The first thing that comes to mind when looking back on my work is recursiveness – subjects, places and strategies repeating over time and across and within images. It began, I suppose, by photographing friends and myself, and documenting my working material in the colour darkroom. It has continued in surprising ways: the ongoing collaborations and inspiration to which these friendships have led, and in repeated re-photographing of materials in my current studio space.

Over the last ten years, the interest in deconstructing the making of images, and the moving of subjectivity and identity (gendered, racialised, politicised) to the centre of how those images are made and seen has been the most resonant and, I think, impactful development. Photography is a technology that grew out of a desire to affix fleeting images, impressions, shadows, and projections. At its core it’s about longing, and a desire to hold or produce a thing of emotional use value, for gratification, for contemplation

For the recent Whitney Biennale my work was collaborative. The invitation for friends to bring their cameras and make photographs with and alongside me in the studio went back to the summer of 2017, with the Dark Room portraits of Giancarlo and James. They continued for the next year, and are still ongoing (in a different form). It was about introducing a second point perspective into consideration after my camera and my own position had become the repeating formal and conceptual structure of most of the pictures since 2015. I decided to propose for the Whitney showing the photographs made by those friends alongside me or collaboratively, rather than my own photographs, rather than my own (one image solely of my own making was included, a large environmental Ground of the studio curtain) but it was important to show the pictures that people had not considered when they saw the second cameras being operated by friends appearing in the works I exhibited. After James and Giancarlo were described as modeling or posing, and as being assistants to my cameras when clearly they were engaged in photographing with their own cameras, I was frustrated but curious at how an image taken by me depicting my reflection alongside a separate person also aiming their camera (two depicted) could be collapsed into one photographer and one camera. So, the Whitney presentation was thought of in response to the shows at Team Bungalow in Fall 2017 and Document in spring 2018 where those portraits of James and Giancarlo were exhibited. I’m not sure how successfully legible the project, and the fact that the majority of the images are not authored by me and are tethered to *other* photographs, by me, that we do not see but have to presume exist, was revealed to the viewer.

For the current twentieth issue of Objektiv, in the tenth year of the magazine, we’ve invited twenty artists to contribute. Some have been given carte blanche to create unique portfolios or collage-like mind maps about the kind of photography that inspires their practices—and perhaps, through this, share something about their future paths. Short statements accompany each artist’s contribution.