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She began to research; she struck up a friendship with a woman named Stacy — formerly the only female employee working on a quarry in New England, and now working behind a desk on the same site — and began to make work in collaboration with her. “In this political climate, I needed a feminist world-building project, and I needed a scaffolding on which to climb out of the murk that we were living in. That was really the genesis for the work,” she says.

That first project laid the foundations for what was eventually to become Spark of a Nail, now being exhibited at Baxter St, New York. Despite its context — of construction, heavy materials and machines, labour — the work is delicate and dreamlike. The dust, grit, and glass involved in this speculative building project diffuse and refract the light, so the women working with them are framed, blurred, surrounded by glitter. Pictured all together, it’s hard not to begin to wonder or imagine what these particular tradeswomen are building; what, exactly, their project is.

As Levy researched, she found that documentary photographs of female labourers were largely relegated to archives, associated with histories of the women’s separatist movement, for example. “We just don’t see those images — of women changing space, and building a different world.”

“What would we think about construction jobs if we imagined an entire job site filled with women?” she asks. “Would we think about this work differently? Would we think about how we build spaces differently? I’ve met tradeswomen who talk about driving down the street and, seeing a building, getting to say to their kid: ‘I built that’.”

Spark of a Nail is on view at Baxter St, 154 Ludlow Street, NYC, until January 28th, 2026.

AZ: Spark of a Nail combines documentary images with staged and performed scenarios. Could you tell me about the decision to combine these different kinds of photographs — what function the combination served, and how you began to explore them together?

ML: As I researched, I was interested in how historically images of labour in the US were dominated by singular heroic white men; rarely did you see images of collective support, or anybody in a minority group. When you’re in the actual spaces where this work takes place, it’s anything but solitary. Of course there are moments of solitude, but there’s so much support; I watched so much solidarity amongst these women. So I wanted to re-make it, but remake it as a more potent image that suggested something broader, that was left open to the viewer to think through emotionally. Documentary images are prone to telling a viewer what to think, and I’m not interested in making pictures that tell you what to think; I’m interested in making pictures that encourage you to ask questions.

And so I knew, early on, that a documentary picture wasn’t going to have the necessary components. Performance has always been an undergirding part of my work — there’s something I need to have happen for a picture to feel like mine, and it’s hard for me to find that through pure observation.

I realised that if I took the camera away for a little bit, and just watched, it allowed my imagination to wander much more. I could see things that were really happening, and at the same time begin to imagine images that were a slightly transformed version of what I was seeing — slightly more photographic, somehow better suited for an image. I’ve taken some liberties in certain places, with the tradeswomen’s consent, and so performance became a necessity; and that kind of re-staging creates an opening for conversation. It made the work more participatory. I never feel good walking into a space and hiding behind my camera; that feels really uncomfortable to me.

And so it was a way for me to be educated; it was a way for my creativity to blossom; and it was a way for these tradeswomen and me to engage in picture-making together, and to talk about photographs. It’s fun to talk about images with people who aren’t always steeped completely in them, but absolutely have thoughts about how important images are, and what being represented means.

AZ: It’s striking — the ways that, as you began to collaborate, the logic of labour entered the speculative project of the work; all of you building, in different ways, separately and together. What kinds of responses were you hearing from the women during the process?

ML: In 2022, just outside of Seattle, I started photographing the back of my camera, and then turning the pictures black and white on my phone so I could show my participants. One woman – and for reference, when I use the word ‘woman’, I’m thinking of Sara Ahmed, who describes the category of womanhood as “anyone who travels under the sign of woman” – she looked at the images and said, “oh, that’s what a picture can do”. What I understood that to mean is that while she was in the scene, she didn’t really see what I was seeing; she didn’t understand why I was making this picture. But through this transformative act of photographing, through the transformative act of rendering a colourful world in black and white, it became something else. It reminded me of those amazing moments of being young, and first seeing an image emerge in the black and white darkroom.

Other people have just said very heartfelt, very straightforward things like, “I needed to see this”, and “people need to see us, we’re here”. That has always been a green light for me to keep going — that there’s this shared need.

AZ: There’s an image of a woman resting, seemingly exhausted, against a pallet of cinder blocks, another woman’s hand on her shoulder. Can you speak to the decision to include images of rest alongside those depicting labour? Why was that important?

ML: Something that has been said to me, again and again, is that a cis man can sit down on a job site, and nobody will question his ability to do the work; but if a tradeswoman is seen sitting, it immediately calls into question whether or not she can do it. The idea that rest is somehow conditional, that rest is somehow gendered — that a resting body is somehow an incapable body — is preposterous to me. Shouldn’t we all have moments of rest and care and compassion?

So these pictures were essentially a way to make trouble, and to do the thing you’re not supposed to do, and to do the thing I believe everybody should have a right to do. And then, thinking back to the history of 20th century images of labour in the US — there’s also a lineage of images that I’m thinking about how to subvert.

And then there’s the metaphorical aspect: that the work of social justice is ongoing, and exhausting, and you need to take breaks to come back in. You have to work, and you have to rest. To me, that makes sense as a way to build a world, both literally and metaphorically. So when I speak about this work, there is the metaphorical component of world-building, of imagining something different; one can’t labour at that all the time. There have to be moments of rest in order to sustain that over the long term.

AZ: Does one of these aspects feel more important or central to the work — on one hand, the metaphorical aspect of imagining and world-building, and on the other, the practical and social aspect of creating visibility for the female labourers you met and worked with?

ML: I’m most drawn to art that is incredibly spacious; that gives me, as a viewer, a lot of room to move around in, a lot of room to think, and imagine inside of. And I wanted this work to be that; to be spacious, not to tell a viewer what to think, not to be prescriptive.

I have five years of research inside me, which is historical and touches a lot of different things — from the history of photography, to labour histories in the US, to other political histories in the US, social movements in the US, to urban design. Part of my brain is holding on to very concrete information, and another part is really trying to take that information alongside the experiences that I’m learning about, and hearing about, and churning them into something that feels tied to all of the research, but in a way that’s open.

That’s how the work lives in me: there are pockets of thought, from concrete to more amorphous to more emotional, and an instinctive consideration about how I can blend those things into an experience of this work that does what I hope it does — which is stay open, and breathing, and filled with a lot of space for a viewer to find meaning.

AZ: That reminds me of something I’ve read you say elsewhere: you describe the work as destabilising a tough/soft binary. Could you tell me some more about that?

ML: I’m sympathetic to why people like things to sit in neat categories. They lend themselves to order and control; and when you’re afraid of something, one seeks order and control. And yet, while I’m sympathetic to it, I find it problematic — I find moving from a place of fear, in general, to be problematic. So I try to ask people to walk into a destabilised space in a welcoming way, because I recognise on some level why it could be frightening for some people; why the idea of destabilising categories could feel threatening, because they mean you have to live in the grey. And living in the grey is not always an easy choice, but it is a far more freeing and breathing choice, and one I choose to live in as much as I’m able.

For me, this notion that something can only be tough or can only be soft, as a personality or a material — it’s not true to the world. These binary experiences aren’t true to a lived life, to what being in the world is like. It is a wildly complex thing, with many varying shades. And so, for me, this is political, and social, and personal. Again — that’s why I want to leave things open, because that’s really what life is: a really big, open-ended question that we try to impose all sorts of shapes around to try to make sense of; but ultimately, it’s porous and messy. That’s what makes it exciting, and also sometimes scary.

AZ: I’m curious about how much our view, in these images, is somehow obstructed or obscured — there are figures behind a sheet, or muddled by reflections, or, in general, a sense that we’re not quite seeing directly or clearly. I wonder if those visual decisions were a reflection of the ambiguity you’re talking about.

ML: It’s an invitation to look closely. When there’s a certain level of ambiguity or opacity, it creates some dream space, or an imaginative space; it’s potent for me, as an artist, to create that for a viewer. It also speaks to the ideas of this work: about visibility, and the things that are there in plain sight that we often fail to see, the bodies we fail to see.

And then there’s an element of playfulness. There’s a lot of humour in this work, and there’s a lot of humour in this world, and it’s a strategy for survival. It’s a strategy to make it through the day. So the work is a combination of all of those things. There are moments when you can feel the tradeswoman and me playing, and we are. We are playing in the way I played with my friends growing up; we’re play-acting together in many of these images. And that’s powerful as adults, too, in a different way.

AZ: Did making this work change you, or your practice, or your thinking?

ML: At the most basic level, when I walk around the city now, a construction site means something so different to me. I think: who’s there, whose needs aren’t being met? Is this a space where people feel good? Is this a good work environment? I think about my immediate landscape differently.

I think about so much legislation we could pass that we don’t pass, and how painful that is. I made bookmarks for the opening, in collaboration with Volume, a wonderful graphic design studio, where I asked a series of tradeswomen to send me pictures from their job sites at sunrise. Many of them take pictures at sunrise — it’s a perk of the job that you get this amazing view.

But of course, the sunrise is not ungendered, in the sense that one of the main barriers for women in the trades is daycare options. Is there a daycare open before sunrise? That is the question that’s written on the back of these bookmarks, and on the front are their sunrise pictures. We choose to not have that in the US. I constantly think about the things we could do, and that we just don’t do, as a nation; who that fails, and who that hurts.

In terms of my practice, this work became an incredible opportunity to think about new ways to present images, to really think about how the material presentation of the work is supporting the images. It feels as though a whole new space has been opened in my practice. I learned some woodworking skills to get some work on the wall, because of budget limitations, and so what felt like a deficit became an opportunity, and that was wonderful. But I think it’s too soon to tell how this work will have shaped my practice. I think you need some distance from the work to kind of look back and then see.

AZ: Last time we met, you were telling me about the comments you received when some of the work was exhibited at Large Glass — the framing, the hang. How much has the physical space of the gallery at Baxter St, and the installation of the work, come into people’s responses to it?

ML: People really seem to respond to the presentation of this work, which is exciting. It felt so freeing to think, okay, what if I throw all the rules away, and just dream up what I want to see? I let go of any preconceived notion of how this work should be shown, and tried to think through what would best serve the work. Like: what is going to get these ideas into the physical space of the gallery with even more immediacy? I’m constantly thinking about how people are presenting pictures, and in a world where we engage with images so much on a flat digital screen, I need the work to do something different. I want the work to be something that is best seen in person, because it engenders an entirely different response.

I have a piece that you can touch — I want people to touch this work. You know, this is the written and unwritten rule of art: we don’t touch art in the museum. So it’s fun to have something you get to break the rules with a little bit. I had to tell people at the opening to go and touch it, to let people know it was okay. I think it’s so funny, how afraid people are to do something like that. We’re so conditioned to be afraid to touch art! So it became an opportunity to think about the pictures living and breathing as autonomous objects in space.

AZ: It seems very apt that the practical decisions you made — shooting in black and white for visual consistency, for example, or learning woodworking because of budget limitations — have ended up opening out onto the metaphorical project of the work; how much the form has come to reflect the content, even if those decisions originally arose from a place of pragmatism.

ML: That’s something that you have to be alive to: the possibility that when you meet constraint in some way, that you can think about how to take that constraint and make something generative out of it. I feel like I’ve had that drilled into me through different art educations: that it is the job of artists to take problems, and pivot, and work with them. And so whenever I’ve been met with any hurdle, I’ve tried to think about how I can get over it creatively. I think I’ve tried to instil in myself that it’s never an option for an artist to say, well, I’m stuck.

If we’re creative thinkers, we have to think creatively in all capacities. I’ve tasked myself with that. That’s not to say that I haven’t tried slightly more practical approaches to problem solving as my first attempt to get over a hurdle, like seeking more funding. But throwing my hands up — that’s never an option for me. In general, I try to figure out how to think generatively. How can I take something that feels challenging, or like an obstruction, and make it into something? It’s an opportunity.

Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

Morgan Levy’s recommended reading:

Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics — bell hooks

Scaffolding — Lauren Elkin

We’ll Call You If We Need You, Experiences of Women Working in Construction — Susan Eisenberg

Boulder — Eva Baltasar

Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World — Leslie Kern

A huge thanks to Morgan Levy, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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In the deep autumn, a few years ago, I went to Lewes to photograph the Bonfire Night celebrations. Bonfire — as they call it in Lewes — is a huge, Carnivalesque event. Preparations begin a year in advance. The whole town gathers together in costumes and parades, divided into Bonfire Societies, carrying torches through the street, and eventually congregating at not just one but several enormous, towering bonfires spread throughout the town, some rumoured to be quite wild, dangerous, and each with their own display of fireworks. I’ve spent the past few years making work about contemporary rituals in Britain, and this famous, town-wide event was one I’d always been especially curious about, long imagining photographing it.

As it happened in the end, I didn’t see any of the fires. I wouldn’t make it to the main event I’d planned for, weeks in advance, booking a room to stay in with several months’ notice (the town fills up completely for the celebrations, and closes to traffic on the day itself).

I drove down from London on the fourth of November, a Saturday. The place had a crackle in the air, the feeling of something coming, palpable even through the misted windscreen of my car. I parked near the lido and walked to the house I was staying in, which was cosy, a fire chattering in the living room and dim light coming through the glass roof above the kitchen. The woman who owned the house was in training to become a death doula, and her kitchen table was covered in information about the end-of-life pathway. Upstairs, the little bed in the spare room was entirely concave, soft and deep, sloping down into a generous cavern in the middle of the mattress. It was also on wheels, easily mobile, sliding fast away from the wall when I tried to lean against it to read.

These were the early days of a period of illness that would go on to last eight months. That night was one of the first times that I acknowledged that I was ill at all. I haven’t yet tried to write about it, and now that I do I’m finding it difficult — I can’t find the words without reaching for cliché, and because in fact that time has almost disappeared from memory entirely, as though I wasn’t forming anything lasting, sensations and events sliding past at such a distance from me as to make no impression at all. But the fact remains: that night, I was too unwell to leave the house, try as I might. Over the first half of the day my legs had stopped working. It began — I was becoming familiar with the pattern — with a deceleration, an increasing heaviness, which culminated in the sensation that, from the waist down, I had become inanimate, and that I may as well be trying to use telekinesis to move something dense and dead. The legs slowed down further and further. The effort cost me more and more. The clouds gathered and glowered until, cracking, they opened and the rain poured down.

And so before the fires were even lit, I was back in my rented room, in the sunken centre of the bed, listening to the first early fireworks and the rain. I went to the death doula’s bookshelf and brought a Mary Oliver collection into the pit I’d made for myself, read it instead of taking all the photographs I’d imagined taking. I want every poem to “rest” in intensity, she wrote. I want it to be rich with “pictures of the world”.

After resting for a long time — I’d begun to learn about pacing — I coaxed myself out of the house, determined to see some of the parade, stepping slow and deliberate. I stood in the cold and the rain while the different Bonfire Societies mustered and the torches were lit. I lifted my camera underneath my umbrella and watched the crowd lining the street, silhouettes looking down from every window. I saw the people of Lewes in their costumes as they began to walk, banging their drums and ringing their bells, the tang of paraffin everywhere. I wiped my lenses with tissue I’d bought from a kebab shop for a pound.

Suddenly a photographer I know was there beside me, unexpectedly, and she looked so alive, the downpour slicking strands of hair against her face, her face which was glittering with the rain and the light from the flames. She was with friends, told me which fire they were going to. I lied and said I’d see her later. I knew I wouldn’t — my legs would barely let me move. I bought a hot chocolate and drank it slowly, hoping to force enough energy into myself to make it the five or ten minute walk home. And then I set out, taking my heavy, impossible steps one by one until I made it, soaking, back to the death doula’s house. I got into bed and returned to the poems. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Later I stood at the window and made videos of the fireworks on my phone. Afterwards, in bed again, I watched the images stream towards me in slow motion, seeing the light shatter into points on the screen, the bedroom floor still revealed at intervals by the shattering light outside. The house shook with each burst. The booming and shaking lasted for hours. The fires burned on elsewhere, or maybe they did — I never saw them. I was warm in my pit. All around me the burnt smell of the radiator coming on.

