MARTIN PARR

Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

My autoportrait project has run over 40 years. The aim is to demonstrate the different ways in which you can have your portrait done in a studio or public space, as well as the different techniques photographers employ. The only reason I use myself as the subject is because I’m the one person who’s consistently there. Hanoi Studio took five black and white shots of me in different poses, and in one they gave me naff sunglasses. They then did a montage, printed in black and white, and hand-coloured.

I’m uninterested in how I look, as long as I’m presentable. I look in the mirror once a day – I have no choice, as I’ve got to comb my hair. I guess that’s interesting given I do fashion photography. I’m not interested in clothes, I just wear what’s comfortable. Socks with sandals is a good combination before it gets to the hottest part of the year. I guess you could call it my spring look …

I have had a wonderful life with photography. From North Korea, to a vicar’s garden party in Somerset, or shooting Mar del Plata beach in Argentina – what a privilege it has been to see the world and record my response. I had a funny one in Morecambe last summer. I was taking photos and this couple came up and said, “That’s a nice camera. What are you doing around here?” I replied, “I’m documenting Morecambe.” They said, “You mean like Martin Parr?” I said, “I am Martin Parr.” They were rather surprised.

I’ve been taking photos for almost 70 years, and in that time we’ve seen the amazing transformation from analogue film to the digital era, and I’ve got a lot older. We live in a difficult but inspiring world, and there is so much out there I want to photograph.

This week’s Afterimage contribution is an edited extract from Utterly Lazy and Inattentive by Martin Parr and Wendy Jones, published by Penguin. It is adapted from “There’s Something Very Interesting About Boring”: Martin Parr on His Life in Pictures, The Guardian, 24 August 2025, in remembrance of Parr following his passing this weekend.

ELLE PÉREZ

From Elle Pérez Diablo, MoMA PS 1.

2024 On the wall collages

When we were developing my show Diablo at MoMA PS1, the curators were interested in doing something that evoked the feeling of being in my studio. The collage Diablo was originally not meant to be an artwork, but was my answer to the question 'What does your studio look like?'

Diablo is a version of one of my foundational impulses: I have always made this kind of image collection, even as a kid. An intense collage covered an entire wall in my childhood bedroom. I was surrounded by images and pieces of text for years, and I’ve made something similar in every studio I’ve had. The wall collages that I make in my studio are an engine for moving my work forward, and for discovering potential formal innovations. I have become interested in these collages as works of art because of how they reflect the process of thinking with images. They both trace and make possible the development of thought, using the multiple and mundane materials of the studio: laser prints, inkjet prints, darkroom prints, reference articles, screenshots, work prints and postcards, Post-It notes, washi tape, and push pins.

The collages reflect the honesty and idealism of the studio space, a place of thought unbounded, where the question to answer is: What more is possible? In these collages made as studio work, I am able to conjure possibility while it is still not yet within my grasp; manifestation and failure to arrive both live within these pieces. A gift of vision that I give to myself.

I’m interested in the movement of the pieces of paper as a gesture. Catching the light and the breeze, the papers are not fixed in place except for at one or two points. They are animated by their relationship to space and open air; a passing person’s wake could lift the page. My drive toward making both these collages and also observational images feels deeply connected to being from places that are always about losing, reimagining, and forgetting.

Reimagining is one of my greatest skills. I think it comes from that experience of constant loss: you can’t hold onto things forever; you have to keep moving, reshaping, and finding new ways to see things. It’s that cycle of loss and reinvention that shapes how I approach the world, especially through photography.

This year has been incredible for Objektiv Press and our Afterimage series. As we wrap up the year, we’ll be sharing excerpts from our books every Monday leading up to Christmas. This is Elle Pérez from their book the movement of our bodies, Objektiv #29.

DAVID CAMPANY

I have been thinking a lot lately about the relation between ‘theory’ and ‘writing’, and ‘literature’. Many theorists don’t think of themselves as writers, and of course many writers don’t think of themselves as theorists. As we know, a lot of ‘theory’ is not very well written, probably because those who write it do not think of themselves as writers.

