Liberated Threads

No. 259 Stories of Black Style Summer 2025

 Robert Adams
Diane Arbus
Bernd & Hilla Becher
Elisheva Biernoff
Mel Bochner
Sophie Calle
Cardiff & Miller
Liz Deschenes
Kota Ezawa
Lee Friedlander
Adam Fuss
Nan Goldin
Katy Grannan
Martine Gutierrez
Peter Hujar
Richard Learoyd
Helen Levitt
Christian Marclay
Wardell Milan
Richard Misrach
Nicholas Nixon
Alec Soth
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Richard T. Walker
Carrie Mae Weems
Garry Winogrand
fraenkelgallery.com

FRÆNKEL
RICHARD LEAROYD, Untitled poppies, 2025, unique Ilfochrome photograph
Liberated Threads
Summer 2025

Columns Features

21 36 44

11 28 36 64
AGENDA SPOTLIGHT LIBERATED THREADS HAIR STORIES
Wolfgang Tillmans, Stan Eli Cohen on Alana Perino’s Guest edited by Tanisha C. Nikki Nelms transforms
Douglas, Marta Astfalck-Vietz, elegiac search for meaning Ford hairstyling into conceptual art
Annegret Soltau in a Florida beach town madison moore
44
14 34 LIVING ARCHIVE 72
DISPATCHES CURRICULUM Seydou Keïta’s revelatory THE DIRECTOR
Dalia Al-Dujaili on the Jack Davison on Flickr, portraits of Malian life Melina Matsoukas creates
efflorescence of Baghdad’s mugshots, and The Simpsons Kobby Ankomah Graham space for Black stories in
photo world Hollywood and beyond
152 56 A conversation with Solange
21 ENDNOTE LONDON CALLING Knowles
REDUX Durga Chew-Bose on adapting Liz Johnson Artur captures
Robert Slifkin on James Bonjour Tristesse to the screen street style’s collision with 82
Welling’s journey into light high fashion CÔTE D’IVOIRE
and darkness Gazelle Mba DREAMING
The brooding, buoyant
24 intimacies of Nuits Balnéaires
STUDIO VISIT Tiana Reid
Somak Ghoshal on Bharat
Sikka’s creative New Delhi
workspace

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 3

Liberated Threads
Summer 2025

The PhotoBook
Features Review

82 148

92 114 138
FAMILY ALBUM PICTURE MAN THE ERISKAY
Silvia Rosi reimagines the Devin Allen’s profound record CONNECTION
African diaspora in Europe of everyday life in Baltimore Aaron Schuman talks to the
Vanessa Peterson Rikki Byrd duo about their publishing
project
100 124
TURNING THE PAGE PROOF OF LIFE 142
The legacy of Honey magazine The quiet world-building of THE FACTORY
Amy DuBois Barnett the fashion stylist Yashua Marigold Warner visits
Simmons Twelvebooks’ new home in
104 A conversation with Darnell east Tokyo
THERE ARE NEW SUNS L. Moore
Two artists on the shifting 146
meanings of self-representation GRAPHIC CONTENT
and creative courage Christopher Hawthorne on
A conversation with Ja’Tovia photography and type
Gary and Fatima Jamal
148
Reviews of photobooks by
Mike Brodie, Joaquim Paiva,
Lele Saveri, and Noriko Front cover:
Shibuya Seydou Keïta,
Untitled (detail), 1952/55
© SKPEAC/the estate of
Seydou Keïta and courtesy
The Jean Pigozzi African
Art Collection
(See page 44)

Subscribe to Aperture and

read more at aperture.org.

4 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 GALLERY

Visit Our Galleries

Leica Gallery Mexico City Leica Gallery New York
100 Years of Leica Landon Nordeman: Last Night
Past and present Leica photographers June 19 - July 27, 2025
in Latin America
406 W 13th St
April 10 - August 10, 2025 New York, NY 10014
Centro de la Imagen
Plaza de la Ciudadela 2
Centro Histórico, 06000 Ciudad de México Leica Gallery Los Angeles
Sandro Miller: The Love Between Us Is
Stronger Than The Hatred Behind Us
Leica Gallery Boston Mark Edward Harris: The Way of the
Constantine Manos, Stella Johnson, Japanese Bath
Iaritza Menjivar: Seeing Across Generations
June 5 - August 4, 2025
July 17 - September 14, 2025
8783 Beverly Blvd
74 Arlington St West Hollywood, CA 90048
Boston, MA 02116

Image by Federico Rios

 The Magazine of Photography and Ideas

Editor in Chief
Michael Famighetti
Guest Editor
Tanisha C. Ford
Managing Editor
Zack Hatfield
Editorial Assistant
Caroline Foulke
Contributing Editors, The PhotoBook Review
Brendan Embser, Noa Lin
Copy Editors
Donna Ghelerter, Chris Peterson
Production Director
Minjee Cho
Production Manager
Andrea Chlad
Press Supervisor
Ali Taptık
Work Scholar
Mira Maxwell

Art Direction, Design & Typefaces

A2/SW/HK, London

Director of Business Development

Flynn Murray
[email protected]

Advertising
Elizabeth Morina
[email protected]
Michel Manzo
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to creating insight, community, and [email protected]
understanding through photography. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, Isabelle Friedrich McTwigan
significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s [email protected]
vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.
Executive Director, Aperture
Aperture (ISSN 0003-6420) is published quarterly, in spring, summer, fall, and winter, Sarah Hermanson Meister
at 548 West 28th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Subscriptions are $75/year.
For delivery in Canada, add $20; for other countries, add $35. Single copies may be Minor White, Editor (1952–1974)
purchased for $24.95. To subscribe or buy single copies, visit aperture.org. Periodicals Michael E. Hoffman, Publisher and Executive Director
postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address (1964–2001)
changes to Aperture, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. For customer service, please Melissa Harris, Editor in Chief (2002–2012)
call 866-457-4603 (US and Canada) or email [email protected]. Newsstand Chris Boot, Executive Director (2011–2021)
distribution in the US is handled by CMG. For international distribution, contact Lesley A. Martin, Founder and Publisher, The PhotoBook
Central Books, centralbooks.com. Other inquiries, email [email protected] or call Review (2011–2021)
212-505-5555.
Aperture Board of Trustees*
Copyright © 2025 Aperture, Inc. All rights reserved under international and Cathy M. Kaplan, Chair; Helen Nitkin, Vice Chair;
Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced Michael Hoeh, Treasurer; Allan M. Chapin, Secretary;
in any form without written permission from the publisher. Peter Barbur; Julie Bédard; Dawoud Bey; Kwame S.
Brathwaite; Stuart B. Cooper; Kate Cordsen; Zackary
Credits for “Curriculum,” pp. 34–35: The Glutton: © Granta; Michaelson: Courtesy Drucker; Rob Giampietro; Dr. Bruce Halpryn; Lyle Ashton
Steidl/Steven Kasher Gallery; Walker: © Brett Walker; The Simpsons: © FOX; Inside: © Harris; Elizabeth Ann Kahane; Philippe E. Laumont;
2025 Playdead; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: Courtesy The Criterion Collection/ Andrew E. Lewin; Dr. Kenneth Montague; Vasant Nayak;
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Melissa O’Shaughnessy; Lisa Rosenblum; Thomas R.
Schiff; Lisa Segalas; Colette Veasey-Cullors; Casey Taylor
Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 58-30845. Weyand; Pamela Thomas-Graham; Deborah Willis;
Trustees Emeriti: Antonia Paepcke DuBrul; Celso
Support has been provided by members of Aperture’s Magazine Council: Jon Stryker Gonzalez-Falla; Susana Torruella Leval; Mark B. Levine;
and Slobodan Randjelović, Susan and Thomas Dunn, and Michael W. Sonnenfeldt, Joel Meyerowitz; Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas
MUUS Collection. * As of February 2025

ISBN 978-1-59711-580-3

Printed in Turkey by Ofset Yapimevi

aperture.org

6 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 FEB. 24–JULY 6, 2025

Zanele Muholi, Phila I, Parktown, 2016, edition of 8 + 2 artist’s proofs. Courtesy of Southern Guild and Yancey Richardson. © Zanele Muholi.

601 TURNER BLVD., SAVANNAH, GA. | SCADMOA.ORG | @SCADMOA | #SCADMOA

 AMY DUBOIS BARNETT (“Turning the 2022, she became the first Black woman
Contributors Page,” page 100) is a writer, editor, and
media executive. The former editor in
to compose music for the New York City
Ballet. For this issue, Knowles interviews
chief of Teen People and Ebony magazines, Melina Matsoukas about her visionary
Barnett has held senior leadership posi- career spanning Hollywood, fashion,
tions at Paramount, Hearst, Disney, and music, and more.
Time Inc., and is the author of Get Yours!:
How to Have Everything You Ever GAZELLE MBA (“London Calling,” page
Dreamed of and More (2007), which was 56) is a Nigerian writer and researcher
nominated for an NAACP Image Award. based in Lagos. Her work has appeared
Her debut novel, If I Ruled the World, will in the British Journal of Photography,
be published in January 2026. In this is- Dazed, Frieze, the London Review of
sue, Barnett reflects on her time editing Books, and The World of Interiors. She
Honey, a short-lived but epochal New publishes the newsletter Good Inten-
York–based magazine for and by Black tions and is currently working on a non-
women. fiction book about Nigerian nostalgia for
which she received the RCA Writing Prize.
KOBBY ANKOMAH GRAHAM (“Living Here, Mba writes on photographer Liz
Archive,” page 44) is a writer, DJ, lectur- Johnson Artur’s collaborations with Feben
er, and cultural researcher who lives in and other London-based designers.
Accra. His PhD research dissects why
alternative musicians in Ghana channel DARNELL L. MOORE (“Proof of Life,”
community into their artistry. Graham’s page 124) is a writer and activist based in
writing previously appeared in Aperture’s Los Angeles. In 2018, Moore published
Fall 2023 issue on Accra, in which he No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black
delved into the preservation of Ghanaian and Free in America, an acclaimed memoir
history in local photographic archives and that covers his tumultuous upbringing
repositories. In this issue, he revisits the as a queer man growing up in Camden,
portraiture of the Malian photographer New Jersey, and Philadelphia, and his
Seydou Keïta. “It’s one thing to admire a role as a key figure of the Black Lives
legend from afar and another to write Matter movement. In these pages, Moore
something that honors them,” he said of speaks with his partner, the stylist Yashua
this assignment. “No pressure at all.” Simmons, about the evolution of his eye
TANISHA C. FORD (“Liberated Threads,” and the role collaboration and community
page 36) is a Harlem-based writer, res- FATIMA JAMAL (“There Are New play in his work.
earcher, and a professor of history at The Suns,” page 104) is a writer, model, and
Graduate Center at the City University “anti-disciplinary” artist based in Har- MADISON MOORE (“Hair Stories,”
of New York. As the guest editor of this lem. She has walked several runways, page 64) is a cultural critic, DJ, and assis-
issue, Ford has curated a range of portfo- appeared in Ryan Murphy’s television tant professor of modern culture and
lios, essays, and interviews exploring series Pose and Tourmaline’s Atlantic Is a media at Brown University. His first
how contemporary image makers are Sea of Bones (2017), and is currently walking book, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful
remixing and reimagining what she terms the halls of Union Theological Seminary Eccentric (2018), considers the aesthetics
“soul style”—a worldwide movement pursuing her Master of Divinity. A maker and political dimensions of fabulousness
that fused fashion and self-expression of images and words as prayer, Jamal is as embodied by such cultural rebels as
with Black freedom in the 1960s and the writer and director of the ongoing Prince, Grace Jones, and the ballroom
1970s, and the subject of her book Liber- documentary project No Fats, No Femmes. pioneer Lasseindra Ninja. He is currently
ated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the In this issue, she appears in conversation at work on a second book, NIGHT FE-
Global Politics of Soul (2015), from which with the artist Ja’Tovia Gary to discuss VER, about Black queer nightlife. In this
this issue takes its title. Ford’s other how they’ve each reckoned with self- issue, moore introduces a portfolio by the
books include Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is hood, history, and the politics of visibility nonpareil hairstylist Nikki Nelms.
Beautiful (Aperture, 2019) and Our Secret in their art.
Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour,
Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights SOLANGE KNOWLES (“The Director,”
Movement (2023). “I wanted to bring to- page 72) is an American singer, songwrit-
gether artists who see style as a way to ask er, and actress. Her albums include When
questions about embodiment, pleasure, I Get Home (2019) and A Seat at the Table
and political consciousness,” says Ford of (2016), whose lead single, “Cranes in the
guest editing the issue. “I hope readers find Sky,” won the Grammy for Best R&B
much to discover in their work, which I Performance. Knowles is the founder of
think exemplifies the ingenuity and capa- Saint Heron, a creative agency that am-
ciousness of the Black imagination.” plifies underrepresented voices and, in

8 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 NOW AVAI L AB LE

18 DIFFERENT FINE ART PAPERS

Florian W. Müller
From the series “California Dreaming”
20 x 75 Inches | Fine Art Print | Hahnemühle German Etching | Miami magnetic frame

Photography in perfection
For everyone who loves photography. For more than 18 years, artists and discerning photographers worldwide
have placed their trust in WhiteWall’s photo lab. Winner of TIPA’s “Best Photo Lab Worldwide”, we offer unmatched
quality through the combination of traditional development and the latest technologies. Discover our printing
passion at WhiteWall.com
April 17–September 7, 2025
Gallerie d’Italia–Torino

Curated by Sarah Meister

Agenda
Exhibitions to See

Wolfgang Tillmans
The name Wolfgang Tillmans more read-
ily evokes nightclubs and day-long raves
of the sort he chronicled in the 1990s
than the hushed environs of a library. But
this summer, the German photographer is
taking over the bibliothèque of the Centre
Pompidou, which will go dark in Septem-
ber for a five-year renovation. Given carte
blanche, the artist will bring together
photographs, videos, music, text, and
archival material to transform the mostly
empty, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot
Public Information Library into a node of
epistemological inquiry and Tillmans-
esque togetherness.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous

y préparait (Nothing prepared us for it – Everything
prepared us for it) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Wolfgang Tillmans, Pompidou poster study, 2024
June 13–September 22, 2025 Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London

Stan Douglas
Stan Douglas produces painstakingly
composed “speculative histories” that
trouble the boundaries between history,
fiction, and myth, using the supposed
objectivity of the camera as a starting
point. Ghostlight, his first United States
retrospective in over twenty years, will
draw out themes of collective memory
and rupture in works that include a new
multichannel video installation reimagin-
ing D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent epic, The
Birth of a Nation. As Douglas once said,
“Maybe by breaking the rules of realism in
photography—the rules of this automatic,
perspectival image—we can get back to a
trace of the humanity of looking.”

Stan Douglas: Ghostlight at the Hessel Museum of Art

Stan Douglas, Exodus, 1975, 2012 at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York,
Courtesy the artist and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College June 21–November 20, 2025

No. 259 AGE NDA 11

 Marta Astfalck-Vietz
Marta Astfalck-Vietz’s contributions to
photography’s story may not be as famil-
iar as that of her peers working in Germany
in the vital, if imperiled, cultural scene of
the 1920s. One reason is that Astfalck-
Vietz’s archive was partially destroyed
during the bombing of Berlin in World
War II. What survived—and have recently
been restored—are dreamy, surreal pic-
tures, often embracing formal experi-
mentation, ranging from portraits, to
nudes, to performative self-portraits that
foreshadow modes of art making that
would become dominant in the 1970s.

Marta Astfalck-Vietz: Staging the Self at the Berlinische

Marta Astfalck-Vietz, Untitled (Self-portrait), 1927 Galerie Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, July 11–October
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 13, 2025

Annegret Soltau
For more than six decades, the German
artist Annegret Soltau has sought to
exceed the strictures of the self through
the visceral manipulation of images. Her
hallmark is the use of black thread; she
stitches representations of her own body
and that of other women into photo
collages that delve into themes of mother-
hood, pregnancy, and aging. Soltau, a
product of the feminist movement, is
now having her first retrospective—an
opportunity for audiences to encounter
remarkable multimedia work by an artist
decidedly unbound by aesthetic and social
conventions.

Uncensored: Annegret Soltau–A Retrospective at the Städel Annegret Soltau, With Myself, 1975/2022
Museum, Frankfurt am Main, May 8–August 17, 2025 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

12 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 Don’t sit on it. Sell it.
More than half of us have camera
gear we no longer use.
Sell your gear and upgrade
your visual storytelling.
Trade up for new adventures.

Upgrade,
completed.

Do you have unused camera gear?

MPB is the largest global platform to
buy, sell and trade used gear.
Get an instant quote

See mpb.com/info/unused-tech-survey
for more details.
 Iraq’s capital has endured waves of
Dispatches violence, from civil unrest to foreign
invasions, leaving little room for arts in-
A new festival in Baghdad hopes frastructure. But the launch of Baghdad
Photo Week, the country’s first photog-
to rebuild the Iraqi capital’s artistic raphy festival, marks a notable turning
point. Organized by the photographer
community following decades Aymen Al-Ameri and his partner Meena
Alyassin, who also cofounded the Iraqi
of war. arts magazine Henna, the event took
place last December at The Gallery, a
Dalia Al-Dujaili commercial art space in Baghdad.
The festival’s theme, “Forgotten,”
paid tribute to two pioneering Iraqi
photographers of the past, Nadhim Ramzi
and Hadi Al-Najjar—key figures, along-
side Latif al-Ani, in establishing the
medium in the country. Much of the
photography on view carried an aesthetic
shaped by conf lict and melancholy. Al-
Ameri, Amir Hazim, and Alhassan Jamal
Aldeen each capture daily life in high-
contrast black and white, depicting
ecological pollution, antiestablishment
protestors, and the month of Muharram,
the start of the Islamic New Year when

14 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 DI S PATCHES 15
Page 14: This page, top:
Claudia Willmitzer, light Aline Deschamps, Two
source of a vehicle friends hold arms and
headlight spot at the walk around the fairy
desert of Dasht e lut, Iran, amusement park, 2022
2014
This page, bottom:
Page 15: Aymen Al-Ameri, from the
Wisam Mutwak, Holy soil, series Halves, 2012–23
2023

The need for a communal space

to share images has become
crucial.

Shias mourn Imam Ali, whose face is

plastered on every street corner.
The program aimed to foster collab-
oration between diasporic Iraqis, image
makers from throughout the country,
and international photographers such as
Charles Thiefaine, who is based in Paris
and has made work about the massive
2019 protests in the capital that left hun-
dreds dead, the subject of his project
Tahrir Disobedience. Another body of his
work, Ala Allah (On God), offers a quiet-
er, warmer portrayal of daily life in Iraq
—a more humanizing view than typically
seen abroad.
The wide accessibility of photogra-
phy, which requires little more than a
smartphone, has accelerated its growth
in Baghdad. With more photographers
emerging, the need for a communal
space to share images has become crucial.
Al-Ameri, the festival organizer, is com-
mitted to working with photographers

16 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

to develop a diverse range of projects. Paul Hennebelle, from
the series Brown Eyes and
“We have many good Iraqi photogra- Sand, 2016–21
phers, but most of the pictures are of the
marshes and Karbala,” he told me, refer-
ring to Iraq’s southern marshlands and
the Shia pilgrimage city. “We need to
see more exhibitions. We donʼt have many
galleries, and most photographers are
stuck in the same cycle.”
Documentary photography remains
dominant, shaped by heavy internation-
al coverage of wars in Iraq. Abdullah
Dhiaa Al-Deen’s work is notable for
capturing pivotal political moments
and social issues with striking honesty.
Professional photography in Iraq often
prioritizes income potential over artistry,
reflecting the country’s high unemploy-
ment rates. Bearing witness to decades
of tragedy has been central, but now,
with the country’s relative stability and
recent urban development, visual narra-
tives are evolving.
Coming to Iraq for the first time as
a war correspondent in 2015, Thiefaine
noted that many international journal-
ists reproduced similar imagery. “I started
to realize there was a big gap between
what international photographers show
and the lived experience,” he said. Be-
friending Iraqi youth, Thiefaine noticed
that people were very open to being
photographed. “Even during the protest,
people wanted to show what they have
in mind as a society. They were proud of
what they were trying to do. I try to stay
far from the imagery of violence in my
personal work.”
Thiefaine believes that although
Western journalism has contributed to
shaping Iraq’s maligned global image,
the “political situation is changing very
fast, which brings about new representa-
tion,” pointing to different subcultures,
queer culture, and how the festival itself
aimed to show diverse perspectives.
With Iraq frequently cited as one of the
world’s fastest-warming nations, envi-
ronmental concerns also drove projects
on view, such as Tamara Abdul Hadi’s
pictures of the iconic marshes and the
Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, as well
as Emily Garthwaite’s photographs of
Kurdistan’s biodiverse landscapes and
minority communities, including Yazidis,
Zoroastrians, and Bahá’ís.
Female representation in Iraqi
photography is growing, albeit slowly.
Initiatives such as Iraqi Female Photog-
raphers, founded by Ishtar Obaid, spot-
light women, including Asmaa Turki,

No. 259 DI S PATCHES 17

18 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE
Opposite: Saba Kareem, and Tiba Sadeq. Turki’s media offers some freedom, but con-
Tamara Abdul Hadi, Best
friends in Chabayish, work ranges from young ballerinas in straints still limit expression. Despite
2018 Baghdad to serene abaya embroidery in Baghdad Photo Week’s groundbreaking
This page:
Najaf, vitalizing traditional themes with success, significant obstacles remain.
Charles Thiefaine, Ala quiet beauty. Kareem’s images of the The country’s cultural infrastructure
Allah, Mosul, Iraq, 2018 marshes and pilgrimages add to this is underdeveloped, with minimal arts
expanding repertoire. education, scant media coverage, and
Al-Ameri organized Baghdad Photo few exhibition spaces. Yet Baghdad Photo
Week with minimal funding—an imp- Week highlighted not only Iraq’s wealth
ressive and steadfast effort emblematic of talent but also its need to rebuild an
of the Iraqi attitude to life. “Habibi, send artistic community and, after decades of
me photos right now, let’s talk tonight,” relentless conf lict, reimagine its global
he recalls saying to friends just months image.
before the festival. “To deal with Iraqis is
not easy,” he added. “Everything is al
Allah [with God],” a phrase symbolizing
a relaxed approach to deadlines. Creative
problem-solving became vital for han- Dalia Al-Dujaili is the
online editor of the British
dling damaged prints and mismatched Journal of Photography
frames. Censorship presents another and the author of Babylon,
Albion: A Personal History
challenge. Political content, nudity, and of Myth and Migration
drug-related themes are taboo. Social (2025).

