Nina Strand 4/7/25 Nina Strand 4/7/25

PETER HUJAR

Afterimage by Pia Eikaas:

There is a seagull in Peter Hujar's exhibition Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row. It's Sunday noon, 23 March 2025—spring, with warm, damp air, soft and almost raining. Last night, my friends and I went to see The Seagull (Chekhov) at the Barbican in London, with Cate Blanchett in the lead role. Actually, there are no lead roles, it is directed by Thomas Ostermeier. When I was younger and still in the closet, I used to date an actor—he was my best friend, and still is—and we’d travel from Copenhagen to Berlin to see Ostermeier's productions at the Schaubühne. Ostermeier, the enfant terrible, wrestling with old classics like Hamlet and An Enemy of the People, was mind-blowing, addictive, destructive, and truth-seeking.

Last night, something strange happened during The Seagull. It wasn't as good. The German, now middle-aged enfant terrible, the British rigidity of Chekhov’s three kinds of humor and ideas clashing—it wasn’t interesting, just half there. (Ostermeier kills the seagull because he has nothing better to do; he kills it because he can).

On stage, Cate Blanchett is always great, but this time, she seems like she doesn’t want to be there. In this deconstructed landscape, she comes across more as a still image than a moving actress. She poses, afraid to stop moving, so these sequences of poses become a contact sheet of an actress in a midlife crisis (quote play) grappling with aging. (Skin, body, form—a fragility…) Nina or Irina? Or is there something else at play?

Many of Peter Hujar’s subjects never got to grow old; the AIDS epidemic wiped out a whole generation of potential mid-life crises, swaggering old queers, memories, and knowledge of how to live other narratives, other ways of aging—myths that were never passed on. A void, a void that could have been avoided if the world hadn't been so homophobic, xenophobic, and capitalist. (How is it that we are still swimming in this dark pool of ignorance today?)

Charlie Porter writes a fictional yet very real story about this loss of a generation, and about gardening in the shadow of high-rises, in his new novel Novia Scotia House. I went to the launch where he spoke about care and kindness, and how gardening, tending, and volunteering are ways of reconnecting—with community.

That bird, that seagull on the beach—Peter Hujar photographs people and animals with the same intense interest, care, soul-searching, and love. He photographs friends, lovers, dogs, horses, writers, actors, scars, desires, dark waters, empty streets, piers, staircases, holes—holding them in squares where it’s clear, in the present, vibrating, time collapsed without blinking.

The image of the seagull (is it a seagull?) and the images of Cate Blanchett on stage merge. I think Peter Hujar would have photographed Blanchett if he were alive (or at least I would have liked to see him do so). The tonal qualities of his photographs—loss, death, presence, love, and affection—will stay with me for many years. The seagull, growing old, not getting old, the free and the trapped. Which is which?

Nina Strand 3/31/25 Nina Strand 3/31/25

ANTONIA SERRA SANNA

Pezza (*sic*) Antonia, positivo, 1899. (c) Museo di Antropologia Criminale Cesare Lombroso, courtesy Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali.

Afterimage by Elisa Medde:

For a long time now, I have been obsessed with a mugshot from 1899, taken in Nuoro, my hometown in Sardinia. The woman in the photograph, whose identity is somewhat opaque today, was photographed during her arrest. Her image is now part of a collection gathered by Cesare Lombroso, a pioneer in criminal anthropology. His theories on anthropological criminology, race, and genetics had lasting consequences and continue to affect us today.

Sardinia was undergoing massive changes at the time. The move from being subjected to Spanish rule to becoming a possession of the House of Savoy in 1720 meant major social and political changes, amongst which moving from a substantially communal land management to a private property-based economy under the House of Savoy. The 19th century saw periods of intense struggle, famine and upheaval, and also saw the introduction of photography on the Island as a tool of colonial control and documentation. Towards the end of the century, by royal command, every person arrested on the island had to be photographed, and a dossier had to be made following the method Berthillon. Of each photograph 6 prints had to be made, and a large selection of those ended up being used as materials for the “new studies” in criminal anthropology. During one night in 1899, almost 700 were arrested in the centre of the Island. Amongst them, is the “mysterious woman” whose portrait hunts me. Her identity is known on the Island: at the time, she was likely one of the most feared women on the island. Books have been written about her, movies have been made, and legends have been created. She was sister to the two “most feared brigantes of the time, eventually slaughtered by the Royal Forces after the largest police operation chronicled in the century, known as Caccia Grossa (the big hunt). Their massacred bodies were photographed as trophies and exposed to the public gaze, a testament to the power of the newborn Italian kingdom. Sardinia’s stability was key to Italy's unification, and her image reflects the broader political context. This woman was called Sa Reina, the queen, equally feared and admired. After her arrest, her brothers were murdered, she spent some time in jail, was eventually liberated, married someone and died in substantial oblivion. We know that the photograph was taken as part of a specific mass arrest. She’s wearing traditional Sardinian clothing, standing straight in front of the camera. Her expression became an act of defiance and rebellion, unreadable and unforgiving.

