MORTEN ANDENÆS ON STEIN RØNNING
In a book on a table in a room in our house, there is a photograph of what appears to be a familiar space, reminiscent of a tabletop set against a wall. Two rectangles rise from—or rest on—a horizontal plane, as figures set apart from the background and occupying roughly one third of the frame. The rectangles are nearly identical in size and set almost side by side with a very slight, but significant gap to separate them. I say almost because one of the rectangles is placed slightly deeper into the space than the other, making it impossible to discern whether they, in fact, are different in size. They are significantly lighter than the horizontal and vertical planes surrounding them, while close in density to what I’d call the lip of the table at the very forefront of the space, or its lower one-tenth. The entire image is cast in a cool bluish tint.
Stein Rønning, h- H, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist and Galleri Riis, Oslo.
Afterimage by Morten Andenæs:
In a book on a table in a room in our house, there is a photograph of what appears to be a familiar space, reminiscent of a tabletop set against a wall. Two rectangles rise from—or rest on—a horizontal plane, as figures set apart from the background and occupying roughly one third of the frame. The rectangles are nearly identical in size and set almost side by side with a very slight, but significant gap to separate them. I say almost because one of the rectangles is placed slightly deeper into the space than the other, making it impossible to discern whether they, in fact, are different in size. They are significantly lighter than the horizontal and vertical planes surrounding them, while close in density to what I’d call the lip of the table at the very forefront of the space, or its lower one-tenth. The entire image is cast in a cool bluish tint.
Stein Rønning and I were born a generation apart. Which means we’ve grown up with different ways of describing and, perhaps, ultimately seeing the same thing. I recently met him at the lab we both use here in Oslo. I wanted to tell him about this photograph of his that had been on my mind ever since I came across it a few months back. Not having the picture present, I struggled with how to verbally distinguish this particular one from the vast corpus of photographic work he’s been making for as long as I can remember.
The description above was an attempt, later that same day, at describing the image in words, in a way that might make it clear to the artist himself what image I was referring to. And yet—this cool description fails to get at the reason it exists in my mind's eye as an afterimage.
An image is a different thing than a photograph. It’s a sense and a remnant, a fleeting reflection that disappears when you try to grasp it.
Stein Rønning's image lodged in my mind cannot be reduced to the description above, but is an intimation of a relationship between two nearly identical entities, set within a space I experience as familiar, and separated by a receding darkness.
Like parents seated around the kitchen table, the image, to me, conjures up scenes of both intimacy and distance. It evokes excruciating closeness and a chasm that is impossible to overcome. And yet there is calm, matter-of-factness. Two separate, but similar things existing together in the same space, facing the same direction.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
Note: The author and the artist are represented by the same gallery.
ASPEN MAYS ON CARLETON WATKINS
The image that I'm thinking about right now is a picture of the American photographer Carlton Watkins from 1906. He's being led away by two other people from his studio in San Francisco. At that point, he was an elderly man; in the photograph, he has a big beard and a hat and is holding a cane. There's a man on one side of him who feels like he's moving him forward. And there's a man just behind him. Watkins' shoulder is oriented slightly back—and the man behind him almost feels like he's pulling him back. The obscurity of the other two figures leaves space for you to fill in the story with your own ideas. There's this remarkable tension in the body language of those three people. Behind them, you can see smoke coming out of a building, and there's lots of rubble in the street. There is a sense of disaster, but you don't quite understand what's happening. The picture alone is pretty captivating because of that tension, who is this man? Is he being rushed forward or pulled back?
Carleton E. Watkins [with cane, during aftermath of earthquake], April 18, 1906. Unknown photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Afterimage by Aspen Mays:
The image that I'm thinking about right now is a picture of the American photographer Carleton Watkins from 1906. He's being led away by two other people from his studio in San Francisco. At that point, he was an elderly man; in the photograph, he has a big beard and a hat and is holding a cane. There's a man on one side of him who feels like he's moving him forward. And there's a man just behind him. Watkins' shoulder is oriented slightly back—and the man behind him almost feels like he's pulling him back. The obscurity of the other two figures leaves space for you to fill in the story with your own ideas. There's this remarkable tension in the body language of those three people. Behind them, you can see smoke coming out of a building, and there's lots of rubble in the street. There is a sense of disaster, but you don't quite understand what's happening. The picture alone is pretty captivating because of that tension, who is this man? Is he being rushed forward or pulled back?
I teach in California, and as a photographer, Carleton Watkins has had a massive influence on how the American West was pictured. His images in particular were used to help justify and support the establishment of the National Park Service and protection of “wilderness” (in part by not depicting indigenous history and presence). He was also a photographer for hire. His clients included logging companies and mining companies. So he also depicted the extraction and depletion of the West. He has a complicated legacy and occupies a fascinating place in history.
Back to the image. The San Francisco earthquake had just happened, and the fire that followed was just starting in the city. Watkins’ studio was completely destroyed in the 1906 fire. All of his glass plate negatives–all those mammoth plates of the West–all of his correspondence, everything was lost. Just the week before, he had been planning to give his entire archive to Stanford University. He was already sort of destitute at this point in his life, but he had made the deal with Stanford. Then the earthquake happened, and then the fire happened.
When things in the world feel particularly destructive, it's one of those pictures that comes back into my mind. The moment when all is lost: does he know it too? When does he know it? Apparently he was also pretty much blind at this point in his life. Knowing that adds another layer. I didn't know that until years after I first saw the picture. Then thinking about the body language in the photograph changes again.
In better times, I still think about this picture, but it is different. I think more about the mystery of legacy. He remains a remarkably influential photographer, especially in shaping the imagination of the American landscape, as many prints of his work survived. Earlier in his career he had been prosperous and well known, but Watkins ended up dying in poverty in California. Despite how it ended, it wasn't the end of the life of the pictures. It also makes me think about the inherent incompleteness of any archive, what survives and what doesn’t, and the fragility of massive plate glass negatives in a place with huge earthquakes.
I love showing this picture to students because it really moves them. It is tragic to think about a life’s work and how close it was to being saved, just a week away. It touches a core feeling we all have about how precarious everything is, the balance, or imbalance, of the world and now more than ever, the environment that he documented.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
CLÉMENT CHÉROUX ON ALIX CLÉO ROUBAUD
The image that keeps coming back to me, hauntingly, is this one by the Franco-Canadian writer and photographer, Alix Cléo Roubaud.
She is renowned for her journal, which was published posthumously by her husband, the poet and Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud. Roubaud is also the central figure in Jean Eustache’s remarkable film Les Photographies d’Alix.
Alix Cléo Roubaud, (1952, Mexico – 1983, France) 15 minutes la nuit au rythme de la respiration, 2 / 15 Minutes at Night, to the Rhythm of Breathing, 2. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Afterimage by Clément Chéroux:
The image that keeps coming back to me, hauntingly, is this one by the Franco-Canadian writer and photographer, Alix Cléo Roubaud.
She is renowned for her journal, which was published posthumously by her husband, the poet and Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud. Roubaud is also the central figure in Jean Eustache’s remarkable film Les Photographies d’Alix.
I acquired this photograph for the Centre Pompidou’s collection several years ago with the help of Hélène Giannecchini, who was responsible for her archives at the time. Dating from 1980, the work is titled 15 Minutes at Night, to the Rhythm of Breathing.
It was taken at night in the south of France. Probably during a spell of insomnia, Alix lay down on the ground on a terrace and placed the camera on her chest in bulb mode. For fifteen minutes, she recorded what lay before the lens: a stand of cypress trees.
Knowing that she would die of a pulmonary embolism and respiratory failure two years later, the image takes on a particular gravity.
The trees are often found in cemeteries and have long been associated with death. One is reminded of Arnold Böcklin’s famous painting, 'Isle of the Dead'.
And there is the trembling, like a graphic trace of breath itself. The photograph calls to mind the pulsating waveform on the cover of Joy Division's album Unknown Pleasures.
For Walter Benjamin, breath is akin to aura: the movement of branches on a distant horizon, the singular appearance of something far away, however near it may seem.
Ultimately, this photograph is an image of breath itself.
En français:
Alix Cléo Roubaud
Une image qui me revient régulièrement à l'esprit, qui me hante, est celle de l'écrivaine et photographe franco-canadienne Alix Cléo Roubaud.
Alix Cléo Roubaud est connue pour son journal, publié après sa mort par son mari le poète et oulipien Jacques Roubaud. Elle est aussi le personnage central de l'extraordinaire film de Jean Eustache, Les Photographies d'Alix.
J'ai fait rentrer cette photographie dans les collections du Centre Pompidou il y a quelques années avec la complicité d'Hélène Giannecchini qui s'occupait à l'époque de ses archives.
Elle s'intitule 15 minutes la nuit au rythme de la respiration. Elle date de 1980.
Cette image a été prise la nuit dans le sud de la France.
Sans doute pendant une insomnie, Alix s'est étendu sur le sol, sur la terrasse. Elle a posé l'appareil sur sa poitrine en pose B. Et pendant 15 minutes elle a enregistré ce qui se trouvait face à l'appareil, devant l'objectif : des cyprès.
Lorsqu'on sait qu'ACR est décédée deux ans plus tard d'une embolie pulmonaire, c'est-à-dire d'une insuffisance respiratoire, cette image se trouve lestée d'un certain poids.
Il y ces arbres que l'on retrouve dans les cimetières et qui symbolisent la mort. On pense au célèbre tableau d'Arnold Böcklin : L'Ile des morts.
Et il y a ce tremblement qui est une transcription graphique de la respiration.
La photographie me fait penser à ce diagramme vibratoire sur la pochette du disque de Joy Division Unknown Pleasure.
Le souffle c'est l'aura selon Walter Benjamin : le mouvement dans les branches d'un arbre à l'horizon, unique apparition d'un lointain aussi proche soit-il.
Cette photographie c'est en somme l'image du souffle même.
GEM FLETCHER ON GENESIS BÁEZ
So much of my energy, of late, has been focused on this sense of feeling between two [photographic] worlds. The former is organised by truth, fact and information - a society built upon the premise that image=evidence. The new image world has the ability to conjure realness untethered from reality, a place where a compelling image matters more than any indexical truth and where images have the potential to usher in new realities.
Genesis Báez, Constellation, 2024-2025.
So much of my energy, of late, has been focused on this sense of feeling between two [photographic] worlds. The former is organised by truth, fact and information - a society built upon the premise that image=evidence. The new image world has the ability to conjure realness untethered from reality, a place where a compelling image matters more than any indexical truth and where images have the potential to usher in new realities.
I’m embarrassingly late to Genesis Báez's work, first encountering it in March 2025 after watching an episode of Session Press Photobook club from Dashwood Books, where she participated in an open and layered conversation with Justine Kurland [the two first met during a critique at Yale] about her debut monograph, Blue Sun / Sol Azul, created with Capricious. The book, which spans a decade of photographic work, offers a glimmering examination of matriarchal kinship and diaspora through studied images of the elemental and generational.
It was during that talk, watched via my iPhone on the train, that I saw Báez’s remarkable image Constellation. The image features the artist and her mother mapping the sky with string, framing the cosmos and together flattening the distance between earth and sky. Shot from below, the photograph has soft, cloud-like edges that create a corporeal sense of being physically pulled up into the image and beyond.
