The exhibition Casa Susanna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario and Les Rencontres d’Arles, showcases this image alongside some 160 other works made by and for a community of cross-dressers in New York and beyond throughout the 1960s. (While many of these folks identified as “transvestites,” the exhibition’s curators use the term cross-dressers, and this text follows suit. All identifying pronouns are used per the curators’ direction.) This community had a series of hubs. The first was a wig shop on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, run by Marie Tornell. One day in the mid-1950s, Humberto (Tito) Arriagada, who had moved to New York after serving in the United States’ Foreign Information Service during World War II, walked into the shop. It was love at first sight between Arriagada and Tornell—and love at second sight when Tornell met Susanna Valenti, the person Tito had been cross-dressing as since teenage years. The pair transformed Tornell’s shop into a dear, clandestine resource for cross-dressers at a time when New York’s so-called masquerade laws still criminalized wearing clothes associated with the “opposite” gender. 

Once this close-knit underground community had the looks, it needed somewhere to show them off. Tornell and Arriagada—now free to be Susanna Valenti more regularly—made their apartment a safe space. In a photograph of “Susanna standing by the mirror in her New York City apartment” (1960–63), the home is a charming hall of mirrors. At the forefront, Valenti poses seductively in a lavender-pink dress not far from the shade of the painted walls, her eyes burning with confidence through the chromogenic print. Behind her, her reflection shows off the elegant cut of her lavender dress; farther back still, another woman stands in front of another mirror, bent over some distant domestic task as a lamp gently illuminates the back of her neck. That lamp, too, is reflected, forming a pair that frames the woman’s dark hair. These photographs are charged. They are proof that their subjects could live as they wanted, happily. They electrify the viewer. They urge the viewer to take charge of their own lives.

The exhibition design groups photographs of women engaged in similar pursuits—posing in front of televisions, for example, or for Christmas cards complete with girly, curliecue well-wishes in ink. The subjects assert their identities through action. They are women because they look and act like women. Femininity is an achievement, and these photographs advertise the spoils. In these images, “wish I was her” becomes “wish you were here.”

Arriagada and Tornell certainly took charge of their own lives. In 1960, they began transforming a humble cluster of bungalows and a barn in the Catskill Mountains into Chevalier d’Éon—named for the eighteenth-century cross-dressing French spy Chevalière d’Éon—and invited their community to visit and stay. A photograph of “Susanna and Felicity in the kitchen, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY” (1960–63) shows two women thrilled to be in their element, the former camping it up with her leg on a stool while the latter, cross-legged, laughs and cuts her food as if at dinner theater. Like “Lili on the diving board, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY” (1966), taken at the second resort Arriagada and Tornell set up in 1964, these are holiday snapshots. They’re proto-selfies. But they’re also performances: moments of people willing themselves into the kind of person and life they desire. 

Casa Susanna surrounds these photographs with others taken in their friend Gail’s Greenwich Village apartment, along with copies of the groundbreaking Transvestia magazine, founded in 1960 by Virginia Prince to connect and celebrate cross-dressers across the country. Arriagada starred as Susanna herself for its December 1961 cover. The ephemera, alongside the photographs, help shape our contemporary understanding of transgender identity. Some of these individuals later took further steps towards living as women—medically and legally. Whether or not all the people in these images fit our current categories, the community they built offered the chance to experiment and escape the narrow confines of gender before the modern gay rights movement exploded.

Moreover, the exhibition emphasizes how Transvestia and its photographers seized the means of production: Before the DIY freedom of the Polaroid arrived, they must have had to find sympathetic photo-lab workers to develop their chromogenic and gelatin-silver prints. They certainly kept these photographs safe. Although countless images have been lost, much of this show draws from a cache discovered at a Manhattan flea market in 2004. The pictures are in such exemplary condition that there’s no doubt they were held dear, and perhaps close to the vest. This exhibition is proof not only that people have always refused the despicable gender laws now resurfacing in this country, but also that remaking the world in your own image is possible, vital, and a hell of a lot of fun. 

Casa Susanna is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through January 25, 2026.

The exhibition Tokyo Underground 1960–1970s: A Turning Point in Postwar Japanese Culture, recently staged at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, explored this movement through its ephemera: movie posters, flyers, magazines, books, festival programs, admission tickets, brochures, handwritten correspondence, vinyl records, and archival photographs. Cocurator Kei Osawa, a research fellow at the University Museum, University of Tokyo, drew the materials from his personal collection, amassed over some twenty years. “When I started, postwar ephemera went unnoticed and I became interested in printed materials that weren’t collected by libraries or art museums,” he said.

The printed matter, organized in glass displays and wall-mounts snaking around a gallery with black walls and high ceilings, was augmented with detailed chronologies covering momentous years of social turmoil: the start of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution; the Beatles’ Japan tour; the arrival of a US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at Sasebo port amid fierce opposition; protests at the University of Tokyo; the Apollo 11 moon landing; the first women’s liberation demonstration; the restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and China.

Films catalyzed the Tokyo scene at this time. On June 29, 1966, filmmaker Kenji Kanesaka organized “Underground Cinema,” a screening of experimental work from the United States. The venue was the Sogetsu Art Center, the epicenter of experimental art in Tokyo, where Yoko Ono had first performed her legendary “Cut Piece,” in 1964. From there, countercultural ideas rapidly spread across music, art, manga, theater, butoh dance, and film.

The Mori exhibition revealed Tokyo’s underground to be both interdisciplinary and international. “We don’t feature photography as a discrete field,” Osawa noted. “Photography, like graphic design, was a medium that permeated every area.” At a time when avant-garde art was increasingly non-object based, performative, and politically charged, printed matter served as a tool of transmission.

The bustling nightlife district of Shinjuku was the primary stage for this cultural ferment. As a major city center within the megapolis—a place where many train lines converge—Shinjuku is a diverse, transitory space. During this period, its plazas, cafes, stores, and event venues held impromptu gatherings and theatrical performances. The independent production company Art Theater Guild, for example, converted the basement of their cinema in Shinjuku into the Scorpio Theatre, and the underground movement coalesced around this screening venue and gathering spot. Its importance was evident in Tokyo Underground, where two dozen framed posters of films and theater plays covered a far wall, floor to ceiling. The posters’ screen-printed designs, several on metallic paper, presented a range of eerily fresh typography and graphic styles.  

The exhibition also documented the era’s anti-establishment protests, including opposition to the Vietnam War and the Osaka World Exposition, in 1970. A long, horizontal poster commemorated the “Anti-Expo Black Festival,” in 1969, organized by the performance troupe Zero Dimension. The image shows a tangle of naked bodies evocative of Dante’s Inferno. Activists viewed the Expo as an attempt to smooth over the imminent renewal of ANPO, a controversial security agreement with the United States that allowed for an indefinite American military presence on Japanese soil.

The West Exit Plaza of Shinjuku Station was a key gathering spot for young people, artists, entertainers, and activists. In an attempt to reclaim public space and quell spontaneous gatherings (often protests), the government officially rezoned the area to prevent people from assembling. In 1968–69, protests in the city, as well as in other parts of the country, were relatively common. Japan’s largest university, Tokyo University, was often a veritable battlefield with students pitted against riot police. By the mid-1970s, however, the protest movement waned and the country entered a new phase of economic development. The underground effectively disappeared. Former participants dispersed—some pursuing spiritual paths, others adapting to new cultural currents or entering the mainstream arts.

