MORTEN ANDENÆS ON STEIN RØNNING

Stein Rønning, h-   H, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist and Galleri Riis, Oslo.

Afterimage by Morten Andenæs:

In a book on a table in a room in our house, there is a photograph of what appears to be a familiar space, reminiscent of a tabletop set against a wall. Two rectangles rise from—or rest on—a horizontal plane, as figures set apart from the background and occupying roughly one third of the frame. The rectangles are nearly identical in size and set almost side by side with a very slight, but significant gap to separate them. I say almost because one of the rectangles is placed slightly deeper into the space than the other, making it impossible to discern whether they, in fact, are different in size. They are significantly lighter than the horizontal and vertical planes surrounding them, while close in density to what I’d call the lip of the table at the very forefront of the space, or its lower one-tenth. The entire image is cast in a cool bluish tint.

Stein Rønning and I were born a generation apart. Which means we’ve grown up with different ways of describing and, perhaps, ultimately seeing the same thing. I recently met him at the lab we both use here in Oslo. I wanted to tell him about this photograph of his that had been on my mind ever since I came across it a few months back. Not having the picture present, I struggled with how to verbally distinguish this particular one from the vast corpus of photographic work he’s been making for as long as I can remember.

The description above was an attempt, later that same day, at describing the image in words, in a way that might make it clear to the artist himself what image I was referring to. And yet—this cool description fails to get at the reason it exists in my mind's eye as an afterimage.

An image is a different thing than a photograph. It’s a sense and a remnant, a fleeting reflection that disappears when you try to grasp it.

Stein Rønning's image lodged in my mind cannot be reduced to the description above, but is an intimation of a relationship between two nearly identical entities, set within a space I experience as familiar, and separated by a receding darkness.

Like parents seated around the kitchen table, the image, to me, conjures up scenes of both intimacy and distance. It evokes excruciating closeness and a chasm that is impossible to overcome. And yet there is calm, matter-of-factness. Two separate, but similar things existing together in the same space, facing the same direction.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.

Note: The author and the artist are represented by the same gallery.

ASPEN MAYS ON CARLETON WATKINS

Carleton E. Watkins [with cane, during aftermath of earthquake], April 18, 1906. Unknown photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Afterimage by Aspen Mays:

The image that I'm thinking about right now is a picture of the American photographer Carleton Watkins from 1906. He's being led away by two other people from his studio in San Francisco. At that point, he was an elderly man; in the photograph, he has a big beard and a hat and is holding a cane. There's a man on one side of him who feels like he's moving him forward. And there's a man just behind him. Watkins' shoulder is oriented slightly back—and the man behind him almost feels like he's pulling him back. The obscurity of the other two figures leaves space for you to fill in the story with your own ideas. There's this remarkable tension in the body language of those three people. Behind them, you can see smoke coming out of a building, and there's lots of rubble in the street. There is a sense of disaster, but you don't quite understand what's happening. The picture alone is pretty captivating because of that tension, who is this man? Is he being rushed forward or pulled back?

I teach in California, and as a photographer, Carleton Watkins has had a massive influence on how the American West was pictured. His images in particular were used to help justify and support the establishment of the National Park Service and protection of “wilderness” (in part by not depicting indigenous history and presence). He was also a photographer for hire. His clients included logging companies and mining companies. So he also depicted the extraction and depletion of the West. He has a complicated legacy and occupies a fascinating place in history.

Back to the image. The San Francisco earthquake had just happened, and the fire that followed was just starting in the city. Watkins’ studio was completely destroyed in the 1906 fire. All of his glass plate negatives–all those mammoth plates of the West–all of his correspondence, everything was lost. Just the week before, he had been planning to give his entire archive to Stanford University. He was already sort of destitute at this point in his life, but he had made the deal with Stanford. Then the earthquake happened, and then the fire happened.

When things in the world feel particularly destructive, it's one of those pictures that comes back into my mind. The moment when all is lost: does he know it too? When does he know it? Apparently he was also pretty much blind at this point in his life. Knowing that adds another layer. I didn't know that until years after I first saw the picture. Then thinking about the body language in the photograph changes again.

In better times, I still think about this picture, but it is different. I think more about the mystery of legacy. He remains a remarkably influential photographer, especially in shaping the imagination of the American landscape, as many prints of his work survived. Earlier in his career he had been prosperous and well known, but Watkins ended up dying in poverty in California. Despite how it ended, it wasn't the end of the life of the pictures. It also makes me think about the inherent incompleteness of any archive, what survives and what doesn’t, and the fragility of massive plate glass negatives in a place with huge earthquakes.

I love showing this picture to students because it really moves them. It is tragic to think about a life’s work and how close it was to being saved, just a week away. It touches a core feeling we all have about how precarious everything is, the balance, or imbalance, of the world and now more than ever, the environment that he documented.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.

