SVERRE STRANDBERG ON JEFF WALL

Jeff Wall, Milk, 1984.

Afterimage by Sverre Strandberg:

It is in a way a hard task to think about just one image as how I relate to photography has changed. The idea of the singular image is not on my mind these days. I think of images in a series, in a context of more images. I am no longer seeking the one glorious photograph as I used to do.

There is one very well-known work on my mind though, Milk by Jeff Wall. It is a bit scary to talk about such a known image, from a time when the formats were huge, in the 80s, with him and Gursky, Ruff, and the others.

This one stuck with me. I had started art academy working with film, and then, in my final year, I flipped through different photobooks and there it was. It sort of beat everything else in a way. Looking at it again for this, it has this composition where everything goes together, and the frozen moment of the liquid, something only photography can do. And the fundamental symbolism of milk for all humans. Milk emerged as a recurring theme in contemporary photography from the early 1960s through the 1980s.

There is something about the modernist house, the architecture, the building filling most of the picture frame. And then this figure outside. There is some realism in the photograph, and yet it is a constructed scenography. I like this dualism between realism and the constructed, where you intervene in something which is realistic.

One can choose many different details in this one. The milk being in a paper bag, for one, hidden from view, and the one holding it looking in the other direction. Turning away from the explosion. One can see the veins in his arm. It makes me think that he is holding something back, something that is about to burst out, much like the splash of milk.

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. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.

BRIAN PAUL LAMOTTE ON Sonderkommando No. 283

Gerhard Richter, Birkenau no. 283, Postscript.

Afterimage by Brian Paul Lamotte:

Perhaps the political power of an image isn't simply its ability to show us something.
It is its ability to make it impossible for us to say that we did not know.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by photographs and steeped in image culture. An early university professor keenly observed that I had seen more images in my short lifetime than all of my classmates combined. Growing up in my father’s photo studio, I had access not only to the means of production but also to endless slides, negatives, and prints. I took this for granted before that comment. I now have the privilege and pleasure of working with images daily, designing art and photography books for nearly twenty years, drawn not only to their material aspects but also to working with sequences and multiple images. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the photograph that has stayed with me since last November cannot be separated from its place at the end of a sequence documenting one of the most horrific moments in human history.

On a brisk and grey Sunday at the tail end of Paris Photo last November, I made the journey to Fondation Louis Vuitton to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective. I went expecting blurry paintings and gestural movements to soothe my eyes and mind after a long week of photographs and books. Instead, when I reached the end of the exhibition, I was confronted with something so urgent and haunting that I couldn’t look away, and seemingly everything I had seen previously vanished. It wasn’t a painting or a book but a series of small black-and-white photographs tucked into the back left corner of a cavernous room, with four overwhelming canvases hanging adjacent and smoky mirrors on the opposite wall. The canvases were Richter’s monumental Birkenau paintings. The small photographs in the corner, framed and placed in sequence, were his source material: the clandestine Sonderkommando photographs taken inside Auschwitz-Birkenau and smuggled out through the Polish Resistance. What struck me, and what has stayed with me, is not simply the photographs themselves but the feeling of urgency and necessity when you observe them. The first two frames, No. 280 and No. 281, depict the atrocities we have come to understand and collectively reckon with. But it was the final two, and particularly No. 283 (shown above), that affected me most—not for what they depict, but for what is missing or lies outside the frame. The danger and fear we feel in the tilted frame of No. 282 become more palpable in No. 283 as form and figure fall away and we’re left with abstraction and uncertainty. Its power comes as much from what is outside the photograph as from what is inside it.

As I left the exhibition, shaken and moved in a way I hadn’t experienced before, I began an internal dialogue about political images and our contemporary image culture. We consume photographs through various feeds and endless social-media scrolls, where images of suffering become part of the same visual stream as everything else. What the Sonderkommando photographs unearthed was a more profound question for me: What has happened to our capacity to sustain attention to an image? The first two frames are figurative and frankly unimaginable, while No. 282 and, more so, No. 283 have a pastoral and abstract quality that becomes deeply unsettling once we understand their context and the frames that preceded them. One could argue they hold more resonance because of the unspectacular nature of what they don’t depict. The trees and skyline bear witness to what is outside the frame and force us to ask: What can an image make visible without showing the thing we expect it to show?

