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The Photographer Who Sees with Her Fingertips

Aperturewp — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:19:10 +0000

Like many analog photographers, Aspen Mays makes images in a darkroom. But unlike most of them, she doesn’t use a camera and film. She creates her photograms in complete darkness, without even the red glow of the safelight. For hours, she works with eyes unseeing and often closed, guided by muscle memory, touch, and the sound of dripping water.

In the dark, Mays reaches for objects she arranged in the light. Her fingers find the taped lines on the table directing her to materials. She creases photographic paper, invents celestial patterns with a hole punch, and layers and removes tape to form sunbursts and spiderwebs.

“I’ve always been interested in uniqueness,” Mays said, “working with base materials that rely on hand processes.” Such an embodied approach requires endurance, which in its solitary production sometimes drifts toward entropy. “I’m taking patterns to such repeated iterative extremes that they often start to fall apart.”

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 15, 2024

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 14, 2024

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We typically think about craft in photography as aligned with technical precision, repeatability, and visual fidelity, but Mays’s images defy such virtues. The hand is privileged over the eye so that every photogram shows traces of manual manipulation and darkroom chance—a pinhole, a light leak. Her work invites the viewer into a story of its making. The intricate, imperfect human elements behind her analog image creation counter our greedy consumption of ever-optimized digital photographs.

Mays was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in the Bay Area. Her father was an architect. Before he switched to digital design tools, his home drafting table was a source of endless fascination to Mays, littered as it was with rulers, erasers, pencils, and templates to make almost any conceivable shape. For a recent series produced at the Rauschenberg Residency on Florida’s Captiva Island, Mays used templates inherited from her father and grandfather, who was also an architect. “I love the uniformity and how they standardize space,” she said, recalling how her grandfather’s and father’s hands had traced lines with these tools.

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 16, 2024

Aspen Mays, Bandanna, 2016

One photogram, Blind Pass (2025), captures a semitranslucent template, which was repeatedly exposed on a folded sheet of paper. Mays arranged the template so that the lacy rows of diminishing ovals converge. The composition flickers between an arrangement of ordinary objects and something more galactic, like a supernova.

Cosmic themes thread through her work, connecting acts of the hands with acts of the heavens. For the series Punched out stars (2011), Mays used a perforator to riddle gelatin-silver prints rejected from the University of Chile’s Astronomical Observatory archive, subtracting every visible star. The result is clusters of enigmatic white circles and fabric-like creases. “The cosmic is a totally dizzying thing to confront—the smallness of your experience or the vastness of the universe,” she said. “It’s a way for me to think through the conundrum of experience.”

Tengallon Sunflower (2016) is a more personal, earthbound project. Two bandanas are at the heart of the photogram series: a starburst-patterned textile inherited from her great-grandmother and an indigo-and-white cloth owned by Georgia O’Keeffe. Mays pricked out the starburst pattern with a pin, marring the cotton rag gelatin-silver paper, then dyed the paper using indigo and other blues that resemble cyanotypes and diazo blue-prints.

Mays likes the intimacy of a bandana, how the square of fabric was designed to be knotted ever so snugly around the neck. “Sense memory feels antithetical to photography, which, of course, privileges a visual kind of memory,” she said. Her work is a meditation on the nature of touch. Not in caresses or gestures that require an artist’s hand—folding, pinning, punching, dyeing—but in the way a stray fingerprint or scratch flouts photographic mores and disrupts a pristine surface. Her transgressions in the dark remake the ordinary into something strange, transcendent, and beautifully otherwise.

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 18, 2024

Aspen Mays, O’Keeffe, 2016
All works courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures

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

A Bittersweet Ode to the Teenagers of 2000s Seoul

Aperturewp — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:19:39 +0000

Korean high schoolers spend on average twelve to sixteen hours a day at school, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at Sung Jin Park’s series Kid Nostalgia (2001–9). Here we see them cutting class, sneaking cigarettes, and recovering from fist fights (one kid gingerly sports a bandaged hand under his school uniform). For this work, Park turned Seoul into his photography studio, capturing public high school students in alleyways, clearings, and other banal public spaces of various outer-borough neighborhoods. The series is photographed like an editorial, with the subjects often looking straight at you; we meet their gaze as teenagers ourselves and are transported back to the thrilling desperation of youthful indiscretions and the hope that they’d puncture the seemingly endless expanse of adolescent boredom. Through the scowls and the smoke, these kids, with their untucked shirts and hiked-up skirts, strike poses with assured nonchalance, as if the tumble of emergent self-formation were the most effortless thing in the world.

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“Looking back, I can only get a glimpse of what I was looking for,” Park told me in Korean (the translations are mine). “These were kids who were striving to express themselves in the most naive ways—cutting their own hair, cutting their own clothes. It’s endearingly awkward. I’m interested in the moment before those impulses are confirmed. I was looking for the kinds of kids I liked, I guess, the ones with a certain style or attitude. In a country where everyone believes that education is the only way up, these were the kids from the bad schools in the wrong neighborhoods.”