But the book. It opens with water, then stone — pages of this stone, close up, its patterns and textures rendered in the graphite black and white that is the overwhelming language of the book. And then, within the walls that now contain us here, images overlaid in collage, rippling, rhythmic: flesh, hands, fabrics, flames. The cosmos. Bodies crouched and ready to run. The images collected in the book are not only Scarville’s own, but also take in those from the archives she works with, both personal and public.

It rewards the reader who returns to it again and again; while preparing for this conversation, throughout it, and even now as I look over the book once more, it kept shifting and changing for me, deepening, revealing new sense and patterning in the way that dreams do. Or perhaps in the way that weeks or years of dreams do — the new symbols arisen and approached from different angles, the surprising detail, the meaning you grasp for a moment before it slips away.

It was a great pleasure to speak with Scarville via email and Zoom this summer, parts of which conversation are recorded here below. She is a practitioner invested in latency, and the value of opacity and resistance, as you’ll see; it may be interesting to read this newsletter alongside the one with David Campany, who shares this ethic. I’m so glad that work like hers exists, that it can chart a path for other artists today; it is ballast against the pressures to be immediate and legible. Not that the work itself is didactic in the slightest; already I find myself wary of unintentionally reducing this layered, tension-filled work — which stages and responds to so many things: thresholds, collective histories and imaginations, the many narratives of the Black diaspora — to some kind of straightforward read or meaning. Having to introduce it, as this format demands, cannot but fail. Really, I just recommend spending time with the book yourself.

At one point I wondered if the freedoms Scarville found in making this work had made themselves felt elsewhere in her life — as artist, as educator, as person. “I feel that it doesn’t have to stop at the book,” she told me. “All of this,” — and here she gestured around herself — “can be the work too. And this can be the way in which the work lives, and becomes.”

Alice Zoo: I’d like to start with the form of your book, which gathers many kinds of images and arranges them alongside one another in a dense collage. Could you tell me about the process of bringing the images together like this, and how you landed on this form in the process of making the book, how it evolved? And why are you drawn to collage as a tool, more generally? I’m thinking, too, of your work Passports.

Keisha Scarville: When given the opportunity to make a book, I knew that I didn't want a book that was a catalog of my own images. I have nothing against catalogs or monographs that are highly specific and focused on the artist/photographer’s work, but that wasn’t what I was envisioning for my first book. I wanted to create a book where my work was presented alongside all the images that have inspired me or have informed the way I think about photography. There are themes that I am often working with in my own images, specifically around the body and place (or ways in which bodies are placed). Every time I approach the act of making an image, there is this abundant ecosystem of work at play. I truly wanted the book to be a piece unto itself where I could engage the poetics of a book format. There are temporal possibilities that I find to be unique to a book versus a wall, gallery space or screen. I started to learn that creating a book is like designing a map. The pages are navigational. Each turn moves us through a visual experience. Michael Mack gave me the freedom and time to work on it. My first step was spending time gathering everything that I wanted to include — a netting of memory and existence. There are images that I grew up with, images from my own family archive, screenshots from some of my favorite films, my own words and doodles from moments when I am contemplating time.

The book opens and closes with detailed images of the seawall in Guyana, South America, where my family is from. I am incredibly captivated by this structure, which is meant to protect the coast from rising waters. I thought it would be fitting to start and end with this. The book then moves into the singular presentation of my images. Then, I wanted the flow to break as we got closer to the center, where I embrace density with brief pauses of words. I found myself thinking more like a filmmaker than a photographer.

I enjoy the ways in which collage lends itself to temporal stitching. I think I am drawn to how collage inherently reorders and creates its own visual language. In the book, every moment is now, regardless of when the image was taken. There are a few images of deceased family members and other individuals. I was thinking about collage as an act of embracing the aliveness of the image.

I think collage operates slightly differently in the Passports series. There, collage — and processes like painting and other media — become a way to uncover or activate what is latent within the image, which is otherwise deceptively neutral.

AZ: I appreciate the idea of the ecosystem of a work or a mode of thinking. It feels like the frameworks you’re thinking with — maps, nets — point to a notion of the artist not as solitary but as interdependent, connected (to other artists, to family, to broader social context) and reliant on mutuality, as indeed we all are, artists or otherwise. It seems like the idea of collectivity within the context of the sole practitioner is ever more rare in today’s creative landscape.

And, like an ecosystem, the book feels like something very shifting and alive. I wonder if you still work with the images in the book, whether you continue to use and rearrange them within your wider practice, or whether publishing the book felt like it ‘set’ them in some way — like they found their place, and you could then move on from those particular images to make and draw from new ones.

KS: I have continued working with some of the images in different capacities. Other images feel very connected to their presentation in the book. The book opened up a new way of thinking about photography for me. I recently did an exhibition at Webber Gallery in LA based on the book. It was a challenge to take the book and make it into physical, navigational space. Some images were shown very differently from how they are presented in the book. I think as we evolve as people, our perception also shifts, and the way I see my images is always changing. I think I tend to resist thinking of images as being fixed in any particular time or place.

Before the book, I had been questioning photography’s capacities. I was very invested in documentary photography and finding the poetic in the everyday. I think I still have those beliefs, but after my mother passed away in 2015 I became more interested in photography’s relationship to absence, and its capability to capture what may not be readily apparent. How does the camera engage latency, and what are the relational conversations between the archive and the present. I released myself from thinking about my work as consisting of defined, separate projects. Working on the book definitely solidified this new thinking for myself.

AZ: I can see how, retroactively, it’s possible to work with images in such a way that old definitions and/or hierarchies collapse; but as you go on to make new works, now, I’m curious how that porousness functions in practice. Do you still find yourself moving through particular cycles or surges of interest at certain moments, currents that previously might have coalesced into separate projects? Or is everything now part of the same, undifferentiated flow? I’m also wondering how that mode actually feels to implement — is it always fruitful, or does the undefined-ness ever feel hard to manage?

KS: This is a difficult question to answer. I do love that I have released myself from concentrating on a particular body of work. I find myself operating more intuitively. I make images based on what is percolating for me at the time. This is also coupled with my constant return to the archive and interest in visual culture. All the images are orbiting around me at any given time. I will admit that since making the book, I vacillate between feeling liberated and being overwhelmed. This way of being is often tested, particularly in spaces where labels, containers, and clear legibility are required for work to be understood.

AZ: Why did it feel important to decentre your work, placing your own photographs amongst the archive, alongside others? And can you tell me some more about the process of enacting that decision?

KS: Honestly, it came about from exhaustion. I have been making images for quite some time and I started to realize that every project, every image, held elements of previous gestures/interests/explorations. The attempts to try to place them in distinct categories of investigation was tiresome. I longed for a language that was more porous, less definitive, and that made space for other visual encounters aside from the images I am making. I was inspired by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Deana Lawson. Their work was the first time I saw references highlighted in the presentation of the work. There was something incredibly energizing about this. Though photographs are inherently still, they are not static. The book was the first place where I started to lay out all the images together and create a sort of tapestry.

AZ: I’d like to know more about the fragments of text that run throughout the book, which feel like another connective thread: where they came from, how they found their way into the book, at what stage, and so on.

KS: They were things that I was doodling. This was something I’d been doing for a really long time, thinking about home, but also thinking about time. I had all these things written down, and I wanted them to be Haiku-like, for them to feel like fragments. During one of my meetings with Michael, at MACK, I had shared it with him, and he said we should use this for the title of the book. And he told me to just keep writing.

So I just kept writing, and thinking about my ideas of home, like: what are these gestures that bring me back to home? What are the gestures that conjure another person in my life? What are the ways in which I’m thinking about how time is mapped? At a certain point I wanted to add dates. Each of the dates represents the year that someone in my family was born, or the year someone in my family passed away.

That was the thinking behind the text. And I think part of it, also, was that as I was laying everything out, I felt like the work was so dense; I wanted to create a space to pause, and to linger in the space that’s created by the words.

AZ: You’ve said that the work is an exploration of the forces and currents that have shaped you. I was wondering about whether you felt that the process of making the work, and turning it into a book, had shaped you in turn, in some way?

KS: The book has had so many reverberations. There are so many things that I hadn’t expected. The book was kind of the first place where I really allowed myself to be free. And, in a lot of ways, it was taking the ways in which I’m thinking, and working, and understanding photography, and understanding all the things that build my relationship to photography, and putting them into this book in a way that was free of any preconceived ideas about what it needed to be, or how it needed to look like something else.

So yes, obviously it’s affected the way I’ve thought about photography, and thought about how things are categorised. I think in my teaching, I’ve always encouraged students to be in the process. Because I work with students who are graduating, I often see the way that they have many ideas, but they’re also responding to market, and responding to how they need to present themselves. There is a validity to that, on some level, but I also think that there’s something about the beauty of being in process. How do you create space for dreaming, and spaces for making mistakes? It doesn’t necessarily have to be packaged neatly. I’m interested in that, and I encourage my students to think about that as well.

Recently I had a conversation a professor who was teaching a course in China, and she assigned my book. She said that on the first day they sat down to talk about it, a lot of people in the class didn’t know what to make of it. I thought that was interesting, actually. I liked that. I thought, well — they don’t have to make anything of it. It doesn’t have to be something that’s easily understood, or digestible, or that makes sense, or that speaks to them.

Having those conversations does make me think about legibility in photography, especially in the space that we’re in now, where the photograph has to translate, it has to speak to something. And then in those moments when maybe it’s not all given — what do you do?

AZ: This comes back to what you were saying about freedom — that it’s difficult to maintain.

KS: Yes. I’ve come to this place where I’m responding to stagnancy, and how to move through it. I’m thinking about the ways in which photography, and how it’s presented, becomes a bit stagnant.

I see it happening within certain spaces, where a photographer, or a way of presenting work, gets pushed forward. There’s a kind of stylising, and a way in which certain photographers get presented and presented and presented, and so everyone starts to try to mimic that style. There should be such a vast multiplicity of ways that photography can be presented and discussed, and sometimes I feel that talking about a handful of the same photographers, over and over again, creates a stagnancy in terms of what new languages can come out of the medium. I’m not really interested in talking about Henri Cartier-Bresson again.

There’s a validity to it, but there are certain things I want to move past, or maybe just broaden. I want to know: what are the things that trouble a photographer? What are the things that they’re wrestling with, and how does that show up?

Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

Keisha Scarville’s recommended reading:

Palace of the Peacock — Wilson Harris

Dub — Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power — Audre Lorde

A Mercy — Toni Morrison

Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice by Rasheedah Phillips

A huge thanks to Keisha Scarville, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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The assignment was part of The Atlantic’s ‘Literary Travels’ series, for which writers go to destinations that speak to the work of a favourite author or book. I’d be in Corfu with Honor Jones on the tail of John le Carré, who had his own history with the island, and who set a few key scenes in his 1986 novel A Perfect Spy there.

The brief was both intriguing and satisfyingly open — and, as such, the assignment was as much a great invitation as it was a puzzle to solve. How to capture the spirit of espionage and alter egos, the stuck-in-the-past Britishisms of Corfu, and a feeling of le Carré’s post-Cold War unease, all in the perfect gorgeousness of spring on a Greek island? I planned to find out.

Behind the scenes on assignment work

Inspired by queen Dina Litovsky’s impeccable assignment reporting (I especially loved her account of photographing one of her heroes, Ringo Starr) I’m going to share a diaristic account of the commission, from top to bottom — creative process, problem-solving, my go-to workflow — and the anecdotes behind it all, the background details that are often the subject I find most interesting as a photographer: the way that a picture shows just a fragment of what it took to make it, and often conceals that making entirely.

I’ll get into the fine detail of what happened on this particular assignment in Corfu — practically, personally — and talk through how I built out the photo story, including:

• how it all happened logistically (timeframe, equipment, planning)

• workflow (gear, pacing, editing process)

• three difficulties I ran into — inevitable on assignment — and how I worked with them (in this case: access denied! Equipment breakdown!)

• the images that made the edit versus those that didn’t — I’ve always loved looking at photographers’ contact sheets, seeing how the greats thought through a moment and what the edit brought out, and so in that spirit I’m including some of my hits and misses here below

And so, without further ado…

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Reading over my draft today, as I prepare to publish it, I’m struck by the thread of my own personal doubt and faltering that keeps surfacing in my responses to these ten books and films. I thought about editing it out, but then I felt it would be more honest — and in the spirit of many of the works on this list, as you’ll discover — to leave it all in. I want to cop to the rhythms of uncertainty and inconclusiveness that are, it seems, common to most artists. Frankly, too, I think it’s a particularly hard moment to maintain conviction in the importance of one’s own creative work. Art can’t make the world better, as much as the idealist in me wants that to be so, and every day the news reminds me of it. (In the meantime, keep writing to your MP and donating when you can — I still believe that clear collective action and refusal can, if slowly, move the needle).

Anyway — many of the works on this list made me feel that moments of faltering don’t have to be something to hide, but instead can give texture to a work, as well as — in the best case — reassuring others who feel similarly. These eight books and two films were meaningful to me, and I think meaning and pleasure are important, even (and especially) in moments of creative inertia and disillusionment. I admire all the artists, working today and in the past, who’ve carried on making things, and thinking things, and reading and writing, during their own moments of doubt, and I’m grateful for their generosity in sharing it.

You can read the previous lists here and here.

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It feels increasingly as though the quality most desired in the artistic product — and it does often feel like a product — is palatability: work that is as available and consumable as possible, which means not only that the images themselves should be immediate and satisfying and easily read, but also that they should be packaged and prepared in a delectable way (when they are sent out to curators, editors, and so on). The artist themselves becomes part of the package.

I was thinking about this when I came upon these lines by Marguerite Duras, quoted by Deborah Levy in Real Estate:

I think what I blame books for, in general, is that they are not free.

One can see it in the writing: they are fabricated, organised, regulated; one could say they conform. A function of the revision that the writer often wants to impose on himself. At that moment, the writer becomes his own cop. By being concerned with good form, in other words the most banal form. The clearest and most inoffensive. […] Even young people: charming books, without extension, without darkness. Without silence. In other words, without a true author.

It made me think about photography, and the predicament of the photographer/artist. More and more it feels like the freedom Duras writes of — and the uncomfortable chaos or opacity that such freedom implies — is inadvisable for the contemporary photographer too, or at least the photographer that would like to make any kind of a living from their work. The cost of the widespread appetite for clearness and regularity, for frictionlessness, for charm, is that eventually artists begin to blur together into one undifferentiated mass, churning out images that feel more often like advertising than meaningful works of art. We are losing authorship, and becoming our own cops.

Perhaps part of the role of the curator today is to shoulder some of the fear of the freedoms and frictions of open space; of risk-taking; of focussing more on the ideas themselves than on smooth and intelligible surfaces. I am grateful that Campany’s work as a curator (he has just been appointed Creative Director of the International Center of Photography), as well as a writer and artist, defends the virtues of difficulty and freedom by its example. This includes the freedom of the work, and indeed the artist, to be strange or silent, to resist the imperative of fast and frictionless understanding.

When I saw his post at the end of last year, I wrote to him to ask about some of these things.

Alice Zoo: I first wrote to you in October after reading your Instagram post about your experience appearing as a guest on a (never-published) podcast.