The essayist and psychotherapist Adam Phillips once suggested that psychoanalytic writing, from Freud onwards, but particularly Freud, should be read as a form of literature. That is to say, not as a claim to truth or science, but as a claim to writing. Asked for a definition of literature, Susan Sontag suggested it was writing that you would want to reread.

I read a lot of theory, but the only theory I reread are the texts I want to reread, and these I think of as also being literature. However, I would like to think that I have a wide sense of what literature is, and can be. When reading, I keep my mind open for those unpredictable moments when a theoretical idea finds what seems to be a fully satisfying, or startling, or at least profound literary form.

People often complain about the way certain writers still seem to dominate theoretical discussions of photography, particularly Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag. I share that frustration. But do you know why their thought dominates where the equally profound thought of others does not? It’s because it was well written. Their writing stays with people as sentences, as modes of thought that found compelling written form, as literature.

Rereading a text has its own satisfactions. Not the least of these are the fact that we never read it the same way twice. In rereading, the emphasis, our emphasis, may fall somewhere else. In this sense, to reread a text is to measure one’s own changes – intellectual, social, political, aesthetic, critical, poetic – and in the process, we find that resonant meaning comes neither from the text, nor from us, but from somewhere between the two. This may explain why there is often a gap between the self-perception of ‘theorists’ and literary ‘writers’. A theorist is often hoping to ‘convey’ their theories, to communicate them unequivocally. A literary writer says “never mind if this is strictly true; is it interesting?” But if a text is interesting, that is a kind of truth. This is why Phillips suggests psychoanalytic writing be read a literature, regardless of the writer’s intention. Freud the writer will outlast Freud thetheorist, or even psychoanalysis itself. And perhaps Freud knew that.

‘Theory’ is often suspicious of the power of ‘literature’, seeing it as rhetorically sly in its way of not appealing to the intellect only. In doing so it often condemns itself to small and specialized audiences. This is why the idea ofthe ‘public intellectual’ is vanishing. But there were never that many public intellectuals, never that many who had found a way to give literary form to their theories. It is very difficult thing to do. What may be vanishing is the desire to even try.

This year has been incredible for Objektiv Press and our Afterimage series. As we wrap up the year, we’ll be sharing excerpts from our books every Monday leading up to Christmas. This is David Campany’s contribution to our A Criticism Review, Objektiv #25.

LUCAS BLALOCK

Afterimage by Lucas Blalock:

11. In my pictures, I’m always looking for language adequate to my own subjectivity, my own messed-up feelings, and this is something I hope viewers might be able to mirror for themselves. Photography is nothing like a verbal or written language in most respects, but, like language, it is in common use. We all ‘speak’ photography and this makes it a particularly interesting form in which to work. Like language, it changes as our use of it alters, shifting to accommodate new uses, evolving socially, and making space for importations and slang. There is a root system in both, but neither is essentially itself—it becomes by being used.

I’m interested in photography the way a poet might be interested in English or Spanish. What can you do with this thing we use every day? How can it be stretched? What can it accommodate? Although my work does have a lot of intervention and gesture in it, I don’t see it as self-expression. It’s more like co-relation or triangulation—trying to drum up potential relationships we both (you and I) share through photography to the world.

So.

How can I get photography to address the real conditions of my experience?

What can I ask photography to do?

From Why Must the Mounted Messenger be Mounted?, by Lucas Blalock, Objektiv #26. Join Blalock, Carmen Winant and Elle Pérez with Objektiv Press during Paris Photo. On Saturday, November 15, at 11h., Delpire & Co. will host a presentation by Winant, followed by a discussion with her, Pérez and Blalock over coffee and croissants.

MARGE PIERCY

Afterimage by Carmen Winant:

I've always been attracted to photography that poses a threat to itself. I probably work the way that I do – using so many found and collected images – because I’m distrustful of how seductive photography can be. But I can't really shake it either: I feel too tender towards the photographic object. I love feeling them, seeing them in relation to each other. I often describe myself as a photographer who doesn't make my own pictures for this reason. This is all to say that I’ve been drawn to other people who remodulate our expectations of the image: Leigh Ledare, Jo Spence, Valie Export, Jim Goldberg, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and so on. And, if I am being honest, I draw more from writers than I do from visual artists. The French poststructuralists and Helene Cixous but also American poets like Marge Piercy, whom I've been re-reading a lot lately. They give me language, but they also – on the best days – help me ideate as I go.

