THALIA STEFANIUK
So I try to reframe the picture—literally and metaphorically. I adjust the aperture. I redefine what accomplishment means. For me, it’s these bonds—this rhizomatic support system—that I return to. For a long time, I kept a rejection letter from a theatre school I desperately wanted to attend framed on my wall as motivation—a reminder that good and bad things are two sides of the same coin, and that neither should be clung to too tightly. But I’ve replaced it now. I chose this photo instead. It’s also a motivator—but one that celebrates the connections I’ve made, the ongoing and slow-moving process, not just the moments of success or failure.
Afterimage by Thalia Stefaniuk:
Even though I’m a curator, I hardly have any art hanging on my walls at home. One of the only images I’ve put up isn’t even an artwork—it’s an iPhone photo my family took of me, surrounded by friends at the opening of my 2024 exhibition Weight of Mind at the Hessel Museum in upstate New York. I love the contrast in this image: the show—a sculpture and photography exhibition featuring Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock—explores memory, the body, and the tension between the visible and invisible forces that shape both. And yet, ironically, it contains no easily recognizable bodies. The artists fragment, disfigure, and hybridize body parts, merging them with other materials to create unfamiliar forms. But in this photo, it’s all familiar bodies—many of my closest friends (not all pictured), shoulder to shoulder, filling every inch and spilling out of the frame.
When I moved to New York, I had to leave behind the community I’d spent my entire adult life building in Montreal and Toronto. It felt like I was turning away from something real and grounding toward something intangible and uncertain. As an only child, friendship and community have never been things I take for granted—they’ve always been something I’ve worked hard for. I began falling into a kind of echo chamber in my head, a self-fulfilling prophecy: I feel isolated, therefore I am isolated. But that wasn’t true. My people were with me, supporting me every step of the way. And at the opening, I got to experience the physical manifestation of that support.
Almost all my friends and family from Montreal, Toronto, and New York came. They piled into cars, booked Airbnbs, and most of them crammed into my tiny one-bedroom apartment, sleeping in rows like sardines in sleeping bags. I remember spending weeks alone in the gallery during planning and installation, and then—suddenly—it was filled with the bodies of my friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators. People from every stage of my life, all moving through the stories, materials, and histories of the artwork I care so deeply about.
In Kaari Upson’s installation, eleven, she embedded casts of her knees into casts of trees from the landscape of her childhood home—a place marked by complicated memories. She literally fuses the idea of home with the physicality of the body. It’s not a romantic image of nostalgia. The limbs hover in a haunting, dreamlike forest—weightless, disembodied, rootless. I painted the back wall of the gallery a cartoon-like sky blue and spaced the works widely apart to heighten that feeling of suspension. I wanted the public to feel the tension between lightness and gravity of the show—the formal sensation of being suspended and unmoored, alongside the emotional weight of the subject matter of each artwork, and the personal histories the public carry in their own bodies.
What I didn’t anticipate was what it would feel like to have others fill the negative space between the objects. For example, walking around the legs stirred the air and caused them to spin slightly. The people in the space—literally and metaphorically—animated the works and enlivened the connection between them. But seeing my community inhabit that space added a personal and emotional weight of having so many people I love in one space. An intense emotional high and a simultaneous feeling of being grounded that I’ll never forget. It reminded me of the profound power of physical gathering—how an audience can complete, complicate, and transform an exhibition in ways you can’t anticipate on your own.
Looking ahead, I dream of cultivating a collaborative practice that feels like a band or a collective. Before curating, I worked in film—long, 14-hour days on set created a kind of intense group energy. While trauma bonding doesn’t always lead to real friendship, at the end of the day, if I spend more time with my collaborators than anyone else in my life, I want to make those relationships meaningful. I want to work with people who care deeply about community, who take ideas and creativity seriously, and who are invested in building a sustainable way of working. I imagine a curatorial model grounded not just in conceptual or formal relationships between works, but in real human relationships between people, including artists, art workers, and the network of connections that each of those individuals brings with them.
The image on my wall from that opening is a kind of evidence. Sometimes I need reminders—fragments of proof—because it’s easy to get lost in your own narrative. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: the art world feeds off a scarcity model and myth of isolated genius—never enough space, never enough opportunity, a careerist culture of eat-or-be-eaten. The hunger for validation is a bottomless pit. It will never be enough. I am currently working my dream job in curation at the New Museum but even now there’s still always a “next thing”—there’s no final mountaintop where you arrive.
So I try to reframe the picture—literally and metaphorically. I adjust the aperture. I redefine what accomplishment means. For me, it’s these bonds—this rhizomatic support system—that I return to. For a long time, I kept a rejection letter from a theatre school I desperately wanted to attend framed on my wall as motivation—a reminder that good and bad things are two sides of the same coin, and that neither should be clung to too tightly. But I’ve replaced it now. I chose this photo instead. It’s also a motivator—but one that celebrates the connections I’ve made, the ongoing and slow-moving process, not just the moments of success or failure.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
AYO AKINSETE
In Moyo, Akinsete portrays a man, partly in shadow, sitting on the edge of a flowery sofa, looking solemnly out the window in front of him. You can’t tell whether he’s focused on something happening outside the window or if he’s not looking at all, just deeply embedded in his own mind. But you know that he sits alone in this room, looking out.
Ayo Akinsete, Moyo, 2018.
Afterimage by Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin:
In Moyo, Akinsete portrays a man, partly in shadow, sitting on the edge of a flowery sofa, looking solemnly out the window in front of him. You can’t tell whether he’s focused on something happening outside the window or if he’s not looking at all, just deeply embedded in his own mind. But you know that he sits alone in this room, looking out.
The work is like a call to action, a call for an early start at sunrise. A call to move away from what has been, and move beyond the horizon before you. The title is also the namesake of the Nigerian Nobel prize laureate Wole Soyinka’s memoir from 2006. For those with little or no insight into Nigerian socio-politics, the playwright, essayist and poet Soyinka often symbolises a cause; political freedom of choice, both in Nigeria and Africa at large. His writings meditate on personal identity and a fervent critique of dictatorial rule from the mid-1950s onward.
In the memoir You must set forth at dawn (2006) Soyinka tells his life story up until the then present, in the form of anecdotes, poetry and dialogue, placing himself and people he cherishes in the story of resistance in Nigerian socio-politics. In it, he’s on his way back to Nigeria after a 5 year long exile. Soyinka describes his exile state as a «liminal but dynamic» state similar to a parachutist’s free fall. Liminal because one is in a non-scripted space, forced there by adversiaries in one’s homeland, being ousted as an enemy of the state. Dynamic because from this space you can take something like a bird’s-eye view on the country you fled from, and if you are in a safe space outside, you can start forming a new language of resistance. The memoir, as memoirs go, is also an intimate account of his life, friendships and loves, in the face of a cherished and troubled country.
Akinsete’s photographies are also intimate. The intimacy is tactile, like a living and breathing organism. I could describe the portrait as of someone in exile, an expression of sadness, someone longing, someone lonely. I could also describe the man as anticipating something, waiting for the right moment to rise and step out. The portraits lend intimacy to the series’ images of landscapes. The landscapes depict indiscernable oceans or lakes, a clearing in a forest, an industrial place, a dark cloudy sky, tangled and sculpturised industrial residue. It feels like Akinsete is portraying absence in these. A meditation on, if not the bird’s-eye view of exile, then a meditation of absence that’s propelled by a question Akinsete poses in his artist statement: ‘How do you navigate through borders and around unamerican surfaces as the privileged subject of an empire you no longer believe in?’
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
JUMANA MANNA
Jumana Manna’s twelve-minute-long film, A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade), 2012), was first shown in Ramallah, at the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist Award 2012, where Manna won first prize. Drawing vectors between photographic image, historical re-enactment and geopolitical space, the film is particularly interesting in the way in which it re-imagines history.