It seems to me that the horror you described was produced by the ways that the conversation didn’t even pretend to aspire to the ideals of art — like experimentalism, innovation, strangeness — but rather instead to the ways that artists should smooth themselves and their work into products to be more easily sold, distributed, digested and consumed. You spoke, in your post, about the dangers of conformity. I’ve been thinking, since then, about the idea of genuine creative freedom, and the ambiguity and even chaos that can imply, and whether there’s space for it in the marketised version of industry art-making that these kinds of podcasts and articles encourage.

Is freedom a principle that is important in your work, and the work you’re drawn towards?

David Campany: Freedoms are always relative, not absolute, and clearly economics play their part. I think it was Roland Barthes who said the purest condition is that of the amateur, the lover of things, the one who does things for the love of it (in French the root connection to love, amour, is clearer than it is in the English use of the word). The amateur does not, or will not, or need not, place what they do under economic pressures. They either earn their money elsewhere or have access to money somehow.

Beyond this, living a creative life is always going to be a series of challenges. I think my horror at having to listen to over-professionalized advice from ‘industry’ people is related to the way ‘creative’ has become a noun. As if there are people we can call ‘creatives’. This to me sounds nauseatingly close to ‘content provider’, someone who works in the ‘creative industries’. I think this completely misunderstands (or actively refuses to see) how a creative life is a life that doesn’t fit, on some profoundly important level. It is beyond the given paradigms. It is resistant, searching, unsatisfied. I don’t want to romanticise the creative life but at the same time it’s not helpful to reduce it to professionalism or suitability to the economies of culture.

The other week I had dinner with an artist acquaintance who I have helped for a long time. She has recently learned how to ‘art world’ after years of struggle, and she’s going for it 150%. It’s kind of hilarious and creepy to watch the swing from disgust at a world that didn’t want her to total embrace of it because it has embraced her. Doors are opening. Opportunities. The seduction of money, the world of ‘high profile friends’ as she called them, quite unironically. She’s suddenly arrogant and self-important, and fake humble, in ways she doesn’t quite realise are annoying everyone. But it’s totally understandable. At the same time, another artist acquaintance makes work at least as good, doing it all in her spare time around her day job in a factory. She longs for something better, of course she does, but for now that longing is poured into her work, whenever she can make it. These cases are real extremes but we do live in extreme times, and I wish we didn’t.

AZ: I wonder, too, if part of the problem with the professionalisation discourse is that it shifts the burden of proof onto the individual artist — here’s how you can streamline yourself, and so on — rather than asking more fundamental questions about larger, perhaps more intractable problems, such as the fact that the UK government has progressively deprioritised the arts, defunding cultural organisations and destroying humanities departments at schools and universities. It seems to mirror the way that conversations around, say, health, or climate, are so often pointed at the individual rather than the corporations and structures that make it harder and harder to exist in the given paradigm.

I’ve long wanted to write a newsletter about day jobs, and the ways that the artists I know support themselves. I feel angry that even longevity and acclaim in the industry often don’t translate to a living wage. I’m saddened to think of all the work that never got made because the artist had to quit. I know brilliant artists, ones who have won the prestigious prizes and have been fully embraced by the institutions, who are on universal credit. I wonder what kind of refusal is genuinely possible within the structures and systems available if, say, a person doesn’t come from a well-off family, or have a partner with a stable job, or is a single parent. The system as it is anoints a few chosen ones, like the acquaintance you mention, and the rest are left fighting over scraps. Anecdotally it seems that, for all the noise about diversity and inclusion, it's mainly the same kinds of people getting the money as always have. Do you think there are many of these different kinds of conversations happening — ones that agitate against the structures rather than the individual, and think radically about how those structures might be changed? And in the meantime, how artists might support one another, and consider themselves part of a community or ecosystem? Do we have to accept the economies of culture as they are?

DC: I’ve just been reading a book about the history of the NEA (the National Endowment for the Arts, a key funding body in the USA). When do you think NEA funding was at its height? It was under Nixon. Art culture had become politicised by the civil rights movement, by the new wave of feminism, and by the anti-Vietnam war movement. Someone in the Nixon government had a word in the president’s ear. ‘These artists will be less dangerous if we fund them.’ That’s a scary historical fact, from whichever angle you look at it.

Yes, there’s lots of talk and some action around getting together to form communities and art ecosystems within the larger economy. There are lots of ways to share costs of living, and share the burden of precarity. But that’s not specific to artists. That’s the history of communes and communal living under capitalism. It doesn’t work if those in the commune are all artists or all artists all of the time. You need farmers, builders, plumbers and all the rest. So it’s not a matter of ‘artists’ sticking together, so much as people wanting to live communally sticking together, and there is art in that wanting.

I saw a clip of Jeremy Deller being interviewed the other day. He was pointing out how often rich collectors talk about artists being visionaries who can change the world, when in fact it’s they, the rich, who can change the world. Instead they buy art and tell themselves they’re supporting change. As Terry Eagleton once put it, ‘the only thing the bourgeoisie won’t hang on its walls is its own political defeat’.

My interest has always been photography, and an important part of the reason for this is the many different ways it fits into culture and the economy. If you’re a painter or a sculptor, pretty much your only context is art. Photography’s scope and field of operation is much wider, although it’s no less precarious, especially when everyone has a camera in their pocket and AI threatens to usurp. But again, I don’t think photographers banding together is much of an answer. It’s people that have to band together. A community, an ecosystem, takes all sorts.

AZ: Last year I read your book-length conversation with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Indeterminacy, in which you wrote that “Arguably, ambitious culture, important culture, is grounded in the refusal of the fixed terms on offer in favour of keeping the door open to complexity, provisionality, possibility.”

It’s interesting that a refusal of your own (in the context of the podcast) resonated so widely — that your post about it on Instagram went semi-viral, and attracted far more kinds of people than would usually engage with your posts. It seems this is often the way: that a public refusal generates a huge public response, as though everyone is waiting for somebody to show them how. It seems like there’s more of an appetite for complexity than is generally accepted.

And then for artists, it seems often that when the right or usual way of doing things is given up on, significant new freedoms are possible, and new ground can be broken. There are many examples of this, but for some reason today Knausgaard comes to mind. He was frustrated, blocked and desperate, and so decided to abandon literary convention and just write everything down, in a project that would become a kind of death — to “empty every reservoir so there would be nothing left” — and the result was the six-part My Struggle, which he wrote extremely fast and which was received by many as a masterpiece.

Are there particular examples of creative refusal, contemporary or canonical, that feel important or totemic for you, that have made something possible in your own work?

DC: Being non-canonical in my approach to photography is so central, and feels so natural to me that I wouldn’t even call it a refusal, although some do see it that way. I’ve found the idea of a canon quite absurd, particularly in photography, a medium so dispersed across society. I prefer to follow the image, not the names, not the money, not the received wisdom about what’s important. I remember writing my first book, Art and Photography, a survey of the places of photography in art since the 1960s. I didn’t select on the basis of names, I chose images, which meant there are some big names that aren’t in the book and lots of lesser known names that are. In the exhibitions I curate, a postcard or a magazine spread might be placed next to an expensive print by a canonical artist. I don’t do this to elevate the postcard or magazine spread, nor to bring down the canonical work. It’s simply a result of being interested in images, and wanting to encourage others to do the same. But I would stress that I’m non- or a-canonical, rather an anti-canonical, which is why ‘refusal’ may not be quite the right word for it.

Something that does feel more like refusal for me is the wish to keep the spotlight firmly on the work I do. I avoid being photographed as much as I can although it’s not always possible.

I do worry that the arts in general are becoming conditioned by appearance, by a certain conformist presentability. This conformist presentability might personalise the arts but it’s detrimental in the long run, not least because it excludes those who are reluctant to step into the given frame of visibility. I’m well aware that a lot of great work — art making, writing, curating — is done by those who would prefer to remain off-stage, so to speak. As I write this, I wonder if my thoughts are connected with my not really wanting to know about the lives of makers. I prefer the imaginary construction of the maker that naturally comes with an individual engagement with the work itself. When I read Virginia Woolf’s writings, I make for myself a ‘Virginia Woolf’ in my head, inevitably, but this is unlikely to be the same as the actual Virginia Woolf. I wonder too if something of this desire to escape the tyranny or the cult of the maker is why there is such a lot of interest in vernacular ages, found images and so forth. Without a name attached, the viewer can feel much more free in their response.

AZ: It makes sense to me that attaching too strong a personality to a given work would limit its freedoms — that it would make it harder for a work to be surprising or subversive. I have a friend who, new to his second language, decided to read Pedro Páramo in the original Spanish, very slowly, dictionary in hand. After he was finished he read it again in translation, and found that the version he'd imagined from his cobbled-together text and misunderstandings was more interesting than the story as it was intended — it was stranger. I wonder if attaching a work so neatly to its maker is something like reading a work in translation, perhaps making it more intelligible but less interesting, shutting down some of the ambiguity that might allow us a deeper, odder engagement with it, and so bringing our own thinking to new and unexpected places. I feel like Instagram, where this conversation began, has a large hand in this conditioning by appearance: it places the emphasis on the person rather than the work, on building a following. As far as the images themselves are concerned, the algorithm prioritises the crowd-stopping single image rather than the body of work, or the sequence, or the strange or subtle or ‘wrong’ image. I’m often thinking of something Teju Cole wrote there — choosing between two images, he opts for the worse one. “Intransigence is what interests me,” he said.

It also seems as though the emphasis on appearance and presentability goes beyond just personalising the arts, making them more palatable, but is even coming to be a necessary part of the sales package. There has been conversation recently about the increasing emphasis on identity in art — this piece in Harper’s, for example, and then Martin Herbert's (who incidentally wrote a great book about artists' refusal to cooperate with the mechanisms of the art industry) response to it in ArtReview — and in my own anecdotal experience, as a reviewer at portfolio review days and so on, it feels like the self is more and more the preoccupation of young artists. I completely agree with what you say about photography, that interesting images come from everywhere, including from non-artists and vernacular sources — but in terms of the artist shows and books you’re seeing, have you noticed an increasing focus on work that concerns identity? Do you feel that artists are increasingly incentivised by the industry to put themselves and their contexts into their works? If so, what effect is that having?

DC: About a decade ago I was involved in a project instigated by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, titled Alias. They asked about twenty artists and writers to each write the biography of an imaginary artist. Around 500 words. I invented a woman born in 1900. Among other things, she was bisexual, a kleptomaniac, and a collagist who fell in with the surrealists in 1920s/30s Paris. She died young when a jealous lover set fire to her house. I figured Broomberg and Chanarin were going to publish the biographies as a collection, but instead they asked us all to make the art our imaginary artist would have made. So I found myself trying to inhabit the persona of this artist I had invented, sourcing interwar Parisian magazines to cut up, and inventing a style of collage that could have existed but didn't. A few years later I included the collages in a public talk I was giving about what it means to be a writer, curator, historian, and artist. A young woman in the Q&A stood up and said she suspected the collages were the most autobiographical and personal thing I'd ever made. I was taken aback but she was dead right. Then she quoted that great Oscar Wilde line: Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth. It's not always when we think we are making ‘diaristic’ or ‘confessional’ work that we are being ‘personal’ and ‘authentic’. Art culture, particularly photo art culture, has it all wrong. It didn't used to. It used to be well aware of this, but you’re right, a sort of karoake version of the personal is now dominant, if not in the work itself then in the way it gets narrated and attached to a personality. It’s pretty tedious, most of the time, and it will soon become clear just how related it is to the rise of social media and the anxieties that come with living in a visual culture of permanent reputation management.

Speaking of surrealism and of Instagram, I posted recently about my favourite thing produced by the Surrealists: the artists’ portraits from the publication that accompanied the New York exhibition ‘The First Papers of Surrealism’ in 1942. They couldn’t find photos of all the artists so Marcel Breton and Marcel Duchamp, the curator-editors, appropriated portraits from various books and magazines. The choice of images was not random. Sometimes there’s a resemblance, sometimes there’s another kind of connection. Walker Evans’ photo of the sharecropper Allie Mae Burroughs was used to represent the painter Leonora Carrington. Picasso is represented by two people looking in different directions — a nod to Cubism’s multiple perspectives; Joan Mirò is represented by a man and a woman (I guess because in America ‘Joan’ would be read as a woman’s name); Duchamp chose for himself one of Ben Shahn’s photos of a woman farmer. She looks like Duchamp, who had long played with gender ambiguity. Who knows what the unsuspecting audience might have made of these ‘Compensation Portraits’, as they were called. Kind of refreshing in our era of endless promotional (self)portraits.

I was recently in the Toronto studio of the photographer Edward Burtynsky. He is, pre-eminently, a photographer of the world ‘out there’. A mural-sized test print of his latest image was unrolled on a large table and then pinned to a magnetised wall for viewing. It was shot in October 2024 on a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a wide, elevated view of the steep escarpment of an open industrial copper mine. That is what the large machinery, dwarfed by even larger landscape, is here to extract. To get to it, however, many metres of surface rock must be removed, and in this rock there are small but valuable traces of cobalt. With the exponential rise in the world’s numbers of smartphones and electric cars, cobalt has become one of the most in-demand substances on the global marketplace for natural resources. It is a vital component of rechargeable batteries. Thousands of artisanal miners, including women and children, work with simple tools and bare hands in this hostile landscape. They break the rock to get to the cobalt, which is toxic to the skin. Working conditions in such mines are among the most hazardous and poorly paid in the world. Moreover, the cobalt supply chain is of such complexity — with any number of intermediaries between those working in the mines and the companies that manufacture batteries — that there are currently no guarantees that it does not involve child labor and other illegal forms of exploitation. It is tempting, of course, to read this image of cobalt extraction, and Burtynsky’s work in general, as somewhat dispassionate, distanced and even cold. About as far from ‘personal photography’ as one could imagine. By extension it is tempting to see Burtynsky as more interested in humanity than humans, perhaps; or more interested in scale and statistics than anything that might feel intimate. But reach for your iPhone, so close to your body. Think about the cobalt that keeps it alive and ready for you whenever you need it, twenty-four hours a day. Think of how insidiously integrated it is into your life, both as a device, and in terms of the images you make with it, perhaps diaristic or confessional images. There is a line of connection that reaches all the way from your hand in your pocket to the countless hands in the earth of that hellish mine. It’s a cliché, of course, but what is local is global, and what is global is local. What is personal is political, and what is political is personal. The webs of interconnection are tangled and intangible, but they are also undeniable. There is no ‘personal’ realm beyond or separate from what Burtynsky’s imagery asks us to see. His photograph of that cobalt mine ought to feel as personal to you as your latest selfie. Perhaps it needs a shift in perspective to grasp this.

AZ: That feels like a good place to end, but just before we do I want to alight briefly on the idea of surprise, which often comes up in your writing. What has surprised you lately?

DC: I’m often surprised by the changes in my judgements, values, tastes and views. I like to revisit works of culture that have meant a lot to me. Certain novels, films, books of photos, buildings, pieces of music. It’s always a surprise to find that while they have not changed, I have, and sometimes quite dramatically. This can be a really illuminating measure of one’s own development.

Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

David Campany’s recommended reading:

A Manual for Cleaning Women — Lucia Berlin

Complete Stories — Clarice Lispector

Poetics of Cinema — Raùl Ruiz

A huge thanks to David Campany, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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How could I explain that I was here in this small village in rural France because decades earlier a kid in my class had brought in an emperor hawk moth squashed into a jam jar?