A revised quote by Winant from Carte Blanche, Objektiv #20. Join Carmen Winant, Lucas Blalock and Elle Pérez with Objektiv Press during Paris Photo. On Saturday, November 15, at 11h., Delpire & Co will host a presentation by Winant, followed by a discussion with her, Pérez and Blalock over coffee and croissants.

OBJEKTIV PRESS AT PARIS PHOTO

Delpire & Co — Saturday, November 15, 11h.
On the occasion of Paris Photo, Objektiv Press will present this summer’s project Double with Carmen Winant and Carol Newhouse at Les Rencontres d'Arles. The event will include a presentation by Winant, followed by a discussion with her, Elle Pérez and Lucas Blalock, over coffee and croissants.

Coffee & Croissants – Delpire & Co
Saturday, 15 November 2025, 11h
Delpire & Co, 13 rue de l’Abbaye, Paris 6e
www.delpireandco.com

Polycopies — Thursday, November 13 & Friday, November 14, 11h–19h.
We’re at Polycopies for our tenth pop-up Thursday and Friday. This year, we will focus on books from Winant, Pérez, and Blalock, but other titles will also be available. Please note: Objektiv Press will be there from 11h to 19h, but the boat will remain open for booklovers until 21h.

The book Double accompanied the exhibition of Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant at the Rencontres d’Arles. Double invites us to consider how we reinvent ourselves and our histories through shared self-representation and interconnection. Using some works from Newhouse’s archive, their work gives form to intergenerational relationships and feminist legacies, bringing past experimental photographic practices into the present.

the movement of our bodies 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.

Why must the mounted messenger be mounted? by Lucas Blalock, soon to be published in Mandarin, offers an expanded meditation on the artist’s twenty-year involvement with photography. In it, Blalock charts the development of his photographic ideas as they run alongside a tangled web of accidents, influence, romance, anxiety, and work. It is a book about coming of age with a preoccupation alternately in full bloom and on its last legs.

At Polycopies we will also present the new publication from Notes Press, an imprint of Objektiv Press. Notes on Paname by Nina Strand opens during the summer of the 2024 Paris Olympics and moves toward the tenth anniversary of the 2015 attacks. Through brief reflections accompanied by images of bistro terraces, it explores the confusing emotions of love and belonging to a city that isn't one's own.

MANUEL ÁLVAREZ BRAVO

The Man from Papantla (Señor de Papantla) 1934, printed 1977. Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Afterimage by Elle Pérez:

The picture of Jose de Jesus took about a year to make. The image itself holds a reference to Señor de Papantla by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one of my favorite artists. I had the luck of being able to study his prints when I wasteaching at the Williams College. As with the works of Peter Hujar and Roy DeCarava, so much happens in Bravo’s shadows. They contain so much information that is hard to re-photograph, and therefore it isimpossible to grasp the true sensitivity of his printing until you see the prints in person. The resulting effect of two-dimensional form holding a profound sense of depth and volume is something I think about frequently while photographing, and even more so while printing.

In Jose De Jesus (2018) and in Jose Gabriel (2017), the shadows are crucial. In the latter photograph, the shadows reveal his eyes when you come closer, making him appear to be looking at you. Jose De Jesus offers three modalities of shadow and light, each with its own depth, against a plain wall. Jose De Jesus happened to personally own the Bravo monograph we were using as reference; it was given to him by a friend. So he was familiar with and had a relationship to the specific photograph.

From the movement of our bodies, Objektiv #29. Join Carmen Winant, Elle Pérez, and Lucas Blalock with Objektiv Press during Paris Photo. On Saturday, November 15, at 11h., Delpire & Co. will host a presentation by Winant, followed by a discussion with her, Pérez and Blalock over coffee and croissants.