The exhibition effectively preserved and revived this history through its material record. “What digital images lack, beyond texture, is a sense of scale,” Osawa said. Indeed, the physicality of the objects in Tokyo Underground reflected the politically charged atmosphere of these years and how those ideas were communicated. Considering the ephemera today, one becomes aware of a shift in how cultural movements form and spread, prompting questions of where—in our current era of surveillance capitalism and platform-modulated expression—are today’s spaces that resist regulation and homogenization?

Tokyo Underground 1960–1970s: A Turning Point in Postwar Japanese Culture was on view at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, from February 13 to June 8, 2025.

For Resistance, Steve McQueen, an artist who is best known internationally for his films Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), brought together photographs spanning one hundred years. Works started from the year 1903, which heralded the Suffrage movement for women’s rights, and ended in 2003 with protests of the war in Iraq. The exhibition and its accompanying book explore the ways that British people have “challenged the status quo.” Respected social-documentary photographers were featured, including David Hurn, a Magnum photographer known for his reportage across the United Kingdom in the 1960s; Janine Wiedel, who documented life in the industrial county of West Midlands during the same period; Vanley Burke, who captured the social awakening of Black Britons in Birmingham; and Tish Murtha, celebrated for her powerful depictions of working class life in North East England during the late 1970s and early 1980s. McQueen also leaned on the knowledge of a research group helmed by Paul Gilroy and Stella Dadzie to bring anonymous works and lesser-known events to the forefront, such as the National League of the Blind’s 1920 march—“a pivotal moment in the fight for disability rights” according to the show’s organizers—and the hunger marches of the 1930s, protests against poverty and high unemployment.

But why did the exhibition stop in 2003? This is the year the writer Mark Fisher identifies as the end of the future—the point when neoliberal capitalism fully triumphed, ushering in what he calls “capitalist realism” and resulting in cultural stagnation. Smartphone footage of the 2011 London riots, Just Stop Oil demonstrations, internet-powered movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter—all missing from the galleries. In their absence, the exhibition lost the opportunity to connect modes of resistance in the old world and attempts at resistance in the new, when it feels like there are no viable alternatives emerging.

That’s not to say the iconic moments in Resistance don’t need to be seen again and again. These include Syd Shelton documenting pop culture powerfully kicking back against the rise of the far right in Britain at the 1978 Rock Against Racism carnival, and Christine Spengler’s striking portrait of a young girl in Belfast at an IRA funeral procession. As Gilroy reminds us in the accompanying publication, “Unequal access to historical knowledge combines with growing political illiteracy and disengagement. Together, they promote a weakening of imagination that incubates the loss of hope.” Yet, instead of stirring the imagination, Resistance offered mostly familiar tropes of the past.

There seems to be a certain nostalgia for monochrome in political photography, perhaps stretching back to Robert Capa’s famous photographs of the D-Day landings and further entrenched by the iconic images of the struggle for Civil Rights. Of the hundreds of images included in the exhibition, it is astonishing that not a single photograph appeared in color. The fastest film stock for photographers in the revolutionary postwar period was black and white, but the curatorial selection implied that every ensuing struggle after looked the same. This approach to all subsequent political events—which frames the previous century as spilling into this one—risks aestheticizing and antiquating political struggle. Even the show’s typeface called to mind postwar propaganda posters and 1960s espionage movies. If a documentary is made of Resistance, I could predict the soundtrack: The Specials, followed by the Clash, and maybe some Bob Marley, accompanied by Ken Burns–style zooms into the photographs.

For an exhibition that claimed to be timely—and indeed, resistance is as urgent as ever in this era of neoliberal algorithms, resurgent fascism, and growing inequality—there was an odd lack of urgency in its presentation. I’d worried that a show about the fight for justice would seem out of place in a gallery setting, and in the end the show seemed all too comfortable in its surroundings. I saw little correlation between people’s lives today and the historic modes of resistance being represented. There was no attempt to reconcile the familiar aesthetics of protests of the past with the contemporary moment: it was London-centric and “back then,” with not much speaking to what Linton Kwesi Johnson once called “the Lumpen elements”—everyday people who are uninterested in revolutionary politics.

The lack of an imaginative bridge between old and new forms of resistance left the exhibition feeling incomplete. What it needed was curatorial connective tissue to address our current moment, in which dissent feels increasingly ill-equipped to tackle powerful lobbyists with endless money and coercive tech at their disposal. It is striking, too, that there weren’t any curatorial interventions that might have activated these historical moments—the images were hung in the classic white-cube-gallery format, one after the other, horizontally, in simple black frames. How might young women dealing with online misogyny spearheaded by the likes of Andrew Tate draw strength from this show? Or the tired-looking men standing outside McDonald’s with large, boxy Just Eat and Deliveroo backpacks, waiting for their smartphones to tell them what the next order is? Or the working class men and women of Margate I saw populating the area around the Turner Contemporary? Resistance clings to older, more familiar methods of resistance set against older, more familiar forms oppression.

Such pictorial disjunction between past depictions and current problems in a neoliberal age is something the French writer and publisher François Maspero noticed in the late ’80s, as he traveled the Parisian banlieue with the photographer Anaïk Frantz to produce their masterpiece Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990). In the book, Maspero writes: “The squalor is disappearing and unemployment is rising. Each generation has its own forms of poverty which maybe only the next generation will know how to comprehend . . . poverty for outside exhibition from the golden age of the picturesque (thank you Robert Doisneau) . . . is now only the fate of dropouts, tramps and drifters . . . but how do you photograph all the poverty behind the smooth walls, the silent walls of depression and fear, of all the strains of everyday life, of so much loneliness?” The same could be said of modes of resistance. We live in a moment of unprecedented flux, with such existential crises as artificial intelligence, climate change, and a new, even darker form of capitalism the French economist Arnaud Orain has called “the capitalism of finitude.” Photographs of outraged crowds are no longer enough.

Even viewed in its own political context, Resistance is a limiting prism. Much was omitted. Early-2000s grime music, which took the crumbs of socioeconomic ruin and created a twenty-first-century version of punk, was vernacular testimony against the gross inequalities of East London. What about early-web hacker culture that fought against the corporatization of the internet, or the tireless work of Doreen Lawrence—mother of Stephen Lawrence, a young Black British man murdered by white youths in a racist attack in 1993—which culminated in a stronger awareness of institutional racism and amplified questions about policing nationwide? Photographs of these moments exist, and they are within the show’s curatorial parameters; they would have offered something other than black-and-white photographs of protest.

A show about resistance could have leapt off the wall, played with high and low culture, and challenged received notions of good taste. As Elaine Brown, the one-time chairwoman of the Black Panther Party, once quipped about the men in the organization, “We didn’t get these brothers from revolutionary heaven.” What was missing in Resistance was naughtiness: the playfulness, subaltern creativity, and energies that refused to bow to the status quo and middle-class etiquette. This was all flattened in the Turner show, and as I wandered through it, I thought of two exhibitions at London’s Somerset House that trod similar terrain—The Horror Show! (2022–23) and Get Up, Stand Up Now (2019), curated by Zak Ové.