SUBVERSIVE DREAM SPACES AMIDST THE ARCHIVES: JUMANA MANNA’S A SKETCH OF MANNERS
By Cora Fisher
A group of tragicomic masqueraders dressed in Pierrot costumes pose for their commemorative portrait to be taken. As they wait for the shutter to click, they address the camera, and through it, the long, piercing glance of history. They stare and fidget; they wait and rustle. The video camera pans across their heavily lined eyes and faces caked with white makeup. Finally, it stops to rest in the centre of the group, framing the portrait. With its patina of a bygone era, the fully frontal image recalls a vintage photograph, but the colour is decidedly contemporary, and the HD video camera captures the sitters’ movements, registering their tension. In this way, the moving image resuscitates the historicity of an early studio photograph, placing us firmly in the present.
Jumana Manna’s twelve-minute-long film, A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade), 2012), was first shown in Ramallah, at the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist Award 2012, where Manna won first prize. Drawing vectors between photographic image, historical re-enactment and geopolitical space, the film is particularly interesting in the way in which it re-imagines history. Its subject is an eccentric and over-looked dimension of the social life of a people now belonging to an unrecognised state and confined behind walls. It was inspired by an archival photograph of a masked ball held in Jerusalem in 1942, on the fateful eve of the nation’s dissolution, and depicts what the artist imagines ‘was to be the last masquerade in Palestine’. It offers a counter-narrative of Palestine through an anecdotal event.
The annual bon-vivant parties described by A Sketch were hosted from the 1920s to the 1940s by a landowner and merchant in Jaffa, Alfred Roch, who was also a member of the Palestinian National League. This cosmopolitan world dissolved with the dismantling of the country and its urban centres in 1948. Manna offers a decidedly romantic view of a bohemian microcosm, where theatricality and dreaming enlarge the psychic dimension of the photographic index. By way of this glimpse into a menagerie of upper-class Palestinians, A Sketch of Manners conjures the prelapsarian moment before the Nakba – ‘the disaster’ – which saw the expulsion of nearly 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and the 1948 Arab-Isreali war, a traumatic rupture shaping Palestine as the space of endless contestation and geopolitical erasure.
Scattered throughout the film are clues suggesting the mutual influence, in terms of cultural fantasy and dreaming, between Europe and the Arab world. A desk is strewn with Arab editions of European books, one by Charles Baudelaire, and the playbills and magazines of Egyptian Opera, cultural ephemera that also serve as archival mementos. Before the scene of the group portrait, the film opens with Roch sleeping on a couch after the ball, his make-up still thickly applied. The projected Orientalist fantasy imagined by the West is met with Roch’s inner dreamtime. A British narrator’s voice recites Baudelaire’s poem ‘A Former Life’, offering a somnambulant texture of fantasy: ‘Long since, I lived beneath vast porticoes … And there I lived amid voluptuous calms / In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave / Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave.’
To create the film and to deepen the understanding of the world evoked by the photograph, Manna consulted both private and public archives, as well as historians and sociologists including Dr Salim Tamari, Issam Nassar and her father, Dr Adel Manna. Her research yielded source images from the Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection held in the Library of Congress, which appear interspersed throughout the film (rather than simulated like the group portrait) as a foil for the film’s social context and the private dreaming of the protagonist. These include a photograph of a Middle Eastern merchant sipping tea with a group of British men, suggesting a detail from the biography of Roch, who was invited to the UK to speak at a conference on the Palestinian question. According to the story, he brought back the Pierrot costumes from this trip, attesting to the porosity between East and West that would be overshadowed by World War II.
This interplay between archival photographs and simulated scenes suspends the Palestinian bourgeoisie of the 1940s in a limbo between present and past time and space. Through the recurrent oscillating between static and moving images – between the external ‘fact’ of the indexical image, and the inward contemplative space suggested by the experiential image (the contemporary actors, the colour video medium) – the work re-animates the archive and offers up a third space – neither fact nor purely fictional – a psychic space of dreaming that is not Roch’s alone. A Sketch shows us how the artistic strategy of re-enactment invokes the lived dimension of history and the private life of politics.
Historical re-enactment is currently circulating heavily in art-world contexts, where historical tropes and content speak to the inheritances and conditions of the contemporary. Omer Fast’s 2005 film Godville, for example, used the site of a living-history museum in colonial Williamsburg to animate contemporary relationships to the imagined past of Virginia. In 2007, Nato Thompson curated ‘A Historic Occasion: Artists Making History’, a survey at Mass MoCA of artists interested in historical retelling, including Paul Chan, Jeremy Deller, Peggy Diggs, Felix Gmelin, Kerry James Marshall, Trevor Paglen, Greta Pratt, Dario Robleto, Nebojsa Seric-Shoba, Yinka Shonibare and Allison Smith. The exhibition took a materialist bent on historical revision, looking at how visual artists render history through objects, especially in a cultural climate where, according to Thompson, the ‘very idea of history seems under siege’ by historians rewriting the past, thinning attention spans, accelerated news cycles and amnesiac governments. In this exhibition, and in films like Manna’s that speak to the present through the past by referencing archival images or moments of historical rupture, one aim is to deliberately slow things down in order to sidestep these modern conditions.
In A Sketch of Manners, the overlay of a twentieth-century past and current events is palpable, if restrained. While we are afforded the spaciousness of historical distance, we can also understand Manna’s film as a direct commentary on the present. Other film and performance work takes up a more recent history of the last five years. Lebanese performance and stage artist Rabih Mroué, for instance, takes as his focus the current political unrest and protest movements throughout the Arab world. However, recent approaches to historical re-enactment can be observed not just in films, but also in paintings that refer to art history or create a historical imaginary that ties into the present. Emerging artists like Los Angeles-based Kour Pour, who recreates Eastern rugs through a process of transfer and erasure, retell a cultural narrative pictorially. The more archaeological, process-based conceptual paintings of Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan, recently included in Documenta 13, present a series of amalgamated objects and images that point to Lebanon’s 1975–90 civil war, when militiamen occupied Beirut’s National Museum, a reference that potently alludes to current events in the country.
The trend for using historical contexts as a vehicle to respond to the urgencies of current local and global protest movements and unrest means that the Middle East has been the historical locus du jour, with many film-makers and visual artists of this region circulating more widely on the international scene than they have done previously. Yet historical re-tellers are not always ‘native informants’ or cultural ambassadors hungry to broaden the cultural breadth and understanding of a Eurocentric West or an increasingly cosmopolitan and international art world. Sometimes, they are Western ethnographer-documentarians working with decidedly ahistorical approaches to storytelling. The striking release The Act of Killing (2012) by Joshua Oppenheim pushes documentary re-enactment towards the experimental, blurring the genre of documentary feature. Oppenheim’s implicit denunciation of the Western military-ideological projects of the Cold War and beyond focuses on the massacre, funded by the United States, of more than 500,000 communists and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia during the mid-1960s. The gangster Anwar Congo led the most notorious death squad in North Sumatra. Oppenheimer invites Anwar and his associates to re-enact the genocide as a theatrical dance macabre, using sets and costumes. The viewer is launched into the slippery terrain of Anwar’s trauma-afflicted psyche as he and his friends re-enact, in increasingly elaborate set-ups, their methods of killing. This performance of earlier crimes by living perpetrators proves that re-enactment is more than just a de-politicised visual strategy; it can convey the violent effects of politics better than any statistical abstraction. The re-enactors activate history as they re-write it in real time. The creation of a tertiary space of consciousness through the combination of documentary sources and artistic elements resurrects the depths of the collective unconscious.
More dreamscape than nightmare, it would be inappropriate to compare Manna’s film to such a full-length re-enactment. A Sketch concisely signifies the unconscious without actually exhuming its contents. (It is enough to hear Baudelaire’s lines and see Roch sleeping on the sofa, to extract the notion of dreaming.) Nevertheless, with its capsular view onto the past, it offers an account that gently defies the prevailing Western cultural bias, which sees the East as hardened by radicalism and categorically antagonistic to Western influence. Like the bon-vivant pleasantries of Roch’s last masquerade, the representation of the psychic space of the dream is a depiction that also runs counter to the expectations of dominant forms of historical narration. In Manna’s short film we find a world of pleasure on the brink of a tectonic geopolitical shift. With her deft transitions from archival image to personal imaginings, she offers a cavernous space that echoes with the traumas of the twentieth century.