Rituals of intoxication are a motif of Ferguson’s work. He pays careful and deliberate attention to the sensuous process of rolling and smoking a spliff, its furls of indigo smoke, its bleached ash, its end glowing orange; the brandy on the table; the memories of the double-stacked Mitsubishis and zoots flicked into the text from the top decks of his narrator’s youth. Often the narrative voice seems suspended at the point just before, or at the moment of, consumption. Whatever comes next — the state that follows the smoke, the drink, the drug — happens elsewhere, leaving its narcotic effect to infuse the pages that follow.

This sense of suspension reflects Deadfall’s general feeling of vertigo. We arrive to the story in medias res, with a dislocation or destabilisation waiting on either side of the words we’re reading, but which never quite arrives. Here we are instead, stilled, inhaling smoke, anticipating the way our felt experience may be about to change. The photographs — quiet and potent — are working their way through delicate membrane and into us.

I wrote to Max — artist, writer, editor, lecturer, publisher, collaborator and friend — via email. We spoke about control and freedom, the split (or not) between image and text, self-exposure, fictions, and working into the not knowing.

Alice Zoo: I’m so glad to have seen the installation of Deadfall — how distinct it felt from the book, as well as your use of unexpected materials: fragile things to print onto, like envelopes, and the frames you built yourself. The tactile is such an important element of your work. Could you tell me about making things yourself, with your hands? Why is that important to you? Is it part of the way you think? What does it make possible for you, what does it teach you, and what effect does it create?

Max Ferguson: I’m so glad you made it to that show, Alice. I had so much fun putting it together, and after two years of working on the book it was nice to share some of the process with people. It’s interesting because most of those fragile things — the envelopes, the sketchbooks, the delicate pieces of paper — were never made to be exhibited. I made hundreds of sketchbooks, prints and zines and the work showed was a small part of the physical experiments. They were research for the book, really — tools to work out the sequence, and the balance of text and image. Almost all of my research is making things and reading fiction — and some other things seep in, of course. I think things often make the most sense when I’m busy making in the darkroom or my studio. It’s where work comes together and the chaos begins to take shape, and the act of making is as integral as making photographs. It’s a break from everything that comes after taking the picture, such as scanning, writing and designing. I made the darkroom prints and the frames specifically for the show, though, and I also framed some of the delicate things in nice wood. Small things such as the the timber or glass you choose for a frame become incredibly important. There is something that I enjoy about treating a laser print with the same respect as a handprint. That can work backwards, too — I sent some friends some silver gelatin prints in the post while I was in one of my making phases. I just wrote their address in Posca marker and put a stamp on the print. I need to challenge myself constantly on the so-called correct way of doing things. 

There is another reason I like to make things, though, and it has something to do with control. I don’t like the idea of relying on other people to make the things I want to make. So I publish my own books, make prints, build frames and organise exhibitions. I would, of course, love to collaborate on any of those things, but I don’t ever want to be in a position where my work requires permission to be shown. Having control over these physical, technical and logistical parts of practice is time-consuming but it gives me a huge amount of freedom in my practice. I only have to convince myself something is a good idea, or worthwhile, and then I’m allowed to do it.

AZ: I think a lot about this push-pull between control and experimentation — the way it frees up space within the work, and allows the work to confound or surprise — Rilke’s “living the questions”, Keats’ negative capability. I remember you posting some images on Instagram recently — I can’t find them now — and in the caption you wrote something like “two pictures from Deadfall I still don’t understand at all”. I find that space of non-understanding very exciting to interact with in the work of others, but almost unbearable in the context of my own. But then often the pictures of mine that I don’t understand, or can’t get the measure of, are the ones others seem to respond to most strongly.

I wrote about this a bit here, but I sometimes find that part of my task as I relate to my work is accepting it as it wants to be, not how I wish it was. I’m wondering whether you ever feel similarly. I remember, for example, being so frustrated when I started out that I couldn’t make pictures like Anders Petersen — my work will never look like his, it just won’t come out that way (though I'm actually glad of this now, in the case of Petersen at least). Does your work ever seem to have its own character, with its own motivations? And if so, does that character ever seem to defy you? Do you ever wish it were different?

MF: Ah, I’m sure that the work takes over. And it always defies me. You have to wrestle with it and drag it into a shape normal enough to show to people and that seems to take years. You have to learn about it, how it lives, how to tame it. There are a lot of ideas in my head that I’m losing that fight with at the moment. I guess we’ll see who tires first. 

With pictures, I’m very comfortable with losing control. I print with chaotic settings in the darkroom, often playing with the cyan dial; I love the unpredictability of laser printing; I barely adjust the colours on scans and I never dust-spot anything. Recently I’ve been enjoying shooting digitally, for the first time, and it’s hard to bring that chaos into such a perfect system. Maybe all of that is the work taking over though. Guiding me. I like that idea a lot. Maybe it’s more than a character, though, and — as I said — I find my control in other places. 

I’m always amazed when people write or talk to me about my work, because they often seem to understand it — better than me, sometimes. People seem to be able to see things I’ve put into it, even when it’s unsaid. Maybe it’s not my job to understand my own work. I don’t think I’ve ever really understood a photograph; not any I’ve taken, anyway. I have photographs framed in my flat by other artists that I look at every day and that still baffle me. I’ve spent the past fifteen years studying, thinking about, editing, teaching and writing on photography, and I’m more confused than ever. I don’t know what makes a good picture. Sometimes I don’t even know what a good picture is. But it’s this disorientation that keeps me interested — no, obsessed with photography. I think I’m trying to ask questions when I take pictures. Like, ‘what happens if I do this?’ or ‘How will a piece of oblique text change this sequence of images?’ I’m sure if I had those answers I wouldn’t need to make photographs. It would be time to move on to something else.

AZ: I’m curious about your process around working with text, and how you consider it in relation to what we’ve been discussing around control. In Deadfall, the text takes many different forms, sometimes mysterious and fragmentary, other times lengthy, seeming almost diaristic. Multiple different voices seem to emerge over the course of the book, different registers and timelines — sometimes the voice is close, clear and specific, anchored to a version of the present alongside the reader, at others it’s mysterious or nostalgic. At one point, the text snakes across the page. It feels like this shifting register is an intensification of the mode you found in Whistling for Owls, which similarly moved between poetic fragments and longer narrative. In Deadfall, more voices are present, the disorientation more pronounced.

How do you identify and transcribe these different voices as you write? How do you go about editing — choosing which text makes it into the work, and where? And could you describe the experience of putting these texts into conversation with your images, and how that changes the nature of each?

MF: I write a lot on my phone. In notebooks too. But mostly I only have my phone with me when I think of something to write down. I guess it’s similar to taking pictures for me but instead of recording things I see it’s usually things I remember or imagine. For Deadfall it was two years of writing and making pictures — but I could only shoot in winter, so there was a lot of time for writing. Some of the longer texts were written on a laptop. Does that make them more serious? A couple of paragraphs came very late into Deadfall. Once I had everything almost finished I knew what was missing. The photographs I want to make leave gaps in understanding. They’re intentionally very loose and writing allows me to fill in some of those gaps, or to widen them further. In some ways Deadfall is a development on what I started experimenting with for Whistling for Owls, but in other ways they feel miles apart. In Whistling for Owls there are people in the photographs so the people in the writing may or may not be the same people you can see in the book, but in Deadfall there are no portraits. You never see the people I talk about or to in the writing, so it’s up to you to decide who they are.

Sebald — someone whose books we both love — talks about using a literary sleight of hand in his writing. The photographs he puts alongside his texts add authenticity to the mostly true things he writes but the existence of lies in his works makes the viewer question everything. I used to think I was doing Sebald in reverse. I wanted my oblique texts to make people question the legitimacy of the images. There’s still something to that but it’s not how I think about it anymore. I try not to think too much about any of the reasons why I do things; it’s more fun just to make things and see what happens. All of that intention is probably somewhere in there anyway. 

I find writing hard and it feels more exposing than taking pictures. Maybe that’s why I lean into different voices: to camouflage my own. I can’t tell you exactly what links the narrative of Deadfall. It’s certainly not time or a narrative arc, but there is some order to the disorientation. That’s the fun of editing for me — collecting fragments and bringing random things together. That’s something else I stole from a hundred better writers. It’s like supergluing a shattered bowl back together but all the pieces are from different plates and mugs. Is that just editing? It’s a lot of trial and error. I made Whistling for Owls while I was doing my Masters, and had so much help from tutors and classmates, and I showed a lot of people I respected. Amak Mahmoodian was one of my tutors — I learned more than I can say from her about how to put text and photographs together. But I didn’t show the sequence of Deadfall to many people. There was too much loneliness in the book. I wasn’t completely alone, though, and I always show things to Hannah, my girlfriend. And Brodie Crellin, who I work with at Granta, edited the text once it was almost finished. It’s because of them that the book is finished. 

You write more than me, and I think of your photography sitting somewhere within literature and photography — maybe because we talk so often about reading. But mostly you keep your text and images separate. Are you never tempted to weave the two of them together? I wonder if they’re separate for you but entwined for me.

AZ: I have actually worked on three projects in text and image in the past, two book-length and one a visual essay, and I’m working on another longer one now. None of those works have been formally published, though, and they don’t exist anywhere online, which makes it seem like they don’t exist. As I write this to you, I’m wondering why I’ve held them back. I think the answer is, in part, a pragmatic one: that at the moment I make my living from working as a photographer on commission — as opposed to as an artist — and it feels like these quieter, more ambiguous projects might confuse or even repel potential commissioners. Perhaps it’s also a defensive move on my part; that I’m comfortable sharing works that are shinier and more legible, but worry about how these other works would be received, or how they would reflect on whatever public professional identity I have. They feel more personal and more vulnerable, so I can imagine a part of me wishes to protect them.

All that said — photography and writing do often feel frustratingly separate to me. I think I’ve split them in a way that’s unhelpful. Maybe this, too, is why I’ve held back the works I’ve made that do both. I find bringing them together very difficult, very confronting, even if the eventual work does satisfy me. I remember you saying or posting something once about image and text respectively representing feeling and thinking, and that really resonated. Of course those things exist on a continuum, but I live so much in my head that feeling/photographing is very mysterious to me, and I don’t know how to easily integrate them with thinking/writing. Of course, as we’ve seen, not knowing shouldn’t be a barrier to making work, and can actually be a point of departure. I wish I were more comfortable with that.

I’m curious about what you said above — that it’s “certainly not time” that produces the narrative of Deadfall — because I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways that time is addressed in your work. Your texts often reflect and reminisce, have a nostalgic element, or a kind of temporal remove, and the photographs seem to depict a place outside time — nothing in bloom or in progress, but instead rust, overgrowth, leaves grown crisp. Houses and vehicles turned to shells. I understand that you don’t arrange or edit according to a chronology, but time feels like a major theme of yours — I think of the environments and atmospheres you create as somehow after time, as if time has ended and your work is the aftermath. Does that make sense to you? Could you tell me more about how your work thinks about time?

MF: Why is it reassuring to hear about other people's anxieties? We don’t share them with each other enough. I see you as particularly precise and confident with both the camera and the keyboard. Making work on commission is so difficult, so I get the hesitation to damage that important part of your practice and career — although I suspect it might not be as much of a hindrance as you think. The teacher in me wants to challenge you to show more of that work. Since I asked you that question I’ve been thinking about the features you’ve done for BJP where you photographed and interviewed people, so maybe it’s all entwined anyway. I realised a long time ago I’m more comfortable commissioning photography than working on assignments. I’m lucky I make a living from teaching and being a photo editor — but then I don’t have enough time to make work. 

Some of my unused phone notes are (clichéd) dystopia. I played with the idea that Deadfall was some event that had wiped out humanity — or at least some of it. The despair turned out to be more internalised than that and I never really used that idea, but it’s in there somewhere. And yeah — time — there is a lot of that in my work. I’m reading Mark Fisher for the first time and there is hauntology in Deadfall somewhere — although I didn’t know that word while I was making it. The past is so present in the work, but I struggle with the saccharine sheen of nostalgia. I think it’s always dangerous when you shoot on film as well. I think that’s where the horror comes in. The ghosts of the past, as Fisher would say. Buildings, cars and scrap are left to decay. Piles of breeze blocks forgotten about. And all the time the forest is waiting to take it back.

Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

Max Ferguson’s recommended reading:

A Month in Siena — Hisham Matar

The Peregrine — J. A. Baker

Trilogy: The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie — Ágota Kristóf

Grievers — adrienne maree brown

Grove — Esther Kinsky

The Blind Owl — Sadegh Hedayat

A huge thanks to Max Ferguson, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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I enjoyed putting together last year’s reading list so much that I’ve decided to make it an annual feature of the newsletter — and so here’s this year’s iteration. As with last year, I’ve curated a list of ten of my favourite recent or not-so-recent reads (well, it’s nine books and a film) related in some way to photography, the life of the photographer, or visuality in general. All of these books go into the soup of my thinking around photography; I’m drawing on all of them whenever I write.

Memory was an unintended theme of this year’s list. Writing on photography often seems to go hand-in-hand with thinking around memory, its slipperiness and inconsistencies, but it felt particularly prominent in these ten works. Two of the writers on this list agree that photography destroys memories, supplanting them entirely. Three of them use photographs as the occasion for memoir (though not all of these three include photographs in the books themselves). As often seems to happen with writing on photography, some of these books adopt slight, fragmentary forms, mirroring the medium they’re exploring. Two of the books deal explicitly with what photography can teach us; three speak to the political responsibilities of the artist. As with last year, none of these works is a photobook; as with last year, I’ve tried to avoid the obvious.

I’d love to hear what your own favourite books on photography are — write and let me know!

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Back to the Future — the theme of this year’s exhibition, which was open for a full two weeks, rather than the usual weekend — “explores photography’s complicated relationship with history”. Personal histories (the family archive, cultural memory, the self and its inheritances) were the explicit focus, and the collected works spoke intimately to one another on these subjects. As a whole, though, it struck me that the show was equally invested in exploring in the capacities of photography as a medium, how far it can be stretched.

Several works involved the staging of performances. In Orí Inú, Aisha Olamide Seriki photographed figures holding keepsakes and ritual objects from her native Nigeria, alongside sculptures of comb forms (a metaphor for African diasporic “ritualistic empowerment, care and communal bonds”). These objects and their staging — which reminded me of the work of Khadija Saye — allow Seriki to “repair a break between her mind and spirit, and realign her own destiny”.

Emi O’Connell, in and then i ran, made a series of self-portraits dramatising her grandmother’s escape from a mother-and-baby home in Ireland, her blurred and tripping figure connected to the foreground by means of the cable release used to trigger the shutter. Nancy Floyd has been photographing herself every day since 1982, watching herself age and change her context, her friends, her pets; even her methodology has changed over the years, as different work schedules meant she had to photograph herself at different times.

Another of the several artists working with self-portraiture — or at least using the self as one of their materials — was Mia Weiner, whose hand-woven tapestries were another highlight. She weaves photographs of herself and her friends into fabric with pale blue thread, silver running along and through it, the warp and weft flashing in the gallery’s intermittent light. The figures in the works are headless, like Greek statues, made symbolic; the artist used their forms as archetypes to explore mythology, memory, and queerness. Vivienne Gamble, artistic director and co-founder of Peckham24, told me that there was a debate around whether the tapestries constituted photography, which to me is always a sign of exciting work.

My favourite works, as well as those by Seriki and Weiner, were by Tarrah Krajnak, whose photographs in SISMOS79 record still lives made from broken glass, mirrors, light, and pornographic and political magazines from the year she was born; formally beautiful panels with an incendiary core that reminded me of Carolee Schneemann’s Controlled Burnings. Krajnak describes the works as as counter-archival; through them, she pushes against fraught personal and social histories, imagining the transitional moment of post-dictatorship, pre-war late 1970s Lima, from where she was adopted as an infant.