Both exhibitions contained ingredients similar to those in Resistance but mashed them up into something new and exciting. The Horror Show! used the figures of the monster, the ghost, and the witch—respectively assigned to the social unrest of the ’70s and ’80s, the haunted ’90s and ’00s (which gave birth to the internet era), and the 2010s (the post-financial crisis years of austerity)—to tell an alternative history of the past five decades in Britain. You came out shocked, disoriented, and charged up. Get Up, Stand Up Now showed resistance in full color, with Afrofuturist sculptures and exuberant footage of the Notting Hill Carnival. Ové described the exhibition as a “place beyond boundaries where we can dare to dream without being limited.” The show was a training ground: It armed its viewers with counterintuitive tricks and cultural technologies that might be applied now. Resistance, by comparison, felt like an echo, an exhibition stuck in the past, looking back at a struggle that has already been lost. Instead of leaving the exhibition buoyed by the energy of resistance, I left with the weight of what felt more like an elegy for it.

Resistance was on view at Turner Contemporary February 22, 2025, to June 1, 2025.

Born in Chicago in 1957, Hemphill moved with his family to Anacostia, a segregated neighborhood in Southeast Washington, DC, in the 1970s. He was awakened spiritually and erotically by the closeted Harlem Renaissance literature of Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Richard Bruce Nugent, and emboldened by the clarity and poise of public intellectuals such as James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. These figures served as guiding lights over the corporeal realities of poverty, racial and gendered violence (by state or kin), and the crack and AIDS epidemics. “I live in a town / where pretense and bone structure / prevail as credentials of status and beauty / . . . where everyone is afraid of the dark,” Hemphill writes in “Family Jewels” (1992). Cabs speed past him, refusing service. Meanwhile, “My mother’s flowers are wilting / . . . Our dinner is cold / by now.” In taking up poetry and performance, Hemphill found a path to dignity and self-liberation.

Fashioning an alternative to the American dream deferred was by no means a solitary endeavor. In DC, Hemphill was part of a vibrant literary, performing and visual arts scene. He founded the Nethula Journal, a platform for young writers of color, with Kathy Anderson and Cynthia Lou Williams. With his friends Wayson Jones and Larry Duckette, he formed the spoken word group Cinque. His early work appeared in Joseph Beam’s revolutionary In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986), the first of its kind to center Black gay, lesbian, and trans perspectives. When Beam died of AIDS in 1988, Hemphill published the follow-up Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991). For a constellation of underground communities along the East and West Coasts, this period in the ’80s through early ’90s was a veritable Black Gay Renaissance, more creatively free, more academic and brazenly political, more unapologetically Black, queer, and sexual than the movements that came before.

Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings, a group exhibition curated by Camille Brown at the Phillips Collection, in Washington, DC, commemorates the bygone era in which the poet thrived, and celebrates the dream that he kept alive for the next generation. Brown gathers multimedia works by friends and creative partners, and those of younger artists whose practices engage with Hemphill’s writing. In a town of memorials set in stone, the show pulsates with optimism and collective life. It is dedicated to someone who was of these streets and who, hard as the powers that be may have tried, refused to be rendered a ghost or statistic, and did what he could to save others from that fate.

Hemphill’s poems have been collected in a new volume by Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene, Love Is a Dangerous Word (2025). To read them—a selection is projected in the main gallery over a cabinet of self-published chapbooks and performance programs—is to become entangled in a bed of blood, sweat, tears, spit, and spunk. That is, to be swept off your feet by unrelenting waves of desire, rage, sorrow, and, despite everything, tenderness. Much as the speaker is looking for love in back rooms, underground clubs, and public parks, he is cruising time itself for redemption in the past or hope for the future. He is discursive, provocative, witty, and lyrical, Mercutio playing jester to the hypocrisy of the American enterprise. In “American Wedding” (1986), Hemphill delivers his vow: 

I place my ring
on your cock
where it belongs.
No horsemen
bearing terror,
no soldiers of doom
will swoop in and sweep us apart.
They’re too busy
looting the land
to watch us.

Across the way in the gallery, among a set of haunting black-and-white photographs, is Living Monuments (1980s), by Sharon Farmer, which Hemphill paired with “American Wedding” in “Dear Muthafucking Dreams,” his landmark interdisciplinary and collaborative “unrhymed poetry concert,” performed most prominently at Franklin Furnace, in New York, in 1988. In the photograph, a hooded figure strides across a bridge in front of the Washington Monument. From the viewer’s perspective, the walkway is at eye level with the pyramidion of the 555-foot obelisk. Farmer evokes Orientalist motifs, conjuring an empire bearing down on itself. Or is the figure rising to meet it? Notably, during the Clinton administration, Farmer became the first African American woman appointed White House photographer. She captured, among many historic moments, the handshake between prime minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, in 1993. 

Another piece Hemphill integrated into “Dreams,” the painting Someone Different (1987), by Joyce Wellman, shares the same wall. As posited by the title, and expressed by the freestyle whorls and patches of frenetic Twombly-esque brushstrokes, the painting suggests transfiguration, as in the Christlike mystery in the paired poem “Black Beans” (1984): “Our chipped water glasses are filled / with wine from our loving. / And the burnt black beans— / caviar.” The pursuit of “the good life” recurs throughout Hemphill’s work. Set in biblical terms, it is the quest for salvation. If not granted by God or state, the hope is that it could be found in or offered by one another. But, as lived by Hemphill and other gay men of his time, the road to paradise is rife with straying paths to danger and self-destruction.

In photographer Lyle Ashton Harris’s Watering Hole series, ephemera tacked on a wood-paneled background are lit with a red neon glow, as in the bathroom of a gay bar or the basement lair of a closeted recluse. Alongside pictures of protesters, male models, and divas—Donna Summer, a Venus in white fur; Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra—hang newspaper clippings of Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis and murders by the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Stuck on throughout each frame are precarious yellow Post-its, notes of a dysphoric mind. The clandestine scene queer people called “the life” allowed for improvisation and indulgence, a desperate break from the mainstream. With so much of the life to live, moderation and safety were often checked at the door.

Diedrick Brackens’s tapestry the night is my shepherd (2022) casts two shadows in melancholy embrace. A faded silhouette in the first panel, and a disembodied arm in the third, luring one of the figures in the central panel, suggests the time-lapse of a doomed affair, or an endless loop of faceless encounters. In either case, heartache. Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s readymade sculpture THE BRASS RAIL (After Essex) (2017), mounted at an obtuse angle, is beguiling and unnerving in its simplicity. Are we going up or down? It’s titled after Hemphill’s poem of the same name about the long-gone “raunchy Black gay club” in DC that was always “bulging out of its jockstrap.” “The Brass Rail,” from the 1980s is  a call-and-response with the readers starting at the opposite ends of the poem. The effect is that of an aural house of mirrors, or a two-man tightrope walk, or, like the Brackens tapestry, a pas de deux heading toward ecstasy and/or oblivion.

CALL: I saw you last night

RESPONSE: Many occupants are never found.

CALL: In the basement

RESPONSE: Many canoes overturn.

CALL: of the Brass Rail.

On the east wall of the gallery, visions of hope. Clifford Prince King’s photographs stage scenes of intentional tenderness and care between Black men. Like Hemphill’s poetry, especially near the end of his life, King’s photographs are salves to the rigid dictums of patriarchal masculinity. The poet’s candor about living with HIV moved King to interrogate his own positive status through his work. The still lifes Night Sweats (2018), which shows a bed imprinted by a night’s feverish bout with infection, and Orange Peel and Biktarvy (2019) render life with HIV rather ordinary. Sonny and David (2019), depicting lovers intertwined in peaceful slumber, is eerily echoed by Shikieth’s adjacent Visiting Hours (2022). A figure wrapped in a white sheet cradles the sleeper. It’s an ancestral visitation or, for those who don’t believe in ghosts, a portrait of self-love.