Park, who had followed his older brother to New York for high school and stayed on to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, returned to Seoul some years after college. It wasn’t long before he began Kid Nostalgia, scoping out subjects on the margins of the metropolis for nearly a decade. The photographer spoke of deriving a vicarious satisfaction from finding these students and their attitudes of refusal. I wonder what fantasies or desires drove Park to sustain this project throughout his thirties, and if they relate to my own immediate sense of identification with his subjects. Was he searching for recognizable parts of himself in a place where he feels both enmeshed and estranged—a way to mark not just a coming home, but the construction of a home? The nostalgia that drives this series is the photographer’s and the viewer’s, a nostalgia unmoored from any real memories. Kid Nostalgia might more accurately be titled Adult Melancholia, for it is essentially a body of work that seeks to retrace that which can’t be located or recognized, a loss without object.

All photographs by Sung Jin Park from the series Kid Nostalgia, 2001–9
Courtesy the artist

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

Photographing the Night That Shook Seoul

Aperturewp — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 19:27:15 +0000

In the midday sunlight of upstate New York, I had no way of knowing how cold the night of December 3, 2024, was in South Korea, how dark and long it had been. With a fourteen-hour time difference, martial law in South Korea felt incomprehensible to me, like seeing the future of my homeland. But for the Seoul-based photographer Yezoi Hwang, it was the present. The words martial law, heard while having dinner, communicated something she couldn’t believe without seeing with her own eyes. So she picked up her camera and went out into the square.

Hwang often uses her camera in an effort to understand the incomprehensible. After making series that focused on her family—capturing, for example, stories of conflict and reconciliation in Season (2016)—she gradually redirected her lens toward people on the margins, people who often bear invisible wounds. She developed a gaze of care, and as a result could see more clearly that she lived in a fragmented society masked by a fantasy of unity. Flashback Diary (2024–25) is Hwang’s documentary photography series of the protests from the moment former President Yoon Suk Yeoul declared martial law to his eventual impeachment.

Hwang witnessed: While men clashed with their bodies and raised their voices in combative protest, middle-aged women stood at the front lines to protect younger women. The uniforms of the police blocking the National Assembly and confronting the protesters failed to absorb light, reflecting it instead, turning them into ghosts. In contrast, hopeful handwritten notes, ribbons, and tiny, solidaristic snowmen became fixtures of the cityscape. So did the voices of countless women beyond the frame, through whom Hwang discovered what care truly means. And just like the lines in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 novel Dictee that the artist continually returned to, it was “MAH-UHM,” the spirit: “It is burned into your ever-present memory. Memory less. Because it is not in the past. It cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts. It burns. Fire alight enflame.”

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Only seven years after the Korean War armistice, Koreans rose up in the April 19 Revolution of 1960, under martial law, to oppose the fraudulent election and dictatorship of the Syngman Rhee regime. In the October Restoration of 1972, former President Chung-hee Park imposed martial law to replace democracy with authoritarian rule in South Korea. In 1980, the Gwangju Uprising erupted in resistance to Doo-hwan Chun’s coup and the imposition of martial law, leading to mass killings. Martial law was present at every major political turning point in the country’s history. Because it granted “special measures” over freedom of the press, publication, assembly, and association, martial law was used as a tool for the government to wield coercive power over the basic rights of the people. It left indelible, inherited scars. A foreign journalist once said that democracy blooming in Korea is as unlikely as a rose sprouting from a trash can. Yet Koreans never hesitated to bleed red if it meant that rose might bloom. For more than sixty years, the people of Korea have protected that rose; the sudden reemergence of martial law was tantamount to its trampling.

To Hwang, the photographs in Flashback Diary are not a record of fear and violence. What she aimed to record with her camera was the strength of invisibles—those who built fortresses of warmth and hospitality against violence, and brought about a slow but democratic victory. The images act as a memoir of the artist as an autonomous woman engaging in dialogue with the social unrest surrounding her. As Hwang told me, “Photography becomes a tool that allows one individual to confront the multitude.” Her lens became a shield against a precarious world, and the resulting photographs became a fiercely burning “MAH–UHM” she carries, ever present.

All photographs Yezoi Hwang, Flashback Diary, 2024–25
Courtesy the artist

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

Silvia Rosi Reimagines the Family Album

Aperturewp — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 16:37:06 +0000

Silvia Rosi picked up photography in her teenage years, documenting friends and family in the northern Italian region of Reggio Emilia, to which her parents had immigrated from Togo in the late 1980s. Rosi’s own move from Italy to England, to attend the photography program at the London College of Communication from 2013 to 2016, instigated a period of introspection about what it means to leave home and put down roots elsewhere. The feeling of being between cultures is at the heart of her practice.

“I was going back to my memories of Italy and looking back at images in family albums that would reconnect me with a sense of my identity,” she told me recently. Far from her familial networks, Rosi, who is still based in London, turned the lens on herself. “You use what you have at hand,” she noted with a wry smile.

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From the series Disintegrata (Disintegrated, 2024), the image Disintegrata con Foto di Famiglia (Disintegrated with Family Photo) shows Rosi standing between two wooden cabinets with framed photographs placed on them. The pictures—a woman in a wedding dress, family snapshots, a black-and-white studio portrait—suggest the ways vernacular photography has been used in the African diaspora as a means of documenting lives in transit. Her work also speaks to visual and oral modes of memory and transmission in family lineages. In Self-Portrait as My Father (2019), Rosi sits on a chair against a blue backdrop, balancing books on her head, wearing glasses and a formal shirt, tie, and trousers, like a clerk about to head to the office. On the ground next to her feet are tomatoes stacked in small pyramids. Here, Rosi steps into the metaphorical shoes of her father, whom she never met, filling in the gaps between his physical absence and the stories passed down about him by her mother. Though he arrived in Italy an educated man, Rosi said, “I know that when my father lived in Italy, he worked as a tomato picker. He ended up being part of the exploitation of migrants. This happened in the late 1980s, but it is also something that is still happening now.”