No. 259 DIS PATCHES 19

 $250,000+ $50,000–$99,999 $25,000–$49,999
Google Pixel Center for Creative Photography at 7|G Foundation
New York City Department of the University of Arizona, Tucson Peter Barbur and Tim Doody
Aperture, a nonprot Cultural Affairs Sharyn and Bruce Charnas Dawoud Bey
organization, gratefully Thomas R. Schiff and S. B. Cooper and R. L. Besson Allan Chapin and Anna Nilsson
acknowledges the generosity Mary Ellen Goeke Michael Hoeh Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary
of the numerous individuals, Joy of Giving Something, Inc. Ishibashi Foundation
foundations, corporations, and Judy and Leonard Lauder Philippe Laumont
public funders who contribute $100,000–$249,999 The Momentary Marina and Andrew Lewin
in support of our mission. Charina Endowment Fund, Inc. Vasant Nayak and Sheela Murthy Leonard L. Milberg
Empire State Development Corporation New York City Council and Council National Endowment for the Arts
Ford Foundation Member Gale A. Brewer New York State Council on the Arts
FotoFocus Melissa and James O’Shaughnessy Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas and
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Lisa Rosenblum and Nina Celebic Ellen Sargent
Board of Trustees Lisa and Harry Segalas Helen Nitkin
Chair: Cathy M. Kaplan Michael W. Sonnenfeldt, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Inc.
Vice Chair: Helen Nitkin MUUS Collection Robert and Jamie Soros
Treasurer: Michael Hoeh Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović
Secretary: Allan M. Chapin
Executive Director: Sarah Meister
(ex officio) $10,000–$24,999
Anonymous (2) Gagosian Anne Levy Charitable Trust
Peter Barbur The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Kristy and Robert Harteveldt Mailman Foundation
Julie Bédard Foundation, Inc. Terry Hermanson Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman
Dawoud Bey Julie Bédard Ingram Content Group Richard and Ronay Menschel
Kwame S. Brathwaite Peter and Jeanette Christian Japan World Exposition Marnie S. Pillsbury
Stuart B. Cooper David Dechman and Michel Mercure Commemorative Fund The Herb Ritts Foundation
Kate Cordsen Documentary Arts, Inc. Leica Camera Inc. Artur Walther
Zackary Drucker Nicole R. Fleetwood Les Rencontres d’Arles Casey and Lauren Weyand
Rob Giampietro
Dr. Bruce Halpryn
Lyle Ashton Harris $5,000–$9,999
Elizabeth Ann Kahane Paula Ely and Cesar Rueda Peter Harned Clifford Ross
Philippe E. Laumont Fraenkel Gallery Marta Heflin Foundation Drs. Marsha and Stephen Silberstein
Andrew E. Lewin Rob Giampietro and Susan Cernek Julie and Will Hobert Lara Trafelet
Dr. Kenneth Montague The Bernard F. and Alva B. Gimbel Dr. Marc and Lynn Karlan Vielmetter Los Angeles
Vasant Nayak Foundation Florian Koenigsberger Ronald and Vicki Weiner
Melissa O’Shaughnessy Mark Gimbel and Dede Welles Mark and Elizabeth Levine Shira White
Lisa Rosenblum Howard Greenberg Alison and Tim Lord Alice Sachs Zimet
Thomas R. Schiff Mrs. John Gutfreund Sarah and Adam Meister
Lisa Segalas Abby Hamlin and Bob Kandel Kenneth Montague and Sarah Aranha
Pamela Thomas-Graham
Colette Veasey-Cullors
Casey Taylor Weyand $1,000–$4,999
Deborah Willis Robin Albert Jeff Gutterman Paul Sack
Gail Albert-Halaban Bruce Halpryn and Charles Riebe Jane Dresner Sadaka and Ned Sadaka
Trustees Emeriti Anonymous (3) Victoria Hansen Ben Sax and Hollis Rafkin-Sax
Antonia Paepcke DuBrul Lisa Marie Baker Molly K. Heines and Thomas J. Moloney David Scharf and Allison Taylor-Scharf
Celso Gonzalez-Falla Leslie and Robert Baraf Chloe Heins Kelley Scofield
Susana Torruella Leval Tina Barney Allison and Keyes Hill-Edgar Felice Shapiro
Mark B. Levine Diana Barrett and Bob Vila Polly and Alastair Hunt Ted and Mary Jo Shen
Joel Meyerowitz Samantha Bass Steven and Robin Hurwitz Sarah and Brooks Shughart
Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas Joan Berkowitz Joie Jager-Hyman Leslie Simitch
Mati and Chris Buccini Darlene Kaplan and Steve Zuckerman Susanna Singer
Trustees In Memoriam Ellen Carey Rania Al Khalifa William and Catherine Sweeney Singer
Annette Y. Friedland Christie’s Steven Koch Rosalind Fox Solomon
Barry H. Garfinkel, Esq. Anne Cohen Allegra Kochman Tabitha Soren Lewis
John H. Gutfreund Shawn Colo and Deirdre O’Neil Béryl and Rex Hamilton Ellen and Lawrence Sosnow
Frederick M. R. Smith Andrew Craven Howard Levi Christine Symchych and Jim McNulty
Willard B. Taylor, Esq. Deborah Crowley Joshua Lewin and Kaavya Viswanathan Steve Symonds
Sharon and John Dye Talbot Logan and Bill Miller Tammy Dowley-Blackman Group, LLC
Founders Aaron Ealy Alan Marks Pamela Thomas-Graham
Ansel Adams Katama and Jay Eastman James McKinney Matthew Tierney and Dana Orange
Melton Ferris Francine Ehrlich Lydia Melamed Johnson Charlotte Tracy
Dorothea Lange Maryam Eisler Héctor Méndez Caratini Kazuo Trusler
Ernest Louie Dana Emmott Robyn F. Mewshaw and Ben A. Indek Elena Urschel
Barbara Morgan Blair England and Peter Carlin Joel Meyerowitz Jurek Wajdowicz
Beaumont Newhall Hany Farag and Sherry Reese Justin Miller Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach
Nancy Newhall Randi and Robert Fisher Wesley and Katherine Mitchell Foundation
Dody Warren Christine and John Fitzgibbons Peyton Muldoon Craig Way
Minor White Arthur and Susan Fleischer Patricia A. Murphy Julie and Andrew White
Dawn and Chris Fleischner Harriette Silverberg Natkins and John C. Williams
Cheri Friedman Stanley Natkins Linda Wisnewski
Thomas Gage, The Gage Fund Lori Perlow Pascale Witz
Listings include donations from Gregory and Aline Gooding Purnima Puri
January 1, 2024, through Stephen Greenberg Heidi and Richard Rieger
December 31, 2024. Terry Greenberg Joel Rosenkranz
 Photography is, etymologically speak-
Redux ing, light writing. The title of William
Henry Fox Talbot’s landmark book The
James Welling’s Light Sources Pencil of Nature (1844–46) boldly annou-
nced the medium’s capacity to automat-
remains an essential and slyly ically delineate the world, making it,
as Henry David Thoreau, another early
mysterious study of photography’s theorist of the medium, put it, nature’s
amanuensis.
raw material. But the graphism of the photograph
is paradoxical: Its apparently immediate
Robert Slifkin transcription of the world is mute and
largely indeterminate. We as viewers
may have a sense of what an individual
photograph depicts, but to ascertain
what it means entails situating the image
within a larger context, such as a personal
narrative or a historical account. Books
such as The Pencil of Nature—and every
photobook since—employ va r ious
techniques to address this underlying
illegibility, whether through textual sup-
plements of essays and captions or, more

No. 259 RE D UX 21
fundamentally, in the organization and the revised edition, as seen through the Previous page:
Lisbon, 1995
sequence of images on the page. tentacular branches of a tree in Meriden,
James Welling’s photobook Light Connecticut, its intense light registered This page:
Jack Goldstein, 1977
Sources, first published by Imschoot, against a white sky only through its
Uitgevers in 1996 and reissued in an ex- corroding overexposure on the tree’s Opposite:
Waterfall, 1996
panded version in 2010 by Steidl/MACK, blooms. By aiming his camera directly at All photographs courtesy
contains hardly any words beyond the a light source, Welling turned an estab- the artist
title and a concise list of each photo- lished photography gaffe into both a sly
graph’s manifest subject at the back of technical coup and a conceptual organ-
the book. When writing does appear in izing principle.
the photographs—as in the volume’s But these light sources are not al-
original cover image, a cursive neon sign ways obvious, and readers are often led
Photographed light
shot from an angle that projects letters of to consider the reason for a particular is always an abstracted
the word brinquedos (“toys” in Portu- photograph’s inclusion. Is it to be found
guese) against a pitch-black sky in Lis- in the subtle f lecks of sunlight that fall
representation of
bon—it is almost indecipherable and on the hefty logs laid out in front of a some deeper source
nearly abstract. We’re presented with a small barn, or is it the logs themselves,
series of black-and-white photographs whose potential energy as ignitable fuel
of energy.
that often include a literal light source, remains untapped? Are we to take the
such as a naked incandescent bulb radi- wispy rapids of a river as capturing re-
ating a halo against a bare white wall (the fracted daylight, or again, should the
first image in the 1996 book), or the sun, rushing water be considered a potential
which appears in the stunning opener of source of energy? Since a photograph is

22 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

essentially the registration of photons to the medium’s more conventional met- pictures taken in European cities and
on a light-sensitive surface, every photo- aphors of mirror and window. Through- those taken in the United States. In this
graph necessitates light and, as a corol- out this body of work, materials such as way, Light Sources serves as a meditation
lary, depicts a light source, however glass and metal are rendered as sensuous on regional specificity, the certain way
obliquely or faintly. Welling’s photo- surfaces rather than transparent or re- that light appears in various parts of the
graphs make this precondition of the f lective transoms, so that a simple mug world, because of not only degrees of
medium a conceptual paradigm and of water contains a thin, allusive silhou- latitude but also wattage and fixtures,
symbolic conceit, suggesting how visible ette that appears on its edge, created by revealing these familiar yet elemental
light when photographed is always an a stack of books: a subtly stunning exam- conditions of vision with a degree of pre-
abstracted and mediated representation of ple of the translation of text into image cision and sensitivity that arguably tran-
some deeper source of energy, whether and representation into abstraction. scends any linguistic description.
solar, synthetic, or subjective. And yet, just as every photograph
Consider Welling’s 1977 portrait of requires light, a photograph, likewise,
his CalArts classmate Jack Goldstein. can never be purely abstract, since it is
His lit cigarette, the neon sign spelling always a picture of something. Despite
“ICE SKATING” seen through a window, its sumptuous exploration of tonal gradi-
and the fluorescent glare on Goldstein’s ents and the suggestive properties of lu-
aviators all make the picture eligible for minous imagery, Welling’s book shares Robert Slifkin is a
the series. But Goldstein’s absorbed gaze something with one of the most direct professor of fine arts at
the Institute of Fine Arts,
and brooding pose question whether the and diaristic of genres, the travelogue. New York University, and
artist might be a source of light himself, Produced at a moment when the artist the author of Quitting
Your Day Job: Chauncey
a Romantic “lamp,” as the literary critic was frequently exhibiting in Europe, the Hare’s Photographic
M. H. Abrams memorably put it, in contrast original book was, in fact, split between Work (2022).

No. 259 RE D UX 23
 Every time I step inside Bharat Sikka’s
Studio Visit studio, in Dhan Mill compound in Chha-
tarpur, located off one of New Delhi’s
Bharat Sikka’s serene workspace busiest arterial roads, I feel like I have
entered the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s
in New Delhi is the result of Stalker. The space is a unique bubble
with immersive energy—albeit without
chance and a few accidents. the sinister vibes of the Russian master’s
imagination—an incubator of creativ-
Somak Ghoshal ity, where the laws of everyday life are
suspended.
The studio feels fitting for a charis-
matic photographer known internationally
for a restless range of work including
magazine editorials, a long-term personal
project on the complexities of fatherhood,
and his own publishing initiatives that
support the work of others.
A converted warehouse with high
ceilings, Sikka’s studio is cavernous and
gray, with an outer room as large as a

24 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

Bharat Sikka and his factory floor. This is his “research studio,” ings and performances, co-organized
studio, Chhatarpur, New
Delhi, December 2024 he tells me, where Stella and Shalini, with artists, are held for Sikka’s private
Photographs by Abhishek who work closely with him, sit behind audiences and sometimes the public.
Khedekar for Aperture
screens, sorting images, organizing Sikka created this haven of activity
prints, and filing away books and papers. through a decade of chance and accident.
There are spacious desks all around with In 2012, his old studio, also situated in the
works in progress scattered on them, vicinity, was destroyed in a fire. “I lost
as well as paints, brushes, pencils, and all my negatives, everything,” he said.
rulers—tools you don’t necessarily expect After a couple of years of working from
a photographer to use. home, he started looking for a new space.
Through the window you can see “It was at that time that Devika Daulet-
The studio buzzes people walking by. A curious few pop in to Singh, the founder of Photoink, pointed
check out the scene. A troupe of dancers me to Dhan Mill.”
with dancers, sculptors, from the studio next door practices their Sikka was immediately smitten by
potters, writers, and lithe moves in the winter light outdoors. the industrial aesthetics of the place. He
Monkeys trample on the roof, setting off rented a smaller studio at first, a former
casual visitors who the stray dogs outside. The world out- warehouse for organic food, and con-
drop by. side keeps spilling in, much like inner verted it into an oasis of wonder. Soon
and outer landscapes crisscrossing OddBird Theatre, a performing arts
through Sikka’s own work. company, set up practice in the hood, as
On one side is the photographer’s did Nappa Dori, a premium brand for
office. Behind a glass-fronted wall, he leather goods. Over the next eight or
sits at a desk facing a large screen, next nine years, the floodgates of commerce
to shelves overflowing with photography opened, and more and more entrepre-
books. The adjacent room holds scan- neurs, designers, and other creatives
ners and other paraphernalia. Then began flocking to Dhan Mill.
there’s an open area at the back, the size By the end of 2023, Sikka had had
of a basketball court, where film screen- enough of the commercial hub that

No. 259 ST UDIO VIS IT 25

26 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE
 mushroomed around his old studio. “While the camera remains the main
When his landlord raised the rent exor- tool of my art, I need the book as a form
bitantly, it was the push he needed to to tell the whole story.” It was only a
f ind a different space. This time, he matter of time before he began layering
moved into the quieter back alleys of painterly and sculptural techniques onto
Dhan Mill. A year on, the studio buzzes his images.
with dancers, sculptors, potters, writers, Sikka’s eclectic sensibility is partic-
and others bringing their ideas and ener- ularly suited to using the book as a
gies into it. Some have their own studios canvas and his archive as raw material—
on the premises, others are casual visi- some of his recent publications include
tors who drop by. And Then (2024) and Souvenir Shop
This collaborative spirit is like (2024). His head is always whirring with
oxygen for Sikka. He started his career multiple projects, some of which are
in India with traditional forms of photog- marinated in the fluid space of his studio
raphy—documentary, fashion—before and cooked during dialogues with
coming into his own during time spent in artists, friends, and visitors. Even as
New York, from 1998 to 2002. “American we speak, he starts showing me early
cinema was a huge inf luence,” he said, iterations of his latest work in progress,
“as was the work of Philip-Lorca diCor- Ripples in the Pond, in which he uses a
cia.” His portraits in the photographic scanner to produce an ingenious shim-
series Indian Men (in the early aughts) mering effect on the surface of the image.
set the stage for later experiments and “Documentation is always a first
adventures. step. Distortion is the real act of dep-
Subsequently, in Where the Flowers arture,” Sikka said. “The images are words
Still Grow (2017) and The Sapper (2022), and sentences. When put together, they
Sikka broke out of the mold of 4-by-5 create a story, novel, poem— whatever it
large-format photography to move into is I want to tell.”
digital interventions and focus on mak-
Somak Ghoshal is a
ing books of his images. “I’ve never been writer and critic based in
a single-image photographer,” he stated. New Delhi.

No. 259 STUDIO VIS IT 27

Spotlight

In a spare, domestic tableau, a bare-chested

older man sits pensively on the edge of a
nightstand. He looks down at a white bird
resting on his hand as a lamp casts light
across his body and an empty mattress.
Above the bed, a small wooden frame
holds a painting of an angel.
The figures within this image—man,
Alana Perino, winner of the 2025 bird, angel—permeate Alana Perino’s
Pictures of Birds (2017–24), an elegiac series
Aperture Portfolio Prize, crafts a of photographs that searches for meaning
in memory and mortality.
haunted story of familial memory Perino, who was born in New York
and raised by separated parents, finds home
in Florida. in many places. In 2020, they moved to
live with their father, Joe, and stepmoth-
Eli Cohen er, Letty, on the small Floridian island

28 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 known as Longboat Key. Perino had
begun to photograph their family in the
Longboat Key condo a few years earlier,
as they noticed Letty first experiencing
symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s.
By the time Perino relocated to Florida,
Letty’s condition had worsened.
In these years, their sense of home
was upended along with the “strange, un-
written contract of the family,” as Perino
put it. Letty was younger than Joe, and
ostensibly would have cared for him as he
aged; now, new family roles formed in
which Perino and their sister became
caretakers of their stepmother. “The en-
tire island became this eulogized space,”
they said. “Everything began to represent
her death.”
At night, Letty would speak aloud in
the room Perino shared with her. “I real-
ized, after many nights, that she was
talking to the same people in the room,”
Perino said. “She was talking to ghosts.”
Pictures of Birds does not shy away from
the idea that spirits dwell in this home,
Page 28: and in many ways, the photographs take
Madi’s Hair, 2022; page
29: Madi on Stair Lift, 2020 comfort in their presence. Perino’s family
on their father’s side is Catholic, though
This page, top:
Lori’s Shell, 2023; bottom:
the photographer was raised Jewish; in
Dad and Samuel, 2024 the spiritual treatment of ancestral re-
membrance and protection, they find
common ground among traditions. Out-
side Longboat Key’s Catholic church,
Perino photographs the three wise men
conjured as statues shrouded in plastic,
an uncanny scene mediating the animate
and inanimate.
Letty died in 2021. Perino continued
to photograph their father, sister, niece,
and a few other family members until
2024, when their father sold the Long-
boat Key condo and moved away. The
later photographs resonate with the loss
and Letty’s continued presence in their
lives. A portrait of Perino’s niece Madi
floating in a pool recalls an earlier photo-
graph of their father, though where his
face turns toward the sky, Madi’s is ob-
scured by her hair as she looks down into
the water. In a self-portrait, Perino, eyes
closed, lays on their back in a pit dug in
the sand on a beach.
Letty would repeatedly ask Perino as
they photographed around the house,
“Why don’t you take pictures of birds?”
After all, that is what most people do on
Longboat Key. Perino initially decided to
photograph anything but the flamingos
and egrets of Sarasota County. In time,
they came to understand everything they
photographed as birdlike, every portrait

30 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

Gulf of Mexico, 2022 as a self-portrait. The mutability and flu-
idity of corporeal figures was never more
apparent than in the countless seashells
cast aside on the shore. Letty had collected
shells for years; Perino viewed them as an
extension of nonhuman ghosts, long dis-
comfited by the removal and disruption
of a creature’s life cycle. They eventually
photographed the shells, too, and made
excursions around the island to photo-
Perino’s sense of home was upended along with graph a wider perspective: the ocean,
statues, a shark living in an aquarium.
the “strange, unwritten contract of the family.” “This is when the project really be-
gan to expand from this notion of memo-
rializing a really sad event for our family
that was prolonged and changed the
shape of all of our roles, to a kind of inter-
nalization of these realities, of our lived
everyday experience with the dead and
their presence in our home,” Perino said.
“How all of these ecosystems—and this
particular ecosystem within Longboat
Key, the humidity, the scope of life—it

No. 259 S POT LIG HT 31

highlights how interconnected all of the This page:
Letty’s Shells, 2020;
different species are and how reliant opposite: Nina’s Afghan,
we are on the shells, the mangroves, the 2020
All photographs courtesy
water, and even things like the aquarium the artist
to survive and to proceed from one gen-
eration to another.”
Perino’s photographs rarely depict
Letty, who resisted the camera’s pres-
ence. In one of her few appearances, only
an out-of-focus glimpse of a hand at rest
is visible in the foreground. The picture’s
title, Nina’s Afghan (2020), refers to the
shawl made by Perino’s grandmother and
draped over the back of a chair. A painted
portrait of their father and Letty hangs on
the wall above the chair, their faces just
out of the photograph’s frame. Nobody
ever sat in that chair. Instead it stayed
empty, an outsize and invisible presence
filling it, a ghostly apparition just out
of reach.
Eli Cohen is a writer and photo-editor based
in Brooklyn.

No. 259 S POT LIG HT 33

Curriculum
Jack Davison
Jack Davison’s nervy portraits of notables revel in
off-kilter composition and dramatic chiaroscuro.
Rough-hewed yet seductive, celebrities before his
lens appear not as chiseled figures of improbable
perfection but rather ghostly presences that recall
a Weegee fun-house-mirror image or the psycho-
logical introspection of an early Ingmar Bergman
film. Davison lives in London and shoots regularly
for The New York Times Magazine and British Vogue,
and for a range of fashion brands such as the Row and
Margaret Howell, all of which seek out his peculiar
but beguiling way of seeing things.