I’m writing this ten months later, sitting in a friend’s Berlin apartment I’m calling home for the next week and a half. An enormous black-and-white print sits behind me depicting a Palestinian olive tree in the occupied territories. Its monumentality and fragility, and the history carried by the tree itself, are not lost on me. Yesterday I biked past the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on my way to see a Brâncuși retrospective. Abstraction keeps reappearing. History and current politics are intertwined and colliding in this country’s collective memory as it struggles to negotiate the complexities of “never again.” What is the responsibility of memory if it does not alter how we encounter suffering in the present? No. 283 gives us trees and sky; the Palestinian olive tree carries land, continuity, displacement, inheritance, and survival; Brâncuși reduces bodies and objects towards elemental form; and the Holocaust Memorial refuses figurative representation, giving us repeated concrete forms. All, in different ways, make visible something that cannot simply be depicted.

The photographer of the Sonderkommando photographs, long identified only as “Alex” and now widely believed to have been Alberto Errera, a Greek Jewish naval officer, made these images as an act of resistance and testimony. He and the fellow prisoners who acted as lookouts risked their lives to document what was being deliberately kept unseen. The photographs survived through a chain of people who understood that this evidence had to reach the outside world. The Nazis understood that images of this nature could not be allowed to exist, that visual evidence threatened the machinery of extermination. What stays with me, and what I continue to ponder, is this contradiction: the necessity of making photographic evidence and the necessity, for those committing the atrocities, of destroying it. The image itself became an act of resistance, evidence that had to survive and reach the outside world.

We’re left with trees. Sky. Almost nothing.

Support for Palestinian Students to Study Abroad (SPSSA) is currently raising funds to help Palestinian photography students evacuate Gaza and continue their studies in the UK, covering tuition, living, evacuation, and contingency costs. Donate via Chuffed

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. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.

WHITNEY HUBBS

Screenshot of the fire.

Afterimage by Whitney Hubbs:

In my second round of puberty (aka perimenopause) my high school burned down. In February 2025, one week before David Lynch died, and six months before my thirty-year high school reunion, I watched my high school in west L.A. burn down on Instagram live, in my home, in an upstate New York town, during a snowstorm. It didn't feel real, and that makes sense to me. I didn't feel sad, and I'm embarrassed that this also makes sense to me. It felt more real and more sad that David Lynch died. And then I feel sad because I felt closer to David Lynch than I did to my life during high school, or maybe that's normal?

Carrie and Teen Wolf were shot at my high school that burned down. I also found out that the second house I lived in—that a reality tv star lived in with his wife—burned down.. In 2018 I watched the first house I lived in burn down on a livestream YouTube channel, shot from a helicopter. M*A*S*H and Twin Peaks were filmed around that house. I watched that house burn down in a different, but smaller, upstate New York town, and also during a snowstorm.

Back to my high school. I don't see why my locker wouldn't have burned down with the entire school, but that would mean that the photo classroom across from my locker also burned down where the only good memories are from my puberty. I took my first photo class when I was a freshman in 1991. That year I wanted to be a war photographer because my teacher showed us James Nachtwey's War Photographer. But then when I was a sophomore, he showed us Annie Leibovitz's pictures of famous people, like that Keith Haring portrait. I didn't really want to be her, because being Keith Haringg seemed cooler. And when I pretended to be him and made a self-portrait, I got photo of the week.

I am writing this in 2026, and I hear that my high school is holding classes at the empty Sears building in the next town over—a place I shoplifted knock off Doc Marten's from. By the time this second round of puberty hit, both houses from my first eighteen years were incinerated. Both times, I decided not to go back and photograph these places that aren't even places anymore, and instead I had a fun (in a macabre way) writing about 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. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.

SERAFIN GERBER ON RYAN MCGINLEY & FERDINAND HODLER

Ryan McGinley, Sparky.

Afterimage by Serafin Gerber:

I am on a journey to find the image in my head. I haven't reached the bottom, but I'm on it. I took the assignment literally: what's the image you see when you close your eyes? So I lay down, closed my eyes, and looked. Not one image came, but many.