“We are so accustomed to thinking of photographs as 'moments' that are 'captured,” Báez told me when I later spoke to her about the work. “But I am interested in the ways that photographs can be like water: unfixed, describing our permeability, and suggesting how we are all interconnected.”
Constellation, and many of the images in Blue Sun / Sol azul caught me off guard. Still now, a year on, I’m haunted by that image and its sensorial possibilities. Using photography in unexpected ways to adequately express the strange, emotional, and unmapable shape of our present is exactly what I’d been craving from the medium that too often sits in the literal and didactic. What is remarkable about Báez’s work is how she returns the joy of looking back to the viewer—something that often feels lost in the daily grind of relentless doomscrolling.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
LUCAS BLALOCK
Of all the ideas I took from painting, the crucial one was probably that new attempts in painting are inevitably in conversation with the whole history of painting. Painting is a kind of collective project. A photograph is often more related to its subject than it is to other photographs, and I wanted to know if I could get them to lean the other way or at least stand upright on the fence.
My research as an artist is in novel readings of accumulated data, in refiguring some of what was left out. I’m looking at the world around me through the camera while simultaneously feeling a desire to put it in conversation with all this other material.
41. Of all the ideas I took from painting, the crucial one was probably that new attempts in painting are inevitably in conversation with the whole history of painting. Painting is a kind of collective project. A photograph is often more related to its subject than it is to other photographs, and I wanted to know if I could get them to lean the other way or at least stand upright on the fence.
My research as an artist is in novel readings of accumulated data, in refiguring some of what was left out. I’m looking at the world around me through the camera while simultaneously feeling a desire to put it in conversation with all this other material.
The philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, writes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about what he calls “normal science.” Normal science posits that in most moments the best scientist is the one who measures the most accurately. Kuhn believes science relies on the idea that most aberrant data is basically bad measuring. But every once in a long while, someone—the necessary scientist, a Newton or Einstein—looks at that aberrant data and sees a new pattern, and that new pattern replaces the old one. Both normal and necessary science have an analogue in making art.
A text from Lucas Blalock's Why Must the Mounted Messenger Be Mounted? to celebrate the book's release in Mandarin!
BRYSON RAND ON MANUEL ÀLVAREZ BRAVO AND PATRICE HELMAR
I've been torn between two images that have been stuck in my head, and I just can’t decide. The first one that came to mind was a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a portrait of a woman brushing her hair at the mirror. I was in Toronto over the summer, and there was a show on Latin American photography where this picture was included. It's an image I've known for as long as I've been making photos, about 30 years. Every time I see it in a book or elsewhere, I think it is incredible. About a month before, I made a picture while my husband and I were in Mexico with a similar diagonal light, and I realized this picture has always been in my head. Everything fell into place. I feel like this image is the root of my practice in a way: the way I think about light and shadow, gesture, and photography’s ability to transform a mundane moment into something transcendent.
Afterimage by Bryson Rand:
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Retrato de lo Eterno (Woman Combing Her Hair), 1932-1933, printed 1977.
I've been torn between two images that have been stuck in my head, and I just can’t decide. The first one that came to mind was a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a portrait of a woman brushing her hair at the mirror. I was in Toronto over the summer, and there was a show on Latin American photography where this picture was included. It's an image I've known for as long as I've been making photos, about 30 years. Every time I see it in a book or elsewhere, I think it is incredible. About a month before, I made a picture while my husband and I were in Mexico with a similar diagonal light, and I realized this picture has always been in my head. Everything fell into place. I feel like this image is the root of my practice in a way: the way I think about light and shadow, gesture, and photography’s ability to transform a mundane moment into something transcendent. This picture has everything I love about photography: the description of her hair, the watery light behind her, the triangle of light on her face—it’s all just… perfect.
It was interesting to have that revelation. If you had asked me about my influences, I would have said Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, the list goes on. But I’m not sure that particular photograph would have been the first thing out of my mouth. Seeing it and making the connection with the picture I took in Mexico, I’ve just been returning to it again and again. I’ve even been showing it to my students too. I think they got tired of me last semester because I kept referencing it in lectures and critiques: "Back to Manuel Alvarez Bravo…" And they’d say, "You’re obsessed with this picture!" But I just can’t get it out of my head.
The other image is a photograph my friend Patrice Helmar made in 2020. They recently showed it, in summer 2024 at PARTICIPANT INC gallery. They created a series of self-portraits during the COVID lockdown after returning to Alaska. Stuck there for over a year, they started making portraits every day with a large-format camera. One picture shows Patrice in front of an old tanker, nude, with their dog Dolly, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix, sitting next to them. Patrice wears a balaclava, connecting to a character or persona they were exploring.
I saw the series and was struck by the generosity of it all, the vulnerability, but also the way it reflects what we all were going through. None of us knew what was happening; many of us were paralyzed with fear. I think Patrice just felt they had to make the work. There’s an almost crazed energy to the series, but this particular image feels grounded, embodied, present. I saw it in the show, a large print in the back of the gallery, and I just started crying. It was incredible.
This image reminds me of something I teach my students: take chances. If you have an idea, do it. Don’t overanalyze, pick up your camera and see what happens. That level of risk is where the generosity comes from. And that connects back to the Manuel Alvarez Bravo image. Both pictures speak to the generosity of photography: the willingness of someone to pose, or to put yourself in front of the camera. There’s a deep humanity in both images that floors me every time.
Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Tanker, 2020. Gelatin Silver Print, 60x48 in.
I always ask myself, and my students, what part of your humanity are you putting into your work? All art is an expression of some aspect of humanity. It doesn’t have to be directly about your body or lived experience, but whatever your mind or imagination produces, it’s coming from you. That generosity is so important, especially today, when it feels increasingly rare.
These images stay in my mind because they offer a kind of respite. They provide moments for others to shift their attention, even briefly. As an artist, sometimes I feel like "The world is on fire, and I’m making my silly pictures." But seeing work like this reminds me it does matter.
I also look to artists from the past for guidance, particularly those responding to crises. So much of my practice is influenced by artists living through the AIDS crisis of the ’80s and ’90s. How did they stay politically and culturally engaged while also creating work that was beautiful or peaceful? That act of creation can be deeply healing. Patrice’s photo exemplifies that. Making the series, putting the show together, it seemed like an act of healing. The dog in their series, Dolly, adds another layer. People might call photos of pets "cheesy," but it’s beautiful, a true relationship captured. I have two dogs myself and would be lost without them. There’s also a generosity in showing that connection that resonates with me.
Photography can heal. It communicates in ways words sometimes cannot. That picture stopped me in my tracks; so much was being conveyed. I can’t fully articulate it, but I can deeply appreciate it.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
LILLIAN WILKIE ON DANH VÔ
There’s something about this image and my relationship with it, from a photographic and representational point of view, but also in the sense of reproduction, that really fascinates me. It is a photograph of photographs, printed as a photogravure, which has then been digitised, and I view it through my computer screen. Three figures, three photographs on the wall. Multiple picture planes, intentions and techniques, all operating in tandem. I adopt the same position as the young men in the image, almost as if I am standing behind them, facing the same direction, becoming a part of their group. I feel invited into the scene, like a safe and benign presence. On the other hand, I am isolated from them entirely. I feel the weight of cultural difference between Carrier and these young men, the impossibility of touch, as well as the vast gulf of years and geographies.
Danh Võ, Archive of Dr. Joseph M. Carrier 1962-1973, 2010.
Afterimage by Lillian Wilkie:
This is the photograph I look at perhaps more than any other. Or rather, I see it multiple times a day, but perhaps I don’t always look at it so well. I didn't really know very much about Danh Võ when I went to see his show Danh Võ: Untitled at South London Gallery in 2019. I’d recently been with the photographer Jason Evans, who had loved it and encouraged me to go. This series really stayed with me, and when a little while later I happened to buy a new computer, and was wondering what to use as a desktop image, this one came to mind. All these years—and a second computer—later, I still have it. Now, it's just so part of the architecture of my workspace, and typically scattered with folder icons and screenshot thumbnails. It’s become the furniture, in a way. Considering it for Afterimage has forced it back into the foreground, and given me the opportunity to kind of fall in love with it again.
Danh Võ is not known as a photographer, although photographs are very functional in his practice. He’s more widely known for installation, sculptural and object-based works, reappropriating or co-authoring the work with others. He was born in South Vietnam during the American war, but his family escaped when he was about four, on a handmade boat. They were picked up by a Danish container ship, and Vo ended up growing up in Denmark.
The photograph is from a series called Archive of Dr. Joseph M. Carrier 1962–1973. Carrier was an American anthropologist, counterinsurgency specialist and closeted homosexual who was stationed in Vietnam from 1962–1973. His black-and-white photographs depict young Vietnamese men and boys in everyday moments of intimacy, within a culture where non-sexual, physical affection between men was much more normalised and accepted. Carrier had come from a very conservative American culture where such liberated tenderness felt impossible. These behaviors and gestures moved him, and perhaps produced a sense of longing or yearning, quietly mourning the lack of such tenderness in the place he grew up.
Carrier never showed these photographs to anybody until he met Võ. Apparently, he just came up to Võ after a talk the artist had given in LA, and told him about his experiences in Vietnam around the time of Võ’s birth. They developed a friendship, and even visited Vietnam together, leading Carrier to show Võ these photographs, and eventually giving him permission to make work with them. Võ was in touch with a master printer in Denmark who was reviving a historical photographic etching process, and Võ eventually worked with him to print a selection of Carrier’s images as photogravures.
There’s something about this image and my relationship with it, from a photographic and representational point of view, but also in the sense of reproduction, that really fascinates me. It is a photograph of photographs, printed as a photogravure, which has then been digitised, and I view it through my computer screen. Three figures, three photographs on the wall. Multiple picture planes, intentions and techniques, all operating in tandem. I adopt the same position as the young men in the image, almost as if I am standing behind them, facing the same direction, becoming a part of their group. I feel invited into the scene, like a safe and benign presence. On the other hand, I am isolated from them entirely. I feel the weight of cultural difference between Carrier and these young men, the impossibility of touch, as well as the vast gulf of years and geographies.
So much is concealed in this image. We can never be sure what exhibition these young men, or boys, are visiting. Their ages are ambiguous. One, in the white shirt, could be smiling, but it could be a grimace. The contrasting tones of the two central figures’ shirts contributes to the image’s brilliance; our eyes dance between the two shirted backs, the cotton crisp and cool-seeming, and down to their interlocked hands. You notice that they are holding hands in quite an unusual way, with the figure on the right grasping two outstretched fingers of his white-shirted friend. Who knows, maybe this kind of configuration is more normal than I realise.
Maybe the image reminds me of all the ways that cultural difference can manifest, from small gestures and inflections, to the ways homosexuality can be deeply problematised, criminalised and brutalised. It also makes me think about the significance of photography to the war in Vietnam, and the ways in which it both challenged and reinforced dominant narratives. Whilst much photography from Vietnam ultimately held up a mirror to the American psyche, I also think about the broader use of photography as an anthropological tool, and its colonial underpinnings.