Silvia Rosi, Disintegrata con Foto di Famiglia (Disintegrated with family photo), 2024

Silvia Rosi, Self-Portrait as My Mother in School Uniform, 2019

In Self-Portrait as My Mother in School Uniform (2019), Rosi carries toothpicks, reminiscences of the items her mother sold at roadsides and markets to passersby as a young trader in Togo, as her mother’s mother had before her. Styled in clothing similar to her mother’s school uniform, with books placed on her lap and her gaze fixed firmly on the viewer, Rosi inhabits the vulnerable yet entrepreneurial spirit of her mother as a young woman before motherhood. In another image, Self-Portrait as My Mother (2019), Rosi carries a radio on her head—a reference to highlife and Afro jazz but also a symbol of a deeply personal memory of her mother’s.

“The radio represents a moment when my mother was working for an Italian family. She overheard on the radio that a law would be passed that would legalize migrants present in Italian territory at that time, which enabled my parents to stay and live in Italy,” Rosi explained. Style and clothing, much of it sourced from secondhand shops, are key to Rosi’s work. In her inhabitations, the glasses or suit her father wore transcend their status as middle-class signifiers to become objects imbued with private meanings. Shutter release cables snake across the floor and lead to the hand of the artist, as if to show she is in complete control.

Rosi’s recent work is openly indebted to West African studio photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, who helped visualize a kind of post-independence modernity. In one photograph, Disintegrata di Profilo (Disintegrated Profile, 2024), the artist, clad in a preppy blazer and khakis, poses with an Agfa-Gevaert book: an apparent reference to the legendary photographer James Barnor, who moved from London back to his native Ghana in 1970 to set up the first Agfa color-processing laboratory in the country. Rosi holds the book up to obscure her face, as if to resist the camera’s capacity to fix identity in place.

In bringing together the performative elements of self-portraiture and the commitment to preservation found in family albums, Rosi stages a different kind of performance, similar to the ways in which Samuel Fosso used his own body in the 2008 series African Spirits to perform and embody famous pan-African figures, including Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. Rather than reaching toward historical personages, Rosi emulates those who aren’t written about, the lives of immigrants trying to establish themselves in a new country in the face of economic precarity and cultural dislocation. Her images beautifully highlight tender, painful feelings of misrecognition and alienation, and the difficulties of starting anew.

Silvia Rosi, Neither Could Exist Alone, 2021

Silvia Rosi, Sposa Italiana Disintegrata (Disintegrated Italian bride), 2024

Silvia Rosi, Self-Portrait as My Mother, 2019

Silvia Rosi, Disintegrata di Profilo (Disintegrated profile), 2024

Silvia Rosi, ABC VLISCO 14/0017, 2022
All photographs courtesy Autograph APB, Collezione Maramotti, MAXXI and Bvlgari, and Jerwood Arts/ Photobooks

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

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s New York City

Aperturewp — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 19:22:21 +0000

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” Spring 2021.

Rosalind Fox Solomon found her calling, photography, in her late thirties. Fox Solomon’s teacher, Lisette Model, encouraged her daring and self-confidence. With a camera, Fox Solomon could view life from her own angle, her distinctive vision.

Fox Solomon has traveled widely, photographing in Peru, the American South, Israel, and the West Bank, to name a few places. But, she tells me, “I did not find myself shooting in New York City in a different way. I made portraits of people and imagined their concerns. As I shoot, there is always inner tension, a trance-like state that contrasts with a nice-girl smile. That’s how I work everywhere.”

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Inside the Gate, Staten Island Ferry, 1986

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Seeing Beyond, Staten Island Ferry, 1986

Over the last five decades, Fox Solomon has pictured New York through its events, inhabitants, and objects. Her commitment to social justice animates her choice of subjects, and her pictures often show those who are troubled, suffering, or in crisis.

A young man with AIDS looks solemnly at the camera. He appears resolute, an implacable expression on his face. “It was wrenching shooting people with AIDS,” Fox Solomon tells me. “I met and photographed them, and some died soon after.” Her exhibition Portraits in the Time of AIDS at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 1988, in the midst of the epidemic, insisted on the public’s awareness of the suffering of so-called ordinary people.

People in wheelchairs on the Staten Island Ferry, people standing, all with their backs to the viewer, are looking at the water or the skyline, or inwardly. What they are thinking about, how they feel, is unknowable; but imaginations are spurred to wonder.

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After 9/11, handmade posters of the missing showed up on walls all over Lower Manhattan. “From a poster, I learned about the death of a friend, the artist Michael Richards,” Fox Solomon says. The attack on the Twin Towers was political, but the effects were instantly personal, each poster a death. Fox Solomon’s photograph of the desperate pleas of families and friends, and not the city’s physical devastation, emphasized her concern with wrecked lives, not buildings.

A Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, lying on a street, is a template for interpretation. This poetic image could register a tragic reality: Americans celebrate a family holiday, which elides North America’s first families, almost entirely wiped out by the US government. Or, it might represent the melancholy that comes after the fun ends, or how temporary pleasure is. There are many ways to see it.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Has anyone seen artist Michael Richards? After 9/11, 2001

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Stuck, before the Macy’s Parade, 1977

People can see so differently from each other, so idiosyncratically. Eyewitnesses have different eyes. There may sometimes be a consensus about a photograph—this is a good picture—but judgments about its meanings vary. Photographs don’t reveal themselves, don’t investigate, don’t tell us how to see them. Reactions to any picture depend on a viewer’s subjectivity, psychology, sympathies, sensibility, and more. An understanding of that dissonance inheres in Fox Solomon’s imagery. These photographs are gentle, also tough and unsentimental, sometimes tender yet unsettling.

Fox Solomon’s New York photographs look at the past and augment public and private histories. They are impressions of what compelled her, or disturbed her, about how people lived and what shaped their lives. Her photographs intend an intimacy, a connection and closeness to this place.

Looking at this work now, Fox Solomon says, “I am struck by the fact that my themes and interests are consistent—people, their differences and similarities; relationships; and issues such as race relations, politics, women’s roles, illness.”

Rosalind Fox Solomon, I Love NY, Staten Island Ferry, 1984

Rosalind Fox Solomon, The Artist’s Wife, Meta Cohen Bolotowsky, 1978

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jeff Engleken, Nuclear War?! There Goes my Career!, 1987

Rosalind Fox Solomon, What Lies Ahead?, 1987

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Singing Revival, Washington Square Park, 1986

Rosalind Fox Solomon, High School Chums, 1987

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Cashier, Cozy Soup and Burger, 1984
All photographs courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” Spring 2021.

A Portrait of Creative Community in Ivory Coast

Aperturewp — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:00:53 +0000

A slinky crease of a jacket, a streetlight lurking in the background, marbles resting in the scoop of a collarbone, flowers forming a shadow on a model’s face. These intense details of light, shape, and form heighten an atmosphere of crepuscular intimacy in the brooding and buoyant images of Nuits Balnéaires, a photographer, musician, filmmaker, poet, and set designer based in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast.

Nuits Balnéaires’s interest in photography can be traced back to some high school modeling he did casually for friends. “In that age, it was the boom of Facebook,” he told me recently. “It was all about doing cool photos for social media.” When his mother came back from a trip with a compact Sony camera, he began to make his own pictures. This eventually led him to the fashion industry—magazines, advertising, brand photography, as well as deep admiration for the know-how of local artists and designers in Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, and Dakar. “It was a great environment to learn,” he said. “But at some point, I had that need to focus on more personal stories.”

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After moving in 2019 from his former home in Abidjan (Ivory Coast’s de facto capital) to a new-to-him scene in the small, historic town of Grand-Bassam, Nuits Balnéaires was renewed by nature. His embrace of landscape is evident in depictions of soft water bathed in twilight. After all, the moniker Nuits Balnéaires translates to “seaside nights” in English and is also meant to provoke what he refers to as an “idea of nostalgia, this melancholy of the Gulf of Guinea, this strong relationship to memory.”

In Grand-Bassam, he created a meditative series called Scent of Appolonia (2021), in which he pays homage to the land of the N’zima Kôtôkô people, an ethnic group of southwestern Ghana and southeastern Ivory Coast. “I was very interested about the link between those territories and the resilience and the sustainability of this whole culture, despite the borders that we inherited from the colonial era,” he explained. “These people still coexist, still share things, even if they exist in those two lands and are separated by these borders.”

Nuits Balnéaires, from Dreaming, Ivory Coast, 2020

Nuits Balnéaires’s interventions, then, mark a wider community. His subjects include friends, professional models, and family. “I work a lot with my sister, who is definitely my main muse,” he said. Another series stems from a partnership with a curatorial platform, Yua Hair, which focuses on textured hair in Africa and the African diaspora. These exquisitely staged photographs take their inspiration from 1960s and 1970s West African studio portraiture, where self-fashioning was understood as a political act within Africa’s postcolonial cultures. A relentless respect for fashion, tailoring, jewelry, craft, and aesthetics are, to Nuits Balnéaires, “a way to really reclaim that identity which is strongly African, but also with a lightness that equals an openness to the world, to this contemporary world, to this global world in which we exist today.”

While Nuits Balnéaires’s crisp and ecstatic images suggest an homage to iconic West African photographic practices, they also attempt to forge ahead, naming and creating a contemporary culture that is specific to his community in Ivory Coast but encouraged by friends in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Europe, and the United States. “I feel like I’ve been so nourished and built up by the space I come from and its people,” he said with pride. “I think I’ve been lucky.”

Nuits Balnéaires, from Infinite Stories for Yua Hair, 2024

Nuits Balnéaires, Keren Lasme et Noella Elloh, Ivory Coast, 2018

Nuits Balnéaires, Guy Martial, Ivory Coast, 2018

Nuits Balnéaires, from Infinite Stories for Yua Hair, 2024

Nuits Balnéaires, La Fleur D’Appolonie (Scent of Appolonia), 2021
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

Sakir Khader’s Portraits of Palestinian Perseverance

Aperturewp — Fri, 09 May 2025 17:22:17 +0000

When Sakir Khader was a young journalist working for a Dutch newspaper in the aftermath of the ill-fated Arab Spring, he wanted to report on the civil war in Syria. His editors refused to send him, so Khader left the paper and joined the Dutch public television broadcasting network instead. There, he undertook a formidable education in the logistics and ethics of documentary filmmaking. Again, he turned his attention to Syria. This time, Khader managed to line up a trip. But the situation was volatile. The regime of Bashar al-Assad had brutally crushed a fledging revolution, setting off an unpredictable conflagration of multiple open-ended conflicts among rebels, insurgents, foreign mercenaries, and more. Things never seemed to get any better—only worse.

