélé entrusted all his photographs to Keïta, prompting some scholars to question the distinction between their images, though others contend that the difference is immediately evident to anyone who looks closely: Keïta’s portraits employ a more deliberate construction, whereas Dembélé’s feel spontaneous and raw. In any case, both men are rightly venerated in Mali—and beyond—as the country’s photographic pioneers.

Today, Bamako’s long roads weave between colonial-era buildings and new developments. The city is situated along the banks of the Niger River, where its pirogue boats, carved from single tree trunks, drift past colorful markets, echoing its past as a vital crossroads along ancient trade routes linking West Africa to North Africa and farther regions. Bamako was once a key city in the ancient Mali Empire, which flourished across West Africa from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, its heart being the legendary Timbuktu. Posterity remembers the empire’s ruler Mansa Musa I as arguably the richest person in history (with a net worth of around $400 billion when adjusted for inflation), thanks to Mali’s vast gold and salt reserves, and for his legendary pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, during which his lavish distribution of gold caused inflation in Egypt.

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1953–57

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1952–55

Now a nation, Mali remains a creative hub where tradition merges with contemporary global influences. Its musicians are internationally renowned, ranging from the soulful sounds of icons such as Salif Keita and Oumou Sangaré, to the African blues of Ali Farka Touré and Tinariwen, to the Afropop fusion of the likes of Fatoumata Diawara. Bamako is Mali’s capital and one of Africa’s largest, most populous cities. Since 1994, thousands of photographers, filmmakers, and art enthusiasts have gathered there for Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, widely known as the Bamako Biennale, Africa’s first and largest photography event, consisting of a large program of exhibitions, talks, and meetings.

In the middle of the twentieth century, however, Bamako was in a state of acute sociopolitical upheaval, its people watching while the might of France fell at their feet. The city bore the weight of colonial exploitation from the late nineteenth century until Mali wrested freedom back in 1960. Even as France urged its colonial subjects to prioritize European fashion over their own, the people of Mali simply integrated it into their existing styles. While European fabrics, including damask and wax prints, now synonymous with African fashion, became symbols of cosmopolitanism, traditional mud cloth (bògòlanfini), indigo dyeing, and intricate embroidery remained embedded in the social and spiritual fabric of the region, forming the foundation of its material culture. Such textiles appear throughout Keïta’s photographs, connecting his sitters to both tradition and global influences. Retaining a connection to the former was an important act as the colonial project attempted to supress everything culturally African that it could not extract and plunder.

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Although he is now celebrated as one of the most accomplished photographers of the twentieth century, Keïta remained largely unknown in the West until the early 1990s, when some of his photographs (uncredited at the time) that were shown at an exhibition in New York came to the attention of the French curator André Magnin. This set in motion a mission to Mali to find Keïta and introduce his extraordinary portraiture—consisting of thousands of images—to a global audience. Others, including the photographers Bernard Descamps and Françoise Huguier, who presented his work at Les Rencontres d’Arles and at the Bamako Biennale, would also help introduce the work to new audiences.

This success has not, however, come without controversy. Some have questioned the commercialization of Keïta’s portraits, and the way their deep cultural ties to Mali are often diminished when framed for the Western art market, a debate that, in turn, connects to broader issues of appropriation and exploitation of African art within global networks. In Keïta’s case, his prints were upsized, from their original, modest dimensions of 5-by-7 inches, for the contemporary market and an imagined clientele purchasing art at blue-chip galleries like Gagosian and Sean Kelly. An illuminating 2006 article in the New York Times by Michael Rips outlined the multipronged, dramatic saga and litigious debates around the authenticity of some editions produced after Keïta’s death.

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1954–57

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1958

This fall, the Brooklyn Museum, in New York, will hold an exhibition that represents an opportunity to once again assess Keïta’s contributions. The show aims to situate Keïta’s genius within its cultural and historical context, and to highlight his family’s role in preserving his legacy. Catherine McKinley, author of The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women (2021), is curating the exhibition. When I spoke with her last winter, she explained that it will allow visitors to immerse themselves in Keïta’s world. His photographs will be displayed alongside textiles and ephemera loaned from the archives of numerous contemporary Malian and Senegalese scholars, collectors, and designers. Highlights include an intricately hand-stitched indigo camisole from 1902 and a women’s pagne (wrapper) from the Musée de la Femme Henriette-Bathily in Dakar that almost perfectly replicates one seen in his pictures.

Unsurprisingly, his work, with its precision and exquisite clarity, has drawn comparisons to August Sander’s portraits made in Germany in the early twentieth century. Keïta’s photography is likewise rooted in the culture and currents of its time. “Keïta crafted a distinctive modernist photographic language anchored in the Malian arts of textile,” Giulia Paoletti, associate professor of African art at the University of Virginia, told me. The cultural and economic forces shaping Keïta’s work were deeply diverse and intertwined. Jennifer Bajorek, an associate professor specializing in literature, art, and visual studies in contemporary Africa at Hampshire College, added that “his photographs bear witness to longstanding histories of trade, trade routes, and zones of cultural and economic exchange. They reveal and carry counter-colonial geographies. This is part of their extraordinary legacy.”

Keïta’s images offer windows into a world where individuals claim space within a rapidly shifting society.