I also just really love photogravure, it’s so romantic, so alluring, so rich and deep. I love Jack Davison’s portrait work with this technique. But when used to render street photographs it gives the work a really cinematic quality, they feel like film stills. There's something about this series that reminds me a lot of the essay films of Chris Marker, and the cinema of Alain Resnais, a decade before. There’s a stylisation and poise, a real sensitivity to silhouette and the form of the body. The texture of skin against wood, water and masonry. And the implication of the viewer in the scene, the sense of quiet complicity. I can’t help but speculate if Carrier had watched something like Hiroshima Mon Amour or Last Year At Marienbad in the years before he left for Vietnam.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
ALAN HUCK ON NATHANIEL DORSKY
The films of Nathaniel Dorsky unfold silently through a series of delicate observations. His camera movements are subdued if not completely absent, moving images that are mostly made up of stillness. Instead there’s just a subtle gesture, the play of light and shadow, an image that hovers there for a moment before disappearing—each one like a prayer. I find it difficult to tell his films apart in memory. Those I’ve seen share a similar tone and structure, a succession of images that float by with the same lightness of touch, free from apparent hierarchy or heavy-handed concepts. Still, there are certain images that manage to stand apart from the slow procession. They linger in the mind a little longer or, inexplicably, imprint themselves only to reappear later, in the guise of another image. The finding of an object is always, in fact, a refinding, Freud taught us.
Nathaniel Dorsky, Variations (still), 1998.
Afterimage by Alan Huck:
The films of Nathaniel Dorsky unfold silently through a series of delicate observations. His camera movements are subdued if not completely absent, moving images that are mostly made up of stillness. Instead there’s just a subtle gesture, the play of light and shadow, an image that hovers there for a moment before disappearing—each one like a prayer. I find it difficult to tell his films apart in memory. Those I’ve seen share a similar tone and structure, a succession of images that float by with the same lightness of touch, free from apparent hierarchy or heavy-handed concepts. Still, there are certain images that manage to stand apart from the slow procession. They linger in the mind a little longer or, inexplicably, imprint themselves only to reappear later, in the guise of another image. The finding of an object is always, in fact, a refinding, Freud taught us.
One such image appears about three quarters of the way through Dorsky’s 1998 film Variations—the first and, probably because of this, still my favorite of his films that I’ve watched. It’s an image of a lemon, framed on either side by shots that are little more than the gentle shimmering of light. Almost eerie in its perfect roundness, the lemon is pressed into the center of the frame looking as if it’s about to burst. Its shadow faces the camera but the rest of the image is aglow with a golden yellow, as though the lemon were radiating its own light, a brilliant sun filling the room with its hue.
Thirty years earlier, Hollis Frampton made a short film that feels as though it could be an extended study of Dorsky’s frame. Over seven minutes, the camera is trained on the tough, pockmarked rind of a single lemon as darkness slowly overtakes it, rendering it into a silhouette. Another luminous, lemony sun, one whose eclipse we witness in real time. In an interview for October, Frampton confesses that he spent over an hour at the grocery store searching for the perfect lemon, the one that was “most splendidly citroid.” Both a kind of deadpan lighting instructional and a scientific experiment in object perception, Frampton claims that the film was ultimately about a “painterly conundrum.” It apparently stemmed from a conversation he’d had with the artist Robert Huot about the extraordinary number of hapax legomena in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the thousands of words that appear in the book only once. One of those words was, of course, lemon.
This past November, I stood transfixed in front of a tiny painting at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris: Édouard Manet’s Le Citron from 1880. Of all the celebrated works in the museum, it was this meager still life, only fourteen by twenty-two centimeters in size, that held my attention the longest—because, rather than in spite of its modesty, its simplicity. It was only later that I learned Manet had begun painting these kinds of miniature studies as his health declined later in life, using mostly objects that were close at hand. Like both Dorsky’s and Frampton’s, Manet’s lemon is offset by darkness—in this case, the pitch black plate it sits on, touched by a glint of white at its curved edge. It reminds me of the philosopher and theologian Jakob Böhme who, upon seeing the sunlight reflecting off a pewter dish, lapsed into a profound mystical experience. There, he saw into the divine mystery of all things, the place where the visible and spiritual realms overlap.
In the poet Mark Doty’s short book about falling in love with a Dutch still life painting, he walks out onto the steps of the Metropolitan museum and is overwhelmed by “a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.” Looking around at people eating pretzels in the chilly afternoon, flocks of pigeons, and exhaust trails from idling taxis, the city seems to be accorded a perfect harmony. Still reeling from the effects of having this centuries-old image draw him into its magnetic field, he feels himself and everything around him “bound together, in the warmth and good light of habitation.”
This sentiment is at one end of a spectrum that, according to Doty, we are forever sliding along—between connection and individuation, intimacy and freedom. Art is one place that we might look to find ourselves momentarily suspended between these poles. In Doty’s newly discovered painting, “there is a spectacular spiral of lemon peel” which he connects to the appearance of so many others throughout Dutch painting of the same century. They are all linked in his imagination, while remaining undiminished in their particularity. This is the strange thing about images and the objects they depict. They can appear so utterly singular in a moment of heightened awareness and yet be drawn into correspondence with others like them, joining together to form a universal mesh of analogy and significance. In Doty’s mind, it may even be that this is especially true for a certain type of citrus: “only lemons, only that lovely, perishable, ordinary thing, held to scrutiny’s light, fixed in a moment of fierce attention. As if here our desire to be unique, unmistakable, and our desire to be of a piece were reconciled. Isn’t that it, to be yourself and somehow, to belong?”
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
SARA ELIASSEN ON ZOÉ AUBRY
Fotoboken #Ingrid peker på den digitale bevegelsen som videre oppstod blant reaksjonene mot publiseringen av bildene. Fotoboken er uten tekst, og med bilder printet på glossy papir av gjenkjennelige motiver — stock-fotos av blomster, solnedganger, skylines og strender; tilsynelatende lyse bilder, eventuelt også «bilde-spam» — langt fra de eksplisitte bildene som sirkulerte sammen med offerets navn. Ved første øyekast framstår #Ingrid som direkte overfladisk satt i kontekst av et kvinnedrap.
On International Women’s Day we’re sharing this essay by Sara Eliassen: Spammen som digital motstandsstrategi: #Ingrid
‘On February 9, 2020 in Mexico City, a 25-year-old woman named Ingrid E. V. was murdered by her companion. Grisly photographs of this femicide committed by Erik Francisco Robledo Rosas, taken at the scene of the crime by the authorities, were avidly circulated by Mexican tabloids….’
Teksten er hentet fra forsiden til fotoboken #Ingrid av kunstneren Zoé Aubry, og refererer til Ingrid Escamilla Vargas som 9. februar 2020 ble drept av partneren sin i Mexico by. Hvert år blir ca 3000 kvinner drept i Mexico, og boken #Ingrid tar utgangspunkt i dette ene drapet for å belyse sammenhengen mellom medias overeksponering av voldelige bilder og normaliseringen av misogynistisk vold.
Bilder av forbrytelsen og det brutale drapet på Ingrid Escamilla Vargas ble lekket til pressen direkte fra politiet som etterforsket drapet, og sirkulerte så umiddelbart i meksikanske tabloidaviser som kalles ‘nota roja’ (den røde pressen). Papiravisen Pasala! trykket et eksplisitt bilde av en lemlestet kvinnekropp som forsidebilde, med teksten: «Det var Amors skyld».
Medias brutale sensasjonalisme, og politiets medvirkning som muliggjorde den, utløste en bølge av demonstrasjoner og i februar 2020 tok kvinner til gatene i Mexico by. De gikk fysisk til angrep på biler og utstyr tilhørende mediehusene Pasala! og La Prensa, som begge hadde publisert bildene av Ingrid Escamillas døde kropp.
Fotoboken #Ingrid peker på den digitale bevegelsen som videre oppstod blant reaksjonene mot publiseringen av bildene. Fotoboken er uten tekst, og med bilder printet på glossy papir av gjenkjennelige motiver — ‘stock-fotos’ av blomster, solnedganger, skylines, strender, tilsynelatende lyse bilder, eventuelt også ’bilde-spam’— langt fra de eksplisitte bildene som sirkulerte sammen med offerets navn. Ved første øyekast framstår #Ingrid som direkte overfladiske satt i kontekst av et kvinnedrap.
I kolofonen står det at boken er gjort i samarbeid med Delia Citlalin, og på baksiden av fotoboken står følgende utsagn:
“Amigas, una vez vi un caso de un feminicidio a una chica de EEUU en el que filtraron las imagenes de su cuerpo y sus familiares y amigos compartieron fotos de cosas bonitas para que cuando buscaron su nombre no aparecieran las desafortunadas fotos. Así que aqui les va un spam.”
Teksten er en tweet av @delia, venninne av Ingrid Escamilla Vargas. Tweeten refererer til et tidligere kvinnedrap i USA, der bilder av den døde kvinnen også hadde sirkulert i etterkant av drapet. For å unngå at bilder av liket skulle dukke opp i sosiale medier når folk søkte på offerets navn, begynte familien og venner av offeret i stedet å dele bilder av vakre ting. Tweeten til Delia oppfordret brukere av sosiale media til å følge samme strategi og ‘spamme’ emneknaggen IngridEscamillaVargas.
Fra hele verden begynte folk å poste bilder av blomster, innsjøer og solnedganger under #IngridEscamillaVargas, og iløpet av våren 2020 ble over 400 bilder delt. Den sveitsiske kunstneren Zoé Aubry fulgte bevegelsen som oppstod, og bestemte seg for å samle bildene og organisere dem etter dato-rekkefølge i det som etterhvert ble til fotoboken #Ingrid. Boken til Aubry framstår som en strøm av lignende motiver, og man nærmest scroller seg gjennom de fargerike og glossy bildene idet fingrene blar raskt fra side til side. Det er vanskelig å la blikket feste seg ved ett enkelt av bildene. Mange av fotografiene er av dårlig kvalitet, til tider piksellerte, og motivene oppleves som mindre viktige enn ansamlingen av dem.
I et intervju til RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse), uttaler Zoe Aubry at “Bildene fungerer som motbilder, signifikante i sin banalitet. Det som gjør at de interesserer meg, er at de opprinnelig ikke ble lagt ut for å bli sett, men for å adressere algoritmene for å få andre bilder til å forsvinne. Fotografiet brukes som et våpen." På websiden sin, beskriver kunstneren at hun bruker egen kunstnerisk praksis til å avdekke dominerende mediers mekanismer for eksponering og usynliggjøring, og hun gjør dette ved å vrenge på oppmerksomhetøkonomiens logikk gjennom bruken av såkalte ‘poor images’.
Photo: Sara Eliassen
I essayet In Defence of the Poor Image fra 2009, skiver Hito Steyerl at essensen til ‘spam’ er sirkulasjonen av den, i motsetning til motiv og innhold. ‘Spammens’ funksjon handler sjelden om det den representerer, men om flyten som bildene (eller teksten) inngår i, og bidrar til; en strøm av informasjon, der elementer oppstår i ulike konfigurasjoner uten en nødvendig kobling til opphavet sitt (og det de representerer).
‘Spammen’ som @Delia oppfordret til i etterdønningen av sirkulasjonen av de voldelige bildene av Ingrid Escamilla, hadde den praktiske funksjonen av å fylle emneknaggen med navnet til offeret, og dermed drukne de voldelige bildene. Istedenfor å bidra til en ytterligere gjentakelse av volden som Ingrid Escamilla hadde blitt utsatt for, pekte bildene av solnedganger og stjernehimler på et fravær, og et tomrom.