Many of the works were sculptural, or displayed in such a way that they became so — pinned directly to the wall, for example, giving them a fragile immediacy. In one of Alba Zari’s works from her project OCCULT, a photograph is bleached almost into disappearance, a reminder that the photograph, as an object, is transient and impermanent. The raw floors and walls of Copeland Gallery itself are an ideal setting for a show like Back to the Future, and its interest in a self-referential photography whose own materials and means of display become part of the subject of the work, the form just as important as the content.

None of the works was straightforward, the kind of photography-as-document that you can interpret without any prior knowledge, which was part of the point. Each used photography as just a point of departure, working into and onto it to force new capacity from the medium, and each was deepened by reading the accompanying text and learning of the artists’ research, methodology, and context. Staged and presented in such a way, the works and their histories point not only to the medium of photography and its limits, but also to the presence of the photographer herself, a presence that some other kinds of photography seem to hope the viewer will forget.

This photography — its methods, materials, and authorship so visible — becomes a system by which we can learn to look anew at the ordinary things that often pass unnoticed or unscrutinised; or indeed to make visible those immaterial things (cultural history, memory, inheritance) that are so hard to visualise. In Back to the Future photography is not just a document, but also a way of shifting, frustrating, refracting our ways of seeing; holding up mirrors, then breaking them into pieces that catch and multiply and muddle the light.

Lately I often find myself wondering about AI (and this is inevitably invoked by the “future” of the show’s title). How will these new technologies affect my work, the ways I understand images, even my ways of looking and seeing? Will they end the need for photographers altogether? As I have reflected on the works exhibited in Back to the Future, I keep returning to how strikingly and irremediably human they felt in their tactility, their materials, their surfaces; made by hand, over time, with effort and intention. As a viewer, too, it felt important to be physically present with the works, to be a body in the gallery, to see their surfaces under the changing light — and to recognise my own contingency, the histories and identities I was bringing to my looking.

The meaning of these works depends on all these kinds of physical substance, and on their contexts. Memory, archive, intergenerational inheritances — all are intimately interwoven with the subjectivities, contingencies and personal histories of the artist making them. I can’t help but think how limp, how shallow, computer-generated images seem by comparison.

Photography does not often attend to the regular, and so it feels miraculous that many of these images exist at all. Who was moved to photograph the chairs in an empty waiting room, the clocks on the office wall? And why? In Winant’s tender arrangement, we see all of these particulars, the unremarkable spaces and materials surrounding a procedure that could, in other circumstances, cost a person their life. In the photographs’ tentativeness and imperfections — the majority of them are vernacular, non-professional, often fogged or off-kilter — we are reminded that the whole network is under threat, the clinics closing one by one in a post-Roe America.

One of Winant’s strategies as a visual artist is quantity. She accumulates and displays such a profusion of images that not to attend to them, not to respond to them, becomes impossible. This strategy is applied differently from work to work, though, and so each copiousness has a different effect. With My Birth, at MoMA in 2018, the effect was awe and shock (and then a kind of shame, that such images should be shocking): the walls of a gallery corridor crowded with thousands of pictures of birth, babies crowning from vulvas on delicate paper cutouts taped to the wall. 

In My Birth, Winant wrote of the desire to describe the ineffable: “Like every good subject, [birth] fails me. How do you speak in a language that has no words?” — as though confrontation with so many photographs might translate some of the intensity of birth inaccessible by text, or by a single image. The quantity of images in The last safe abortion has a different effect; to me, it feels rhythmic and vast, like an ocean, describing not intensity but expansiveness: these women are here in the world, have been here in the world, caring and providing for one another for decades. They will continue to do so.

As I spent time with this book (and it is a book that has come to feel talismanic to me, that I have been carrying around with me, that heartens and consoles), I was thinking not only about abortion care but also about the feminist vision of photography that Winant’s larger project proposes. Photographing — so often thought of as an act of dominion — can also be an act of care, of maintenance, of guardianship and partnership. The act of taking these photographs, the act of keeping and preserving them by the clinics, Winant’s own warm and careful stewarding and curation— all of these are undertakings grounded in generous mutuality.

What might an ecosystem of art founded on these principles — rather than the imperatives of capitalism and patriarchy — look like? And what might such a system make possible? The last safe abortion comes to seem like a vision of that other world, so rarely depicted in this one.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
Content note: this newsletter contains explicit images of childbirth.

Alice Zoo: I’d like to start with your decision to focus on abortion care, as distinct from abortion. I wondered how you came to that decision, and why.

Carmen Winant: It’s not a secret that the anti-abortion movement has weaponised photography, for as many decades as they have, as a decisive and intentional strategy. I work on college campus in the Midwest region of the United States; there are anti-abortion posterboards that I encounter, sometimes on a multi-week basis, and have to circumnavigate on my way to the art building where I teach classes in photography — so I’m confronting the manner in which this movement and these agitators are utilising our shared medium. And so I began to ask myself, in the early stages of the project: what is a way to countermand these kinds of photographs? 

Another way to ask that question is: why has our movement — which was once called pro-choice, and is now more often called reproductive justice, for a number of reasons — been so shy or reluctant or unknowing in its relationship to photographs? And when they do appear, they’re often laced with trauma narratives. The more I thought, ok, what is not necessarily the inverse of what they’re doing, but a way to create a counterimagination to it? — the more I felt like, oh, that’s pictures of care. Because in these pictures of so-called aborted foetuses — and not just the gory pictures, but also the Lennart Nilsson, hyper-sensual, “space man” pictures of the floating foetuses — the mother or pregnant person is nowhere to be seen. She’s completely detached from the experience. It has no reference point to science, labour, care — it’s just this floating foetus. 

And so I began to think increasingly about how important it was to put those people and that act back in the frame. And in so doing, I had to confront the fact that I was meeting a scream with a whisper. There’s never going to be anything that I could make as sensational and graphic and attention grabbing as a picture of — I mean, this is total misinformation, but of “an aborted foetus”. And that’s ultimately ok. That is what it has to be, necessarily; not just abortion care, but all care works this way. It’s quiet. Answering the hotline, or sterilising medical equipment, or throwing a staff birthday party; these are not inherently photographic acts. And that’s really what interested me about them the most.

AZ: It’s also an interesting counterpoint to My Birth, which had an immediately arresting, visceral quality, especially compared with this very measured, consciously non-sensational work.

CW: I agree. I was just talking about countermanding the graphic and attention-grabbing kinds of photographs — and what could be more attention-grabbing than a baby crowning, or a body coming out of another body? And ultimately what I find myself gravitating towards as I return to that work, is — surprise, surprise — all of the birth workers that are there, and support staff, and the tenderness and specificity of their gestures. But I couldn’t have named that for myself at the time, and it’s really only looking back, and with a project in between in and around domestic violence advocacy and support workers, that I can really appreciate it as an arc around feminist healthcare workers. While things are ongoing, it’s much messier. I think it’s easier to name that retrospectively. And so in coming into the consciousness that that was the locus of my interest, reaching as far back as My Birth in 2018, I was able to centre it more deliberately in this project.

AZ: Have you read How to Do Nothing?

CW: I have, I love that book.

AZ: I was thinking about that book a lot while I spent time with this work, and what Odell writes about the priorities of capitalism — of constant growth, and innovation — and how they don’t leave much room for the acknowledgement or depiction of care and maintenance work.

CW: Right, which are in some way anti-capitalist activities, but also hold up capitalism.

AZ: In The last safe abortion you write: “I am interested in how we build kin,” and then, “What if building social alliances (also known as friendships) was the outcome of the work and not only its subject?”

I’m curious to hear more about that process — how it began, what it looked like, and how those relationships continue now that the work has been made.

CW: I write about this a little bit in the book, about how looking back I consider my earlier work to be much more extractive, and problematic, for that reason. This instinct — as so many archives’ researchers are inclined — to go in, root around, and find the material that you need. That’s not a bad thing; that’s how we make sense of archives, it’s the reason we maintain archives. But my work is about social coalition-building. It’s about how feminist community networks are developed, how solidarity is built in service of a larger social movement, and so it just began to feel increasingly isolating and nonsensical to work that way. Again, I can talk about this now as if I had it all worked out; it’s really something that happened slowly over time, that I’m only coming awake to now in a lot of ways. 

Because, too, I’m working with material largely from the mid-to-late twentieth century, a lot of these people are alive — or their daughter, or their niece who’s managing their material or their estate or what was in their closet — and so it felt like these folks are actually accessible. What an interesting and obvious prospect: that building a relationship is not only a means to an end. How could I think about that more deeply as it comes to matters of reciprocity and long term friendships? So it manifests in lots of different directions, everything from really functional questions around scanning material for use in the centres’ own marketing and comms, building an internal database so that they can access it; to helping folks apply for grants, and placing their material in public libraries.

There are practical things like that, but there’s also just knowing folks, you know? And continuing to demonstrate curiosity and investment, not as a favour, but because that’s what it is to sustain relationships. That can be particularly hard to talk about in an interview or put into a slideshow, because it’s not demonstrative in the same way; but it has really become the engine of my practice in recent years.

AZ: I really admire that. You speak a lot about materiality, and making the labour of your work visible, and this feels like the logical endpoint of that commitment — which is that the work is actually in the world, is in being in relationship with other people. I feel that art often doesn’t go that far. Often it remains in a space where it might be talking about materiality and labour, but refers only to itself.

CW: Well, you’re describing a major existential crisis of mine, this question of how far art can go. At what point can it be functional — really, actually serviceable — and at what point does it cease to do that? Another way to ask that question is: is art enough? And for me the answer’s always no. I feel like it always has to be paired with real groundwork. And I’m either more or less successful in doing that myself, but I have a healthy ambivalence about it, which drives me to its outer edges of possibility. 

AZ: Could you tell me about putting yourself into this work? How did it feel?

CW: It wasn’t how I started the project. Initially I thought I would do something a little bit more in my wheelhouse. I was going to the clinics and looking through their archives, as well as going to institutional archives, special collections, and universities. 

I thought that I would pull from those photographs, doing what I’m most interested in doing, which is creating a visual lexicon where there’s otherwise a vacuum. Where were these pictures of abortion care? I’d never seen them before. And as with the projects around birth and domestic violence, that was really my initial goal and logic. It’s all so decentralised. 

And then how did I start taking pictures of myself? I was photographing myself to finish off the roll — I would get back to the hotel room, if I was travelling, and I would have four more frames left, and I would photograph myself. And I showed those pictures, almost by accident, to the curator on the project, Casey Riley, who’s really so brilliant, a feminist visionary, and she encouraged me to not only keep taking those pictures, but to include them in the project. I’ve always felt really reticent to have my fingerprints anywhere — I don’t want to make myself the protagonist in a story that I don’t belong to, that I was not otherwise around for, and that is definitionally about a broad base community and network. Centering myself has always felt very weird, which is why I’ve never done it. 

At Casey’s urging I continued to photograph myself, sometimes inside of the clinics, the idea being that I was there, whether or not I wanted to name it. I’m the one who’s making editorial decisions about which pictures I want to include, how I want to sequence them, what I want to exclude — and not only that, but I’m there historically, as a beneficiary of 50, 60 plus years of the work of these folks who I’m photographing, and inheriting pictures from. And so the idea was to name myself in both of those ways, and also demonstrate how abortion care looks and exists in the present moment; that it’s not an anachronistic, bygone question. As a movement, and also as a matter of healthcare, this is existing in the present tense — and the only way to show that was to make my own pictures. 

AZ: The work includes images of yours that others might exclude — camera mishaps, and so on — and I’ve been wondering if you could tell me about the decision to include those so-called mistakes. And then, as an extension of that question, what is interesting to you about failure as an idea? What does it signify for you?

CW: In retaining those photographs I wanted to do a couple of things. First, I wanted to point to my own process inside of the making. You referred earlier to the ways I try to hold onto and demonstrate labour, in a number of ways — not just as a subject or idea, but as a demonstrative process, in the material presentation itself. And so, to me, the mistakes — be they over- or underexposed, setting to the wrong ISO, photographing on film that’s not meant to be photographed under tungsten lights — there are any number of errors I can make, as we know. It felt to me like a way to point to process, labour, intention, floundering, regrouping; that this is what the artist does, this is what the activist does, this is what the feminist healthcare worker does; it’s one foot after the next. 

The other thing is that the archives themselves have all these kinds of pictures. I was really moved by this. It’s largely pictures of women — and they are almost all women — in clinics, going about these really functional tasks, but they also keep the blurry pictures, and then somebody brings the camera home, and they’re photographing their kids, and the sky. There are so many “incorrect” moves throughout the archives themselves, and I wanted to not just mirror that, but signal my appreciation for the fullness of that picture. 

As for the question of failure — I am really interested in that, in all sorts of ways. I talk to my students about it constantly: what is this question of productive failure? I’ve always operated that way in the studio. I think of myself as a studio artist as much as a photographer, if not more so; and it’s always been a matter of coming in contact with the work with my body, and trying and failing, learning, regrouping, rejiggering, and so I’ve really come to not just appreciate that as a part of the process, but work to intentionally fold it into the messaging around the work.

AZ: In My Birth you spoke about your difficulty in finding people of colour in the archives you were working with; you mentioned this in the wall text, and made this omission a part of the work. How were you thinking about intersectionality and representation in the course of making The last safe abortion?

CW: I learned a lot from working on My Birth. It’s such a meaningful project for me, but I feel like it was a really imperfect one, and an imperfect solution that I arrived at — naming the omissions over and over. That achieved something, but I don’t know if it achieved enough. And I worry, still, about the ways in which I stood to reinforce certain tropes around whiteness and motherhood, and so many other things like ableism, and heteronormativity, and so forth. And one thing that I learned — and again, this is something that I wasn’t so intentional about at the time — but I think now that I have my head above water I can say, in retrospect, that I really wanted to go to the places where intersectional exchange was happening already. I think that’s also how I found myself, for instance, in the domestic violence support worker project, because that is a space that was ignored by a lot of feminists in the second wave. 

That is a space that is so multiracial, intergenerational, transnational; it’s all happening already, and was happening before we had words for it. And I feel that way to a certain extent around abortion care in the United States. I was amazed by the diversity of the identity positions represented, the multiraciality in the photographs themselves.

It was incredibly moving to encounter the intersectional solidarity that’s so clearly represented in the pictures, not only in the patients — so few of whom are represented, because one needs permission to photograph patients — but also in the providers. I don’t want to flatten out this history, it is complicated, and for so long the “pro-choice” movement was a middle class white woman’s game in this country; but since the mid-80s it’s really been led by Black women, and women of colour, and that is hugely represented in the pictures. And not just the abortion movement, but also reproductive justice is entirely Black women-led. 

And so that’s just to say that it’s evolving, and I really felt I was engaged in propagating an intersectional movement in and of itself, not just as it comes to race and identity position, but also huge intergenerational inheritances and collaboration. I felt so honoured to be coming in contact with that material, and to be centering it in one place, where it’s otherwise been atomised throughout these various regions, clinics, and institutions.

AZ: In an interview from around the time of My Birth, you said “I want to see the labor on the surface of the work, as the work. I want the artist to present as a self-made expert, and I want to sense that process of self-making in the thing they do.” I’m interested in the idea of self-making in art — could you tell me some more about that?