I'm a melancholic person, especially in summer (I’m writing this in July); every new one makes me feel time passing, and I think of past summers, miss what has been. The older I get, the more I think: I used to be so young, so free, everything felt light, endless, limitless. Now it all feels heavier, more serious. This feeling hits me every summer.

There's a contrast in it. On one side I'm fully present, swimming in a river under this exact sun, hyper-real, right here, right now. But then it layers with every summer before it. It results in this sort of mental time travel, this longing for what has been, this slight fear of what's coming. The very moment becomes a timeline. Saturated, both ways at once.

I grew up in the countryside, so visually summer to me means saturated colour, late evening light lying horizontal and warm, fields, meadows, the wind in them, rivers, hills, mountains.

I have this ritual I do every time I swim: I dive, open my eyes underwater, and swim toward the sun looking straight at it, watching the light break. Full steam summer evening light, running super fast, close friends, warm beer—this is where freedom lives, where everything feels possible. Wide space, the sky, closeness, intimacy, melancholy.

Three images came out of it, layered.

The most photographic one is Ryan McGinley's early work—fireworks, figures shot against the sun. It's the same gesture: looking into the sun through water, that closeness, that youth. His images breathe. Everything is here at once. I found his work years ago, forgot about it, and it came back to me while I was trying to name this feeling—the wide lens, people close together, fireworks or sun, small flares of light. Not many photographs move me the way his do.

Ferdinand Hodler, Sonnenuntergang auf dem Genfer See, 1915.

The second is Ferdinand Hodler, a Swiss painter—lakes, forests, streams, rocks, his light. Figures holding each other by the hand. I can't name one painting; it's the colour and the light matching what I feel, not any single image.

The third is the sunrise emoji. I use it constantly. A small square that is also an image.

These three layer into what I see right now when I close my eyes. Together, they are my inner world right now. Not a concise answer to a simple question. The word for it might be saudade—the presence of an absence. Longing for something that isn't here now.

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.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND ON DIM REVELATIONS

Following the recent release of Dim Revelations, The 2013 Journal, we present two interviews in which Rødland speaks about the book and his photographic process.

Torbjørn Rødland, Hot Dog, 2013, 28 x 35 cm.

Dark Revelations, D2
By Maja Hattvang

Torbjørn Rødland publishes his diary from 2013 and gives a rare insight into his own photographic process.

In 2013, photographic artist Torbjørn Rødland decided to write. A small piece of text every day, sometimes about photography as an art form, sometimes about his own process ("I got up early and put striped toothpaste on a frankfurter in a wheat bun, right here on the floor"), sometimes about films he watches, Edvard Munch's understanding of hell, or the joy of a fully charged electrical device.

"My best thinking is wordless," he writes, for example, on January 8: "I'm a photography-thinker, which is not quite a thinker." Nevertheless, the entries carry the same shifting between high and low, sincerity and irony that characterizes his photographs.

The idea was always that it would be published, but only now, 13 years later, has Dim Revelations, The 2013 Journal arrived.

"The year 2013 very quickly looked very outdated," says Rødland, who recently moved from Los Angeles to New York. "I had to wait until we could look at the year from a certain distance."

The book is part of Objektiv Press's essay series on camera-based art, and offers a rare glimpse into Rødland's photographic process, which tends to depend on a combination of thorough preparation and intuition.

Halfway through the year, he comes across, by chance, the American author Ken Wilber's so-called integral theory: a kind of synthesis of Eastern and Western, new and old knowledge traditions. It has a tremendously productive effect on his thinking around his own work.

"When I studied photography in Bergen, you were either straight, subjective and poetic, or you were staged, appropriating and critical. Only the latter of these two positions had validity, but it wasn't inclusive enough for me. I needed the poetic and the subjective, but I couldn't ignore the staged and the critical," he says.

"I knew that what I was searching for wasn't a nostalgic image, but I had no suitable concepts. What I wanted to do didn't exist, and therefore had no name."

This was what he found in Wilber's ideas: a concept that encompassed all layers of meaning at once.

