Completed mostly in 2024, the same year that citizens of several African nations took to the polls in fateful elections, It’s Not Going to Get Better homes in on the squandered promises of long-held incumbency. It’s a familiar story throughout the Frontline States (the clutch of southern African countries, including Zambia, Botswana, and Angola, that collectively opposed apartheid), where the wheels of democracy have turned full circle, quickening expectations while heightening the sensation of free fall. In Botswana, Makepe’s home country, the Botswana Democratic Party enjoyed fifty-eight years of uninterrupted political power until November 2024, when a three-party coalition led by Duma Boko won the popular vote. Once considered one of Africa’s more stable economies (diamonds were discovered in 1967, a year after independence), Botswana endured the tumult of Seretse Khama Ian Khama’s rule from 2008 to 2018, and the ensuing years that tore that legacy asunder. 

Thero Makepe, Confusion, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Lerato, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Born in 1996 to parents who both worked as accountants, Makepe studied photography at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, where he began to refine a visual language that includes staged portraiture and reenactments that sometimes reference fables, current affairs, and family history. His dynamic, long-form approach offers viewers multiple entry points to the maze of political, professional, and personal ties that preoccupy him, flattening the boundary between South Africa and Botswana. 

Makepe’s maternal grandfather was Hippolytus Mothopeng, a jazz musician who left apartheid South Africa for Botswana (then called Bechuanaland) in 1958 and worked in both Francistown and Gaborone. Hippolytus’s uncle was Zephania “Zeph” Mothopeng, a teacher and president of the liberation movement Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, a man with unflinching eyes fittingly nicknamed “the Lion of Azania.” Zeph’s son, Johnny, played with the influential Afro jazz bands Batsumi and Marumo. With so much of this lineage to unpack, the long-form essay has been Makepe’s preferred mode of operation, encompassing diorama, immersive installation, and lighting experiments, both in reference to photography’s history and as commentary on the present. Forlorn afternoons and twilight are recurring motifs in Makepe’s oeuvre, evoking interiority as opposed to illuminating his scenes.

Thero Makepe, Kereke, 2022, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Makgadikgadi Pans, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

It’s Not Going to Get Better, initially conceived for a solo exhibition at Vela Projects in Cape Town, is a departure point for the artist. Brevity replaces the speculative sprawl of series such as Music from My Good Eye (2019) and its companion piece, We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here (2020–ongoing), which both grapple with the legacy of his matrilineal family’s twin heirlooms, music and resistance. This tighter focus led him to present the work as midsize prints. “I’d never made work in that format before,” Makepe told me recently. “I knew that, okay, these are the sorts of themes that I want to touch upon. These are the different people I know in my life, and I’m drawing upon their real lives and their situations.”

The seed for It’s Not Going to Get Better was planted in 2023 through Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning. “I was like, Wow! This feels a lot like Botswana, in terms of the conservatism that you have in [South] Korea; the military influence, the surveillance on people, and the way in which Koreans are very within themselves.” Makepe says Burning also offered a searing take on the elusiveness of class ascendancy, which surfaces in his images as both an embodied angst in his peers and a kind of intergenerational fallout.

A landlocked country of fewer than 2.5 million people, Botswana has a GDP of 19.4 billion dollars and an unemployment rate of nearly 30 percent—a figure president Duma Boko characterized as “a ticking time bomb.” The country’s shrinking economy (it registered negative three percent growth in 2024) has been overly reliant on diamonds at the expense of broader economic development, resulting in instability as synthetic diamonds increasingly erode their value. Botswana exported around five billion dollars worth of diamonds in 2022, but since then global prices have fallen by around 40 percent. Mining Weekly reported that Debswana, a joint venture between De Beers and Botswana’s government, saw a 52 percent drop in sales during the first nine months of 2024—all while the government pushes for a controlling stake in the company and a diversification of its economy.

Thero Makepe, Kalamore, 2022, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Sello, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

“In my lifetime there’s never been a more hopeless time when it comes to what you can get from politicians,” says Makepe. “There’s always been some sort of symbol of hope. It started with Nelson Mandela, and then, by the time I was a teenager, came Barack Obama. And then, you know, from my late teens to early twenties, there hasn’t ever really been a hero or icon figure like that. So when I listened to a song by rapper billy woods, whose father was part of the Pan-African struggle in Zimbabwe, he says, ‘It’s not going to get better,’ I was like, Yeah, that’s it. There’s a sense of grounding in not pretending.”

While Makepe draws from a wide pool of references—Alex Webb’s densely composed street scenes or his fellow artists of TBP Artist Collective, like Rrangwane, Kim Karabo Makin, and Legakwanaleo Makgekgenene—he always cites South African artist Lebohang Kganye, whose work has been on view recently in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Fotografiska Berlin. “She was instrumental to my development as a photographer and what I perceived as what could be done within this medium—that you don’t have to just be a traditionalist,” he says. Makepe’s earlier work, particularly Monna O Montsho (2018), which uses cardboard cutouts and miniature furniture to reconstruct mythological tales from his childhood, borrows from the trajectory of Kganye, who has increasingly incorporated theatrical sets, three dimensionality, and variations of scale into her work. For now, Makepe is certain that he wants to continue in the vein of experimental works like Fly Machine/Mogaka (2018), which uses diorama and a camera obscura to reconstruct the 2018 plane crash of Botswana Defence Force pilot Major Cliff Manyuni. “I want to get back to doing things that are a little bit more surreal,” he says. Given the burden of shared histories between Botswana and South Africa, perhaps this decision is as much about creative expansion as it is about self-care.

Thero Makepe, Under Surveillance, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Sharpeville, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Moral Compass, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, Father and Daughter, 2022, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Shattered Dreams, 2023, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, Modimo a mo Tlamele, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, The Place that Dried Up, 2023, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, Re Mmogo Akere?, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Coers, a photographer based in Rotterdam, doesn’t know why his grandfather’s passing made the papers. His grandfather died of a heart attack, not of the deadly new disease that was then ripping across the globe. “He was just a regular guy,” Coers told me. But Coers suspects that his death caused alarm because he was technically a foreigner. His grandfather had lived most of his life in the Netherlands, after he and his mother fled the Indonesian National Revolution that erupted in the wake of World War II. He had returned to Indonesia in 2015.