CLÉMENT CHÉROUX ON ALIX CLÉO ROUBAUD

Alix Cléo Roubaud, (1952, Mexico – 1983, France) 15 minutes la nuit au rythme de la respiration, 2 / 15 Minutes at Night, to the Rhythm of Breathing, 2. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Afterimage by Clément Chéroux:

The image that keeps coming back to me, hauntingly, is this one by the Franco-Canadian writer and photographer, Alix Cléo Roubaud.

She is renowned for her journal, which was published posthumously by her husband, the poet and Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud. Roubaud is also the central figure in Jean Eustache’s remarkable film Les Photographies d’Alix.

I acquired this photograph for the Centre Pompidou’s collection several years ago with the help of Hélène Giannecchini, who was responsible for her archives at the time. Dating from 1980, the work is titled 15 Minutes at Night, to the Rhythm of Breathing.

It was taken at night in the south of France. Probably during a spell of insomnia, Alix lay down on the ground on a terrace and placed the camera on her chest in bulb mode. For fifteen minutes, she recorded what lay before the lens: a stand of cypress trees.

Knowing that she would die of a pulmonary embolism and respiratory failure two years later, the image takes on a particular gravity.

The trees are often found in cemeteries and have long been associated with death. One is reminded of Arnold Böcklin’s famous painting, 'Isle of the Dead'.

And there is the trembling, like a graphic trace of breath itself. The photograph calls to mind the pulsating waveform on the cover of Joy Division's album Unknown Pleasures.

For Walter Benjamin, breath is akin to aura: the movement of branches on a distant horizon, the singular appearance of something far away, however near it may seem.

Ultimately, this photograph is an image of breath itself.

En français:
Alix Cléo Roubaud

Une image qui me revient régulièrement à l'esprit, qui me hante, est celle de l'écrivaine et photographe franco-canadienne Alix Cléo Roubaud.
Alix Cléo Roubaud est connue pour son journal, publié après sa mort par son mari le poète et oulipien Jacques Roubaud. Elle est aussi le personnage central de l'extraordinaire film de Jean Eustache, Les Photographies d'Alix.

J'ai fait rentrer cette photographie dans les collections du Centre Pompidou il y a quelques années avec la complicité d'Hélène Giannecchini qui s'occupait à l'époque de ses archives.
Elle s'intitule 15 minutes la nuit au rythme de la respiration. Elle date de 1980.

Cette image a été prise la nuit dans le sud de la France.
Sans doute pendant une insomnie, Alix s'est étendu sur le sol, sur la terrasse. Elle a posé l'appareil sur sa poitrine en pose B. Et pendant 15 minutes elle a enregistré ce qui se trouvait face à l'appareil, devant l'objectif : des cyprès.

Lorsqu'on sait qu'ACR est décédée deux ans plus tard d'une embolie pulmonaire, c'est-à-dire d'une insuffisance respiratoire, cette image se trouve lestée d'un certain poids.

Il y ces arbres que l'on retrouve dans les cimetières et qui symbolisent la mort. On pense au célèbre tableau d'Arnold Böcklin : L'Ile des morts.

Et il y a ce tremblement qui est une transcription graphique de la respiration.

La photographie me fait penser à ce diagramme vibratoire sur la pochette du disque de Joy Division Unknown Pleasure.

Le souffle c'est l'aura selon Walter Benjamin : le mouvement dans les branches d'un arbre à l'horizon, unique apparition d'un lointain aussi proche soit-il.

Cette photographie c'est en somme l'image du souffle même.

GEM FLETCHER ON GENESIS BÁEZ

Genesis Báez, Constellation, 2024-2025.

So much of my energy, of late, has been focused on this sense of feeling between two [photographic] worlds. The former is organised by truth, fact and information - a society built upon the premise that image=evidence. The new image world has the ability to conjure realness untethered from reality, a place where a compelling image matters more than any indexical truth and where images have the potential to usher in new realities. 

I’m embarrassingly late to Genesis Báez's work, first encountering it in March 2025 after watching an episode of Session Press Photobook club from Dashwood Books, where she participated in an open and layered conversation with Justine Kurland [the two first met during a critique at Yale] about her debut monograph, Blue Sun / Sol Azul, created with Capricious. The book, which spans a decade of photographic work, offers a glimmering examination of matriarchal kinship and diaspora through studied images of the elemental and generational.

It was during that talk, watched via my iPhone on the train, that I saw Báez’s remarkable image Constellation. The image features the artist and her mother mapping the sky with string, framing the cosmos and together flattening the distance between earth and sky. Shot from below, the photograph has soft, cloud-like edges that create a corporeal sense of being physically pulled up into the image and beyond. 

“We are so accustomed to thinking of photographs as 'moments' that are 'captured,” Báez told me when I later spoke to her about the work. “But I am interested in the ways that photographs can be like water: unfixed, describing our permeability, and suggesting how we are all interconnected.” 

Constellation, and many of the images in Blue Sun / Sol azul caught me off guard. Still now, a year on, I’m haunted by that image and its sensorial possibilities.  Using photography in unexpected ways to adequately express the strange, emotional, and unmapable shape of our present is exactly what I’d been craving from the medium that too often sits in the literal and didactic. What is remarkable about Báez’s work is how she returns the joy of looking back to the viewer—something that often feels lost in the daily grind of relentless doomscrolling. 