A. K. BLAKEMORE
I discovered the author A. K. Blakemore
quite by accident when a new literary
magazine called Footnote asked me to cre-
ate work in reaction to her text. Amy’s
writing is beautiful, visceral, and urgent,
and I have greedily read everything she
has written. Her 2023 novel, The Glutton,
is particularly sublime.

THE ADVENTURES OF BARON INSIDE

MUNCHAUSEN Ever since Pokémon Blue appeared on the
I had a series of Monty Python VHS tapes Game Boy in the 1990s, video games have
that I watched endlessly as a kid. In the been a part of my life. There’s something
hunt for further silliness, I unearthed that speaks to my imagination when I’m
Terry Gilliam’s 1988 The Adventures of Baron playing that completely draws me in.
Munchausen—a chaotic, bizarre, and vis- Inside (2016) is one of those perfect gam-
ually exuberant film that I think about ing experiences. It functions as simply as
often. Movies of that era can seem so tac- any regular platformer, but it toys with
tile, and the limitations set by a pre-VFX- built-in preconceptions and punishes you
heavy world forced directors to be more for your presumptions. You play as a
creative. I love that everything in the film mute, unnamed character exploring a
feels a little haphazard but nonetheless surreal industrial hinterland. The game’s
beautiful. sparse sound and dramatic lighting are
equal parts enthralling and terrifying.

34 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 LEAST WANTED
I met Mark Michaelson when I went to
the United States for the first time, in
2013. His apartment was a relic of a by-
gone era of New York: a tiny, brilliant
space filled with books, artist ephemera,
and mugshots. We’d known each other
awhile online, but as a first step into the
city, this was really special. He handed
me a copy of Least Wanted: A Century of
American Mugshots (2006), and I fell into
his world of riveting faces. It’s one of my
most treasured books, and I always come
back to it. His passion for the vernacular
set me on a path delving into found pho-
tographs.

BRETT WALKER and FLICKR

When I was a teenager out in rural Essex
with dodgy internet, Flickr opened my
eyes to a world of imagery that I wouldn’t
THE SIMPSONS have had access to otherwise. Early on, I
The Simpsons, particularly seasons one to stumbled across the beautiful—and
ten, has been a big influence on my sense sometimes brutal—street photography of
of the silly and absurd. It was on British Brett Walker. After I did a project on his
TV at the prime slot: post-dinnertime on work for an art class, Brett became a big
a school night, following on from Neigh- part of my life. He was the first person to
bours. There’s not a day that goes by sit me down and tell me what I was doing
without something from those episodes wrong. Served with an acid tongue, his
floating into my head unannounced. lessons would smart and sting, and I’d
leave feeling angry. But within a week I’d
realize what I’d been taught and come back
with a fresh batch of photographs. Flickr,
at the time, was a cauldron of creativity, a
rewarding community that encouraged
See page 6 for image credits. me to share work and experiment daily.

No. 259 CURRICULUM 35

 Guest Editor’s Note
Tanisha C. Ford considers the ongoing work of style, self-expression,
and political change.

Liberated
Threads
MELANIN ABUNDANT. THE DARK LENSES OF SOUTH
African activist Amonge Sinxoto’s Black Vibe Tribe sunglasses
obscure her eyes. The message, written on the frames in white
block text, speaks for her. Sinxoto’s pride is so uncontainable
it bursts through her dermis. Holy Ghost dances on her mela-
nated skin. It’s an offering. We give thanks.
The Kenyan-born, Johannesburg-based Cedric Nzaka
(who runs everydaypeoplestories, the popular photography
blog) snapped this image of Sinxoto at the 2018 Afropunk music
festival in Joburg. By composing the portrait around Sinxoto’s
face, Nzaka enunciates the power of Black abundance. It’s in
the architectural baby hairs, the Senegalese twists that expand
into a low Afro puff ponytail, dainty pearl earrings, and the
headdress—designed by the South African hair artist Nikiwe
Dlova—that resembles a helmet (it can also be worn as a Zulu-
style crown). Dlova’s technique of affixing hair over flexi rods
offers a new take on the now-iconic hair-in-rollers aesthetic,
elevating it from a pre-style to royal wear. The photograph is
simultaneously vintage and futuristic, dainty and militaristic.
It’s the circles. On Sinxoto’s shades, on the headpiece.
Kwame Brathwaite, MER,
1968
They offer a Global South Black girl geometry that emanates
© Kwame Brathwaite Estate from the ancestral soil and conjures itself into a way of knowing

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 37

Shaniqwa Jarvis, Untitled, that is equally artistic and mathematical. A geometry that
2021
© the artist imagines new theorems for new worlds. A cosmology, flexible
like the rods on Sinxoto’s crown, bending and folding time.
MELANIN ABUNDANT.

Fashion has never been trivial for people of African

descent.
It is an act of personal expression.
A pleasure practice.
A ritual.
A political language.
A tool of resistance.

When I started writing about Black fashion over a decade

It is time to revisit the concept of ago, I was taken with the ways that Black women across the
style as resistance across Africa and African diaspora incorporated dress into everyday acts of
resistance in the 1960s and 1970s. Afros, dashikis, cowrie
its diaspora. shells, and head wraps communicated something about their
sense of self, pride in their Blackness, and an embodied vision
of freedom. In the United States, they wore denim overalls in
solidarity with Southern sharecroppers. In South Africa, they
sported hot pants and brandished stiletto heels as weapons. In
the United Kingdom, they adopted the leather jackets and
berets of the US Black Panther Party. I was taken by what I
identified as a cycle of pleasure, innovation, and social violence

38 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

Cedric Nzaka, Afro Punk
2018, Constitutional Hill,
Johannesburg, South
Africa
© the artist

through which Black styles across the diaspora were fortified.

Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of
Soul (2015) was the book that emerged from years of research
across three continents and a constellation of cities.
The “movement of movements” that shaped the 1960s
represented the pinnacle of fashion activism. Radical activists;
entertainers; fashion designers; and young students like my
mother, Amye Glover-Ford, battled Jim Crow segregation,
apartheid, European colonialism, and the afterlives of slavery.
Their clothing became a uniform, armor in the struggle. As I
excavated archives across the Black Atlantic, I stumbled upon
the work of photographers such as Kwame Brathwaite, Malick
Sidibé, James Barnor, Neil Kenlock, and Ming Smith, among
many others chronicling this global movement. They used the
fast-changing technology of the camera to capture the political

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 39

imaginations and freedom dreams of young people of African This page:
Kathleen Cleaver on the
descent, laid bare on garments and accessories. cover of Jet, December
These photographs served as portals to an era. An era that 1971

for Gen Xers like me, was taught in US history classes and Opposite:
conveyed through popular culture as one of seismic social Nontsikelelo Veleko,
Hloni, 2003/2007
shifts and legislative changes, the likes of which we had never Courtesy the artist
seen before and would never see again. But their rendering of
the history was mangled and distorted. In these photographs
lay another political reality. An episteme, a way of knowing a
Black past through the practice of adornment. These images
wrench the words style and fashion from the grips of the
Western fashion world, which had proselytized and commod-
ified them by linking them to conspicuous consumption and
superficiality.
This is not a typical fashion issue.
Their messages were echoed elsewhere in my emerging It does not aim to prove that Black
Black style archive. In Black magazines—Ebony, Essence, Jet,
Sepia, South Africa’s Drum, Flamingo, a West Indian magazine
people are stylish, with our own
published in the UK—on jazz, soul, and funk album covers; fashion ecosystems. It is a refusal.
and in memoirs, yearbooks, and personal correspondence.
They told of underground African diasporic fashion economies
that resisted capitalist impulses, with their own taste cultures,
revered designers, tailors and seamstresses, second-hand mar-
kets, and politics of the liberated Black body.
I engaged in this form of deep study about Black style and
its transgressive politics amid the “they sleep, we grind” cul-
ture that was social media in the early 2010s, tweeting in 140
characters about my archival finds. Like the rest of the world,
I became enamored with posting selfies on Instagram. We
were amateur photographers. Playing with aperture and satu-
ration until our self-portraits were soaked with color, so wet
they bent reality. Auteurs making filmic shorts for Vine with
our smartphones. Bleaching out the edges, blurring, shadow-
ing. Filters as play. A digital visual language.
As 2011 folded into 2015—the year that Liberated Threads
was published—my tweets and IG posts became more enraged
and furious as a large-scale Movement for Black Lives unfurled
around me. Names of Black folks of all genders memorialized
on T-shirts, their names linked with the & sign. Hashtags pro-
claiming #blacklivesmatter, #sayhername, #handsupdont-
shoot. Viral videos of the Black massive taking to the streets
in protest, dancing and screaming to Kendrick Lamar’s 2015
anthem “Alright”: We gon’ be alright / We gon’ be alright / Do
you hear me, do you feel me? / We gon’ be alright.
We were living through an immense social and political
uprising to end anti-Black violence in all forms. Suddenly, the
book I’d written was not about the past in the ways my teachers
had presented it. Liberated Threads was living history. Just like
the young people of the 1960s and ’70s used clothing and acces-
sories to define the contours of their movement, chanting
“Black Is Beautiful” and “The Revolution Has Come,” folks in
the 2010s were too. In the United States, hip-hop fashions (a
direct middle finger to “respectability politics”) were garments
of choice. Skinny jeans and joggers, hoodies and screen-printed
T-shirts, snapback ball caps, Jordans, tattoos and piercings,
box braids with Kanekalon hair in the colors of the rainbow,
and hoop earrings. A new generation of documentary photo-
graphers—including Andre Wagner and Devin Allen—were
recording the moment.
It’s a moment we still have not had time to process, to
fully understand. A moment that was punctuated in many ways
by the pandemic. A calendar of death marking time as we

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 41

 This page:
James Barnor, Sick-
Hagemeyer shop assistant
with darkroom chemical
bottles, used as a guide
for the colour processing
laboratory, Accra, ca. 1970
© the artist and courtesy
Galerie Clémentine de la
Féronnière

Opposite:
Arielle Bobb-Willis,
New Orleans, 2016
Courtesy the artist

marched into the turbulent 2020s. When latex gloves and face lifestyle magazine, Honey, with its f ly fashion editorials. The
masks became an essential part of our everyday attire. When hair artist Nikki Nelms, whose work epitomizes the Black
grind culture was replaced by “soft life” and “rest is resist- whimsical imagination. The generational influence of the Ma-
ance.” We were gearing up for an even bigger fight. lian photographer Seydou Keïta, as seen in the work of Silvia
Ten years after the publication of Liberated Threads, the Rosi and Nuits Balnéaires. This issue is on a mission to unearth
world is still on fire. It is time to revisit the concept of style as unusual pairings, the Black uncanny. Images that disturb and
resistance across Africa and its diaspora. confound vis-à-vis those that avail conventional visual tropes.
But this is not a typical fashion issue. It does not aim to Ultimately, I wanted to see what happens when we take the
prove that Black people are stylish, with our own fashion eco- renegade tool of the camera—or what the historian Dan Berger
systems. It does not beg for Black people to be seen as beauti- calls “insurgent technology”—to demand answers of style. I
ful, or human. It’s not a primer on Africana histories. It is a wanted to hear from contemporary Black image makers about
refusal. what’s at stake for Black communities today in the face of a
I wanted to curate a visual conversation between Black rising tide of global capitalism and genocide. How have camera
image makers who are remixing, reimagining, and, in some and film technologies made new modes (and nodes) of creative
cases, rejecting the aesthetics and political grammars of the expression possible?
1960s and ’70s soul era. Liz Johnson Artur captures the beauti- I hope this issue offers a metalanguage for people who are
ful clash of high fashion and London street style through the trying to make sense of the world. Who refuse to accept cur-
work of designers such as Feben and Mowalola, from Ethiopia rent conditions. Who dare to imagine a free, Black future.
and Nigeria, respectively. Interviews with director Melina MELANIN ABUNDANT.
Matsoukas and stylist Yashua Simmons—who are innovating
in the commercial space—contrast with that between Ja’Tovia
Gary and Fatima Jamal, who both subvert dominant narratives
of Black life through filmic collages that experiment with the
politics of form. Devin Allen offers us another way to think
about protest photography, capturing activists in moments of Tanisha C. Ford is a writer and history
joy or rest. Amy DuBois Barnett on the legacy of millennial professor based in Harlem.

42 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 43
Seydou Keïta

In midcentury Bamako, sitting for a portrait

in Keïta’s studio was a defining
assertion of identity.
Kobby Ankomah Graham

Living Archive
No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 45
A YOUNG WOMAN GAZES CONFIDENTLY AT THE Page 44: Opposite:
Untitled, ca. 1952–55 Untitled, ca. 1952–55
camera, her black hair adorned with white cowrie shells; a man
poses in a sharply tailored suit and glasses, embodying an This page:
Untitled, ca. 1953–57
elegance that is at once African and European. The act of sitting
for a portrait in Seydou Keïta’s studio was a quiet but deliberate
assertion of identity in a heady age of self-determination.
Taken mostly between the late 1940s and 1960s, Keïta’s
portraits are master classes in texture and composition. His
studio—located on land his father gave him behind a prison in
the Malian capital city of Bamako—welcomed a diverse range
of visitors after its 1948 opening, from government officials,
traders, and intellectuals to artists and everyday members of
Mali’s rising middle class. Some went to the studio for profes-
sional pictures; others went to record their growing status and
Keïta captured not just the aesthetics
personal achievements in ways that could be hung on the walls of an era but the ambitions of a
of their homes, stored in family albums, or given away as gifts.
Much like the highlife music that would soon become the rage
people.
across West Africa—a genre blending traditional African ele-
ments with Western inf luences, creating the aspirational
soundtrack to African independence—Keïta captured not just
the aesthetics of an era but the ambitions of a people. His pro-
cess was meticulous. Known for his patient, precise use of a
large-format camera, he favored natural over artificial light.
His signature use of shallow depth of field ensured that atten-
tion remained on his subjects and their attire, creating an
intimacy that distinguished his work from more conventional
studio photography of the time.

46 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 Moreover, as the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor— heart being the legendary Timbuktu. Posterity remembers the
one of Keïta’s foremost champions and exegetes—has noted, empire’s ruler Mansa Musa I as arguably the richest person in
the photographer conceived of his studio as a porous site, for- history (with a net worth of around $400 billion when adjusted
going the late-Victorian device of painted, idealized backdrops for inflation), thanks to Mali’s vast gold and salt reserves, and
for quotidian, ever-changing textiles that allowed him the flex- for his legendary pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, during which
ibility to make work in various settings. “Any space could become his lavish distribution of gold caused inflation in Egypt.
a studio for Keïta,” Enwezor wrote in 2010. Now a nation, Mali remains a creative hub where tradition
Born in Bamako in 1921, Keïta began his journey with photog- merges with contemporary global influences. Its musicians are
raphy in 1935 at the age of fourteen when his uncle gave him a internationally renowned, ranging from the soulful sounds of
Kodak camera. He would eventually work with Mountaga icons such as Salif Keita and Oumou Sangaré, to the African
Dembélé, a former schoolteacher who shifted careers to become blues of Ali Farka Touré and Tinariwen, to the Afropop fusion
one of Mali’s first professional photographers. At one point, of the likes of Fatoumata Diawara. Bamako is Mali’s capital
Dembélé entrusted all his photographs to Keïta, prompting and one of Africa’s largest, most populous cities. Since 1994,
some scholars to question the distinction between their imag- thousands of photographers, filmmakers, and art enthusiasts
es, though others contend that the difference is immediately have gathered there for Rencontres Africaines de la Photogra-
evident to anyone who looks closely: Keïta’s portraits employ phie, widely known as the Bamako Biennale, Africa’s first and
a more deliberate construction, whereas Dembélé’s feel spon- largest photography event, consisting of a large program of
taneous and raw. In any case, both men are rightly venerated exhibitions, talks, and meetings.
in Mali—and beyond—as the country’s photographic pioneers. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, Bamako
Today, Bamako’s long roads weave between colonial-era was in a state of acute sociopolitical upheaval, its people watch-
buildings and new developments. The city is situated along the ing while the might of France fell at their feet. The city bore
banks of the Niger River, where its pirogue boats, carved from the weight of colonial exploitation from the late nineteenth
single tree trunks, drift past colorful markets, echoing its past century until Mali wrested freedom back in 1960. Even as
as a vital crossroads along ancient trade routes linking West France urged its colonial subjects to prioritize European
Africa to North Africa and farther regions. Bamako was once a fashion over their own, the people of Mali simply integrated it
key city in the ancient Mali Empire, which f lourished across into their existing styles. While European fabrics, including
West Africa from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, its damask and wax prints, now synonymous with African fashion,

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 47

This page, left: Opposite: became symbols of cosmopolitanism, traditional mud cloth
Untitled, ca. 1953–57; Untitled, ca. 1952–55
right: Untitled, ca. (bògòlanf ini), indigo dyeing, and intricate embroidery
1952–55 remained embedded in the social and spiritual fabric of the
region, forming the foundation of its material culture. Such
textiles appear throughout Keïta’s photographs, connecting
his sitters to both tradition and global influences. Retaining a
connection to the former was an important act as the colonial
project attempted to supress everything culturally African that
it could not extract and plunder.
Although he is now celebrated as one of the most accom-
plished photographers of the twentieth century, Keïta
remained largely unknown in the West until the early 1990s,
when some of his photographs (uncredited at the time) that
were shown at an exhibition in New York came to the attention
Keïta’s images offer windows into of the French curator André Magnin. This set in motion a
a world where individuals claim mission to Mali to find Keïta and introduce his extraordinary
portraiture—consisting of thousands of images—to a global
space within a rapidly shifting society. audience. Others, including the photographers Bernard Des-
camps and Françoise Huguier, who presented his work at Les
Rencontres d’Arles and at the Bamako Biennale, would also
help introduce the work to new audiences.
This success has not, however, come without controversy.
Some have questioned the commercialization of Keïta’s por-
traits, and the way their deep cultural ties to Mali are often
diminished when framed for the Western art market, a debate
that, in turn, connects to broader issues of appropriation and
exploitation of African art within global networks. In Keïta’s
case, his prints were upsized, from their original, modest

48 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 49
dimensions of 5-by-7 inches, for the contemporary market and
an imagined clientele purchasing art at blue-chip galleries like
Gagosian and Sean Kelly. An illuminating 2006 article in the
New York Times by Michael Rips outlined the multipronged,
dramatic saga and litigious debates around the authenticity of
some editions produced after Keïta’s death.
This fall, the Brooklyn Museum, in New York, will hold
an exhibition that represents an opportunity to once again
assess Keïta’s contributions. The show aims to situate Keïta’s
genius within its cultural and historical context, and to
highlight his family’s role in preserving his legacy. Catherine
McKinley, author of The African Lookbook: A Visual History of
100 Years of African Women (2021), is curating the exhibition.
When I spoke with her last winter, she explained that it will
allow visitors to immerse themselves in Keïta’s world. His
photographs will be displayed alongside textiles and ephemera
loaned from the archives of numerous contemporary Malian
and Senegalese scholars, collectors, and designers. Highlights
include a Ducretet Thomson radio, identical to one seen in
several of Keïta’s iconic images, as well as an intricately hand-
stitched indigo camisole from 1902 and a women’s pagne
(wrapper) from the Musée de la Femme Henriette-Bathily in
Dakar that almost perfectly replicates one seen in his pictures.
Unsurprisingly, his work, with its precision and exquisite
clarity, has drawn comparisons to August Sander’s portraits
made in Germany in the early twentieth century. Keïta’s photog-
raphy is likewise rooted in the culture and currents of its time.
“Keïta crafted a distinctive modernist photographic language
anchored in the Malian arts of textile,” Giulia Paoletti, associate
professor of African art at the University of Virginia, told me.
The cultural and economic forces shaping Keïta’s work were
deeply diverse and intertwined. Jennifer Bajorek, an
associate professor specializing in literature, art, and visual
studies in contemporary Africa at Hampshire College, added
that “his photographs bear witness to longstanding histories of
trade, trade routes, and zones of cultural and economic exchange.
They reveal and carry counter-colonial geographies. This is part
of their extraordinary legacy.”
Bajorek is critical of earlier scholars’ preoccupation with
whether the textiles in Keïta’s photographs were African or
European, given the many cultural currents these objects em-
body. By way of example, she points to the sanu koloni gold
choker worn by many women who went to Keïta’s studio. Its
name—meaning “colony gold” in Bambara, a language spoken
across Mali—acknowledges its colonial ties. Yet its cruciform
shape and five raised points reflect Maure and Amazigh designs,
with jewelry historians tracing its craftsmanship and aesthetics
to Jewish goldsmiths from the Maghreb, whose techniques and
motifs inf luenced adornment traditions across the region.
Bajorek noted that items such as sanu koloni and koso walan—a
dark-blue-and-white checkered strip-woven blanket often seen
as a backdrop or mat in Keïta’s pictures—possess both colonial
history and cross-cultural inf luences. “A community’s rela-
tionships to indigo and indigo-dyed textiles, the protective
properties of the number five, the influence of Islam, ideas of
Blackness associated with gold, the spiritual as well as material
legacies of a millennium of Saharan crossings—all of this is
there and, in its way, visible or traced in the photographs made
by Keïta in his Bamako studio,” Bajorek said.
Untitled, ca. 1954–60
More recent history and events have hampered ongoing
studies and engagement with Keïta’s pictures and legacy. In the

50 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 51
 This page:
Untitled, 1958

