Nina Strand 2/16/25 Nina Strand 2/16/25

AMANDA WASIELEWSKI

I’ve generated many different images, and there’s always something interesting that comes through. I think many commercial AI tools are refined repeatedly to become more and more standardized, so users get what they expect and no longer encounter strange, unexpected results. The commercial tools don’t want weird stuff. But in terms of an art practice, what’s most interesting to me are the weird things—the fragments, the mistakes, the artefacts of what's happening within the model to generate these images based on whatever associations the words in the prompt carry.

Afterimage by Amanda Wasielewski:

I’ve generated a lot of AI images for both my research and also my art practice, it is driven by curiosity and exploration. I created this image about a year and a half ago, and I keep coming back to it. The prompt was inspired by the famous line from The Songs of Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont: "…as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!" This line was crucial to the Surrealists because it spoke to the unexpected chance encounters of objects, and I wanted to see what an AI tool would generate from that.

What intrigued me was the unexpected appearance of a weird object on the left side of the image. The sewing machine and umbrella are represented here, though not quite as I envisioned, but then there’s this other object. It is the most uncanny part of the image. It looks like some kind of medical equipment stool covered in periwinkle, shiny fabric, something you’d expect a surgeon to wear in an operating room, but it has a metal pan on top. I kept coming back to this odd object, wondering what it means, why it’s there, and how it was conjured. It feels like fragments of associations, visualized through the AI model based on the prompt. For instance, I wanted an operating table or surgical table, but what I got was something closer to a sewing table. Still, the surgical part comes through with this strange figure that seems to have wandered in from the side.

I was thinking about what kinds of pixel fragments or textures the model associates with specific words. It’s a mistake, but it’s also evocative in this weird, uncanny way. The more you look at it, the less you understand. I could point out other absurdities in the image, like the umbrella being both a rain umbrella and an outdoor patio umbrella, or the lamp hanging from nothing. These are weird, but not inexplicable like this stool which feels more unknowable.

There’s something about how we want to trust and believe in images, no matter the medium. We’ve had years of easy image alteration—from Photoshop to social media filters—and yet, we still want to believe in what we see. I look at these images, and it’s so obvious, how could anyone possibly believe in them. But I think we still want images to communicate truthfully, and that’s something I find interesting. Over time, those images will become less creepy, and I think that will cover up or beautify the weirdness. But right now, we’re in this moment in image culture where we can still see the oddities before they’re smoothed over.

Wasielewski is Associate Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities and Associate Professor (Docent) of Art History in the Department of ALM (Archives, Libraries, Museums) at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on the use of artificial intelligence tools to study and create art and images.

Nina Strand 2/10/25 Nina Strand 2/10/25

ED THOMPSON

It’s not so much an image in my mind, but something I’ve seen all my life—an optical phenomenon. I often wonder, psychologically, when I first became aware that I was seeing something no one else did—and how that shaped my understanding of reality. After all, seeing is believing, right?

Afterimage by Ed Thompson:

It was probably around 1984, lying in my parents’ bed in Wales—though I’m not sure why. Maybe they put me there to help me sleep. I remember shouting downstairs because I couldn’t sleep due to the lights, and they came in, but when they did, the lights were off, and they didn’t understand what was going on. If I focus now, I can still see those lights, like they’re in the palm of my hand or on your head—like an LED laser sight.

Years later, I was diagnosed with an optical anomaly: a cluster of lights at the center of my vision, like the static on an old TV set but in bright colors. I’ve learned to ignore it, but I can still choose to see it whenever I want. It’s small, but it flickers in every color of the rainbow—constantly shifting, never still. I don’t know when my brain learned to ignore it, but there must have been a time when I couldn’t shut it off, and it was always there. I can’t say how that affected my visual perception or what I believed I was seeing. I have no memory of when I realized no one else saw it, but I know it’s always been there. People may not see what I see. I’ve come to realize I’m literally hallucinating all the time, and the opticians just call it an anomaly.

I’ve had students with similar experiences. One, Sarah, had vision problems that caused her to see things differently. She created a photography project to show how she saw the world when she wasn’t looking directly at things.

As a photographer, I’m acutely aware of how subjective photography is. That’s why I love documentary photography. It’s beyond my imagination. If you're limited to your own imagination as a photographer, you’re just illustrating ideas. But when I pick up my camera, I feel like a conduit—capturing the weirdness around me. I never know what will happen. A lot of the time, I wonder: When you’re on the edge of something, are you actually onto something? Artists like William Blake and other visionary figures believed their visions were real, I feel the same way about my work.

Nina Strand 2/3/25 Nina Strand 2/3/25

SEMANA

It is a widely circulated magazine in Colombia, much like Der Spiegel in Germany. The image is from 1985, and I kept the cover, though I’m not sure why. I was eight years old when I first saw it. The picture shows a building in flames, with the title reading 28 Hours of Terror. The building is the House of Justice, home to Colombia’s Supreme Court, burning to the ground. For me, this event is particularly significant for two reasons: first, because my father was a lawyer, and second, because the impact of what happened changed Colombia forever.

Afterimage by Jorge Sanguino:

Semana is a widely circulated magazine in Colombia, much like Der Spiegel in Germany. The image is from 1985, and I kept the cover, though I’m not sure why. I was eight years old when I first saw it. The picture shows a building in flames, with the title reading 28 Hours of Terror. The building is the House of Justice, home to Colombia’s Supreme Court, burning to the ground. For me, this event is particularly significant for two reasons: first, because my father was a lawyer, and second, because the impact of what happened changed Colombia forever.

In Colombia, any major legal case had to be handled in the capital. All significant cases ended up in this court, the Supreme Court, located in the heart of Bogotá. In front of the building stood the parliament on one side, the cathedral on another, and the mayor’s office on the third. This is the main square of Bogotá, and by extension, the central plaza for the entire country.

During the siege of the building by the M-19 guerrilla group, the army responded by retaking the building with fire and bullets. An investigation into the events is still ongoing, though it may never be fully resolved. During the retaking of the palace, the military entered the building and forcibly removed many people—allegedly labeling them as communists—who later disappeared. The families of the employees who were inside that day still have not found their loved ones. The full story remains untold.

Alfonso Reyes Echandía, a magistrate of the Supreme Court and a friend of my father, addressed the president, asking the military and the government to cease fire in order to start a dialogue. The president never responded to this call. Instead, the military indiscriminately bombed the palace, with people trapped inside.

I remember this as one of the first times I saw my father cry. His generation was very socially engaged when they studied, fighting for social justice. It must have been hard for him to lose so many friends with a similar mindset. In Colombia, it’s difficult to change the country; it’s tough even for politicians. But at least there’s the judicial system, the third power, with the Supreme Court, where you can propose decisions to protect the people and the environment. Around the time this image was taken, Colombia was one of the first countries to propose a complex system for environmental protection. But that generation was lost in the terror, and I think that’s why I kept this magazine.

We may never know all the details of what happened, as I’ve described in the image, but it remains a powerful and haunting portrayal of terror.

Growing up in a country marked by so much violence—a violence often told through stories, rather than images, because there were so few—it’s been hard for those who work with memory and reconciliation. 1985 was the moment when that generation lost confidence that they could rebuild the country. After that, everything in Colombia just got worse.