This portrait became part of the Lombroso Archive, and it was included (together with other mugshots) in an accordion-shaped display format, used to illustrate Lombroso’s thinking in congresses and symposia. Today, the woman depicted is identified with a name that is not hers. Her name was known at the time, her fame being the reason why she got included amongst some of the most famous male bandits. It is also handwritten in the photographs, now hidden under the passpartout holding them. Yet, in current official documents, her real name has been misrecorded due to confusion with identifying Sardinian surnames.

This photograph could trigger many conversations: about the historical role of photography within colonial contexts, such as the one my Island found itself in, about gender matters related to consent and narrative, about the complexities of relations within dominant and subordinate groups with and within archival entities and the power dynamics they enact and often enable at many conscious and subconscious levels, up to the very complex issue of how identity is constructed, both through photography and despite it. The photograph and the history of the woman it depicts offer an interesting case study in observing how women’s lives and actions were more often than not depicted in historical accounts - their complexities flattened into dichotomies of passive submissions versus terrifying, evil power. Her story is tied to patriarchal and colonial power structures that still influence how we read our past, and understand our present. She is just one in the very long list of historical figures and individuals fetishized as exotic specimens, hyper-sexualised in their fierce barbarism, forced to become almost mythical figures.

Then there is my favourite part: the photograph’s afterlife, its uses and abuses, its purposes, and the meaning it acquired and lost over time. But this part of the story is for another time. For now, it starts with her name:

Antonia Serra Sanna.

Nina Strand 3/24/25 Nina Strand 3/24/25

JAMES BALDWIN AND LEONARD BERNSTEIN

From the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of The Baldwin Family.

Afterimage by Dani Issler:

I was going to choose a catastrophic image, seeing that we are living through a catastrophic era—it seemed more truthful. When I read the description of the Afterimage series, Gaza immediately came to mind. I also thought of Los Angeles, an image of something that consumes itself—fire, catastrophe, and misery. But then I realized that it would be more important for me to present an image that is closer to my own life. This image is my desktop background, and it has been on my computer for about a year. It feels like a tableau, almost like a painting.

On June 19, 1986, American writer James Baldwin and composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein were each awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, by President François Mitterrand. The ceremony took place at Place de la Concorde in Paris, at what is now a museum, Hôtel de La Marine. It was a symbolic moment: a Black writer who revolutionized literature and Civil Rights, challenging the American status quo, and a Jewish composer who reshaped American music and supported progressive causes.

I came across this image randomly while researching both men. I think I chose it because there's something very amusing about it. As far as I can tell, it’s a candid 35mm shot. There’s intimacy between the two men in the foreground. Bernstein looks like a Bar-Mitzvah boy, only recently out of the closet. This could even be a photo of a Gay marriage avant la lettre. In other photos from the event, they both seem genuinely happy and more relaxed than ever before. It was also a rare moment when Baldwin was honored outside of the U.S., where his work was often controversial. The fact that he and Bernstein—both gay and deeply involved in Civil Rights causes—stood together to receive this award is a powerful image of artistic and political solidarity. There’s also a kind of melancholy that I project onto that moment: Baldwin would die one year later, 1987, and Bernstein shortly after in 1990, at the height of the raging AIDS pandemic, where many Gay cultural icons and thinkers were struggling for their lives, often perceived melancholically in black and white images (I’m thinking of Hervé Guibert’s intimate portraits, such as that of Michel Foucault).