OBJEKTIV PRESS 15 YEARS!
Founded in 2009, Objektiv began as a biannual journal dedicated to lens-based art. The very first issue was released in April 2010. After a decade of exploring that format, Objektiv transitioned into a more book-like publication, inviting a single writer to fill its pages with raw and authentic reflections on trends within the medium.
This photograph by Tom Sandberg is featured in Making Worlds, Objektiv #22, written by Morten Andenæs.
Founded in 2009, Objektiv began as a biannual journal dedicated to lens-based art. The very first issue was released in April 2010. After a decade of exploring that format, Objektiv transitioned into a more book-like publication, inviting a single writer to fill its pages with raw and authentic reflections on trends within the medium. Objektiv Press have just released Elle Pérez’s the movement of our bodies, a collage of loose thoughts, letters, press articles and reviews, text messages, pictures, sketches, responses, emails, notes, and lectures, the book explores what Pérez chooses to photograph and what photography means to them. More here.
Objektiv Press’ next release is in the works. The book Double will accompany the exhibition of the same title with Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant for this year’s edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles. Through Carmen Winant’s exploration of radical reinvention—particularly within the context of the lesbian separatist communities of the 1970s—she connected with Carol Newhouse, co-founder of WomanShare, a lesbian feminist community on the West Coast of the United States. For Double, they’ve created unique new work that weaves together their stories, passions, and curiosities. Over the course of a year, they engaged in a photographic dialogue: one would shoot a roll of film, wind it up, and send it across the country, where the other would expose it again—using the technique of double exposure to create a layered interplay between their images. More information here.
Since the very first issue in 2010, Objektiv has asked a wide range of people to describe the image they can’t stop thinking about. Originally titled Sinnbilde, this column now appears on Objektiv Press' web journal under the name Afterimage. It is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind.
Objektiv Press extends heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed so far — the artists, the writers, the copy editors, the designers, the printers, the supporting foundations, and all the members of our editorial board, especially Lucas Blalock, Ida Kierulf, Brian Sholis and Susanne Østby Sæther. Most of all, thank you to our readers.
EUGÈNE ATGET
My favorite photograph of Atget’s is deceptively simple. It is from 1925, two years before his death. He made it during the seven-o’clock hour as winter turned to spring in the Parc de Sceaux. A tree cuts the frame vertically, splitting our view of the water in half. This formal choice creates the illusion that the pond is a waterfall—or a portal to another plane of existence.
Afterimage from our latest publication the movement of our bodies by Elle Pérez:
Eugène Atget, Parc de Sceaux, 1925.
My favorite photograph of Atget’s is deceptively simple. It is from 1925, two years before his death. He made it during the seven-o’clock hour as winter turned to spring in the Parc de Sceaux. A tree cuts the frame vertically, splitting our view of the water in half. This formal choice creates the illusion that the pond is a waterfall—or a portal to another plane of existence. Atget might have been surprised by how familiar this view on the ground glass felt, even in his twilight years. And, as photographers know, this feeling of surprise can often inspire the making of a photograph, quickly turning into intention.
Having spent his formative years as a cabin boy at sea, he would have regularly stood watch on deck as part of his duties. The tree, dead center in the frame, recalls the view of the water from the helm of a ship, mast bifurcating both water and the horizon. The branches of the tree softly lay over one another to form an X in the top left of the frame.
Perhaps Atget recalled the intersecting ropes that he would have used to control the sails of the ship, through which his view of the sky was mediated, day in and day out. Or did he remember the chill that came over the crew whenever someone would tell stories of the high seas? The crossed bones, red flags, creatures, and treasures that plagued the sailors of the previous century? Or maybe he recognized the symbol from the international code of maritime signals, which was standardized the year of his birth, and already in use during his tenure at sea.
Even after all those dry and steady years on land, the message would have been clear to him: ‘I require assistance.’
In the winter of 1925, Atget could likely sense the nearing end of his own cycle of seasons. An existential plea was probably quite resonant to his state of mind—strained, I imagine—as he witnessed the fast decline of his wife’s health. Valentine died in June 1926. In August of the following year, Eugène followed her.
At only seventy years old, he slipped away into the warmth of the late summer light.
For those in New York, check out Elle Pérez's The World Is Already Beginning Again: History with the Present at Arts and Letters. 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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
DOUGLAS GORDON
It could be the image of the watermelon that lingers in my mind as I sit at Zürich Flughafen, waiting for a flight from a non-EU country back to my own. The reopening of Fotomuseum Winterthur has been reassuring—it’s a place where lens-based art is taken seriously. And this series on how we relate to emojis in our digital world feels important.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
Douglas Gordin. Taken by the author seeing the exhibition WALL WORKS & SCULPTURES at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zürich, 16th of May, 2025.
It could be the image of the watermelon that lingers in my mind as I sit at Zürich Flughafen, waiting for a flight from a non-EU country back to my own. The reopening of Fotomuseum Winterthur has been reassuring—it’s a place where lens-based art is taken seriously. And this series on how we relate to emojis in our digital world feels important, especially that symbol this weekend, being in the host country of the music competition, where one nation should probably not have been allowed to participate.
There’s so much to take in after the exhibition—and from my afternoon wandering Zürich, just twenty minutes away by train. The city holds it, too, in small ways: graffiti on the walls that reads Free Gaza. It stays with me, especially when I see a work made of scaffold dust sheets and other materials, said to suggest that buildings—and maybe societies, too—are always in progress, never truly complete. I think of it again as I pass a man sitting in a window, sipping wine and watching the people below. It’s a clever, much cheaper way to people-watch, but I wonder if he’s sitting up there alone because he’s afraid to join the rest of the world. Does he need help?
When I can’t see more art—everything is closed—I have a glass of wine at Kronenhalle, a tip from two different friends. I sit next to some artists and gallerists speaking in excited tones about an opening yesterday at a place that, sadly, wasn’t on my itinerary. They’re also talking about next year’s Venice Biennale and what will happen now that its curator has passed—something I’ve also thought about. Where do all her visions for next year’s edition go?
There’s something familiar about the woman sitting in the corner of their group. I want to look her up, but instead, I ask if they could watch my things while I look at the art in the restaurant. When I return, she laughs and says she never took her eyes off my stuff. I want to move closer to their conversation.
Later, at the airport, I look up images of one of the most famous Swiss artists I know—and it is her. I got her. I got all the art. But what is it I’m really looking for, walking and taking trams all over these two cities to see as much as I can in the short time I’m here? What does it help, anyone suffering?
Waiting for my plane, I thought I was sitting down to write about the fruit emoji. But instead, I think of a text work I saw on one of the gallery walls: Where does it hurt? I mumble to myself: Everywhere.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
PATRICK NAGATANI
Although this body of work was made over two decades ago during the high phase of postmodernism, its concerns around the way that truth is constructed resonated deeply. Its critical engagement that is, with the photographic image as a composite of interwoven narratives and suspensions of disbelief, felt timely and urgent against the backdrop of a politics increasingly stranger than fiction.
Patrick Nagatani, Spectacular Proof, 1994.
Afterimage by Matthew Rana:
Although this body of work was made over two decades ago during the high phase of postmodernism, its concerns around the way that truth is constructed resonated deeply. Its critical engagement that is, with the photographic image as a composite of interwoven narratives and suspensions of disbelief, felt timely and urgent against the backdrop of a politics increasingly stranger than fiction.
Patrick Nagatani, Amazing Image, 1994.
Like much of Patrick’s work, Novellas evokes the spectacular, media-saturated landscape of late capitalism. But unlike his better-known directorial projects, such as the collaborations between 1983 and 1989 with painter Andrée Tracey, which stage fictional scenarios in elaborate, often ambiguous tableaus, the Novellas are more collage-like in their approach. Using a variety of mediums and techniques to create densely layered compositions, they incorporate a broad range of imagery including advertisements, film stills, religious etchings and archival photographs.