Nina Strand 1/27/25 Nina Strand 1/27/25

OLI SCARFF

I’ve always been drawn to images taken in or under water, and to stories related to water. When I was growing up, my favorite book was The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. The idea of submersion and drowning has always fascinated me. Drowning is such a strange word because it’s often used in a very pragmatic, negative sense, referring to literal drowning or death. But we also use it metaphorically, to convey a depth of feeling—like ‘drowning in ideas,’ ‘drowning in emotions,’ or even ‘drowning in money.’ There’s a complexity to this idea that I think is reflected in the image. It almost looks choreographed, and it reminds me of some of my favorite photographic series, such as Larry Sultan’s Swimmers, which I study frequently—those underwater shots taken in public pools.

Afterimage by Lou Stoppard:

This image was taken in the summer of 2022 during the World Aquatics Championships in Budapest. The U.S. swimmer Anita Alvarez fainted or lost consciousness while performing. The photograph was taken by Oli Scarff, a press photographer present at the event. What I find so beautiful about the image is, first, its dream-like quality. The softness of her limbs in the water conveys fragility. The two bodies entwined looks almost like a scene from a Renaissance painting. But there's also something else—a real sense of tenderness and transcendence.

I’ve always been drawn to images taken in or under water, and to stories related to water. When I was growing up, my favorite book was The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. The idea of submersion and drowning has always fascinated me. Drowning is such a strange word because it’s often used in a very pragmatic, negative sense, referring to literal drowning or death. But we also use it metaphorically, to convey a depth of feeling—like ‘drowning in ideas,’ ‘drowning in emotions,’ or even ‘drowning in money.’ There’s a complexity to this idea that I think is reflected in the image. It almost looks choreographed, and it reminds me of some of my favorite photographic series, such as Larry Sultan’s Swimmers, which I study frequently—those underwater shots taken in public pools.

I think my fascination with the image is to with the combination of delicateness, elegance, and drama. It’s full of contradictions in that it depicts a very fraught event, but reads as a very still, slow moment. There’s a lingering sensation about it that I find incredibly beautiful.

As a child, I loved swimming. I was a competitive swimmer and spent a lot of time underwater. There’s a sense of suspended feeling when you’re submerged, like a suspension of sound. I’ve never been able to meditate—I'm too much of an overthinker —but for me, swimming, that hum you get in your ears when you’re submerged, offers a kind of meditation. It’s the feeling that you can disappear. I would spend hours in the pool as a child, diving as low as I could, letting my body float. I think the sensation of floating and being held by water—it’s such an unusual sensation, isn’t it? Obviously, she’s literally unconscious in this moment, but I remember play-acting at something similar as a child—diving under the water and letting myself be still, without intention, allowing my limbs to flail, almost playing-dead. There’s a way of letting go and floating in the water that’s deeply freeing. So I think I also really feel the sensation of the image, which is a strange power it has. I can almost feel the bodily aspect of it. Since I first saw it while reading the news, it has become an image I think about constantly and return to often—not just for its beauty, but for the feelings it evokes.

What’s also fascinating is that, when you think of the language of competitive sports photography—the context in which this image originated—you don’t typically think of poetic imagery. Sports photography is often very visually arresting, striking imagery. But I think maybe the poetry and stillness in this image was actually quite striking for many. There’s something about it that feels almost like a scene from a Disney movie or a love film as it evokes the idea of being saved, which is one of the most romantic concepts there is.

Nina Strand 1/20/25 Nina Strand 1/20/25

RUTH ORKIN

I find a seat on the terrace of a small café in the garden and take my notebook and pencil out of my bag. The photograph The American in Italy is on my mind. While many have described the image as a symbol of sexual harassment, the woman depicted told a journalist that it represented female empowerment. She owns the situation, she claimed. Still, for many, the photo serves as a stark example of how risky it can be for a woman out in the world.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

Ruth Orkin, *American Girl in Italy, Florence,* 1951.

I find a seat on the terrace of a small café in the garden and take my notebook and pencil out of my bag. The photograph American girl in Italy is on my mind. While many have described the image as a symbol of sexual harassment, the woman depicted told a journalist that it represented female empowerment. She owns the situation, she claimed. Still, for many, the photo serves as a stark example of how risky it can be for a woman out in the world.

I remember arguing about this image on a date. I tried to explain how merely walking down a street could be a challenge for women. My date claimed the woman in the photograph had said it was wonderful, that she was young, carefree, and the world was her oyster. He laughed when I said that maybe she just didn’t want to go into the complexities of the situation with the journalist. That perhaps she was tired of discussing street harassment or being the example of it in this picture. I became angry, asking him how he could argue with me as a member of the opposite sex. The evening did not go well.

On the table next to me sits a couple who are either on their first or last date. He has put on enough aftershave to last him through the day, if not the week. There's a certain nervous energy in the air between them that makes me curious, but I shouldn't be eavesdropping on their conversation. I should be working. I really want to create a project that will change the way women of my age are represented in our society, but when the waiter finally comes to take my lunch order, all I've done is draw a circle and write the words New Narratives in it.

Nina Strand 1/13/25 Nina Strand 1/13/25

FRANZISKA KUNZE

Many younger students today take photography for granted. They think that what they see is simply what they get. They don’t realize that, even in the 19th century, photography—no matter the subject, even war photography—was usually staged. I think it’s essential to teach children how photographs are made, of course in the analog sense but also within the digital spheres which seems even more pressing currently. Kids have smartphones everywhere; they use images, see images, create images and distribute images within seconds. But often, they don’t fully grasp what it really means to make an image. How is it made? What is the background of the picture? What is happening there? And who is involved? I think this is important—and this picture reminds me of that.

Afterimage by Franziska Kunze:

This picture hangs framed in my living room; I’ve had it for almost 20 years. It has always been close to me, but I’ve never really taken the time to think about why. So, when I was asked about an afterimage, I thought: What image resonates with me? There are many, but often they stay with me for maybe a few minutes, a day, or a couple of days—if it’s a particularly urgent image. But this one has been constantly by my side for many many years and I always come back to it.

I don’t know who took this picture because I found it during an internship at the Hamburger Kunsthalle on my semester break in 2006. At that time, I was studying for my bachelor’s degree in communication studies and art history and I was curious how the work in an education department in a museum looks like. There were a lot of summer courses going on, including a photogram course, which took place in the room next to mine. I was curious, so after the course finished, I went in and saw all these beautiful photograms created by very young children—some of them even preschoolers. The variety was astonishing, but there was one picture that had been discarded in the trash. I took it out and immediately fell in love with it. I loved the shapes and forms and the dynamic of the arrangement. I asked my colleague if she remembered why it had been thrown away, and she recalled that the child wasn’t happy with how the shapes had shifted on the surface. So, that dynamic that I felt so strongly about, initially wasn’t meant to be and, obviously, wasn’t worth keeping. I see this with other children in my personal life too—how they can be very hard on themselves, especially when it comes to art.

I rescued the image from the bin because I thought it was cute, and I still think it’s beautiful both in its simplicity and complexity. I also appreciated that this child had obviously approached the format differently—by cropping it and freeing it from its strict rectangular appearance. That shift in form, I think, adds a lot to the dynamic of the piece. For me, this image serves as an important reminder of many things. For one, I believe it’s crucial to educate children about photography at an early age, especially now. When I was working on my PhD thesis, I was fortunate to spend some months at The Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University with Elizabeth Edwards and even more intensely with Kelley Wilder, who taught photography to history students.

There’s a famous quote by Ansel Adams that says: ‘You don’t take a photograph, you make it.’ This quote resonates with me deeply. It’s something I always tell students or visitors in general when I guide them through the collection: You have to be aware that photography is not just a click—and then you’re done. It’s crafted. And there are so many decisions involved: What technique and material do you use? What camera do you choose? Do you even use a camera at all? In the case of this image, the young creator made a number of subjective decisions that shaped the final result. In the end, and perhaps this is the most important takeaway from this picture, it reminds me to be playful and to stay curious.