Sakir Khader, The shepherd and his sheep, Khattab, Northern Hama, Syria, 2025

Khader’s trip to Syria was canceled. But by that time he was no longer taking no for an answer. He decided to apply what he had learned and go anyway, on his own, as a freelancer. As soon as he arrived, Khader began looking for Abdul Baset al-Sarout, the former goalkeeper for Syria’s youth soccer team who had become a rebel commander with the Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade. Sarout was famous for popularizing revolutionary anthems. For that reason, he was hugely irritating to the Syrian regime. Government forces eventually killed him, in 2019, during a chaotic battle in the country’s northwest. Sarout was just twenty-seven years old. Khader was around the same age when he found him, a year earlier, and spent three months living with him and the men of his battalion. Khader made a film and a book and took many photographs, including a portrait of Sarout, close-up, face ablaze with an irresistible smile, tired eyes, and a crown of cherubic curls.

Sakir Khader, A friends’ gathering on the mountain, Rujib, Nablus, Palestine, March 2025

Sakir Khader, The mothers of the Martyrs, Jenin refugee camp, 2023

Blurring the line between still and moving images by making extremely short films, which Khader refers to as “moving still lifes,” as well as singular photographs that play with high contrasts and the conventions of tableau vivant, Khader’s work combines the beauty of Italian neorealist cinema with the horrifying churn of contemporary warfare. He photographs and prints almost exclusively in black and white. He has won a slew of awards. He joined Magnum last summer as a nominee. His second photobook, Dying to Exist, was published last year. His “moving still lifes” add up to over fifty-five hours of footage, which he is slowly transforming into a feature-length film. His first solo museum show, focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine and titled Yawm al-firak (Farewell Day), after a line from a poem by the great eighth-century poet of the Islamic world Abu Nuwas, is currently on view at Foam in Amsterdam, accompanied by a forthcoming publication of the same name featuring handwritten notes and Polaroids, subtitled Diary of an Invisible Genocide. For Khader, who lives between the Netherlands and Palestine, his success has been both remarkably efficient and impressively assured. More so than achievements or critical acclaim, however, the story of how Khader got himself to Syria reveals how an all-consuming methodology has defined his visual style.

“I like to stay with people,” Khader says. “A lot of the real work happens when the camera is off.”

In Arabic, Khader’s first name means “falcon” or “hawk.” When I spoke to him by phone during a brief stay in Paris, he joked that his name had predestined him to become a photographer. “See? Sharp-eyed,” he said, laughing. Because he was born in 1990, Khader’s first camera was, in fact, an LG Prada smartphone, which he used as a teenager to take pictures in the West Bank district of Nablus. He wanted to be able to look at them after he’d left, to summon images of the homeland in his mind whenever he was away. This was a pre-professional pursuit. By the time Khader landed at the start of his career and was finding his way through several different modes of image making all at once, it struck him that no one in the mainstream news media was paying enough attention to how, in places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, which had been destroyed by years, even decades, of chaotic yet systematic violence, people were carrying on with their daily lives. Khader’s ongoing bodies of work show people young and old, combatants and bystanders, as they fight, survive, grieve, and mourn but also dance, sing, play games, and experience quieter moments of tenderness or reprieve: men and boys resting sideways on oversize armchairs, a balloon seller eating a Popsicle, two boys waiting for a pair of bumper cars to begin, kids celebrating a holiday in absurdly matching festive dress.

Sakir Khader, On this earth we belong, Rudjib, Nablus, 2023

Khader doesn’t parachute into war zones. He doesn’t join official military embeds. Without narrative or polemic, his images create a withering critique of US foreign policy from the so-called War on Terror until today. He immerses himself in the lives of his subjects, who are people he knows or has come to know. “I like to stay with people,” he explained. “I blend in fully. I build relationships. A lot of the real work happens when the camera is off.”

Given that he no longer considers himself (or introduces himself as) a journalist, Khader’s status as a Dutch-born, Arabic-speaking, Muslim-observant Palestinian has served him well. It has opened doors to communities that otherwise might not have been so welcoming.

But Khader is also excruciatingly careful not to instrumentalize his or his subjects’ identities. He doesn’t resort to clichés. “I don’t want to shoot olive trees and kaffiyehs,” he said, citing two well-worn symbols of Palestinian struggle. What holds his still and moving images together—and protects them from glorifying the violence that is undeniably his milieu—is Khader’s ability to find in his subjects the same pluck, charm, and relentless perseverance that brought him to Syria six years ago.

Sakir Khader, The neighborhood is no more, Darayya, Syria, 2025

Deep scars in a paradise, Darayya, Syria, 2025
All photographs © the artist/Magnum Photos”>

Sakir Khader, Deep scars in a paradise, Darayya, Syria, 2025
All photographs © the artist/Magnum Photos

Intifada in the village: The battle for Mount Sabih, Beita, Nablus, Palestine, 2021″>

Sakir Khader, Intifada in the village: The battle for Mount Sabih, Beita, Nablus, Palestine, 2021

To be sure, Khader has photographed a prodigious amount of weaponry, including slingshots, rocket launchers, hand grenades, pistols, and AK-47s. His portraits include men in balaclavas, men missing eyes and limbs, and boys who lift their shirts to show gruesome scars. Although he has, on occasion, captured groups of women joking for the camera, his image world is largely male and shattered by violence. “This is the raw reality,” Khader told me. “I can’t filter it out.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting,” under the column Viewfinder.