The snapshot quality of the photo, almost like a Kodak moment, adds a sense of relatability. Color clearly plays a key role here, from the rich textured decor to their clothing. Baldwin chose elegant black, while Bernstein dared to wear a white tuxedo with a red bow tie. The flamboyant, gay-ish quality of their attire, paired with the colorfulness, sets the tone in my mind. The queerness, in the true sense of the word (though I find it difficult to embrace how the term has evolved today), is partially present in the pairing of these two larger-than-life figures. It feels like they are on a stage and the human backdrop (predominantly women) adds character and liveliness to this casual, yet festive scene. I can spot Baldwin’s brother and his elderly French housekeeper from Saint-Paul-de-Vence who was close to him, and this moves me, that she accompanied him there.

For me, it’s a symbolic event—a ceremony that could represent an alternative existence in time. This moment of happiness is also tied to the trope of ‘an American in Paris,’. Although I am not American, I can certainly relate to the idea of expatriatism, especially in today's context – as we bear witness to the decline of the Pax Americana. Under Trump the American experience in Paris, as particular and privileged expatriatisms as it may be, feels more relevant. Paris was and still is a real place, even for Americans. As Oscar Wilde summed it up in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

‘They say that when good Americans die, they go to Paris.’

‘Oh, and where do bad Americans go?’

‘They stay in America.’

This photograph captures a fleeting moment of joy, camaraderie, and recognition—an afterimage of history. I’m tempted to title it Glitter and Be Gay, which is the title of the famous coloratura aria from Bernstein’s comic operetta adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide (1956). A critique of false optimism, war, religious hypocrisy, and human cruelty – ideas that feel just as relevant today. This aria is a satire of aristocratic excess and female suffering, blending irony, musical brilliance, and theatricality.

Glitter and be gay,

That's the part I play;

Here I am in Paris, France,

Forced to bend my soul

To a sordid role,

Victimized by bitter, bitter circumstance.

[…]

Enough, enough

Of being basely tearful!

I'll show my noble stuff

By being bright and cheerful!

[…]

Observe how bravely I conceal

The dreadful, dreadful shame I feel.

*Listen and see Bernstein conducting this aria here.

Nina Strand 3/20/25 Nina Strand 3/20/25

CAROL NEWHOUSE

For this year's Les Rencontres d'Arles, Objektiv's editor Nina Strand curates the exhibition Double with Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, featuring this image by Carol Newhouse as her current afterimage.

‘Is it possible to leave everything behind? Is it possible to begin again, outside and beyond every system of living you've ever known, reinventing what it means (and looks like) to exist as a body and soul on the land?’ These questions shaped Carmen Winant's exploration of radical reinvention, particularly within the context of the lesbian separatist communities of the 1970s. Through this process, Winant connected with Carol Newhouse, co-founder of Womanshare, a lesbian feminist community on the West Coast of the United States. Winant’s and Newhouse’s ongoing dialogue has evolved through several collaborative projects that examine the transformative impact of feminist movements from that era, viewed through the lens of Newhouse's photographic practice and archive. The medium became an essential tool for Newhouse, allowing her to assert and control her own representation.

For Les Rencontres d'Arles, they've created unique new work that weaves together their stories, passions, and curiosities. Over the course of a year, they engaged in a photographic dialogue—one would shoot a roll of film, wind it up, and send it across the country, where the other would expose it once more—using the technique of double exposure to create a layered interplay between their images. Double exposure was a technique used by Newhouse and her comrades to play with the singularness of pictures, or the claim of a single (often masculine) art creator.

Through this creative collaboration, the artists reclaim feminist photographic strategies. With a fulcrum in a series of images by Newhouse from the very beginning of the community, Winant and Newhouse invites us to consider how we reinvent ourselves and our histories—both individually and collectively—through the act of self-representation and interconnection. Their visual conversation delves into intergenerational relationships and feminist political legacies while bringing the experimental photographic practices of the past into the present.

Nina Strand 3/13/25 Nina Strand 3/13/25

BILLY MEIER

From the very beginning of photography things have been altered, making people believe false narratives. For instance, many believe Communist Russia propaganda photography was full of people drinking champagne, but in reality, they were just sitting around empty tables. If you asked me to draw a photograph, it would probably look something like this. It encapsulates everything that photography stands for—and everything that's problematic about it. It’s about the idea of evidence, but photography is arguably one of the worst mediums for documenting an event.

Afterimage by Oliver Griffin:

Last February I did a residency at the Andreas Züst Library in Switzerland. I found that most of the photographic records of UFOs in the country were taken by a Swiss farmer, Eduard 'Billy' Albert Meier, just outside Zurich in the seventies. The images are beautiful, and every time you look at one, it evokes the idea of what a UFO encounter should be, in the Hollywood sense—not as a horror story, but more as a captivating experience. It’s the kind of encounter that makes you want to believe in a truth beyond our world.