Bajorek is critical of earlier scholars’ preoccupation with whether the textiles in Keïta’s photographs were African or European, given the many cultural currents these objects embody. By way of example, she points to the sanu koloni gold choker worn by many women who went to Keïta’s studio. Its name—meaning “colony gold” in Bambara, a language spoken across Mali—acknowledges its colonial ties. Yet its cruciform shape and five raised points reflect Maure and Amazigh designs, with jewelry historians tracing its craftsmanship and aesthetics to Jewish goldsmiths from the Maghreb, whose techniques and motifs influenced adornment traditions across the region. Bajorek noted that items such as sanu koloni and koso walan—a dark-blue-and-white checkered strip-woven blanket often seen as a backdrop or mat in Keïta’s pictures—possess both colonial history and cross-cultural influences. “A community’s relationships to indigo and indigo-dyed textiles, the protective properties of the number five, the influence of Islam, ideas of Blackness associated with gold, the spiritual as well as material legacies of a millennium of Saharan crossings—all of this is there and, in its way, visible or traced in the photographs made by Keïta in his Bamako studio,” Bajorek said.

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1952–55

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1952–55

More recent history and events have hampered ongoing studies and engagement with Keïta’s pictures and legacy. In the spring of 2024, McKinley traveled to Mali to meet with the Keïta family as part of her research. But with the ongoing conflict in Mali—which began in 2012, when northern insurgents sought independence—she extended her search beyond the country’s borders, delving into archives and collections within the large Malian communities of Dakar and Saint-Louis in neighboring Senegal to gather the pieces that will help bring Keïta’s work to life in the upcoming exhibition.

With its stronger colonial ties and more urbanized infrastructure, Senegal’s long tradition of studio photography dates as far back as 1859. In contrast, Mali’s first studio was established by the Frenchman Pierre Garnier in 1935. Garnier trained several of Mali’s earliest photographers, including Dembélé, but it would take another decade before they would start producing their own studio photographs, opening the door for others, such as the legendary Malick Sidibé, who looked up to Keïta and called him “the Elder.” Keïta’s formal studio portraits not only capture the elegance and aspirations of post-colonial Mali, but also reflect the growing desire for independence, eventually achieved in 1960. In contrast, Sidibé’s candid nightlife photography, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, conveys the energy and popular culture of a nation embracing its newfound freedom. Together, they paint a dynamic portrait of a country in flux.

Mali’s relatively late start in photography turned out to be a blessing, allowing its photographic culture to develop with greater freedom from the colonial conventions that defined Senegal’s numerous, more formal studios. Keïta was arguably the first Malian photographer to fully embrace this freedom. So formidable was his craft and reputation that in 1962 he was appointed Mali’s official state photographer. The arc of his career was punctuated by the progression of Mali’s history, all the way from how his portraiture mirrored the high cosmopolitan hopes that followed the country’s independence, to the military junta that pushed him into retirement in 1977 at the age of fifty-six. At this point, Keïta started pursuing his second passion: auto mechanics. Moving from photography to working on cars may sound like quite a switch, but it had been a passion of Keïta’s before his uncle put the Kodak in his teenage hands. It afforded him a more sedate life, away from the politics of the time. Having been originally trained in the family business of carpentry and furniture making, Keïta had always been a man of his hands. McKinley sees a kind of consistency here: “He was a real technical guy. He liked to tinker and learn and take things apart completely and reconstruct them. That was kind of his nature. He did it with cars, he did it with cameras and everything.”

Keïta died in Paris (where he had traveled for medical attention) in 2001 at the age of eighty. Today, the Bamako property his father gave him can still be found with his family’s name hanging from its tall wrought-iron gate. His legacy within Mali remains strong, with his prints found in places such as the Musée National du Mali, which showcases the country’s cultural heritage and history through an exceptional collection of traditional and contemporary art, including sculptures, textiles, historical artifacts, and photography by the likes of Keïta, Sidibé, and others. “Keïta is widely revered in Mali today,” said Antawan I. Byrd, a photography curator at the Art Institute of Chicago who has worked in Mali. “And his legacy is affirmed through symbolic gestures such as the Grand Prix Seydou Keïta Award, the top prize given at the Bamako Encounters Biennial of African Photography. Yet, despite the international visibility and acclaim his photography has rightfully achieved, Keïta remains, in many ways, a mythologized figure. There is still much to explore and critically examine about his practice.”

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, ca. 1954–60

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1949
All photographs © SKPEAC/the estate of Seydou Keïta and courtesy The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection

This mythologization stems in part from how Keïta’s work has been understood within global art circles as a singular, almost omniscient eye of post-colonial Mali, widely celebrated yet often removed from the complexities of his working conditions, the commercial nature of his practice, and the broader photographic landscape of Bamako at the time. As a studio photographer, Keïta primarily responded to the needs of his clients, creating portraits that reflected their aspirations in a season of change. Unlike many modernist photographers in the West, he did not fetishize authorial control, and likely considered himself both a craftsman and an artist. While shaping images to meet demand, he was acutely aware of the times in which he lived but may not have consciously curated the legacy he has left behind. Over time, Keïta’s work has been imbued with layers of meaning—revered as both documentary and art—even while it is sometimes unmoored from its original context, a recurring problem in the circulation of African photographic archives.

Keïta’s images offer windows into a world where individuals claim space within a rapidly shifting society. They are living archives, constantly being reinterpreted through contemporary perspectives. They show the enduring power of photography to capture more than mere aesthetic. In contrast to the colonial photography that came before Keïta, which presented the African as mere object, his subjects gaze directly into the camera and claim their place in history on their own terms. Yet his work endures as not only a quiet defiance of colonial narratives but a testament to his mastery. His images do more than resist; they honor, elevating each subject with a care so profound that their presence, etched by Keïta into history using shadow and light, feels both intimate and monumental.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads.”