Sander Coers, Holiday Scene II, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Golden Hour (Asleep), 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Coers’s grandfather almost never talked about his childhood. Born to a Dutch colonial soldier and an Indonesian mother, he was interned with his mother in a concentration camp by the Japanese, who sent his father to Burma, where he died of an illness while working on the infamous “death railway,” a 258-mile train route between Thailand and Burma, the construction of which resulted in the deaths of 90,000 Southeast Asian civilians and 12,000 Allied prisoners of war. Later, he was persecuted by his Indonesian countrymen as they attempted to purge the islands of any trace of colonial occupation, including mixed children. After his grandfather’s death, Coers’s family discovered an extensive archive of photographs and documents that he had compiled: pieces of a family history shattered by war and upheaval. His return to Indonesia had been a part of a quest to hunt down the ghosts of his past. 

When his grandfather died, Coers was finishing his master’s degree in photography at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, where he was working on a project, Come Home, that dealt with issues of masculinity, self-discovery, and memory. Another project, Blue Mood (Al Mar) (2021–22), with similar concerns, followed shortly after his graduation. Dreamy and sun drenched, these pictures are precociously self-assured and emotionally resonant, recalling the atmosphere of Éric Rohmer’s summer idylls. Coers explained that the work sprang from a reckoning with the nostalgic pull of his provincial hometown of Terneuzen, which he grew up longing to escape. By returning home and attempting to capture something akin to the memories of his youth, he sought to revisit and reimagine the story of his life.  

Sander Coers, POST, 2023. AI-generated imagery

Sander Coers, POST, 2023. AI-generated imagery

Coers began a new pair of projects in the wake of his grandfather’s passing, POST (2023–24) and Eulogy (2024–ongoing), in which he expanded the ambit of his fascination with the slippery nature of memory and identity to encompass his family’s history as well as his own. In POST, Coers fed photos from old family albums into an AI model, which then spit fragmentary facsimiles of a past that never existed: a dark-skinned man frolicking in a field of flowers; a white boy splashing through the surf; the slope of a man’s suit jacket shoulder. Coers’s interest in masculinity, which anchored his earlier work, is broadened here to include the question of cultural heritability. 

“The way I view AI is that it’s sort of a collective memory of humankind,” Coers told me. But he is aware that AI constructs our collective memory strangely. It produces images that are more archetype than archive, assemblages of our collective fantasies about ourselves. Underscoring the constructed nature of these AI images, and, by extension, the cobbled together quality of both masculinity and memory, Coers UV printed the pictures from this project on plywood, adding extra material and metaphoric dimensions to his work.    

For Eulogy, an ongoing project he began in 2024, Coers delved deeper into his grandfather’s past, and the legacies of colonialism and conflict that shaped it. As in POST, he continued to work with both AI-generated images and archival materials, but he also journeyed to Indonesia to make pictures of his own. The resulting works, some of which are printed on hand-glazed tile as well as plywood, provide gauzy, evocative glimpses of a past both idealized and indistinct. It is a time that Coers knows only through pictures, that his grandfather sought first to forget, and then, perhaps, redeem through remembrance. 

Coers is continuing his grandfather’s final project, but he’s doing so with the knowledge that it is a futile one. Looking at these works, I am reminded of a passage in a letter written by the fictional protagonist of Chris Marker’s great cinematic disquisition on memory, San Soleil. “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,” Marker writes through his character, “which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”

Sander Coers, Jens (Calvin Klein), 2020, from the series Come Home

Sander Coers, Three Brothers Climbing Rocks, 2020, from the series Come Home

Sander Coers, Warm (View on Salt Mountains), 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Waving Around a Flower in the Sun, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, David in Pink with Cyan, 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Sunburnt Car, 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Jens in White with Blue, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Shade, 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Holiday Scene, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Pink Stop (Salt), 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Office), 2025, from the series Untitled, India

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Water), 2025, from the series Untitled, India

Famously hostile to its women, Delhi’s landscapes, especially in times of unrest, can thwart their access. “The street does not favor me as it does a man,” Bhushan says. “And I think that that’s where I’m starting from.” This disadvantage might propel a young woman photographer toward elaborate tactics, such as staged reconstructions of past events. Over the last year, Bhushan spent her summer and winter breaks doing precisely this, shooting every day in Delhi, using two different cameras, a large-format 4-by-5 “not commonly seen in India” and a 35mm. She staged locations covered by the international press during the heatwave that wracked India in 2024. The idiosyncratic criterion was a way of asserting control over an “unforgiving” geography. Collaborating with aspiring actors from Delhi’s informal street theater communities, who were largely migrants from smaller towns and villages, she photographed young men playing the roles of the policemen and protestors who could well have been part of, for instance, the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act five years ago.

The nature of the camera influences the choreography and distance between Bhushan and her protagonists; the photographer’s body becomes a focal point. Elaborating on how she set up the shots, Bhushan says, “I photographed while the actors perform the seemingly ‘actual’ event; they do not know when I will choose to make the photograph. I was also often pushed, shoved, and me and my camera hit by lathis during the making of these.”

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear (I), 2019

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear (III), 2019

The untitled series, shot with the 4-by-5 camera, depicts the characters of the policemen in medias res at the untended, vaguely industrial, and desolate frontiers of Delhi. Bhushan composed the images without a viewfinder, shooting without seeing. She gave little direction to the participants, because “once the film is in and you’re exposing the negative, you’re not looking at anything. I don’t see what I’m doing as I press the shutter. I am positioning my actors, but they’re not standing still. And standing still is very important to the 4 x 5.” On the other hand, in the series Waiting on images that won’t appear, the fluidity of the 35mm camera places Bhusan—and by extension the viewer—in the thick of what resembles a first-person record of police brutality. Shooting these images, she felt like a photojournalist, “because I’m moving while the performance is happening and there’s multiple times where I have gotten hit because I’m so within the moment.”

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Soldier), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (The Moment Before MY Camera Is Taken Away), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

The landscape, too, was in conversation with the camera, becoming yet another participant. “I had to wait for the landscape to perform for me,” Bhushan explains. “The dust, for example.” There were no fixed roles—actors played both policemen and protestors depending on the day’s schedule—destabilizing fixed notions of identity over the course of the series. Nor were there scripts or pre-planned scene blocks, leading to Bollywood-inspired improvisations: “You want to let the actor be the actor. What’s really interesting is the take on masculinity when they’re in uniform. I think there’s a shift in power.” In one photograph, a policeman stands arms akimbo in the dust-hazed background, while an out-of-focus colleague prowls towards the camera, once again casting Bhushan in the role of intrepid photojournalist, recalling the risks that chroniclers of state violence often take. “In this emulation of a journalist, that image is the last one before my camera’s taken away from me,” she says. “But in reality, I would never have access to it.”