A Photographer’s Scavenged Still Lifes

Aperturewp — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:34:04 +0000

The problem with still lifes is that they’re often lifeless, as suggested by the Italians’ term for the genre: natura morta. From this problem, the photographer Lia Darjes, based in Hamburg and Berlin, is making a life’s work. Her latest pictures, recently collected in her photobook Plates I–XXXI (2024), appear to be formal arrangements but are, in fact, highly improvised tableaux in which snails, squirrels, ladybugs, and other fauna pay visits to the backyards of Berlin and parts unknown. They scavenge the leftovers of human congregation, triggering Darjes’s camera. They revel and rest. One cat, imperious, stares into the lens with convincing intent. Ants line up on watermelon slices like animated seeds. Raccoons paw crumbs and scream into the night. Squirrels, they’re just like us. They party hard, knocking over glasses, making a scene.

Lia Darjes, Plate XXX, 2022

Photojournalism was Darjes’s first passion. Her previous series include portraits of Germans recently converted to Islam and photographs of temporary market stands by the roadside in Kaliningrad, Russia. Those images, with their hunks of meat and ripened fruit, summon the old tradition of vanitas, with its formal satisfaction, all vibrant foreground and dark beyond. Their ad hoc nature tells us that change—like the rubles piled before plastic cups of raspberries in one of her photographs—is all.

Lockdown came, and as the world stilled, memento mori were suddenly everywhere. Darjes relocated to her parents’ house in the German countryside. “I was sitting in the garden one day,” she said, “just thinking, What’s next? And I saw a squirrel jumping on our garden table. I thought, I wonder if I can recreate that.” The world reopened. She made plans—birthday parties for her kids, tea dates with mentors—and then plans for the after-parties, in which tablescapes of balloons and dirty dishes and cups of water to clean paintbrushes were left out overnight. The guest list was self-determined. A crow arrives and selects a perfect cherry from a bunch, seeming to offer it to the viewer. A field mouse sniffs out whether the printed image of a bird on a tablecloth might be a predator. Her images may tilt toward tweeness, particularly in comparison to the technical marvels made by the Dutch still life artists in the seventeenth century, whose painterly efforts embody the futility of trying to cheat mortality. But her work is anchored by the idea that when the stakes are life and death, we all must improvise.

Plate VI, 2022; from the series Plates I–XXXI

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Collect this limited-edition print by Lia Darjes from the artist’s series Plates I-XXXI, featured in the “Photography & Painting” issue of Aperture.

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Plate VI, 2022; from the series Plates I–XXXI

$ 700.00

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Description

During lockdown, the Berlin-based artist Lia Darjes relocated to her parents’ countryside home. In an essay by Jesse Dorris for the spring issue of Aperture magazine, “Photography & Painting,” Darjes reflects on that time: “I was sitting in the garden one day, just thinking, ‘What’s next?’” she recalls. “Then I saw a squirrel jump onto our garden table, and I thought, ‘I wonder if I can recreate that.’” Despite her early passion for photojournalism, Darjes has long been seduced by the dramatic artifice of the Dutch vanitas tradition. “I struggled, because I was always interested by still life, but it’s made up—arranged,” she says. This photograph is part of the series Plates I–XXXI, the imaginative outcome of her first encounter with that neighborly squirrel. Inspired by that moment, she began orchestrating picnics and luncheons on tables in gardens of friends and family. She leaves behind delicate remnants of these meals, subtly coaxing future guests. Their movements, in turn, trigger the camera, which has been left in place for hours or even days. The result is a fairytale-like scene featuring a coal tit whose presence serves as a quiet testament to the space where the natural world and the human world gracefully intersect.

Details

Lia Darjes
Plate VI, 2022; from the series Plates I–XXXI
Archival pigment print
9 1/2 × 11 3/4 in.
Edition of 20 + 3 artist proofs
Printed, signed, and numbered by the artist

About the Artist

Lia Darjes (born in Berlin, 1984) lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin. She studied at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Darjes is known for Tempora Morte, a documentary still life study about the small stalls seen at street markets in Kaliningrad, Russia. In 2018, Darjes began teaching photography at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin, an institution she has ran together with the photographer Jörg Brüggemann since 2023. She is represented by Robert Morat Galerie.

A Photographer’s Scavenged Still Lifes

Of her previous work, Darjes said, “I struggled. Because I was always interested in the still life. But it’s made-up. Arranged.” The photographs in Plates offer ways out of that bind. They acknowledge the artificiality of documentation. The darkness at the edge of these frames is always a forest, but not always at night; the picnics were sometimes a pretext for the photographs, but you don’t know which ones. It’s hard to resist imposing a little vanitas-y symbolism on, say, Darjes’s image of a wasp attempting in vain to breach a Tupperware of kiwi. We’ve all been there. But we haven’t been alone, and we’re not solely in control. There are other, wilder partiers out there in the world. Here, for once, they get to call the shots.