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.

LUCAS BLALOCK

41. Of all the ideas I took from painting, the crucial one was probably that new attempts in painting are inevitably in conversation with the whole history of painting. Painting is a kind of collective project. A photograph is often more related to its subject than it is to other photographs, and I wanted to know if I could get them to lean the other way or at least stand upright on the fence.

My research as an artist is in novel readings of accumulated data, in refiguring some of what was left out. I’m looking at the world around me through the camera while simultaneously feeling a desire to put it in conversation with all this other material.

The philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, writes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about what he calls “normal science.” Normal science posits that in most moments the best scientist is the one who measures the most accurately. Kuhn believes science relies on the idea that most aberrant data is basically bad measuring. But every once in a long while, someone—the necessary scientist, a Newton or Einstein—looks at that aberrant data and sees a new pattern, and that new pattern replaces the old one. Both normal and necessary science have an analogue in making art.

A text from Lucas Blalock's Why Must the Mounted Messenger Be Mounted? to celebrate the book's release in Mandarin!

BRYSON RAND ON MANUEL ÀLVAREZ BRAVO AND PATRICE HELMAR

Afterimage by Bryson Rand:

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Retrato de lo Eterno (Woman Combing Her Hair), 1932-1933, printed 1977.

I've been torn between two images that have been stuck in my head, and I just can’t decide. The first one that came to mind was a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a portrait of a woman brushing her hair at the mirror. I was in Toronto over the summer, and there was a show on Latin American photography where this picture was included. It's an image I've known for as long as I've been making photos, about 30 years. Every time I see it in a book or elsewhere, I think it is incredible. About a month before, I made a picture while my husband and I were in Mexico with a similar diagonal light, and I realized this picture has always been in my head. Everything fell into place. I feel like this image is the root of my practice in a way: the way I think about light and shadow, gesture, and photography’s ability to transform a mundane moment into something transcendent. This picture has everything I love about photography: the description of her hair, the watery light behind her, the triangle of light on her face—it’s all just… perfect.

It was interesting to have that revelation. If you had asked me about my influences, I would have said Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, the list goes on. But I’m not sure that particular photograph would have been the first thing out of my mouth. Seeing it and making the connection with the picture I took in Mexico, I’ve just been returning to it again and again. I’ve even been showing it to my students too. I think they got tired of me last semester because I kept referencing it in lectures and critiques: "Back to Manuel Alvarez Bravo…" And they’d say, "You’re obsessed with this picture!" But I just can’t get it out of my head.

The other image is a photograph my friend Patrice Helmar made in 2020. They recently showed it, in summer 2024 at PARTICIPANT INC gallery. They created a series of self-portraits during the COVID lockdown after returning to Alaska. Stuck there for over a year, they started making portraits every day with a large-format camera. One picture shows Patrice in front of an old tanker, nude, with their dog Dolly, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix, sitting next to them. Patrice wears a balaclava, connecting to a character or persona they were exploring.

I saw the series and was struck by the generosity of it all, the vulnerability, but also the way it reflects what we all were going through. None of us knew what was happening; many of us were paralyzed with fear. I think Patrice just felt they had to make the work. There’s an almost crazed energy to the series, but this particular image feels grounded, embodied, present. I saw it in the show, a large print in the back of the gallery, and I just started crying. It was incredible.

This image reminds me of something I teach my students: take chances. If you have an idea, do it. Don’t overanalyze, pick up your camera and see what happens. That level of risk is where the generosity comes from. And that connects back to the Manuel Alvarez Bravo image. Both pictures speak to the generosity of photography: the willingness of someone to pose, or to put yourself in front of the camera. There’s a deep humanity in both images that floors me every time.

Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Tanker, 2020. Gelatin Silver Print, 60x48 in. 

I always ask myself, and my students, what part of your humanity are you putting into your work? All art is an expression of some aspect of humanity. It doesn’t have to be directly about your body or lived experience, but whatever your mind or imagination produces, it’s coming from you. That generosity is so important, especially today, when it feels increasingly rare.

These images stay in my mind because they offer a kind of respite. They provide moments for others to shift their attention, even briefly. As an artist, sometimes I feel like "The world is on fire, and I’m making my silly pictures." But seeing work like this reminds me it does matter.

I also look to artists from the past for guidance, particularly those responding to crises. So much of my practice is influenced by artists living through the AIDS crisis of the ’80s and ’90s. How did they stay politically and culturally engaged while also creating work that was beautiful or peaceful? That act of creation can be deeply healing. Patrice’s photo exemplifies that. Making the series, putting the show together, it seemed like an act of healing. The dog in their series, Dolly, adds another layer. People might call photos of pets "cheesy," but it’s beautiful, a true relationship captured. I have two dogs myself and would be lost without them. There’s also a generosity in showing that connection that resonates with me.

Photography can heal. It communicates in ways words sometimes cannot. That picture stopped me in my tracks; so much was being conveyed. I can’t fully articulate it, but I can deeply appreciate it.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.