Rødland's photographs tend to be perfectly lit, sometimes bordering on softcore or advertisement-like in their choice of subject matter, and haven't always been read in the multi-layered way he himself works from.

"Is it about a need to be understood?"

"Understood. Seen. Mostly on behalf of the images. I'm painfully aware that I fall short as a communicator. But stronger than the need to be understood is my own need to understand."

The 2013 Journal: Torbjørn Rødland, Daily Lazy
By Koshik Zaman

K.Z: This is an honor. I very much enjoyed reading your brand new book Dim Revelations: The 2013 Journal, which is based on diary entries from that year. I chuckled several times, and I loved all the references and insights. According to the preface, you had not kept a diary before 2013, or after, for that matter. What prompted you to start then? Why was that year particularly suited to this?

Torbjørn Rødland: In 2011 I published twenty sentences on photography, and the response I got to that text encouraged me to write more. I was in Scandinavia without my equipment over the 2012 Christmas holidays and decided to start writing on January 1.

K.Z: Out of curiosity, why did you leave out Sundays?

TR: I like the biblical concept of taking Sundays off. It makes a lot of sense to me.

K.Z: Right, you allude to that in one of the entries where you mention Roe Ethridge. What did an ideal Sunday look like then?

TR: Not so different from all the other days. I just didn't have to come up with a paragraph for the journal. A Sunday could be a great day for, say, making a picture.

K.Z: The format is intimate, very reminiscent of a notebook, and fits well within Objektiv Press' essay series. Had you always intended for it to be published, or did that idea come later?

TR: The idea was always to publish it, and the question was always when.

K.Z: So why is now a good time to publish it?

TR: I'm not sure it is. Objektiv Press asked very nicely for a contribution to their book series, and this journal was the best unpublished "essay" I could find on my PowerBook. A lot of people look back at the years leading up to 2016 as a different reality, so maybe 2013 is finally ripe for a revisit. Things and times have definitely changed.

Excerpts from Dim Revelations:

04/26

I think I'm violating the portrait image. They think I'm violating the portrayed person.

06/01

Sexual tension is either projection, telepathy, or a combination of the two.

10/30

A photographer is someone who has grown to love the limitations of her camera.

K.Z: It's evident that you're a talented and very witty writer. Have you not felt compelled to keep writing?

TR: No. Every generation produces a lot of writers who do it better than me, but there is a lack of exciting photographers.

K.Z: Returning to the project more than a decade later, are there any entries that made you think, "I would not write that today"?

TR: Certain artistic approaches that felt tired to me in 2013 are receiving less positive attention today, so I probably wouldn't feel the need to throw shade in those directions. I'm older and would generally throw less shade now, though I repeatedly went there because, as a reader, I'm excited by that type of frankness. I'm drawn to the directness in Edmund Wilson's diaries, perhaps forgetting that they weren't published until after his death.

K.Z: For a contemporary art audience, an introduction is almost redundant. You are one of the leading figures in contemporary photography, and your mise-en-scène approach has clearly

influenced many younger artists. I would still love to ask how you first got started in photography.

TR: I grew up with a father who read amateur photography magazines. He gave me a camera when I was maybe eleven. At that time I was already a dedicated cartoonist, but when that spark expired in my late teens, I transferred my love of image-making to photography. I never seriously considered painting.

K.Z: I read somewhere that you have also worked with video and film, which I was not aware of at all. I believe some of those works were made before you moved to Los Angeles. Has living in the city not inspired you to revisit those mediums? Reading the book, it's evident that you're very interested in film.

TR: Moving to Los Angeles in 2010, I thought the next step would be to make a movie long enough to cross over into the world of cinema, but Hollywood diminished rather than strengthened that appetite. Last year I moved away from California. Let's see if the hunger returns. I won't tell you my genre-bending idea for a feature-length film, as it has still not been attempted by anyone else.

K.Z: Finally, what is left for you to explore? You've exhibited widely, in blue-chip galleries and world-renowned institutions alike. What still excites or challenges you?

TR: Oh, I'm not as impressed by the reception as you seem to be. Have you ever seen one of my exhibitions? Very few have. In my mind, it's just getting started. It will be a long process. What else is exciting? There are still a lot of possible photographic images that just aren't being created. I'll try to make some of them.