CW: What comes to mind is permission and vulnerability. Let me put it this way: I was working this way when I was a teenager, as were so many of us. I was obsessed with images, and I would tape them to my wall so densely that they would cover the whole wall, and then I would tape another layer, another layer, another layer, such that when my parents moved out of the house when I was in college they had to peel it all down like a skin. And when I got to university I felt I had to become a “serious” photographer, which was coded as male, effectively. And based in a history from which I was learning that what I had been doing, and my affinities, were very feminised, and crafty, and something that teenagers do, or that mothers do with their children. And so as you were asking about self-making I was thinking about this, even if it wasn’t quite the thrust of your question; how many years and decades it took for me to come back around to this original intelligence, and consider it “serious”, and viable, and worthy of creative and intellectual enquiry. Worthy of the museum. And I still have to talk myself into that, and I show up at the MoMA with my dinky shoebox of pictures that are crinkled, that my kids have been licking, and I’m taping them up with blue tape. I have to self-make in perpetuity, I guess is what I’m saying.

AZ: I’m trying to both photograph and write, and I often find myself thinking of them in a polarised way, setting words and images up against one another. I don’t think that’s very useful, and I’m slowly trying to untangle those ideas. I wonder how you think about the difference, or not, between those aspects of your practice.

CW: Oh, it’s evolving. I have always struggled to conjoin the two, or make them see each other. There are countless examples of artists and artworks that do this really well — I know it’s possible, I see that work, and admire it deeply. Somebody like Fred Lonidier comes to mind, for instance, who I’ve been rather obsessed with since I was a teenager. 

I’ve always reached to include text in the work because I have this writing practice, as you’re saying, and I’ve always felt like, if I could just jam them together they could become one thing, a singular force. And by and large I’ve been pretty unsuccessful at it. I try things and then I reel back, the fear being that I never want the text to read as a caption, or like an explanation in regard to the image, which of course in image-text hierarchy is how we understand them to function in relation: one explains the other. I’ve always had this belief that photographs can explain themselves, and in fact can be most powerful in doing that, in being their own agents. Not just explaining themselves, but not to flatten out their slippery meanings, or their contradictory meanings.

But that doesn’t stop me from trying; and I’ve tried. I write about art, I try writing as art, I try massaging my writing into art, so it’s this never-ending quest, but the place that I feel that I have been able to do it the most effectively is in artist’s books — not just because that’s where text “belongs” most conventionally, but I feel that I’ve been able to invert text and image more successfully there. My hope is that text becomes a thing that you can look at, and image becomes something you can read. Or that image explains text, as opposed to the other way around. Or they start to resemble each other in a way that I haven’t been able to do anywhere else. So I’m probably the wrong person to ask, because I have this perpetual frustration, but I don’t give up on it.

AZ: In Instructional Photography you mention Cortázar, Tolstoy, and Plath. It made me wonder how reading fiction or poetry had affected your work and your thinking.

CW: Quite a lot. I read a lot, although I read a lot more before I had children, so not as much as I once did; but I think about reading as informing my work more than anything else, and it’s something I talk a lot to students about, as we think about our constellation of influences. They name exclusively visual artists in their medium, and it just feels like there’s such a broad expansive world of creative enquiry and experimentation — what a shame to limit yourself. There’s not a right and wrong way to find influence, so that’s not to be too judgemental, but for myself — I’ve always been really interested in imagining possible worlds. 

I think that is the imperative of feminism: to imagine what could be possible, and worlds that we have not yet built. And so in that regard fiction has been enormously important to me, not just feminist fiction, which I’m also really into, but this exercise in imagination, of which poetry also is excellent, and has the added benefit of playing with language structurally. 

I’ve recently been on a big Marge Piercy kick. I’ve always been into Marge Piercy, but the novels, which are considered science fiction — women on the edge of time, and feminist parables. I’ve recently been into her poems, and damn, they are so good! I have to catch my breath as I’m reading them, and take breaks. They’re all sex and revolution, sometimes in the same poem. I find myself very moved by them. Some of the poems were written before I was born. I think that’s a good example of someone who does this really profound work of imagining and building parallel worlds.

The Last Safe Abortion will be published by SPBH/MACK on 24 May.

Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

Carmen Winant’s recommended reading:

The Moon is Always Female — Marge Piercy

The Old Drift — Namwali Surpell

Who’s Afraid of Gender? — Judith Butler

A huge thanks to Carmen Winant, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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As it happened, I found myself as transported by the work as I always am with Woodman and Cameron, and the curation was sensitive and interesting — the light dim, the atmosphere hushed, and the works arranged non-chronologically, instead paired image-by-image around the two artists’ shared themes of angels, rituals, myth. All the works are contemporaneous prints made by the artists themselves, which made the whole show feel very precious; and I was especially excited by seeing works I was unfamiliar with, like Woodman’s large caryatids, and her pictures of men. I found that the spikiness I treasure in both artists was still there, needling at me as it always does.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs have had a considerable influence on my approach to portraiture — I see her work in my classical inclination, my interest in portraying ambiguous psychological states. Woodman, by contrast, was one of the first photographers that made me understand what photography is capable of. I learned quite quickly that my work would be nothing like hers, but her photographs made many things feel possible for me, potentialities that I’m still trying, all the time, to edge closer towards.

With Woodman on my mind, this month I’ve decided to revisit an article I wrote for Elephant Magazine in 2021, about the picture of hers that set me on my way as a photographer, and that is currently hanging in the NPG. I highly recommend a visit to see it — the small 1970s handprint annotated in Woodman’s unmistakeable pencil script — and the rest of the show, too.

I grew up in photographs. Photography was a bright and vivid proof of life as it is lived, all colour and movement. It was glued into family albums, and it was also my mother’s profession. I lay on the floor surrounded by fairy lights with my brother and sister for a Christmas card picture, and later I lay on the roots of a tree for an art photograph. I didn’t mind, I was a child taking instruction. One day I did mind, and stopped cooperating. I don’t remember this decision, but my refusal is visible in my disappearance from the albums. Just as I’m leaving childhood, I become the back of a head, or occasionally a face baring teeth, furious that I’m there in the picture for a moment again.

Later, I started taking pictures myself — perhaps it was a way of exerting control, putting myself safely on the other side of the lens. At the time, though, it didn’t feel like that; I was drawn to image-making, but it wasn’t an impulse I thought hard about. As a teenager studying literature, my sense of photography was as a comparatively blunt instrument, recording only surfaces where prose could describe the interior. At best, a photographic portrait might show the crudest facts of a person’s split-second experience — grief, pride, longing — but where was the nuance, the temporal? How could the outward appearance of a person or situation get at the heart, the mind, the relentlessness of change?

One winter I met a friend at Victoria Miro, a cold white day on Old Street. I’ll never forget stepping quietly around the gallery and seeing Francesca Woodman’s work for the first time. The prints were small and intense in their velvet greys, and they showed things that I didn’t recognise from reality, nor from the photography I understood as document: figures and forms twisting and elided by long exposure, hidden or distorted by wallpaper and clothes pegs.

In Self Portrait At Thirteen, Woodman uses herself in the frame, but she is turned away from the camera. Her body is a form to use as a kind of graphic element, just as much as the cable from the shutter release. Light frames the back of her head, forms a delicate halo around her exquisitely relaxed hand. It’s a self-portrait, but in her turning away it’s also a self-effacement; a complication of the self, rather than a capturing of something essential.

Looking back at the moment when I saw that image for the first time, I think of my own refusal, my turning away from the camera at a similar age, and the way that Self Portrait At Thirteen countered the belief I held: that you could either turn towards or away from images — that you had to choose. She showed me that the refusal and disappearance itself could be the subject of the work, that an image could be both things at once. As I pursued photography more seriously in the years that followed, I began to wonder what else it could do.

Woodman’s work opens up a space that words can’t access, using the symbols of myth or religion to provoke questions, or induce a restless kind of feeling that can’t be easily described. It reminds me what visual art is capable of more generally: that it can articulate something beyond words. As a teenager this felt revelatory. I had a new sense of the possibilities of photography, the ways it might broaden rather than foreclose the scope of our feeling.

That photograph has continued to exert a subtle influence on both my thinking and my practice in the decade since the first time I saw it. I have started to step cautiously into my personal work, seeing the self as a formal material that can be explored or challenged on the photographic plane. A few years ago, I photographed throughout a phase of family upheaval, eventually making a project about archives and memory, cringing at the self-exposure and vulnerability it required. When I returned to look at it later, it felt both completely authentic and completely separate from me.

In spring I collaborated with another photographer on a series of self-portraits. When the rolls came back, I was amazed to find that they seemed to know things that we didn’t, seemed to indicate something that gestured far beyond the moment of our standing there, dawn light on our backs. The figure I saw in the images felt not like myself, but like a symbol; the photographs described and concentrated a narrative I hadn’t seen or understood even as I participated in it, telling me things about our relationship that I wouldn’t come to fully understand until long afterwards. Such is the potency of the photographic scenario; and Woodman was the first person to demonstrate this to me, the camera’s capacity for the uncanny.

In her final diary entry, Woodman wrote that she was “inventing a language”, and this is how her body of work has come to seem to me. If photography previously felt to me like a proof, here is a work that proves nothing, is form and feeling instead, creating other worlds with all the strangeness of fiction. This is one of the reasons that biographical readings of her work, which focus on her depression and eventual suicide, are so frustrating. Rather than offering clues as to the meaning of her photographs, she believed that her death would leave her work “intact”.

As a reader, I am compelled by the space to the side of fiction where reality and unreality push and pull towards and away from one another. In the decade that has passed since I first saw the show at Victoria Miro, my inclination in photography has become the same; and a medium that seems, on its surface, to depict reality is the ideal one to antagonise and frustrate it. A picture that uses the self but conceals it completely has this tension at its core.

To love Francesca Woodman is a commonplace now; her work has been picked over, analysed, alternately lauded and dismissed at length. But seeing Self Portrait At Thirteen was my first encounter with a photography that played at the borders of fiction and fact, whose relationship to the self was complex and complicating. I see its influence in the work I’ve been most drawn to since, and in the works I am beginning, tentatively, to make. My relationship to it, and to her, is ongoing.

All of Mahmoodian’s works are based on research, and for this project she eventually spent six years learning about the science of dreams, examining the relationship of Rapid Eye Movement to imagination and memory, as well as the mythic and cultural importance of dreams through time — the different ways that philosophers and artists have tried to understand the spontaneous nightly creation of a private, autonomous world. The images in One Hundred and Twenty Minutes follow a kind of dream logic, simple-seeming symbols — eyes, windows, mirrors, hands, snakes — hovering above a limitless depth.

Born in Shiraz, Iran, and living in Bristol, Mahmoodian’s work is shaped by the experience of exile and displacement from home. This has been her experience here in the UK, after she was advised not to return to her native Iran following the publication of her work Shenasnameh, as well as her experience of childhood. The artist was born a year after the beginning of the Iranian Revolution and her father was imprisoned when she was a child; her family were subsequently exiled to the mountains bordering the Caspian sea. “This period of my childhood was lived with the fear of imprisonment, and the ever present shadow of violence,” she says.

In some ways it’s hard to write satisfyingly about Mahmoodian’s artistic project, whose essential character reaches beyond language, and frustrates a craving for clarity and understanding. The simplicity and restraint of her images ask the viewer to look beyond the frame, to ask questions of themselves and their preconceptions. The experience of her work is unmistakably one of absence and distance, but it is also an invitation. “I trust the viewer,” Mahmoodian told me.

We spoke about dreams, exile, artistic refusal, and the sacred potential of activism, via Zoom. Our (much longer) conversation has been condensed.

Alice Zoo: I’d like to start with your most recent work, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes. Could you tell me how the project began?

Amak Mahmoodian: The title of the project, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, is the amount of time we dedicate to dreaming. Every night, every single person dreams for two hours. Some might remember their dreams and some might not, depending on personal experience; but that is the length of time that we’re living in a private world that we are creating. And this project, similar to all the projects that I work on, was deeply personal. It related to recurring dreams that I had about home, beginning in 2017. After that I became quite interested in the myth of dreams, and also the science of dreams.

Living in exile now for fourteen years, there are times that I feel quite hopeful — I feel there may be a time to return, I feel the connection — and there are times that I feel quite hopeless. And I wonder if there will ever be a time or an opportunity for me, after fourteen years, to go back to the roots that remain in Iran.

So I decided to focus on the dreams of people who live in exile, in situations similar to my own. Very often when someone is displaced, we don’t talk about what remains in their country, what they left behind. This is very often forgotten. And those memories, pasts, families, loved ones, identities, are somehow visualised and reformed through their dreams. I started to work with people living in exile through working with Multistory. I met five people living in Birmingham, in exile from their own countries, and that project was the very first stage, the beginning of the work. But later on, those people started to introduce me to others, and the project was expanded to sixteen people, living in different areas in the UK. They all live in exile, and they are from sixteen different countries, and they talk to me. 

One of the reasons that the project was quite long is that dreams are personal, and I respect that. I am forever grateful for the trust that participants had in me. There wasn’t any push to contact them and say tell me your dreams now. Very often it was dialogues, conversation, and then sometimes they gave me their recurring dreams, or sometimes it would be one dream — the one that they could not forget. They told me their dreams, and I constructed them into images, trying to turn the most accurate or significant elements of the dream into pictures, in the hope of creating a new experience — a vision of exile which is understandable for me, as a researcher and photographer who lives in exile; for the participants; and also for the viewers. It doesn’t matter if you live in exile or not; I was creating a universal language to understand the experience of those people.

AZ: Once you had decided to make images of the dreams, how did you go about beginning to make them visible? How did the process begin, how did things start to take shape?

AM: I look at this project as a life experience. It was something that was very much related to my own experience, therefore it wasn’t about any outcome. It wasn’t about finding one final image to convey the message; it was about the process. The process of understanding, sharing, giving, coping, with other people who are living in the same circumstance.

The process was quite active, and it helped me to develop the work, and also to observe and deal with the situation — because part of it was really painful. Towards the end I started to dream their dreams. 

And what eventually became the most important element of my work was the sketchbooks of the dreams. By working through sketching, and repeating, and visualising the dreams, I started to understand the elements; and I started to realise and accept that I could not make the dream exactly the way they saw it. We had this conversation together. I could make something which would be the most similar experience for me, and also for viewers of the work. 

Therefore the edit of the work was always in conversation with them. I would sketch their dreams in this sketchbook — you have seen the sketches, they are my life, they are always with me — I would sketch, find the elements, take the photographs. We went through the editing process together, and they would choose the image closest to their vision of their dream. That was the way we were working together from the beginning.

AZ: I’d love to hear more about the sketchbooks, and your process of working things out on your studio walls — it’s striking that you work in such a physical, tangible way. It’s very material, which is especially interesting given how often your subject matter is immaterial or abstract. Could you speak about the importance of physicality in the way that you work, and how that informs your process?

AM: The importance of physicality comes through the importance of understanding the collective work. I had to learn how to make videos for this work, I am drawing some of the dreams, I even have to paint some of them. I couldn’t use photography as the only medium for this work. And the physicality comes through this collective experience of working with the participants. The subject matter is not physical — it’s very strongly connected, as I said, to the imagination, to the past.

Through conversation and dialogues with the participants we decided we wanted to create evidence: a body of evidence, a testimony, and a dedication to these people. Therefore I am collecting all the physical evidence that I have from their dreams, from their words, from their visions, in order to create a language which is more understandable for the viewers, without even being in exile, but sharing that experience. 

I collect photographs, writings, and everything goes on the wall as evidence, and also as a reminder. Very often, when you are working on projects which are collaborative, I think it’s really important to have this constant reminder that you are one of these elements, and they are all surrounding you. These people are individuals — they have their own identity, and their place on the wall of my studio.