Hemphill’s legacy was his generosity of spirit, in life and in art. His poetry demands to be performed, shared, and interpreted. One of his most synergistic collaborations was with the filmmaker Isaac Julien. In the film Looking for Langston (1989), a spoken-word fantasia of gay Black bon vivants frolicking in an ethereal 1920s speakeasy, Julien mingles archival footage of Langston Hughes with tracks of Hemphill reading his own poems. In the exhibition, a viewing station for a five-minute B-roll montage of Hemphill recording the audio for the film allows visitors to hear the poet’s rhythmic, emotive idiolect for themselves. Nearby is Pas de Deux No. 2 (1989/2016), a still from Looking for Langston, in which two of the characters are dancing affectionately, breaking through a cloud of smoke. A bouquet of roses adorns the foreground. In the film’s denouement, we would see the dapper revelers fleeing from an armed mob of killjoy straights, running up a staircase lined by a brass handrail. We hear “The Brass Rail” read by two voices in playful repartee, likely belonging to the duo of go-go boy angels guiding the gentlemen’s ascent.

Closing the exhibition, in a secluded room off the main gallery, is a wall projection of Hemphill’s speech at the City University of New York’s “Black Nations/Queer Nations?” Conference, in 1995, just a few months before his death. In dedication to his partner Roger, Hemphill says, “If I had known sooner the true power of love to heal and affirm, I would have left the bathhouses, bushes, and bookstores immediately . . . I would have pursued a healthy way of living with more diligence than I gave to pursuing and busting a nut.” But how could these young men have known any better? What else were they supposed to do? Languishing in the closet may have been an option for some, but for Hemphill and his kind, it was out of the question. It was not these men who were at fault, nor was the pursuit for companionship and gratification the problem. Are those not essential? It was the lack of support and empathy from wider society that sealed their fate.

In a 2019 interview with ARTnews, Lyle Ashton Harris calls Hemphill and the filmmaker Marlon Riggs his “elder brothers.” “There was an insatiable need to try to create a language for something that I felt was there, that was real to me,” Harris said, recalling when he first saw Hemphill and Riggs’s documentary performance film Tongues Untied (1989). “I felt that Essex and Marlon had a language that I did not have. It was a language out of necessity. It was what sustained me.” Borne out of precarity, manifest of tenacity and survival, is the miracle of mortal creation. The convictions and dreams of those who came before made art, these are our blessings. “I ask no more of you / than I ask of myself: / no more guilt / no more pity,” Hemphill writes in “The Tomb of Sorrow” (1992) which is set in Meridian Hill Park, what was then a cruising site Black people claimed as Malcolm X. “Occult risks await us / at the edge of constraint.”

Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings is on view at the Phillips Collection through August 31, 2025.

‘‘I just got the bug, you know, that thing where everyone says the magic of being in a dark room and then you see an image appearing in there,” Perrier said recently. Her work is now the subject of a solo exhibition, A Thousand Small Stories, at Autograph, in London’s East End. As the curator Bindi Vora explained, the title illustrates how each individual experience, no matter how minor it may appear, contributes to a bigger, shared narrative. This concept aligns closely with the sociologist Stuart Hall’s insight that images can express meanings that reach far beyond their immediate surroundings, enabling us to envision and comprehend more than just what is presented in the frame.

The exhibition opens with When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years?, a series from 2024 that delves into the challenges teenage girls encounter as they navigate social media, body image, and misogyny. Perrier’s fascination with the complex politics surrounding beauty is further evident in her renowned portraits from the late 1990s and early 2000s, particularly in Afro Hair and Beauty Show (1998–2003), which emphasize the important role of hair and hairstyles as markers of cultural pride and resilience. The young participants sit there, oozing self-confidence. 

What makes this section special is an installation created with replicas of Black haircare products from the ’90s, on plinths. Perrier has collected these products over the years, and Vora noticed, in her research, that their packaging has often stayed consistent. Vora felt that displaying them would demonstrate “in a very tangible way, the aspirational branding still in use today.”  

In 1995, Perrier made a pivotal trip to Ghana. Until then, most of her images were made in black and white. In Ghana, she gained confidence in using colour. “All the images I was seeing at that time were black and white,” she said, mentioning the kind of photography commissioned for foreign charities. “And I just didn’t want to emulate or recreate the images they were portraying.” In one close-up of a bottle of Cussons baby powder, the pale blue wall in the background complements a white bottle with a picture of a blonde baby and the name of the product in baby blue. Perrier, who regularly used Cussons as a child, sees it as an emblem of neocolonial economics: at the time, the company did not bother to differentiate the packaging for an African market. 

Perrier frequently immerses herself in communities, a spirit of collaboration that resonates in her series Red Gold and Green (1996–97), which was commissioned by Autograph. Here, she joined forces with first-, second-, and third-generation British Ghanaians, friends of her mother’s and extended family, to craft intimate portraits within the comfort of her subjects’ London homes. Perrier’s temporary home studios beautifully reflect the complex blending of modern migrant identities. Symbols from various homelands subtly appear in the background, and vibrant textiles recall longstanding traditions of African studio portraiture. In the exhibition, a vitrine displays ephemera connected to the series, showing, as Vora notes, how Perrier’s “three decades of working as an artist come together beyond just the final images.”

Another celebrated series considers a painful memory. As a child, Perrier faced teasing for the gap in her teeth, a feature she rarely saw in others around her. Aware that it is seen as a sign of beauty in various cultures, she made the series Grace (2000), which comprises images of people with their faces angled towards the camera, facing right and smiling so their teeth are on display. Perrier herself features in a self-portrait along with a portrait of her mother. The personal connection Perrier builds with her subjects goes beyond simply taking their photographs. Instead, a sense of social engagement permeates her work—an alluring reminder that our experiences of love and fear are intertwined, allowing us to perceive them through one another’s perspectives. 

Eileen Perrier: A Thousand Small Stories is on view at Autograph, London, through September 13, 2025.

By frankly depicting what was in front of them, the Bechers set themselves apart from others in the West German art world, which had largely embraced the consolations of abstraction after the unrepresentable horrors of the war. With their ostensibly plain, technical pictures, the Bechers found a way forward by looking back, bridging the uncanny verism of August Sander’s New Objectivity portraiture with the mechanized repetitions of the American avant-garde (think Minimalist sculpture and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Marilyns). “We don’t have any message,” Bernd said. “We are only interested in the object.” The couple photographed thousands of machines and factories—obsolescing blights transmuted into totems of alien beauty—but their most compelling subject was arguably the camera itself. The reticent majesty and rational order of their inventories, in which every form correlates to a clear function, belie an uncertainty about the function of photography in a world where the center no longer holds.

This air of uncertainty, if not full-out melancholia, pervades Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, an exhibition on view at the Prada Foundation in Milan. Curator Susanne Pfeiffer had first set out to make a show about the Dusseldorf School, a loosely knit group of photographers educated by the influential Bechers at the Kunstakademie during the 1970s and ’80s. Six alumni made it into Typologien—Candida Höfer, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gurksy, Simone Nieweg, and the Thomases Ruff and Struth—but the exhibition quickly outgrew its academic origins as Pfeiffer decided to mine a more general proclivity for typologies (that is, systems of classification used to organize things) among German photographers, here represented by some six hundred images by twenty-six artists.