As the title suggests, each image reads like fiction — a page or passage in a short story. Yet whereas Patrick’s other projects from the same period, such as Nuclear Enchantment (1988-93), Japanese-American Concentration Camps (1993-95), or Ryoichi Excavations (1985-2000), tend to cohere around a single theme, history or character, Novellas is more fragmented, and plays out on a distinctly personal register, exploring themes such as sexuality, spirituality, race and gender; symbolic anchor points of the self.
I was saddened to learn of Patrick’s passing at the age of 72, following a decade-long battle with colon cancer. As way to remember his artistic legacy and vision, I want to offer a selection of his Novellas here: a sequence of five large-format Polaroids from 1994 in which covers from the now-defunct publication Weekly World News — a supermarket tabloid known for outlandishly manipulated photographs claiming to depict supernatural and paranormal phenomena — feature. Also appearing in each image, a $5 novelty photograph in which Patrick’s head is digitally superimposed atop a figure shaking hands with then-president Bill Clinton. The dissonance that these images create still feels oddly synchronous with, for instance, the curious mix of faith and paranoia that seems to structure the American imagination at present. They are Amazing, Divine, Miraculous, Spectacular, and Terrifying.
This text has been edited, was originally published on our web journal in 2018. 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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
TOM SANDBERG
I find myself drawn to images that carry an ambiguity—a kind of visual dissonance. A story only half-told. Something has happened, and the image holds that space open. I think of Tom Sandberg’s photograph of a child with their head buried in the sand. That quiet tension, that sense of something just beyond reach.
Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2004.
Afterimage by Linnea Syversen:
I find myself drawn to images that carry an ambiguity—a kind of visual dissonance. A story only half-told. Something has happened, and the image holds that space open. I think of Tom Sandberg’s photograph of a child with their head buried in the sand. That quiet tension, that sense of something just beyond reach.
There is a photograph I keep returning to—an image by Hans Olav Forsang from his Human Tonic series. A white horse. A picture that stays with me. It is visually beautiful, yet, at the same time, unsettling. The first time I saw it, I stood still for a long time. My eyes were drawn to the horse’s eye. It looked as if it had been sewn shut or was simply missing, leaving me with many questions. Later, I learned that the horse was blind after an accident, but at the time, I didn’t know. I just stood there, thinking.
Hans Olav Forsang, from his Human Tonic series, 2017.
I have often reflected on how we humans make decisions for animals when they are injured or ill. We are the ones in power who define what a worthy life is. We speak on behalf of their silence. Perhaps this horse was perfectly fine, but in the photograph, its ears are pinned back, its nostrils flared—signs that can indicate distress. Maybe it was frightened, or maybe it was just a fleeting moment of tension. Or maybe that moment of tension was simply that—a moment. We don’t know. And that’s precisely why the image stays with me. It doesn’t give answers. It asks.
Photographs claim to capture truth, but what they offer is always just a fragment—a frozen frame that conceals as much as it reveals. They can show us reality, but not its entirety. That thought lingers with me: how quick we are to interpret what we see through the lens of our own emotions and assumptions.
This makes me think about how we perceive the unfamiliar—a disability, an injury, something outside our usual experience. We want to understand, to categorize. But there are things that resist such clarity. We project our own emotions onto what we see and what we know, but we don’t always see the full picture. Life is given, and while some can shape it, others must simply take it as it comes and as it has been given. To me, the photograph becomes more than an image of a horse. It becomes a quiet meditation on power and vulnerability. here is something about black and white. I love color—it’s a cliché to say—but perhaps black and white strips away some of the noise. It forces us to confront what is, without distraction.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
TREVOR PAGLEN
There is an image of Simone de Beauvoir on my mind. It’s a composite photograph, created by blending images identified as her by facial recognition programs. The result is an AI-generated portrait: a machine’s interpretation of identity. It’s surreal, yet strangely vivid—a young version of de Beauvoir—but I remind myself that it is a photograph never actually taken, she never posed for this and yet it now exists in the world. Its subtitle, Even the Dead Are Not Safe, feels truer than ever.
Trevor Paglen, De Beauvoir (Even the Dead Are Not Safe) Eigenface, 2017. © TREVOR PAGLEN.COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
There is an image of Simone de Beauvoir on my mind. It’s a composite photograph, created by blending images identified as her by facial recognition programs. The result is an AI-generated portrait: a machine’s interpretation of identity. It’s surreal, yet strangely vivid—a young version of de Beauvoir—but I remind myself that it is a photograph never actually taken, she never posed for this and yet it now exists in the world. Its subtitle, Even the Dead Are Not Safe, feels truer than ever.
I think about this non-image as you walk through a darkened room filled with sculpted heads—disembodied forms that evoke the sensation of the dead still living among us. Like Whitney Houston on Instagram, where I see endless reels of her tragically destroying herself with drugs. Even Princess Diana is alive there, smiling conspicuously. It feels as though the dead will return to haunt us, and some should, for we didn’t do enough to protect them.
I passed Beauvoir’s grave the other day, on my way to see the house of Agnès Varda, who’s also gone. I wonder what they might make of us now. Of where we are. Of what we do. I wish I could turn back time so that the women who call themselves feminists hadn't made that ridiculous trip into space—crammed into a tiny craft, too aware of every camera. Watching them, it was as if they didn’t exist. That they weren’t really there, only creating images of themselves rather than actually living, reducing themselves to constructed, non-existent selfies.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
HELMUT NEWTON
From Objektiv’s very first issue in 2010, we’ve asked a wide range of people to describe the image they can’t get out of their minds. Afterimages is an ekphrastic series about that one image that lingers behind your eyes—the one that won’t let go. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can’t shake. This column has been part of Objektiv since the beginning, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series asks: which visuals linger and take root in today’s endless stream? Much like a song that plays on repeat in your head, these images stick. Whether it’s a billboard glimpse, a newspaper portrait, a family photo, or an Instagram reel—we’re drawn to those fleeting moments that stay with us.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
There’s a still in the film about Yves Saint Laurent—he’s in his studio at 5 Avenue Marceau, sketching a dress. I can’t remember whether I saw it in the nine-minute film about his life, shown in a small projection room at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, or in the one projected on the wall as I stood in his studio, completely awestruck to be in the very room where he created those empowering vêtements. He draws with such ease and precision, and it’s clear how deeply he believed in the power of clothes to transform a woman.
I'm at the museum with my friend, whom I’ve known since high school. We’d just come from the Palais Galliera, where she said she could spend hours, showing me the hand-sewn garments and explaining how long they took to make, pointing out the sewing needles still resting on the late designer’s desk. I’ve never been especially interested in the history of clothing—but that’s about to change. We don’t know it yet, standing here at YSL, but by the end of the day, luck will take us to Atelier 1900 – Cygne Rose, where we’ll meet la propriétaire, who we later learn is also involved with the Musée de la Femme. There, visitors can explore the lives of 18th- and 19th-century women through antique dresses, costumes, textiles, and accessories.
Right now, in this room where Yves actually worked, I can’t help but think of Helmut Newton’s photograph of a woman standing in a Marais street, wearing Le Smoking—shot for a Vogue series. That image became iconic, inspiring a revolution in the social codes of its time. Newton and, certainly, the designer both imagined a detached, powerful, liberated woman—wearing a tuxedo once reserved solely for men.
The fact that one day in Paris—a fashion metropolis—showed me how the lineage of women’s clothing is interwoven with the history of liberation has transformed me.
On the Afterimages:
Objektiv Press celebrates 15 years this April. Founded in 2009 as a gallery in journal format, Objektiv began as a biannual publication dedicated to lens-based art. After a decade of exploring this format, we transitioned to a more book-like publication—inviting a single writer to fill the pages with their real and raw opinions on various trends within the medium.
Since 2020, we’ve invited a range of voices—photographers, critics, curators—to reflect on their relationship with photography through longer essays. Our aim is to deepen our content and continue exploring the development and role of film and photography, both within the art world and in society at large.
From Objektiv’s very first issue in 2010, we’ve asked a wide range of people to describe the image they can’t get out of their minds. Afterimages is an ekphrastic series about that one image that lingers behind your eyes—the one that won’t let go. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can’t shake. This column has been part of Objektiv since the beginning, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series asks: which visuals linger and take root in today’s endless stream? Much like a song that plays on repeat in your head, these images stick. Whether it’s a billboard glimpse, a newspaper portrait, a family photo, or an Instagram reel—we’re drawn to those fleeting moments that stay with us.