NINA STRAND ON MATIAS FALDBAKKEN

En opprettholdelse / Upholdong (2026), Matias Faldbakken. Photo by Niklas Hart / KORO.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

And then, there it is. Fifteen years after the terrorist attacks in Oslo and on Utøya: Upholding, the national memorial for July 22. A towering steel structure as a protest against forgetting.

Those who live in Oslo will likely remember the large steel rig built to preserve Pablo Picasso's The Fishermen from the demolished Y-block. This inspired the artist, who filled this new structure with a mosaic work whose motif is from the island of Utøya. We see a wading bird, a common redshank typical of the area around the island, and some reeds and twigs reflected in the water. The other side of the sculpture is painted in the same red as Utøya's speakers' platform, can function as an open wound

The rig itself refers to what happened in the government quarter, and the motif to what happened on Utøya; the work thus becomes a bridge between the two horrific events. In the description of the work, the artist states that the rig that protected Picasso's work ‘appeared as an essential object from the transitional phase between the old and new government quarter, and further, a Norway before and after the attack.’

The placement is also significant: when standing in front of the mosaic, one looks towards Utøya, with only a couple of degrees' deviation. According to the artist, the mosaic functions in this way both as a window and as a screen, echoing Vilém Flusser: ‘The image is a screen which hides what it means.’

Co-creating the work with survivors and the bereaved underscored its inclusive dimension. Many were invited to place the mosaic together with the artist, among them teenagers who were not yet born when the terrorist acts took place. As one of them put it, we are the future, and it is important that we know what we want to do with 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.

RUTH ANDERWALD ON ALEC SOTH

Alec Soth, A couple off of Nome's beachfront, Alaska, 2015.

Afterimage by Ruth Anderwald:

What is the image that is always at the back of my mind, on the inside of my eyelids? When thinking about this, I realised that my thinking in images puts them in relation to each other, and that my afterimage is somehow overlaid imagery. When I tried digging deeper, I realized the image that I'm yearning for is one that I have to make — my next project. It's been a really interesting self-discovery journey, this task of thinking about an afterimage.

Nevertheless, I will propose an image that exists, made by a really well-known photographer. It is Alec Soth's A Couple off Nome's Beachfront, Alaska, from 2015. You see a couple standing on a small piece of ice; one of them has crutches, and they hug each other. There is only this — the ice, the couple, and the blue sea.

There are several elements that I connect to in this image. One is that, with all the problems that we have in the world right now, constantly on our minds whenever we open (or don't open) the newspapers, we are perpetually aware of a certain level of pressure that exists. And the way I think about it, and the way I connect this image to it, is that we only have each other as humanity. This is it. We have only us, and we need to connect with each other. That's our only way of managing, of moving on, of creating. Connected to that is a kind of wonderment: how have we survived as humanity for so long without creating a sustainable way of coexisting? I mean, how did we even manage to end up here? It's crazy. I see a lot of these things in that couple on the ice sheet, also in connection with climate change.

And then I think what stands out is that this is a part of Alaska that was part of the gold rush of the early 20th century, taken away from Indigenous people — erasing their culture and values, or at least trying to. So, a lot of things come together in this image.

My thinking has revolved a lot around coexistence lately, and what art and artistic thinking can teach us — also artistic practice and photographic practice. There are performative aspects to photography. One is the bodily presence of the photographer and the subjects: how their presence is impressed upon the photographer and vice versa. The presence of a camera changes the setting and allows for different things to emerge. And then, of course, photography makes things visible and is therefore used a lot in activism, making visible things that would otherwise remain hidden. I think there is a lot in the medium of photography, but also in the way that we as artists manage to survive — building relationships, grasping opportunities, and trying to build up not only careers for ourselves, because this wouldn't work alone; we also create networks to sustain each other and deal with things together.

This is the performativity that art has. It can nudge you to think differently, to engage, to act. In Austria, the climate of discussion is so heated right now that even people who agree on a lot of things don't talk to each other anymore. I think we should have more burning questions to raise and more pressing challenges to address than to stop speaking to a person because they might see certain things differently. It's so strange. Each other is all we have.

