KAREN HELLMAN ON PAUL STRAND

Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1915

Afterimage by Karen Hellman:

I think of this photograph as the one that made it possible for me to discover photography. I saw it in a Paul Strand retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (I grew up outside San Francisco) in 1992. I was in high school and went to see the show with my mom.

I remember being in awe of how simple the structure of the photograph is: the contrast between the large, dark rectangles of the windows of the recently completed J.P. Morgan & Co. building and the small hat-and-coated people walking to work, their shadows stretching out behind them on the sidewalk. The angle of the pavement is slightly uphill for the morning commuters as they walk against the sun.

I had this recognition of how simple yet powerful a photograph can be. I had been very interested in photography before this and had been taking photography classes in middle school and high school for five or six years. There were also some lectures that went along with the show, Paul Strand in Context.

I know it’s a very iconic image, but I really did have this moment with it, and I think this set me off on the path I’m still on today.

I love how photography can be both a social document and an abstract, conceptual one in the same image. When studying the history of photography, I was always struck by its different strands – the social and the artistic.

I gravitate toward photographs that don’t take much to understand or to react to emotionally. There is the slab of light across the photograph, and the angle: the people are walking uphill, underneath these looming, regimented windows. Because it was a new bank building, opened in 1914, it represents the monolithic financial power of New York overshadowing the worker underneath.

It is also considered a film still, because Strand photographed the same shot for Manhatta. I love that discovery, that it is both a still and a moving image. It has so much to it, while at the same time being a beautiful photograph to look at. That is what I like about photography: it can be beautiful, but also socially aware and powerful.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.

ELLE PÉREZ ON TORBJØRN RØDLAND

Torbjørn Rødland in conversation with Elle Pérez
Delpire & Co, Paris · Thursday 12 November · 11am

To celebrate Paris Photo, Objektiv Press is returning to the brilliant Delpire & Co for another coffee and croissant event. This time, Torbjørn Rødland will be in conversation with Elle Pérez. Following a successful event in New York during NYABF, we are bringing this conversation to Paris. Dim Revelations by Rødland, the movement of our bodies by Pérez, and other titles will be available in the bookshop.

Coffee & Croissants – Delpire & Co
Delpire & Co, 13 Rue de l'Abbaye, Paris 6e
www.delpireandco.com
Photo of Dim Revelations by Elle Pérez.

HANS PETTER BLAD ON MRS. NEWTON

Image found at BookBot. From the 2004 book Mrs Newton by June Newton.

The image of Helmut Newton as a convalescent with an umbrella propped beside his bed remains unforgettable in the dark recesses of my hypochondriacal mind. This photograph is taken from the wonderful book Mrs Newton, which pays tribute to June Newton’s work as a photographer and is also a classic Bildungsroman written in the darkroom. The novel's central theme is her all-consuming love for Helmut Newton and, by extension, for all that is illuminated.

Unlike almost all other literary lovers, who are condemned to wander astray in purgatory, the Newtons find their way to a happiness beyond words. Leafing through the book, one might be tempted to quote Jorge Luis Borges: 'After all these years, I have noticed that beauty, like happiness, appears often. Not a day passes without our finding ourselves, for a moment, in paradise”.

Among the book’s many eloquent images, I have chosen a photograph of Helmut Newton shortly after a heart attack — or juste un souffle au cœur, as he himself dismissively called it — reclining with elegant nonchalance in his hospital bed. Even in the intensive care unit of Lenox Hill Hospital, the celestial is present in the eyes of the man looking through the viewfinder.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal. This Afterimage was first published in Objektiv #4.

NANCY WECHTER ON A PICTURE NOT TAKEN

Erik Kessels, The Last of the Lens, 2026. Installation view, Oslo Negativ, Nasjonalgalleriet. Image via Kessels’ Instagram.

Afterimage by Nancy Wechter:

Before I ever had a camera or made much use of one, I experienced the world as a big, insatiable pair of eyes. Taking in everything. I didn’t own a camera until after college, when I could buy myself an Olympus SLR. I bought it with a macro lens; I knew I wanted to get close to things. Seeing is done with more than one’s eyes.

Even though my current home environment is unquestionably rural, I am an urban photographer. Shaped from childhood by New York City, where I grew up and lived until not so long ago. Shooting humans in their environment, being active, quickly perceiving what was fleeting came without thinking. Without thinking is how I like to photograph (and write). Or rather, without thinking beforehand or without overthinking.