Opposite:
Untitled, ca. 1954–57

spring of 2024, McKinley traveled to Mali to meet with the and 1970s, conveys the energy and popular culture of a nation
Keïta family as part of her research. But with the ongoing con- embracing its newfound freedom. Together, they paint a dynamic
flict in Mali—which began in 2012, when northern insurgents portrait of a country in flux.
sought independence—she extended her search beyond the Mali’s relatively late start in photography turned out to be
country’s borders, delving into archives and collections within a blessing, allowing its photographic culture to develop with
the large Malian communities of Dakar and Saint-Louis in greater freedom from the colonial conventions that defined
neighboring Senegal to gather the pieces that will help bring Senegal’s numerous, more formal studios. Keïta was arguably
Keïta’s work to life in the upcoming exhibition. the first Malian photographer to fully embrace this freedom.
With its stronger colonial ties and more urbanized infra- So formidable was his craft and reputation that in 1962 he was
structure, Senegal’s long tradition of studio photography dates appointed Mali’s official state photographer. The arc of his
as far back as 1859. In contrast, Mali’s first studio was estab- career was punctuated by the progression of Mali’s history, all
lished by the Frenchman Pierre Garnier in 1935. Garnier the way from how his portraiture mirrored the high cosmopol-
trained several of Mali’s earliest photographers, including itan hopes that followed the country’s independence, to the
Dembélé, but it would take another decade before they would military junta that pushed him into retirement in 1977 at the
start producing their own studio photographs, opening the age of fifty-six. At this point, Keïta started pursuing his second
door for others, such as the legendary Malick Sidibé, who passion: auto mechanics. Moving from photography to working
looked up to Keïta and called him “the Elder.” Keïta’s formal on cars may sound like quite a switch, but it had been a passion
studio portraits not only capture the elegance and aspirations of Keïta’s before his uncle put the Kodak in his teenage hands.
of post-colonial Mali, but also ref lect the growing desire for It afforded him a more sedate life, away from the politics of the
independence, eventually achieved in 1960. In contrast, Sidibé’s time. Having been originally trained in the family business of
candid nightlife photography, which f lourished in the 1960s carpentry and furniture making, Keïta had always been a man

52 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 53
 This page:
Untitled, ca. 1952–55

Opposite:
Untitled, 1949
All photographs ©
SKPEAC/the estate of
Seydou Keïta and courtesy
The Jean Pigozzi African
Art Collection

of his hands. McKinley sees a kind of consistency here: “He

was a real technical guy. He liked to tinker and learn and take
things apart completely and reconstruct them. That was kind
of his nature. He did it with cars, he did it with cameras and
everything.”
Keïta died in Paris (where he had traveled for medical
attention) in 2001 at the age of eighty. Today, the Bamako property
his father gave him can still be found with his family’s name
hanging from its tall wrought-iron gate. His legacy within Mali
remains strong, with his prints found in places such as the
Musée National du Mali, which showcases the country’s

54 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

cultural heritage and history through an exceptional collection and art—even while it is sometimes unmoored from its origi-
of traditional and contemporary art, including sculptures, nal context, a recurring problem in the circulation of African
textiles, historical artifacts, and photography by the likes of photographic archives.
Keïta, Sidibé, and others. “Keïta is widely revered in Mali today,” Keïta’s images offer windows into a world where individ-
said Antawan I. Byrd, a photography curator at the Art Institute uals claim space within a rapidly shifting society. They are
of Chicago who has worked in Mali. “And his legacy is affirmed living archives, constantly being reinterpreted through con-
through symbolic gestures such as the Grand Prix Seydou temporary perspectives. They show the enduring power of
Keïta Award, the top prize given at the Bamako Encounters photography to capture more than mere aesthetic. In contrast
Biennial of African Photography. Yet, despite the international to the colonial photography that came before Keïta, which
visibility and acclaim his photography has rightfully achieved, presented the African as mere object, his subjects gaze directly
Keïta remains, in many ways, a mythologized figure. There is into the camera and claim their place in history on their own
still much to explore and critically examine about his practice.” terms. Yet his work endures as not only a quiet defiance of
This mythologization stems in part from how Keïta’s work colonial narratives but a testament to his mastery. His images
has been understood within global art circles as a singular, do more than resist; they honor, elevating each subject with a
almost omniscient eye of post-colonial Mali, widely celebrated care so profound that their presence, etched by Keïta into history
yet often removed from the complexities of his working condi- using shadow and light, feels both intimate and monumental.
tions, the commercial nature of his practice, and the broader
photographic landscape of Bamako at the time. As a studio
photographer, Keïta primarily responded to the needs of
his clients, creating portraits that reflected their aspirations in
a season of change. Unlike many modernist photographers
in the West, he did not fetishize authorial control, and likely
considered himself both a craftsman and an artist. While shap-
ing images to meet demand, he was acutely aware of the times
in which he lived but may not have consciously curated the Kobby Ankomah Graham is a
legacy he has left behind. Over time, Keïta’s work has been writer, DJ, lecturer, and cultural
imbued with layers of meaning—revered as both documentary researcher who lives in Accra.

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 55

Liz Johnson Artur
Germany with her mother. During trips
to Ukraine to visit relatives, she was ex-
posed to the notion of clothing as a social
language—a recurring theme in her

London Calling
work. Her Levi’s were inconspicuous in
1970s Germany but prized and sought
after in the Soviet Union. She would
pack suitcases stuffed with “hard to get”
clothes for each of her family members,
the Western labels within the scarves and
jeans the objects of fantasy and desire.
But clothing in a Johnson Artur photo-
graph is never a status symbol or marker
of wealth—hers is not fashion photogra-
phy but the documentation of what she
calls “presence,” which pertains to the
stories her subjects carry of loss, heart-
break, and redemption, the ordinary sto-
ries of work and leisure.
Movement between worlds—first
Germany and Ukraine, followed by New
York and then London, where she has
been based for more than thirty years—
formed Johnson Artur’s attunement to
the particularities of Black self-fashion-
ing. Her photography constitutes a long,
sprawling conversation with the Black
people of London.
The designer Feben—of Ethiopian
heritage, raised in Sweden, and now
living in London—is one collaborator
Gazelle Mba The photograph sneaks up on me. A for whom clothing’s affordance, Johnson
Black girl with a platinum-blonde buss Artur said, is “navigation through a coun-
down wig, her face slightly cocked, a try you don’t speak the language of,” or, I
closed invitation. We might as well not might add, has not welcomed you, or
exist. She is lined up backstage with an- threatens to deport you.
other woman like her, matching in Mow- Johnson Artur and Feben met at PDA,
alola T-shirts emblazoned with the word a monthly East London club launched in
ebony in bold capitalized letters, fishnet 2013 by Mischa Mafia, Ms. Carrie Stacks,
tights, and black thongs. Their location is and Crackstevens. PDA was set up with
indistinct, a fashion show or a nightclub the aim of providing a dance floor for
or both, but this image, taken behind the queer and nonbinary POC dissidents to
curtain in the fever of preparation, nudg- let loose amid vogue anthems and blaring
es at a memory I believed lost. It brings edits of Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming
to mind East London underground raves Back to Me Now” or Mariah Carey’s
and sweaty red-light basements, after- “One Sweet Day.” It is the magnetism and
parties in someone’s Camberwell flat sticky sociality of the club that pervades
dancing till midafternoon, running to Johnson Artur’s photographs of Feben’s
catch the 185 bus home afterward, spent work. What is on display in her images of
but satisfied. And I think only Liz John- the models backstage at Feben’s show is
son Artur can do this—the photograph’s not just a svelte Black woman in a bright
subtle evocation of nostalgia, not for the halter neck and textured mid-length skirt
past but for the present, a longing for a but clothing as a vestige of belonging, the
time that is still here. means through which Black people find
This longing, as powerful as it is themselves and find others like them.
ineffectual, is common to the Black dias- When I spoke recently with Johnson
pora, the desire to return as strong as its Artur about her work with designers such
impossibility. Johnson Artur herself was as Feben and Mowalola, whose T-shirted
born in Bulgaria to Russian and Ghanaian girls still haunt me, there was a large
Tolu Coker fashion show
parents in the mid-1960s. She spent her tapestry in her living room. I asked her
backstage, 2024 childhood and adolescence living in West where it is from. She responded, hazily,

56 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

“from the street,” or one of those markets
that are abundant in parts of South London
where Johnson Artur has her home and
studio. Staring at the tapestry, I asked
again, “Are you good at finding things, or
do they tend to come to you?” Her an-
swer: “I think it’s both, you know. I’ve
trained myself to look for things, and I
think things find me too. I’m a bit of a
collector.” This seems to describe her
photographic practice as well. It’s not
things she looks for but people. Photogra-
phy is what gives her a “reason to go up
to someone,” she told me. This lifetime in
search of presence has shaped a living
archive of Black life in London.
Looking at a woman in a curly Farah
Fawcett–style wig and bright-pink leather
jumpsuit, I see myself, eighteen, about to
head to university. I am, for the first time,
alone in London, without my strict Nige-
rian parents—only an older cousin who
disappears for most of the day to see his
friends. He leaves my boyfriend and me
to our own devices, no questions asked.
Summer is nearing its end, and we arrive
a few days shy of Notting Hill Carnival. I
do not know where I am going or what
precisely I am going to do once I get
there, but I know it is important how I
dressed. My hair in fluorescent silver
twists, a thrifted red-and-white striped
shirt, and lips stained with bright cherry-
red lipstick. When I look at Johnson
Artur’s work, it is this implicit under-
standing I recognize, of the importance
of dressing up as a Black person in Lon-
don. The way the streets almost seem to
demand it, the delight in the bright smear
of eye shadow across eyelids or the fla-
grant display compelled by a miniskirt
and bra top, the insouciance of sagging
denim, the undeniable glamour of a lace
frontal. Johnson Artur’s photographs are
devoid of the self-protective “should” I
grew up with (“This is how a lady dress-
es,” I was told). They are never bawdy,
but exude a certain confidence and a lust
for life, a Black jouissance.

Gazelle Mba is a Nigerian writer

who is currently working on her
first book.

58
Previous spread:
Street style at Mowalola
show, 2024

This page:
Tolu Coker fashion show
backstage, 2024

60 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 Mowalola fashion show
backstage, 2024

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 61

This page:
Mowalola fashion show
backstage, 2024

Opposite:
Feben fashion show
backstage, 2024
All photographs courtesy
the artist

62 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

Nikki Nelms thing because I knew so many Black girls
who could do hair,” she explained. That
may have been so, but she was in demand.

Hair Stories Even at such a tender age, Nelms already

had a roster of professional women com-
ing to get a French roll. “At first, my mom
couldn’t believe these adult professional
women would come over and let this kid
give them short haircuts.”
Dropping out of Florida State Uni-
versity to enroll in Loraines Academy,
Nelms initially saw doing hair as a fall-
back plan. But a legendary local stylist in
St. Petersburg named Donna, who ran an
in-demand salon called Shear Essence,
inspired her to see that another way was
possible. “She was so poppin’,” Nelms
said. One day, she noticed Donna featured
in Ebony magazine and was surprised to
discover that hair could be big. That
something she thought was so regular
and had been doing for as long as she
madison moore Nikki Nelms lifts hair to the level of con- could remember—doing hair—could
ceptual art. In one indelible look, a zipper be grand.
runs down the middle of a French roll, Nelms is not afraid to embrace im-
and who knows what kind of goodies are perfection, breakage, and flyaways, mak-
inside. “The zipper style was my nod to ing hair junky by using unconventional
the ’90s, Detroit, down south Miami, and materials sourced from vintage shops,
hair competitions,” Nelms told me rec- old sewing kits, and Home Depot. In
ently. “Back in the day, they would add one collaboration, with the artist Lorna
color sprays to a French roll, or trinkets. Simpson for Vogue, the model’s plaits are
It was the ’90s, so you had to go crazy on punctuated with the rhythms of trinkets,
the French roll.” It’s no wonder that 1997’s jewels, and other whatnots. In another,
B.A.P.S. (Black American Princesses) colorful spools of thread are added to the
is one of her favorite movies. “B.A.P.S. hair as a reimagining of beaded styles—
was so iconic because those styles were “the ultimate sew-in,” she called it.
considered ghetto and hood—as are a lot What defines Nelms’s boundless flava
of things we do—until it’s mainstream, is making something she wants to see, a
and then it’s chic and high fashion.” love for constructing beauty in unexpected
With collaborators who span the ways. There’s a nervousness that comes
worlds of contemporary art, fashion, when working with new, experimental
film, and music—including Mickalene ideas. “But that is what you have to lean
Thomas, Janelle Monáe, Lorna Simpson, into if you want to create,” she told me.
Deana Lawson, Solange, Arthur Jafa, and One look for Allure says it all. Styled
Zoë Kravitz—Nelms uses her talents to in less than ten minutes, it consists of
uplift the beauty of Black hair. Her lyrical, red, blue, and yellow combs stuck into a
mesmerizing approach often incorpo- high, gravity-defying ponytail, fluffy like
rates vibrant, electrifying colors, unusual cotton candy. “The shoot was supposed
materials, and a campy, sculptural zhuzh to be an earring story, it wasn’t supposed
that adds a twist and turn to the story. to be a hair feature,” she said. “But I love
“Hair is such a canvas to be creative,” she for hair to take over! I could see a mother
said. “You can be a walking billboard of wanting art in her daughter’s room, and
art on your own. If you don’t have a dol- this picture might be the thing that she
lar, you can express yourself through your goes to bed seeing at night. Hair is the
clothes, through your hair. You could best art.”
put a whole palm tree in your hair if you
want to.”
Born and raised in Florida, Nelms madison moore is the author of
Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful
grew up surrounded by hair. “I’ve done Eccentric (2018) and an assistant
hair since I was a little kid—third or professor of modern culture and
fourth grade. I didn’t think it was a big media at Brown University.

64 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

Sharif Hamza for Allure,
2020
Courtesy the artist

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 65

This page:
Sharif Hamza for Allure, 2020; opposite: Ming Smith for i-D, 2021
Courtesy the artists

66 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

This page and opposite:
Adrienne Raquel for Aritzia,
2024, and for Allure, 2023
Courtesy the artist

68 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 69
This page:
Renell Medrano for Elle, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Opposite:
Lorna Simpson for Vogue,
2017
© the artist and courtesy
Hauser & Wirth

70 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

Melina Matsoukas
The Director
A Conversation with Solange Knowles

Melina Matsoukas has made a lasting mark on visual culture as the director
of unforgettable music videos—among them Rihanna’s “We Found Love”
and Beyoncé’s “Formation”—and the 2019 feature film Queen & Slim, which
bends the romance outlaw genre into an utterly contemporary meditation on
police brutality and Black love.
In some ways, though, it feels like Matsoukas is just getting started. The
Los Angeles–based polymath is currently developing a flurry of passion
projects (the only projects she does), among them adapting a legendary
female mobster’s life for the screen and documenting her own experience as
a new mother. On top of everything, Matsoukas also runs De La Revolución,
a bicoastal collective of photographers and directors that she founded in 2021
as an alternative to exploitative models of inclusion in the creative sphere.
Solange Knowles, the singer-songwriter, recently sat down with Matsoukas
for the “Barbara Walters treatment,” interviewing her friend and collaborator
about her expansive image making across the fields of photography, music,
television, commercials, and film.
No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 73
Solange Knowles: One of the powerful
things about an image is that it lives
far beyond us, forever. At what age did
you understand the gravity of image
making?

Melina Matsoukas: I was raised by free-

dom fighters. My parents were part of a
socialist movement called the Progres-
sive Labor Party, and I was raised to create
change and incite dialogue, to challenge
the status quo and how people think. I
always felt like I had this purpose to do
these things and honor my family and
the people that empowered me. I just
didn’t know what the tool or medium
would be to do that.
In high school, I started dabbling in
photography. My father was an amateur
photographer, and he introduced me to
the power of the lens and the idea of doc-
umentation and what that can do as a
tool in the revolution. And then, when
I got to college—I went to New York
University—I really started understand-
ing the reach and the scope and the con-
versation and the story you could create
with the photograph, and understanding
the power of filmmaking to reach the
world and to give voice to the unheard,
to document communities that we don’t
necessarily see all the time, and use that
power to unify people. That felt like my
purpose.

SK: I love this origin story. I didn’t know

your father was an amateur photogra-
pher.

MM: He’s going through all his slides now,

thousands of slides of our family and
friends, and just our lives. It’s so beauti-
ful to have that archive.

SK: I think a lot about the photographs

that you took in Cuba in 2001 and how
personal and intimate and special
they are, and the gravity they hold.
Although, obviously, your style has
evolved and changed, I still see the
loving, tender, and attentive gaze of
how you see Black women—and have
always seen Black women—in those
images, celebrating their strength and
vulnerability, but also allowing them
to just be. I wonder how your adult self
sees those images.

MM: NYU had a summer exchange pro- Page 72: This spread:
Melina Matsoukas, 2025 Andre D. Wagner, for Melina
gram where I went to Cuba and studied Photograph by Alexander Matsoukas’s “Precious Cargo”
photography for a summer. That was Saladrigas for Aperture campaign, Levi’s, 2023

74 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 actually my first time in Cuba, my first
time returning to my mother’s home-
land. It was an incredible experience
to be able to take that camera and have
the courage to photograph people—and
learning how to do that and thinking
of Ming Smith and Gordon Parks and
Anthony Barboza, all these people who
have documented our history. I remem-
ber being shy, and not wanting to essen-
tially steal these images of people with-
out asking permission. But then, it’s a
hard dance to play. You ask permission
and then people start posing, and that’s
not necessarily what you want. Anyway,
I was able to really hone the skill of being
a street photographer there.
At the same time, I had this other
side of me, and I still do, where I like
fashion and celebrating Black women
and bodies, and embracing our sexuality
and our beauty. One of my main goals
in life is to change the idea of what tradi-
tional beauty looks like in our culture.
I was also able to photograph some of my
friends and the people that were on the
trip with me, and other Cuban women.
I did a series of nudes, I remember.

SK: And some pregnant women.

MM: Yes, that was a friend of mine.

When I look back at those pictures, I feel
like, Oh, they’re very amateur. It was
definitely part of my journey to under-
stand the technicality of how to take a
photograph. But there’s a lot of themes
in that work that have continued and
evolved through my career, which seems
pretty evident, in terms of how I look at
Black women and try to celebrate them
and honor the role that they’ve played in
my life and my artistry.

SK: When you talk about the song and

dance between the gaze and the lens,
and also finding that trust with people
to capture them authentically, I often
think about our first time—well, sec-
ond time—working together, which
was the video for “Losing You,” and
being in South Africa, and us wanting
to enter the continent with as much
sensitivity as possible. When you pull
out the camera, you feel definitely a
little shy or hesitant in some ways. But
as soon as the cameras came out, the
sapeurs came to life. I know from be-
ing on the other side of the lens, some-
times the photographer can have all
of the technical skills in the world,

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 75

the best lighting, the best set design, have thought a lot about in my practice, beauty is, that’s created by commercials
or can capture on an expert level—but because in our creative industries, —commercial advertising and what you
if the synergy is not there and I don’t people sneer or frown upon commer- see on television and all of that. So in
feel comfortable or safe, then my jaw cial work, despite the gravity to story- order to be a part of that dialogue, you
is tight and it’s clenched, and you can telling and the incredible ways that have to actually enter that dialogue.
see that in the image. Are there any you can use commercial work to tell I try not to get too product heavy. I
specific skill sets you bring to the ex- stories. That’s something that I’m hate shooting products, so that’s kind of
perience to have people put their fascinated by. a deal breaker for me. But I love to tell
guard down and feel safe with you to What is your approach to com- stories. I made a Levi’s commercial two
capture them at their most vulnerable mercial work? And how do you choose years ago, in Jamaica. I’m part Jamaican,
and authentic? the projects that you wish to be a part and they sent me a story of how Levi’s in
of? the ’70s made its way to Jamaica, and
MM: I think the key to that, and to my these people made it their own, and it
success, is humility and respect for the MM: I was so influenced by pop culture, was kind of the staple of reggae and
subject. My job has always been to tell with MT V and music videos and, dancehall, and the role that denim
someone else’s story. It’s never to tell my honestly, with commercials. I always played in that culture. I felt such close-
story. I’m trying to document and bring wanted to start on music videos. In my ness to that subject matter and that era
out somebody else’s influences and feel- younger years, I definitely did things and time and that visual language.
ings and values and inspirations. So it just to pay bills. But at one point in my
never begins or ends with me. career, I was like, I can’t do this any- SK: I want to use that as a segue into
more; it’s not worth enough to work on De La Revolución and talk about how
SK: I think that you are one of the best things I’m not passionate about. you have transitioned not only as a
commercial directors of our genera- So in my commercial work, I try to businesswoman and an agency but as
tion, and I know it’s really difficult find brands or stories that I believe in. a mentor to emerging directors and
to find a way to maintain a sense of And with commercial work, the reach is photographers, and what that day-
authenticity and integrity and even so much greater because of the money to-day looks like for you, how that’s
spirituality when working with com- behind it. I find that it’s actually a great changed the way that you approach
merce and the idea of selling some- way to create change. When we talk your own work. Tell us more about
thing. It’s something that I actually about changing what the standard of that.

76 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

Opposite: MM: So I did a film called Queen & Slim. crossover. So being a part of this collec-
Ming Smith, Sun Ra, Space
II, New York, 1978 I fought really hard to bring in four dif- tive during my film inspired me to cre-
Courtesy the artist ferent photographers to shoot alongside ate a space that actually helps guide
This page: me as I was making that film, to inter- directors and photographers in their
Still from Melina Matsoukas’s pret the film in a way that was different goals and what they want to achieve.
music video for Solange
Knowles’s “Losing You,”
than what I was shooting. One of them De La Revolución was born of a
2012 was Andre Wagner. He’s an amazing, time when people were starting to ex-
Courtesy the artist
primarily street, photographer. I call ploit Black artists, and feeling like, Oh, I
him our generation’s Gordon Parks. I want to have this person on my roster
also invited the incredibly talented because they’re Black, and I want them
photographer Lelanie Foster, who was to shoot Black people, but I have no un-
there the whole time. She’s my cousin, derstanding of the culture, I don’t care
too, so that helps. She was able to photog- about who this is profiting, where it’s
raph the actors and the behind-the- going, I just want to check a box. I wanted
scenes, and have access in a way that I to provide a safe space that felt more like
I always felt like I thought was just so powerful. I brought community, a collective of support and
had this purpose to Awol Erizku there a couple times to take empowerment. So that’s why I started
objects from the film that symbolize the De La Revolución over one banner. My
do these things and story and create still lifes around them. mother is from Cuba and was a child of
honor my family I loved the idea of this collective the revolution, so I feel like I’m a child of
coming together to tell one story. I thought the revolution in ways that I’ve inherited
and the people that back to the Kamoinge Workshop, the from her.
empowered me. Black collective in the ’60s. Anthony
Barboza was part of it, Ming Smith, SK: I’m so proud of you and what you’ve
Shawn Walker, Daniel Dawson, Jimmie done with . . . would you call it an
Mannas, and many others. agency? A studio?
In my journey, I’ve gone from photog-
raphy to music videos, to commercials, MM: It’s all of that. Agency, studio, pro-
to narrative and f ilm, to T V—and duction company, collective, whatever
they’re all very separated. There’s not a you want it to be. That’s family. That’s
lot of crossover in terms of the people who we are.
you work with, and the crew. They like
to keep it so segregated. I hate that, SK: It’s been incredible to watch it
because obviously there’s incredible unfold. Thinking about Queen & Slim,

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 77

Anthony Barboza, Portrait
of Beverly Johnson, 1970s
Courtesy Getty Images

and the world that you created not

only with just the film but with the
music and with the style and with the
rollout and the stills, what have you
learned from that process of world
making and the importance of the
space that surrounds the film just as
much as the film itself?