We encounter so much each day—what does it do to us? According to Phototutorial, by 2025, humanity will take approximately 2.1 trillion photos. In the Western world, we may snap 20 photos a day, while the average person, immersed in a media-saturated environment, is likely to see between 4,000 and 10,000 images daily.
Several contributions offer fresh perspectives on these visual imprints, inviting valuable reflections on what photography can be, and how we interpret images today. Art criticism is subtly woven through many of the texts. Most people responding to our question about afterimages have found visuals that echo their thoughts or emotions. Many texts explore seeing oneself through an image—literally and metaphorically. This includes self-portraits, mirror images, or how an image can stir something deeply personal or existential. Old photographs, childhood memories, grandparents, and lost moments are recurring themes. The image becomes a vessel of time—or frozen time.
One afterimage emerged when an art historian fed a sentence from The Songs of Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont into an image generator: “...like the random collision of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table!” The output included an umbrella and a sewing machine, but also an unexpected object: a medical chair, draped in what looked like a surgeon’s gown, with a metal bowl on top. It had taken the thought a step further.
Many contributors share reflections, ekphrases, and use images as gateways into something personal:
A gallery owner describes a photo she would love to own—of a drink on a plane taking her away from daily life.
An artist reflects on the unsettling image of Pogo the Clown, and how a clown can appear so evil.
An author discusses a photo of a sick Helmut Newton, which we couldn’t publish. Instead, we photographed the book where the image appeared and referenced it.
The Danish Minister of Culture recalls an image of a public servant buried under a mountain of documents.
An author reflects on a photo from Utøya, July 22nd. We did not publish the image at his request—the description alone was haunting enough: lifeless bodies.
An artist speaks of the sisters from Gaza, captured in a video still, the eldest carrying the youngest.
A photo editor remembers an image of a son setting out to sea for the first time since his father drowned—an image that continues to haunt him.
I believe this series has lasted fifteen years because we need space to talk about everything we’ve seen—and to process our impressions. It endures, too, because it is democratic. All images are welcome.
Many texts dwell on what is no longer there. Loneliness and longing often emerge—sometimes more than you might initially notice. These images act as mirrors: we don’t just see their subjects, but also our own grief, dreams, and anxieties.
GRACIELA ITURBIDE
Later, I wrote a thesis using Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum in an image, exploring how this was my first encounter with such a punctum. It became an image that is very dear to me; I’m still captivated by it many years later, and it continues to evoke strong emotions for me.
Graciela Iturbide, Carnival, Tlaxcala, Mexico, 1974.
Afterimage by Pauline Koffi Vandet:
I saw this many years ago, and it still gives me goosebumps. After high school, I took a year-long sabbatical and was in London, where my interest in art—especially photography and new media—began. I have this image to thank for that. I was at Tate and came across a retrospective exhibition of the artist Graciela Iturbide. As I entered one of the rooms filled with many photographs, this one stood out. I can’t quite say what it was, but it was visually captivating in a way that immediately caught my attention. I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was that captured me.
Later, I wrote a thesis using Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum in an image, exploring how this was my first encounter with such a punctum. It became an image that is very dear to me; I’m still captivated by it many years later, and it continues to evoke strong emotions for me. I think this is because it’s so uncanny: the mask is human-like, yet not entirely. It appears to be a person in a carnival suit. To me, it is a genderless or perhaps genderfluid being, and from my perspective it could be either living or non-living. There’s something deeply alluring about it. The plain background, which doesn’t compete with the figure, helps focus attention on the masked being.
This photograph is an acknowledgment of the deeply personal and non-universal nature of Barthes’ punctum to me. While many walked past it, it absorbed me and has never let me go.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
PETER HUJAR
There is a seagull in Peter Hujar's exhibition Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row. It's Sunday noon, 23 March 2025—spring, with warm, damp air, soft and almost raining. Last night, my friends and I went to see The Seagull (Chekhov) at the Barbican in London, with Cate Blanchett in the lead role. Actually, there are no lead roles, it is directed by Thomas Ostermeier.
Peter Hujar, Dead Gull, 1985 © 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich.
Afterimage by Pia Eikaas:
There is a seagull in Peter Hujar's exhibition Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row. It's Sunday noon, 23 March 2025—spring, with warm, damp air, soft and almost raining. Last night, my friends and I went to see The Seagull (Chekhov) at the Barbican in London, with Cate Blanchett in the lead role. Actually, there are no lead roles, it is directed by Thomas Ostermeier. When I was younger and still in the closet, I used to date an actor—he was my best friend, and still is—and we’d travel from Copenhagen to Berlin to see Ostermeier's productions at the Schaubühne. Ostermeier, the enfant terrible, wrestling with old classics like Hamlet and An Enemy of the People, was mind-blowing, addictive, destructive, and truth-seeking.
Last night, something strange happened during The Seagull. It wasn't as good. The German, now middle-aged enfant terrible, the British rigidity of Chekhov’s three kinds of humor and ideas clashing—it wasn’t interesting, just half there. (Ostermeier kills the seagull because he has nothing better to do; he kills it because he can).
On stage, Cate Blanchett is always great, but this time, she seems like she doesn’t want to be there. In this deconstructed landscape, she comes across more as a still image than a moving actress. She poses, afraid to stop moving, so these sequences of poses become a contact sheet of an actress in a midlife crisis (quote play) grappling with aging. (Skin, body, form—a fragility…) Nina or Irina? Or is there something else at play?
Many of Peter Hujar’s subjects never got to grow old; the AIDS epidemic wiped out a whole generation of potential mid-life crises, swaggering old queers, memories, and knowledge of how to live other narratives, other ways of aging—myths that were never passed on. A void, a void that could have been avoided if the world hadn't been so homophobic, xenophobic, and capitalist. (How is it that we are still swimming in this dark pool of ignorance today?)
Charlie Porter writes a fictional yet very real story about this loss of a generation, and about gardening in the shadow of high-rises, in his new novel Novia Scotia House. I went to the launch where he spoke about care and kindness, and how gardening, tending, and volunteering are ways of reconnecting—with community.
That bird, that seagull on the beach—Peter Hujar photographs people and animals with the same intense interest, care, soul-searching, and love. He photographs friends, lovers, dogs, horses, writers, actors, scars, desires, dark waters, empty streets, piers, staircases, holes—holding them in squares where it’s clear, in the present, vibrating, time collapsed without blinking.
The image of the seagull (is it a seagull?) and the images of Cate Blanchett on stage merge. I think Peter Hujar would have photographed Blanchett if he were alive (or at least I would have liked to see him do so). The tonal qualities of his photographs—loss, death, presence, love, and affection—will stay with me for many years. The seagull, growing old, not getting old, the free and the trapped. Which is which?
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
ANTONIA SERRA SANNA
This photograph could trigger many conversations: about the historical role of photography within colonial contexts, such as the one my Island found itself in, about gender matters related to consent and narrative, about the complexities of relations within dominant and subordinate groups with and within archival entities and the power dynamics they enact and often enable at many conscious and subconscious levels, up to the very complex issue of how identity is constructed, both through photography and despite it.
Pezza (sic) Antonia, positivo, 1899. (c) Museo di Antropologia Criminale Cesare Lombroso, courtesy Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali.
Afterimage by Elisa Medde:
For a long time now, I have been obsessed with a mugshot from 1899, taken in Nuoro, my hometown in Sardinia. The woman in the photograph, whose identity is somewhat opaque today, was photographed during her arrest. Her image is now part of a collection gathered by Cesare Lombroso, a pioneer in criminal anthropology. His theories on anthropological criminology, race, and genetics had lasting consequences and continue to affect us today.