My current environment is beautiful. Green from abundant rainfall, resulting in grass-carpeted hills and fields. And then there are the cows. Just yesterday, I walked past the electric-fenced field where my neighbor confines young heifers and where there is an adolescent bull calf with whom I have fallen in love. He stands still while I talk to him, and I take his photo as he is such a willing subject. Am I turning my urban honed gaze onto something quieter? Less clogged with humans? I used to say (and it is still true) that I photograph to find out what I am seeing.

The most vivid story of a picture not taken (an ekphrastic image) that came to mind was the first time I met my rural neighbors. We had just closed on the house and spent our initial night there on a mattress on the floor of the bedroom. That morning, as soon as I woke, I started pulling red contact paper off the lower part of the kitchen walls. Took a break. Took a walk. It was late November, just after Thanksgiving, and there was a light coating of snow on the ground. We saw some activity on the farm next to us and thought it would be nice to go over and say hello and meet our neighbors. As we approached the barnyard, we spotted two men dressed in hunters’ red and black buffalo check jackets and hats. They wore these bright garments to prevent other hunters from mistaking them for deer. The men were one of our neighbor’s grown sons and his grandson.

As we descended into the barnyard, we were greeted by the grisly sight of a deer head, then a ribcage, and finally a bloody red heart lying on the snow. In spite of my distaste for hunting and fear of firearms, all I could think of at that moment was: “Where is my camera?” Of course I hadn’t thought to bring it and I wasn’t yet carrying a cell phone everywhere.

It is this image that remains. Indelible.

P.S. I eventually did get to take pictures of deer carcasses hanging from the beams in their barn during hunting season, like an animal crucifixion. I learned to see this as a local source of good, untainted, even organic meat. Like the smell of manure, it is something you get used to.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.

TOMINGA O’DONNELL ON YVES KLEIN

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photograph: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

This photograph is the visual equivalent of an earworm: a catchy tune that you can't get out of your head. Often an annoying one. The fact that this photo emerges when I close my eyes perturbs me. I wish my mind had decided to conjure up something more worthy or urgent. Something that captured the Zeitgeist or made an important political point. Not a manipulated photo of a white male artist seemingly launching himself into the void. The Met Museum in New York called it a seminal gesture. It is – in the sense that the etymology of seminal is semen, and this work bears all the hallmarks of male privilege as Klein made sure that the photograph was widely distributed in a four-page newspaper, Dimanche, that mimicked the Sunday paper Journal du Dimanche, with the headline: A man in space!

It is impossible to read the gesture separately from Klein's other well-publicised performative acts: ordering naked women around on canvases as "living brushes", dipped in his characteristic ultramarine International Klein Blue. I adore this colour, but even as I first encountered these works as a teenager at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo in 1997, something felt a bit off. It evoked the misogynist stereotype of using women as objects – tools for the great male artist to show off his genius. Nonetheless, the image of Klein launching himself seemingly into mid-air has stayed with me over the subsequent years, surviving in the private database of my mind, pushing itself to the forefront past worthier, more beautiful, richer, more colourful analogue photographs, not to mention vast swathes of digital, enhanced or AI-generated imagery. Why?

First some contextual information: Leap into the Void was staged in October 1960 on a street in the Parisian suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Klein was 32 years old at the time and would die just two years later. The artist had hired photographers Harry Shunk and János (Jean) Kender to take a series of pictures of him launching himself from the rooftop of a building onto a tarpaulin that his friends held up beneath. By printing two negatives of him falling and one of the street scene together (sans friends and tarpaulin), he was able to create an image that looked like he had launched himself into the void. He claimed this was a restaging of an actual leap from a second-storey building earlier that year. Klein's helpers were sworn to secrecy, and it was several years before images of how the process was staged emerged.*

In today's media landscape of image manipulation, deepfakes and swift, AI-generated pictures, the status of the photograph as a truthful witness has all but evaporated. In the aftermath of Klein's trick in 1960, however, the veracity of photography was relatively undisputed. That made the image all the more intriguing. The tongue-in-cheek references to space travel Klein made in his newspaper insert, along with an established history of "trickery" including showing "invisible paintings" at Galerie Colette Allendy and an empty display case in an empty space in the exhibition The Void at Galerie Iris Clert in 1958, all added to the intrigue. For the opening of the latter, Klein famously posted Republican Guards at the entrance to the gallery, which was painted IKB on the outside, and served blue cocktails to his many visitors (some 2000–3000), which resulted in their urine turning blue for several days. Like Leap into the Void, these works thematise absence but are ultimately about performance, which is why Klein holds such influence both within the histories of Conceptual Art and Performance Art.