MM: That was an incredibly challenging

journey, creating the film. I didn’t real-
ize it, because I had never done a film,
that the way that you market it is just as
important to the success of the film as
the film itself. So for me, it actually was
a way that I was able to take what I felt
my skill set was and bring it all together.
Obviously, I started in music, so the mu-
sic’s going to be really important. The
collaborative nature of filmmaking is
what I truly enjoy and flourish in, and is
one of the reasons I became a filmmaker.
So to have all these different, incredible
artists involved in the making, but also
the rollout, of the film was really impor-
tant, and it felt important to stay true to
the messaging behind the film.
We wanted to make sure our com-
munity had access to the film first. So
we had a screening at the Underground
Museum in LA and the Brooklyn Academy
of Music in New York before it was out,
and we focused on Black publications
and journalists first before we brought it
to the broader audience.

SK: I’m curious how at this stage, after

your success with Insecure and The

78 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 79
This page: Changeling, you decide on other pro- SK: I love seeing you as a mother to
Photographer
unknown, Portrait jects you want to pursue. Charli, and I’m very excited to see how
of Madame Stephanie that will impact and influence your
St. Clair, 1930
Courtesy Bettmann/Getty MM: I’m working on a lot of things. I’m work in your lens as well—because I
Images developing a f ilm based on Marlon know that it will.
Opposite:
James’s novel A Brief History of Seven I had a few other questions. My
Andre D. Wagner, Still Killings (2014), which is a story that takes favorite moment, among my top three
from Melina Matsoukas,
Queen & Slim, 2019
place in ’70s Jamaica and moves to ’80s Melina moments, was Master of
Courtesy the artist New York—two periods that are very None’s “Thanksgiving” episode. The
important to me in my life and my artistry. fact that you created such iconography
I’m working on a film on Stephanie St. with one episode.
Clair, who was this West Indian woman
who ran Harlem during the Harlem Ren- MM: I never really wanted to do episodic
aissance and protected it from white work because I like to create the world
I would like to see mobsters. It’s a gangster flick about this from inception. But Lena Waithe is a
that renaissance not incredible woman who has been erased very persistent person, and she really
from history. And I’m working on a TV wanted me to direct this episode of
be a renaissance, but show on Jack Johnson, who was the first Master of None, which was a bottle episode
just be a standard. Black heavyweight boxing champion— about her character coming out as a
he’s from Galveston, your place—with lesbian to her mother, played by Angela
HBO. That’s a series. There’s a bunch of Bassett. The story is told through several
other projects that are in the works that Thanksgivings, from childhood to adult-
I hope will come to fruition in the next hood. Like I say with everybody, “Send
couple of years. I’m also working on rais- me the script or the song or whatever it
ing my baby and documenting that jour- is, and if I love it, I’ll do it.” And I fell in
ney of motherhood and life. love with the script.

SK: I love that about your work, that

no matter what the medium is you
have such a distinctive fingerprint.
Whether it’s a music video, a film, just
one episode, or a photograph, we can
quickly identify that it is your lan-
guage.
My last question is about the pow-
er of image making through the lens
of Blackness. I feel like there was a
renaissance in photography and film-
making of Black artists, but that
renaissance was through the gaze of
whiteness and white validation. It’s
been really interesting to see this mo-
ment in 2020 when everybody was
running out to prove that they saw us
and that they valued us in one way or
another. What do you think the future
looks like for Black artists, Black
filmmakers, Black photographers in
this space? And what would you like to
see the world look like and evolve
into?

MM: I feel like there was a renaissance

when I was growing up, when there
were these beautiful Black films and
filmmakers that were actually kind of
blacklisted afterward, like Julie Dash,
Darnell Martin, Theodore Witcher, and
Ernest Dickerson, to name a few. And
then, yes, around 2020 or 2019, there
was another renaissance for Black film,

80 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

and a lot of what maybe you can call Black executive who was looking for a Black art, and archiving it, and creating
white guilt about the systemic racism gangster film that centered on a Black space for other Black artists, and collab-
within filmmaking. People were trying woman, and she was very excited about orating with each other. And, also, just
to move against it, which was necessary. it—and now, we’re developing that to- being able to be a cheerleader at times
There was a lot more space for Black sto- gether and getting it made. A lot of other and showing that there’s value to our
ries and for those to be told by Black art- people who I have great relationships stories and our image, and we need that.
ists. Now a lot of people are reverting with just didn’t see the value or the idea That’s what feeds us. And it’s not just us.
back to their racist ways, and they’re that that has appeal to an audience— It’s the world. I feel like, especially as
like, We never really felt differently, and of any color. So it’s important that we’re African Americans, our greatest commod-
now we don’t have that same pressure, on the other side. It’s important that ity is our culture, and it has been shipped
and we can go back to excluding Black we’re creating our own platforms, so around the world and appropriated, and
and people of color from this conversa- that we’re creating these opportunities, we need to regain ownership of it. And
tion, and denying access to them. and having ownership on the business you are very much a part of that story.
Honestly, this last year has been very and the decision-making side of things, One of the things I love most about you
difficult, even for me, to get projects and are on some of these boards. Until is not only your art but your appreciation
made that are about people of color. that happens, we are relinquishing the for our artists and our stories and the
Many of my projects have been dropped. power to control our image, which is really idea that we have to own them and own
I would like to see that change. I upsetting. that history and also protect it. That’s
would like to see that renaissance not be what we need to do.
a renaissance, but just be a standard. I SK: Well, we look to you.
will continue to make room for artists of SK: Yes. We can end it with the words
color involved in filmmaking and stills MM: Thanks. I mean, I’m going to keep of the great NeNe Leakes: We see each
and image making, period. But I think on fighting the good fight. And I will other!
it’s also about creating that access and us continue standing on the shoulders of
being on the other side of it. I was just many who came before me, who fought MM: Exactly.
talking about working on a f ilm on that good fight, and be inf luenced by
Stephanie St. Clair, which I had taken to them and their work, and even stand
a bunch of people, and nobody was inter- arm in arm with my fellow comrades, Solange Knowles is a singer, songwriter,
ested in making it until I took it to this you being one of them, and creating and actress.

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 81

 Nuits
Balnéaires
Côte
d’Ivoire
Dreaming
Tiana Reid

A slinky crease of a jacket, a streetlight facto capital) to a new-to-him scene in the

lurking in the background, marbles rest- small, historic town of Grand-Bassam,
ing in the scoop of a collarbone, flowers Nuits Balnéaires was renewed by nature.
forming a shadow on a model’s face. These His embrace of landscape is evident in
intense details of light, shape, and form depictions of soft water bathed in twi-
heighten an atmosphere of crepuscular light. After all, the moniker Nuits Bal-
intimacy in the brooding and buoyant im- néaires translates to “seaside nights” in
ages of Nuits Balnéaires, a photographer, English and is also meant to provoke
musician, filmmaker, poet, and set designer what he refers to as an “idea of nostalgia,
based in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast. this melancholy of the Gulf of Guinea,
Nuits Balnéaires’s interest in photog- this strong relationship to memory.”
raphy can be traced back to some high In Grand-Bassam, he created a med-
school modeling he did casually for itative series called Scent of Appolonia
friends. “In that age, it was the boom of (2021), in which he pays homage to the
Opposite and following
spread: Facebook,” he told me recently. “It was land of the N’zima Kôtôkô people, an
From Infinite Stories all about doing cool photos for social me- ethnic group of southwestern Ghana and
for Yua Hair, 2024
dia.” When his mother came back from a southeastern Ivory Coast. “I was very in-
Pages 86–87: trip with a compact Sony camera, he be- terested about the link between those
From Dreaming, Ivory
Coast, 2020
gan to make his own pictures. This even- territories and the resilience and the sus-
tually led him to the fashion industry tainability of this whole culture, despite
Page 88:
Keren Lasme et Noella
—magazines, advertising, brand photog- the borders that we inherited from the
Elloh, Ivory Coast, 2018 raphy, as well as deep admiration for the colonial era,” he explained. “These peo-
know-how of local artists and designers ple still coexist, still share things, even if
Page 89:
Guy Martial, Ivory Coast, in Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, and Dakar. “It they exist in those two lands and are sep-
2018 was a great environment to learn,” he arated by these borders.”
Pages 90–91: said. “But at some point, I had that need Nuits Balnéaires’s interventions, then,
La Fleur D’Appolonie to focus on more personal stories.” mark a wider community. His subjects
(Scent of Appolonia), 2021
All photographs courtesy
After moving in 2019 from his for- include friends, professional models, and
the artist mer home in Abidjan (Ivory Coast’s de family. “I work a lot with my sister, who

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 83

is definitely my main muse,” he said.
Another series stems from a partner-
ship with a curatorial platform, Yua Hair,
which focuses on textured hair in Africa
and the African diaspora. These exqui-
sitely staged photographs take their inspi-
ration from 1960s and 1970s West African
studio portraiture, where self-fashioning
was understood as a political act within
Africa’s postcolonial cultures. A relentless
respect for fashion, tailoring, jewelry,
craft, and aesthetics are, to Nuits Bal-
néaires, “a way to really reclaim that iden-
tity which is strongly African, but also
with a lightness that equals an openness
to the world, to this contemporary world,
to this global world in which we exist to-
day.”
While Nuits Balnéaires’s crisp and
ecstatic images suggest an homage to
iconic West African photographic prac-
tices, they also attempt to forge ahead,
naming and creating a contemporary cul-
ture that is specific to his community in
Ivory Coast but encouraged by friends in
Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Europe, and the
United States. “I feel like I’ve been so
nourished and built up by the space I
come from and its people,” he said with
pride. “I think I’ve been lucky.”

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor

in the Department of English at
York University.

85
 Silvia Rosi picked up photography in her
Silvia Rosi teenage years, documenting friends and
family in the northern Italian region of

Family Album Reggio Emilia, to which her parents had

immigrated from Togo in the late 1980s.
Rosi’s own move from Italy to England,
to attend the photography program at the
London College of Communication from
2013 to 2016, instigated a period of intro-
spection about what it means to leave
home and put down roots elsewhere. The
feeling of being between cultures is at the
Vanessa Peterson heart of her practice.

92 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 “I was going back to my memories of photographs placed on them. The pict-
Italy and looking back at images in family ures—a woman in a wedding dress, family
albums that would reconnect me with a snapshots, a black-and-white studio
sense of my identity,” she told me recently. portrait—suggest the ways vernacular
Far from her familial networks, Rosi, who photography has been used in the African
is still based in London, turned the lens on diaspora as a means of documenting lives
herself. “You use what you have at hand,” in transit. Her work also speaks to visual
she noted with a wry smile. and oral modes of memory and transmis-
Opposite: From the series Disintegrata (Disin- sion in family lineages. In Self-Portrait as
Self-Portrait as My Father,
2019 tegrated, 2024), the image Disintegrata My Father (2019), Rosi sits on a chair against
con Foto di Famiglia (Disintegrated with a blue backdrop, balancing books on her
This page:
Self-Portrait as My Mother,
Family Photo) shows Rosi standing be- head, wearing glasses and a formal shirt,
2019 tween two wooden cabinets with framed tie, and trousers, like a clerk about to

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 93

head to the office. On the ground next to
her feet are tomatoes stacked in small
pyramids. Here, Rosi steps into the meta-
phorical shoes of her father, whom she
never met, filling in the gaps between his
physical absence and the stories passed
down about him by her mother. Though
he arrived in Italy an educated man, Rosi
said, “I know that when my father lived
in Italy, he worked as a tomato picker. He
ended up being part of the exploitation
of migrants. This happened in the late
1980s, but it is also something that is still
happening now.”
In Self-Portrait as My Mother in School
Uniform (2019), Rosi carries toothpicks,
reminiscences of the items her mother
sold at roadsides and markets to passersby
as a young trader in Togo, as her mother’s
mother had before her. Styled in clothing
similar to her mother’s school uniform,
with books placed on her lap and her gaze
fixed firmly on the viewer, Rosi inhabits
the vulnerable yet entrepreneurial spirit
of her mother as a young woman before
motherhood. In another image, Self-Portrait
as My Mother (2019), Rosi carries a radio
on her head—a reference to highlife and
Afro jazz but also a symbol of a deeply
personal memory of her mother’s.
“The radio represents a moment
when my mother was working for an Ital-
ian family. She overheard on the radio Disintegrata di Profilo In bringing together the performa-
(Disintegrated profile),
that a law would be passed that would le- 2024 tive elements of self-portraiture and the
galize migrants present in Italian territory commitment to preservation found in
at that time, which enabled my parents to family albums, Rosi stages a different
stay and live in Italy,” Rosi explained. kind of performance, similar to the ways
Style and clothing, much of it sourced in which Samuel Fosso used his own
from secondhand shops, are key to Rosi’s body in the 2008 series African Spirits to
work. In her inhabitations, the glasses or perform and embody famous pan-African
suit her father wore transcend their status figures, including Patrice Lumumba and
as middle-class signifiers to become objects Kwame Nkrumah. Rather than reaching
imbued with private meanings. Shutter toward historical personages, Rosi emu-
release cables snake across the floor and lates those who aren’t written about, the
lead to the hand of the artist, as if to show lives of immigrants trying to establish
she is in complete control. themselves in a new country in the face
Rosi’s recent work is openly indebted of economic precarity and cultural dislo-
to West African studio photographers such cation. Her images beautifully highlight
as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, who tender, painful feelings of misrecognition
helped visualize a kind of postindepend- and alienation, and the difficulties of
ence modernity. In one photograph, Disin- starting anew.
tegrata di Profilo (Disintegrated Profile,
2024), the artist, clad in a preppy blazer and
khakis, poses with an Agfa-Gevaert book:
an apparent reference to the legendary
photographer James Barnor, who moved
from London back to his nat-ive Ghana in
1970 to set up the first Agfa color-processing
laboratory in the country. Rosi holds the Vanessa Peterson is a writer
book up to obscure her face, as if to resist based in London and a senior
the camera’s capacity to fix identity in place. editor at Frieze.

94 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 Self-Portrait as My Mother
in School Uniform, 2019

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 95

Neither Could Exist Alone,
2021

96 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 Sposa Italiana Disintegrata
(Disintegrated Italian
bride), 2024

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 97

Disintegrata con Foto di
Famiglia (Disintegrated
with family photo), 2024

98 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

 ABC VLISCO 14/0017,
2022
All photographs courtesy
Autograph APB, Collezione
Maramotti, MAXXI and
Bvlgari, and Jerwood Arts/
Photobooks

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 99

 Turning
Top:
Spread from Honey,
June/July 2002, with
photographs by Marc
Baptiste

Bottom:

the
Spread from Honey,
December/January 2001,
with photograph by
Marc Baptiste

Page

In the early 2000s, Honey magazine mixed hip-hop, street style,

and high fashion.
Amy DuBois Barnett

DURING THE 1990S AND EARLY 2000S, HIP-HOP SURGED embodied the male-dominated perspective of the urban music
from the streets of Harlem and the Bronx into a multimillion- universe.
dollar international industry. As hip-hop and pop culture Things changed in 1999, when Kierna Mayo and Joicelyn
became indistinguishable, music executives and artists ran Dingle founded Honey, launching the New York–based maga-
New York’s social scene, with everyone from Wall Street bros zine with a free preview issue graced by Jonathan Mannion’s
to fashion-industry brass begging for access to the most exclu- iconic honeycomb photograph of Lauryn Hill and the words
sive record label parties. Models walked high-fashion runways “Taste the Future.” After the magazine was purchased by
in dookie chains and do-rags, imitating the culture’s true inno- Vanguarde Media in 1999, I left a senior role at Essence to
vators: the first generation of Black women who had grown up become Honey’s editor in chief—a dream job. I hired a team of
with hip-hop. brilliant, ambitious women of color who loved music, cared
For years, newsstands had little to offer these women. about social issues, and had fabulous taste. The magazine
Though venerable and empowering, Essence, the lone title for quickly carved out a space where young Black women could see
Black women, couldn’t possibly reflect the true diversity of its themselves represented—not as a monolith but as a dynamic
overly broad target audience. Meanwhile, mainstream women demographic with multifaceted aspirations and a collectively
were able to choose between titles like Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, dope aesthetic.
Harper’s Bazaar. For hip-hop enthusiasts, there was Vibe, XXL, What set Honey apart wasn’t just the stories we told but
and The Source, among others. But those magazines largely how we told them. The magazine’s design sensibility captured

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 101

 the raw, vibrant energy of New York—a hub for hip-hop and
fashion. Our photoshoots were cultural events in themselves,
visual love letters to a generation. We hired a mix of photog-
raphers with art, fashion, and music-industry cred who also
understood our audience, such as Vincent Soyez, Lauri Lyons,
Estevan Oriol, Udo Spreitzenbarth, Kwaku Alston, and Garth
Aikens. Our visuals were steeped in insider cultural allusions:
models in roller skates wearing both fascinators and Kangols,
taken by Jamel Shabazz; a black-and-white designer photoshoot
in a boxing ring, photographed by Piper Carter; a moody image
of a shirtless male model combing a female model’s thick
natural hair, taken by Barron Claiborne; a spread featuring our
favorite female DJs, photographed by Renée Cox. The brilliant
Marc Baptiste, who was responsible for many of Honey’s most
memorable spreads, photographed models in looks that refer-
enced Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and
other music icons. Honey’s pages spoke to our readers on a
This page, top: Opposite, top:
Spread from Honey, Spread from Honey, deeply personal level.
August 2001, with December/January 2001, We extended our smart trendsetting ethos to the artists
photographs by Barron with photograph by
Claiborne; bottom: Jonathan Mannion; we covered, featuring hot up-and-comers as well as established
Spread from Honey, bottom: Spread from stars. Multiple major artists credit Honey with their first solo
October 2001, Honey, March 2002,
with photographs by with photographs by
magazine covers—from Alicia Keys to a baby-faced Beyoncé,
Piper Carter Barron Claiborne styled in a dramatic blond Afro and swinging 1960s makeup.
Courtesy the author Being a hot up-and-comer itself, Honey, and everyone on the
editorial team, often had to fight for our more famous cover
subjects and for our uncommon creative perspective. I don’t
know what was more difficult, confirming Mary J. Blige for a
cover or persuading her to be photographed by Dah Len in a

10 2 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

black leather rocker-chick outfit holding an electric guitar. I
don’t know if it was more challenging to secure André 3000’s
cover or get him to pose shirtless in a surreal circus-themed
conceptual photoshoot by Baptiste. Booking the Lil’ Kim cover
was a monthslong undertaking; getting her to pose for Ruven
Afanador wearing a custom-made micromini dress made of
dollar bills was nearly impossible. But we did. And that’s what
made Honey unique.
In fighting the notion that Black women were a monolith,
Honey stood alone in representing the diversity of our readers.
But what I’m most proud of is how Honey empowered its audi-
ence to see themselves as cultural innovators. We didn’t just
tell them they were leaders in style and creativity—we showed
them, through every photoshoot, feature, and editorial deci-
sion. Honey helped galvanize a generation and, in doing so,
created a powerful sisterhood that lasted beyond its untimely
discontinuation in 2003.
In my last editor’s note in Honey, I wrote that “as editor of
this crazysexycool magazine, I have been able to give a voice to
us—young women of color who just didn’t see our lives, inter-
ests, and style reflected in other magazines.” That accomplish-
ment has been one of the greatest honors of my career. “Because
of you,” I wrote, “I feel I can achieve my wildest dreams—and
I want the same for every one of you wonderful Honey women.
I love you guys and I’m going to miss you tremendously. But I’ll
be watching!” Amy DuBois Barnett is the former
editor in chief of Honey, Teen
People, and Ebony magazines.