Vani Bhushan, Archival Photograph (1), 2024

Vani Bhushan, Darkroom Print (in collaboration with the Lens Media Lab), 2024

This play with facticity, an increasingly common mode of image-making in the post-documentary era, runs through Bhushan’s work. A bleak off-highway wide shot, a decrepit airplane, and tear-gas-misted policemen offer clues to an ominous but irrecoverable chain of events. During her darkroom experiments, Bhushan printed these photographs from the untitled series on paper aged in an environmental chamber, bestowing on them an unsettling vintage quality, as though they’d been sourced from a dusty old police file, or perhaps film stills from a defunct studio’s detritus. The ambiguous effect is enhanced by the archival disaster images found in a box at a secondhand market that intersperse the series—the flotsam of what looks like a tram submerged in monsoon deluge and the scene of motorcycle accident. Bearing the stamp of a famous old tabloid’s art department, they intrigued Bhushan, who wondered if they were actual images or if they had been staged. 

The instability of truth was inscribed by the camera itself onto Bhushan’s images. In the photographs from Waiting on images that won’t appear, the left quarter of the frame is covered by a black vertical strip, the result of inadvertent shutter drag. The effect gives the sense that the photographer was shooting from behind a screen, her visual field occluded and her vision therefore unreliable. “I don’t like the term half-truth,” she says. “A half is when something is divided equally. The black shroud on the left cannot be equated to the event on the right. They both have separate meanings, but are read as one plane.” Perhaps one way to think about the relationship between the two sections is to compare it to that between object and subject, between history as it happened and as it was experienced, when it becomes memory. 

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear, 2025

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear, 2025

Bhushan considers her work a record of recollections, both unauthorized and official, rather than hard realities. Considering the figure of the photojournalist and the artifice of the archive, she questions the medium’s claims of verisimilitude and the integrity of photography collections. In discussing her work, “truth comes up a lot, document comes up a lot. I think the word ‘document’ is flattening, both formally and conceptually.” Bhushan is interested, instead, in the camera’s ability to reveal truths, citing revelations yielded in the darkroom off the blindly shot 4-by-5 negatives scratched by Delhi’s dust, or the accidental shutter drag of the new 35mm camera. “I learn from the medium when I make the image . . . I think of the photograph as a didactic device.” The word document comes from the Latin docere, to teach. There are lessons in revisiting well-documented narratives of contemporary state violence. Bhushan’s practice reflects on how history (and, indeed, truth), as she puts it, “exists in imagery in one way, and then within memory in another.”

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Plane), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Dust Storm), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Photography was merely a hobby then, a way of documenting life in college, his friends, and his city. After some encouragement from an uncle who saw his pictures, Protick decided to enroll in night classes at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in 2009. Established in 1998 by the photographer and activist Shahidul Alam, Pathshala was (and still is) unlike any other institution in South Asia, founded with a strong documentary focus. When Protick arrived, he was surrounded by photojournalists from the region, but it wasn’t until he saw the work of Robert Adams and William Eggleston, another photographer-musician, that he felt a deep resonance. “This is what photography can also be,” he recalls thinking. “This is what I wanted to create.”

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing

Protick splits music and images as two distinct parts of his journey as an artist, but over the last fifteen years—and across projects spanning photography, video, and sound—he’s built a career out of listening. His work uses historical frameworks rooted in Bangladesh and the wider Bengal region to unpack questions about photography’s relationship to time and memory. Combining deep research, a patient eye, and an intuition for visual rhythm, his approach negotiates the impulses of the photojournalist with those of the musician. “Musical composition is such an editorial process; you build a logic through it,” he says. “That selectiveness is vital, and it came to me naturally as a photographer.”

Protick’s compositions are quiet and spacious, inviting a wide field for association despite their highly specific context. In one of his earliest series, Leen (Of River and Lost Lands) (2011–ongoing), he photographs the Padma River that cuts through Bangladesh. Waterways dominate the country’s topography, and the river is embedded into its national and cultural story. In college, Protick read the novel Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman of the Padma) by prolific Bengali writer Manik Bandopadhyay, which exposed him to the narrative potential of the river, an artery signaling both life and destruction.

Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. & Mrs. Das, 2012–16

Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. & Mrs. Das, 2012–16

He later drew a connection to the American highway, and the work of Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, and Stephen Shore from the 1950s to ’70s. “In the US, the entire country is road,” Protick says. “But it’s not the same here. The traveling mode is the river, and it’s always been the lifeblood.” On the riverbanks, land and livelihoods are at perpetual risk of being swallowed up by flooding. Over multiple trips, Protick observed the Padma’s eroding embankments with great care, using a subdued photographic palette to represent the calm yet alarming ticking of a geological clock.

In the series Mr. & Mrs. Das (2012–16), Protick telescopes into a single apartment in Dhaka, where he photographs his aging grandparents in their final days. His images of sparse interiors contrast with archival imagery of his subjects’ life as a young couple. The whitened, near-clinical palette reappears, isolating seemingly nondescript objects—telephones, vases, frames, loose wires, suitcases—to tell a larger story through fragments. As on the river, Protick attempts to grasp time’s pervasive crawl, and from this stillness honors the ordinary, intimate details that furnish a shared life.

Nature, memory, and time gradually became thematic tentpoles for Protick. His video work Raśmi (2017–20) projects these ideas onto a cosmic scale. A montage of images creates a constellation of flashing associations between light and dark, abstract and figurative scenes, and planetary and microscopic degrees—all layered over music composed by Protick himself. We move from lightspeed to the lumbered march of historical time in the series Jirno (2016–ongoing), meaning “ruins” in Bangla. Here, Protick uses serene, long-exposure compositions to depict abandoned feudal estates, once owned by Hindu landlords from pre-Partition Bengal, now decayed and returning to the landscape.

Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21

Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21

The images, shot in black-and-white and often in hazy conditions, force dense greenery to flatten against the buildings’ architectural contours. “There’s always an extra thing happening, even in a very static, still moment,” Protick says of his approach. “Nature becomes more present in the photograph.” The colonial-era buildings stand as frozen testaments of the region’s transformation (or lack thereof), and the place of the past in the present. If the story of Bengal over the twentieth century is in some ways the story of migration, Protick mines for what is left behind.

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing

Sarker Protick, from the series Ishpather Poth (Crossing), 2019–23

The marks of movement reemerge as a theme in Ishpather Poth (Crossing) (2017–23), which traces the built legacy of the Bangladesh Railway, once part of the sprawling train network that traversed the historical Bengal region. Following two partitions—of India in 1947 and Pakistan in 1971—many lines on the railway were severed from their ends. As in Jirno, Protick expresses historical time through the stoic language of the built form; industrial remnants of colonial rail workshops and power stations, abandoned offices and bungalows, and aging railway towns.