Sardinia was undergoing massive changes at the time. The move from being subjected to Spanish rule to becoming a possession of the House of Savoy in 1720 meant major social and political changes, amongst which moving from a substantially communal land management to a private property-based economy under the House of Savoy. The 19th century saw periods of intense struggle, famine and upheaval, and also saw the introduction of photography on the Island as a tool of colonial control and documentation. Towards the end of the century, by royal command, every person arrested on the island had to be photographed, and a dossier had to be made following the method Berthillon. Of each photograph 6 prints had to be made, and a large selection of those ended up being used as materials for the “new studies” in criminal anthropology. During one night in 1899, almost 700 were arrested in the centre of the Island. Amongst them, is the “mysterious woman” whose portrait hunts me. Her identity is known on the Island: at the time, she was likely one of the most feared women on the island. Books have been written about her, movies have been made, and legends have been created. She was sister to the two “most feared brigantes of the time, eventually slaughtered by the Royal Forces after the largest police operation chronicled in the century, known as Caccia Grossa (the big hunt). Their massacred bodies were photographed as trophies and exposed to the public gaze, a testament to the power of the newborn Italian kingdom. Sardinia’s stability was key to Italy's unification, and her image reflects the broader political context. This woman was called Sa Reina, the queen, equally feared and admired. After her arrest, her brothers were murdered, she spent some time in jail, was eventually liberated, married someone and died in substantial oblivion. We know that the photograph was taken as part of a specific mass arrest. She’s wearing traditional Sardinian clothing, standing straight in front of the camera. Her expression became an act of defiance and rebellion, unreadable and unforgiving.
This portrait became part of the Lombroso Archive, and it was included (together with other mugshots) in an accordion-shaped display format, used to illustrate Lombroso’s thinking in congresses and symposia. Today, the woman depicted is identified with a name that is not hers. Her name was known at the time, her fame being the reason why she got included amongst some of the most famous male bandits. It is also handwritten in the photographs, now hidden under the passpartout holding them. Yet, in current official documents, her real name has been misrecorded due to confusion with identifying Sardinian surnames.
Pezza (sic) Antonia, positivo, 1899. (c) Museo di Antropologia Criminale Cesare Lombroso, courtesy Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali.
This photograph could trigger many conversations: about the historical role of photography within colonial contexts, such as the one my Island found itself in, about gender matters related to consent and narrative, about the complexities of relations within dominant and subordinate groups with and within archival entities and the power dynamics they enact and often enable at many conscious and subconscious levels, up to the very complex issue of how identity is constructed, both through photography and despite it. The photograph and the history of the woman it depicts offer an interesting case study in observing how women’s lives and actions were more often than not depicted in historical accounts - their complexities flattened into dichotomies of passive submissions versus terrifying, evil power. Her story is tied to patriarchal and colonial power structures that still influence how we read our past, and understand our present. She is just one in the very long list of historical figures and individuals fetishized as exotic specimens, hyper-sexualised in their fierce barbarism, forced to become almost mythical figures.
Then there is my favourite part: the photograph’s afterlife, its uses and abuses, its purposes, and the meaning it acquired and lost over time. But this part of the story is for another time. For now, it starts with her name:
Antonia Serra Sanna.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
JAMES BALDWIN AND LEONARD BERNSTEIN
The snapshot quality of the photo, almost like a Kodak moment, adds a sense of relatability. Color clearly plays a key role here, from the rich textured decor to their clothing. Baldwin chose elegant black, while Bernstein dared to wear a white tuxedo with a red bow tie. The flamboyant, gay-ish quality of their attire, paired with the colorfulness, sets the tone in my mind. The queerness, in the true sense of the word (though I find it difficult to embrace how the term has evolved today), is partially present in the pairing of these two larger-than-life figures.
From the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of The Baldwin Family.
Afterimage by Dani Issler:
I was going to choose a catastrophic image, seeing that we are living through a catastrophic era—it seemed more truthful. When I read the description of the Afterimage series, Gaza immediately came to mind. I also thought of Los Angeles, an image of something that consumes itself—fire, catastrophe, and misery. But then I realized that it would be more important for me to present an image that is closer to my own life. This image is my desktop background, and it has been on my computer for about a year. It feels like a tableau, almost like a painting.
On June 19, 1986, American writer James Baldwin and composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein were each awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, by President François Mitterrand. The ceremony took place at Place de la Concorde in Paris, at what is now a museum, Hôtel de La Marine. It was a symbolic moment: a Black writer who revolutionized literature and Civil Rights, challenging the American status quo, and a Jewish composer who reshaped American music and supported progressive causes.
I came across this image randomly while researching both men. I think I chose it because there's something very amusing about it. As far as I can tell, it’s a candid 35mm shot. There’s intimacy between the two men in the foreground. Bernstein looks like a Bar-Mitzvah boy, only recently out of the closet. This could even be a photo of a Gay marriage avant la lettre. In other photos from the event, they both seem genuinely happy and more relaxed than ever before. It was also a rare moment when Baldwin was honored outside of the U.S., where his work was often controversial. The fact that he and Bernstein—both gay and deeply involved in Civil Rights causes—stood together to receive this award is a powerful image of artistic and political solidarity. There’s also a kind of melancholy that I project onto that moment: Baldwin would die one year later, 1987, and Bernstein shortly after in 1990, at the height of the raging AIDS pandemic, where many Gay cultural icons and thinkers were struggling for their lives, often perceived melancholically in black and white images (I’m thinking of Hervé Guibert’s intimate portraits, such as that of Michel Foucault).
The snapshot quality of the photo, almost like a Kodak moment, adds a sense of relatability. Color clearly plays a key role here, from the rich textured decor to their clothing. Baldwin chose elegant black, while Bernstein dared to wear a white tuxedo with a red bow tie. The flamboyant, gay-ish quality of their attire, paired with the colorfulness, sets the tone in my mind. The queerness, in the true sense of the word (though I find it difficult to embrace how the term has evolved today), is partially present in the pairing of these two larger-than-life figures. It feels like they are on a stage and the human backdrop (predominantly women) adds character and liveliness to this casual, yet festive scene. I can spot Baldwin’s brother and his elderly French housekeeper from Saint-Paul-de-Vence who was close to him, and this moves me, that she accompanied him there.
For me, it’s a symbolic event—a ceremony that could represent an alternative existence in time. This moment of happiness is also tied to the trope of ‘an American in Paris,’. Although I am not American, I can certainly relate to the idea of expatriatism, especially in today's context – as we bear witness to the decline of the Pax Americana. Under Trump the American experience in Paris, as particular and privileged expatriatisms as it may be, feels more relevant. Paris was and still is a real place, even for Americans. As Oscar Wilde summed it up in The Picture of Dorian Gray:
‘They say that when good Americans die, they go to Paris.’
‘Oh, and where do bad Americans go?’
‘They stay in America.’
This photograph captures a fleeting moment of joy, camaraderie, and recognition—an afterimage of history. I’m tempted to title it Glitter and Be Gay, which is the title of the famous coloratura aria from Bernstein’s comic operetta adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide (1956). A critique of false optimism, war, religious hypocrisy, and human cruelty – ideas that feel just as relevant today. This aria is a satire of aristocratic excess and female suffering, blending irony, musical brilliance, and theatricality.
Glitter and be gay,
That's the part I play;
Here I am in Paris, France,
Forced to bend my soul
To a sordid role,
Victimized by bitter, bitter circumstance.
[…]
Enough, enough
Of being basely tearful!
I'll show my noble stuff
By being bright and cheerful!
[…]
Observe how bravely I conceal
The dreadful, dreadful shame I feel.
*Listen and see Bernstein conducting this aria here.
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 artists and writers 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
‘Is it possible to leave everything behind? Is it possible to begin again, outside and beyond every system of living you've ever known, reinventing what it means (and looks like) to exist as a body and soul on the land?’ These questions shaped Carmen Winant's exploration of radical reinvention, particularly within the context of the lesbian separatist communities of the 1970s.
Carol Newhouse, self-portrait from an Art and Photography Workshop, Womanshare, summer 1975.
For this year's Les Rencontres d'Arles, Objektiv's editor Nina Strand curates the exhibition Double with Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, featuring this image by Carol Newhouse as her current afterimage.