Why this show now? Photographic typologies “enable a clarity of their own, which allows similarities and differences to emerge,” the curator writes, a bit mistily, in the show’s catalogue, adding that typologies’ “photographic equivalence is simple and liberating, but also disturbing, frightening.” There are no explanatory labels or thematic sections. Photographs speak for themselves, or don’t, floating in a labyrinth of artificial gray walls suspended across the hangarlike space of the Prada Foundation’s Podium. Despite a lack of argumentative thrust, Typologien can easily be read as a kind of stealth exhibition about AI, its typology of typologies issuing an elegant rejoinder to the malign systems of image- and meaning-making—our world of infinite surveillance and slop—brought about by machine vision. We could stand to invest, the show suggests, in slower, more embodied, and more unsettled ways of connecting images.

A mania for typologien first swept German photography during the Weimar era. Amid compounding postwar crises, artists and intellectuals turned to classificatory patterns as a way to impose psychological order on their infant democracy. Typecasting in interwar Germany fit hand in glove with physiognomy, the ancient practice of reading character from outward appearance. Spellbound by this pseudoscience—which extended beyond human beings to objects, nature, and even entire cities—German photographers of all political hues began to reconceive the modern camera as a facial recognition technology able to represent and simplify categories of race, class, religion, age, occupation, and politics, such that by 1927, the critic Siegfried Kracauer could remark that reality itself had assumed a “photogenic face.”

Surprisingly, portraiture is nowhere to be found on the first floor of the exhibition. It opens with Karl Blossfeldt’s gorgeous 1920s close-ups of ferns, a reminder of typology’s origins in seventeenth-century botany. These unfurling fronds, photographed in unprecedented detail with a homemade camera, neighbor the sensual orchids of Lotte Jacobi, studies of leaves by Hilla Becher, and Simone Nieweg’s late-twentieth-century photographs of neglected garden plots on the fringes of German towns. Nearby, Thomas Struth’s photographs of dew-dappled lilies, shy sunflowers, and other flowers, originally commissioned as art for hospital rooms, act as foil to Andreas Gurksy’s gargantuan 2015 aerial view of a tulip field, abstracted à la Color Field painting into machined bands of dull red, green, and brown.

In lieu of isolating types for comparative analysis, many of these artists offer variations on a theme of dispassionate obsession. Sigmar Polke’s 1966 morphology of everyday things—a black glove, a balloon, a folding ruler, etc., all ostensibly manipulated to look like palm trees—snickers at the show’s very premise, wryly deflating a German typological tradition that emerged during the Enlightenment. Candida Höfer’s forlorn menagerie of zoo animals, as with Struth’s much-celebrated photographs of museumgoers, taxonomize nothing so much as the camera’s inability to generate new sight lines within Europe’s stagnant institutions. A massive 1989 Cibachrome by Struth of tourists at the Louvre dwarfed by The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) may be a masterpiece in its own right, but Géricault’s painting inside the photograph feels, strangely, like the more contemporary image.

Amid so much famous work, there are a few hidden gems. The show’s real discovery, a group of quietly wondrous photographs by Heinrich Riebesehl, records harshly lit encounters with elevator passengers over the span of a single day in 1969. Isa Genzken’s 1979 appropriations of ads for hi-tech Japanese record players—“The clean and simple truth,” goes one tagline—link the Capitalist Realist painting of 1960s Düsseldorf with the sleek cynicism of New York’s Pictures Generation. They may also bait thoughts of RAF ringleader Andreas Baader, whose 1977 suicide was carried out with a gun secreted inside his jail-cell record player. At least, that was the spin. Nine years after the dark German Autumn, Gerhard Richter included Baader’s record player in October 18 1977, a fifteen-painting cycle that portrays a gray, blurry reality where the truth is neither clean nor simple. October 18 1977 didn’t travel to Milan, but a kindred series by the underrated artist Hans-Peter Feldmann is on view. Die Toten 1967–1993 (The Dead 1967‒1993, 1996–98) depicts about ninety people who died during the wave of domestic terrorism that convulsed West Germany, a reaction, in part, against the capitalist system that brought about the country’s economic miracle, so called. Across three walls, a crawl of newspaper photographs silently tallies and ambiguates the instigators and victims of assassinations, shootouts, kidnappings, hijackings, and crossfire, a monument to national trauma as ephemeral as birdcage liner.

The human face is finally pulled into focus on the second floor, where the familiar subjects of August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century greet us like the return of the repressed. Sander undertook his vast, unfinished compendium of portraits, beginning in 1928, as a way to represent the seven types of Germans—“The farmer,” “The skilled tradesman,” “The woman,” “Classes and professions,” “The artists,” “The city,” and “The last people”—who, as he saw it, made up a country undergoing an intense identity crisis. He called it the “physiognomic image of an age.”

Hindsight haunts Sander’s words, of course. The critic Allan Sekula once described the photographer’s naive vision of society as that of a “neatly arranged chessboard,” set up only for the Nazis to send it all crashing to the floor. But Sander’s triumph resides in the futility of his project: The particularity of his sitters always manages to break through whatever category he has filed them under, and the portraits astonish for their simple demonstration of how objectivity and subjectivity can exist only through each other. Each person’s anonymity, later echoed in the Bechers’ phrase “anonymous sculpture,” gains new resonance at a time when algorithmic typologies are relentlessly arrayed to create brutal regimes of identification. How to read Walter Benjamin’s 1931 description of Twentieth Century as a “training manual” for democracy and not think of the billions of AI training sets that reduce photographs to inputs and humanity to datapoints? Even so, it’s often hard to requite the gaze of Sander’s people, characters in a dream about to go bad. In 1936, the Gestapo destroyed the plates for Face of Our Time, a portfolio of sixty Twentieth Century portraits, for being insufficiently Aryan.

The maze of Typologien finally deposits you into a sparse section devoted to Holocaust-related panels from Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, a vast reservoir of found pictures juxtaposing the banal with the harrowing, from sunsets and bouquets to the atrocities of Auschwitz. In this room, gridded thumbnail photographs of corpses and soldiers waver in and out of focus, some completely illegible. Begun in 1962 and still ongoing, Richter’s Atlas seems to descend from the Mnemosyne Atlas (1928–29) by the Jewish German art historian Aby Warburg (conspicuously absent in Typologien), who attempted to map the “afterlife of antiquity” through hundreds of reproductions of artworks mounted on sixty-three panels. But whereas Warburg traced how cultural remembrance is constructed through imaginative connections across time, Richter questions whether collective memory is still possible when the guarantors of truth and presence no longer sway. Yet, by hallowing this somber passage of Atlas with its own alcove and depriving it of juxtapositions with other works in the show, no doubt out of an abundance of caution, the show risks undermining Richter’s profound project, which acquires its painful meaning by treating all images as equally significant.

Typologies are intended to help us understand the world, but the works in Typologien repeatedly parade photography’s failures: to document, to mourn, to bend experience into arcs of narrative. In 1997, as Feldmann was compiling his book of the dead, Wolfgang Tillmans began photographing the Concordes screaming over Heathrow. For the artist, these Cold War symbols of tomorrow conjured “an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology” at the speed of sound. The airliner was retired after a 2000 crash killed more than a hundred people, lending the photographs a valedictory mood, glimpses of the future slipping into history. “The true picture of the past flits by,” Benjamin wrote in in his final essay, composed shortly before his death in flight from the Nazis. “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized, and is never seen again.” The sentiment has been internalized by many of this show’s artists, who treat the camera not as a lepidopterist’s pin but as an instrument of unknowing, a tool to unfix our way of seeing a world that exceeds any attempts to predict or name it.

Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany is on view at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, through July 14, 2025.

A retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit, endeavors to introduce the photographer to a new generation and reestablish her place in the canon of modern American art history. Organized by Drew Sawyer, a curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition first appeared at the Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona and Madrid, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With organizational support from Pauline Vermare, the show concludes its run at the Brooklyn Museum, the institutional home to some five hundred prints by the artist as well as many more negatives. Catch the Spirit generally follows the chronology of Kanaga’s life and career, but Sawyer groups the nearly two hundred photographs and contextual pieces of ephemera by style and subject, so that the viewer can sense the artist’s creative restlessness, exceptional versatility, and recurring preoccupations.

Kanaga’s practice began when she was working as a young reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, an unconventional profession for women in the 1920s, and she discovered a penchant for directing the photographs that accompanied her articles. Encouraged by her editor, she began hauling the large-format view cameras of the day out to the field and shadowing colleagues in the darkroom. In the Brooklyn Museum installation, this photojournalism—penetrating scenes of poverty and tragedy in the twentieth-century American city—appears alongside portraits of wealthy clients and fellow artists that she made on the side. These are daring exercises in straight photography, made hauntingly beautiful by the almost surgical application of cropping and chiaroscuro.

Kanaga favors dramatic closeups. Her gaze captures the piercing blue eyes and supple lips of an androgynous blonde studio model in Untitled (ca. 1925) and the dark, imploring eyes and sunken cheeks of a poor little boy, a recurring journalistic subject, in Malnutrition (1928) with the same devotional intensity. It takes a delicate boldness to get that close to a subject, and an impish curiosity. Kanaga wants to know them, through their faces and hands. Hers is a necessary violation, a shedding of the external signifiers binding her subjects to the realities they suffer. At times, her composition and framing are in service of sly allusions to the biblical and art historical, as in the deprived Madonna and Child of Untitled (New York) (1922–24) and the three mourning Fates of Fire, New York (1922), finely rendering the human experience specific and universal.

In the late 1920s, Kanaga made a sojourn through Europe and North Africa that shifted her work from documentary photography to liberated image making. She took inspiration from French and Italian painting, like the Pictorialists before her, and even tried her hand in watercolor. She felt challenged by photomontage, which was all the rage in Germany and Austria. In Tunisia, she was struck by otherworldly light and towering minarets. In portraits of the Kairouan locals, she eschewed anthropological and orientalist trappings, capturing them as she did the people back home, in their candid fullness. A smile or a glint in the subject’s eyes, as in those of the young woman in Young African, North Africa (1928), tell of an intimacy that has been broached and kindled.

“I would sacrifice resemblance any day to get the inner feelings of a person,” Kanaga wrote home to her friend and patron Albert Bender. “It seems so much more of one than our face which is so often just a mask.” In the darkroom, she mixed formulas to achieve specific tones, experimented with burning and overexposure. She traced lines over a printed image with graphite, or smudged them altogether. She cropped prints and negatives with equal ferocity. All of this, a calibration of drama with dignity, or the feeling of connection to the subject with implication and self-awareness on the part of the viewer.

Time blurs magnificently at the midpoint of the show, a delightful interlude of Americana still lifes, landscapes, and abstract nature studies, showcasing Kanaga’s compulsion to push her medium to its limits. Mostly devoid of human subjects, the pictures are charged with her wit and worldview. The lipped porcelain pitcher in Untitled (1925) is a reclamation of the libido from the exploitation of capital, represented here by the hard-edged bar of Ivory soap. The Abstraction and Untitled series (1948), snapshots of the reflective surface of the pond by the Yorktown Heights home Kanaga shared with her husband, the painter Wallace B. Putnam, like Monet’s water lilies, occupy the threshold between the material world and the divine.

Among Kanaga’s most important works is She Is a Tree of Life, II, Florida (1950), which she made during a visit to the mucklands of Florida, where migrants worked the fields, picking lettuce and other vegetables. She had spent the day with her subjects, a mother and her family, learning about their life and toil, taking several pictures. This composition, practically sculptural, arrived in their parting moments when the light was just right. It would be immortalized in Edward Steichen’s landmark Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1955. “This woman has been drawing her children to her, protecting them, for thousands of years against hurt and discrimination,” Steichen captioned the photograph. The image is a technical study of contrasts, epitomizing Kanaga’s trademark blend of social documentary and expressive pictorialism.

Kanaga’s early descriptions of her affinity for Black subjects can sound naive, paternalistic, or overly romantic. Yet, in a time when discrimination was law and racial terror was ever-present, she aligned her work with Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals, celebrating Black beauty and self-expression while pushing for progressive reform. Many of these portraits were collaborations with the subjects, not only in the studio, but in life as close personal relationships. Kenneth Spencer (1933) is a tight close-up on the actor and singer. His head is lifted, soaking in the warmth of what appears almost like stage lighting. If you were to zoom out of the frame, he could be, blissfully, mid-pirouette. The poet is in repose on a méridienne in Langston Hughes (ca. 1934), Olympia in a smart suit, a playful assertion of the freedom to move between the worlds of desirability and respectability. Eluard Luchell McDaniel (1931) cradles Kanaga’s family friend and constant muse (the San Francisco police once detained them for driving in a car together). Eluard rests his head on the grass, hands pressed against his cheeks, eyes closed in unburdened tranquility. In these final rooms of Catch the Spirit, there is a surge of both fiery passion and gentle uplift.

Kanaga’s final assignment as a photojournalist, a favor for her friend, the poet Barbara Deming, was to document the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace, a series of marches, from 1963 to 1964, for Black liberation and in protest of the Vietnam War. The photographs, some of which Deming later published in Prison Notes, harken back to Kanaga’s early days of straight photography. Yet, even at this late stage, she could not resist the application of painterly flourishes. Dramatic shadow throws the smiling titular figure of Ray Robinson, Albany, Georgia (1963) into stark relief. While his more solemn comrade holds out an open palm, curved and questioning, Robinson’s arm grips with assurance a suitcase with the acronym “CORE,” for the Congress for Racial Equality, and the phrase “LOVE FORGIVES,” from Corinthians. The image is taken from a low angle, so the figures are elevated. Behind them are bare trees, leafless tendrils reaching to the sky.

Catch the Spirit arrives in a season of diminished public welfare, deportations of lawful residents, and criminalization of dissent, all government sanctioned. Kanaga’s creativity and conviction, therefore, feel especially timely, and the exhibition a call to action, as well as a case for beauty in the face of adversity. “I don’t feel I’m young enough to stand the rigors of peace walks,” Kanaga, who was almost seventy and suffering from emphysema, said about marching with the coalition of young people in Georgia, Black and white together. “But I’m heart and soul for peace and integration and if my camera can be of help, I want to use it to the fullest.”

Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through August 3, 2025.

To Carry is organized by Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell, curators working in geographies from Turkey to New Zealand whose interests skew towards language, the environment, and cultural heritage. During the opening, Tamati-Quennell amusingly referred to the group as the “Spice Girls,” but little fanfare was made about the fact that a major biennial in the Middle East was directed by five women, and no emphasis placed on who was representing whose territory. Feminism and Indigenous activism are inflection points throughout, but strangely, for an otherwise open-minded exhibition, the word queer doesn’t appear once in the accompanying catalog. Compare this absence to the ludic and sensitive—and openly queer—presentations by the artists Sabelo Mlangeni, Salman Toor, and Louis Fratino, and the pro-trans murals of Aravani Art Project, in the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

Yet in Sharjah, the politics of the moment are front and center. When Hoor Al Qasimi, the director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, ended her remarks at the preview, she called for solidarity with the people of Palestine, Lebanon, Armenia, Syria, Congo, and Sudan. Only hours before the official opening, President Donald Trump proposed for the US to “take over” the Gaza Strip, an imperial development scheme tantamount to ethnic cleansing. The idea of solidarity, between regions and across generations, was therefore no mere art-world watchword, but an urgent political stance. The Sharjah Biennial, as Khalaf put it, is “a lament, an offering, a divination ritual” in response to “dispossession and loss.” In other words, survival mode.