Both the "leap" and the "void" had long interested Klein, the former from his experience of judo and falling techniques, and the latter as a form of dematerialised art practice. On 27 October, just over a week after the staging of Leap into the Void, the manifesto of the New Realists was signed in Klein's apartment. It was drafted by the critic and curator Pierre Restany and signed by several artists, including Arman, Raysse, Spoerri, Tinguely and Klein.* In Restany's obituary in Artforum in 2003, curator and proponent of relational aesthetics Nicolas Bourriaud wrote, "To Restany, art represented a 'cleansing of vision'—that is, not a set of more or less well-made objects but an optical device that allowed us to look at the new world surrounding us, whether that meant supermarkets or streets."* Klein's rather polished and crafted works are not immediately resonant with the other New Realists' emphasis on readymades and the manipulation or collaging of everyday objects, but his Leap into the Void instead fits into this notion of "the streets" that Bourriaud mentions.* Another famous image by Klein "from the streets" captures the dematerialised essence of the work and shows him throwing gold leaf into the Seine – having just received it as payment for one of his invisible paintings.

Leap into the Void can also be connected to the notion of a leap of faith. Klein had a complex form of spirituality, derived from different religious sources: his judo and long stays in Japan had familiarised him with Japanese Zen Buddhist traditions, whereas he was also a member of the Catholic confraternity The Order of the Archers of St. Sebastian, and the Rosicrucian Order, which was based on Christian mysticism. Combined with the widely publicised space exploration of the time, which challenged many people's conception of a "heaven above", and which Klein played with in his publication of Leap into the Void, this makes the philosophical backdrop of the work both metaphysical and highly topical.

My father was an art student in the early 1970s and stresses the impact of Klein's work, citing its novelty and originality. Ten years after his death in 1962, seemingly no other artist had done what Klein had done. My father describes his initial memories of Leap into the Void as "uplifting". I think this is the source of my inability to shake this doctored photograph from my mind's eye. The analogue doctoring of the image has long since been made redundant. Rather, it is about what it represents both performatively in the physical leap, which was captured by the cameras, and conceptually as the potential for human flight or levitation. It invites the imagination to soar like the artist in the photograph.

* According to Thomas McEvilley, the first time these images came into public view was in the exhibition Yves Klein (1928–1962): A Retrospective at the Institute for the Arts, Rice University, in February 1982. Thomas McEvilley, “Yves Klein: Messenger of the Age of Space”, Artforum, January 1982.

** Despite the movement initially being rather male-heavy, Restany spent his career championing a number of female artists, as this 2018 article by Hélène Gheysens notes: “Pierre Restany et les artistes femmes”, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2018.

*** Nicolas Bourriaud, “Pierre Restany”, Artforum, 2003.

**** In Norwegian exhibition history, New Realist artists can be seen in the exhibition Our World of Things – Objects, which Harald Szeemann co-curated at Henie Onstad Art Centre in 1970. This exhibition was one of my case studies for my PhD thesis, Space as Curatorial Practice: the exhibition as a spatial construct (AHO: Oslo School of Architecture and Design, 2016).

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.

FLORENCE BONNEFOUS ON THE ZAPATISTAS

Zapatista Painting. Signed and dated Bruno 04-2018. Gouache and ink on canvas. 40x30 cm. Photo by Florence Bonnefous.

There are so many images that remain, a jumble of loose images, one or another of which sometimes rises to the surface of our memory, until it flickers behind our eyelids.
They keep each other warm they sometimes connect to one another to form an impromptu, a sequence of images, a cinematic collage that comes back when some unexpected trigger calls them up.

No image truly stays. Its persistence is irregular, and its sudden emergence is propelled by the unconscious. Hot sources, healing sources smelling of sulphur, sure sources.

All images flicker.

The frightening ones are sometimes the least explicit, the most abstract, in 2D and in black and white.

A ball drawn in a thin black line moves along a horizontal line against a white background. It rolls quite slowly; it seems very far away. Gradually the perfect circle begins to break down, and the line thickens and warps. Little by little chaos sets in, the simple lines and shapes are destroyed, and blackness takes over, and with it, fear.

And then there are the reassuring, hopeful images that stay with us. We close the shutters, we close our eyes, and they keep watch.