KETUTA ALEXI-MESKHISHVILI

When we could still afford to have a stable world view, an image could shift our perception of the world. In this sense, it’s the billion collective images that I’ve consumed in the past ten years that have resonated with me the most. Slowly, over time, the power of a single exhibition or image to change one’s perception has been put to question. In a time of relentless and almost involuntary consumption of images, the rise of mass-market digital retouching and live rendering software, can a single image hold power?

What made me love photography was its boundary problems: how the ambiguous power of decisions such as composition, editing, framing, circulation and presentation of an image tends to determine the meaning more than that which is being depicted. Or, for example, the opaqueness of boundaries between the depicted and depicter that are easily blurred by the dynamics of power. These tendencies allow photography a vast, mysterious area for an artist to investigate and play in. What has surprised me most lately, in my inquiry into this phenomenon, is how closely the experience of motherhood has paralleled it and in turn, has fed my images post-partum.

My exhibition at Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris, that was titled mother, feelings, cognac, was an attempt to communicate a sense of lost boundaries, between bodies, images, definitions: a certain amnesia, personal and general, if you will. Recently, I sense myself moving away from that as well, but whatever is brewing is very new and I can't yet verbalize it.

Artists have been foreshadowing our ‘post truth’ moment for a long time. I think whether directly or indirectly, all work is affected by the broader realities of its time. Generally, I don’t set out to comment on things through my work. Following the last US presidential election, however, I was invited to participate in a group show called Produktion: Made in Germany Drei, at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. For this exhibition I worked on a concise project, titled MID, where I photographed – off the computer screen – found images of window locks produced in Germany. I also added a crumpled ribbon of a different colour to each image, in order to keep things open to interpretation. But the images still turned out to be too resolved for me. After that experience, I turned in again, hoping that the personal, with its call to empathy, can also be political.

What comes after the pictorial turn? Instagram has eaten Facebook, fashion is having pop culture for breakfast, emojis are feasting on the written word, and most of human communication is taking place on a screen. Maybe the pictorial turn is the last turn we make before the end.

From the final issue of Objektiv in 2020, marking its tenth anniversary. We gave twenty artists carte blanche to create portfolios or collage-like mind maps exploring the photography that inspires their practices. Each contribution was accompanied by a short statement.

Though not part of our Afterimage series, these contributions touch on themes of memory and perception. The artists were prompted with a set of inspirational questions, including one posed to W.J.T. Mitchell: What comes after the pictorial turn? He responded:

‘I think the study of the whole sensorium – the senses themselves, beyond vision, or as connected to vision – is one thing that follows logically after an emphasis on the visual. I never thought of images as silent; even silent movies were never silent: they had music and text.’

LEBOHANG KGANYE

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Playing Cards/Malcolm X) from the Kitchen Table II series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery.

Afterimages by Lebohang Kganye:

Santu Mofokeng’s photographs from the series Chasing Shadows and Black Photo Album/ Look At Me & Carrie Mae Weems’ images from Kitchen Table Series and Family Pictures are still on my mind. The influences and events that have changed the atmospheric pressure of my working space are oral histories, self-recollection and the recollection of others, autobiographical narratives, psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic practice dealing with transgenerational trauma, and the social and political climate of South Africa in the present, as well as its history, especially language and oral history. Naming and oral history is directly linked to the prohibition against black people learning to read and write in the context of apartheid. This attests to the power of literacy – voting was connected to the ability to read and write.

Santu Mofokeng, Eyes-wide-shut, Motouleng Cave, Clarens – Free State, 2004. Courtesy: the artist and Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp

When asked about what comes after the pictorial turn, I’ve been thinking about ghosts – multitudinous manifestations and co-existences in a timespace between past and present – and Roland Barthes’s use of death as a metaphor for photography: the ‘presence of absent figures’ and an ‘always-already absent present’, which is ‘neither present, nor absent’. So for me, photography is a ghost, an existence in transition, hovering in a duality of time. By considering time as a construct, one can consider the ghost as a single being or as multiple possible presences, whether it is a spectre from the past, appearing in the present, or a spectre from the present, seeking refuge in the past.

From the final issue of Objektiv in 2020, marking its tenth anniversary. We gave twenty artists carte blanche to create portfolios or collage-like mind maps exploring the photography that inspires their practices. Each contribution was accompanied by a short statement.