Artists working with lens-based media deliver some of the show’s most compelling statements. M’hammed Kilito portrays Morocco’s fragile oases and communal baths, adding a soundtrack of field recordings. The duo Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser) used the AI image generator Midjourney to make gold-toned, nineteenth-century-style salt prints that envision a four-thousand-kilometer hedge built by the British in India to evade a salt tax. Mónica de Miranda stages dramatic scenes amid abandoned buildings in the Namib desert in Angola, where solitary figures emerge as surveyors of a postcolonial utopia or witnesses to an end-times scenario. It’s a vision that’s materialized in another dispensation by the sculptor Hugh Hayden, who places Brier Patch (2022), a collection of wooden school desks sprouting tree trunks, in an abandoned desert village that doubles as a biennial site. 

In Search for Life II, Comilang deftly blends the styles of the nature documentary and the music video, using several cameras to tell a story about commerce and migration. Golden-hour cityscapes of Dubai, shot from the Burj Khalifa, complement lush underwater visuals. A cameo by Fatima Khalid, also known as Pats, a Filipina Emirati who performs with a K-pop cover group called the Pixies, provides a charismatic counterpoint to scenes of an open-air pearl market in Zhuji City, China. Comilang projects one channel of the video onto an enormous screen made from strings of acrylic pearls sourced from a factory near Shanghai. She built a pier from which visitors could view the video on multiple levels. 

A second channel, on an LED screen, shows dancers from the Pixies and TikTok videos of jewelry designers. “Pearls,” a text message reads, “are the new diamonds.” Filipinos constitute one of the major migrant groups to the United Arab Emirates, yet children born there to foreigners are rarely seen as fully Emirati. Pats speaks with uncommon candor about her mixed-race identity, appearing as an avatar of a hybrid Emeriti future. Elsewhere in Comliang’s film, the family of a Filipino diver who was paralyzed after coming up for air too quickly returns a pearl to the ocean in a ritual offering. The pearl will have more value in the spirit world than the open market.

Search for Life II is presented in Al Mureujah Square in Sharjah City, a labyrinthine collection of galleries that forms the principal venue of the Sharjah Art Foundation. In a sleek white cube, Kapulani Landgraf shows selections from Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui, a series of black-and-white photographs of sacred sites in Hawaii. The pristine quality of her prints, and the long exposure times that render the movement of water like ripples of satin, are comparable to mid-twentieth-century landscapes by Ansel Adams, who also photographed in Hawaii. But Landgraf, who is native Kānaka Maoli, includes texts below each image denoting place-names related to Indigenous Hawaiian genealogy. For Landgraf, the sublime is not about manifest destiny, but instead the continuity of cultural knowledge. 

In the Bait Habib Al Yousef, an historic courtyard house renovated by the foundation, a group of photographs by Akinbode Akinbiyi contemplates the choreography of spectatorship. His images of street life, photo studios, and everyday rituals in a variety of African cities contain the subtlest vibrations of forward motion. “He listens with his camera,” the curator Natasha Ginwala said. Akinbiyi’s prints are organized in elegant grids or set at various heights within concrete recesses, spot-lit and self-possessed. One image shows two men pointing handheld video cameras toward a couple in the middle of an outdoor wedding ceremony. Like the pair of documentarians he portrays, Akinbiyi himself is a photographer-participant, close enough for an intimate encounter yet standing at the slightest remove to sense a moment of visual poetry.

Among other sites repurposed by the Sharjah Art Foundation is the Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, a gently curving arcade that serves as a stage set for Aziz Hazara’s ingenious, multifaceted project I Love Bagram (ILB) (2025). Bagram was an American military base and prison until the summer of 2021, when the US withdrew its troops, switched off the electricity, and essentially vacated overnight. Hazara began to collect garbage left at the base, photographing ghostly bottles of mouthwash, lotion, and conditioner and installing his pictures in typologies set against the brightly patterned wallpaper of former fruit and vegetable stalls, a post-occupation bazaar within a post-commodity market. He added videos of Afghan men handling electronic waste, allowing power cords for projectors to pile up unconcealed, as if to say that even these exhibition devices will end up in some other market someday.

The afterlife of an ancestor, or the afterimage of a photograph, is the subject of several of the biennial’s projects about art as a container for history. Like Hazara, Alia Farid delves into the recent record of US military intervention abroad. She researched objects taken from Iraq after the American-led invasion in 2003, and became fascinated by blue faience, a ceramic material used in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. For her series Talismans, she embedded photographs, enlarged on a copier, of her mother and her grandmothers, who were from Puerto Rico and Kuwait, within polyurethane panels. Glazed with blue faience, the panels are suspended from the ceiling, inviting a continual movement around the gallery to glimpse the images in their various layers, like peering through a window. 

Fiona Pardington photographed life casts made in the late 1830s by a French phrenologist in New Zealand. Depicting Maori leaders who are also ancestors of Pardington and the curator Megan Tamati-Quennell, the casts are what Pardington calls a “pre-photographic form of portraiture.” She printed her arresting, evenly lit images at a large scale, pointing up the monumentality of the figures and their uncanny lifelike presence. They appear neither as exemplars of nineteenth-century pseudoscience nor as idealized heroes, but instead as individuals hovering between life and death. “We have our family with us once again,” Tamati-Quennell said.

In 1944, Kegham Djeghalian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, opened the first professional photo studio in Gaza. Decades later, his grandson, Kegham Djeghalian Jr, an artist based in Cairo, began to investigate the studio’s legacy: three red boxes of prints and negatives showing the rhythms of daily life—weddings, parties, street scenes, family portraits—that also amount to a community’s proof of existence. In a gallery at the Sharjah Art Museum, Djeghalian Jr presents hundreds of black-and-white reproductions from the studio’s archive, withholding individual dates or locations, a gesture that suspends the images in the present tense. He recreated the Photo Kegham storefront in a Sharjah souk, and he screens a video interview from 2021 with Marwan Al-Tarazi, who inherited the studio. Together they discuss the photographs in detail, but the video would be a final encounter. Al-Tarazi was killed during an Israeli bombing in Gaza in October 2023.

When it’s time to “travel, flee or move on,” the biennial’s curators ask, what do we carry for survival? For the Palestinian artists Mohammed Al-Hawajri and Dina Mattar, who are part of Eltiqa, an artist collective in Gaza City, endurance is about cultural protection. Al-Hawajri and Mattar were living with their family in a Rafah camp when they decided to flee Gaza, carrying with them as many artworks as possible. In a former classroom at the Al Qasimiyah School, a 1970s-era building that serves as another of the biennial’s sites, they present political paintings that channel Diego Rivera and Faith Ringgold, together with artworks by their children, including a video by their eldest son, Ahmad, who follows the path of a kite flying over a refugee camp in Gaza. Al-Hawajri and Mattar’s work is also featured in a concurrent exhibition about Eltiqa at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, in which a timeline of photographs tracks the activities of the collective from its founding in 1988 to the ceasefire in January. Like the portraits from Photo Kegham, the images of joyful exhibition openings at Eltiqa’s gallery in Gaza are an intimate form of evidence.