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 1 03

There Are
New Suns
Ja’Tovia Gary in Conversation with Fatima Jamal

“My films are for audiences who have yet to be born,” Ja’Tovia Gary some-
times says. Gary, born in Dallas and now based in Atlanta, makes cinematic
poems that interweave archival and contemporary images in an attempt
to recast narratives around Black histories and futures. Her breakout work,
The Giverny Document (2019), alternates footage of the artist walking through
Monet’s canonical garden with recordings of Nina Simone, the activist Fred
Hampton, on-the-street interviews in Harlem, and police brutality, forming
a dense, associative tapestry about the safety and bodily autonomy of Black
women.
Fatima Jamal also confronts the gaze placed on the Black female body. An
Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose practice spans filmmaking, writing,
activism, and modeling—she’s walked runways for labels such as Telfar and
Random Identities—Jamal is perhaps best known for No Fats, No Femmes
(2015–ongoing), a documentary experiment in self-portraiture and a vivisec-
tion of the power structures that shape desire. Her work aspires to imagine
a world where othered bodies thrive.
The two artists and friends recently met to discuss the roles spirituality
and ancestral healing play in their work, the importance of creative courage,
and their shifting understandings of home.
No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 1 05
Fatima Jamal: My first encounter with Page 104: but also creative courage, and with a
Ja’Tovia Gary, Precious
your work was The Giverny Document. Memories (Tower), 2020 thought toward, how can we honor these
It blew my mind as a young experi- folks?
This page:
mental filmmaker to find someone Fatima Jamal, The Long
who was searching for new ways to Memory Quilt, 2024– FJ: Something related to this is con-
ongoing
bend the form. Courtesy the artist
sent. For a long time, I’ve only wanted
to film myself, because consent gets
Opposite, top and bottom:
Ja’Tovia Gary: In that film, I’m consid- Ja’Tovia Gary, Stills from
tricky when you’re making images
ering the body. If you take my body, or An Ecstatic Experience, with people who have changed over
your body, and place it in Monet’s gar- 2015 time. Even myself. I reckon with how
den, that’s going to bring about a differ- I’ve changed over time and how much
ent meaning than if you place us in the I’m willing to allow past images to be
middle of Times Square. So how do put on the table.
history and time come to bear on that
person? How will that affect, or how will Home is something JG: It’s real.
that in some ways counteract or add to,
any sort of meaning that can be made
that we do and make FJ: I was just thinking about a recent
when that body is present? Since I’m wherever our body trip to Dakar, and how there are so
using archival material so often, I’m not many people there who resist capture.
behind the camera filming all the time. I
goes. There was this one guy who was just
might be using footage of, say, Ruby Dee so beautiful, who didn’t want to be
from the 1960s. What does Ruby Dee photographed. It’s partly about some-
represent? What is she saying? What’s thing spiritual that can’t be seen in
going to happen if I place Ruby Dee next pictures. So when I think about repre-
to Assata Shakur? I try to represent senting Black bodies on a transnat-
Blackness with integrity, with courage, ional level, I’m just like, Wow, there

10 6 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

are some of us who can’t even be cap-
tured in a photograph, and what that
means for our lineage, what it means
for our eyes being documented perma-
nently by a camera.

JG: That’s definitely something to con-

sider when you think about the history
of the camera, which was not made for
us. It’s an anti-Black instrument. I’m
making this long-term memoir film that
incorporates old footage of myself—I’m
talking 2007, early aughts—being an ob-
noxious American tourist in Ghana,
pointing the camera at everyone. Folks
are putting their hands up, blocking
their faces, and I get this quick lesson in
consent, but also privilege. Looking at
this footage now makes me question
what it means for people who are coming
from the West to spaces in the Global
South and the desire to explore and
lay your gaze upon people, wanting to
capture them. Even as a Black American.

FJ: It’s like when people did allow me

to film them, it was because they
desired me. I felt that I could often
exploit their desire for me to keep the
camera up, because they’re not even
worried about the camera as much as
they’re just worried about me giving
them time and attention. It’s pretty
interesting.

JG: You often turn the camera on your-

self. I’m wondering, why is it important for
you to document yourself at this moment?

FJ: I turn the camera on myself in an

effort to make myself real to myself in the living room. When you come to domestic space, is so specific. My great-
and to see myself. To leave evidence. my grandmother’s house, it’s literally aunt had the same figurines. I also have
To craft some manner of aliveness and an African American art and historical an auntie in Arkansas, and she’s got a
beauty that registers in my brain and museum. If I could offer a title to the bunch of yard art. I’m talking angels,
body as a knowing and confidence. exhibition that is our living room, I’d butterf lies, frogs, and bottle trees, and
That I might believe in myself and think title it Sunday Morning for all the chimes, a bunch of ceramic stuff, things
myself worthy and capable of good. church-going, Sunday-morning paint- hanging from the roof, and positioned
That I might have a record of how I ings. She has multiple Black render- on the porch. My mom is usually critical
lived, how I worked to love myself, and ings of The Last Supper and an array of this aesthetic when we visit. But I’m
all the things I saw and did in between. of Black and African figurines that I like, “No, no, no, baby, this is abstract
To build an archive. used to have to clean one by one, and expressionism. You need to get into it.”
Growing up, I loved taking pic- put back in place, because she knew
tures. I’d often buy disposable cameras where every one of them was. Like bell FJ: When I think back on what makes
and turn them onto myself to take a hooks said, the home was a place that me an artist, I keep coming back to
selfie (before the iPhone came out). loved her. So when I lived with my that. I asked my grandmother recently
And after being told I was ugly for so grandmother as a teenager, subcon- in a letter, “Have you ever considered
long, I needed to see for myself what sciously my mind was being awakened yourself an artist?” So much of the art
was possible of my image. On top of to Black art aesthetics every day. world takes us away from the places
that, I loved my family’s photo-albums. where we first learned or encountered
My grandmother has containers full of JG: That Black American practice of art. I learned art in my grandmother’s
them, and she has a select few on view dressing and styling the home place, the house. And a lot of my arts education is

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 107

due to the Black church. I learned and
developed my talent and artistic sensi-
bility there in theater, worship arts,
singing, dance, graphic design, and
oration.

JG: I love that you’re thinking about

these elders as artists. My great-aunt
Mae walked around with a Super 8 cam-
era in the 1960s. This is the same auntie
that’s responsible for me having six or
seven reels of Super 8 footage where I
can see people who have passed on. She
used to clean white folks’ houses. She
said, “They could do it. Why couldn’t I
do it? I know who they are. I’m cleaning
their house. I know everything about
them. So, of course, I can go out here
and get me a camera, too, and record my
folks.”

FJ: When you think about what has

been passed down to you from your
family, these ancestral understand-
ings of style, of space, of installation,
how does that extend to your work?

JG: I’m trying to put forth a grammar, a

fingerprint, something that is specific to
me, but that resonates with the collec-
tive. I’m thinking about rappers and jazz
musicians. Thelonious Monk doesn’t
sound like Oscar Peterson. McCoy Tyner
doesn’t sound like Miles Davis. Just as
GloRilla doesn’t sound like Meg or
Doechii. Everybody has their style. But
too often, this notion of style sometimes
gets lost, especially if you are somebody
who’s trying to come up in the ranks.
You might feel like you to have to conform
or create something familiar and safe.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the
process of making my films. I always tell
the young people, “Don’t worry about
those mistakes; oftentimes these are
little portals, these are little thresholds
for you to push forward toward some-
thing new.” This is not to say that
everything has to be completely original.
There’s nothing new under the sun. But
Octavia Butler says there are new suns.

FJ: Hearing you talk, I thought about

one of my favorite DJs, who’s also
a record producer, Theo Parrish.
He says that we should all work to
Ja’Tovia Gary, Still from An
identify our sound signature, which Ecstatic Experience, 2015
is the title of his label. Brilliant phil-
osophy and approach to making mu-
sic. I want to develop my own sound
signature, and I am learning how to

10 8 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 109
 craft that. But you can only learn that
through improvisation. You have to
play.

JG: There’s such an extreme archival

aesthetic right now. And I say archival
aesthetic and not an archival practice
because I feel there is a distinction. So
we have to be very careful about just ran-
domly pulling clips because we think
that they’re cool and cute, and removing
context. But visually, because the formula
is so insisted upon, folks will fall in line
with that formula. And then, if some-
body diverges and does something new,
you’ll see a bunch of repeats. I don’t
want to say copycats, but you’ll see a
bunch of folks that are interested in
exploring that aesthetic as well, without
having any real connection to it perhaps.
But it is something to strive for, your
own unique sound signature.

FJ: People can hop on aesthetic value,

but they don’t know the madness that
one undergoes within to birth such
a thing.

JG: My God.

FJ: They want the final aesthetic. They

don’t want the initiation though.

JG: My God today!

FJ: That’s why I think people can be

protective over the things that they
give birth to.

JG: Right. That’s so important. Because

you’re not getting to a new song without
a little bit of tribulation. You’re going to
have to travail a bit. You got to go
through that valley in order to come out
on the other side.

FJ: Earlier, you mentioned wanting to

construct a grammar. Doing language,
as Toni Morrison says. Talk to me about
Quiet as It’s Kept (2023).

JG: Quiet as It’s Kept is a short experimen-

tal film–cinematic poem, and a companion
piece to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s
first novel. I’m using the text as a point
of departure to create a loose interpreta-
tion, or reply, not an adaptation of the
book. I’m taking contemporary icons,
imagery, events, and I’m exploring some
of the themes that come up in the book.
Chief among them would be the gaze.

110 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

This idea of perception, how we perceive
ourselves, how we are perceived by oth-
ers, and how this has an inf luence and
an impact on our mental health, our
wellness. The Bluest Eye includes a lot
about cinema and the movies.
I’ve taken the algorithm, I’ve taken
the TikTok feed, I’ve taken viral videos
from Instagram, because I feel that’s a
contemporary manifestation of the gaze.
That’s how we are formulating our sense
of self. It’s how value and judgment on
what is considered beautiful and desira-
ble is passed. Also, whose life is worthy
—who gets to live and who dies at the
end of the day. So you see a lot of con-
temporary social-media footage, but you
also see archival from Old Hollywood.
You see Super 8mm film that I have shot
of myself. So I am gazing at myself, and
engaging with marigolds, which are a
totem in the text. You see me in Senegal.
You see a very important interview with
an elder of mine, Dr. Kokahvah Selassie,
a Toni Morrison scholar who has written
about how traditional African religious
practices show up in Morrison’s books.

FJ: Many people think only about the

adaptation, but they don’t think much
about the reply. I don’t want to know
what you think, I want to know what
you feel. Toni Morrison makes you feel
some horrific things.

JG: She makes us feel these things be-

cause she understands that in order to
move through these things, we have to
feel them.

FJ: Right. Because from a very African

cosmological perspective, we’re not
thinking from the brain. We’re think- This page: FJ: It reminds me that home is a very
Fatima Jamal modeling
ing from the gut. The film was such a a look from Random active thing. It’s not passive. It is some-
great response to that. Identities’ fall 2020 thing that we do and make wherever
season in Florence.
Photograph by Texas Isaiah
our body goes. Because I started griev-
JG: Thank you. ing as I was leaving Dakar for Saly, and
Opposite, top: again leaving Saly to return to America.
Ja’Tovia Gary, Still from
FJ: The waters. The Giverny Document, I felt like I was leaving home for a place
2019 that is home but not so much my home,
JG: The water. There’s a lot of water in Opposite, middle and as I feel so estranged. I left thinking
there. bottom: Ja’Tovia Gary, of the words of an elder from Gorée
Stills from Quiet as It’s
Kept, 2023 Island. When asked, “What can we in
FJ: Speaking of waters, indigo is cur- the West do to stay connected to our
rently bleeding on my hands. That’s ancestry?” he said to learn an African
how you know it’s real. language. What does learning differ-
ent languages open up for our under-
JG: There’s nothing like an indigo- standing of home and belonging?
stained hand. There’s nothing quite like
it. It feels auspicious, like holding a JG: It opens up new pathways and possi-
handful of black-eyed peas. bilities of connection in the brain and in

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 111

Gioncarlo Valentine, the collective. There’s something about houses there were in addition to Mai-
Fatima in London, 2019
© the artist landing in a space where things feel both son des esclaves (where the Door of
familiar and new at the same time, No Return is) blew my mind; and also
where these are complete and total that the island had a people before
strangers, but you’re looking at doppel- and after the capture. There are peo-
gängers and members of your family. ple who still live on the island, and
You’re saying, “Oh, that looks like my they have a culture and a way of being
uncle right there; oh, this is my father’s and a way of relating to one another.
smile; this was Bahia; this was Accra.” Home is such a troubled notion. When
There’s something very beautiful about I think about it in relationship to
I’m trying to put reconnecting. I’m glad you got to experi- the body, it feels a little bit closer to
ence Dakar, because, baby, she’s gorgeous. belonging.
forth a grammar,
a fingerprint. FJ: I think a kind of baptism happens JG: And the body, give or take, is some-
when we cross the Atlantic to return thing that we can control. As someone
to the place of capture, where we were who has survived sexual violence, for a
stolen from. It’s just like asking, What very long time it was very hard for me to
would we be if we were never stolen be in my body. In fact, sometimes it still
from this place? And then to come to is. It can be terrifying to be in your body.
Gorée Island and see how many slave But when you engage in things like, say,
a somatic practice, or prayer and medita-
tion—and I’ve been doing Qigong,
which an elder introduced me to—this
kind of energetic work helps you come
back into the body. There’s something
very powerful about that—reclaiming
this first space, this initial home, like
returning to where you were stolen from.

FJ: When I first had the idea for No

Fats, No Femmes ten years ago, I
thought about Marlon Riggs’s Tongues
Untied (1989) as a model. Since there
was a limited grammar available to
me, so much of the early part of the
project was through that subjective
lens where I was taking up Black
gay men’s sociality and history. All
through a Black feminist gaze, of
course, but it has since expanded far
beyond that.
I’ve recently taken up the prac-
tice of letter writing. I wrote to my
mom and my grandmother last year,
and one of the things that I talked to
them both at length about was how I
can only imagine what it has been like
navigating the world as they are—be-
cause we are spitting images of each
other. I come from fat, dark-skinned
women. There was a moment where I
was filming my grandmother, and she
uttered the word ugly. So the psychic
pain that I had been feeling is not im-
agined. This is a real thing. I felt them.
I’m praying for the bloodline. Because
I’m like, If this is what I’m navigating,
walking through the world as a six-
foot dark-skinned Black woman, I
know they got hell. There is just noth-
ing but grace and abounding love for

112 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

Ja’Tovia Gary, You Smell them. Because it’s not an easy thing. your art as an archive of who you are.
Like Outside . . ., 2023
All works by Ja’Tovia Gary This film is a portrait of a woman. It’s This is the real-deal work. When people
courtesy the artist and Frank a self-portrait of a woman who is reck- talk about “doing the work,” this is what
Elbaz, Paris
oning with some very serious things in I think about.
creating an image of herself. My body
has gone so many places they wish
that they could have gone, and when I
consider all of that, it’s a self-portrait,
but it also feels like a very generative
and venerative work, where I’m lifting
up these people that reared me to a
certain place where I could rear
myself.

JG: I’m so strengthened to hear you

clearly identify the creative work as work
of ancestral healing. How this creative
project is connecting you to the lived
experiences of your mother, your grand- Ja’Tovia Gary is an artist and filmmaker based
mother. When folks talk about being an in New Orleans.
artist, this is what matters. Moving be- Fatima Jamal is a writer, model, and artist
yond an object and really thinking about based in Harlem.

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 113

Devin Allen and pride that people don’t know that we
have here. That’s when I decided that I
was going to document everyday life in

Picture Man Baltimore.”

Allen notes that it was the tattoo art-
ists, rappers, hairstylists, and nail techni-
cians in his community that he first rec-
Rikki Byrd ognized as artists. This acknowledgment
is tantamount to the aesthetics he draws
attention to in his portraits: swooped
baby hairs, door-knocker earrings, gold
necklaces, and the woman sitting stately
atop a horse adorned in sneakers, cut-off
denim shorts, and fishnet tights. In one
image, Allen zooms in on a subject’s
overlapped hands in fingerless gloves
reminiscent of a Spiderman costume. In-
stead of webbing being emitted from
the fingers, stiletto nails emerge, embla-
zoned with jewels and a declaration of
place and ego: “West Baltimore” written on
the thumbs, “Top Bitch” on other fingers.
Allen himself hails from the area
scripted across these nails, and he, too,
proclaims its specificity. The camera
turned him into a sort of flaneur of Balti-
more, pushing him into neighborhoods
outside of West Baltimore that were un-
familiar to him growing up. Apprehensive
glances toward the man with the camera
In a photograph taken by Devin Allen, a him to begin photographing Black wom- who was not from around here eventually
woman stands against a brick wall, light en from a vantage point that causes the turned into admiration, garnering him
bouncing off her darkened puffer coat. viewer to look up at them, exemplifying the title “Picture Man.” This meandering
With the subject’s gaze averted from the their strength. This approach is evident was a lesson in building trust as well as an
camera, the image reads as Johannes Ver- in his image of two women wearing Afros instantiation of his use of the city’s exte-
meer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) and large hoop earrings at the 2019 Afro- riors as his primary setting. Allen ex-
reimagined. The covered head of the sit- punk festival in Brooklyn: The photogra- plained, “People will be like, ‘Oh, can I
ter in the painting is swapped for Bantu pher casts them against a cloudy sky, so come do a studio visit?’ And I’m just like,
knots. The luminescent bauble of Ver- that they look down like a pair of angels. ‘The street’s my studio. Catch me outside.’”
meer’s painting is replaced by a large disk This photograph is an example of In a self-portrait, also staged out-
stating “BLACK LIVES MATTER” be- not only Allen’s study over the years but doors, Allen does not take the moment
side a raised fist. “Apparel is a part of that also his ever-expanding subject matter for himself. Instead he trains his lens to-
whole activation,” Allen said of his obser- since his rise to prominence. In 2015, his ward a mirror being held up by a person
vations of style within the protests he has photograph of a Black Lives Matter pro- hardly in the image. He kneels in the low-
documented. “‘I’m going to wear my test organized in the wake of the murder er left corner, his community of peers
pain, in a sense. I’m going to wear what I of Freddie Gray appeared on the cover of taking up most of the frame. With his
stand for.’” Time. Since then, he has added another hair styled into an Afro, a barely there
In addition to his decade-long com- Time cover, a fellowship from the Gordon pick jutting from it à la a Black Power fig-
mitment to photographing social justice Parks Foundation, a nomination for an ure, the picture reflects Allen’s foremost
movements, this image also demon- NAACP Image Award, and published backdrop: his people.
strates Allen’s deeper engagement with three books. Among all this, he remains
portraiture. In 2017, he spoke with the focused on documenting Black life and
critic Jessica Lynne for this publication his beloved hometown of Baltimore—not
and noted his interest in exploring the just protests but also the mundane.
genre further, naming the work of Anthony “It took me a while to understand
Barboza, Jamel Shabazz, and Ruddy Roye what I wanted to say in the work,” Allen
as a kind of self-guided syllabus for said. “I had to be the visual eyes for my
expanding his practice. The list now community because we had been de-
Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator, and
includes other photographers such as monized, definitely, coming out of Fred- curator working at the intersection
Ming Smith and the painter Amy Sher- die Gray’s murder. I wanted to show the of fashion, performance, and visual
ald, whose work, Allen said, prompted humility and the love and the admiration art.

114 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

Unless otherwise
noted, all
photographs
Untitled, 2019–22

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 115

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 11 7
118
120 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE
Around Da Way
Cowgirl, 2023
All photographs
courtesy the artist

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 121

122 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE
No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 123
Yashua Simmons
Proof of Life
A Conversation with Darnell L. Moore

As a stylist, editor, and éminence grise, Yashua Simmons is an influential

force in the worlds of fashion and photography. Whether he’s creating looks
for celebrities such as Travis Scott, Laverne Cox, and Lana Del Rey or paying
homage to his own father as he rides through Yonkers on horseback, Sim-
mons approaches his shoots with a novelist’s flair for scene, working with a
close-knit network of photographers to craft moments of beauty that often
tell stories the fashion industry has long ignored or dismissed.
“My process in making pictures isn’t only about clothes,” said Simmons,
whose work has graced the covers of magazines including Vanity Fair, Harper’s
Bazaar, and Vogue and the pages of many more. “It’s really about the 360—
the who, what, where, when, why. If I’m dressing someone, even if it’s a still
portrait, just the idea of, Where is this character going? Where are they
coming from? If they have this on, what’s the story around this portrait?”
Here, Simmons talks with the author and activist Darnell L. Moore about
navigating the pressures of legacy media, how he found his point of view, and
photography’s life-affirming qualities.
No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 125
Darnell Moore: Let’s start with your Page 124: tecture by the push of my father for a
Yashua Simmons,
backstory. Where do you come from? Los Angeles, 2025 very long time, three years at a special
Who are your people? How did you Photograph by Paul Mpagi high school, and I studied it two years at
Sepuya for Aperture
come to work in fashion, editorial, and Howard. But it wasn’t really my calling.
styling? This page: Then I connected the dots between fash-
Dana Lixenberg, Untitled,
for Vibe, 1994. Styled
ion and picture making, and that being
Yashua Simmons: I always had a love for by Andrew Dosunmu something I enjoy and love.
Courtesy the artist and
images, without the context of work. I GRIMM, Amsterdam
was always drawn to seeing people who DM: When is this?
looked like me editorialized in a fantasy Opposite:
Micaiah Carter for Out,
way. That’s, sort of, the beginning of it 2019 YS: This is 2004. My main consumption
all. Courtesy the artist of pictures was Vibe magazine, and bill-
boards in Times Square, and just snap-
DM: And you’re from Yonkers? shots that really brought me to that
place.
YS: I’m from Yonkers, New York, born
and raised, and I did my undergraduate DM: You’ve said that Vibe was one
studies at Howard University. It was at of the spaces that inspired you. You
Howard where I really found myself. found yourself in those pages. Are
Two years into school, I had no idea what there cover stories or pictures inside
a career looked like. I had studied archi- the magazine that inspire you to this
day?

YS: There’re a couple of images that took

my breath away. I’ve looked and looked
for them and can’t find them. I don’t
even know if they’re real or if I made it
up in my imagination. But there’s a
friend—a stylist, editor, a fantastic per-
son—named Memsor Kamarake who did
a story where there was a group of
around-the-way girls. They’re in this
picture, and they’re under the Brooklyn
Bridge, and shot in the evening, and
they’re in these silk chiffon dresses, like
John Galliano, Dior, and they look like
me and you and the people that I know
and I grew up with—and they just look
stunning and beautiful under the bridge.
It’s a picture that stuck out in my mind.
It was sort of like, How do these people
get to wear these things? We don’t have
access to that. That’s not what we wear.
Why are they wearing this? Why are
they in this beautiful setting? Why are
they in a fantasy set that is not ours?