In one image, the steel mouth of the Hardinge Bridge opens into a mile of track over the Padma. The bridge—which evokes the twin legacies of colonial engineering and the Bangladesh Liberation War—also appears in the Leen series, this time from the perspective of the Padma below. Both projects brought Protick back to the Pabna District in central Bangladesh, home to one of the largest railway junctions in the country, and to the Padma. “Every time I finish a project, I somehow find a layer for another,” he says.

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24

Take a step back and a greater tapestry emerges. The river, the ruin, and the railway become interconnected protagonists in a story spanning centuries and national borders. Protick’s latest series, Awngar (Ash to Ash) (2024), recently exhibited at C/O Berlin, adds another layer. Made across modern-day India and Bangladesh, the series explores the linked development of railways and the coal mining industry under British rule. Its images and video works are characteristic of Protick’s style, atmospheric and rich in allusion. Landscape views of marred coal mines and videos of explosions juxtapose more meditative scenes of mining offices and coal-black surfaces. Predatory capitalist and colonial extraction have mercilessly shaped Bangladesh’s ecological reality, the series argues. “Awngar” is the Bengali word for coal in a red-hot state, ready to combust, and the series associates this catastrophic, latent energy with imperial and industrial ambitions in the region.

Installation view of Sarker Protick: Awngar at C/O Berlin, 2025
Photograph by David von Becker

Installation view of Sarker Protick: Awngar at Crespo Open Space, Frankfurt, 2025
Photograph by Jens Gerber

Memory is difficult source material. While many of these explorations are historically embedded, they raise universal questions about the power of the image to illuminate a place. These questions do not end behind the camera for Protick, who has been on the faculty of Pathshala since 2013 and acts as the co-curator of Asia’s longest-running international photography festival, Chobi Mela, which will return for its eleventh edition this December, in Dhaka. Across his work, Protick frames the past with the present, where looking constitutes both remembering and recomposing. Robert Adams once said of his forty years of work on the American West, that, “by looking closely at specifics in life, you discover a wider view.” In his stillness and attention, Protick composes his own.

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24
All photographs courtesy the artist

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

David Gilbert, Drama at Sunset (Summer), 2013

David Gilbert, Solar System, 2023

Photographs are comprised of three essential elements—light, fixative, and ground, usually paper—which freeze-frame the ever-changing world in simplest matter. Since Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844), the medium has been understood as an index of loss. The simple stuff that Gilbert photographs isn’t meant to last: drawings and collages on paper that are usually destroyed by the time their image circulates. Instead, they’re preserved in the paper stock of his photographic prints. In Gilbert’s studio, the lens always comes last, even though it’s the first thing we see. “The camera is the glue that holds things in place,” he says. This recursive tendency is part of what makes his photographs more than they seem.

David Gilbert, Hereafter, 2022

David Gilbert, Window Frame, 2023

Fox Talbot’s first photograph was of the slanting light through the window at Lacock Abbey, transferred from paper negative to salted paper. Conforming to the pictorial standards of his time, he composed his images like Dutch genre paintings. There’s a similarly Vermeer-like quality to Gilbert’s window photographs, several of which appeared in Flutter, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, which was presented last year at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem. The checkered wallpaper in Hereafter (2021) recalls the floor patterns in old master scenes of domestic life, while the play of natural light and shadow endows the photograph with its alluring sense of depth. The light is much flatter in Stencil (2021), but in this respect it mimics the titular paper cut-out at the picture’s center, and the way that photographs themselves are produced from negative images. The chiaroscuro in Window Frame (2023) is so intense that it’s difficult to tell negative from positive, solid from air.

Installation views of Flutter at the North Carolina Museum of Art, 2024
Courtesy the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem

In contrast, other photographers have used paper to render architectural features as simulacra. The meticulously constructed paper sets of Thomas Demand, with their flat, matte surfaces, mimic the photo paper upon which their images are printed. Casting no shadows, they appear unnervingly real. James Casebere’s paper architectural models are dramatically illuminated with studio lights, but are likewise too perfect to be entirely convincing. Such analog art, situated in an uncanny valley, seems to predict the advent of AI-generated imagery. And then there’s Gilbert’s Night, Night (2015), with its crudely-painted cardboard building model sitting before a set of clashing curtains decorated with butterflies and stars. Such assemblages, by contrast, are full of jagged cuts, curls, and other hand-hewn imperfections, which lend them an almost comical pathos. Gilbert’s work wears its heart on its sleeve.

Its decorative elements are the marks of a tender obsession. The unapologetically kitschy Cloud Clutter (2018), with its tableau of fake birds and flowers, colorful mugs and tins, straws, feathers, marbles, and a wide variety of store-bought art supplies, could be a queer bedroom collection or the aftermath of a crafting party. Several of his photographs depict sets with painted or patterned backdrops and bright footlights—Constellations (2020), Full House (2019), and Center Stage (2019)—like living room theaters where the performers have just left the stage. They recall Jack Smith, who used mass-produced materials to transform his East Village apartment into a queer fantasyland for renegade films and performances, or James Bidgood, whose long-lost cinematic masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971), remastered this year by the Museum of Modern Art, made horny harems, docks, and country idylls from cut-up prom dresses, tinsel, and beads. 

David Gilbert, Small Erotic Picture (Spring), 2013

David Gilbert, Grand Dame, 2019

In Smithian spirit, Gilbert scatters camp, erotic Easter Eggs throughout his pictures, like painted penises both big (Pink Thing, 2019) and small (Small Erotic Picture (Spring), 2013). Gone Girl and Grande Dame (2019) could be portraits of Harlem Renaissance queens by Carl van Vechten, but with no bodies, just drag. As critic Matthew Schneier observed in the catalog for Heaven and Earth, Gilbert’s 2023 exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York, “Gilbert is a consummate squirreler of set pieces, and the studio is a stage.”

Nick Mauss echoes this notion in Body Language (2023), his recent study of the photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa co-authored by Angela Miller. “The early twentieth century artist’s studio was a site for the creation of queer ‘counterpublics,’” he notes—a place for collaborative performances, discussions, and intimate exchanges of albums and other ephemera. The gently curling paper cutouts, tinsel garlands and fake flowers in Gilbert’s photographs recall the cellophaned interior of artist Florine Stettheimer’s Manhattan salon, or the studio sets built by Platt Lynes and van Vechten, where both men photographed countless models, lovers, and friends. “A resistance to the effects of market-based public circulation led these artists to specify the terms of their work’s access to a limited ‘inner’ public, not unrelated to the gesture of sharing the contents of their scrapbooks,” Mauss writes. This may be why Gilbert’s work feels so intensely private, like a scrapbook for a tightly knit circle of friends. Its cut, torn, and folded surfaces carry a queer wish for other worlds—or utopias—to emerge from the waste-paper of this one. 