Nina Strand 1/6/25 Nina Strand 1/6/25

EMILE RUBINO

Today, photography continues to occupy an ambiguous position between art and non-art. But I would argue that this indeterminate position is actually one of photography’s greatest strengths because it holds a subversive political and artistic potential. As an outward-looking medium, photography is also inevitably derivative as it always seeks to mimic, copy or emulate aspects of other mediums such as painting—just as much as it mimics and copies ‘the real.’ For better or worse, photography’s equivocal position as art (but also its inferiority complex) is still the engine that keeps the medium moving: both forward and backward… So illustration (or illustrating illustration so to speak) struck me as a relatively unassuming way to think about much bigger questions pertaining to the contentious history of photography’s political potential.

EMILE RUBINO in conversation with Lucas Blalock.

Lucas Blalock: Your show of recent photographs at LambdaLamdaLambda was called Illustration. This strikes me as a funny quality of photography to foreground in an exhibition, an idea reiterated in the exhibition text written by Aaron Peck. Can you talk a little about where this is coming from?

Emile Rubino: Photography is always tasked with illustrating. It was very productive for me to recognize that it’s actually rather bad at it. To some extent, a photograph is always ambiguous and even when photography attempts to forgo its inevitable ambiguities, it often ends up creating new ones that are potentially even more confounding. I find this shortcoming of photography to be fascinating because depending on how you handle it, you can make a picture do very different things through minor gestures. So I began to use the notion of illustration as a lens or a prism through which I could consider photography. For instance, I started noticing different kinds of pictures where objects were stacked on top of one another or placed side by side in the most literal way, like simple mathematical equations (i.e Euro bills + heater = energy precarity, or again, white eggs + brown egg = discrimination)… Photography has a long and strange history related to equations as a way to make sense of things that can't be rationalized. To explain the modernist concept of Equivalency, a photographer like Minor White also used an equation, which went like: ‘Photograph + Person Looking ↔ Mental Image.’

Illustration came as a way of giving myself license to overthink these seemingly simple equations by foregrounding photography’s brilliant dumbness. But I also came to focus my attention on illustration by thinking about the way in which it perfectly encapsulates photography’s forever ambiguous position between art and non-art. Both photography and illustration can be considered to be petit métiers, and their histories are materially intertwined. On a commercial level photography posed a threat to illustrators (more than painters) in the 19th century, which is partly why many of the first commercial photography studios were opened by illustrators and caricaturists like Nadar.

I’ve always been fascinated by the work of the great illustrator and caricaturist Honoré Daumier who was very much in the back of my mind in the making of this exhibition; especially his famous caricature of Nadar in his air balloon with the witty caption: ‘Nadar elevating photography to the heights of art.’ In the realm of art, to say that something is ‘merely illustrative’ is a commonly accepted form of criticism; it is as common as saying that a work is ‘derivative.’ So here I am embracing and celebrating both the illustrative and also the derivative nature of photography. But other artists do that too in very different ways. I recently learned that Torbjørn Rødland used to be an editorial cartoonist, which makes so much sense. His best pictures work like cartoonish jokes and illustrations pushed to an extreme.

Emile Rubino, *Samozveri*, 2024. Photo credit: Useful Art Services. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

To ground this discussion a little more, I would say that the starting point in the studio was Alexander Rodchenko’s series of photo-illustrations called Samozveri (Auto-Animals), which were made for a Soviet children’s book. This series captured my imagination, and I enjoyed the silliness of the discrepancy between the revolutionary intention of making ‘photo-illustrations’ as a new, radical and avant-garde way of picture-making, while doing so by staging still lifes with cute paper cut-out figurines. My version of this is just a bit more anxiety provoking than Rodenchko’s, because I’m not very good at cutting out smiley faces properly, and because the world is a dark place these days.

LB: The Rodchenko remake is just one of several nods to moments in progressive or revolutionary pedagogy. When looking at this group together it feels like I’m being invited into a visual literacy seminar with footnotes.

ER: It’s funny you say that because at some point in the making of this show I did actually start to think about it as if I was writing an essay by other means. On paper that doesn’t sound like a great way to make art, but somehow it felt OK here. This quasi-literary approach to making the work made sense with the idea of illustration. But maybe I’m just spending too much time writing art criticism on the side and it’s starting to affect my work.

I hope I’m not starting to make bad didactic art. But then again, the work in this exhibition purposefully plays with didacticism, so it felt like a relevant thing to channel and play with. I let my pomposity run free on this one and it felt good… I trust that viewers understand that the ‘footnotes’ are just one of many ways to engage with the work. The pictures themselves are quite direct and accessible I think.

LB: Yes, I definitely think this is true.

ER: Although I deliberately make work in a very eclectic way, I’ve noticed that I often hit the same note over and over again. For a picture to work, it needs to inhabit a certain level of productive ambiguity—a sweet spot where it seems to be doing one thing while also doing another thing at the same time. I try to make pictures that work on the viewer but also invite them to put some work in. These different moments in viewing / different levels of engagement are very important because I want to make pictures that function in a compound manner.

The references/footnotes (the works, texts and images used as starting points) are really just tools for thinking in the studio. I need these tools to make the work and I’m happy to talk about these tools but they’re not there to justify what I’m doing. Instead, I think with, through and against these things; they allow me to have a dialogue all by myself—and I either abstract, combine or put pressure on them.

LB: But when we discover these textual underpinnings they do lead us to think about their sources—here maybe pedagogy or visual literacy, or education?

ER: Education and pedagogy is definitely one of the main themes of this exhibition. For the past two years I’ve been teaching a ‘photographic research’ course in the MFA in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and this exhibition is very much a reflection on my new role as a young teacher who is trying to figure it out. From this position I find myself reflecting upon my time as a student in new ways. There are so many concerns and anxieties I had as a student that I could not process at the time, and now that I’m teaching I’m beginning to understand some of these things through my students' own concerns and anxieties. It's a confronting process.

This is not the first time I’ve used my day job as a starting point. My previous solo show at KIOSK/rhizome focused on my former job as an art worker in a gallery so it felt natural to have this exhibition speak to my current job as a teacher. In fact, two of the seven pictures in this exhibition are photographs of my students. I invited them to my studio and asked them to bring whatever texts we’d been reading in class and the pens, notebooks and coffee cups they’d usually have in the classroom. We staged something that I’d noticed is a very common occurrence during seminars: that moment when someone is trying to explain something complicated about the text we’re reading and does so by using the mundane objects at hand in front of them in order to ground their argument and make their thought less abstract. The result tends to be precarious and transient sculptural arrangements of water bottles, coffee cups, books and pens. This stacking of objects intended to create or convey meaning is quite similar to what I’ve noticed in many illustrative pictures, especially in stock images. Staging this trivial occurrence when someone is trying to illustrate/illuminate others on a particular idea was interesting to me because the results are simultaneously too generic and too specific.

The two texts seen as photocopies in these photographs of the students are Craig Owens’ The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (1983) and Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer (1934). Two texts that happen to question the role of the artist in society. In the photograph of the student with Craig Owens’ text, you can see a reproduction of Martha Rosler’s famous piece The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974/75), which critically deconstructs the documentary image through its relationship to text. Funnily enough, I only realized after making the picture that Florine (the student) was holding up a coffee cup and a pen in a way that mimics the idea of image vs text.