Idet jeg blar gjennom boken, er det egentlig bare ett bilde som får meg til å stoppe opp. Bildet viser en plakat som holdes opp i et urbant bymiljø, gjenkjennelig som Mexico City’s sentrum med Torre Latinoamericana i bakgrunnen. Plakaten viser et portrett av Ingrid Escamilla Vargas, med teksten: “Hermana: Tu muerte NO FUE EN VANO. Nosotras seguimos en la lucha!!! Somos tu voz!!! #JusticiaParaIngrid.” (“Søster: Din død VAR IKKE FORGJEVES. Vi fortsetter kampen!!! Vi er din stemme!!! #JusticiaParaIngrid.”) Bildet er mest sannsynlig tatt under en av protestene som spredte seg i kjølvannet av hendelsen i 2020, og bryter med den ellers flytende strømmen av bilder i boka. I motsetning til de andre motivene tilfører dette bildet en festing av tid, og knytter oss til virkeligheten utenfor det digitale.
Zoé Aubry beskriver måten bildene av offeret ble spredt på i pressen som et uttrykk for strukturell kvinnefiendtlighet: “Kvinnedrap, eller feminicid, og i dette tilfellet drap på ektefelle, er et sosialt fenomen og voldelig representasjon av disse drapene bidrar til en normalisering, og blir dermed også en form for usynliggjøring av fenomenet.”
Ingrid Fadnes, som har skrevet mye om kjønnskamp og femicid med et Latin-Amerikansk fokus, skriver om begrepet Femicid i etterordet av den norske oversettelsen av Selva Almadas bok Døde jenter: “Begrepet femicide, som senere ble til femicidio eller feminicidio på spansk, ble først tatt i bruk på Den internasjonale domstolen for forbrytelser mot kvinner, et folketribunal som fant sted i mars 1976 i Brussel. Det var den nå avdøde feministiske forfatteren og aktivisten Diana Russell som lanserte begrepet. I første omgang ble femicide brukt for å skape bevissthet mellom forskjellen på voldelige drap på kvinner og det kjønnsnøytrale homicide. I følge Russell var det en eksplisitt forskjell i det at en kvinne blir drept fordi hun er kvinne, mens en mann kan bli drept av mange ulike årsaker.”
Femicid utviklet seg etterhvert til begrepet feminicid, som også omhandler strukturene og kulturen rundt kvinnedrapene og som muliggjør en normaliseringen av dem. Marcela Lagarde som definerte begrepet feminicid mente at det bedre innkapslet den sosiale konstruksjonen som ligger bak kvinnedrap, og straffefriheten som ofte omgir dem. Mexico har den andre høyeste andelen drap på kvinner i Latin-Amerika, med ca. ti drap på kvinner hver dag, hvorav 3% blir kriminelt undersøkt og 1% ender i domfellelse. Sosiolog Anne Ryen ved universitetet i Agder har forsket på vold mot kvinner, og sier at i løpet av perioden 2003-2023 har 160 kvinner i Norge blitt drept av sin partner, mot rundt tjue menn.
I fotoboken #Ingrid’s flyt av tilsynelatende behagelige motiver søker jeg etter mønstre, gjentakelser og sammenhenger. Fargen på innsiden av permene til publikasjonen er lilla, en farge som går igjen i boken. Lilla er også fargen til Ni una menos bevegelsen som startet i Argentina i 2015 og som har spredt seg til hele Latin-Amerika. Ni una menos kan oversettes som ‘ikke uten en til’, eller: vi vil ikke miste en til, og fargen lilla gikk også igjen i gatene i Mexico city våren 2020 og 8.mars-toget bare noen uker etter at Ingrid Escamilla brutalt hadde blitt drept. Rundt 800 000 kvinner gikk samlet langs Reforma avenyen med bannere og plakater, ikledd lilla t-skjorter. Toget beveget seg ned mot Zocalo-plassen foran Palacio Nacional i sentrum av byen, der et stort bål ble tent midt på plassen og kvinner danset rundt bålet. Dette var bare noen få dager før den globale covid-pandemien satte inn for fullt, og gatene ble tømt for folk.
Photo: Sara Eliassen
Jeg befant meg midt i samtalene rundt feminicidios og kjønnskamp i Mexico våren 2020, som på dette tidspunktet hadde spredte seg vidt i befolkningen og langt utover den feministiske og transfeministiske bevegelsen. Så kom pandemien, og bevegelsen som hadde oppnådd et fornyet momentum i Mexico avtok brått. Lorena Wolffer, meksikansk kunstner og feministisk aktivist, fortalte meg i et intervju, at: ‘Mars 2020 var det siste øyeblikket av feministisk kamp i all sin kraft, da vi endelig hadde klart å sette det som skjer i dette landet i senter av den nasjonale samtalen. Og dette varte i nøyaktig én uke, før krisen var en annen. Pandemien kom og oppløste den.’
Lorena fortalte meg videre om en gruppe kvinnelige studenter som hadde okkupert instituttet for filosofi og litteratur ved UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Jeg bestemte meg for å oppsøke dem, og etter å ha hengt rundt en stund på utsiden av det barrikaderte inngangspartiet, ble jeg sluppet inn av en ung kvinne som hadde vært ute og handlet mat. Veggene i det tomme universitetsbygget var nedsprayet av graffiti, og jeg ble møtt av ti-tolv kvinner i starten av tjueårene som anonymt ville fortelle meg om bakgrunnen for okkuperingen av instituttet og bevegelsen de hadde startet. Kvinnene hadde tatt over bygget og bodd der i nesten ti måneder da jeg møtte dem, for å protestere mot kjønnsbasert vold på universitetet. Daglig, sendte de sendte en av dem ut for å handle mat og andre nødvendigheter, og ellers barrikaderte de seg inne i bygningen. Undervisningen hadde for lengst stoppet opp.
“Hvordan kunne all den seksualiserte volden fortsette å skje inne på universitetets område, uten at universitetets lederskap gjorde noe? Sanksjonene deres var ikke nok og prosedyrene deres var mangelfulle, så vi bestemte oss for å streike for å protestere mot alt dette. (…) Vi tok over instituttet, approprierte bygningen, og ga rommene en ny verdi. Fra å være et sted som var voldelig og utrygt for oss i tiden vi hadde undervisning, har dette nå blitt et trygt og godt sted for oss å være.”
Intervjuet med de unge anonyme feministene ble del av det som etterhvert utviklet seg til et essayistisk filmprosjekt, med utdrag fra samtaler og møter tatt opp over flere år i Mexico. Prosjektet omhandlet medias medvirkning til systemisk vold i en meksikansk kontekst, og undersøkte hvordan medieaktivister, uavhengige journalister og politisk engasjerte kunstnere jobbet for å motarbeide normaliseringen av volden. Iløpet av årene jeg jobbet med undersøkelsen, dreide materialet og samtalene seg mer og mer over til kjønnskampens (gjen-)oppblomstring i Mexico.
Prosjektet startet opprinnelig som research til en artikkel etter forsvinningene av 43 studenter fra Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa, i delstaten Guerrero i Mexico i september 2014. Studentene hadde vært på vei til Mexico City i busser og til en minnesmarkering for studentmassakeren som skjedde på Tlatelolco-plassen i 1968, da bussene med studentene ble angrepet på ulike steder i byen Iguala. Det tragiske utfallet av natten var at seks mennesker ble funnet døde, 40 personer såret og 43 studenter var forsvunnet. Motstridende fortellinger om hva som skjedde den natten i Iguala sirkulerte umiddelbart, og selv om ulike detaljer har blitt avdekket iløpet av årene, er saken fortsatt uløst og har blitt del av et nasjonalt traume.
Jeg reiste med et journaliststipend fra Fritt Ord til Mexico i 2015, for å undersøke regjeringens fortelling om hva som hadde skjedd den natten studentene forsvant, også kjent som den såkalte ‘historiske sannheten’ (la verdad historica). Prosjektet utviklet seg fra intervjuer og research til en artikkel, til å bli en bredere undersøkelse som spant fra mediedekningen rundt de 43 studentene og til dominerende medias medvirkning til å spre frykt og desensitivisere vold i en meksikansk kontekst, og til medieaktivister og uavhengige journalisters motsvar. Iløpet av perioden 2015-2022 gjorde jeg intervjuer og samtaler, dokumenterte reiser, og samlet inn dokumentasjon fra filmer og annet uavhengig medieamateriale som diskuterte forsvinningene, og relaterte hendelser.
For å oppsummere prosjektet, inviterte jeg våren 2022 noen av nøkkelpersonene jeg hadde snakket med iløpet av årene til en visning av materialet og til en avsluttende kollektiv dialog: en gruppe medie-aktivister, journalister, feminister og kunstnere. Vi møttes i Centro Cultural Universitario de Tlatelolco i Mexico by, og sammen så vi utdrag fra filmer og intervjuer. Vi snakket om bildene vi så, og diskuterte hvilke strategier vi som jobber med bilder, film og diskursive prosjekter kan ta i bruk for å motvirke feedback-loopen av vold i en meksikansk kontekst, og videre i en global digital sammenheng. Dette ble det sentrale motivet i det essayistiske filmprosjektet med tittelen Images [and Talking Back to Them], og som ble vist i 2023 på Kunstnernes hus i Oslo, og i 2024/25 på Laboratorio Arte Alameda i Mexico City.
Den meksikanske filosofen, poeten og transfeministen Sayak Valencia skrev i boken Gore Capitalism (eng. 2018) blant annet om medias aktive rolle i en feedback loop av systemisk vold i Mexico. Hun beskriver hvordan mediene forbereder tilskuerne på voldens nærvær, noe som gjør at det stadig blir vanskeligere å skille mellom virkelighet og fiksjon, hvilket bidrar til en ukritisk og passiv holdning i befolkningen. Det Valencia kaller for «gore-praksiser» normaliseres gjennom mediene, og bidrar til “la normalization de la muerte.”
Sayak Valencia var en av bidragsyterne til den kollektive samtalen på Tlatelolco-senteret, og i en diskusjon rundt montasjens funksjon i dagens mangefasetterte mediabilde, reflekterte hun rundt hvordan den konstante insisteringen på umiddelbarhet i vår digitale virkelighet jobber for å tilsløre, og også fjerne, minnene våre:
«... Dominerende medias montasjer handler om å fjerne våre kollektive minner ved å skape superlineære fortellinger. Sosiale medier gjør det samme, de fjerner minnene våre, ved å skape øyeblikk og øyeblikk og øyeblikk… gjennom en overproduksjon av bilder.»
«... når du først har blitt dratt inn i et bilde kan du ikke slutte å se på det, men i virkeligheten er det det motsatte som skjer: den digitale kapitalismen jobber for at vi skal slutte å se — for å sørge for at vi ikke har en aktiv minnesproduksjon. For hadde vi hatt det, ville vi alle nå vært ute i gatene.»