Though not part of our Afterimage series, these contributions touch on themes of memory and perception. The artists were prompted with a set of inspirational questions, including one posed to W.J.T. Mitchell: What comes after the pictorial turn? He responded:

‘I think the study of the whole sensorium – the senses themselves, beyond vision, or as connected to vision – is one thing that follows logically after an emphasis on the visual. I never thought of images as silent; even silent movies were never silent: they had music and text.’

EM ROONEY

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1919/21, Palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

Afterimages by Em Rooney:

The way that I’ve often thought about photographs as private, personal, and small I think might have its roots in the way photographs were often stored at my house when I was growing up. They weren’t typically on display. They were in hidden in boxes in the attic, or shoved in the pages of books – old family photos, or pictures of my mother in High School might drop out of the OED or the Joy of Sex when you pulled them off the shelf. So that relationship between the page, and image (and its one that Sontag, Barthes, Berger, Davey, and many others have often spoken about) was there for me when I was a child, and has reoccurred formally, on and off, throughout the past ten years.

This time has been stuffed to the gills with non-stop reading about, teaching about and seeing shows; talking about work (with my love, artist and collaborator Chris Domenick) first thing in the morning, last before bed at night; getting into serious fights with friends about work they like/don’t like and why; writing about work I love and curating shows, and pouring myself into it. This question, of what has resonated with me, would be incomplete unless it were to include the work of all my friends and everything I learned from Chris and his practice, and every show I’ve seen and then verbally dissected (not to mention the work of so many gifted students I’ve taught since 2010) – the number is probably in the thousands.

Catherine Opie’s show at Lehmann Maupin, comes to mind. It featured the artist Pig Pen as protagonist in a fictional, doomsday narrative laid out in a series of photographs and a video. Pig Pen (aka Stosh Fila) is a person I love looking at who Opie has been photographing for years. The magic of the photograph can be very simple, just like that; I like looking at you. And this is a watered down version of punctum I guess. It's captivating to think about who or what a photographer photographs over time. What subject does she return to? As a student I was obsessed with Steiglitz’s photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, how we could watch her age (becoming more handsome with every year). We saw what Steiglitz saw (although O’Keefe lived much longer after he died). What a privilege the photographer grants the viewer, a stranger to the world of her intimacy. Opie’s show felt particularly impactful, in this way, as I realized her subject, had become someone I’d grown up with as well.

I think the pictorial turn might be the last turn, especially if we think of it in relationship to Foucault’s ideas about surveillance. I’ve seen corporate tools and machines that render quality/detail/data more quickly and easily, tools that are historically and presently, used for military and capital gain; drones and advanced data processing systems, used well by responsible artists. But, I worry that the merging of scientific/corporate invention and genuine creativity will continue to alienate us from our physical world, biochemical feelings, observations and instincts and this will hasten the destruction of the planet.

From the final issue of Objektiv in 2020, marking its tenth anniversary. We gave twenty artists carte blanche to create portfolios or collage-like mind maps exploring the photography that inspires their practices. Each contribution was accompanied by a short statement.

Though not part of our Afterimage series, these contributions touch on themes of memory and perception. The artists were prompted with a set of inspirational questions, including one posed to W.J.T. Mitchell: What comes after the pictorial turn? He responded:

‘I think the study of the whole sensorium – the senses themselves, beyond vision, or as connected to vision – is one thing that follows logically after an emphasis on the visual. I never thought of images as silent; even silent movies were never silent: they had music and text.’

LUTZ BACHER

Untitled (1975), Lutz Bacher. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin, and, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

Afterimage by Susanne M. Winterling:

Shadows and forms seem to reach out of the frame and pass right through the installation space. A hand approaches or withdraws from a chest blemished by marks. The fragility of this skin that has just been touched or is about to be touched contrasts with the image itself, which manages to convey the opposite of fragility. The black and white photograph comes from another time and yet is so necessary in our time.