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.

YUE CHEN ON GERTRUDE KÄSEBIER

Gertrude Käsebier, The Manger, circa 1900.

Afterimage by Yue Chen:

I have always liked the idea of photography as a way of lending private eyes and feelings to every moment. This because a photographer, guided by a genuine feeling for the moment, can render their subject with a rare dignity and tenderness that would otherwise be unseen, especially across time.

Lately, I am beginning to feel a deep urge to genuinely attend every moment I choose, and to consciously infuse my care into the people and things I hold dear. Attuning oneself to these fleeting instances feels like a deeply photographic act. The moments we live for, or survive on, have a way of staying with us if we just pay closer attention to how they feel in real time. It is a way to hold them close so that they become permanent architecture within us, like rocks standing firm in a river, keeping us from being swept away.

I recently came across this photograph again while looking at Camera Work and felt its grounding power. It is a photograph made by Gertrud Käsebier, a leading Pictorialist and a key figure in the Photo-Secession, a fin-de-siècle movement organized by Alfred Stieglitz to establish photography as an art form on par with painting, with ambitions spanning both Europe and America. Titled The Manger, the photograph references the widely known Nativity scene of Mary wrapping Jesus in swaddling clothes and placing him in a manger. However, the compelling nature of the image lies in its indexicality, a quality unique to photography that distinguishes it from painting. The very fact that real people served as models for these holy figures made the scene take on a palpable, lifelike presence.

To the viewer with no prior knowledge of its art-historical context, the picture strips back to the most fundamental act behind the camera: under the beautiful light, a woman in a white gown holding a baby in a rustic barn-like environment. A sense of mystery pervades the image. One cannot quite discern the features of the woman, whose side profile is softened by a haze-like blur. Yet, one can feel her strong presence in the picture and her attentiveness to the baby, an intimacy that seems to shut out the rest of the world, oblivious to everything around her. And to me, that is the very presentation of maternal love. That is what makes the picture touching. It is not about a relationship re-enacted for the camera, but real relationships as they exist in the world.  And you can sense that it is about motherhood without being told. The image hinges on a chain of attentive gazes: from the photographer to her subject, and from the mother to her child. It derives from the knowledge of motherhood that comes from the photographer, being a mother of three.

By 1899, this was the most ever paid for a photograph. It certainly was related to its religious motif and photography being the new art form, but also all of the above. Her promotion of photography as a viable career for women stemmed directly from her dedication to her own values. I looked into her biography and envisioned what it was possibly like for her, how she was standing in a slightly different position from the Photo-Secession movement as it developed and wanted to make different pictures for her family. Sometimes you will encounter this photograph flipped in both directions on the internet, or see it through varied digital scans of prints that have been preserved to different levels. The various states of the photograph make even clearer what makes it truly valuable: it is the touch of love that anchors it against time.

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.

DUANE MICHALS

Afterimage-interview by Nina Strand:

It was inspiring to learn, when interviewing Michals in 2016, that he, at the age of 83, had made his first films. These were created for his exhibition Sequences & Talking Pictures at DC Moore Gallery in New York, which featured a number of his short films, or ‘mini-movies’ as Michals called them. The show also included posters for the films and several of his earlier picture sequences from the 1960s and 1970s.

‘A new illiteracy of images is being born,’ he said, ‘and this is the result of the illiteracy of a culture with pretend language and pretend emotions. The images people are being presented with don’t demand much.´ Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of one-line-insult intellectual discourse. Trump is the ultimate destination of the trivialisation of language and meaning.

He said he didn’t pay much attention to photography as a field, feeling peripheral to PHOTOGRAPHY. However, because he loves the medium, he remains thoughtful and critical about its possibilities and limitations. He has always enjoyed literature and poetry, in some ways more than photography, because writing conjures up an imaginary universe that you share with the writer and help create. Photography is defined by the facts it represents. ‘It doesn’t float in the air the way poetry does.’ De Chirico and Magritte are both poetic painters who play with facts, yet contradict them with mystery, in his opinion.