Lia Darjes, Plate VII, 2022

Lia Darjes, Plate VI, 2022
Courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting.”

How Can Synthetic Images Render Blackness?

Aperturewp — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:12:27 +0000

In today’s humanities classrooms, the gravest anxiety stems not from the relentless corporatization of universities, or even the end of the English major, but rather from students’ nefarious use of artificial intelligence. The kids are liars, cheaters, and dumber than ever, my professorial colleagues shout, if not in so many words. AI is often polarizing: all good or all bad. In everyday life, though, many of us use AI without even knowing it: navigation, fraud-detection services, social media feeds.

To demonstrate Silicon Valley’s ironclad control over these technologies, many artists have been using AI to disrupt this kind of Manichaean thinking, looking deeply into the mirror that algorithmic hegemony holds up to our unequal society. The New York–based artist and researcher Minne Atairu came to her AI work in 2020 while studying art education, generative AI, and policy in a PhD program at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “I became interested in AI in the classroom, specifically how we can address the needs of Black students, because we learn in spaces that are very distinct,” she tells me.

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What goes by simply “AI” is, in fact, a broad spectrum of different and diverging programs, developers, materials, datasets, frameworks, and processes. Over the years, Atairu has explored a few, including an early machine learning framework called a generative adversarial network (GAN); StyleGAN2; text-to-image, text-to-3D, and text-to-video models; DALL·E 2; augmented reality; and various other flavors of machine learning. Beginning in 2020 with her Igùn series, she’s consistently scrutinized and scrambled the assumptive logic of computer vision while drawing attention to the silences and absences in Black archives.

These days, Atairu uses mostly Midjourney, a generative AI program created in 2022 that produces images based on text prompts. Recently, she began making Cornrow Studies (2024)—close-up portraits of dark-skinned Black women wearing blue and pink sculptural cornrows. Some of the pictures are so tightly framed that certain facial features are cropped out—lips, eyes, chins, foreheads. A closer look reveals that something is askew. The hair sits a little too deep on the forehead. Or the cornrows rest atop the head instead of being braided into hair strands. In one image, a Black woman has a shaved head with sea-blue braids swirling atop it, like an atomic wig or glued-on hairpiece. Bulbous sweat drips from a forehead, counterposed with tears dried on the face, tears that have funky turquoise residue. Such secretions, rather than humanizing the models, only nudge us further into the uncanny valley.

For all its allure, Atairu’s art resists the temptations of the technocapitalist aura.

Atairu’s unheimlich headshots suggest how Midjourney as a technology understands itself and its capabilities. “What I’ve tried to do as a researcher is use Midjourney as a tool to investigate the ways in which developers have paid attention to Blackness, particularly as it relates to hair and the ways that Black people present themselves,” Atairu explains. “That’s sometimes inconsistent with what the algorithm has been trained on in terms of the dataset but also how the developers themselves are thinking about Black representation in their tools.” (Many generative AI systems are trained on not simply normative images but on uncompensated labor.)

Hair and skin color—both intense signifiers of racialization—serve as leitmotifs in Atairu’s body of AI-generated portraiture, beginning with S-T-R-E-T-C-H Wigs (2021), which portrays a glitchy face and shape-shifting orbicular wig. The ongoing Blondes Braid Study started in 2023 with the following question: Can Midjourney (V4) accurately generate studio portraits of twins with “blue-black” or “plum-black” complexions and blond braids?

Minne Atairu, Blondes Braid Study, Visual Supplement, 2022

Minne Atairu, Portrait of Mami Wata, 2023

The algorithm did not provide. The Midjourney outputs had neither blue-black skin nor braids but mostly light-brown complexions and wavy, chemically straightened hair. When the artist conducted a search for “Blonde Box Braids” and “Blonde Braids” within LAION-5B—the open-source dataset of five billion internet-scraped images that Midjourney is trained on—she found that the index overrepresented caramel-complexioned Black women and white women. On the one hand, Atairu’s ongoing braids series examines the distinction between the description and the image, calling attention to the anti-Blackness, racism, and bias in generative systems. On the other, it sheds light on phenotypical obsessions, a white-supremacist insistence that we can see race.

A number of Atairu’s images appear as beautiful aesthetic objects in their own right. Tumblr-coded, they look at first glance like Afrofuturist posters, glossy magazine photoshoots, or cosmetic advertising campaigns. In the text-to-image Portrait of Mami Wata (2023), which was inspired by Nigerian folklore, a Black, thalassic goddess seems to have just emerged from the ocean, her head crowned by a frothing net of scaly platinum braids.

All this beauty is dripping with ambivalence. “It’s not just a pretty image of a Black girl made using an algorithm,” she says. “It’s more critical.” In other words, Atairu seizes on some viewers’ desire for “Black girl” beauty without complication. Her project situates the digital ethereality of AI against the grisly realities of the commodification of Black people, subverting the histories of colonialism and capitalism that made the technology possible (and profitable).

Atairu’s work goes beyond the realm of photography. For To the Hand (2023), a recent commissioned installation at the Shed, in New York, Atairu used 3D printing metal, bronzeFill, clay, and StyleGAN2 to pursue her ongoing series Igùn, which imagines a continuation of the Benin Bronzes, speculating about what could have been if the British military had not invaded present-day Edo State, Nigeria, in 1897 and looted thousands of plaques and sculptures. The resulting deposition of the oba, or king, instigated decades of artistic decline in Atairu’s homeland through a lack of royal support for artists. “The Igùn project is much more related to colonialism and how museums have held on to these objects that are considered colonial loot—for over a century,” she says. While Atairu’s research-based art often comes with ancillary materials, including her own academic articles, the subjunctive is at the heart of her practice.