Emile Rubino, *Made to Scale,* 2024. Photo credit: Useful Art Services. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

The nerdy footnote here is that, in The Author as Producer, Walter Benjamin criticizes New Objectivity photographers. Notably Albert Renger-Patzsch for the way his work makes: ‘misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection.’ For Benjamin, the presence of text in the form of a caption is necessary in order for photography to be political and to say more than ‘the world is beautiful.’ He writes: ‘What we should demand from photography is the capacity of giving a print a caption which would tear it away from fashionable cliches and give it a revolutionary use value.’ The thing is that photography inevitably trades in fashionable clichés.

There is another picture in the exhibition—titled Made to Scale—which directly emulates staged photographs by Allan Sekula (someone who was very attached to captions) that he made for his 1978-82 photo essay called School is a factory. Sekula photographed someone holding a plastic schoolhouse over a funnel filled with plastic figurines in front of the corporate landscapes near the school where he taught at the time in Southern California: he was denouncing the way in which students, regardless of what he taught them about art, would be funneled into these new corporations and become technicians... I sourced the same plastic schoolhouse online and made a very pop/toys’r’us version of this staged situation, focusing more on the gesture alone. This picture is probably the most obvious example of the way I was trying to mess around with this dichotomy between smart/critical vs not smart/not critical photography. In my experience, photography is rarely either just smart or just dumb, it’s most often smart and dumb at the same time, and that’s really the beauty of it.

LB: I hear that. I’ve been listening to Mark Fisher’s last lectures recorded at Goldsmiths just before he passed, and in one of them he talks about Lukács and his theory of reification. Reification, as I understand it, is where an ideology effectively imbeds itself so deeply that it takes on the quality of reality itself. He sees the power in undermining the naturalization of such an ideology and uncovering / describing the forces that make it work even though this new wrinkle is eventually integrated into the whole. Lukács is talking about capitalism but as Fisher was talking I kept thinking about photography. Coming home to your response made me smile. I feel that these tensions you’re interested in are related to Lukács’—where you’re employing the aesthetic of free signifying stock images to get at, or picture, the historical conditions that have brought us to this kind of generic, open-ended, repurposable signification. In a way, they’re kind of trashy, or they traffic in trashy, (which I say excitedly) and yet in another way, they function pedagogically as a kind of primer.

ER: One of Fisher’s students calls it ‘thing-ifaction,’ which I quite like. Fisher explains it in a nice way when he says that reification is the process by which ideology transforms what was not fixed (what was always in the process of becoming) into something that is seemingly permanent and therefore something that looks as if it cannot be changed. The work then is to raise consciousness so that the possibility of change becomes visible again. I guess that’s essentially what overtly political art aims to do, but I’m actually more interested in the political impotence of art, which is centered here. For this show, I was busy thinking through different historical instances of didactic and political art/photography that I admire and/or want to question: The German mid-twentieth-century artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger was concerned with making communist/feminist art that would communicate efficiently; Rodchenko and his productivist photography; Allan Sekula and his didactic documentary approach; and the apolitical or conservative ‘social aesthetic’ of stock images. It’s very liberating to take the political impotence of art (and the flat-footed aspects of photography) as a starting point for the work. I don’t mean that in a cynical or a pessimistic way. It’s more like acknowledging your own shortcomings so you don’t have to apologize for them.

LB: I get that feeling—leaning into the anti-heroic without discarding the commitment to the need for real change.

ER: Exactly. And photography has a particularly insidious relationship with ideology. There’s something about the material ‘thinness’ of photography which actually makes it the perfect container for ideology. It’s in there yet it’s so thin that you don’t really see it. It works on you without you noticing that it’s working. It seems to me that under late capitalism, the kind of photography that serves capital and the kind of photography that attempts to operate a critique of capital have more in common than it might seem at first. One has to subvert or play with the codes of the other but in the end it’s more of a feedback loop. Both are just trying to communicate and neither is able to give the viewer much agency.

So forefronting trashiness is key. I would even say that photography is the quintessential trashy medium in that it is always cheaply imitative of something else (often something better), whether that thing is reality itself or another existing picture. As I was saying earlier, photography is derivative in nature. I’ve sort of doubled down on that aspect of photography because I imitate imitations and by doing so I create something else. But my pictures don’t necessarily make something invisible become visible. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think about it as a kind of conceptual bootlegging practice. Except that usually when you make a bootleg of something, it’s because the original thing has very specific or idiosyncratic features. But here, as you pointed out, these are more like primers, what defines them is a kind of blankness. I like the absurdity of making a bootleg of something that is generic to begin with. What defines a bootleg is that it is not a ‘fake,’ it has no intention of appearing to be the real thing. This is a really interesting relationship to the real. In a very simple way, it shows that reality can be re-imagined.

For a photograph to achieve a kind of artistic autonomy, it needs to be alienated from other potential functions so that autonomy becomes its predominant quality. What I was looking for in these pictures was a way for them to sit awkwardly between suggesting function and suggesting autonomy. I think that’s a way for pictures to appear in a perpetual process of becoming.

LB: I know we’re kind of going in circles here but I want to ask one last question about the character of the appropriation of other artists’ work in your show aside from this idea of bootleg-style. I’m particularly curious about the way that open quotation brings these other historical moments into the room together. It's a little like a dinner party, but maybe more like some sort of ventriloquism or puppet show. We’ve heard how you think about the medium but I’m also curious how you feel about the legacies of these characters who were so invested in radical change?

Emile Rubino, *Poverty Remix (After Lex-Nerlinger)*, 2024. Photo credit: Useful Art Services. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

ER: I thought it would be interesting to compare—or at least bring into proximity—this moment of photography (1920s/1930s) with the 1970s, another important moment for photography’s political claim, and then draw all of this closer to the present through references to stock imagery. In some cases, such as the work titled Poverty Remix (After Lex Nerlinger), which riffs on the photograms of Lex Nerlinger, it’s more of an homage. Lex Nerlinger is not very well known, despite the amazing work she produced and the courageous and complicated life she led. She was briefly imprisoned and much of her work was destroyed; she was a very committed communist and feminist artist advocating for reproductive rights and changed her name to Lex Nerlinger later in life to make it less gendered.

I first saw her cartoonish photograms representing workers and class inequalities in a major exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris devoted to Germany in the 1920s. I had never seen her work before and these photograms made with stencils cut from some sort of tissue paper really caught my attention. They’re naive but also beautiful and somehow felt really fresh to me. In her photogram called Arm und Reich (1930) she placed the bourgeoisie on one side, with each vignette representing a different kind of luxury lifestyle or leisure activity. And on the left, she placed the poor and working class, copying each vignette three times, so that for every bourgeois there are three times as many working class and poor people.

One of the vignettes representing the poor uses the figure of an amputee with crutches which is the one I decided to emulate by simply cutting out pieces of paper which I scanned on my flatbed scanner and reworked in Photoshop to look like a photogram. The final print is a laser-exposed silver gelatin print so it’s kind of a faux old photogram: if you look closely you can easily see the traces of coarse digital manipulation. So it really is just an homage/digital remix. The title, Poverty Remix, I borrowed from a poem by Anne Carson where she talks about the ancient Greek poet Hipponax, who was known for being physically deformed and for writing verses about poverty using coarse language. Hipponax is also known for pioneering a form of meter in poetry called the limping iambs, which brings the reader on the wrong ‘foot’ so to speak by reversing the stresses towards the end of a verse. Again, I thought it was interesting to bring these two things in proximity, at least for myself, since it shows how the figure of the limping man is a consistent way of illustrating poverty throughout the ages. I was at the Getty this summer and I saw this painting by Manet called La Rue Mosnier aux drapeaux (1878), which is the typical street view with French flags on a national holiday (many painters did that), but Manet included a man walking with crutches at the side of the street as a way of drawing attention to inequities and criticize patriotic sentiments.