A small Zapatista painting shows a globe floating in the air against a background that shades from blue to yellow, rising from the oceans to the sun. On the globe, North and South America are joined by a small portrait of Subcomandante Marcos smoking his pipe. A Zapatista woman stands proudly on the globe, surrounded by flowers and bees, holding up a bouquet. Every flower and every insect has a human face. Above her, clumsy lettering reads LA DIGNIDAD REBELDA NO TIENE FRONTERAS.

Here is an image that will always remain, an afterimage if the party lasts all day and all night, a cosmos factory, and the few words that describe it may form an ekphrasis of my personal shield.

En français:

Il y a plein d’images qui restent, un fatras d’images en vrac dont l’une ou l’autre remontent parfois à la surface de notre mémoire, jusqu’à nos paupières.
Elles se tiennent chaud elles se connectent parfois l’une à l’autre pour former un impromptu, une séquence d’images, un collage cinématographique qui revient quand un déclencheur inattendu les appelle.

Aucune image ne reste vraiment, elle a une rémanence irrégulière et son surgissement est propulsé par l’inconscient. Sources chaudes, sources guérisseuses à l’odeur de soufre, sources sûres.

Toutes les images vacillent.

Celles qui font peur sont les moins explicites parfois, les plus abstraites, en 2D et en noir et blanc.

Une boule dessinée par un fin trait noir avance sur une ligne horizontale, sur un fond blanc. Elle roule assez lentement, elle semble très lointaine. Peu à peu le cercle parfait s’abîme, la ligne s’épaissit et se déforme. Petit à petit le chaos s’installe, les lignes et les formes simples sont détruites et le noir s’installe, avec lui de la peur.

Et il y a ces images rassurantes et pleines d’espoir qui nous accompagnent. On ferme les volets, on ferme les yeux, elle veillent.

Une petite peinture zapatiste représente un globe qui flotte dans les airs, le fond est un dégradé de bleu au jaune, en remontant des océans au soleil. Sur le globe les continents américains nord et sud sont réunis par un petit portrait du sous-commandant Marcos qui fume la pipe. Sur le globe se tient fièrement une femme Zapatiste entourée de fleurs et d’abeilles et qui brandit un bouquet. Chaque fleur et chaque insecte a un visage humain. Au dessus d’elle une écriture maladroite dit LA DIGNIDAD REBELDA
NO TIENE FRONTERAS.

Voilà une image qui restera toujours, une afterimage si la party dure tout le jour et toute la nuit, une cosmos factory, et les quelques mots qui la décrivent forment peut être une ekphrasis de mon bouclier personnel .

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.

MATTHEW RANA ON ROBERT HEINECKEN

From Robert Heinecken's series Are You Rea (1964-68)

Afterimage by Matthew Rana:

Seduction belongs to artifice. It's a play of surfaces and transformation, disappearance and gestural veils. In other words, seduction is fleeting and mysterious, it takes what's visible and licks it with falsity. On a different register, pornography might be pure allegory: forced over-signification verging on the baroque. With its graphic disclosures, pornography points to an external logic, an invisible power that determines what can be seen. More simply put, it leaves nothing to the imagination. 

Unlike his more libidinally charged works that actually make use of pornographic imagery, Robert Heinecken's series Are You Rea (1964-68) seems to negotiate the tension between these two poles. In the 25 photograms, magazine pages featuring advertisements for products such as cosmetics, cigarettes, lingerie and spaghetti, are juxtaposed with images of police violence, protests and photo essays on reproductive rights. Layering image on top of image, recto and verso are flattened, so to speak, onto a single surface. The compositions are chancy and ironic; everything is inverted and continuity and scale are confused Often full of sex appeal, the images in Are You Rea also indicate a loss of coherence, a figuration that is ghostly and at times grotesque. But despite all their violence, fragmentation and internal dissonance, they seem less about critique or defamiliarization than they do correspondences. Because if archives create the illusion of totality by making gestures of equivalence between things archived (i.e., between an ordered multiplicity of things, indexed and gathered together to be read as a single entity), Heinecken's series is archival in that it suggests a deep and dark unity. 

I think this might be part of why his work still looks so fresh to me, especially the photograms. It's their insistence on materiality and distribution. What I find across the multiple surfaces, in the patterned utterances and the vulgar repetitions, is not the reality that's hidden behind appearances. Rather, it's the spatialization of circulatory and temporal relationships, of reading and discourse. If speech takes place at the intersection of material and social forces, then this is how the archive surfaces – a shifting assemblage of contradictory and inconclusive statements – iterative, synthetic, hardcore.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.This contribution is from Objektiv #9.