That wish takes full form in Castle (2024), a tracing-paper schloss which Gilbert photographed in beguiling shadow and printed at larger-than-life scale, enhancing its architectural illusionism. But unlike the artificial light in photographs by those architectural illusionists, Demand and Casebere, the slanting glow imprinted on Gilbert’s works is almost always natural, illuminating traces of the artist’s hand that seem just as evanescent. As that light changes and fades, so too will these constructions be dismantled and repurposed to make something new. They bear an entwined melancholy and hopefulness often shared by works that can be characterized as “queer,” in the sense that theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz used it to signify “a horizon imbued with potentiality,” something which has either recently gone or “is not yet here.” These photographs aren’t indexes—they’re dreams. 

David Gilbert, Castle, 2024

David Gilbert, Stencil, 2023
Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Sara Kontar, “Travel Document for refugees allow to enter all countries except: Syria.” As a refugee you had to give up your passport and replace it with a “Travel Document for Refugee,” from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, A view from our home in Paris, 2023

That journey had been hard, and in a way, Kontar was relieved not to have any visual reminders of it. But she remembered it, dreamed about it, and those images started to haunt her. It turned out that making new images, not casual snapshots with her phone but more planned-out photographs with a camera, helped ease her mind. “Since I was young, I wanted a camera, but it was really expensive, and I couldn’t afford it,” Kontar recalled. In Paris, she went to art school and studied animation. A classmate was selling her camera. “It was cheap, so I bought it,” Kontar said, adding with a laugh, “I didn’t choose photography. It chose me.”

Sara Kontar, “If you weren’t here I would have really felt exiled.” My mother and her two friends, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, Someone told me that we carry memories of the past in our hair, so I asked my mother to cut it all, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, An auto-portrait with my mother after she cut my hair, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Kontar’s body of work—across several different series of archival collages, documentary photographs, and experimental films—returns again and again to the question of exile, not only as a metaphorical space, or a set of lived experiences, but also as an adversary, as a tangled ball of bureaucratic red tape. Therefore, I Cut (2023) is both a collection of portraits and still lifes—hands holding a pair of scissors, two passports on a bed—and an unfolding narrative about a group of women who find everyday trust in each other. Them Syrians (2024–ongoing) chronicles the tangled relations between Lebanon and Syria as they play out among the old stones and historical scars of a mountain village. 

In Syria, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, like that of his father before him, was explicitly built to fend off coups. The prison system, the many layers of intelligence services, the brutal structures of an authoritarian state were all constructed to absorb, co-opt, diminish, and defeat any effort to overthrow the government. When protests swept across the Arab world fourteen years ago, unleashing all kinds of hopes and dreams for a better future, Syria was the rocky shore on which those aspirations crashed, deformed themselves, and died.

Sara Kontar, The blurry portrait of Majeda, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, Family archive, from the series Paper Home, 2024–ongoing

Assad survived and seemed immoveable. When a coalition of rebel factions suddenly stormed the capital last year, and Assad just as suddenly fled Damascus for Moscow, it was a shock. For the fourteen million Syrians who had been displaced from their homes between 2011 and 2024, half of whom had left the country altogether, it was a shock complicated by laws and statutes that were blind to this dramatic change in circumstances. For the 46,000 Syrians granted asylum in France, returning home would mean voiding their refugee status. That means they are forbidden from going back to Syria, even for a short visit, unless they are willing to leave France forever, or if they are willing to become French citizens first. That is the predicament Kontar is exploring, to powerful and ruminative effect, in the series Paper Home (2024–ongoing), where bureaucratic hurdles stand in the way of real justice and equality.  

Sara Kontar, A family picture captures the essence of unity despite physical distance. Members are scattered across the globe, with some in Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Kurdistan, from the series Paper Home, 2024–ongoing

Sara Kontar, Lava and Kais find themselves in the cramped confines of the 14 cubic meters student room, from the series Paper Home, 2024–ongoing

Four years after arriving in Paris, Kontar suddenly recovered all the images she had lost. By that point she was experimenting with different materials and modes of image-making. She printed the previously missing images as grainy cyanotypes. For the installation Towards a Light (2022), she arranged them over column of texts and wallpaper replicating an image of the sea. Although the texts tell of a harrowing passage—trying to reach Greece by boat, fighting with smugglers—the images that so troubled Kontar for years appear tender, almost beautiful. “After that, I started documenting the lives of people around me,” Kontar explained. “Everybody’s lost.” People are living in welfare associations, with roommates, far outside their norms. “But when they come together as a group, I love this atmosphere. What I love about documentary is that when you live through these hard stories, the camera becomes a third eye, to look [with] and also to appreciate. It’s another relationship with a space, with exile. All photographers are outsiders. But this is my way out.”

Sara Kontar, Last image of my brother and me, taken by our father in Syria in 2015 on a bus, with the city’s reflection in the window, from the series Towards a Light, 2022
Courtesy the artist

Sara Kontar, An image of my mother embracing my brother upon our arrival in Paris in early 2016, after a two-month journey seeking asylum and crossing multiple borders. My mother had been in France for six months prior, from the series Towards a Light, 2022

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Yıldıran’s images are polyphonic; their projects overlap. Many photographs are rich with autoethnographic elements. The Dispossessed contains dimly lit scenes captured in the Black Sea mountains and valleys of their ancestry. In darkness, a flashlight exposes a rural woman or a detail in the landscape with such brightness that it turns them into surfaces with newborn vitality. Yıldıran uses flashlights extensively “because this is what women who work and live in those mountains do.” In one image, a woman appears faceless against a dark background. Yıldıran had instructed her to point the flashlight to her face. “I cherish the performative aspect of photography,” they told me.

Yıldıran spent many summers returning to and taking pictures of Çaykara, or “lower village,” which lies in a V-shaped valley in the Pontic Mountains. Nomadic Turkish tribes, Armenians, and Greek-speaking Christians populated the region for centuries. Traces of its history as part of the Byzantine, Trebizond, and Ottoman Empires remain. In 1915, during the Caucasus Campaign of World War I, the Russian Army invaded. The ensuing decade saw the Ottoman extermination of some three hundred and fifty thousand Pontic Greeks. Today, Çaykara has a population of about twelve thousand.

On their visits, Yıldıran tried to embrace and understand the place. Portraying women and animals that for centuries formed “an alliance of mountain creatures,” they said, was a means of announcing, “We’re here to ponder the memory of our homeland.” Yıldıran joined their mother, aunt, and other relatives as they picked nuts. Taking pictures, walking around, and trying to be helpful proved therapeutic. The fog that covered the view created sublime landscapes. A woman burns fallen leaves; four women pray before lunch; a goat is milked in a barn.