But there was also this thing I found to be interestingly similar to Rodchenko’s cut-out figurines, whereby both he and Lex Nerlinger wanted to make radical/political art, and both of them resorted to little paper cutout figurines. There is something cute or slightly inadequate about it in both cases, which really fascinates me since, in my work, I'm curious to see what happens when a picture embodies its own contradictions.

Bringing these different artists together in order to make my work is very similar to hosting a dinner party for sure. You never really know what kind of discussion your guests are going to have when you invite people over. But still, I’ve made it convenient for myself because none of them are here to contradict me now, so I can indeed become a ventriloquist; I can organize the dinner but in the end they’re having a discussion that I’ve spent time scripting for them. For me, the best way to honor the artistic legacies of these artists is to question them and to keep their inquiries alive.

Nina Strand 12/18/24 Nina Strand 12/18/24

SOPHIE THUN

Afterimage by Nela Eggenberger:

We are overloaded with images—especially as editors—seeing hundreds, if not thousands of pictures every week. Accepting the invitation to slow down in this endless stream of photographs the question is: which ones really stay in our minds?

This specific self-portrait by Sophie Thun has been haunting me for a while, in a positive manner. It’s documented in the artist’s gallery in Vienna, and is multilayered in many ways. Above all, it’s clearly constructed: What we’re looking at is an installation, consisting of six different photographic prints. The prints depict two photograms of the artist’s own body, shown as white shapes fixed on the light-sensitive surfaces themselves. In doing so the artist creates an aura (see center) while these figures are also referencing the layers of (production) time. The fact that the artist is presenting a print of her own image further multiplies of her own body (and layers of image-making).

The work captures an emancipatory act—she’s very much the author here, owning her own portrait. The cable release in her hand emphasizes that she is the one creating this image. It’s an interplay between subject and object, because in photography—and in the fine arts more generally—women are often positioned as the object, exposed to the male gaze. Thun cleverly evades this by presenting blank photograms of herself. Here, a woman clearly flips that power dynamic, showing us her empowerment. Her wide stance, direct gaze and the powerful fist further reinforces this. The fact that the artist is depicted life-size makes her feel incredibly present.

I love how the artist plays with the photographic image in all its facets, thus challenging our perception of seeing in multiple ways.

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, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream—much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.

Nina Strand 12/11/24 Nina Strand 12/11/24

ANNIKA ELISABETH VON HAUSSWOLF

The photograph balances between the familiar and the strange. I’m fascinated by how it’s clearly staged and arranged, yet I still read it as real. I believe in the image. Even though it’s obvious that I shouldn’t be able to, it still feels genuine. The image has influenced me in terms of how I want to create art. I also work with staging, and sometimes it works, while other times you just don’t believe it. That’s the beauty of this – you believe in it.

Afterimage by Hilma Hedin:

The first image that came to mind was Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff’s photograph: Det tar så lång tid att dö (It Takes So Long to Die). I was introduced to her work early in my career, right at the beginning when I started with photography. She had an exhibition recently at the Moderna Museet, and I got to see the photograph in person. I was just as moved by it as I was the first time I saw it.

What’s fascinating about it for me is how simple it is. This strange non-place, the gravel area she stands on. Her pants, worn at the knee as though she’s moved around a lot. Then the nice, clean sweater and her high heels – she looks good, also. And then she’s carrying this stone.

And the title – it’s so simple, almost banal, maybe even childish, but it speaks to a feeling I think everyone can relate to: the burden that living can be. There are so many relatable elements in the image, yet it’s so strange. Like the fact that she has her foot in a bucket and is carrying a stone – it almost becomes surreal.

It feels as though she’s using her body to symbolize what it’s like to live. It’s a physical and overtly clear representation of the inner burden. She stands still with one foot in the bucket. She can’t move forward, it never ends. Perhaps that’s why it works so well as a photograph: it stops right there, it doesn’t give us before or after, just that moment. We just have to be in it. It goes on forever; we don’t see the end in this photograph. It’s cold around her, the gray, cold, dark surroundings, but it feels as though she’s protecting and guarding this stone. She carries it carefully, she holds onto it – it’s not something she’s ready to let go of.

Nina Strand 12/5/24 Nina Strand 12/5/24

AGATHA WARA

I don’t have one specific image in mind, but the question made me think about the images we see with our mind's eye. I thought about something I recently learned—many people can’t actually see images when they close their eyes, a condition similar to those people who don’t have an internal dialogue; they don’t hear the ‘voice’ inside their head.

Afterimage by Agatha Wara:

I wonder: how do these people process the world if they don’t see images in their heads? Do they relate things to experiences? Do they rather feel things?—maybe see a color, an or feel an emotion or some other sensation rather than visualizing the thing?

It’s also fascinating how, in the realm of modern science and technology, there now exist neuroimaging techniques that use AI to create visual representations of what we are looking at. In other words they can decipher the images we see in our minds.

In some ways it feels like our inner world is our last private space. Here, we can have thoughts that we can keep private, unknown to the outside world, unless we choose to reveal them. The development of neuroimagine technology makes me wonder how much longer we will have an inner world that is individual, just for the oneself, and private. In the future people may be forced to share their thoughts and inner images without consent. They will simply be hooked up to a machine and voilà !

In my work I think about blushing—when the face turns red from embarrassment—in relation to private and public space. Not everyone blushes, but those who do are tormented by it. They feel as if they are betrayed by the reddening of their face which reveals to the public what they feel inside: vulnerable. By blushing, one is forced by one's own body to make public an emotion that one would rather keep private and secret.

In order to survive, we’ve learned to hide our emotions. And while that’s sometimes a good thing—otherwise, we’d be walking around without any ‘skin,’ so to speak—it also highlights the tension between privacy and exposure. This idea has a dystopian quality, especially when we think about the future and how images and emotions may be accessed without our consent.

Nina Strand 11/26/24 Nina Strand 11/26/24

ROLAND PENROSE

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the gaze in photography. This particular image is especially interesting because it involves a refusal of the gaze. Each of the women has her eyes closed, yet their faces are very strategically positioned—almost in a diagonal line, tilted upwards toward the camera. It’s clear they’re aware of being photographed. Of course, it’s a posed image; I don’t believe for a second that they’re actually sleeping.

Afterimage by Clare Patrick:

I’m thinking about an image of four women sleeping. It was made in Cornwall in 1937, by Roland Penrose, and I first saw it earlier this year at the Met in New York. I was struck by how it ties into the surrealist fascination with dreaming and with closed eyes. This theme of dreaming has recurred in interesting ways over the past year, particularly now with the major surrealist exhibition here in Paris, for example. It continues to feel relevant.

It’s a very beautiful image, but it’s also a little unnerving. When I think of images that stick with me, they often do so because there’s something about them that troubles me in relation to photographic practice, or because they’re sentimental. Often, when I spend the most time reflecting on a photograph, it’s because the image ties into broader questions I have about the medium—its uses, its ethics, its craft, and the strategies people use to compose an image. This image pokes at questions of viewership, autonomy, and representation. I’m also very interested in the role of femininity within surrealism, and I think this image complicates that idea as well.

The women featured in the image are Lee Miller, Adrienne (Ady) Fidelin, Nusch Eluard, and Leonora Carrington. I’m currently researching Fidelin, and this was the first photograph of her I really encountered. Much of her history and narrative hasn’t yet been recorded, so it’s through photographs that I come to know her. This ongoing exploration of representation, autonomy, viewership, and subjecthood within photography is something I’m deeply interested in.