AZ: In having this identity, and their place on the wall, as you say — it makes me think of art, or the making of art, as a kind of anchor or a home, somewhere that’s native to you.

AM: Absolutely. It was really interesting to come towards some writings, some writers I really admire, like Ben Okri, and talk about the portrait: what remains, and how it’s become an anchor, and connection, and the hook to take us back, and again push us forward. It’s just understanding who you are, and what you do, and what your responsibilities are as an artist, or a writer, or a painter, or a human being. Especially these days, in the shadow of what’s happening. Every single step is quite critical. And I don’t want to feed the system, because unfortunately the system is brutal. Very often I don’t want to call myself an activist, but I am really interested in activism. I really respect activists.

I also read about photographs that invite you to see not what is it only in the frame, but that actually invite you to see what is beyond the frame. To look at a photograph is not the end. You don’t go to a gallery, or come to my studio, or look at a photograph to see the end — to see the imagery, framed, shaped. Actually the frame is more like a window, the beginning of understanding beyond that frame — an invitation to understand more. I’m really interested in this while I am working.

AZ: In past interviews you’ve described feeling tired of having to prove yourself as a Persian woman living in the UK. I’ve been thinking about your work with that in mind; the ways that it’s not documentary, but instead it’s questioning, it’s mysterious. I was thinking about the ways your work refuses the demand to prove or demonstrate — how it asks you to think beyond the pictures. 

AM: I’m so glad you mentioned this, because this is what I’m really trying to achieve through all these chapters of work. The world makes us angry, and we are all angry, screaming, shouting; it could be related to social issues, or it could be related to our gender identity. We are all fighting, we are surviving, which I really respect about every single human being these days. Everything is political now, especially looking at children, and the next generation: you cannot divide your work from politics. But what I’m trying to achieve, and to present and explore through the work, is not to shout it. Even my Shenasnameh is quite quiet. It’s a work of protest. It’s a reminder of females in Iran and their fight for 40 years against the dictatorship, and against the Islamic regime.

Instead of having very clear language within the photograph, I love to go through the quiet moments. I trust the viewers, and I want to invite them to come closer and look with different eyes, without any preconception, without any stereotypes, without any influence from the media. Then you stand in front of that fingerprint, and see what you see — rather than showing the person shouting in the street, or showing something full of blood, or colours. Because I’m thinking: what if we invite the viewers through the quiet, more thoughtful moments, which become like a bridge, bridging their lives to those lives. I did this with Zanjir too; talking about quiet moments of concealing the face in hope of revealing the identity.

And the same with dreams. Of course we read about violence, and anger, and the reduction of real identities, every day on our phones, from morning til night. And right now it’s happening more and more because of those in Palestine, or Ukraine, or Lebanon. But the dream is something which creates a private world to pull you in, into this wonderland of the past and imagination. They create this bridge, and make you feel closer to the real experience: the inner state. The outer state is related to political leaders and their decisions, and we are not part of that. I am interested in the inner state of my participants. That creates the quietness and calmness through the work.

AZ: It’s interesting that you don’t identify as an activist, given that you describe Shenasnameh as a work of protest — and after which you were advised not to return to Iran. Your commitment to your work has led to extreme consequences. For me and most photographers I know, it’s a real luxury to practise however we wish without fear that we’re risking our freedom.

Your work does feel at least related to activism, in the sense that the personal risk or the stakes of making it are so high. What happens to art when its consequences spread out into the whole of a life, for example leading to exile?

AM: It feels like a shadow. The art shadows your life, and that shadow will be a shadow of comfort. Art has so many different meanings for different artists, in terms of the context of the place they live in. And for me, I was really grateful for the uprising that happened last year in Iran, because it was clear, and obvious, and visible to everyone because of social media. The Woman Life Freedom uprising was evidence of the silent protest that has been happening in Iran for decades.

As an artist you make a decision; it depends on what art means to you. And for me, there’s no separation between me, my identity, my life and my work, because my work is a narrative of my life. They are embedded within each other, and connected to each other. And as a person you cannot turn a blind eye towards reality. As a person who is dealing with the pain of people, and their struggles, and their bravery, they are hopeful and they are powerful; and that is something which we can see, and we have witnessed… Therefore it gives you a sort of responsibility, when you have the opportunity to speak with them, and for them, to become the speaker, not the voice — because they have the loudest voice, and they don’t need my voice. My voice is nothing compared to them. 

Because of the dictatorship, because of the Islamic regime, the platform [in Iran] is not as free as it is here. But on the other hand, it is a choice. And through the work I decided to talk about the reality of my people, and the reality of my people is something which has been censored. The regime don’t want it to be seen by others. It was risky, because I was talking about Iran in a Western country. I had a different context, and I had a different audience. And because of the preconceptions, because of the stereotypes, I always had this fear of being misunderstood, that the work would become misinterpreted, or be translated in the wrong way. 

As an artist you cannot control everything, but you can create a bridge, a language; so that was what I tried to do. But on the other hand, in your own state, they don’t want you to talk about reality. I somehow knew what the result of that would be, and I wasn’t scared 11 years ago; but now there are these confusions in my head. There are days that I cannot even leave this room; and there are days that I feel the power is in my veins. So that is the price. 

Maybe one of the reasons I don’t call myself an activist is because it’s a holy word for me. I think the real activists are, for example, the participants in my work, because they allow the collaboration. If they decide not to tell me their dreams, I’m nothing. Those people, with those very strong, powerful stories — they are the real ones, they are the real activists. To stand there and tell me their stories and make it possible for me to make this work.

AZ: And then you’re the one that’s bridging the distance between the activist and the viewer — or the past and the present, the inner and the outer. I’ve thinking a lot about your use of mixed media: you’re writing poetry, and taking photographs, and making films, and working into sketchbooks. I’m wondering whether you think of each of these mediums differently, or whether they exist on a continuum of materials for creating bridges.

AM: It’s great actually, the way you describe that, because building a physical bridge, when you want to bring two sides of the river together, you use different materials. You just want it to work, and to be safe, and to bring truth to the people. You don’t want somebody to step on it and fall into the river. As an artist, I don’t want to limit myself to one idea, or one medium, especially with research-based works. 

Through the research, through the process, you learn that perhaps I can use these different materials to create a more understandable language, or a universal language, rather than limit myself to this specific medium. And that is what I try to understand through the research for each work, understanding what would be the most truthful approach for the audience, and also for the participants of the work. When you work with communities, the ethical aspect is above everything else. Therefore whatever makes the elements of the process — the narrative, the story, the identity of the participants, their past, their present — more understandable, and more clear for the audience, I use it. It could be film, it could be painting, it could be photographs, or I turn to my words, and use words to create something that I don’t know how to make within an image. All these materials come together. I use poems, archives, paintings, drawings, sketches, films, but I never separate them. I see them as one element, which are the materials of creating my language, and creating the outcome.

AZ: I’m curious to know more about the presence of poetry in your life.

AM: Part of it is cultural, because the Persian language is quite poetic. It is really hard to translate, because, for example, for the word ‘love’ — we have 17 different words to describe different levels of love, and so I’m thinking which love is this one, how can I explain it? So part of it is related to the poetic approach which we have in our language, and Persian culture, and the historical and mythical epic writings, and poems and poets who were in Iran for centuries. 

And another part of it is related to my family, because poetry was the element that could bring my family together. We would get together, sit together — it didn’t matter whether they were good days, hard days, difficult days, happy days — and read poetry together. We were all reading Hafiz. And it was the language that we used as our love letters. Even now, when my mum wants to write something for me she writes a poem. It shows a poetic connection. 

And that is one of the reasons I use it in my work, and as I said, sometimes living here [in the UK] it is hard to create photographs related to my past. It is difficult to visualise them, because although you know within what you want to achieve, outside you cannot see it in the way you want. And so I prefer to construct them through words, rather than images and photographs.

AZ: What language do you write poetry in? Or is it across languages?

AM: I write in Persian too, but for the projects I write in English because of the limitations of translation, and because the work will be seen in this context. But then often I write in Persian; and for the final pieces, I write in English and then translate into Persian.

AZ: Do you believe that people have a different soul in a different language?

AM: Yes. Because you create that soul. And it’s the beliefs and the memories within each word. Even within your own small family, there might be a few words that are really common words for me, but maybe they are very special for you, because for instance it could have been something between you and your mother. I think that is the power of words. Your personal language, and the language of a nation. 

AZ: Yes. And that ties back to this idea of dreams as a transcultural language.

AM: Absolutely.

Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

Amak Mahmoodian’s recommended reading:

Sculpting in Time — Andrei Tarkovsky

A Time for New Dreams — Ben Okri

A huge thanks to Amak Mahmoodian, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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In Todd Haynes’ recent film May December, a well-known actress arrives at a family home to research for an upcoming role. The actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) will be playing a woman convicted and jailed for the sexual relationship she conducted with a seventh-grader; she was 36 and he was 13. That was more than two decades ago, though, and the couple — Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) — are married and live together in a large, light-filled house in Georgia. She makes cakes on commission, he raises butterflies; they’re about to send their youngest daughter to college; they seem well-liked in their community. Elizabeth arrives in sunglasses and hands them a decorated box she found on their porch. The box is full of dogshit.

Like Elizabeth’s film-within-a-film, May December was inspired by a true story: that of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, whose relationship trajectory maps pretty closely onto Gracie and Joe’s. As the film progresses, the lasting consequences of the affair and the tabloid scandal it instantiated become more and more clear. The narrative explores the tensions between the three leads for the duration of Elizabeth’s trip; she outstays her welcome, pulling on loose threads and beginning a process of unravelling.

Long after I saw the film I kept thinking about Elizabeth, her ambition and her methods. As someone also working from life, they were uncomfortably familiar to me. I make people’s portraits for a living, and in order that my pictures might capture something authentic, I strive for as much intimacy as I can. Elizabeth is a deeply unsympathetic character, but May December raises questions for anyone working with real lives and stories: actors, filmmakers, journalists, documentarians. What ethical responsibility do we have towards people we believe to be unethical? Does good art excuse exploitation? Does fictionalising a story mean that the usual rules no longer apply? Is it better to engage disingenuously, or not to engage at all?

Elizabeth is clearly well-practised at ingratiating herself. She adopts a persona of warm, grateful humility — Gracie is so generous to welcome her, she wants Gracie to feel seen and known. She endlessly simpers and compliments the extended group of people she meets with for interviews. She explains to a neighbour that she’s drawn to the story because it’s complex and human. This is a vocabulary of euphemism. There’s no judgement, her careful idiom suggests; she’s trying to understand deeply, so that she can perform the role of Gracie with the requisite nuance.

Of course it’s all performance. As the film develops, she becomes more and more ruthless, careless with her subjects’ feelings, making her tactics of ingratiation seem even more hollow and manipulative. But however warped her ethics, we understand her manipulations as means to a high-minded end: her art. We have reason to take her seriously as an actor. She’s dedicated (endlessly taking notes on her yellow notepad, pushing her director for more research budget, poring over old tabloid reports in her hotel room, rehearsing Gracie’s faces in the mirror); she’s thorough (spending extensive time with the family, with those connected to the family, visiting the relevant locations, always asking for that little bit more — the extra access it’s awkward to ask for, the bit that feels like a risk). She’s obsessive about the role, and her investment in it seems like one of the only sincere things about her; she emphasises to both her subjects and her director that she’s trying to get to something “true”.

The kicker, at the end of May December, is that Elizabeth’s film is bad. The final scene opens on a set, the directors and producers crowded around monitors and facing towards the shot. We wonder what we’re going to see; and then there’s Elizabeth, in a twee pink dress, next to a badly cast boy, lisping terribly. After three takes the director says they’ve got it, and Elizabeth leaps to her feet, intent, pleading. “Wait, can we do it again please? Please? Just for me? It’s getting more real.” She’s urgent and committed; this is what all her scheming and manipulating was for; and yet it’s amounted to something totally janky. The cost to Joe and Gracie, both separately and together, has been huge — and for what?

I fear this possibility, or a version of it, in my own working life. When I turn up with my cameras, and my subject gives me their time, welcomes me into their home, engages with me in good faith — trusts me in this vulnerable moment of revealing themselves in front of the camera — what happens if the pictures are no good? Or simply unflattering? And should my photographs always flatter, or should the priority be “truth”? When the circumstances don’t align and, for whatever reason, the photographs are disappointing — or if I sense later that my subject is displeased — I feel a terrible shame. I gave a person reason to trust me, and they feel mistaken, misled.

For anyone working from life: is there an ethical responsibility to guarantee that the work is good? Making the work requires that the documentarian must a) override propriety to push for as much access as they dare, and b) adopt respectful investigative language, be serious, and as sensitive as possible, all in the hope that the finished product is good enough to dignify such measures. What’s hard to accept, as with Elizabeth’s performance, is that the work’s eventual quality can’t be guaranteed. Sometimes a work is bad because of things beyond our control. The above practices, which seem at the time like normal professionalism, come to seem like pointless manipulation. The inveiglement into a person’s life hasn’t been justified by the creation of good art.

Luckily May December is great. But there’s yet another layer of complexity to these questions, because for all its critique of Hollywood vampirism, the production of the film has replicated the same dynamic it calls to question. Fualaau, on whom the story was based (Letourneau died in 2020) was not consulted at any point during its development. “I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it,” he has said. (“This is my fucking life!” Joe shouts in May December). 

The filmmakers have been circumspect on this point. Writer Samy Burch — currently nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay — has distanced herself somewhat, describing Fualaau and Letourneau’s story as just a “jumping off point”.

Portman, sounding uncannily like Elizabeth:

“Most artists who tell stories want to hold up their ethical standpoint in the light. It can be vampiric to take human emotion and human story and capitalise on it and tell a story. But hopefully the energy that you come to it with is empathy and the curiosity to explore someone’s human behaviour and someone’s inner self. That it’s an act of empathy and not an act of bloodsucking.”

And Todd Haynes:

“A lot of narrative filmmaking and fiction-making has an internal desire to redeem oneself through the process, to sort of affirm one’s own aims. That’s the thing that I’m not particularly interested in as a director. And I’m drawn to actors who feel similarly, who are actually interested in creating a distance between maybe their own values and ideas and those portrayed in the character.”

This seems to me like a Get Out of Jail Free card: he’s interested in making films that don’t reflect his values, and so the decision not to approach Fualaau is not an ethical failure, but instead a commitment to artistic principle. The implication is that his ethics exist elsewhere, away from his work, and that filmmaking is a protected, amoral space whose status as art allows it to transcend ethical responsibility.

It’s all infinitely recursive, slippery and irresolvable, and that’s part of the point. May December is full of mirrors. Elizabeth and Gracie shoulder to shoulder, looking at each other through the glass at each other’s reflection, their own truths mutually inaccessible. Natalie Portman, an actress playing an actress, and speaking to the press in the same language of intelligent deflection that her character satirises. The audience in the dark of the theatre, watching a screen projection of a film crew.

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Why think about images at a time like this? Why does this matter at all? Well: private, image-led companies like TikTok and Meta have become major news sources, and as such have the power to direct our attention, or to disable the accounts of key witnesses. Celebrities are sharing misattributed photographs of dead children. Journalists, and/or their families, are being murdered to suppress the dissemination of the information and images that could prove and verify the atrocities taking place. Telegram groups are sharing celebratory images of dead and injured Palestinians. Children on TikTok are taking part in trends mocking the bombarded in Gaza.