The photo was shown in the exhibition Black Beauty, which included an installation in which tons of black coal slag filled the entire gallery floor, and the site-specific work Black Magic, made from vibrating black astroturf cladding the walls. The glimmering sand-like coal seemed to point to the photograph, which was placed next to the viewer’s path of the architecture. The resulting dynamic was both of lightness and heaviness, as the exhausting playfulness and desolation of the sand found a correlation in the awkward intimacy of the photograph.

This ambivalence is perhaps why this photo in particular has remained with me – its violent affirmation of a skin too thin. Like a spark, the image illuminates a certain and defined materialism within the virtual flow of information and image technology. Without concrete stability, it nevertheless affirms a dynamic and thus a reality, but one that will always remain vague, even though so visceral.

This afterimage is from Objektiv #8, 2013.

ELINE MUGAAS

Eline Mugaas, Pillow I-IV, 2019.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

I’ve been thinking about something that Eline Mugaas once told me: a film still that has stayed with her for a long time. The scene is from one of Constantin Brancusi’s films shot in his Paris studio. A woman is dancing on a low plinth, her body twisting as she raises her arm above her head. The movement reminded Mugaas of other images throughout art history, from antique caryatids – columns shaped like women's bodies whose function was to hold up temple roofs – to the Greek urns from the geometric period, stylised as women raising their arms above their heads and pulling their hair in grief. She thought of the writhing female bodies in the paintings of both Matisse and Modogliani, all of this reminding her of the movement made when swinging an object up on one’s head or lifting a child on one’s arm.

When Brancusi installed his Endless Columns, he filmed his trip to Romania. Mugaas watched the film repeatedly and found, in a one-and-a-half-second frame, a woman at a market carrying a tin on her head with the same form she had on her mind. She saw it as a serendipitous moment, where everything comes together, belongs to each other or is created from each other. This idea of lifting, supporting and carrying is on display in Mugaas’ work Pillow I-IV, which contains images of seated sculptures taken from the Ludovisi throne at the Roman National Museum.

(This afterimage is inspired by a text I wrote about Mugaas's work for Camera Austria.)

INGRID EGGEN

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

Still thinking about Ingrid Eggen's pedknots. They look so uncomfortable that it actually hurts to watch. It seems as though toes have been amputated. This makes me think about how we continue to survive in our bodies. Eggen has consistently worked with the human form throughout her artistic career – previously using symbols and signs tied to communication, where she explored how physical expression can be distorted to create something new, based on the body’s unconscious ways of collecting and storing information.

As the exhibition text describes, the works are part of an ongoing exploration of how organisms and ecosystems have developed clever, innovative solutions to problems through evolution and adaptation, and how the human body might be transformed in response to future changes – a potential vocabulary for the body's affective intelligence.

I pick up the accompanying text, a short fictional piece by Ruby Paloma, where she paraphrases Samiya Bashir's quote: ‘How will we survive this having a body? Trying to be intelligent life,’ with: ‘Perhaps the body is the most intelligent part of us.’ And maybe this is why I’m so fascinated by Eggen's insistence on photographing the body. For how are we, as the accompanying text asks, supposed to survive being a body – in the face of the world's development? These works feel important, like the beginning of something larger in an attempt to evoke a new form of corporeality – shaped by the lived experiences of the body.

SOPHIE RISTELHUEBER

Sophie Ristelhueber, Every One (#3), 1994.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

He has a plaster under his left eye—something has been removed. As he sits down, he tells me not to worry. It was only a birthmark his doctor wanted to take off, nothing important.

‘There will be more,’ I say to him. ‘Each time we meet, another small part of our bodies will be taken away.’ One by one, we’ll be stripped down. There will be less and less left of us. ‘And the worst thing,’ I say,’is that we’ll find this completely normal.’ 'It's just age,' we'll tell each other, nodding knowingly.

While Jean goes to see Louis Vuitton’s Homme show at the Palais de Tokyo—an event I’m in no way invited to—I visit the Musée d’Art Moderne. Some years ago, they hosted an exhibition of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s work, including the self-portrait that appears on the cover of the book I’m currently reading: she is pregnant, holding an extra body inside her.