Tilbake til tweeten fra @delia som oppfordret folk til å fylle emneknaggen med Ingrid Escamilla Vargas sitt full navn, overkjøre algoritmene, og slik bygge et digitalt arkiv som motarbeidet tabloidpressens overeksponering av misogynistisk vold. Bevegelsen hadde en helt reell funksjon, og i kjølvannet av hendelsen, protestene, og kanskje også denne bevegelsen, ble det gjort en tilføring i meksikansk straffelov som fikk tilnavnet Ingrids lov. Denne loven rammer personer, inkludert offentlige tjenestemenn, som «uberettiget sprer, avslører, publiserer, distribuerer, fotograferer, filmer, reproduserer, markedsfører, tilbyr, bytter til eller fra seg, bilder, videoer, lydopptak eller dokumenter fra åstedet».
Dette kan anses som en viktig seier for en bevegelse som #IngridEscamillaVargas, men samtidig nevner organisasjonen Articulo 19, en internasjonal organisasjon nedsatt for å beskytte journalister, at loven er formulert slik at den også har en bakside. Loven kan føre til at informasjon tilbakeholdes, og i et land som Mexico der 9 ut av 10 kriminalsaker opplever straffefrihet, har det nettopp ofte vært pressen som har bidratt til at saker har kommet fram i lyset og blitt etterforsket.
Dagens digitale virkelighet gjorde bevegelsen #IngridEscamillaVargas og #JusticiaParaIngrid internasjonal og ga en ny dimensjon til motstanden mot misogynistisk vold og normaliseringen av den, men hva vil det si å arkivere en bevegelse som fant stede i en digital virkelighet og lage en analog fotobok som #Ingrid?
Den analoge distansen til media som sirkulerte bildene av blomsterenger og solnedganger gjør fotoboken #Ingrid til en form for arkivering av en digital strategi. Boken tar bevegelsen tilbake til en ikke-digital virkelighet, away from the keyboard (AFK, som Legacy Russel beskriver i boken Glitch Feminism), og idet man browser gjennom boken oppstår det en kobling til det digitale og #IngridEscamillaVargas. Og slik rettes kanskje det bruddet opp som har oppstått mellom ‘spammen’ og dens manglende forbindelse til et opphavet, og gjør boken til et lite bidrag til å motvirke den digitale kapitalismens arbeid med å fjerne våre kollektive minner i en digital virkelighet, som Valencia nevner.
Det er også umulig å tenke rundt digital distribusjon av bilder og vold i dag, uten å nevne det vi har vært vitner til i Gaza siden oktober 2023. I over to og et halvt år (og det fortsetter), har mange av oss, avhengig av personlige preferanser og påfølgende algoritmer, daglig vært avstandsvitner til digitale montasjer i sosiale media som blant annet har inneholdt grafiske bilder av ofre for umenneskelige krigsforbrytelser på Gaza—et live-streamet folkemord. Blant disse bildene og informasjonen som har blitt delt har vi også fått essensiell informasjon og vitnesbyrd— resultat av borgerjournalistikk fra et område som i lange perioder har vært stengt for internasjonal presse— i en krig som også handler om informasjonen som deles og ikke deles, og der journalister er aktive mål. Og nettopp her tenker jeg at en selektiv arkivering av bildene vi har observert og vitnesbyrdene vi har hørt kan bli avgjørende i videre kamp mot politisk amnesi og mot straffefriheten for de som utøver disse krigsforbrytelsene. Hvilke bilder vi velger å beholde og hvilke etiske retningslinjer vi velger å følge blir avgjørende for at verdigheten til ofrene blir ivaretatt inn i framtiden, samtidig som de digitale strategiene til journalister og aktivister som fortsatt formidler livsnødvendig informasjon fra Gaza må opprettholdes, både i sanntid og videre. Dette, så det viktige arbeidet til Bisan Owda og andre ikke ties og når oss— med bilder og vitnesbyrd som bidrar til at et kollektivt minne blir opprettholdt og at vi ikke slutter å gå ut i gatene.
The essay is based on a lecture and a close reading of the photobook #Ingrid by Zoé Aubry, presented at the Oslo Fotobokfestival at Munchmuseet in autumn 2024. The festival was curated by Marte Aas and Line Bøhmer Løkken.
HILDE HONERUD ON PHIL NOBLE
When I was a little girl, I cut out pictures of the Monaco sisters and Diana and Sarah. I collected old magazines from the neighbors and organized the clippings into folders. The weddings were the highlights; the princesses were so beautiful, I admired them deeply; the royal gowns with their impossibly long trains were really cumbersome to cut out, and I would sit for hours. The men, however, I observed with a sense of wonder. They were utterly uninteresting—so gray and charmless—almost paltry. I genuinely wondered how it could possibly add up. Nine years old, in my childhood bedroom in Sigdal, I knew little about the intricate connections between power, money, and gender.
The image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, after being arrested on suspicion of abuse of office with regard to his involvement in the sordid and depraved world of Epstein, becomes the image he will be remembered for. I have looked at this image over and over. It is a striking shot, but unlike the kind we are used to. It is an image that gives us what we want; it satisfies us.
Phil Noble, Reuters.
Afterimage by Hilde Honerud:
(English text followed by the Norwegian original.)
This image will be his legacy.
When I was a little girl, I cut out pictures of the Monaco sisters and Diana and Sarah. I collected old magazines from the neighbors and organized the clippings into folders. The weddings were the highlights; the princesses were so beautiful, I admired them deeply; the royal gowns with their impossibly long trains were really cumbersome to cut out, and I would sit for hours. The men, however, I observed with a sense of wonder. They were utterly uninteresting—so gray and charmless—almost paltry. I genuinely wondered how it could possibly add up. Nine years old, in my childhood bedroom in Sigdal, I knew little about the intricate connections between power, money, and gender.
The image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, after being arrested on suspicion of abuse of office with regard to his involvement in the sordid and depraved world of Epstein, becomes the image he will be remembered for. I have looked at this image over and over. It is a striking shot, but unlike the kind we are used to. It is an image that gives us what we want; it satisfies us.
The contrasts in the image are stark: we peer into a luxury car with white leather seats, a driver and a guard (it seems), while the flash pierces the blood vessels of his skull, laying him bare. The way he holds his hands—withered, desperate—and his gaze—all of it makes us think of a deathbed. We see the fall, and we see that he sees that he has fallen; he stares into the abyss.
It has a distinctly paparazzi style, yet, as far as I understand, it was taken by a serious press photographer (Phil Noble). It is not, of course, the absence of other images from an exceptional event—the arrest of a high-ranking royal—that makes this image stand out. When I look at the images the photographer took just before and after, the others appear far less dramatic.
But this image tells the story we long for. A moment that exposes a life (an institution? a social class?) void of self-awareness, in disbelief. The recognition of a fall, of guilt—it is an image that, through its unequivocal testimony of downfall, also, in a strange way, contains the possibility of remorse and forgiveness. We just love it. It is an image that satisfies us, in which we see that he understands his fall—he and all that he represents. Whether the image truly shows us what we will eventually get, is another matter.
I have no doubt, however, that this image will endure as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s legacy.
Dette bildet er hans legacy.
Da jeg var liten klippet jeg ut bilder av Monaco-søstrene og Diana og Sarah. Jeg fikk gamle ukeblader fra naboene, og organiserte utklippene i mapper. Høydepunktene var bryllupene, prinsessene var så vakre, jeg beundret dem dypt og inderlig, og kjolene med de enorme slepene, de var kronglete å klippe ut, jeg satt i timevis. Jeg registrerte derimot mennene med undring. De var helt uinteressante, så grå og sjarmløse, begredelige, og jeg lurte virkelig på hvordan dette kunne henge sammen. Ni år gammel på barnerommet i Sigdal visste jeg lite om makt, penger og kjønn.
Bildet av Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, i baksetet av en bil etter å ha blitt arrestert for mistanke om misbruk av embetet og hans involvering i Epsteins usle og fordervede verden, blir et bilde han vil bli husket gjennom. Jeg har sett og sett på dette bildet. Det er et blinkskudd, men annerledes enn det vi er vant til. Det er et bilde som gir oss hva vi vil ha, det tilfredsstiller oss.
Vi ser inn i en luksusbil med hvite skinnseter, med det som framstår som sjåfør og vakt, og blitzen går rett inn til blodårene i hodeskallen, han er avkledd, motsetningene i bildet er slående. Måten han holder hendene, vissent, desperat, og blikket, alt dette får oss til å tenke på et dødsleie, vi ser fallet, og vi ser at han ser at han har falt, han stirrer inn i avgrunnen.
Det er i en tydelig paparazzistil, men likevel så vidt jeg forstår av en seriøs pressefotograf (Phil Noble). Det er naturligvis ikke mangelen av andre bilder fra en eksepsjonell hendelse (arrestasjonen av en høytstående kongelig) som får bildet til å skille seg ut. Når jeg ser på bilder fotografen tok like før og etter, ser de andre bildene langt mindre dramatiske ut.
Men dette er et bilde som forteller en fortelling vi søker. Et øyeblikk som blottlegger et liv (en institusjon? et samfunnslag?) uten selvinnsikt, i vantro.
Erkjennelsen av et fall, skyld, det er et bilde som også gjennom sin utvetydige bevitnelse av undergang på en underlig måte også rommer potensialet for anger og tilgivelse. Vi elsker det. Det er et bilde som tilfredsstiller oss, der vi ser at han ser fallet, han og alt han representerer. Om bildet egentlig viser oss hva vi kommer til å få, er noe annet.
Men at bildet vil bli stående som Andrew Mountbatten-Windsors legacy, det er jeg ikke i tvil om.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
NINA STRAND ON TOM SANDBERG
After looking through the twenty issues of the journal Objektiv, I notice that the images that speak the loudest to me, and about which I’ve continued to think long after the issue went to print, all stem back to one singular photograph, a sort of fulcrum image. Asked about his work, the late Robert Frank said: “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a poem twice.” It is a photograph by Tom Sandberg, taken in the nineties. When I first saw this image in my early twenties, printed on a postcard sent to me by a friend, it seemed to sum up my interest in photography, both as a practitioner and as a writer. The black-and-white photograph depicts a man walking in the rain, taken through a window.
Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 1997.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
After looking through the twenty issues of the journal Objektiv, I notice that the images that speak the loudest to me, and about which I’ve continued to think long after the issue went to print, all stem back to one singular photograph, a sort of fulcrum image. Asked about his work, the late Robert Frank said: “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a poem twice.” It is a photograph by Tom Sandberg, taken in the nineties. When I first saw this image in my early twenties, printed on a postcard sent to me by a friend, it seemed to sum up my interest in photography, both as a practitioner and as a writer. The black-and-white photograph depicts a man walking in the rain, taken through a window. He is blurry; the focus is on the raindrops. Before I knew anything about the photographer, the image simultaneously evoked both loneliness and authority; his oblivion to the rain was something that I later discovered says a lot about Sandberg. He was drawn to the darkness, and this darkness and longing are in the photograph.
He lived with a curiosity and a restlessness to understand the world he inhabited, a world that was black and white in his vision. He worked continuously throughout his life because, as he put it in our interview with him in our very first issue: “Without the pictures, things would not have gone well for me.” Some situations simply had to pass through the camera.