I first saw one of these images in the 1983 book UFO…Contact from the Pleiades by Brit Elders & Lee Elders and something about the composition, the landscape, and the idea of an object floating and observing caught my attention. The stories behind his ‘encounters’—which lasted for much of his life until the end of the seventies when the aliens supposedly stopped contacting him—fascinated me. By then, he had an international UFO religious organisation with followers in the US, Mexico, and Europe. Despite Meier’s fame, he was a recluse, never leaving Switzerland. His photography and filmmaking were extraordinary, and this particular image still haunts me. It feels so ordinary, as if you were on a form of transport, traveling through a familiar landscape, and in the background, you spot a UFO floating quietly.

There’s a crazy history behind Meier. He ran away from Switzerland, joined the Foreign Legion, escaped again, lost an arm in Turkey while riding a bus back to Switzerland, and eventually ended up with a farm where he shot everything. He then claimed to have communication with an alien race over five years, with instructions on where to spot UFOs. He used a specific Olympus 35 ECR camera— the one that required winding with your thumb with a wheel —because it was the only camera he could use. He would take his motorbike up the hill to shoot these photos. Ironically, one of his images was used for the infamous X-Files TV series poster. When you think of TV series, popular culture, and aliens, you probably think of the iconic X-Files image, and Meier’s photograph is the one featured in the back of Fox Mulder’s office. It became the popular cultural representation of what a UFO should look like.

What’s fascinating is that Meier, who didn’t seem to want much, kept taking these photographs of aliens. It was later revealed that he actually made these aliens himself, using various bits of scrap metal on his farm and polishing them up as models. Some of these models occasionally pop up on eBay, not for much money. There’s a whole typology of different alien crafts and there supposed capabilities.

Nina Strand 3/10/25 Nina Strand 3/10/25

JONI STERNBACH

Afterimage by Christiane Pratsch Monarchi:

The image that captivates me is a tintype by Joni Sternbach, which won second place in the Taylor Wessing Photography Portrait Prize in 2016 out of over 4,300 entries. The image itself is fascinating because it combines a traditional photographic process with a contemporary subject. It features a young surfer couple, exuding relaxation, poise, and trust—qualities that elevate them into monumental representations of virility and youth. The composition is emotionally charged, evoking different narratives: perhaps they are returning from surfing or heading out to the sea, deeply in love, or simply enjoying the beauty of their bodies and the moment.

Growing up in America on the Gulf of Mexico, there was no surfing where I lived—just underage drinking and cars driving in circles. I always longed for that surf culture but didn’t experience it until much later in life. In my 40s, I learned to surf with my kids and husband in North England, and I’ll continue to do so for the rest of my life. There’s something incredibly special about surfing that has always drawn me in, and it connects deeply to my personal memories.

What fascinated me about the image was learning that Joni wasn’t a surfer herself. She initially began photographing the sea because of her interest in water and its environmental significance. She had no intention of photographing surfers, but eventually, she was drawn to them. Her tintype process, which was such a spectacle on the beach, led her to engage with surfers and over time, she developed a connection with them, photographing them in a way that speaks to both the vulnerability and strength of their characters. The trust and relaxation they exhibited in front of her camera transformed them into monumental figures, full of gravitas. The tintype process itself—so different from digital photography—adds to the timeless, object-like quality of the image. It’s a piece of art that will endure, much like the surfboards she photographs, which have their own monumental significance.

Making a tintype is an amazing process. I did it once in a workshop, and it’s highly controlled. The process is meticulous—you coat the plate, handle it with care, and expose it to just the right light. It requires a very specific environment, which makes Joni’s work even more impressive. She’s out there on the beach, doing something that typically requires a controlled setting, and that adds a level of fragility to her work. The wind, the elements—all of that interference creates beautiful imperfections in the final images, which I find fascinating. Joni’s ability to do all this on the beach, with such an unstable process, adds another layer of complexity and beauty to her work.

The beauty of Joni’s work lies in the diverse subjects she captures. Some of her other images feature older surfers or women with different body types, showing that surf culture isn’t just about the typical image of young, athletic individuals. There’s something timeless and humanizing in the way she captures people from all walks of life. The image I selected might be more traditional, featuring a young, blonde, athletic couple, but it’s the one that I couldn’t stop staring at. It’s a fabulous piece.