The curator wrote that in her ‘numerous self-portraits, Modersohn-Becker asserts her identity as a woman, portraying herself intimately and without complacency, in an ongoing quest for her inner being.’ But I can’t find that self-portrait anywhere. I know the museum acquired another piece from that exhibition—a portrait of her sister, Herma. It’s a close-up. She wears marigolds on her hat. I want to see it.

My bag is heavy with books about other artists as I walk through the vast halls of the museum. I’m so impatient to find the Becker that I barely register Bourgeois’ Maman, which usually makes my breath catch. I only stop when I reach the large-scale black and white piece by Sophie Ristelhueber—scarred skin from her Every One series, inspired by her visit to war-torn Yugoslavia. The photographs were taken in a Paris hospital: close-up images of post-surgical scars serving as symbolic stand-ins for the wounds of conflict.

I think about Jean and me laughing about losing body parts. And now, standing in front of someone who has. I know that Paula’s last word was: ‘Schade.’ Dying eighteen days after giving birth. Her sister Herma is somewhere in this building, wearing marigolds on her hat. One of the few things Paula left behind.

DOUBLE Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant

A page from the book Double Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant.

Double opens with a series of photographs of a woman practising Tai Chi on a beach, apparently alone, moving in and out of the waves. She seems lost in her own movements. The year is 1974, and the woman, along with her two friends, is weeks away from discovering the land where they will build a new community. They have left everything—their homes and families—to find a place where they can live outside society. This short photo-novel of the woman on the beach serves as a symbol of that dream.

And let this dream begin with Carol, who captured the series on the beach. In the 1976 book Country Lesbians, about the community they built, we learn that she and the woman on the beach, Dian Wagner, met in college and later lived with Carol’s then lover, Billie Miracle, in a collective in Nova Scotia. Wagner dreamed of returning to the States to buy land, envisioning a future where they could build a more sustainable and independent life. Later, Carol recalls that they didn’t feel as if they would need to give up very much. Even if they didn’t know where and what the land they eventually found would be, they were just filled with passion and a confidence that they would find something better. They knew they had to leave a system they felt was harmful to them.

(…)

This dream of a new future was something that Carmen also sought. For her 2018 project My Birth, she extensively researched the international lesbian-separatist communities and became fascinated by these images that capture a radical movement toward lesbian self-determination. As she puts it, these photographs, created by and for women, reflect a world rooted in mutual recognition: women behind the camera, photographing one another and building lives outside the structures of patriarchy. In this context, photography becomes both a survival strategy and a shared language—an archive of intimacy, pleasure, labour and resistance.

An excerpt from Double. Order your copy now at our online bookstore.

DOUBLE Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant

Double by Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant, 2025.

In a 2022 conference, On Wimmin's Land at Oregon University, Carol Newhouse talks about her experience at WomanShare, about sharing her life through photography—how she spent time in the funky little darkroom they built, staring in wonder at her photographs. She wanted to capture the strength she felt on the land. She reflected on how to create images that conveyed a sense of togetherness in an environment that was both healing and challenging. She talked about how all the women brought who they were to the lands and then negotiated who they became. She called WomanShare “a place of power,” where they could realize their full potential. As she spoke about slowly becoming visible to herself and to each other, I thought about how an analogue image emerges through the development process.

The vast number of publications produced by these Lesbian Lands—zines, pamphlets, magazines—demonstrate how photography became an important tool; making pictures became a way to reclaim and reinvent. Between 1979 and 1981, Newhouse was part of the Ovulars, a series of photographic workshops for women. (The word “ovulars” is a replacement for “seminars,” whose etymology relates to “spreading seed” or semen.) Over the course of three summers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, women met to take pictures, get inspired, and share ideas.

For her 2018 project My Birth, Carmen Winant extensively researched these intentional lesbian-separatist communities and became fascinated by the images that captured a radical movement toward lesbian self-determination. As she puts it, these photographs, created by and for women, reflect a world rooted in mutual recognition—women behind the camera, photographing one another, and building lives outside the structures of patriarchy. In this context, photography becomes both a survival strategy and a shared language—an archive of intimacy, pleasure, labor, and resistance.