The moment he learned that he had incurable cancer in the late fall of 2013, he started working on what he knew would be his final exhibition, Photographs, at OSL Contemporary. The exhibition presents works from his forty-year career—pieces shown all over the world, some new—and it is difficult not to ascribe a particular symbolism to them, especially the photograph from January this year of two airplane fuselages meeting. The exhibition also includes an early work from his student days at Trent Polytechnic in England: a diptych of a boy with a tennis racket. It is an artistic exercise. The boy is practising, and the young photographer Tom Sandberg is practising. He insisted on completing it despite his failing health. Photography was, as he himself said, the only thing he knew how to do, and the 16 black-and-white photographs stood as a powerful testament. He selected the images with great care; they were reprinted and refined until the very end. In the years before he passed, it might have seemed as if he was chasing the dark, but he himself said he was in control. And with that exhibition, he ensured that it is the photographs we will remember.
Four days before his passing, he made one last adjustment to a photograph of a plane in the clouds. We don’t know where we end up when we die. But when we think of Tom, maybe we can picture him, camera in hand, on a plane making lasting vapour trails in the sky.
See the retrospective with Sandberg, Vibrant World, at Henie Onstad until March 1. Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press. This one is drawn from a text in Objektiv #11 and a chapter in the first essay in our series, Perpetual Photographs, both written by Strand.
ESTHER HIEN
I was thinking again this morning about that image and the feeling it gave me: I felt at peace. In the village, I feel good, serene, without stress. Many people from the city are surprised that I love being in the village so much. The journey is long: a ten-hour trip, eight hours by bus and then two hours on the back of my cousin’s motorcycle.
Once there, everything is very calm, almost meditative. There is little or no network coverage, which allows me to disconnect and does me a lot of good. When it is time for me to leave, I always feel a kind of melancholy and a heaviness in my heart. Even though I know I will return a few weeks later, it is always difficult for me to leave this life and my family.
Photo from Malba by Esther Hien.
Afterimage by Esther Hien:
(English text followed by the French original.)
In your email, you asked me what the first image that comes to mind is when I close my eyes. I closed my eyes and was immediately transported to my father’s village in Burkina Faso. It is a small village called Malba, in the south-western region. I saw the banco house where I sleep and its patio. We are fortunate to have houses built with solid materials, as people say there.
The village is organized like a square. On each side of the square, there is a house: my cousin with his wife and children, my aunt, and the two houses built by my father. At the time when my grandparents were still alive, there were only huts—traditional houses made of earth and reinforced with cow dung. As a child, I was lucky enough to know my grandmother and her hut. Now, their graves are in the middle of the courtyard. Everyone sits on them; children often fall asleep on them in the evening. For us, this is a kind of blessing. Even though they are no longer here, they remain very present and watch over us.
I saw myself at six in the morning, stretching in front of my grandparents’ grave, almost like a form of greeting. In the village, people wake up very early, often to the sound of the rooster crowing. No one uses an alarm clock. At that moment—during that moment when I closed my eyes—I felt that it was not simply my mind that was traveling, but my soul.
These mornings are filled with sounds: the sound of pestles as, through the strength of their arms, women grind condiments into a fine powder in preparation for the meal; the comings and goings of motorcycles; children playing football; birds singing. Described like this, the village might seem as noisy as the city, and yet, paradoxically, it is calm.
I saw myself on those mornings when chickens run outside clucking, followed by their chicks after a night in the henhouse. The goats, too, are released and wander freely around the compound. My aunt, with her traditional basket balanced on her head, goes to gather leaves in the bush. She returns in the early afternoon, the basket filled with moringa and sorrel leaves. During the rainy season, greenery covers the paths traced by people; the sky is blue, the earth is ochre, sometimes even red. These mornings are slow, because in the village everything is much slower. Life is calmer, yet at dawn you can see people becoming active. Women, basins balanced on their heads, go to the water pump if they are among the luckier ones, or to the marsh for those who follow more traditional ways. They talk, laugh, and greet us as they pass through the house. In the village, the concept of gates or fences does not exist.
I was thinking again this morning about that image and the feeling it gave me: I felt at peace. In the village, I feel good, serene, without stress. Many people from the city are surprised that I love being in the village so much. The journey is long: a ten-hour trip, eight hours by bus and then two hours on the back of my cousin’s motorcycle.
Once there, everything is very calm, almost meditative. There is little or no network coverage, which allows me to disconnect and does me a lot of good. When it is time for me to leave, I always feel a kind of melancholy and a heaviness in my heart. Even though I know I will return a few weeks later, it is always difficult for me to leave this life and my family.
These mornings are filled with sounds: women preparing food, the sound of women pounding, the various noises of daily life, some people moving around by motorcycle. But it is not like in the city, where everything is loud and where one must constantly be on alert. These sounds are familiar, known, and not unsettling. It is truly this feeling of serenity that I wanted to share.
En français: Dans ton mail, tu me demandais quelle était la première image qui me venait à l’esprit quand je ferme les yeux. J’ai fermé les yeux et j'ai été tout de suite transportée au village de mon père, au Burkina Faso. C'est un petit village qui s'appelle Malba, dans la région du sud-ouest. J’ai vu la maison en banco dans laquelle je dors et son patio. Nous avons la chance d'avoir des maisons construites en dur, comme on le dit là-bas. Le village est organisé comme un carré. Sur chaque côté du carré, il y a une maison : mon cousin avec sa femme et ses enfants, ma tante, les deux maisons construites par mon père. A l’époque ou mes grands-parents étaient encore vivants, il n’y avait que des cases, maisons traditionnelles construites en terre et renforcées avec de la bouse de vache. J’ai eu la chance petite, de connaître ma grand-mère et sa case. Maintenant, leurs tombes est au milieu de la cour. Tout le monde s'assoit dessus, les enfants s’endorment souvent dessus le soir. Chez nous, c’est comme une bénédiction. Même s'ils ne sont plus là, ils restent très présents et veillent sur nous.
Je me suis vue à 6 heures du matin, m’étirer en face de la tombe de mes grands-parents, un peu à la manière d’une salutation. Au village, on se réveille très tôt et souvent grâce au chant du coq. Personne n'utilise de réveil. A ce moment-là, ce moment durant lequel je ferme les yeux, j’ai senti que ce n’était pas simplement mon esprit qui voyageait, mais mon âme.
Ces matins sont remplis de sons : le bruit pilons qui à la force des bras des femmes réduisent les condiments en fine poudre en vue de la préparation du repas. Les va et vient des motos, les enfants qui jouent au football, le chant des oiseaux. Décrit comme cela, le village semble être aussi bruyant que la ville et paradoxalement, c’est d’un calme !
Je me suis vue lors de ces matins où les poules courent dehors en caquetant suivies de leurs poussins après une nuit dans leur poulailler. Les chèvres, elles aussi sont libérées et se promènent librement autour de la concession. Ma tante, son panier traditionnel sur la tête, part chercher des feuilles dans la brousse. Elle reviendra en début d’après-midi, le panier chargé de feuilles de moringa, d’oseille. En saison des pluies, la verdure recouvre les routes tracées par les hommes, le ciel est bleu, la terre est ocre voire rouge. Ces matins sont lents, parce qu'au village, tout est beaucoup plus lent. La vie est plus calme, mais l’on voit à l’aurore les gens s'activer. Les femmes, bassines sur la tête s’en vont à la pompe pour les plus chanceuses ou au marigot pour les plus traditionnelles. Elles discutent, rient et nous saluent lorsqu’elles traversent la maison. Au village, le concept de grille, de barrière, n’existe pas.
Je repensais ce matin à cette image et à la sensation qu’elle me procurait : j'étais apaisée. Au village, je me sens bien, sereine, sans stress. Beaucoup de personnes de la ville sont étonnées que j’aime tant être au village. La traversée est longue. C'est un voyage de 10 heures dont huit en bus puis deux heures à l’arrière de la moto de mon cousin.
Quand on est là, c'est très calme, presque méditatif. Il y a peu ou pas de réseau, ce qui me permet de me déconnecter et me fait du bien. Lorsque le moment est venu pour moi de repartir, je ressens toujours une forme de mélancholie et une sensation de cœur lourd. Pourtant, je sais que je vais y retourner quelques semaines après mais c’est toujours difficile pour moi de quitter cette vie et ma famille.
Ces matins sont remplis de sons : les femmes qui préparent, le bruit des femmes qui pilent, les différents sons de la vie quotidienne, certaines personnes se déplacent à moto. Mais ce n’est pas comme en ville, où tout est bruyant et où l’on doit être constamment alerte. Les bruits sont connus, familiers, et n’inquiètent pas. C’est vraiment cette sensation de sérénité que je voulais partager.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
MANUFACTORIEL ON SANLÉ SORY
Our work grew out of an ongoing research into the image, approached as a space for exploring Black and African visual cultures. Since 2010, we have been collecting photographs, videos, and other visual materials, guided by the intuition that images can function not only as documents, but as tools for knowledge, reflection, and transmission.
Sanlé Sory, Mali Djeli, 1984, Yossi Milo Gallery, © Sanlé Sory
Afterimage by Aurélia Niat Toundji & Salwat Idi:
(English text followed by the French original.)
Our work grew out of an ongoing research into the image, approached as a space for exploring Black and African visual cultures. Since 2010, we have been collecting photographs, videos, and other visual materials, guided by the intuition that images can function not only as documents, but as tools for knowledge, reflection, and transmission.
As this initial research resonated with a wider audience, we chose to structure and deepen our approach. In 2018, this process expanded into publishing, as a way of sharing our research and giving editorial form to our commitment to archives and visual thinking.
We are Aurélia Niat Toundji and Salwat Idi, founders of manufactoriel, a research studio working across four interconnected fields: research, publishing, design, and transmission. Our practice includes physical and digital archiving projects, critical research, collaborations with cultural institutions and brands, and public engagement through workshops, commissions, and curatorial projects.
Through our editorial platform, cahiers manufactoriel, we explore contemporary African and Black visual cultures, art, and style from a critical perspective. We approach research as an artistic process, where the relationship between content, the materiality of the book, and its spatial form is central. Publishing becomes a site for creation, experimentation, and critical inquiry.
At the core of our practice is the belief that knowledge can be conveyed through images — a form of visual epistemology.
In many African societies, knowledge has long been transmitted through orality, metaphor, and storytelling, as well as through visual and symbolic forms embedded in cultural practices. Our work continues this lineage by connecting visual research, symbolic thought, and knowledge production, in order to explore alternative ways of understanding and sharing ideas.
While building our curatorial database, we encountered numerous challenges: fragmented sources, vanished websites, inaccessible archives. These obstacles strengthened our commitment to collecting, preserving, and materializing images, in order to safeguard a tangible and lasting visual memory.
One emblematic example of this approach is a studio portrait taken by Sanlé Sory in Mali in the 1980s. The photograph shows two young men seated side by side. One wears a traditional boubou and holds a ngoni, an emblematic West African string instrument; the other adopts a hip-hop aesthetic, striking a b-boy pose while holding a boombox — a direct dialogue between local traditions and global influences.
The image speaks to musical transmission, dress, and the coexistence of tradition and modernity. It also opens onto broader sociological questions: how images make cultural and structural tensions visible, and how they allow us to understand ways of being, self-representation, and belonging.
Through this photograph, Mali Djeli (1984) by Sanlé Sory, we reflect on the image’s capacity to produce meaning around society, identity, style, and the body. It shows how cultural practices circulate and transform, shaping both individual and collective identities, while revealing generational differences and overlapping cultural temporalities.