This image also seems to capture a specific moment in time—a snapshot from before things changed. It was taken in 2016; since then I’m not sure how Santa Cruz has been affected by wildfires but it's such a difficult time. Despite the challenges they face, these people are still going out to surf, living their way of life. It’s a time capsule, a reminder of a different era, and that’s something I find incredibly poignant. It’s not just about the photograph itself, but about the process and the environment in which it’s made. It’s also a beautiful portrait of a culture that is not just about surfing, but about a way of life.

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

ANDREAS FEININGER

Because of its ambiguity, several ideas bounce around. The most immediate is seeing and thinking about the activities of the photographer. This much is immediately visible: how the camera mediates (obscures and also complicates) the photographer’s relationship to the world. It’s surprising: we see the photographer, but there’s an imbalance or a merging with the machinic, with the apparatus in the foreground. Of course, this is often how it is – the photographer says they step back for the photograph to function as truth. But here the photographer’s way of looking is shaped by this object that they’re seeing through, they are transformed by it. And in case we forget, we’re seeing them with a similar device. Feininger would also build his own cameras, so he’s conscious of the act and the construction, and so should we. How do we recognize what’s happening in an image? That the picture is not just a window; but a vision, a translation, an act of looking shared with us? That’s another thing.

Afterimage by Duncan Wooldridge:

This is an image that keeps coming back to me; it comes out of nowhere, resurfaces; it always feels relevant. The photograph was made by Andreas Feininger and is called The Photojournalist. There's some debate about when it was taken: many examples are dated as 1951, whilst MoMA has a print with a subtly different point of view which it dates to 1955. Pragmatically, exact dates don’t matter in this image that much – it’s not an image of an event - but imaginatively it feels fitting: it’s a strange document, an image of someone who a viewer might think is a time-traveller, before Chris Marker’s La Jetée. But it's also a portrait, an image of the Magnum photographer Dennis Stock. It is a document with one foot in fiction, a bit post-human. And it makes me think about what photography does.

The next is its strangeness, the light and shadow, the shroud of the cap. The who of the image: even if we have no access to the knowledge that it is Stock who Feininger is photographing, there is the title, The Photojournalist. Anonymised, an archetype ‘The photojournalist’. Is the photojournalist human? Are they like us? It seems to be posed as a question. As we look to the eyes, we have two optical devices: the lens and the scope on top of the camera in their place. The two ‘eyes’ are not the same. They’re a pair, interrelated, but not identical. Equivalence or balance is complicated. For me, this is telling about an important relationship we should have with photography—it’s not exact reality, but a negotiation with it, a very contingent and powerful one.

The fictions I enjoy aren’t fantastical or detached from the tangible. I’m interested in that kind of Jose Saramago or Clarice Lispector sense of something happening, becoming. In Saramago that is "what happens if the world was different in just this one respect?"— what are the consequences of subtle shift? What moves our position, our way of seeing the world? This image lets us think approach those concerns, even if this pushes up uncomfortably against the photojournalist’s conventional claim to objectivity, to reporting. Maybe that’s because the old fact and fiction duality just isn’t working anymore.

Astill from Chris Marker’s *La Jetée*, 1962.

As a document with one foot in fiction, we can expand our perspectives. Stock is photographing us with a rangefinder camera, probably a Leica. And we can see that he is seeing us through a scope or viewfinder that sees a different world. The rangefinder, as opposed to a single-lens reflex, has two positions: one position from which the camera operator sees, and a second which is the view that is exposed onto film. The machine and human operator see differently. Though the camera and viewfinder are configured to minimise the disconnect, a difference can be seen under careful observation. It’s called parallax. I’m interested in parallax as the actual and poetic optical event that is happening here, in this portrait and in fact in all photographs. Stock is looking through the scope and seeing one thing, and the lens is seeing another. This opens up a potentially radical possibility: photographs can modify the world. They are showing us emergent possibilities, for good and for bad. This allows us to think about how the world is given form, in-formed by our looking. Just think how much the world been changed by the presence of photographs! Has the time-traveller returned to remind us?

Nina Strand 2/28/25 Nina Strand 2/28/25

ELLE PÉREZ

This book gathers a decade of celebrated artist Elle Pérez’s reflections around photography. A collage of loose thoughts, letters, press articles and reviews, text messages, pictures, sketches, responses, emails, notes, and lectures, the book explores what Pérez chooses to photograph and what photography means to them. It is a tapestry of personal insights, intimate moments, and candid reflections, all woven through the medium.