In this fairy-tale land, Yıldıran’s dreamy images capture a historical process of dispossession. Yıldıran’s mother, who studied dentistry before returning to her hometown, couldn’t own a house because of an old custom that says only men could buy property there. “I realized my work was about being guests for life. About the desire to belong to a place but being rejected by it.” (The Kuşmer Highland is deeded to 373 households residing in Çaykara, which prevents people who emigrated from the village from acquiring property.) “For some reason, I’m taking all these depressive, dark, uncanny images amidst so much natural beauty,” they said. “When I looked at my photos, I noticed they’re all sad because of this cloud of dispossession.”

As Yıldıran frequented Çaykara in the mid-2010s, social protests were rocking Turkey and testing the patience of its authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Yıldıran skipped class to join protests at Cerattepe, where thousands marched against planned mining activities by cronies of Erdoğan; eventually, because they were failing her coursework, they left college. Women led the charge in these protests against mining: blowing whistles, playing accordions and drums, banging pots and pans. They inspired Yıldıran to spend a month in 2015 tracking, climbing mountains, and photographing local activists, with an eye to “preserve these things and to act as their memory,” they said. “To help me recall how they felt like at the time.”

In 2016, Yıldıran won a photography contest, Foto Istanbul. The winning image shows Burçak, a trans woman walking down a street. Her back naked and straight, she stands tall against several people, primarily men, who consider her from a judging distance. Taken during Trans Pride in Istanbul, Yıldıran’s photograph, part of their Shelter series, distills the Turkish government’s intensifying assault on queer communities, known locally as lubunyalar. As efforts to marginalize and criminalize lubunyalar increased, Yıldıran’s interest in documenting the “self-exploration” of Generation Y grew: One man places his head on another’s naked body, where he takes refuge. Shaving each other’s heads, sharing lights for cigarettes, cruising, and dancing, Istanbul’s lubunyalar opened their bodies and hearts to the photographer. Yıldıran shared those images on Instagram, where they had seventeen thousand followers. Then, in 2022, Instagram closed the account. “It was because of the nudes,” said Yıldıran. “That day I learned not to trust Instagram.” Now, they are focused on maintaining an archive and not relying on social media.

For years Yıldıran mainly used a Canon AE-1 and shot their projects on 35mm film. Pressing the shutter once, instead of fifty times, felt right, and they savored “this serenity of waiting for the right image.” The technique empowered hallucinatory frames where characters seem unaware of being filmed but also act out. One example is Yıldıran’s work on Eleni Çavuş, a rifle-wielding Pontic guerrilla, who spent a year in the Nebiyan mountains in Samsun in 1924, before Turkish soldiers captured her in a cave there. Yıldıran’s mother Ayşe Durgun played the role of Eleni. According to legend, a Turkish sergeant had killed Eleni’s child, so she killed him, wore his jacket and gun, and climbed the mountain, from whence her dead body returned. “What happened to the Pontus people is rarely talked about. It’s a really dark history,” said Yıldıran. “It’s not part of the public conversation, and that pisses me off.”

Haunt the Present, Yıldıran’s first exhibition in the US—recently presented by the organization Protocinema at the Arts Center on Governor’s Island in New York—riffs on previous series, adding new layers. The photographic-sculptural installation tells a semifictional immigration story, imagining a scenario in which Yıldıran’s mother immigrates to the US from the Black Sea. The show includes images of both places, and for the images of America, Yıldıran spent weeks road-tripping from Michigan to the Pacific Ocean, driving up to ten hours daily, visiting national parks. Istanbul’s lubunyalar were an inspiration: Yıldıran observed how they began immigrating outside Turkey in large volumes over the past decade. “I felt oppressed in Istanbul, and to get away and see all the vast vistas opened me up.” The superimposed images explore the possibility of meshing the Anatolian plateau and the American landscapes and ask whether they can converse.

The intermingled fragments of Yıldıran’s vision will endure: the faces of their mother and aunt in costume, details from historic Pontus photographs, and images of Black Sea women who continue to live under the oppression of a patriarchal regime. Their multilayered compositions create new geographies. “This is why I add volume, cut, and shape my images,” they said. “I build my dreamlands.”

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Appropriating found ephemera is central to Rodriguez’s artistic practice. He was born and raised in Mexico, and his family moved to Chicago when he was thirteen. Before he was even conscious of art and the possibility of it as a career, he was obsessed with images. He cut out photos of Latin pop stars from his sister’s Eres magazines and plates from encyclopedias that his father purchased secondhand. “It was how I learned about the world,” Rodriguez says. “I knew I was gay, and it was my way of figuring out who I was because I constantly felt alienated.” Rodriguez eventually applied and was accepted into Chicago’s After School Matters program, which provides teens a stipend while they learn a trade skill of their choice. For Rodriguez, it had to be photography.

As Rodriguez went on to study art—he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania—he became intrigued by the slippage of time and mutability of a photograph’s meaning . “When I started grad school, I didn’t really want to make photos anymore,” Rodriguez says. “I was less interested in making pictures than understanding how they function.” He discovered the works of artists like Nancy Davenport and texts by the theorist Ariella Azoulay, who writes about photography as a tool for social and political interrogation. For a self-titled show with Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago, in 2018, Rodriguez juxtaposed archival photographs from the Nicaraguan Revolution with production notes and stills from the Nick Nolte film Under Fire, text from a 1983 Playboy interview with the Sandinistas, and excerpts from declassified psychological-operations manuals. Emblematic of his more documentarian mode of working, the exhibition unraveled tidy, valorizing narratives about the United States’ intervention in Latin America.

The Technoir archive inspired Rodriguez’s return to a more intimate way of engaging with pictures. “They’re private but can be read publicly,” he says. “They move through the personal and political in interesting ways.” What if, he wondered, their potential energy was intentionally harnessed to construct a shared history? His cheekily titled New Photographs series marks the first time he incorporated the Technoir archive in his work. He considered the found photograph an object of inquiry and elevated status, influenced by the Pictures Generation, particularly Sarah Charlesworth’s Objects of Desire (1983–89), in which she rephotographed iconic imagery sourced from antiquity to contemporary culture against saturated backdrops of pure color—semiotic gestures that sought to evoke and stimulate the cognitive process of desire. For New Photographs, Rodriguez superimposed Technoir’s images over his own, staging heart-to-hearts across time.