Years ago, he saw a photograph of a young man on crutches. His leg was in a cast, he had no shirt on, and he was standing at home, leaning in a doorway. Michals was deeply moved by his vulnerability, his future possibilities as a man, and his fragility. Although he has never specifically copied this image, it has crept into his work as part of how he perceives life.

Perhaps some of this can be seen in his work The Unfortunate Man, which is currently included in the exhibition Fragile beauté. Photographies de la collection de Sir Elton John et David Furnish, at Jeu de Paume, along with other works by Michals.

Interview with Duane Michals published in the essaybook Perpetual Photographs, 2020.

DIM REVELATIONS BY TORBJØRN RØDLAND

Torbjørn Rødland, Avocado, 2013.

03/04

Blanket pins might offer a temporary fix for a torn sun lounger. I drive down to Koontz Hardware in West Hollywood to find some. Passing the store’s kitchen department on my way out, an oversized avocado in glazed ceramics makes me stop and stare. That … guacamole bowl is too interesting to leave behind. Don’t ask me why. This is not a time for reflection.

There’s still a bit of direct light on the terrace when I get home. The sun lounger can wait. I chase the light calmly, exposing three color negatives while 1987 Sodom plays from iTunes inside the house. I photograph the dark avocado discharging a dotted, white fabric through its spoon hole. Then I unload the film holders, get back into the car, and drive to the Icon lab.

We are delighted to announce the launch of our new title with Torbjørn Rødland with this excerpt. Dim Revelations offers a rare and generous insight into the work of one of today's most renowned lens-based artists. Like his photographic practice, this illustrated diary operates on multiple levels — internalizing a variety of genres and voices, including theory, aphorism, criticism, poetry, and the occasional spilling of tea. Rødland has not kept a journal before or since 2013. Order your copy here.

DIM REVELATIONS BY TORBJØRN RØDLAND

Photo of the book by Rødland.

04/23

The temperamental relationships between successful gallerists and their artists seem to have undergone a reversal. The erratic painter is now an anomaly. Young artists everywhere are patiently waiting for their dealers to straighten up, calm down, write back and keep their promises.

04/24

Any concern too small to be turned into a photograph is too small to be made into a burden.

04/26

I think I’m violating the portrait image. They think I’m violating the portrayed person.

04/27

Words, words, words. The unconscious cannot speak and is therefore more comfortable with photography.

We are delighted to announce the launch of our new title with Torbjørn Rødland with this excerpt. Dim Revelations offers a rare and generous insight into the work of one of today's most renowned lens-based artists. Like his photographic practice, this illustrated diary operates on multiple levels — internalizing a variety of genres and voices, including theory, aphorism, criticism, poetry, and the occasional spilling of tea. Rødland has not kept a journal before or since 2013. Order your copy here.

VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT, Einkreisung, 1976/1980. Courtesy the artist/Thaddaeus Ropac.

An Afterimage homage to VALIE EXPORT:

The body as a sign was for me a tool of negation and affirmation at the same time. In the Body Configurations series for example, I was interested in placing the body in relation to power, to architecture, to the monument. Architecture is a language of power: it speaks through urban space, it shapes us, it conditions us. These works were born precisely from this relationship between body, space, ideology and language.

Nature too is culture. Architecture often comes from natural materials: stone, earth. Where does nature end and civilization begin? The body configurations show how these spaces — urban or natural — shape us, even when we believe we are free. The restrictions we often carry within ourselves.

The relationship with media has always been central to my work. From the very beginning it was clear to me that the subject would become increasingly mediated, technologically extended. Body, politics, technology are inseparable. What we now call biopolitics was already present. My work tries to make this condition visible, to think it critically, to inhabit it without being subjected to it.

- Taken from an interview with EXPORT by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, featured in Il Giornale dell’Arte, 2026

NINA STRAND ON ANDRE KERTÉSZ

André Kertész, from the series From My Window, 1979.

There is a simple Polaroid of a flower in a vase on a windowsill. That is it. I have seen two other exhibitions before this, many other images, but it is this one that will stay with me.

I came to see a young talent. A friend came with me, admitting she was a little jealous that this new photographer had been given all this space. She is herself on the brink of getting into one of Europe's best galleries, she should be a fountain of joy and generosity. but the green feeling comes with it. I admire how open she is about this.