‘Is it possible to leave everything behind? Is it possible to begin again, outside and beyond every system of living you've ever known, reinventing what it means (and looks like) to exist as a body and soul on the land?’ These questions shaped Carmen Winant's exploration of radical reinvention, particularly within the context of the lesbian separatist communities of the 1970s. Through this process, Winant connected with Carol Newhouse, co-founder of Womanshare, a lesbian feminist community on the West Coast of the United States. Winant’s and Newhouse’s ongoing dialogue has evolved through several collaborative projects that examine the transformative impact of feminist movements from that era, viewed through the lens of Newhouse's photographic practice and archive. The medium became an essential tool for Newhouse, allowing her to assert and control her own representation.
For Les Rencontres d'Arles, they've created unique new work that weaves together their stories, passions, and curiosities. Over the course of a year, they engaged in a photographic dialogue—one would shoot a roll of film, wind it up, and send it across the country, where the other would expose it once more—using the technique of double exposure to create a layered interplay between their images. Double exposure was a technique used by Newhouse and her comrades to play with the singularness of pictures, or the claim of a single (often masculine) art creator.
Through this creative collaboration, the artists reclaim feminist photographic strategies. With a fulcrum in a series of images by Newhouse from the very beginning of the community, Winant and Newhouse invites us to consider how we reinvent ourselves and our histories—both individually and collectively—through the act of self-representation and interconnection. Their visual conversation delves into intergenerational relationships and feminist political legacies while bringing the experimental photographic practices of the past into the present.
BILLY MEIER
From the very beginning of photography things have been altered, making people believe false narratives. For instance, many believe Communist Russia propaganda photography was full of people drinking champagne, but in reality, they were just sitting around empty tables. If you asked me to draw a photograph, it would probably look something like this. It encapsulates everything that photography stands for—and everything that's problematic about it. It’s about the idea of evidence, but photography is arguably one of the worst mediums for documenting an event.
‘UFO’ sighting by Billy Meier.
Afterimage by Oliver Griffin:
Last February I did a residency at the Andreas Züst Library in Switzerland. I found that most of the photographic records of UFOs in the country were taken by a Swiss farmer, Eduard 'Billy' Albert Meier, just outside Zurich in the seventies. The images are beautiful, and every time you look at one, it evokes the idea of what a UFO encounter should be, in the Hollywood sense—not as a horror story, but more as a captivating experience. It’s the kind of encounter that makes you want to believe in a truth beyond our world.
I first saw one of these images in the 1983 book UFO…Contact from the Pleiades by Brit Elders & Lee Elders and something about the composition, the landscape, and the idea of an object floating and observing caught my attention. The stories behind his ‘encounters’—which lasted for much of his life until the end of the seventies when the aliens supposedly stopped contacting him—fascinated me. By then, he had an international UFO religious organisation with followers in the US, Mexico, and Europe. Despite Meier’s fame, he was a recluse, never leaving Switzerland. His photography and filmmaking were extraordinary, and this particular image still haunts me. It feels so ordinary, as if you were on a form of transport, traveling through a familiar landscape, and in the background, you spot a UFO floating quietly.
There’s a crazy history behind Meier. He ran away from Switzerland, joined the Foreign Legion, escaped again, lost an arm in Turkey while riding a bus back to Switzerland, and eventually ended up with a farm where he shot everything. He then claimed to have communication with an alien race over five years, with instructions on where to spot UFOs. He used a specific Olympus 35 ECR camera— the one that required winding with your thumb with a wheel —because it was the only camera he could use. He would take his motorbike up the hill to shoot these photos. Ironically, one of his images was used for the infamous X-Files TV series poster. When you think of TV series, popular culture, and aliens, you probably think of the iconic X-Files image, and Meier’s photograph is the one featured in the back of Fox Mulder’s office. It became the popular cultural representation of what a UFO should look like.
What’s fascinating is that Meier, who didn’t seem to want much, kept taking these photographs of aliens. It was later revealed that he actually made these aliens himself, using various bits of scrap metal on his farm and polishing them up as models. Some of these models occasionally pop up on eBay, not for much money. There’s a whole typology of different alien crafts and there supposed capabilities.
From the very beginning of photography things have been altered, making people believe false narratives. For instance, many believe Communist Russia propaganda photography was full of people drinking champagne, but in reality, they were just sitting around empty tables. If you asked me to draw a photograph, it would probably look something like this. It encapsulates everything that photography stands for—and everything that's problematic about it. It’s about the idea of evidence, but photography is arguably one of the worst mediums for documenting an event.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
JONI STERNBACH
What fascinated me about the image was learning that Joni wasn’t a surfer herself. She initially began photographing the sea because of her interest in water and its environmental significance. She had no intention of photographing surfers, but eventually, she was drawn to them. Her tintype process, which was such a spectacle on the beach, led her to engage with surfers and over time, she developed a connection with them, photographing them in a way that speaks to both the vulnerability and strength of their characters.
Joni Sternbach, 16.02.20 #1 Thea+Maxwell, Unique Tintype, Santa Cruz, CA 2016.
Afterimage by Christiane Pratsch Monarchi:
The image that captivates me is a tintype by Joni Sternbach, which won second place in the Taylor Wessing Photography Portrait Prize in 2016 out of over 4,300 entries. The image itself is fascinating because it combines a traditional photographic process with a contemporary subject. It features a young surfer couple, exuding relaxation, poise, and trust—qualities that elevate them into monumental representations of virility and youth. The composition is emotionally charged, evoking different narratives: perhaps they are returning from surfing or heading out to the sea, deeply in love, or simply enjoying the beauty of their bodies and the moment.
Growing up in America on the Gulf of Mexico, there was no surfing where I lived—just underage drinking and cars driving in circles. I always longed for that surf culture but didn’t experience it until much later in life. In my 40s, I learned to surf with my kids and husband in North England, and I’ll continue to do so for the rest of my life. There’s something incredibly special about surfing that has always drawn me in, and it connects deeply to my personal memories.
What fascinated me about the image was learning that Joni wasn’t a surfer herself. She initially began photographing the sea because of her interest in water and its environmental significance. She had no intention of photographing surfers, but eventually, she was drawn to them. Her tintype process, which was such a spectacle on the beach, led her to engage with surfers and over time, she developed a connection with them, photographing them in a way that speaks to both the vulnerability and strength of their characters. The trust and relaxation they exhibited in front of her camera transformed them into monumental figures, full of gravitas. The tintype process itself—so different from digital photography—adds to the timeless, object-like quality of the image. It’s a piece of art that will endure, much like the surfboards she photographs, which have their own monumental significance.
Making a tintype is an amazing process. I did it once in a workshop, and it’s highly controlled. The process is meticulous—you coat the plate, handle it with care, and expose it to just the right light. It requires a very specific environment, which makes Joni’s work even more impressive. She’s out there on the beach, doing something that typically requires a controlled setting, and that adds a level of fragility to her work. The wind, the elements—all of that interference creates beautiful imperfections in the final images, which I find fascinating. Joni’s ability to do all this on the beach, with such an unstable process, adds another layer of complexity and beauty to her work.
The beauty of Joni’s work lies in the diverse subjects she captures. Some of her other images feature older surfers or women with different body types, showing that surf culture isn’t just about the typical image of young, athletic individuals. There’s something timeless and humanizing in the way she captures people from all walks of life. The image I selected might be more traditional, featuring a young, blonde, athletic couple, but it’s the one that I couldn’t stop staring at. It’s a fabulous piece.
This image also seems to capture a specific moment in time—a snapshot from before things changed. It was taken in 2016; since then I’m not sure how Santa Cruz has been affected by wildfires but it's such a difficult time. Despite the challenges they face, these people are still going out to surf, living their way of life. It’s a time capsule, a reminder of a different era, and that’s something I find incredibly poignant. It’s not just about the photograph itself, but about the process and the environment in which it’s made. It’s also a beautiful portrait of a culture that is not just about surfing, but about a way of life.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
ANDREAS FEININGER
Because of its ambiguity, several ideas bounce around. The most immediate is seeing and thinking about the activities of the photographer. This much is immediately visible: how the camera mediates (obscures and also complicates) the photographer’s relationship to the world. It’s surprising: we see the photographer, but there’s an imbalance or a merging with the machinic, with the apparatus in the foreground. Of course, this is often how it is – the photographer says they step back for the photograph to function as truth. But here the photographer’s way of looking is shaped by this object that they’re seeing through, they are transformed by it. And in case we forget, we’re seeing them with a similar device. Feininger would also build his own cameras, so he’s conscious of the act and the construction, and so should we. How do we recognize what’s happening in an image? That the picture is not just a window; but a vision, a translation, an act of looking shared with us? That’s another thing.