The tension between middle-class conformity and ecstatic self-liberation ripples on the surfaces of the works in New Photographs. In Untitled (Formal Portrait) (2022), a vibrant yellow blouse patterned with the childish scribble of a penis and balls looms behind Technoir in a tan suit. In Untitled (Dying Slave) (2021), the sterile, classical depiction of agony is disrupted by a gonzo shot of Technoir in a shower stall, donning a red silk bathrobe, with shoulder-length hair and a put-on expression of unrequited love. In Untitled (Madonna) (2021), an image of Technoir wearing a faded Madonna T-shirt overlays a photograph of a rumpled blanket printed with the portrait of a female Mexican revolutionary, creating a fun-house mirror of gendered power play. Clearly, for Rodriguez, the entanglements go beyond the intellectual and art historical. “Why did this person decide to make this photo?” he asks. “Why have I wanted to make the same photo in the past? There’s something there like desire, the unpacking of something.”

For his most recent show Survey, at David Peter Francis gallery in New York, Rodriguez diversified the milieu of images while dialing up negative space and what Charlesworth describes as “the coherence of photographic illusion,” expanding his visual dialogue with Technoir. He photographed what appear to be steel mobiles (some resembling Tom Burr’s abstract but sensual Addict-Love tableaux) on which hang photographs from art history, retro men’s magazines, the Technoir archive, and Rodriguez’s own portfolio and iPhone camera roll. These are not digital collages, Rodriguez clarifies, but installations he had photographed in the studio then dismantled, never to be exhibited in physical form. He cites as a reference the German art historian Aby Warburg and his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a collection of black burlap boards pinned with clusters of images that share motifs across geography and time. Warburg calls this spatiotemporal distance and one’s consciousness of it “Denkraum”—a room for reflection—and that is exactly what Rodriguez provides, more than he ever had before, in Survey.

The historical and biographical details add dimension to the constellations of images in the framed night skies that compose most of Survey, but the works resonate in their spareness. In Figure II (2024), two photographs depict a young woman in an ’80s power suit: imperious shoulder pads, ostentatious jewelry, and wild hair barely contained in a tight headwrap. In her mind, she is Linda Evangelista. “Is she a friend of Technoir’s? Is it Technoir in drag?” Rodriguez asks. The other two photographs in the frameare Rodriguez’s own. One is of a silhouetted monument to the Spanish dramatist Jacinto Benevente, of an actress lowering a Grecian mask onto her face. Another is of the Fuente de los Cántaros, a fountain in Mexico City that depicts the figure of an Indigenous woman holding pitchers from which water momentarily flows. She is modeled after Luz Jiménez, a Nahua woman whom scholars consider the face of twentieth-century Mexican art because she was the constant muse turned collaborator of artists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. The Fuente is in Parque México, close to where Rodriguez’s parents currently live, and where he believes Technoir staged one of his guerrilla fashion shoots. The photographers, past and present, are captivated by moments of becoming and understand exactly how pictures are not only representational but are themselves conduits of power.

Rodriguez’s spiritual collaboration with the Technoir archive recalls Jonathas de Andrade’s Tropical Hangover (2009), an installation of found photography and writing guided by entries from a stranger’s diary which the Brazilian artist salvaged from the trash in Recife. The result is a collective reconstruction of a city crumbling in the wake of colonialism and rapid modernization, and the human drama that persists. Like those of de Andrade, Rodriguez’s works are constructs of empathy, divining meaningful and humane coincidences across time. To this day, Technoir’s identity remains a mystery to Rodriguez. He doesn’t know whether the young man died of AIDS-related illness or grew into normative obscurity. But in the great void of what is not known, there’s the possibility of redemption through remembrance and beauty. In the triptych Sleeping Boys (2024), Rodriguez uses the same arc structure to visually connect duos of young men in repose: Rodriguez’s friend, Technoir’s lover, some male models, The Sleeping Hermaphroditus. The arc suggests a projectile, perhaps a flare, a parabolic return, a threshold, the path of droplets in the atmosphere waiting to refract light into a rainbow, or an arm wrapped around you, drawing you into an embrace.

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Born in Kuwait and raised across Egypt and the United States, Ahmed’s identity is convoluted, and that’s exactly how he thinks it should be. “I’m an amalgamation of all these things,” he tells me. His work explores the complexities of identity, history, and the performance of masculinity and citizenship—both in Egypt and globally. Central to his artistic ethos is the rejection of imposed identity categories and an inquiry into what life for men could look like beyond the confines of the status quo. He’s taken these themes to several solo exhibitions—including at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; Tintera Gallery, Cairo; and Primary, Nottingham—and has also participated in group shows, including at the Sharjah Art Museum and biennials in Dakar and Havana. 

His series, I Never Revealed Myself to Them (2016–2021), is concerned with both the politics and the nature of visibility. What does it mean to be seen as a man, as an Arab man, as a colonial subject, as an Egyptian, as none or all of those things at once? “When we center the nation-state, we have to pick a side,” he tells me. “That in itself is still centering a colonial legacy. The idea of the annihilation of the self is very important to me because, in a world full of representation and hypervisibility, to be invisible is powerful.” Absence as presence has been a motif throughout his career, which also includes a well-established textile and sculpture practice, with work that meditates on the American dream and inherited codes of masculinity.  

In the first installment of the series, You Can’t Recognize What You Don’t Know, Ahmed deliberately obfuscates his face in his self-portraits. “The idea is not about me as an individual,” he says. “It’s about the individual as representative of this performance of masculinity.” Understanding notions of “Arab masculinity” as inextricable from global patriarchy, Ahmed explains that his work invests in breaking down entrenched mythologies surrounding manhood: “the psychological aspect of it, the grotesque nature of it, and how that is deeply rooted not just in Arab culture, but in cultures around the world.” His images reimagine idealized masculinity, drawing on documentary and studio photography from across Africa and the Middle East; Greco-Roman and Pharaonic poses; and advertising aesthetics associated with men’s clothing. 

Ahmed primarily works with collage, using photographs as a material to “collapse our immediate affiliations” and construct something new “from the rubble.” He calls it an experiment. In Figure #26 (2020), Ahmed pulls a rock with rope, his muscles tensed and an enlarged shadow behind him. With a bare stone background, the composition alludes to iconic classical sculptures such as Myron’s The Discobolus, Rodin’s The Thinker, and, of course, Michelangelo’s David.

In Some Parts Seem Forgotten, the second installment, Ahmed uses archival photographs, predominantly those his father made over a fifty-year span as he was building a successful career as a businessman in the US. He situates these alongside black-and-white studio images from the previous installment to highlight a repetitive history of masculine performance within his family nucleus, as seen in Figure #2 and Figure #5 (both 2020), which show almost caricatured power stances and flexed biceps in Greek statuesque poses. Ahmed appropriates his father’s lens on the world and his belief in such constructs in order to critique the pattern manifesting within himself.