The image has many layers, particularly in a theoretical sense. As I spend more time with it, I think about the friendships, the intimacy, and the collaboration involved. Photography can be a space for collaboration, where the model or subject is as involved in the creation of the image as the photographer. So much of surrealist photography involves men taking photos of women, and it’s often been assumed that the relationship was one of muse and creator, with little collaboration. I believe it’s far more complex than that. And to start thinking about these relations differently can unearth so many more interesting possibilities.

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, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream - much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.

Nina Strand 11/26/24 Nina Strand 11/26/24

DIEZ & INSTAGRAM

Right now, Instagram is the news outlet we rely on to follow the live streams of political events, and I'm struck by its importance, and also still pondering some people's use of it. I'm still thinking about a post from Katherine Diez, a Danish writer and Instagram influencer who became famous for her carefully curated selfies, accompanied by reflections on literature and feminism. In 2018, she sparked controversy with a nude selfie in bed, holding a book she was reviewing, with the caption ‘Going to bed with my job.’ But it's the fairytale-like post from a hotel in Paris, where Diez lay in a large bathtub reading Le Monde, with a quote from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar in the caption: 'Nothing can't be cured by a long, hot bath.' It was one of many beautiful photo-novels she shared.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

Maintaining such a glamorous presence likely became a full-time job, but everything fell apart in January when Reddit users uncovered plagiarism in her reviews and Instagram posts. The criticism of Diez, was enormous, overshadowing scandals like the case of journalist Lasse Skytt, who plagiarized and even fabricated sources. Diez admitted to sloppy notes and missing citations, and soon after, she turned off the lights on her Instagram. Behind the scenes, it was revealed that she had signed a deal with People’s Press, and by October, a picture of the cover of her new book, I Egen Barm (In My Own Bosom), was posted.

The book reads more like an autobiography than a deeper analysis of her actions, with only a few pages devoted to the plagiarism itself. What remains is her strong need for validation. Diez might believe this personal backdrop explains her actions, feeling consumed by her role as a provocateur with a ‘fuck you all’ attitude. In her book Diez revealed intimate details about her relationship with Adam Price and other ex-boyfriends. The drama that has since unfolded between Diez and Price feels like a storyline from his TV series Borgen.

In an October interview on DR’s Genstart, Diez admitted she had lived in a different reality, always seeking recognition and not trusting that she was enough on her own. I’m still thinking about her meticulous planning of posts, she told the host about the one announcing her relationship with Price. She wanted to create an image of strength and invulnerability, with Price gazing off into the distance while she looked directly at the camera, as though signalling: ‘you can't reach us.’ As the host dryly pointed out, nothing about this image was left to chance.

Diez also writes about wanting to be an actress. The book itself could maybe be read as a performance, much like the platform that created her. She calls Instagram her theatre, but also her museum and playground. I think about another picture she posted with Price just weeks before everything fell apart, a picture he later removed from his profile. In it, he’s wearing an apron, leaning toward the camera holding a champagne bucket and a bottle under one arm, while pretending to taste a sauce from a pot in the other hand. It’s a peculiar pose. She stands beside him in an amazing dress, one hand leaning on the set table, a glass of white wine in the other. She’s in motion, her dress and stance reminding me of the dancing woman emoji in a red dress. She’s clearly dressed up—this is her stage. She had one dress for the photoshoot and another to move in for dinner. As I read further into the book looking for answers to why she plagiarised, this image begins to reveal itself. Although Diez doesn’t explicitly say so, the explanation might be the amount of effort she put into maintaining her curated platform.

Diez seems to have decorated her appearance just as she decorated her texts with the words of others. In one of the book’s brief chapters, she writes about how much she loves beauty. She points out that everything posted on social media, even the ‘imperfect’ moments, is curated. The word ‘imperfect,’ she writes, is the worst she knows. But is it not this striving for perfection, with our weaknesses always visible, that defines us all?

In a recent interview, Diez rhetorically asked, ‘How much more do you want?’ claiming she’d already delivered all her painful stories. All the ugliness. She doesn't know how to take any more responsibility for committing the same crime, which she believes has been committed by many before and alongside her, and says that she is certainly not the last to take other people's texts. From what she says, it seems that in her book, she confronts all her so-called imperfections. How I wish she could come to embrace these, seeing them not as flaws, but as part of the ongoing journey toward becoming better.

And now, after this appearance, Diez has slowly started posting again, in a carousel of images she writes that she has found herself again. I hope that's true. I'm thinking of something I read in a novel about ballet, that it's about pursuing perfection and also about pleasing, and how the protagonist didn't want that anymore, to pursue pleasingness. As Diane Arbus said, ‘There's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't avoid them knowing.’ Perhaps it's at this point - between perfection and imperfection - that Diez could have even more fun in her photo-novel life.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream - much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.

Nina Strand 11/21/24 Nina Strand 11/21/24

TOVA MOZARD

I quickly tire of images with a clear framework. Maybe it’s because I want to add my own story to the image—or at least leave room for that. I want there to be a form of communication between the image and the viewer, where my own experiences and associations also have space.

Afterimage by Max Barel:

Tova Mozart, *Musso & Frank Gril*l, 2003

It was interesting to walk around the Grand Palais during Paris Photo. Perhaps mostly because I realised how much I’m unable to be captivated by. As if there’s so much I don’t understand or can’t quite connect with. And where does one’s gaze even come from? Is there a distinct Nordic style, with its own ideas of what works or doesn’t? It was a valuable exercise in trying to look beyond the image itself, beyond the initial response.

I first saw this image a couple of years ago, as a student at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg. At first, it was his hands that caught my attention. Piano fingers, the half-closed gesture, and how they rest on the tabletop—both tense and relaxed. There’s something fragile about them. Then there’s his face. I’m drawn to it, both positively and negatively. I feel a lack of trust in him, almost disgust. His ambiguous gaze and body position—he’s both about to stand up and sit down—create a tension. There’s both calm and noise in the image, a look that’s both distant and determined.

He’s in a transitional phase, caught in an unnatural movement. I think of all the movements we see around us that we don’t have time to notice. In this way, photography is unique: it captures a brief glimpse of something that would normally be out of reach. Many photographers work with similar stagings, and I think a common denominator for the images I enjoy is that they simultaneously depict something staged and something real—a moment captured.

I also keep returning to the themes of playfulness and simplicity. How the cornice at the top of the image isn’t straight, and how I often strive to create straight lines and controlled compositions in my own work. Yet many good images have a crookedness, an imperfection to them. At least in an image like this, with so few elements. An empty restaurant, a few tables, a leather sofa, two lamps, a paneled wall. A pleasant room to be in, yet you can’t avoid the violence he radiates.

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, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream - much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.

Nina Strand 11/11/24 Nina Strand 11/11/24

LAURE PROUVOST

There is a newsletter. Laure Provoust opens a big new show. My day (and my soul) is slowly sinking and the accompanying photo lifts me up, it makes me smile. Breasts like eyes and head. Lots of tentacles, one even giving a thumbs up as if to signal that this is all going to work out, the rest holding water and a cup and other things. Some are just hanging there, ready to work. It makes me think of something Aretha Franklin said when asked what her biggest challenges in life were. I am pretty sure the journalist did not expect her to answer that the hardest thing was figuring out what to make for dinner every day. Although I am a long way from being Franklin, I feel very connected to this octopus who holds on to important things.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

There is a newsletter. Laure Provoust opens a major new show. My day (and my soul) is slowly sinking and the accompanying photo lifts me up, it makes me smile. Breasts like eyes and head. Lots of tentacles, one even giving a thumbs up, as if to signal that it will all work out, the rest holding water and a cup and other stuff. Some are just hanging there, ready to work. I am reminded of something Aretha Franklin said when asked about her greatest challenges in life. I am pretty sure the journalist did not expect her to reply that the hardest thing was deciding what to make for her children's dinner every day. Although I am a long way from being Franklin, I feel very much like that octopus holding on to important things.