I've often thought about what an Ovular workshop might look like today, particularly in terms of choosing one’s own representation and exploring the freedom that comes with it. And that is how their year-long dialogue began: during the first Zoom conversation, after receiving the green light from the Les Rencontres d'Arles team, Carmen, Carol, and I shared on screen this double exposure The Promise. Carol was sitting in her Bay Area living room, wrapped in the morning light from a window. Carmen was in her Ohio studio at noon, with some collages visible behind her. I was at a makeshift desk in my flat in Oslo at six in the evening. In a way, we were all on that beach—the images from that day becoming a fulcrum for Double—a dialogue between Carmen and Carol, an exploration of how to make work in this way.

An excerpt from Double Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant—published in conjunction with the exhibition Double at Les Rencontres d’Arles.

DOUBLE Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant

Double by Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant, 2025.

‘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 friendship and 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 ongoing lives. 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 embraces the element of unpredictability, where the layering of images lead to unforeseen narratives that challenge conventional photographic control. This technique used by Newhouse and her comrades to play with the singularness of pictures, or the claim of a solitary (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 invite us to consider how we reinvent ourselves and our histories—both individually and collectively—through the act of shared self-representation and interconnection. Their visual conversation gives shape to intergenerational relationships and feminist political legacies while bringing the experimental photographic practices of the past into the present.

The exhibition is part of Les Rencontres d'Arles, and can be seen until October 5.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND

Torbjørn Rødland, This is My Body, 2013-15. Courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Algus Greenspon

Afterimage by Ann-Christin Bertrand:

What always comes back to my mind are the images by Torbjørn Rødland. I worked with him many years ago when curating his show at C/O Berlin, but even now, those images still hold up. He’s referring to so many fields of visual culture that are relevant for us—whether it’s art history, religion, pop culture, or social media. So his images at first sight seem very familiar and make us immediately find numerous links to other visual worlds we know.

But then, this familiarity comes along with a certain weirdness—something slightly uncanny, unfamiliar, surreal—that evokes very mixed feelings. And that connects the intellectual perception with emotion. It’s exactly this connection that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, allowing his images to stay in our minds instead of just becoming part of the constant image flow surrounding us everywhere.

I recently invited Brooklyn-based artist Charlie Engman to give a lecture at BA Camera Arts, the study programme I am currently heading at Lucerne University.* He said that when he published his latest book, Cursed, people reacted very emotionally—either completely repelled or totally loving it. There seems to be a kind of link to Rødland, although Engman, in Cursed, works entirely with AI, while Rødland works with analogue photography and is much more focused on materiality and physicality. But this triggering of emotion, this uncanniness and surrealism—they both share that. For me, there’s something similar in how their work functions. They confront us with images that are at once familiar and strange, that make it impossible to rely on our usual categories of perception.

I like to compare it to walking—something very natural for us, just like the act of seeing. But then, once you stumble over something, your next steps become cautious. You think, “I have to be careful,” and you place your foot more deliberately. You become aware of something that usually happens automatically. And for me, Rødland’s images work the same way. They are images you stumble on, and suddenly you become aware of your own process of seeing—how you see, what you see, and how you move through the world. Afterwards, you’re more attentive to the imagery that surrounds you and the mechanisms behind it. At least, that’s the effect his images have on me.

His work This is My Body, which I selected for Afterimage, is already about ten years old, but it still works well for me. It brings together both layers: mind and intellect, gut and emotion, body and feeling. There’s something caring in the depicted gesture on one side, but it could also completely shift in a weird direction. There’s innocence, but at the same time an erotic touch—and also a religious one. Rødland manages to hold all of that at once. There’s something strange in the situation—the person being depicted oscillating between adult and child, between masculine and feminine—the gesture between care and, at the same time, enclosure or power.

And I think that’s what makes a good image for me today. In this omnipresent visual culture, I need something that involves me emotionally, something that isn’t easily readable or solvable, something even unsettling. The more the message or situation depicted stays unsolvable, ambiguous, the more it stays with you—because you’re chewing on it, you want to grasp it, and you just can’t.

*Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts / Design, Film and Art.

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.

THALIA STEFANIUK

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

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.