The third installment, Quickly but Carefully Cross to the Other Side, follows a nonlinear timeline where family album images from the ’50s are spliced with those from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. These include photos of a young Ahmed standing by his father in Figure #4 (2020), the scene adorned with a US flag and a classic Western car, allusions to the “self-made American dream” that his father pursued. The work encapsulates a broader discourse on identity, colonial legacies, and the complexities of cultural affiliations. In Figure #3 (2020) we see an American flag behind a lineup of navy men on a warship alongside a classic American car, with the photographer and his father posing together in traditional Gulf attire. Through his references, Ahmed builds on the work of visual artists throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa—including M’hammed Kilito, Filwa Nazer, Huda Lutfi, and Mahmoud Talaat—as well as curators and writers Farida Youssef and Nadine Nour el Din. 

When Egypt was reimagining itself into a strong, Arab nation-state, new ideas of masculinity were adopted from British colonizers, who occupied the country from 1882 to 1965. Egyptian men were disciplined away from traits considered “feminine, lazy” and instead turned into enforcers. “You are a regulator of the system,” Ahmed tells me. For him, living in an Egypt that has gone through multiple revolutions—from Nasser’s reforms to the Arab Spring—shrugging off colonial ideas of masculinity starts from deep within. “It’s not that you’re going to break free from these things because of some academic writing. That is where my spirituality comes in,” he adds.

Ahmed’s spiritual compass guides his work and centers the idea of universality, where the philosophy of an “annihilation of the self” comes into play. He strives for accessibility, emphasizing everyday experiences in his work and deconstructing ideas of the individual. To achieve this, he attempts to democratize his art to reach beyond academic realms; hence the familiar touchstones of the family photo album and the location of his studio in Ard El Lewa, a working-class neighborhood of Cairo. 

Through his collages, Ahmed dismantles the masks of societal expectations, inviting viewers to confront the intricacies of selfhood as they pertain to hypermasculinity and class, and the legacy of colonialism in enforcing them. In Figure #11 (2020), from the third installment of his series, a mosque towers above men only to be topped by a US flag, beckoning us to confront our understanding the hierarchies of power in self and in society.

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

The photographer has a knack for having beautiful encounters. He runs into fishermen, boxers, street cyclists, hooligans, vagrant kids. In his almost minimalist black-and-white images, Sierra Leone’s capital becomes its own universe that is poetic, even mythical. Everyday people are seen marching on valiantly on epic quests. Kanu’s images are ostensibly of the obvious things one might encounter in a city. But they also give a glimpse of a richer architecture of human relations, desires, and preoccupations that lurk just beneath the obvious. “We Sierra Leoneans are storytellers by nature,” he said. “You ask someone today how [their] day went, and they’ll tell you how they slept, what happened overnight, if they had mosquitoes, if it was really hot, but [it] turned out fine.”

Kanu was exposed to photography from a young age. His father would carry around a camera and take photos of his sister and him all the time. His mother worked as a cashier at one of the first digital-photography studios in the area, on Rawdon Street. A peaceful childhood was cut short: for him and many of his peers, the decades-long civil war in the country threw life as they knew it into disarray. Kanu’s family sought refuge in Guinea, until their return to Freetown in the early aughts. The image of Salone had by then become one of destruction and disorder, desolation, chaos, and fear—all the negative stereotypes of Africa that feed the Western imagination.

Photography took a back seat for Kanu until a stint as a student in Turkey rekindled his love for the art. In 2015 he moved to Sakarya, a town by the Black Sea just northeast of Istanbul, to pursue a degree in information-systems engineering, but he struggled and felt isolated. “I knew Turkish and was fluent in it,” he said, “but it was quite different when it came to the academics.” He also wasn’t truly passionate about his topic of study. “At some point, I got good at coding and building programs, but it wasn’t as interesting as photography.” The province is full of traditional and historical Ottoman sites and natural scenery like lakes, rivers, and springs. He ventured around town with a camera, interacting with people and breaking the bubble of loneliness that sometimes engulfed him. But the real thrill was during breaks when he traveled to Istanbul. There, he met and learned from other street photographers as he tried to explore every corner of this legendary city that charmed him.

Kanu’s photographs display a preternatural ability to be in the right place at the right time. He knows the city’s cadences, and time seems to slow down for him to observe his surroundings, so that his viewers may peer into a brief but more detailed view of things. One day, while running an errand for his dad, he came across a soccer gala organized by some neighborhood kids in the sitting room of an unfinished building. Abandoning his bike, he raced to the scene to take a photo; through his eyes, the viewer becomes part of the throng of ecstatic spectators who consume the action in the arena.

Kanu’s major influences range from old-school photographers such as Gordon Parks and James Barnor to the young, self-taught New Yorker Steve Sweatpants. He finds particular resonance in Parks’s documentation of segregation across the United States, famously portrayed in the series Segregation Story. Several of Kanu’s own photographs have echoes of Parks’s. Take one photograph of a man in a kufi and billowy caftan. The photograph captures him mid-step, neck strained as he looks in the direction of a house; in Parks’s from 1948, Leonard “Red” Jackson, seen from behind, is also mid-step, his slightly baggy suit billowing in the wind. In Parks’s photo, the tall buildings tower over the man, suggesting the scale of what a Black man has to contend with in America. In Kanu’s, the more modest building is made of zinc and wooden parts. It reminds the photographer of the Freetown of old: “Twenty years ago after the war, when you look around, you’d see places like this,” he said. “People just rebuild slowly using zinc, wood, and whatever materials they can find.” In their adornments, the men in both photographs communicate dignity in the face of a reality that looms large.

The work of Kanu and his generation represents a continuation of attempts to establish new relationships to the image and image-making in Sierra Leone. During and immediately after the war, Sierra Leoneans were subjected to the exploitative Western gaze of international journalists and organizations in search of what we now term poverty or disaster porn. Some people, tired after years of cameras being pointed at them, coined the phrase “you click you pay,” demanding recompense.

Today most people smile at Kanu and ask him to make more photos. Once, he was photographing a street celebration when a little girl waved him down. “Snap me, I’m fine,” she demanded. Recalling this beautiful encounter, he told me: “I literally just burst into tears of, like, Oh my god, the confidence. I’m always grateful to be able to capture these little moments of time, and the people.” Kanu sees his work as a way of documenting life and being in community. “Initially, one of the top goals of my work was to counter some of the narratives that were around about Sierra Leone not being safe,” he said. “And one way I feel like you can answer that is by showing daily life.”

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.