Objektiv Press was founded in 2009 and began as a biannual journal of lens-based art. After ten years of exploring this format, we transitioned into a more book-like publication, where we let just one writer fill the pages with their real and raw opinions, writing about different trends within the medium.

Since 2020, we have been inviting different people—photographers, critics, curators—to reflect on their relationship with photography through a longer essay. We want to deepen our content and continue to explore the development and position of film and photography both in the art scene and in society.

Nina Strand 2/23/25 Nina Strand 2/23/25

YOLA BALANGA

I long to join the surfers in a diptych I pass. It could offer a needed pause, but politics continue, in another two-work collage showing two women sporting large headpieces full of images from different manifestations. This is what many carry, symbolisingthe worry that never ends, the protest that never rests. The large blue Post-it note with the words ‘Technically, this piece can be considered a painting’ and the smaller red one on the side, stating ‘Not for sale (edition of 3)’ offer some smiles, as do the men in large pink kaftans and the women in gold- and silver-embroidered dresses flâneuring around the fair, champagne in hand, only there to be seen. They might pass quickly by the work in a triptych depicting a woman crawling out of a too-tight cave, and what I will carry with me is the artist’s quote on how Nature is a Black Woman.

Afterimage(s) by Nina Strand:

Yola Balanga, from the series *Born of the Earth.*

The word ‘fuck’ on a pink painting is the first thing I really notice while walking around the Cape Town Art Fair for the second year in a row. The word, written on the hand-colored paper, sums up many of my feelings after just having seen the return of the fascist salute for the second time in such a short span of time.

We are, in some ways, at rock bottom. The past has become the present. I watched the film on Lee Miller on the plane here and was reminded of her reportage Believe It, published in Vogue in June 1945. Her haunting documentation from a concentration camp proved what really happened during World War II. Have we learned nothing? We didn’t. Apartheid was established in 1948. I’m confronted with blurry Holga camera images in black and white from the site of multiple executions of political opponents listed by the Afrikaner government in this town. It faces a collage featuring a floating black woman’s head in a blonde wig, surrounded by objects like a pant line and a cartoon rabbit. It hurts. We are all fucked.

I can’t stop thinking of the suffering here—officially ended in ‘94, but still. I am the tourist. Always. Just like when I visited Vienna and, while passing the art academy, thought of what might have been avoided had he been accepted there. I think of how Elon Musk’s grandparents emigrated from Canada to this country in support of apartheid. Musk holds Canadian citizenship through his mother, Maye, who was born in Canada. Now, many Canadians are signing campaigns to remove his citizenship. They don’t want him, and I’m guessing this country doesn’t either.

I long to join the surfers in a diptych I pass. It could offer a needed pause, but politics continue, in another two-work collage showing two women sporting large headpieces full of images from different manifestations. This is what many carry, symbolising the worry that never ends, the protest that never rests.The large blue Post-it note with the words ‘Technically, this piece can be considered a painting’ and the smaller red one on the side, stating ‘Not for sale (edition of 3)’ offer some smiles, as do the men in large pink kaftans and the women in gold- and silver-embroidered dresses flâneuring around the fair, champagne in hand, only there to be seen. They might pass quickly by the work in a triptych depicting a woman crawling out of a too-tight cave, and what I will carry with me is the artist’s quote on how Nature is a Black Woman.

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

AMANDA WASIELEWSKI

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

Afterimage by Amanda Wasielewski:

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

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

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

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

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

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

ED THOMPSON

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

Afterimage by Ed Thompson:

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

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

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

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

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

SEMANA

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

Afterimage by Jorge Sanguino:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OLI SCARFF

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

Afterimage by Lou Stoppard:

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUTH ORKIN

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

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

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

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

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

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

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

FRANZISKA KUNZE

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

Afterimage by Franziska Kunze:

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

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

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

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

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

EMILE RUBINO

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

EMILE RUBINO in conversation with Lucas Blalock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: Yes, I definitely think this is true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOPHIE THUN

Afterimage by Nela Eggenberger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANNIKA ELISABETH VON HAUSSWOLF

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

Afterimage by Hilma Hedin:

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

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

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

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

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

AGATHA WARA

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

Afterimage by Agatha Wara:

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROLAND PENROSE

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

Afterimage by Clare Patrick:

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

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

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

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

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