DM: I imagine that Vibe might have

been a place where, finally, the people
who seemed to be absent in those
pages are now present. I don’t want to
use the word resistance. I want to say
that this, for you, is a place where you
finally got to see the people who had
been erased in some ways.

YS: Maybe. But that’s not how I experi-

enced it. I experienced it as truth, and I
experienced it as our truth. I always
found myself dreaming in those pages. I
wasn’t looking at other magazines. I

126 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

128 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE
don’t have the story of, Oh, I was in fash- Clifford Prince King, At this point, the digital presence of
Kelvin Harrison Jr., for
ion because I loved Vogue. I didn’t know Fantastic Man, 2022 fashion was getting big.
what Vogue was. Courtesy the artist It took me leaving to really find my-
self and what it is that I wanted to say. In
DM: You don’t like your work being a corporate environment, a lot of the
described as activist. You say you’re messaging and a lot of the point of view
more interested in creating beautiful, is not necessarily yours.
singular artistic work that has a point
of view, work that you love. Is that a DM: I’m going to jump a bit. I often go
fair assessment of how you go about to this quote when I’m thinking about
image making? photography. Susan Sontag wrote in a
1963 novel of hers called The Benefac-
YS: I think that’s fair. My first job, or my tor that “Life is a movie. Death is a
first real stake in fashion, I was intern- photograph.” I always disagreed with
ing at Elle magazine. This is not a Black that. I think about Vibe. I think about
space. A lot of the information that I re- the work of Gordon Parks or Carrie
ceived there—and I was there for ten Mae Weems, or younger folk like Clif-
years—was counter to what my instinct ford Prince King, Shaniqwa Jarvis,
was. I got there as an intern, and later Kennedi Carter, Jamel Shabazz, Texas
on, when I started making my own pages Isaiah, Tyler Mitchell. We can go on
and styling my own work for the maga- and on. Black people have a very par-
zine, a lot of the critique of my work was ticular relationship, I think, to photo-
that it was not Elle. Right? A lot of my graphs because that’s where our lives
work was edited, because for me, the are captured, particularly lives that
reference in my head was something have been in some ways erased. So in
other than what they had going on. So that way, photography is not where we
the information that I was receiving in go to die but where our lives are
terms of the quality of my work was I was always drawn brought to bear.
based off of a lot of non-Black people
having opinions about what it was that I
to seeing people YS: Well, speaking to “Life is a movie.
was doing. who looked like me Death is a photograph,” what I realized
in the magazine space, specifically, is
DM: Your first magazine job, then, is at
editorialized in a that images over time become more im-
Elle as an editor? fantasy way. portant. They may be important today,
but they are more important over time.
YS: As an intern with the then creative They’re snapshots. They’re time cap-
director Joe Zee, who was a master. He sules. They’re proof of life. They’re ar-
was doing editorial pages and also touch- chival. I might like a magazine today, but
ing talent like Justin Timberlake and I know in twenty years that magazine,
Jennifer Lopez. For me, he was kind of that issue, is going to be much more im-
like the first über-editor, the person who portant than it is today. I get most joy
was doing it all. I wanted his job. He was now when I’m looking at an old issue of
the creative director at probably one of something.
the top three American books, and he
was also working in pop culture and do- DM: Are there people, photographers
ing projects, working with talent outside in particular, who have inspired you?
the magazine space. He had this niche
position within fashion that was very at- YS: You named quite a group of them
tractive to me. So I was interning there, that have done that. Tyler and Clifford
and when I left, that’s a ten-year span. It and Shaniqwa are making beautiful pic-
was the bread of my training, my absorp- tures now, but I think in twenty years
tion of sensibility. It’s where I came into those pictures are going to represent a
my own and developed my point of view time and space that—who knows what it
as it pertains to fashion and styling. will be? They all do singular work, and
they capture Black life that is very differ-
DM: And then what after that? ent from a Jamel Shabazz capture or a
Gordon Parks capture. They’re captur-
YS: After that, I took a bigger role within ing today, and that is their work, that’s
Hearst, styling across many different their passion. Those images will be im-
publications in their portfolio: Esquire, portant in telling the times that we live
Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Elle. in now.

No. 259 LIB ERATE D TH RE ADS 12 9

DM: After leaving Hearst, you went to Lelanie Foster, Yonkers, we’re working on this art issue. Will you
New York, for Essence,
Out. Unlike Hearst, which is a parent 2023 come make these pictures with us? We
company of several magazines, Out is Courtesy the artist want to shoot a lesbian on the cover. We
very specifically focused on LGBTQ have a beautiful model, Ruth Bell, and
life. I imagine that afforded you more we want to shoot with Bell on the cover.”
space to possibly dream new stories, She was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
to tell new stories. But what was the
decision behind that move? DM: Can you think of one or two times
where there was a perfect collabora-
YS: Phillip Picardi, wonder kid in media, tion?
leaves Condé Nast in 2018 to become ed-
itor in chief of Out, a legacy brand, which YS: As you mentioned before, my pro-
at that point had focused primarily on cess in making pictures isn’t only about
white gay men. So he’s taking over this clothes. It’s really about the 360—the
brand to sort of build new life, to take who, what, where, when, why. If I’m
the magazine in a more modern, all- dressing someone, even if it’s a still por-
inclusive queer direction. He DMs me trait, just the idea of, Where is this char-
one day: “Hey, I’m going to Out. I’d like acter going? Where are they coming
you to come and be my fashion director. from? If they have this on, what’s the
I love your work. What do you say?” I story around this portrait?
said yes without thinking about it. And I’ve often collaborated with Emma-
not because it was Out and not because nuel Monsalve, who’s an amazing photog-
of really anything other than growth. It rapher. We’ve worked very closely in
was a selfish reason. There was more that way. One of my favorite shoots that
money, and it was a higher title. But it I’ve done to date appears in Cultured
really was my foray into people working magazine. We worked together to high-
with the idea of a political agenda, or light the folks of East LA. We worked
with politics on the line, and working in Images may be hand in hand on that storytelling, from
what we would call an activist space. I clothing to location to pictures to hair
didn’t come from that space. But I was
important today, but to makeup.
like, Shit, yeah—all this needs to hap- they are more important
pen. This idea of a time capsule for queer DM: I want to go to this Essence maga-
people needs to also be taught, and this
over time. zine series you did with the photog-
all needs to go down on the books. This rapher Lelanie Foster, which was
needs to be written. another collaboration. You partnered
with her to make photographs of your
DM: You mentioned some fashion father, who you styled on horseback,
houses and photographers. There are with his horse, in your hometown, on
a few stories I want to list that made the streets of Yonkers. I would call it
me so enamored of your approach. a dream project, right? A project of
Like when I saw the images of the legacy for you. They were some of the
Alvin Ailey dancers who were dressed most beautiful images that I know you
in Louis Vuitton, or the story of the created.
ballroom icon Jazell Barbie [Royale],
or your shoot with Laverne Cox. And YS: One of my style inspirations has al-
then you and Micaiah Carter did a ways been my dad, and the way that he
shoot with Marilyn Minter. I saw the lives his life. He’s kind of this renais-
photographs, but I also saw so much of sance man. He’s a salsa dancer. He’s a
what I understood to be your finger- business owner. He’s an entrepreneur.
print on those works, beyond just the He’s a philanthropist. He’s a cowboy.
photographer capturing the image. And we don’t live in the countryside. We
Help us understand how those are lived in Yonkers. He could have on, I
made. don’t know, Timberlands with a North
Face and a cowboy hat, and be in a pick-
YS: Well, it wasn’t rocket science. It was up truck, with jeans on. I always thought
very simple and very easy for us to sit that was very interesting from a style
and be like, “We want to highlight these perspective. I wanted to honor my dad
people, we want to make them feel beau- that way, and also to create what may not
tiful.” Marilyn Minter, for example, is an be “normal” pictures that we’re seeing
activist in her own right. She’s an ally. of ourselves.
We called her, and we were like, “Hey,

13 0 SUMME R 2025 APERTURE

This page and opposite:
Emmanuel Monsalve
for Out, 2020, and for
Cultured, 2023
Courtesy the artist

DM: You styled Aretha Franklin, Cicely DM: You’ve shared so many ways that Oh, Black people are in the swimming
Tyson, these two icons. the projects you’ve been a part of, even pool. Oh, that’s a phenomenon. It’s really
when you weren’t aware of it, were like, I just wanted to go for a swim. I’m
YS: I styled Aretha. I assisted Samira pushing back against erasure. Do you Black, so I have a political job? No. I just
[Nasr], and she styled Cicely Tyson. still not see it as resistance work? want to make pictures.

DM: Who are now these venerated an- YS: No. I don’t see it as resistance work.
cestors. When I think about what you I see it as work that I want to do, as
said about the importance of photo- something that feels authentic and hon-
graphs for Black people, particularly est for me. I think if I start thinking
in terms of archival pictures, do you about it in terms of resistance work, it
look at those photographs today and would take the joy out of it. I hate that as
just go, Wow, I can’t believe I was part Black people—all people, Brown people,
of that? What’s your response when marginalized people—our existence has
seeing them? to be set up in the idea that it has to be
political or fighting against something.
YS: As a practice, I don’t really revisit That every time a picture is taken of a
Darnell L. Moore is a writer based in Los
work that I’ve done. I just kind of let it Black person or Black family or Black ex- Angeles, and the author of the memoir No
live and be out there in the world. perience, it falls into a political category. Ashes in the Fire (2018).

No. 259 LIBERATED THREADS 133

 mica.edu/aperture

The Stuart B. Cooper Endowed

Chair in Photography is an annual
distinguished artist-in-residence.
The Endowed Chair provides
important feedback and nurtures
growth in the students through
community discussions, individual
and group critiques, and topical
lectures and workshops related
to their own scholarship and
artistic practices.

2025 Letha Wilson

2024 Sara Cwynar
2023 Mahtab Hussain
2022 Stephen Marc
2021 Magnum Photos Collective
2020 Dr. Deborah Willis

Letha Wilson, Slit Slot Canyon, 2023.

Installed at the Richard and Dolly Maas
Gallery. Photograph by Steven Probert.

Catherine Opie: Genre / Gender / Portraiture

Nearly four decades of work from the photographer
who redefined the expression of gender in
contemporary queer portraiture. MUSEU DE
ARTE DE SÃO PAULO ASSIS CHATEAUBRIAND /
KMEC BOOKS

Robert Frank: Mary’s Book Frank’s artist’s book

and love letter for his first wife exemplifies the poetic,
virtuosic approach to photobooks that would come to
define his storied career. MFA PUBLICATIONS, MUSEUM
OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

David Armstrong: Fashion Unearthed from the

Armstrong archive, this sensuous selection of never-
before-seen fashion photography from the artist marks
the first publication since his death in 2014.
MATTE EDITIONS
Mitch Epstein: American Nature Seminal photo
series, together with new works, demonstrate Epstein’s
unflinching documentation of America’s landscapes
ravaged by climate change. SKIRA
The source for books on art & culture | artbook.com
Beacon
A HAHNEMÜHLE CERTIFIED STUDIO

Archival Pigment Printing

Fine Art Fine Art & Film Scanning

Printing
Post-Production

Computerized Mat Cutting + Mounting

Custom Framing

Serving fine art photographers, artists,

galleries and museums worldwide
since 2013

beaconfineartprinting.com 914.522.4736

Ofset Yapımevi is a printing house

producing high-end quality books
globally.
For further inquiries please contact us.
[email protected] | www.ofset.com
 Available Now
A vibrant remix of Walker Evansʼs photographs
of African sculptures that questions our relationship
to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.

aperture.org/a-reprise
The PhotoBook
138 The Eriskay Connection
on their bookmaking
philosophy

Review
142 A new art center blooms
in east Tokyo
146 The revolutionary fusion
of photography and graphic
design
148 Reviews of books by Mike
Brodie, Joaquim Paiva, Lele
Saveri, and Noriko Shibuya
The Eriskay
Aaron Schuman: How did you get into
graphic design and publishing?

Rob van Hoesel: I was always drawing as

Connection
a kid, and as a teenager, I was really into
skateboarding and graffiti. I struggled with
finding my path through education but
eventually studied at the art academy St.
Joost, in Breda. That’s where graphic design
became an obvious choice for me. I felt
A Conversation with Aaron Schuman very comfortable in it, and I also felt I was
good at it.
While studying, I did an internship
and then started working at Kummer &
The Eriskay Connection, a Dutch pub- Herrman, in Utrecht, a well-known
lishing house run by Rob van Hoesel Dutch design studio. In 2006, I started
and Carel Fransen, covers the water- my own design business, first making
front. In their hands, labyrinths of identities, posters, and so on. But by
research—whether into the history then, everything was becoming digital,
of hallucinogenic fungi, China’s one- and I didn’t like making websites and
child policy, domestic architecture in Facebook headers. I wanted to be in
Los Angeles, or the ruins of a fusion print, to smell the ink. In 2010, the idea
reactor on a forsaken island in Patago- for the Eriskay Connection came to me.
nia—are transformed into stories told We published our first book in 2011, two
on both intimate and epic scales. Here, years after Carel joined my studio.
the photographer Aaron Schuman
talks to the duo about their design Carel Fransen: I also drew a lot as a kid,
Spread from Thomas Locke
philosophies, their process, and the mostly cars and maps. I actually tried to
Hobbs, Rampitas (2024) challenges facing the industry today. become a car designer, but that didn’t

138 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

work out. I was more interested in books, AS: How would you explain the differ-
maps, and atlases. I went to art school in ence between a photobook and a
Breda, too, and met Rob. I told him that I book that primarily utilizes photog-
was interested in publishing, and he invit- raphy?
ed me to join him for one day a week. After
graduating, I joined his studio full-time. RVH: For us, it’s always important that
the book is a meaningful object, that it
AS: Where did the name, the Eriskay has something to say, reflect upon, ex-
Connection, come from? plain, or educate about. Often our pro-
jects include many layers—archives,
RVH: When I was searching for a name, I maps, texts, photographs—but we’re
was reminded of Eriskay, a small Scottish primarily focused on the subject and the
island in the Outer Hebrides that I visited story the author wants to tell.
with my girlfriend on our first backpack-
ing trip. We were just traveling around,
Sometimes design AS: What’s an example of a multilay-
and, somehow, we ended up on Eriskay. is about recognizing ered book you’ve published recently?
We went to see the dolphins, but it was
misty, so we didn’t see anything except
good ideas that work CF: Daniel Chatard’s Niemandsland
rainy fields. Anyway, it was nice to think of and then implementing (2024) is about opencast mining in Ger-
this small island being connected to the many. He worked on it for seven years,
big world by these random traveling steps.
them. returning to the same community several
This is what we do in publishing as well; we times with book dummies in which he’d
connect a small island—the author or the pasted his photographs, and invited
story—with the wider world, and vice versa. people to write on them, to react to the
photographs and to what other people
AS: You describe the Eriskay Connec- wrote. Also, the book covers a twenty-
tion as an intersection between photog- five-year period and is chronological, so
raphy, research, and writing, and many in the beginning there’s a lot of archival
of your books incorporate lots of other material, because Daniel hadn’t started
materials beyond photographs. photographing yet. Then, in 2016, his
photographs begin to enter the story,
RVH: Yes. Although all of our books along with newspaper clippings, letters
include photographs, I don’t think that he wrote, and so on. It’s quite a dense and
we’re necessarily a photobook publisher. multilayered book.

Spread from Crystal

Bennes, Klara and the
Bomb (2022)

No. 259 THE PH OTOBOOK REVI EW 13 9

AS: It’s very easy for photographs to a simpler book. We like variety. For exam- AS: Do you prefer artists to approach you
serve more as illustrations rather than ple, we recently published Thomas Locke with a dummy or design idea in mind?
independent statements or expres- Hobbs’s Rampitas (2024). It’s a small Or do you prefer a messy pile of material?
sions when placed with so much other leporello that contains a typology of
material. Is that something you try to concrete ramps in Medellín, Colombia. RVH: To be honest, we prefer a messy
avoid or embrace? In the poorer regions of the city that lie pile of material. Today, we see many
against the mountain, people need to photographers making dummies, but the
RVH: There’s not necessarily anything wheel their bikes home at night, so they difficult thing about only seeing an art-
wrong with photographs being illustra- build small concrete ramps on the stairs in ist’s dummy is that it sometimes feels like
tive. It varies in each project and for every these neighborhoods. It’s a kind of folky a fixed form. We don’t know about the
author. Some use photographic elements brutalism. The ramps become like ab- process that went into it, what was edited
in an illustrative way, some express them- stract sculptures, but as structures, they out, or how the photographer made deci-
selves much more artistically and freely also say a lot about the social and physical sions. When we’re confronted with an
through photographing. Whatever the challenges of these people, who need to almost finished object, all we can really
case, as designers it’s our job to under- go up and down this mountain every day. say is yes or no. So we prefer to receive
stand both the essence of the story and images, ideally accompanied by a text that
the expression of the artist, and to find AS: And physically, the accordion- explains the project and why the author
the form that suits all of it. like leporello design references the thinks it could be a meaningful book.
stairs and ramps. Perhaps when the
AS: If someone has invested seven author’s creative approach is relatively AS: With most of your books, only one
years in a project and then drops it in straightforward, it allows you as of you carries the design credit.
your lap, that’s a big responsibility. designers more freedom in terms of
There could be tension there in terms playing with the book’s physicality? RVH: Yes, we share ownership of the pub-
of who controls the form. lishing house, but we’re both independent
RVH: Definitely, although Rampitas designers who have our own design com-
RVH: Actually, when someone spends might not be the best example because panies. With every project, we decide
seven years on something, they often Thomas actually made an early dummy quite naturally who’s going to design it.
can’t see it very clearly anymore. Some- himself—a leporello that used blue tape
times you need to show it to someone to hold the images together. We liked it CF: Usually one of us is more enthusias-
else to be able to get more perspective. so much that we simply mimicked his tic about a project and feels it fits them
Of course, it can be heavy and time- dummy. Sometimes design is about rec- nicely. We’re very different designers.
consuming to make a book with many ognizing good ideas that already work Rob is more of an intuitive designer; I’m
layers. Sometimes, it’s also nice to make and then implementing them. more of an analytical designer.

140 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

RVH: I would say that I’m the more emo- Opposite:
Spread from Daniel Chatard,
tional designer, and Carel is the more Niemandsland (2024)
rational designer. But, of course, with
This page:
each design, we discuss our progress with Cover of Barbara Debeuckelaere,
each other, challenge one another, give ’Om (Mother) (2024)
feedback, and reflect on each other’s work.

CF: We share a studio space, so we talk

about the books a lot. It’s always collaborat-
ive, but one designer definitely takes the lead.

AS: What’s an example of a “Rob book”

versus a “Carel book”?

RVH: Stéphanie Roland’s Isle of Seven

Cities (2024) centers around this idea of
phantom islands. It’s a fictional book and
very cinematic, so design-wise it was
about getting a strong sequential flow
and a cinematic feel to the book. This
would be a typical project that I might do.

CF: Crystal Bennes’s Klara and the Bomb

(2022) is more my kind of book. It’s based
on the history of, invention of, and inter-
connection between atomic bombs and
computers, and focuses especially on the
role women played in their development.
It’s a long research-based project, which
includes a lot of text. It’s probably one of
the first books we published where the texts and made it quickly, and it was short- processes and presses, which will become
may be more important than the images. listed for the Paris Photo–Aperture Photo- cheaper to work with. The quality of
Book Awards. digital printing is already almost on par
AS: How has your approach to design with offset, and there’s the potential that
shifted in fourteen years? AS: What do you anticipate will change it will become even better. The challenge
in the art- and photobook publishing is to stay open to change.
RVH: The challenge is to avoid routine. industry in the coming years?
We’ve published around 135 books—it’s AS: Where do you draw wider inspira-
like designing a chair again and again. RVH: More books are being published tion from?
How do we keep it fresh? than ever, but I don’t think readership
has grown significantly. This means that RVH: I like hiking. When I walk in nature,
CF: Because book production is increas- every publisher is selling lower quanti- I feel a sense of calmness, purity, and
ingly expensive and budgets are tighter, ties, and there’s more competition. honesty. I want to bring that sense of
we’re forced to be more radical in our Also, the prices of materials, energy, and purity and honesty into our books.
design decisions now. I think this can transport are increasing. Publishers are
lead to better books, because you need to finding ways to handle this—some are CF: I’m drawn to secondhand books,
strip down to the essence of what a pro- connected to printing houses, some especially ones that are extremely niche.
ject is about and feed that into the design. are connected to galleries, some have One example is a small booklet that I
We recently published ’Om (Mother) side jobs. Of course, you can also reduce found for one euro at an outdoor book-
(2024), by Barbara Debeuckelaere. Most the quality of the books. For some types stall. It has black-and-white photos and
of the images are taken by Palestinian of books that’s okay, but this isn’t how we reviews of every meatball sandwich in
mothers—women from eight Palestinian want to work. There are also fewer print- Rotterdam. On the last page, there are
families. The project was initiated just ers now, and the ones that are still around just the words, “Every meatball sandwich
before the war began in Gaza, so there are bigger and sometimes have a kind of is fantastic, so I cannot rate them.”
was a sense of urgency to publish, but we monopoly. And lastly, the people working
didn’t have much of a budget. So we on presses are usually older guys who’ll
made it small. It has a wraparound cover, retire in ten years. That’s a big concern—
and it uses paper effectively. We fit seventy- the loss of that knowledge.
two pages onto each printing sheet rather
than the usual sixty-four. In these ways, CF: I think that within five years, we Aaron Schuman is a writer and photographer based in the
we kept the production costs very low will have very different digital printing United Kingdom.