‘We must keep our energy,' my friend says, or rather shouts at me, as we are in the noisiest hour of the day for the bar. When I arrived, the waiter scolded me for not saying bonjour before asking for a table. He was right, I was very tired, it's been a year this week since Tuesday when the misogynist was re-elected. Is this a test, are they letting him try again to see if he can do something good? I wonder if he appreciates being treated fairly, with none of his opponents shouting that the election was rigged.

My friend and I both long to live in two cities. I tell her about a still I’ve just seen on Instagram, from a film where the subtitles read: ‘All my life I've felt like I've been in two places at once. Here and somewhere else.’ It's the week of the photo fair in this city, and after all the images I've seen at this year's very spacious and splendid edition, and also on the boat of books, this is what remains in my mind. My friend wonders why these stills don’t pop up in her feed. In hers it is as if Princess Diana and Whitney Houston are still alive, they are in almost every post she sees.

She says she is staying in Paris for now. No need to go where the madman is taking over again. The music is back to normal, so are the shoulders of the angry waiter, many have left for dinner and we can spread out more. I tell her she's right, we need to conserve our energy. A year into a catastrophic war and with this unknown uncertainty unfolding. We didn't order wine, just citron chaud for the vitamins. As I leave, I make sure to wish the waiter a bonne soirée and also bon courage, because I think he, and we all, will need it.

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, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream - much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.

Nina Strand 11/6/24 Nina Strand 11/6/24

ALAA HAMOUDA

Despite the constant wave of visual and written information we receive every day, there's one video I've been thinking about since it came out. It's of two Palestinian siblings, Qamar and Sumaya Subuh, released by the Al Jazeera network. We see a journalist meeting these two young children, one carrying the other. The journalist asks them what has happened and where they are going. It turns out that one of them was hit by a car. They say they are on their way to the Bureij refugee camp or just anywhere that can help. The journalist decides to help and drives them to Bureij, where one of them carries the other. Then the clip ends. Of all the videos I've seen, this is the one I play over and over in my head.

Afterimage by Sunniva Hestenes:

Screenshot from Al Jazeera’s Instagram. Images of the two sisters were captured by Palestinian journalist Alaa Hamouda.

I think it's because of the way it's filmed. It feels close, almost like I'm standing in the journalist's shoes. I look the children straight in the eye, they look at the journalist and the phone in his hand (me). I think about their gaze, how it is absent and present at the same time. I know that such a look can only come from one thing, and that is cruelty. At the same time, I know that I will never understand how bad it really is. The video's powerlessness haunts me. My own, Sumaya's and Qamar's. It could have been me. And it's a truth that is so extremely frightening, also in relation to the fact that there are so many who choose to look the other way.

It's about empathy and positioning. If we can place our experience in what we see, it's easier to recognize. This applies to everything - dreams, reality, relationships and possessions. The more willing we are to relate to something, the easier it is to engage, participate, and share. I think of the duality that exists in constantly witnessing what the Palestinian people are going through without really understanding, physically or mentally, the level of damage you are witnessing. The same goes for Congo, Lebanon and Sudan. All through the telephone, which both communicates and protects.

Still, refusing to witness the atrocities you see is the same as saying it's okay in my worldview; I can't vouch for it. You can't look away. You have to do something.

Nina Strand 10/30/24 Nina Strand 10/30/24

DUY NGUYEN

As a photographer, I often think about the pictures I can't take. We live in a world where almost everything is documented, especially with the internet and social media. Everything is instantly shared and broadcast, especially in these turbulent times of war, genocide and more. It almost feels like nothing is off limits to be documented. I often feel that my brain and emotions are not built to consume it all at the current rate.

Afterimage by Duy Nguyen:

Like many others, I'm often looking for a way to escape the real world and our documented reality. One place of refuge for me has been club culture, and as I live in Berlin, one of my most frequented clubs is Berghain/Panorama Bar. A place where I often meet people from different backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities, ethnicities and so on.

Not long ago I was there with two friends visiting from Norway. Taking a break from the sweaty dance floor, we found ourselves standing against a wall facing a group of sofas where clubbers come to smoke, rest and chat. The room was filled with all sorts of almost naked bodies piled on top of each other, lightly covered in cigarette smoke. As different coloured lights fell from the ceiling on each of them, it really did look like a grimy version of a Renaissance painting. At that moment I wanted to take a picture. Of course, I knew I couldn't, because that would defeat the purpose of being in a place where you can escape and no one can document you. Instead, it became a mental image for me and my friends as we stood there, archiving time. I suppose when you know you're not being recorded you can be more yourself. Or at least a version of yourself that you can't be in a documented reality.

A space is just walls (physical or not) - and what everyone brings to it makes up the space. In Berghain, we all agree that the experience shouldn't be documented, and that's part of what makes it special. Maybe you see better when you can't photograph it, or maybe you see beyond your eyes when you're not just looking through a lens. In any space, you get what you give. That night, I gave everything I had on the dance floor. When my legs couldn't take me any more, I left those walls feeling inspired by the pictures I couldn't take.

Nina Strand 10/23/24 Nina Strand 10/23/24

HODA AFSHAR

When you asked me to choose just one image, it was difficult. I see so many images all the time—especially through social media—that my mind feels both full and empty at the same time. But there's one image I've only encountered on social media that has stuck with me. Every time I see it, I feel compelled to linger on it and return to it, both visually and because of its content.

Afterimage by Marie Sjøvold:

When you asked me to choose just one image, it was difficult. I see so many images all the time, especially through social media, that my mind feels both full and empty at the same time. But there's one image I've only encountered on social media that has stuck with me. Every time I see it, I feel compelled to linger on it and return to it, both visually and because of its content.

In my memory, I had merged two of the photographer's images. One depicts three women braiding each other's hair, and the other shows a woman holding another's braid. Somehow, in my mind, they've fused into a single image. It's fascinating how our memory can absorb so many images that they blur and transform into something new.

Without knowing anything about the photographer or the context of the work, my initial associations were with my own childhood. I remembered a scene from Anne + Jørgen = Sant, where one girl cuts off another's braid—an incredibly dramatic moment. There was something so vulnerable about the braid being held. Hair carries many associations: it's free, intimate, and personal, often tied to identity. Cutting hair can feel like severing part of your own history.

There was something subtle yet political about the image for me, and upon closer inspection, I learned more about the Iranian photographer Afshar and the image's explicit political context, which made it even more powerful. It's stayed with me for so long because of that. The image's visual simplicity and poetic nature become even more impactful when you understand it's connected to the feminist uprising in Iran in 2022, following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini. That connection to real-world events makes you reflect on your own life and privileges.

What makes this picture so incredible is how it captures a moment of solidarity with such a powerful, political message, yet still resonates with something deeply personal that I believe everyone can relate to. It's an impressive fusion of the political and the personal.

Nina Strand 10/15/24 Nina Strand 10/15/24

NONA FAUSTINE AND JULIANA HUXTABLE

I had a lot of options in my head, there's so much good stuff out there that I think about a lot. One of the first images that came to mind was from Nona Faustine's White Shoes series. I saw the series in New York at Easter and the artist took pictures, in different versions of nudity and with white shoes, of different places in New York City where there was a slave trade or places where black people were not allowed to be.