The show is good, or it is okay; it is what it is. Maybe it was needed. We walk down one floor to see a photography legend's show, and then further down, in the basement, some of the art hall's collection photographs hang together. The title, Nature Morte, reminds me that the previous director was asked to leave, suddenly, last September. I don't know why, and perhaps I don't want to.

There is a new powerhouse director now. I still think of the quadtych of Polaroids she showed in the last exhibition I saw at the institution she came from, four images installed in a square on the wall, each depicting a mouth like the gritted-teeth emoji. As I shook hands with her there, I felt my own jaw clench. The close-ups of hands and bodies had no daylight, no view of Paris; perhaps she felt they deserved more. There were too many needs in one room, and I didn't stay long.

This is what I think about when I stand in front of this 1979 Polaroid of a New York window by André Kertész. He bought his first Polaroid camera to make work combining still lifes with window views. A tribute to his wife, who died in 1977. He came to this technique in his eighties, I tell my friend. It's never too late to be discovered, or to start something new. She says she doesn't understand what I mean, and leaves for the bookshop. I linger over Kertész' love letter a little longer.

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.

MARYAM JAFRI ON JO SPENCE

Jo Spence, A Picture of Health: How Do I Begin?, 1982-1983.

Afterimage by Maryam Jafri:

It’s really hard to identify just one image that stays with you at a time when we're so bombarded with images. Photography in our contemporary, tech-bro steered visual culture seems to have devolved into a means to make people feel overloaded, anxious and disoriented rather than a quixotic attempt to freeze a moment in time. Are we even capable of focusing on just one image anymore? So I think it's an interesting question, and a difficult one. Nonetheless, Jo Spence's work—and in particular this piece from her series The Picture of Health from 1984—comes to mind. I've never seen this work in real life, unfortunately, because her work is still not shown as much as it should be, in my opinion.

Spence’s work was pioneering in its insistence on addressing issues of gender, labor, aging, and disability. Humorous, vernacular and irreverent, her practice undermined notions of (male) virtuosity and genius. This image, however, takes a more serious and contemplative tone than in some of her other works. She was in her late forties at the time it was taken, diagnosed with breast cancer. What Spence sought to do, as I understand it, was to use the gaze of the camera—and the gaze of the spectator—to introduce other gazes besides the medical gaze onto a body defined as debilitated. The X marks her as an object, like on a survey map where X indicates something to be mined or excavated. However, although at first glance she is the object of the gaze, she wrests back control by looking directly into the camera and silently addressing the viewer with a calm, composed and determined look on her face. It is a moment of vulnerability but the expression on her face is resolute as she looks at us. Spence primarily used self-portraiture and performance in her photography, and with this image in particular I think she is very aware of, and in control of, how she comes across. She often used text alongside images in her works; but here the X is more a mark than a letter, nonetheless it communicates as clearly as any speech bubble or caption. The X may mark the spot but her breast remains covered, so she both reveals and conceals, leaving one to wonder if this photograph was taken before or after the operation. The neutral background tells me we are not in a hospital but in her studio perhaps. She is not in a hospital gown but instead wears a semi-translucent cloth held up by safety pins. To me, the safety pins look like the ones used for cloth diapers; they are pink, and make me think of the trajectory of life, from infancy to aging, bookended by birth and death.

Notable was Spence’s desire to make art about breast cancer at a time when vulnerability and illness were not widely represented or discussed, remember this work predates the AIDS crisis. Even now, if somebody has an illness or exhibits a visible manifestation of ill health, you politely avert your gaze—you don’t look there. It was important for her that this body of work, The Picture of Health?, was exhibited not just in art contexts, but in community centers and schools. Women's health issues are still overlooked and underfunded. She wished to merge art with everyday life not just in terms of subject matter but also in terms of audiences and access. In 1984, around the same time as Spence embarked on her project, the feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild published The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, the first work to formulate the concept of emotional labor, a concept that has only gained traction since. For me, this image helps open an affective space outside the commercialization of feelings, instead Spence uses photography to stake a claim to visibility, care and agency.

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.

MORTEN ANDENÆS ON STEIN RØNNING

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

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

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

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

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

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.