In bookshops, libraries, and cultural institutions, we repeatedly encountered a lack of literature on contemporary African art and the visual cultures of the diaspora. This absence led us to produce this knowledge ourselves.
Our work engages with these visual cultures by affirming the image as a tool for critical and artistic research. Since 2018, we have been publishing books drawn from archival research, documenting, preserving, and valuing these images, so that visual and cultural memory remains accessible and continues to inspire new forms of research and creation.
En français: Notre travail est né d’une recherche autour de l’image, envisagée comme un champ d’exploration de la culture visuelle noire et africaine. Dès 2010, nous avons commencé à rassembler des photographies, des vidéos et différents supports visuels, portées par l’intuition que l’image pouvait constituer en elle-même un outil de connaissance, de réflexion et de transmission.
Face à l’écho rencontré par cette première phase de recherche, nous avons choisi de structurer cette démarche afin d’en approfondir les enjeux. En 2018, cette dynamique s’est prolongée par la volonté de publier le fruit de nos recherches et de donner une forme éditoriale à notre engagement pour l’archive et la pensée visuelle.
Nous sommes Aurélia Niat Toundji et Salwat Idi, et nous dirigeons manufactoriel, un bureau de recherche dont la pratique s’articule autour de quatre axes : la recherche, la publication, le design et la transmission. Nous développons des projets d’archivage physique et numérique, des recherches critiques, des collaborations avec des institutions culturelles et des marques, et activons notre travail à travers des ateliers, des commandes et des projets curatoriaux.
À travers notre plateforme éditoriale, cahiers manufactoriel, nous proposons une approche critique de la culture visuelle contemporaine africaine et noire, de l’art et du style. Nous concevons la recherche comme un processus artistique et poïétique, dans lequel le dialogue entre le contenu, la matérialité et la spatialité du livre est central. L’édition devient ainsi un espace de création, d’expérimentation et de pensée critique.
Notre démarche repose sur le constat que la connaissance peut se transmettre par l’image; ce que nous abordons comme une forme d’épistémologie visuelle.
Dans de nombreuses sociétés africaines, le savoir se transmet par l’oralité, la métaphore et la parabole, mais aussi par des formes visuelles et symboliques profondément ancrées dans les pratiques culturelles. Notre démarche s’inscrit dans cette continuité en articulant recherche visuelle, pensée symbolique et production de connaissances, afin d’explorer d’autres modes de compréhension et de transmission des idées.
Dans la constitution de notre base de données curatoriale, nous avons été confrontées à de nombreuses limites : sources fragmentaires, sites Internet disparus, archives inaccessibles. Ces obstacles ont renforcé notre volonté de collecter, conserver et matérialiser les images, afin de préserver une mémoire visuelle tangible et durable.
Un exemple emblématique de cette démarche est un portrait studio réalisé par Sanlé Sory au Mali dans les années 1980. La photographie représente deux jeunes hommes assis côte à côte : l’un, vêtu d’un boubou traditionnel, tient un ngoni, instrument à cordes emblématique d’Afrique de l’Ouest ; l’autre adopte une esthétique hip-hop, affirmant une posture de b-boy et tenant un boombox, dans un dialogue direct avec les traditions locales.
Cette image met en lumière la transmission musicale, les styles vestimentaires et la coexistence entre tradition et modernité. Elle interroge également des dimensions sociologiques plus larges : la manière dont l’image rend visibles des tensions culturelles et structurelles, et comment elle permet d’appréhender des façons d’être, de se représenter et de se situer dans le monde.
À travers cette photographie, Mali Djeli (1984) de Sanlé Sory, nous interrogeons la capacité de l’image à produire du sens autour de la société, des identités, du style et de la corporéité. Elle montre comment des pratiques culturelles circulent, se transforment et participent à la construction d’identités individuelles et collectives, tout en révélant des différences générationnelles et des temporalités culturelles multiples.
En fréquentant librairies, bibliothèques et institutions culturelles, nous avons constaté le manque de littérature sur l’art africain contemporain et les cultures visuelles de la diaspora. Cette absence nous a poussés à produire nous-mêmes ces savoirs.
Notre travail explore ces cultures visuelles en affirmant l’image comme outil de recherche critique et artistique. À partir des archives, nous éditons depuis 2018 des livres pour documenter, conserver et valoriser ces images, afin que la mémoire visuelle et culturelle reste accessible et continue d’inspirer de nouvelles recherches et créations.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes — the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.
NYDIA BLAS ON JAMES VAN DER ZEE
There are many aspects of this photograph that draw me to it. I like to think about the process of looking. When I look at something, I follow my feelings. I want what I see to move me, usually in a layered way. I also want complexity, because it makes me want to look longer and reflect. When I looked at this picture again, I understood why I loved it so much—it resonates with my subject matter. Looking at it now, with my 45-year-old eyes, in a world burning in many ways, and with a deeper understanding of myself and my work, I realize that this photograph makes me feel safe. In a time when everything feels confusing, this photograph feels clear—like a statement. I feel devoted to it. I admire it. I feel included in it, and I feel protected by it, with a sense of safety.
James Van Der Zee, Couple, Harlem 1932, © 2026 Estate of James Van Der Zee. www.moma.org Acquired through the generosity of Richard E. and Laura Salomon.
Afterimage by Nydia Blas:
I think it’s my all-time favorite photograph. When I was asked about Afterimage, this came straight to my mind. It feels like it’s been in my head forever, but I probably became more familiar with it during graduate school in 2013. By chance, I realized that I had taken a photograph that kind of spoke back to this one, without realizing they were in conversation. That moment of connection is one of the reasons I’m drawn to photography in general: its ability to speak across generations and time, still remaining relevant. Everything we’ve ever seen is somewhere in our minds, and we never know when we might reference it, be reminded of it, or recall it creatively. That’s one of the things I find fascinating about photography. I’ve never exhibited this photo.
I’m from New York, and in 2016, while visiting Atlanta—where I now live—I was at the High Museum. I turned a corner and saw this photograph in a frame. It surprised me to encounter it in person after having seen it so many times on a screen. That was a beautiful moment. The image doesn’t change, but we do in relation to it. I have changed and grown since I first looked at it. Even my worldview and thoughts are constantly expanding. It’s interesting to think about time: the photograph was taken during an important, powerful, and moving period, yet we find ourselves in similar moments again.
There are many aspects of this photograph that draw me to it. I like to think about the process of looking. When I look at something, I follow my feelings. I want what I see to move me, usually in a layered way. I also want complexity, because it makes me want to look longer and reflect. When I looked at this picture again, I understood why I loved it so much—it resonates with my subject matter. Looking at it now, with my 45-year-old eyes, in a world burning in many ways, and with a deeper understanding of myself and my work, I realize that this photograph makes me feel safe. In a time when everything feels confusing, this photograph feels clear—like a statement. I feel devoted to it. I admire it. I feel included in it, and I feel protected by it, with a sense of safety.
When I think of James Van Der Zee, a photographer popular during the Harlem Renaissance, I appreciate how he created a record, or counter-narrative, to the stereotypes about Black people at the time. In his photographs, the subjects—most often Black Americans—and the locations and clothing (what I like to call costumes) serve as markers for other things, like status. The car functions as a prop and feels powerful because it takes up almost the entire frame. It cuts through, making the subjects important. They feel safe. The light is very soft, and the car door is open just enough to welcome me into that space. These people seem to be inviting the viewer into an important space.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
TIAGO BOM ON JEAN ROUCH
Images from the film Les maîtres fous by the French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch have been on my mind recently. I find Rouch interesting because he started as a documentarian making anthropological films but later began making ethno-fiction. In Les maîtres fous, as far as I know this film is documentary, participants enter trance-like states in ritual performances in Ghana, where they dress as colonial authorities, mimicking their gestures and violence, while also channeling spirits.
© Jean Rouch, Les Maîtres fous, 1958. Les Films de La Pléiade
Afterimage by Tiago Bom:
Images from the film Les maîtres fous by the French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch have been on my mind recently. I find Rouch interesting because he started as a documentarian making anthropological films but later began making ethno-fiction. In Les maîtres fous, as far as I know this film is documentary, participants enter trance-like states in ritual performances in Ghana, where they dress as colonial authorities, mimicking their gestures and violence, while also channeling spirits. They sometimes imitate dogs—crawling, barking, and howling—and actual dogs appear in the ceremonies, adding to the chaotic, transgressive energy. The performances are a mix of possession, music, dance, and symbolic reenactment, creating a visceral exploration of power, oppression, and ancestral memory.
The images I am thinking about are very context-driven, as I am currently preparing to go on a small residency in São Tomé e Príncipe to shoot a film, curiously, in part about dogs.
Portuguese sources from the time state that it was an uninhabited archipelago, and that the Portuguese used it to grow exportable crops and as a testing ground and base for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. As with any colonial enterprise at the time, it became, I think for centuries, one of the biggest producers of coffee and chocolate in the world.
The people who were sent there were mainly from Angola (another former Portuguese colony), and in smaller percentages from places like the Congo. I read somewhere that in Haiti there was a similar Central and West African population. Maybe that is why you find similar African syncretism, akin to voodoo, in São Tomé e Príncipe, much like in Haiti. Coincidentally, alongside Haiti—and I don’t know which came first—these were the only two places in the world where there were slave revolts that managed to take over and form their own communes.
São Tomé e Príncipe also has a unique cultural tradition called Tchiloli, a public theatrical performance combining music, dance, and drama, rooted in a 16th‑century Portuguese play about Charlemagne, adapted and creolized over the centuries. Performers wear colonial-style costumes and masks, creating a symbolic cultural tradition. It is kind of eerie: people who are descendants of slaves and colonized peoples putting on the white face, carrying the memory of a centuries-old ritual, metabolizing and transforming a tradition that started with their colonizers.
This performative aspect and the ritualized mimicry reminded me of Les maîtres fous. I’m not sure the conceptual depth translates in a still, but I haven’t been able to shake that film ever since I saw it.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
NINA STRAND ON SZILVESZTER MAKÓ
What is this? Is it a glimmer of hope we can spot in the series of photographs accompanying the interview with Rama Duwaji in The Cut? Shot by Szilveszter Makó, the portraits of the Syrian illustrator and animator, wife of the new Mayor Zohran Mamdani, referred to here as the ‘First Lady of New York City’, seem like small life boats floating in the dark sea of the States. They playfully evoke classic fashion photographs of the 1940s, as well as the Surrealist paintings of René Magritte. I love this one, with her standing barefoot, her shoes placed on one side and a painted sleeping cat on a bar stool on the other. Her posture, her firm gaze …
Szilveszter Makó for The Cut, with Rama Duwaji. Published in The Cut (online/print).
Afterimage by Nina Strand:.
What is this? Is it a glimmer of hope we can spot in the series of photographs accompanying the interview with Rama Duwaji in The Cut? Shot by Szilveszter Makó, the portraits of the Syrian illustrator and animator, wife of the new Mayor Zohran Mamdani, referred to here as the ‘First Lady of New York City’, seem like small life boats floating in the dark sea of the States. They playfully evoke classic fashion photographs of the 1940s, as well as the Surrealist paintings of René Magritte. I love this one, with her standing barefoot, her shoes placed on one side and a painted sleeping cat on a bar stool on the other. Her posture, her firm gaze … these are the kind of images we need while the rest of her country and so much of the world descends into free fall. The president hasn't even finished his first year in office, there are three more years to go, and so much is already broken.