For all its allure, Atairu’s art resists the temptations of the technocapitalist aura, resists the myth of neutrality. Her beguiling pictures emerge tentatively from an algorithmic sea of racism, sexism, environmental degradation, surveillance, unfair labor practices, and other conditions we live with—but might one day live without.

Minne Atairu, The Virgin and Child, 2024

Minne Atairu, from the series Cornrow Studies, 2024

Minne Atairu, Prototypes, 2020, from the series Igùn, 2020–ongoing

Minne Atairu, Prototype X, 2024, from the series Igùn, 2020–ongoing
All images courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 257, “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI.”

Charlie Engman Transforms the Internet’s Murk into Art

Aperturewp — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 15:05:25 +0000

All photographs come from somewhere—are of something. At least that’s still the premise, even as AI-generated pictures suffuse the world. A cursed image, then, is one without context: someone slicing sausage with a bootleg Windows XP disc, a motorcycle tucked into a bed, so much wayward spaghetti. From nowhere, going nowhere; a scratch in the feed.

“They feel like products of the deep internet that have this authorless, golem-like quality,” Charlie Engman says of his recent work. “Images that have taken on a life of their own, that seem to have been created from the murk of the internet rather than by any one real scenario.” His new photobook is duly titled Cursed (2024).

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Engman is typically a camera-using, straight-ahead photographer, perhaps best known for a lengthy series of revealing, bare portraits of his photogenic mother. In the last two years, though, he’s become something of an AI whisperer, employing Midjourney, DALL·E, and their ilk of generative AI programs to dredge the internet. He plumbs the mushy, statistically average but practically unreal quality that makes AI-generated pictures derivative and bad until he finds something compelling: Body horror. Misbegotten hugs. Ceramic or part-human swans wading knee-deep in impossibly shallow parking lot puddles. Waxen human-approximates crumpled on bedcovers. The interface—where people touch objects and one another, where light touches an object—is the place in which AI miscarries.

Drawing on reservoirs of sleazy hard flash, incidental still lifes, and pickling Polaroids, Engman leans into these pictures being photographs, assembled from whatever clots of photographic data float through the internet’s sewer. “I feel like, weirdly, this work is the most photographic work that I’ve ever made,” he states. In his previous output, he was trying to push and bend photography’s conventions, its history. With the AI images, “I actually felt like I was running toward photography to see how close I could get,” he says, “and what that kind of closeness would mean in this new context.”

Charlie Engman, A Cliff Overlooking Water, 2024

Charlie Engman, Boy Glint, 2024

Are his pictures technically photographs? It’s hard to say, but their source images are, or, somewhere down the line, were. Engman’s pictures draw on a latent, ghostly indexicality, the sense that light touched something, a piece of something, bounced into a lens, and now the software is doing its best impression of that light.

The images in Cursed derive primarily from Midjourney, although a few incorporate Engman’s custom models or photographs he made. It was important to him to use accessible technology. In the spirit of the “cursed” genre—popularized on Tumblr in 2015 to describe certain lo-fi photographs with an unintentional creep factor—you don’t need special training (though maybe a taste for the uncanny) to pull the most haunted accidents. This sifting is part of Engman’s process. From a slough of trawled pictures, the software replies to each prompt with four composites. He’ll feed in his own images, add both language and image prompts, and process the pictures again and again until they eke that cursed look.

The square format, the nostalgic default of Instagram via the Polaroid instant camera, is also the standard for text-to-image models. Photobook aficionados, perhaps allergic to social media’s rigid conventions, “really balked at the fact that I was making a square book,” Engman tells me. The square is too basic, too accessible—which, he continued, illuminates a tacit line of critique of AI: that it is undermining the rarefied conventions of fine art (as well as scraping images without permission). The availability of cursed images is part of their threat: Simply by dipping into the mainline, you can find something that surpasses the most studied fine-art photograph for punchy strangeness.

Engman grants that there’s something a bit perverse to having made a photobook out of this material. A binding elevates and fixes the content it contains, marking a particular state of the art even as technology rushes on. It is all the more contrarian to pause images that might have had no destiny. Engman is standing in rushing waters. He described perusing images he’d generated not two years ago and finding them outdated, the quirks of early AI (extra fingers, mismatched eyes) already digested by pop culture.

“I became excited by this idea that you could be nostalgic for the present,” he says. “There’s an experience of things moving at such a scale that you couldn’t even be present with what you were making because you are already anticipating it becoming valueless or irrelevant.” The project, of course, also pokes at the notion that AI itself is a cursed invention, rushing to the world’s end. “Does interaction with the technology curse the user?” he muses. “Does it curse the author? Does it curse the viewer?” Engman’s recent pictures ooze from our AI-crazed moment but also float free of it. Consider yourself cursed.

Charlie Engman, Watermelon, 2024

Charlie Engman, Swan III, 2024

Charlie Engman, Leaves, 2024

Charlie Engman, Ants, 2024

Charlie Engman, Bedroom Animal II, 2024

Charlie Engman, Hand to Chest, 2024
All images courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 257, “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI.”