At the biennial preview, the curator Alia Swastika introduced Al-Hawajri, Mattar, and their four children in the courtyard of the Al Qasimiyah School, just outside the gallery where their artworks were on display—artworks they had risked their lives to salvage and bring to the Emirates, or have made since arriving. They lined themselves up in order of height and the children listened as Al-Hawajri spoke about the exhibition. The moment was like any other artist talk at the biennial, but the family’s presence was overwhelming. They had survived.

To Carry, the Sharjah Biennial 16, is on view in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, through June 15, 2025.

For Edges of Ailey, the museum’s fifth floor was transformed into a den of crimson and shadows: the walls were Lynchian red. Opaque, rouge curtains covered the windows and tinted the New Jersey skyline and Hudson River the color of blood. Set near the ceiling, a long video montage of performance clips ran the length of the gallery, while existing and newly commissioned artworks by Black artists both living and dead occupied the center of the floor. Upon entry, visitors were almost violently confronted with the thesis: “THIS IS DANCE. THIS IS ART. THIS IS ALVIN AILEY.” Yet, as the exhibition title suggests, we only get an outline.

Photography was positioned most prominently in the exhibition’s first section, which focuses on music and Ailey’s notion that dance is a conduit for sound, rather than response. This is illustrated effectively, if slightly predictably, by the selection of images. Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava bear the weight of such visualizations, by turns moody and romantic in their depictions of John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and a couple lost in emotion in a string duet. Lyle Ashton Harris’s Billie #21 (2002), a self-portrait of the artist in costume as Billie Holiday, is the most recent work, but it makes an obvious connection, amplified by the other selected photographs. Works by James Van Der Zee, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and even Carrie Mae Weems, for example, seem like a greatest hits compilation dispatched to highlight Ailey’s connection to civil rights and labor movements, spirituality, and the history of enslavement in the United States.

Other sections of the show touch on Ailey’s collaborators and influences, but the aforementioned artists aren’t included. The works of the photographers (and most of the artists in the exhibition) connect to the themes in Ailey’s work, but not to Ailey himself. This does not detract from the beauty of the photographs, nor the sense that Ailey would commune deeply with them, but too frequently they are wielded as illustrations of concepts and fail to illustrate a specific relationship to Ailey as a person, as an artist, rather than the notion of his legacy.

Edges of Ailey exists in a climate of institutions playing catch-up—recognizing the contributions Black artists have made to their respective fields—to the point where I feel if you’ve seen one Van Der Zee you’ve seen them all, especially for visitors to any major New York survey in the last few years, such as The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Met, which seemed to have a Van Der Zee every two paces, or Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now at the Guggenheim, which positioned Fani-Kayode’s work in conversation with Robert Mapplethorpe’s.

On the literal edges of the exhibition were portraits of Ailey by Carl Van Vechten. These offer more direct evidence of Ailey’s relationship to photography, and to visual art in general. Van Vechten was a white writer known for inserting himself into the Harlem Renaissance via his controversial novel N***** Heaven (1926). He later pivoted to photography, and became famous for his portraits of prominent artists and intellectuals. The intimate images here hold many of the visual cues referenced in Ailey’s work, including early twentieth-century studio work (for instance, Van Der Zee’s The Actor) and iconography from African spiritual practices, rendered in lush, sensuous color akin that of Fani-Kayode.

Throughout the show, glimpses of Ailey appear in the form of ephemera, such as show documentation, or newly commissioned works by artists such as Jennifer Packer, but the portraits offer the most direct view. His expressions are coy, his gestures controlled. The backgrounds are rich in hue and pattern, with shadowy vignetting that holds much visual weight. There is something about this set of images that implies Ailey was aware of the power of being seen, especially by the white gaze. Perhaps he could intuit that, like his pieces, he could not be seen nor preserved in totality. But, like the woman in the lobby, he knew there was still something worth sharing, worth being proud of, something worth dancing for.

Edges of Ailey was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from September 25, 2024 through February 9, 2025.

McDarrah was never a household name like Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, or Robert Mapplethorpe, but he was one of his generation’s most essential architects and arbiters of photojournalism, and his immeasurable impact on the cultural landscape in New York receives a full accounting in the exhibition Fred W. McDarrah: Pride and Protest, curated by Marilyn Satin Kushner and Rebecca Klassen at The New York Historical. McDarrah not only documented countercultural life, he also created a fabulous historical record of it; indeed, he was more than the Voice, in that his work, in a way, encapsulated the changing times.

Although McDarrah made singular portraits of Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and other such Beatnik luminaries, he is best known for arresting photographs of LGBTQ­ artists, writers, and activists as well as the local gay liberation and AIDS movements. There’s unsmiling Susan Sontag, smoking in the shadows of the Mills Hotel in 1962; and there’s Marsha P. Johnson glowing at the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1971. McDarrah himself was not gay (he had a wife and son), yet he zealously and sensitively chronicled queer art and politics, even in the years before he started contributing to the Voice. His 1994 photobook Gay Pride: Photographs from Stonewall to Today, published to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, was reprinted on the event’s fiftieth anniversary in 2019. Iconic images of Candy Darling with a fatigued expression on the set of The David Susskind Show in 1970 and an unrelenting ACT UP demonstrator being yanked away by four armed policemen from the “Target City Hall” action in 1989 are now more frequently being transported from the printed page to the museum walls.

Pride and Protest presents over sixty black-and-white photographs that date from 1959 to 1993, reproductions of contact sheets, a book of bound newspapers, and two daybooks, and seeks to tell three intersecting stories: the rise of queer culture and activism, the emergence of the Voice as a community venue, and McDarrah’s own photographic trajectory. In the curators’ wall text, however, there is a greater attention to detailing the identities and cultural contributions of the legendary individuals in the pictures than to elucidating McDarrah’s specific encounters with his subjects and general approaches to editing, printing, and circulating his work beyond the Voice.

Regardless, it’s often his images without underground celebrities—and even without people at all—that speak most forcefully. As one of the only photographers to document the earth-shattering riot at the Stonewall Inn, McDarrah captured, among other things, the tame graffiti on the establishment’s boarded-up windows, which featured messages like “legalize gay bars and lick the problem” and a call for calm from the homophile Mattachine Society of New York. These rare photographs of textual assertions beg to be contrasted with a particularly devastating image of political speech that comes later in the exhibition: Duane Kearns Puryear’s panel for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt during its display on the National Mall in 1992. “I MADE THIS PANEL MYSELF,” it proclaims. “IF YOU ARE READING IT, I AM DEAD.”

The first version of this exhibition was curated by Vince Aletti, a longtime writer and editor at the Voice who knew McDarrah well, at the 2023 edition of Paris Photo. Interestingly, after years of being a music critic, Aletti started to focus on photography once McDarrah stopped writing short photo exhibition reviews, and thereby turned the Voice into a premiere platform for photo criticism, further legitimizing the medium’s status as a fine art. While there is no doubt that Pride and Protest likewise intends to elevate a vital body of work by an extraordinary photojournalist, and justifiably so, one can only imagine that nothing compares to the bygone experience of relishing these pictures in their glorious newsprint immediacy.

Fred W. McDarrah: Pride and Protest is on view at the New York Historical through July 13, 2025.