Nona Faustine, from the White Shoes series. *They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from Their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC*, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures. © Nona Faustine

Afterimage(s) by Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin:

There's a particular image in that series where you see Faustine pushing a column, completely naked, in these white shoes, you can see that she's exerting herself, that it's exhausting. I've been thinking a lot about this exhibition, and I thought that's something I should continue to think about, in relation to who I am and where I'm going. And in relation to the issues that are going on in the world. It visualizes what these people have experienced in the generations before us.

Juliana Huxtable, *Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm)*, 2015

And I realized that I'm really interested in that, and what it's like to cross boundaries between what's human and what's not, and then become a hybrid or a myth, and then I came to a work that I keep coming back to, by Juliana Huxtable. I love everything she does, but there's one self-portrait in particular that I saw during the triennial at the New Museum in 2015. Untitled in the Rage, Nibiru Cataclysm shows the artist sitting with a background of clouds, and behind her you can see a planet that looks like a moon. Her body is green and her hair is yellow. I feel that there are three things that this painting represents to me.

First, it's what the Nibiru cataclysm means, the myth of a ninth planet in the solar system that threatens to crash into the Earth and destroy everything. Which Huxtable then mythologizes as this cataclysm that comes and blows up everything about identity, trans identity and feminism. And about freedom and unfreedom within that theme. The second is how the portrait circumvents what a self-portrait is. The image has so much to say about who Huxtable is, the image for me has an effect where it breaks absolutely all boundaries of what it means to identify as something.

The last part is about how you think about where you're going in terms of feminism and identity politics. Because what's interesting about Huxtable-and this particular portrait-is that it points to a place where we're going in terms of identity politics and feminism in the future. We often talk about what's happening now and what's happened. What we want to fight against and what we can achieve in the future. And if you drag the past into the future, you're kind of stuck, you're so quickly influenced by the past that the future becomes impossible to imagine. That's where Huxtable comes in as Cataclysm and helps with that. Her starting point is what she wants the future to look like. And that's why that image stuck with me, because it felt completely eye-opening.

Nina Strand 10/10/24 Nina Strand 10/10/24

NICK WAPLINGTON

Afterimage by Emma Aars:

It’s funny to think back on the photographs that meant a lot to me when I was younger. Not just as a nostalgic reminiscence, but as a way to understand and remember what I saw and liked in them, compared to what I see today. I remember being five years old or so, and loving the photographs by Nick Waplington. Their plush, synthetic surfaces stood out to me. I think of families eating ice cream in rooms with carpeted floors and patent-leather sofas in different shades of pink. The drama and chaos and abundance of people and stuff—which I have now come to see as the images of struggling British working-class homes in the 90s—filled me at the time with an unsettled combination of envy and fascination. I didn’t notice the cigarette butts on the floor, the stains everywhere, how everything was covered in a shade of dirt, or see the fights as real fights. I saw the girly dresses, soft tracksuits and plastic toys I never got. Waplington’s photos captured everything I felt my own life lacked. I can still recall my obsession with the young girl in a tartan dress trying to cut the lawn with a vacuum cleaner. There was always so much happening, and it always seemed to be so much fun.

A girl in her early teens, leans against the floral wallpaper. An older girl sits on a sofa to her left, along with others who are beyond the frame, while to her right, two younger children attempt to strangle each other. A mother with a pair of infants on her lap and a troubled face speaks to someone in the room from deep down in her red velvet armchair. Our girl has red-brown hair and a sharp face, and her hands are in the pockets of her way too big pink sweatpants, pulled up at the ankles, showing her dirty white sneakers on the wine red carpeted floor. She watches her family from a distance, as if she were the photographer—not indifferent, but reclusive in a sense. She acknowledges, but she does not participate. She is a grounding element amongst the chaos in the image. There is a self-consciousness underneath it all. Some are looking at themselves being looked at.

This text is taken from the essay Eye as a Camera, Objektiv #28. 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, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream - much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.

Nina Strand 10/7/24 Nina Strand 10/7/24

RAGNHILD AAMÅS

You send me an old image of yourself somewhere in the West, near where I grew up. A squinting, grinning child, facing the sun, feeding a lamb, one hand holding on to a metal string fence. There is text written over the image. An invitation. But my mind is distracted by another image, and we text about it. I'm leaning on the hope that in our knowledge of the fickle status of images, of their bending, we still have a capacity that can help us think, even when we're distracted.

Afterimage by Ragnhild Aamås:

I thought I was beyond the effects of them, the images. We live in far too interesting times. But this one hits my inbox, in a newsletter from a newspaper I follow. I register it in my side-view while I'm working on a wooden figure.

It is not, I think, the aesthetics of the image, its sensuous reach, that strikes me, nor the indignation of the suffering, but rather a mimetic response that lands like a fist. A child sitting on her mother's lap, with a calm, almost angelic face. She looks the same age as my daughter EY. Like any other child, she is quite content to be on a parent's lap, regardless. The mother is hunched over, her face distorted by muscle and emotion, far from calm. Around her, women and children sit on the dusty floor, their wounds treated in various ways. In the background: a rubbish bin with a black bag, a plastic tube sticking out, empty packaging for bottled water, a five-litre container of some liquid in front of it, protected by cardboard. There is familiar street wear, dust-covered black backpacks on the floor, several darkened reflective surfaces of depowered screens. A bald man, propped up halfway between wall and floor, with bloody cotton swabs on his head, clutches a mobile phone, his face an empty field. As a group in a setting, they conform to what Susan Sontag quotes as Leonardo Da Vinci's instructions for showing the horror in a battle painting:

Make the defeated pale, with their eyebrows raised and knit, and the skin over their eyebrows furrowed with pain ... and the teeth apart as if crying out in lamentation ... Let the dead be partly or wholly covered with dust ... and let the blood be seen by its colour, flowing in a sinuous stream from the body to the dust (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003).

I wonder if they have consented to have their pictures taken. I wonder in whose feeds the picture will appear, and with what caption.

Wait, there is something nestling in the stillness of the child's face: a quiet place, a silence, a projection beyond

Has motherhood, parenthood, the carrying of responsibility, rekindled in me a certain need to no longer ignore politics? Or let's put it this way: it seems to have attuned me to the fragility of things, to the integrity of the body, and to a certain stickiness of time (EY, who I'm calling as I type, has been intruding on me since she came home from kindergarten on the third day with an eye infection – and we have sterile saline water). There is a feeling of being turned upside down, but this is balanced by obligations of care, in the sense of Juliana Spahr, a micro-dose of contempt for the ethnostates and the ongoing governance of death.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag points out that suffering is always at a distance; in a sense, we can never be close enough. In the confrontation with images, there remains a central potential for empathy. But it is not independent of narrative and the ability to place oneself in the privileged position of having distance from immediate suffering, from the unfolding hierarchy in which the damage is received and captured.

Who is not in the picture? What is not depicted? What subject is not as easily captured as suffering? Could I imagine that the eyes of the child, who is certainly not looking at the lens, are staring at something beyond, at something responsible, at the ideology of nation states? Not somewhere else, but here.

Image: Aamås’ screenshot from inbox of newsletter showing photo by Mohammad Abu Elsebah / DPA / NTB). 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, originally titled Sinnbilde in Norwegian. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream - much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. Whether it's an image glimpsed on a billboard, a portrait in a newspaper, a family photo from an album or an Instagram reel, we're interested in those fleeting moments that stay with you and refuse to let go.