Over the holidays, I read the text about photographer Donna Gottschalk by Hélène Giannecchini for the show Nous Autres at Le Bal, Paris. Gottschalk grew up in in Alphabet City, New York, in the 1950s, and Giannecchini reflects: 'The people she loved most lived on these streets, and most of them are long dead. And it’s the brutality of this city, of society as it is, the relentless poverty, everything that weighs on marginalized bodies, that killed them.' And today, all bodies that are not white male bodies seem in danger, like the woman with the last name Good, just killed by ICE in Minneapolis.
Over the past year, I have collaborated with two female photographers, Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, observing them creating double exposures, a technique Newhouse learned while living in a lesbian separatist community in the United States during the 1970s. They used photography as a tool to reinvent themselves. They had abandoned their families and everyday lives and built their own homes in the woods of Oregon. They were safe there. They were unsafe in the city. The houses are still standing, and I wonder if the women might feel tempted to move back there as they witness history grimly repeating itself for the queer community in the States.
Maybe we should all leave society? Or we could move to New York, where the powerful wheels of Mamdani and Duwaji are turning, there is hope. In the photo series, Duwaji’s confident gaze and half-smile bring a sense of sanity and control. Scrolling through her illustrations on her website gives even more, with the drawing of three fierce women of different races surrounded by flames. The one in the centre has her arm raised in a fighting pose as a text promises: 'Sooner or later, people will rise up against tyranny.’
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
CAROL NEWHOUSE & CARMEN WINANT
The mirrors in Double are hidden among the other works, aiming to include the viewer by having them unexpectedly catch sight of themselves, perhaps noticing something about who they are. For the artists, the mirrors also function as a material reference. There are many mirrors within the pictures from the old Ovulars that placing them on the outside creates a kind of double exposure—a doubling in itself.
Double Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant, Les Rencontres d’Arles, 2025..
The mirrors in Double are hidden among the other works, aiming to include the viewer by having them unexpectedly catch sight of themselves, perhaps noticing something about who they are. For the artists, the mirrors also function as a material reference. There are many mirrors within the pictures from the old Ovulars that placing them on the outside creates a kind of double exposure—a doubling in itself.
As Carol points out in an email: ‘In that moment, it can feel as though the three of us—the viewer, Carmen and I—are held together in the same instant, captured in the same image. It’s instantaneous, like the click of a shutter or the glance of an eye. It is also intergenerational, echoing the passage of time.’ Carol sees this as an inclusive encounter that suggests movement and the potential for freedom and creativity: ‘To me, all of this describes the female gaze, which I could also call the feminist gaze.’
(…)
Carol shares a thought about how she never anticipated how her work in the 1970s—those ideas and images—would eventually find their way into the world. The footage and the creative process had never seemed as if it would last beyond the moment; the women hadn’t been thinking about the future, just doing what felt right at the time. Now, years later, people are still asking her what they were thinking when they made their work. The fact that it continues to resonate with so many is a surprising reminder of how far it has travelled and how deeply it has impacted others. It was serendipity that led Carmen to rediscover this work almost a decade ago, bringing it back into the light through her book and the several shows she’s curated with Carol. Their ongoing conversations around using photography as evidence led to this one-year workshop where together these two friends have created new narratives. As Carmen later writes, there is poetry in the fact that their pictures and stories have quite literally merged on celluloid.
The photographic works from the Ovulars explore the construction of histories, as well as the significance of the photographs themselves—images designed to challenge the existing power structures within the medium. The double exposures created by Carmen and Carol are part of this lineage, contributing to an ongoing feminist photographic movement. Their work not only reflects history but actively reshapes it.
This year has been an incredible one for Objektiv Press and our Afterimage series. As we wrap up 2025, we’ve been sharing excerpts from our books every Monday leading up to Christmas. We leave you with these words from Double by Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant, Objektiv #30. We’ll return next year with more. Until then, we wish you moments of peace and connection.
MARTIN PARR
My autoportrait project has run over 40 years. The aim is to demonstrate the different ways in which you can have your portrait done in a studio or public space, as well as the different techniques photographers employ. The only reason I use myself as the subject is because I’m the one person who’s consistently there. Hanoi Studio took five black and white shots of me in different poses, and in one they gave me naff sunglasses. They then did a montage, printed in black and white, and hand-coloured.
Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
My autoportrait project has run over 40 years. The aim is to demonstrate the different ways in which you can have your portrait done in a studio or public space, as well as the different techniques photographers employ. The only reason I use myself as the subject is because I’m the one person who’s consistently there. Hanoi Studio took five black and white shots of me in different poses, and in one they gave me naff sunglasses. They then did a montage, printed in black and white, and hand-coloured.
I’m uninterested in how I look, as long as I’m presentable. I look in the mirror once a day – I have no choice, as I’ve got to comb my hair. I guess that’s interesting given I do fashion photography. I’m not interested in clothes, I just wear what’s comfortable. Socks with sandals is a good combination before it gets to the hottest part of the year. I guess you could call it my spring look …
I have had a wonderful life with photography. From North Korea, to a vicar’s garden party in Somerset, or shooting Mar del Plata beach in Argentina – what a privilege it has been to see the world and record my response. I had a funny one in Morecambe last summer. I was taking photos and this couple came up and said, “That’s a nice camera. What are you doing around here?” I replied, “I’m documenting Morecambe.” They said, “You mean like Martin Parr?” I said, “I am Martin Parr.” They were rather surprised.
I’ve been taking photos for almost 70 years, and in that time we’ve seen the amazing transformation from analogue film to the digital era, and I’ve got a lot older. We live in a difficult but inspiring world, and there is so much out there I want to photograph.
This week’s Afterimage contribution is an edited extract from Utterly Lazy and Inattentive by Martin Parr and Wendy Jones, published by Penguin. It is adapted from “There’s Something Very Interesting About Boring”: Martin Parr on His Life in Pictures, The Guardian, 24 August 2025, in remembrance of Parr following his passing this weekend.
ELLE PÉREZ
When we were developing my show Diablo at MoMA PS1, the curators were interested in doing something that evoked the feeling of being in my studio. The collage Diablo was originally not meant to be an artwork, but was my answer to the question 'What does your studio look like?'
Diablo is a version of one of my foundational impulses: I have always made this kind of image collection, even as a kid.
From Elle Pérez Diablo, MoMA PS 1.
2024 On the wall collages
When we were developing my show Diablo at MoMA PS1, the curators were interested in doing something that evoked the feeling of being in my studio. The collage Diablo was originally not meant to be an artwork, but was my answer to the question 'What does your studio look like?'
Diablo is a version of one of my foundational impulses: I have always made this kind of image collection, even as a kid. An intense collage covered an entire wall in my childhood bedroom. I was surrounded by images and pieces of text for years, and I’ve made something similar in every studio I’ve had. The wall collages that I make in my studio are an engine for moving my work forward, and for discovering potential formal innovations. I have become interested in these collages as works of art because of how they reflect the process of thinking with images. They both trace and make possible the development of thought, using the multiple and mundane materials of the studio: laser prints, inkjet prints, darkroom prints, reference articles, screenshots, work prints and postcards, Post-It notes, washi tape, and push pins.
The collages reflect the honesty and idealism of the studio space, a place of thought unbounded, where the question to answer is: What more is possible? In these collages made as studio work, I am able to conjure possibility while it is still not yet within my grasp; manifestation and failure to arrive both live within these pieces. A gift of vision that I give to myself.
I’m interested in the movement of the pieces of paper as a gesture. Catching the light and the breeze, the papers are not fixed in place except for at one or two points. They are animated by their relationship to space and open air; a passing person’s wake could lift the page. My drive toward making both these collages and also observational images feels deeply connected to being from places that are always about losing, reimagining, and forgetting.
Reimagining is one of my greatest skills. I think it comes from that experience of constant loss: you can’t hold onto things forever; you have to keep moving, reshaping, and finding new ways to see things. It’s that cycle of loss and reinvention that shapes how I approach the world, especially through photography.
This year has been incredible for Objektiv Press and our Afterimage series. As we wrap up the year, we’ll be sharing excerpts from our books every Monday leading up to Christmas. This is Elle Pérez from their book the movement of our bodies, Objektiv #29.
DAVID CAMPANY
I have been thinking a lot lately about the relation between ‘theory’ and ‘writing’, and ‘literature’. Many theorists don’t think of themselves as writers, and of course many writers don’t think of themselves as theorists. As we know, a lot of ‘theory’ is not very well written, probably because those who write it do not think of themselves as writers.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the relation between ‘theory’ and ‘writing’, and ‘literature’. Many theorists don’t think of themselves as writers, and of course many writers don’t think of themselves as theorists. As we know, a lot of ‘theory’ is not very well written, probably because those who write it do not think of themselves as writers.
The essayist and psychotherapist Adam Phillips once suggested that psychoanalytic writing, from Freud onwards, but particularly Freud, should be read as a form of literature. That is to say, not as a claim to truth or science, but as a claim to writing. Asked for a definition of literature, Susan Sontag suggested it was writing that you would want to reread.
I read a lot of theory, but the only theory I reread are the texts I want to reread, and these I think of as also being literature. However, I would like to think that I have a wide sense of what literature is, and can be. When reading, I keep my mind open for those unpredictable moments when a theoretical idea finds what seems to be a fully satisfying, or startling, or at least profound literary form.
People often complain about the way certain writers still seem to dominate theoretical discussions of photography, particularly Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag. I share that frustration. But do you know why their thought dominates where the equally profound thought of others does not? It’s because it was well written. Their writing stays with people as sentences, as modes of thought that found compelling written form, as literature.
Rereading a text has its own satisfactions. Not the least of these are the fact that we never read it the same way twice. In rereading, the emphasis, our emphasis, may fall somewhere else. In this sense, to reread a text is to measure one’s own changes – intellectual, social, political, aesthetic, critical, poetic – and in the process, we find that resonant meaning comes neither from the text, nor from us, but from somewhere between the two. This may explain why there is often a gap between the self-perception of ‘theorists’ and literary ‘writers’. A theorist is often hoping to ‘convey’ their theories, to communicate them unequivocally. A literary writer says “never mind if this is strictly true; is it interesting?” But if a text is interesting, that is a kind of truth. This is why Phillips suggests psychoanalytic writing be read a literature, regardless of the writer’s intention. Freud the writer will outlast Freud thetheorist, or even psychoanalysis itself. And perhaps Freud knew that.
‘Theory’ is often suspicious of the power of ‘literature’, seeing it as rhetorically sly in its way of not appealing to the intellect only. In doing so it often condemns itself to small and specialized audiences. This is why the idea ofthe ‘public intellectual’ is vanishing. But there were never that many public intellectuals, never that many who had found a way to give literary form to their theories. It is very difficult thing to do. What may be vanishing is the desire to even try.
This year has been incredible for Objektiv Press and our Afterimage series. As we wrap up the year, we’ll be sharing excerpts from our books every Monday leading up to Christmas. This is David Campany’s contribution to our A Criticism Review, Objektiv #25.