Andreas Feininger, The Photojournalist (Dennis Stock), New York, 1951.
Afterimage by Duncan Wooldridge:
This is an image that keeps coming back to me; it comes out of nowhere, resurfaces; it always feels relevant. The photograph was made by Andreas Feininger and is called The Photojournalist. There's some debate about when it was taken: many examples are dated as 1951, whilst MoMA has a print with a subtly different point of view which it dates to 1955. Pragmatically, exact dates don’t matter in this image that much – it’s not an image of an event - but imaginatively it feels fitting: it’s a strange document, an image of someone who a viewer might think is a time-traveller, before Chris Marker’s La Jetée. But it's also a portrait, an image of the Magnum photographer Dennis Stock. It is a document with one foot in fiction, a bit post-human. And it makes me think about what photography does.
Because of its ambiguity, several ideas bounce around. The most immediate is seeing and thinking about the activities of the photographer. This much is immediately visible: how the camera mediates (obscures and also complicates) the photographer’s relationship to the world. It’s surprising: we see the photographer, but there’s an imbalance or a merging with the machinic, with the apparatus in the foreground. Of course, this is often how it is – the photographer says they step back for the photograph to function as truth. But here the photographer’s way of looking is shaped by this object that they’re seeing through, they are transformed by it. And in case we forget, we’re seeing them with a similar device. Feininger would also build his own cameras, so he’s conscious of the act and the construction, and so should we. How do we recognize what’s happening in an image? That the picture is not just a window; but a vision, a translation, an act of looking shared with us? That’s another thing.
The next is its strangeness, the light and shadow, the shroud of the cap. The who of the image: even if we have no access to the knowledge that it is Stock who Feininger is photographing, there is the title, The Photojournalist. Anonymised, an archetype ‘The photojournalist’. Is the photojournalist human? Are they like us? It seems to be posed as a question. As we look to the eyes, we have two optical devices: the lens and the scope on top of the camera in their place. The two ‘eyes’ are not the same. They’re a pair, interrelated, but not identical. Equivalence or balance is complicated. For me, this is telling about an important relationship we should have with photography—it’s not exact reality, but a negotiation with it, a very contingent and powerful one.
The fictions I enjoy aren’t fantastical or detached from the tangible. I’m interested in that kind of Jose Saramago or Clarice Lispector sense of something happening, becoming. In Saramago that is "what happens if the world was different in just this one respect?"— what are the consequences of subtle shift? What moves our position, our way of seeing the world? This image lets us think approach those concerns, even if this pushes up uncomfortably against the photojournalist’s conventional claim to objectivity, to reporting. Maybe that’s because the old fact and fiction duality just isn’t working anymore.
Astill from Chris Marker’s La Jetée, 1962.
As a document with one foot in fiction, we can expand our perspectives. Stock is photographing us with a rangefinder camera, probably a Leica. And we can see that he is seeing us through a scope or viewfinder that sees a different world. The rangefinder, as opposed to a single-lens reflex, has two positions: one position from which the camera operator sees, and a second which is the view that is exposed onto film. The machine and human operator see differently. Though the camera and viewfinder are configured to minimise the disconnect, a difference can be seen under careful observation. It’s called parallax. I’m interested in parallax as the actual and poetic optical event that is happening here, in this portrait and in fact in all photographs. Stock is looking through the scope and seeing one thing, and the lens is seeing another. This opens up a potentially radical possibility: photographs can modify the world. They are showing us emergent possibilities, for good and for bad. This allows us to think about how the world is given form, in-formed by our looking. Just think how much the world been changed by the presence of photographs! Has the time-traveller returned to remind us?
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.
ELLE PÉREZ
This book gathers a decade of celebrated artist Elle Pérez’s reflections around photography. A collage of loose thoughts, letters, press articles and reviews, text messages, pictures, sketches, responses, emails, notes, and lectures, the book explores what Pérez chooses to photograph and what photography means to them. It is a tapestry of personal insights, intimate moments, and candid reflections, all woven through the medium.
This book gathers a decade of celebrated artist Elle Pérez’s reflections around photography. A collage of loose thoughts, letters, press articles and reviews, text messages, pictures, sketches, responses, emails, notes, and lectures, the book explores what Pérez chooses to photograph and what photography means to them. It is a tapestry of personal insights, intimate moments, and candid reflections, all woven through the medium.
Objektiv Press was founded in 2009 and began as a biannual journal of lens-based art. After ten years of exploring this format, we transitioned into a more book-like publication, where we let just one writer fill the pages with their real and raw opinions, writing about different trends within the medium.
Since 2020, we have been inviting different people—photographers, critics, curators—to reflect on their relationship with photography through a longer essay. We want to deepen our content and continue to explore the development and position of film and photography both in the art scene and in society.
YOLA BALANGA
I long to join the surfers in a diptych I pass. It could offer a needed pause, but politics continue, in another two-work collage showing two women sporting large headpieces full of images from different manifestations. This is what many carry, symbolisingthe worry that never ends, the protest that never rests. The large blue Post-it note with the words ‘Technically, this piece can be considered a painting’ and the smaller red one on the side, stating ‘Not for sale (edition of 3)’ offer some smiles, as do the men in large pink kaftans and the women in gold- and silver-embroidered dresses flâneuring around the fair, champagne in hand, only there to be seen. They might pass quickly by the work in a triptych depicting a woman crawling out of a too-tight cave, and what I will carry with me is the artist’s quote on how Nature is a Black Woman.
Afterimage(s) by Nina Strand:
Yola Balanga, from the series Born of the Earth.
The word ‘fuck’ on a pink painting is the first thing I really notice while walking around the Cape Town Art Fair for the second year in a row. The word, written on the hand-colored paper, sums up many of my feelings after just having seen the return of the fascist salute for the second time in such a short span of time.
We are, in some ways, at rock bottom. The past has become the present. I watched the film on Lee Miller on the plane here and was reminded of her reportage Believe It, published in Vogue in June 1945. Her haunting documentation from a concentration camp proved what really happened during World War II. Have we learned nothing? We didn’t. Apartheid was established in 1948. I’m confronted with blurry Holga camera images in black and white from the site of multiple executions of political opponents listed by the Afrikaner government in this town. It faces a collage featuring a floating black woman’s head in a blonde wig, surrounded by objects like a pant line and a cartoon rabbit. It hurts. We are all fucked.
I can’t stop thinking of the suffering here—officially ended in ‘94, but still. I am the tourist. Always. Just like when I visited Vienna and, while passing the art academy, thought of what might have been avoided had he been accepted there. I think of how Elon Musk’s grandparents emigrated from Canada to this country in support of apartheid. Musk holds Canadian citizenship through his mother, Maye, who was born in Canada. Now, many Canadians are signing campaigns to remove his citizenship. They don’t want him, and I’m guessing this country doesn’t either.
I long to join the surfers in a diptych I pass. It could offer a needed pause, but politics continue, in another two-work collage showing two women sporting large headpieces full of images from different manifestations. This is what many carry, symbolising the worry that never ends, the protest that never rests.The large blue Post-it note with the words ‘Technically, this piece can be considered a painting’ and the smaller red one on the side, stating ‘Not for sale (edition of 3)’ offer some smiles, as do the men in large pink kaftans and the women in gold- and silver-embroidered dresses flâneuring around the fair, champagne in hand, only there to be seen. They might pass quickly by the work in a triptych depicting a woman crawling out of a too-tight cave, and what I will carry with me is the artist’s quote on how Nature is a Black Woman.
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 artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.