No. 259 THE PH OTOBOOK REVI EW 14 1

142 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE
The
“This is not a bookshop,” Atsushi Ham- Alongside a record store and café,
anaka told me recently, as he stood be- Twelvebooks forms the centerpiece of
tween thousands of books that line the SKWAT, a project initiated by Keisuke
dramatic scaffolding structure of a new Nakamura of the design agency Daikei

Factory
multipurpose art center in Kameari, on Mills. The agency has been transforming
the outskirts of east Tokyo. Hamanaka is disused buildings into creative spaces
the founder of Twelvebooks, a distributor since 2019—most recently in Aoyama, a
that recently moved its entire operations, neighborhood known for high fashion
including around eighty thousand books, and art.
into this new warehouse. Visitors can Of all the places to set up shop in
purchase books here, but that isn’t the Tokyo, Kameari is an offbeat choice. It is
primary aim. It is more akin to a library or a distinctly ordinary neighborhood locat-
a factory floor, with staff zipping around ed in the farthest reaches of the JR Jōban
to check stock or package up the latest Line, almost an hour away from its previ-
order. ous location in Aoyama, west Tokyo. The
“Our main intention is to use this SKWAT Kameari Art Centre, abbreviated
space as a warehouse, but we organized it to SKAC, occupies a tunnel-like space
On the outskirts of in a way that accommodates visitors,” underneath the train tracks. Long and
said Hamanaka. “Art books are often tall, it is both dramatic and inviting. In-
Tokyo, a sprawling thought of as ‘nonessential’ or ‘niche side is a mix of concrete, metal, and
compound centers art items for enthusiasts.’ I want to overturn wood, with beams of white LEDs that
that perception. I want art books to be light up the scaffolding. Books are every-
books in everyday life. seen as part of everyday life—something where—in rows, piles, and glass cabinets
Marigold Warner anyone can pick up and engage with.” that display rare and limited editions.

No. 259 THE PH OTOBOOK REVI EW 143

 As such, Twelvebooks’s new location
is an anomaly. It’s a risk that has, so far,
paid off.
Twelvebooks is an exclusive Japanese
distributor for many international pub-
lishers, including Aperture, employing
around twenty staff who work from the
Kameari location. This is a big leap from
its humble beginnings as a one-person
operation. Hamanaka initially started out
in fashion in the aughts as a photogra-
pher’s assistant, but he quickly realized
he wasn’t suited to technicalities. “I loved
photographs, but I wasn’t interested
in cameras,” he explained. “I was more
foc-used on the visuals, and how to tell a
story.”
Pivoting to editorial, he went on to
work in Paris as an assistant in the
upper echelons of the fashion world. All
the while, he was consumed by collecting
art books from cult shops such as Ofr and
Yvon Lambert. “In the publishing world,
the only jobs I understood were at pub-
lishers or bookshops. When I learned
there was a job called distribution, I
thought it could fit me well,” he said.
Now, his business celebrates its fifteenth
year, with the warehouse an embodiment
of Hamanaka’s distinct taste, outlook,
and passion.
Occasionally, the clanks of the over-
head train line interrupt our conversation,
a brief reminder of the temporality that
sits at the heart of SKWAT’s ethos. At the
back of the warehouse is a huge LED
sign: “The museum is not enough.” The
installation was made in 2019 as part of a
collaborative project with the Canadian
Centre for Architecture that explored the
need for better arts education. It encap-
sulates Hamanaka’s mission to reimagine
how art books can exist among the every-
day. This once-empty tunnel is so much
Atsushi Hamanaka and Two giant rolls of Bubble Wrap hang more than a bookshop—it’s a multifaceted,
the SKWAT Kameari Art
Centre, Tokyo, 2025 from the scaffold; a set of metal stairs experiential space that challenges tradi-
Photographs by Tetsuo leads to a second balcony with even more tional ideas of how and where we interact
Kashiwada for Aperture
books. Designer chairs are dotted around with art.
the space, creating cozy spots to browse
in comfort.
But would people come all this way
for books, records, and a cup of coffee?
The short answer is yes. Since opening in
November 2024, SKAC has seen an aver-
age of a hundred visitors on weekdays,
and three hundred on weekends. Until
now, the majority of art bookstores stock-
ing international titles—from titans such
as Tsutaya to independents including
POST, Commune, and SO Books—were
almost exclusively clustered in west Tokyo. Marigold Warner is a writer based in Tokyo.

144 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

No. 259 THE PH OTOBOOK REVI EW 145
Graphic
Just about a hundred years ago, ambitious
graphic designers in Germany began incor-
porating photographic halftones, manipu-
lated to one degree or another, into their

Content
advertising work for newspapers and mag-
azines. And because they were ambitious
graphic designers in interwar Germany,
which is to say members of the Weimar in-
telligentsia, many of them almost immedi-
ately started theorizing this combination of
The New Typography movement revolutionized text and image, generating a critical debate
nearly as wide-ranging and multifaceted as
the relationship between image and text. A century the nascent design technique itself.
later, its impact is still rippling. This new hybrid genre, elastic enough
to connect experimental movements such
Christopher Hawthorne as Dada on the one hand with print ads
for bar soap on the other, was dubbed
“typophoto” in 1925 by the Hungarian
photographer, painter, and Bauhaus peda-
gogue László Moholy-Nagy. It was further
explored, as part of the modernist move-
This page: ment New Typography, by the German
Press advertisement
illustration for Gal soap, typographer Jan Tschichold, who came to
1929 experimental graphic design by way of
Courtesy New York Public
Library
training in calligraphy. Now the phenome-
non is the subject of Typophoto: New
Opposite, left:
László Moholy-Nagy,
Typography and the Reinvention of
Cover of Die neue Linie, Photography (University of Minnesota,
September 1929 2025; 288 pages, $30), a thorough if rather
© Estate of László Moholy-
Nagy/Artists Rights Society cautious new book by Jessica D. Brier,
(ARS), New York curator of photography at Vassar College’s
Opposite, right: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.
El Lissitzky, Pelikan Tinte, If Brier never quite defines typophoto
1924
© Artists Rights Society
with finality—the concept keeps squirming
(ARS), New York about, wormlike, on the page—that is partly
by design. The creative category appeals to
her precisely for its elusiveness and mallea-
bility, what she calls its “layered meanings.”
She writes admiringly of the “persistent
strangeness” of the halftone in this period
—an unsettled quality that photographers
and designers realized they could manipu-
late at will, making the halftone’s matrix of
dots more legible or less legible on the
page. Mixing the halftone with experimen-
tal graphic design and the imperatives of
advertising, Brier writes, energized and
destabilized both categories.
The book’s tidiest description of typo-
photo’s emergence comes from the Rus-
sian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch archi-
tect and designer Mart Stam, who wrote,
in a joint contribution to a 1925 journal
edited by Tschichold, that two inviolable
mandates governed print advertising: “The
product must be mentioned” and “the
product must be shown.” In nineteenth-
century advertising, that meant some com-
bination of text and illustration; in the
1920s and 1930s, it increasingly meant text
and photography (or photomontage). For

146 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

Brier, the ad business operated between to the creaky, risk-averse conventions of alluringly and algorithmically mix text,
the wars “as a surreal endgame for the hy- academic writing. I was left wanting to hear photographs, and video in ways directly
bridization of photography and type.” more about Moholy-Nagy and Tschichold reminiscent of the work of Brier’s protago-
The New Typography—characterized as the radical and politically targeted fig- nists. These hybrids are morphing and re-
by, among other elements, sans serif letter- ures they were (rather than narrative cut- constituting themselves too quickly to be
forms and aggressive asymmetry, with clear outs, stiff stand-ins for theories of design) fully made sense of by design critics or so-
affinities to modernist architecture—was and the polymathic creative circles in cial scientists, to say nothing of the law-
the subject of a 2009 exhibition at New which they traveled. Why would the Nazis makers who cluelessly quizzed TikTok
York’s Museum of Modern Art featuring see Tschichold, a young graphic designer CEO Shou Zi Chew in congressional hear-
material from Tschichold’s own collection. and teacher with a limited following, as ings two years ago.
Brier’s focus is narrower, analyzing New enough of a threat to arrest him in 1933? Without bringing up present-day anx-
Typography principally for the way it used, Likewise for the way artists after the war, ieties about the dangers of an image-domi-
and changed, photography. (It helped including Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar nated culture, or even nodding in their di-
photographers understand, for example, Polke, further experimented with halftones rection, Brier quotes the cultural critic
that the easiest way for them to reach a (or painterly versions of them), making dots Edlef Köppen, who, like many German
mass audience was to forge an alliance, not only visible but in some ways a central writers of the era, understood the rise of
however uncomfortable at first, with graph- subject of their canvases. As Polke memo- photo-based media and related declines in
ic design and the worlds of media and ad- rably put it in 1966, in a bizarrely great attention spans—in time spent looking as
vertising, given the halftone’s remarkable quote Brier saves for the epilogue: “I love opposed to reading—as a dire trend. Here’s
flexibility as a medium and, importantly, its all dots. I am married to many of them. I Köppen in 1925: “The mark of our age is
ability to travel to far more places, far more want all dots to be happy. Dots are my haste, hurry, nervousness. People have no
quickly, than a traditional photographic brothers. I am a dot myself.” time, indeed they flee the calm of contem-
print ever could.) Along the way, she offers What might have been the lively plation. . . . The rhythm of life pounds short
fascinating detours on the psychology of center of the book is touched on only indi- and hard: further—further! The conse-
advertising and the history of airbrushing. rectly: the echoes of 1930s debates over typo- quence in many respects is superficiality.”
Brier’s book is content to be almost photo that can be clearly heard in today’s Sound familiar?
wholly a hermetically sealed historical lamentations about the dangers to the cul-
study, confined, with few exceptions, to tural order posed by TikTok, Instagram, Christopher Hawthorne is a senior critic at the Yale School
the 1920s and 1930s and faithful throughout and other social-media platforms, which of Architecture.

No. 259 THE PH OTOBOOK REVI EW 14 7

Reviews

he had influences and forebears (Larry

Mike Brodie Clark, Danny Lyon, Jim Goldberg, and
Mark Cohen for starters), Brodie blasted
Mike Brodie’s life reads like young adult right past them all by shrugging off style
fiction—a dark, bruised version of the and focusing on what was right in front of
classic tale of the boy who leaves home to him: the marvelous, fucked-up particulars
find himself and his place in the world. of life as it unraveled day by day.
Starting in 2003, and for many years there- A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, Bro-
after, he was a self-proclaimed hobo, hop- die’s first book, was a revelation, a bomb-
ping freight trains across the United States shell, as sophisticated as it was spontane-
with other runaways and lost souls, mak- ous, and one of the best photobooks of
ing hundreds of Polaroids along the way. 2013. At the time, Brodie wasn’t a com-
At some point he began carrying a Nikon, plete unknown. He’d already begun show-
but he remained a passionate amateur, and ing his Polaroids in galleries; critics had
Spread from Mike Brodie,
his work had the grit, wit, and restless, their eye on him. But A Period of Juvenile
Failing (Twin Palms, 2024) careless intensity of an outsider artist. If Prosperity, made largely with that Nikon,

148 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

opened the work up to a new sort of drama
and incident. He was making film stills,
not snapshots, but he hadn’t lost any of
the earlier work’s authenticity or gut-
punch power. The outsider was an insider
in the world he was recording, and his
subjects shared the space with him in a
way that felt intimate, if provisional. Noth-
ing was solid, nothing lasting, but each
moment had weight and poignance if you
only stopped to look.
Not long after A Period of Juvenile
Prosperity was published, Brodie put the
camera aside, became a diesel mechanic,
got married, and settled down. His big
new book, Failing (Twin Palms, 2024;
412 pages, $85), is a jagged narrative,
spiked with bits and pieces of that new life
and its dissolution. Inevitably, perhaps,
the work is less exciting, more contempla-
tive and brooding. Any glimmers of hope
that spark the opening section are quickly
snuffed out. An undated picture, Building
our home, shows only a bare wooden frame
on a desert lot. We never see the finished
house, and, little by little, death and drugs
begin to weigh everything down. As the
book’s title suggests, Brodie is more frankly
autobiographical here. In one sequence,
he shows us My hand (grimy from work),
My spoon (twisted and burned from use),
and My dick (erect in the steering wheel of
a car). Double-page spreads crop up to
show scenes of decay and destruction and
roads that suggest dead ends, not exhila-
rating escape. Still, the book’s relentless-
ness feels somehow redemptive, cathartic.
It opens with what reads, in a biblical
typeface, like a brief sermon that closes
ambiguously: “The Darkness within dark-
ness, / The gate to all mystery.” It ends Cover of Lele Saveri, Dashwood Projects and loosely chronicles
Luna 10 Years (Dashwood
with another spread of a wide-open road, Books, 2025) the last ten years of Saveri’s ritualized zine
only this time I’d like to think it was a way making, which is still ongoing. It’s a large,
out. —Vince Aletti floppy softcover—unpretentious and DIY,
like the publications it reproduces at scale.
The thin, uncoated pages feel almost xer-
Lele Saveri oxed themselves. While each cover of the
124 zines is represented, their pages aren’t
For the past decade, Lele Saveri has cap- reproduced in full. Instead, the sequence
tured the people, places, and moments unfolds as if you’re flipping through each
around him, photographing daily on both zine, picking it up, skimming a few
film and his iPhone. Then, with each full spreads, moving on. The photographs nar-
moon (every “29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, rate his movements through New York,
and 2.5 seconds,” as he precisely notes in his travels, his friends and family, and,
the introduction to his book), he assem- more recently, his work as an EMT. The
bles a zine from the past month’s images, book loosely traces Saveri’s preoccupation
xeroxes twenty to thirty copies, and hands with the ways we communicate in public
them out to friends and family. space—with a particular attunement to
Luna 10 Years (Dashwood Books, street signs, graffiti, protest banners, and
2025; 440 pages, $72) coincides with an advertisements—while more intimate
exhibition of the same name at Manhattan’s moments, such as friends gathering to

No. 259 THE PH OTOBOOK REVI EW 149

This page: view the eclipse, remind us that these dreams, painful or bursting with life, on
Spread from Joaquim
Paiva, Estas Figuras de zines are, above all, visual diaries of display.
Tempos e Sonhos (These Saveri’s life. Luna 10 Years is both a time Life has the winning hand in this
Figures of Times and
Dreams) ({Lp} Press, capsule and a meditation on the act of game. The book splices spontaneous, ba-
2024) recording: a decade of aimless dérive, nal, and glamorous moments together in
Opposite:
bound together by ritual, memory, and the all the vertiginous danger and glory of
Spread from Noriko rhythms of the moon. —Noa Lin standing naked in the middle of a crowd.
Shibuya, Takenokozoku
(Area Books, 2024)
There is more than a handful of nude men
interspersed among the pages, some beau-
Joaquim Paiva tiful, some ugly. They hide their anatomy
behind phallic flowers, or skimpy swim
The bald man who stares hard at us from attire. A queer sensibility pumps and
behind his sunglasses on the silver, shim- throbs through all the veins of this visual
mering cover of Joaquim Paiva’s Estas odyssey, a journey that is dark and bright
Figuras de Tempos e Sonhos (These Fig- at the same time, running parallel to the
ures of Times and Dreams) ({Lp} Press, advance and retreat of desires that often
2024; 432 pages, $45) is full of himself, or dwindle into quiet cul-de-sacs. Like the
could be. He is the center of all attention, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa—whose
the author, the authority, master of an verse inspired the book’s title, and who
attitude, the lonely star of his own galaxy. wrote under approximately seventy other
A Brazilian artist, collector, and diplomat names—Paiva is something of a shape-
who has amassed an impressive photo- shifter. In these glowing pages, whose
graphic archive over the past few decades paper alternates between glossy and
in Rio de Janeiro and across the world, stripped-down matte, the silvery explosive-
Paiva here puts himself, his memories and ness of the photographic grain screaming

150 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

all throughout, we glimpse friendly get- tourists who arrived in droves to watch bottom to top, unexpectedly mimics the
togethers, lovers long lost and new, open the spectacle. motion of scrolling on social media. Takeno-
seas and complex cityscapes, a dive down The slim, unfussy book includes a kozoku reminds us, no matter our age, that
deep that also, somehow, feels like a breath short explanatory text written by Shibuya while youth may be fleeting, its spirit is
of fresh air. —Silas Martí and the Camp cofounder Daido Mori- timeless. —Mimi Wong
yama (and translated by Lucy Fleming-
Brown), which provides background for
Noriko Shibuya this so-called rock ’n’ rollers scene. While
viewers can’t hear the disco tracks blaring
Every generation believes it invented being from the boom boxes or see the choreo-
young. For as long as the camera has graphed movements in the still images,
been readily available, the compulsion period-specific details shine through in
to document youth culture can be located candid moments, such as pink dye being
in almost every era. Noriko Shibuya: applied to a young woman’s feathered
Takenokozoku (Area Books, 2024; 116 hair, and in the dancers’ fashion, includ-
pages, $50) captures one such window, ing harem pants that helped define their
between 1979 and 1982. The book borrows funky style.
its title from a trend where, on Sundays, Despite the presence of these dated
thousands of people would gather in the fads, Shibuya’s vibrant photographs feel as
streets of Harajuku to listen to music, if they could have been taken today. In one
dance, and otherwise flaunt themselves. snapshot, a woman blows cigarette smoke
The first woman to break into Japan’s in- and gazes irreverently at the camera. In
dependent photography gallery Camp, another, a young man unselfconsciously
Shibuya celebrates this exuberance applies eye shadow. At night, two friends
through colorful, off-the-cuff street por- giggle and grin in synchronized step. Even
traits, close-ups of clothing and accesso- the vertical layout of the book, which re-
ries, and wide shots of the onlookers and quires the reader to flip the pages from

No. 259 THE PH OTOBOOK REVI EW 15 1

 Durga Chew-Bose,

Endnote Aliocha Schneider and

Lily McInerny on the set
of Bonjour Tristesse, Port

Durga Chew- d’Alon, France, 2023

Photograph © Thaïs
Despont
Bose
Durga Chew-Bose is practiced in
the art of heeding small things.
A writer, editor, and filmmaker, her
essays linger over gestures, memo-
ries, and daydreams, modeling a
restless curiosity about the nuances
of the human condition. Here, the
Montreal native talks about her
directorial debut, an adaptation of
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan’s
bittersweet 1954 tale of hedonism
and heartbreak on the Côte d’Azur.

When did you first read Bonjour liant artists. It didn’t feel hard to switch, ately getting ideas from. It had all these
Tristesse? Did it strike a chord with to wear a different hat, because I didn’t little details, doorways and windows that
you then? feel like people were asking me to wear you could look through, where you could
I can’t remember when I first encoun- another hat. They were actually saying, see across the terrace. You could really be
tered Bonjour Tristesse, but it wasn’t one “Stay as you are, we will support who you a voyeur. That spoke to me.
of those books for me, the kind that are in this new playground.”
changes your insides. I think it was a Did you have any photographers on
sweet escape at the time. (And escape Were there visual references you set?
holds plenty of value!) Of course, since showed the cast and crew to help com- We had Jessica Forde, who is incredible,
rereading it nearly ten years ago, when municate a certain vision? shooting production stills, and our second
this project started, my relationship to Bonjour Tristesse already has this sort of AD, Thaïs Despont, made some BTS im-
the book has changed. It holds the key lore, and films set in the South of France ages. But I was insistent on also bringing
to a lot. In some ways, it’s a very simple are also their own category of cinema. in a photographer who doesn’t only do
story with a very complicated heart. In While I wanted to honor that, it was im- behind-the-scenes. My producers were
that way, it continues to grow on me and portant to me that we found a new way able to find a way to have Estelle Hanania
provides new points of entry. It’s always in. We looked a lot at Luigi Ghirri photo- on set. I love her work. It’s a little eerie—
been a book with some of my favorite graphs, and considered a kind of sandy- her sensibility is almost like found photo-
themes: father-daughter relationships, blue color, how evocative it is. graphs. Her pictures are this strange mix-
women influencing women, summer ture of behind-the-scenes and then this
doom. Tell me about location scouting—those heightened other film that’s being made
early steps in the filmmaking process alongside it.
What was the transition to directing where it’s just starting to exist visually,
like, having already spent so much time where you can start to picture those Making a movie seems like a natural
with the project as the screenwriter? moments. progression for you since your writing
One advantage I had in this process was The villa that we found was discreet. It is so clearly informed by the language
that there was no proof of concept. I’ve wasn’t as grand as I think people expect of film.
never done it before. The unknown was for this movie. It lives in harmony with Filmmakers taught me how to see, and
energizing. It didn’t present itself as an the pines—there’s this three-hundred- taught me how to express myself, and
obstacle to me. The major difference year-old pine that the villa is built around. taught me how to have a voice. I think it
between writing and directing is it’s a There’s a very inside-outside feeling that was always a part of my expression, even
massive collaboration, with so many bril- my cinematographer and I were immedi- if I hadn’t expressed it yet.

152 SUMME R 2025 AP ERTURE

 SCAN FOR MORE
PRODUCT DETAILS

Photo © 2025 Michael Troast

INTRODUCING

FUJIFILM GFX100RF
Engineered to Deliver
(QJDJHLQDFRPSOHWHO\QHZLPDJHPDNLQJ
H[SHULHQFHZLWK)8-,),/0*);5))HDWXULQJ
WLPHOHVVUDQJHࢉQGHUVW\OLQJDQHZO\FRQFHSWHG
DVSHFWUDWLRGLDODQGDVSHFLDOO\GHVLJQHGࢉ[HG
OHDIVKXWWHUOHQVHYHU\GD\QRZEULQJVDQHZ
RSSRUWXQLW\WRFUHDWHVRPHWKLQJH[WUDRUGLQDU\

Photo © 2024 Casey Cavanaugh

)8-,),/0*);5)5DQJHࢉQGHU'LJLWDO&DPHUDLQ%ODFNDQG6LOYHUZLWKLQFOXGHGOHQVKRRG0653&DVH\&DYDQDXJKLVD)8-,),/0FRPSHQVDWHGSURIHVVLRQDOSKRWRJUDSKHU
)8-,),/0LVDWUDGHPDUNRI)8-,),/0&RUSRUDWLRQDQGLWVDࢇOLDWHVk)8-,),/01RUWK$PHULFD&RUSRUDWLRQDQGLWVDࢇOLDWHV$OOULJKWVUHVHUYHG