As Gaza is now all but inaccessible — to journalists, money, aid — and its power and internet are cut off, an ever-greater percentage of the images that find their way to us are coming from civilians rather than professional photojournalists. In the age of ubiquitous cameraphones and social media, images of war are raw and immediate in a way that feels new. A young Gazan journalist I follow begins every video by announcing she is ‘still alive’. Watching on our phones, from our normal, boring, blessed lives, we feel helpless; our ability to meaningfully change anything is limited by our ineffectual governments; and the images keep coming. They demand our attention. And so — what next?

In amongst the despair, the casting about for ways to help, to resolve feelings that cannot be resolved, I am thinking about the pictures. I want to know: what exactly can images do during a time like this, and what are their limits? Does ‘raising awareness’ help? What happens when social media is a source for our news? Can we fully process and understand images of death and devastation? Do we have a responsibility not to look away? At a time when images often come to us without context, how can we improve our visual literacy? Do images taken by civilians change the way we see and understand conflict? What can history teach us about how to respond to images of war?

I’m grateful that Jennifer Good was open to sharing her knowledge and expertise with me in order to think some of these questions through. As she points out, in the case of images coming out of Gaza, ‘this is not aftermath’. These photographs and videos are the present, and — as she points out — they are the promise of more to come. These are the stakes of what we’re seeing.

My questions are not new, even if our technologies and means of distribution are. ‘How to respond to the steadily increasing flow of information about the agonies of war was already an issue in the late nineteenth century,’ Sontag wrote in 2003. ‘One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show.’

Later on in that book, she argues against cynicism about the value of such images as tools for effecting change. She cautions the reader, too. ‘Compassion is an unstable emotion,’ she warns. ‘It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.’ 

Speaking of which, here are some resources. Keep going.

Dr Jennifer Good is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the history and theory of photojournalism and documentary photography at London College of Communication, UAL. She is the author of the books Photography and September 11th: Spectacle, Memory, Trauma (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Understanding Photojournalism (Bloomsbury, 2017), and writes regularly across scholarly and commercial platforms on photography with an emphasis on violence, psychoanalysis and power.

Alice Zoo: I guess a place to start is to consider the objectives of a conversation like this — what are its limits, and what can we hope for? I’m coming from a place of feeling helpless, exposed to a ceaseless stream of devastating images, not knowing how best to think about them beyond the immediate bodily response of shock and despair, and where to go from here.

Jennifer Good: As an academic I’m not, in general, very comfortable with the present. I prefer to work as a historian; responding to things with some space and temporal distance. But that’s not an option right now. I feel, in many ways, that I’m relating to this stream of images on just the same terms as anyone else. No better equipped, except with a particular kind of historical awareness, and a knowledge of the critical debates that circulate in the background. 

I’ve been navigating these questions in my own work for years — questions of how much graphic violence is too much; of whose interests it serves; of the right to see versus the right not to see, as well as the right of victims and their loved ones to remain unseen in death. This war, like the ongoing war in Ukraine that has preceded it, is continually, in real time, recontextualising the canonical literature on photography and death. As it does so, I watch, recalibrating my analytical relationship to these scenes of death and devastation, reconsidering my point of view, ethical values established and positions taken. In the words of Jacqueline Rose, ‘this is what war does to theory’.

Theory, at a time like this, can feel inadequate, detached, impotent. But that’s a view that needs to be resisted. bell hooks said ‘I came to theory because I was hurting.’ It is not inadequate. It just needs to be pushed at, challenged and stretched to meet the urgency of the moment. 

AZ: Is it accurate to say that news is more visual now than it ever has been? And if so, what does that mean? Does it make it more immediate, more accessible? And what are some of the issues with consuming news via an image-led platform like Instagram, whose algorithm prioritises visual (as opposed to text-based) content?

JG: Actually, there is precedent for this. Life magazine, for a long time many people’s main source of news, was highly unusual when it began, as a distinctly image-led platform in which words took second place, not only in terms of the amount of space they took up, but in the sense that photographers and their images led the stories and dictated the balance of news values. And in a further parallel with Instagram, words became relegated to the status of captions and description. Opinion differs, of course, as to whether that was a good or a bad thing, but in my view it makes sense that this kind of news consumption exists in an ecosystem, alongside other platforms that give words the prominence and space that they need. 

To me, the biggest shift characterising Instagram and other social media platforms is not the prevalence of images over words, but the increasing prevalence of moving images over still ones. This shift, psychically speaking for viewers, is profound. In my current work, I’m preoccupied with still photography’s ‘fixity’; its inherent propensity to distance and to master, which is potentially disrupted by the moving image. But I also know that moving images have a greater power to traumatise, especially when they come to us unbidden, confronting us with horror that we cannot hold metaphorically at arms in length in the way we can with a frozen, stilled image.  

For previous generations of news consumers, photographs tended to reach us after a time lag, presenting a stilled version of a past moment, and so offering a much more stable form of engagement with violence. Now, they come immediately or even in real time, unfiltered, unedited, often with video first and stills afterwards. Crucially, when images come before the words that explain them, we have no frame of reference, no warning. The key question is not which historical period was the more visual, but rather this temporal dislocation: how time works in each. This is a difference that photography theory — even psychoanalytic theory — is not well equipped to understand. 

AZ: Obviously another major difference is the proportion of footage that comes to us from civilians on the ground, filming on their phones, as opposed to images that come to us from professional photojournalists with backing from press organisations, conflict training, and professional equipment. What kinds of new advantages and/or problems does this pose? 

I feel that in some ways the immediacy and rawness of citizen journalism seems ‘truer’ — not least because there isn’t a team of people deciding whether to go ahead and publish it or not, so it’s less mediated by multiple voices and agendas — but what do professional photojournalists provide that civilian images don’t? And how do ethical questions around images of war change given the far shorter distance between photographer and subject?

JG: For some time now, the only photographs coming to us out of Gaza have been from those already living in or based there, including professional Palestinian photographers. As in any war zone there is a mix of professional and amateur, but considering how compromised the area is in terms of internet connection and electricity, and the conditions under which these local photographers are working, many of the images are really striking in their compositional effectiveness. As a teacher, I spend a lot of time talking about the aestheticisation-of-suffering critique: the idea (originating in the 1980s, with some quite ferocious critics like Martha Rosler) that there is a disingenuousness to photography that creates visually pleasing depictions of war and suffering, flattening its complexity into an arrangement that serves to soothe rather than challenge the viewer. But in the past few weeks I’ve noticed in my own media consumption a softening of this view. I’ve found myself avoiding certain social media feeds where I know I’m likely to encounter a lot of citizen photojournalism — vital as it is — and instead kept to more mainstream sites carrying professional imagery, because in general I know that these images will convey the horror in a form that is literally easier to look at. It’s my way of ensuring that I’m able to stay informed, to not look away. But this is an ethical compromise: it’s a great privilege to choose to see ‘easier’ images of war.

I also know that, although not perfect, information from mainstream sources is more likely to have been factchecked. If my priority was getting news immediately, as quickly as possible, I’d be looking to different feeds and platforms. But personally, I would rather wait a beat, and know that the reporter had waited a beat; to get my news at a two-hour or even a two-day remove.

AZ: I’m thinking about what’s commonly said about the ways that fiction, or narrative in general, make life more intelligible to us by removing extraneous detail, even despite the fact they’re constructed and to some degree artificial. I’m also thinking about trauma as an experience nailed to the present: the way that sufferers of PTSD, when triggered, are brought physiologically back into the state they were in when the trauma took place. It’s almost like amateur videos, chaotic and without narrative, are a direct visualisation of trauma, and that’s what makes them so arresting and provokes such an immediate physical response, and makes them such a potent tool. Narrative being applied, by means of composition, is a kind of making-sense-of; perhaps that makes it more possible for us to integrate the things we’re seeing, but the cost is some level of authenticity.

JG: Yes, I agree. And I also think, despite what I’ve said above, that citizen journalism is vital at the moment. There is a clear political and humanitarian need for these raw, pre-narrative images, alongside the ones that come to us from further along the timeline of psychic integration. However, the clinical psychologist Judith Herman wrote that traumatic memory exists like ‘a series of still snapshots’; the role of therapeutic process is to arrange them into an order with a beginning, a middle and an end. 

Coming from a different critical perspective, in his 1997 book, Open Sky, Paul Virilio writes about the advent of 24-hour rolling news, saying that, rather than time unfolding in the form of conventional narrative succession (before, during, after), media audiences are increasingly accustomed to perceiving time in terms of abrupt and discontinuous ‘irruptions’ of varying intensities. Because of the way in which wars and violence are represented, they are not in fact represented at all — just presented, in eternally simultaneous real time. This, then, was a new kind of trauma — Virilio calls it a ‘pollution of distances’ or a kind of collapse. In order to comprehend it we need space, distance from the image, which we currently do not have. Representation is fraught, but these and other writers persuade me that we need it if we are to be any use in activating a response to violence.

AZ: That makes me think of the collapsing of contexts that happens on Instagram and feels especially charged now: that we’re seeing intensely disturbing images of violence alongside pictures from brands, colleagues posting career achievements, friends’ holiday pictures, celebrities, whatever.

JG: I see that. But it’s also what life is. There is no vacuum in which images have ever come to us, or could ever come to us, in pure isolation — traditional news magazines have always had lifestyle advertising placed right next to war photography. So, this may be one of those things that feels more unprecedented than it really is. We’ve always had to filter, parse and switch our responses to different kinds of images alongside one another.

Another way of thinking about social media is that maybe, rather than simply decontextualizing images, it can actually contextualise them more fully or more flexibly. Someone posts an image, and others can immediately comment, engage, repost, recontextualise and layer other information, other images on top of and around it. Maybe that can be seen as a democratic, dialogic and collaborative kind of meaning-making; not just an alienating shitstorm of discordant images alongside one another. 

It didn’t take long for Ukraine to be called ‘the first TikTok war.’ The New Yorker reported in March 2022 that for Ukrainian civilians, ‘the war has become content, flowing across every platform at once.’ TikTok and Instagram are, as much as anything else, ‘platforms for networked flows of information’, in which not just images but information of all kinds interact.

In the context of a war that continues as we are talking right now, this flow is a matter of life and death. This mobility, in contrast to the traditional fixity of photography, can break the temporal frame of stillness even when the images themselves are still, turning them from mute, spatially-orientated signifiers to things that speak, testify, interact, and respond. Language flows around them, too. There is great scope for activism here.

And the flipside of an increasingly unregulated, unedited space in which disinformation can proliferate, is that people — photographers included — can change their minds. We’ve seen this a number of times already in this conflict. It’s an uncertain space, but I believe in the importance of being able to change one’s mind, even — or especially — in a very public way.

AZ: I’m wondering about the way that on Instagram we often come to these images unprepared. If we go to a news website, on some level we’re prepared to see images of conflict and devastation. On social media, you can’t really know in advance what you’re consenting to when you log on; in times of conflict, as now, maximally disturbing images are shared widely and so seem to seek us out. When that happens there can be a reflexive looking-away, because we’re not prepared. Is there a risk of becoming desensitised, if we’re seeing so many images, of such extreme subject matter, and so continually?

JG: No, I don’t believe in the idea of desensitisation. Another term that’s sometimes used to describe this effect is compassion fatigue, which to me feels more accurate because it reflects the fact that when most of us encounter streams of horrifying imagery, if we eventually feel the need to look away, it will not be because we have been desensitised. It will be precisely the opposite; that we are too sensitised. It’s a generalisation, I know, but I do believe that in the face of the unrelenting suffering of others, when we feel compelled to look away, it’s only to avoid our hearts becoming entirely broken. 

AZ: On a really basic level, what does it mean to look at images of death? How do we respond?

JG: As the end of the Covid-19 pandemic blurred into the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Jacqueline Rose asked the question, ‘what do you do with death and dying when they can no longer be pushed to the outer limits of your lived experience or dismissed from your conscious mind?’ She is not suggesting that we should drag death out into public view and look it in the face as a kind of cathartic punishment. ‘How can we ensure,’ she rather asks, ‘that death, as much as life, is given its dignity?’ These are truly existential crises, and Rose’s point is that it’s matter of psychic survival to be able to bracket death off in order to go about our lives. We have to take seriously what it means to be confronted by so many of these images, because we are not equipped for it.

Writing some years ago about the September 11th terrorist attacks, I was preoccupied with the question of whether photography was of any use in the process of healing. I saw so much faith being put in photography as catharsis, as a tool to process and remedy loss — such a heavy burden of desire — and yet, I couldn’t help concluding, it ultimately represented nothing more than a dead end, doomed endlessly to repeat that already twinned act of spectacular violence.

But this situation is different. The function of these photographs of death, now, is not primarily to offer any kind of way forward, to contribute to mourning or recovery, or to trap us in an endless loop of paralysis. It is something else — much closer to the imperative that is called, within the history of photojournalism, bearing witness. In themselves, the pictures take us nowhere, and give us nothing. But together, caught up in a flow of words, of other images, of pictures moving and still, they might create a collective response that leads to intervention.

If this situation was in the past, I would say different things about it: ‘be kind to yourself, look away, take a walk, make a donation.’ But this is a different kind of existential crisis. I have no right, in this instance, to prioritise self-care or to advise it to anyone else. Protecting or healing from the trauma of looking at these images is not the priority right now.  

AZ: It feels like, especially in the current moment, there are particularly high expectations of, and high pressure on, the sharing and distribution of images. It’s much easier to not bother reading the full length of an article than it is to not see an image, hence the heavy burden of desire, as you put it.

There are demands, from sceptics, for images that prove the truth of what’s happening — casualty figures, for example. Then there’s the search for the image persuasive enough to finally mobilise sympathy (Dr Hala Alyan in The New York Times: ‘We are up at night, combing through the flickering light of our phones, trying to find the metaphor, the clip, the photograph to prove a child is a child. It is an unbearable task. We ask: Will this be the image that finally does it?’)

How can we reconcile ourselves to this — that people are being forced to share the most intimate and devastating moments of their lives in order to prove their humanity?

JG: I could trace some of the lines of critical debate around these issues. One of the biggest is this question of dignity: on the one hand, people shouldn’t have to be pictured in the worst moments of their lives, in order to move the dial of public opinion or policy. But then there is the argument from Ariella Azoulay, who, in her game-changing book The Civil Contract of Photography — and the origin of her proposition is actually the plight and representation of Palestinians themselves — claims that photographs are not just documents, but presences. They are a lived encounter with a person; and we live that encounter again, in a different way, every time we look at them. This is what she means by a civil contract: we have a moral obligation to the person in the photograph.

But what does that mean if, as you say, a person is having to share the bleakest and most undignified moment of their life in order to be seen as human at all, or someone that’s worth responding to? Unfortunately, the repetition of images of suffering from the Middle East, and the racist double-standard by which images of, for example, Palestinians have been continually subject to different editorial treatment than those of white people over successive decades, means that many audiences are conditioned to see them as less human in the first place. Arguably, it’s a lack of images of ordinary life, of joy, of play, of love and everyday dignity that unequally dehumanises Palestinian people in the eyes of the rest of the world — not just their suffering. 

AZ: It feels like maybe there are three ways of understanding images: that images used to be documents or reports, saying ‘this is what happened’; and then, per Azoulay, we could start to understand them as encounters; and now, more recently but especially in the context of this specific conflict, their explicit demands on the viewer have been turned up a notch further, and images have become pleas. Now more than ever before it seems as though images are attached to messaging (captions, posts, etc) saying ‘please look, please pay attention.’

JG: Because of this long historical legacy of dehumanising, for Palestinian people — of what we might call the politics of their visibility — the bar is perhaps even higher in terms of what they have to show to us in order for this plea to be taken seriously. But again, it feels significant to me that the premise of Azoulay’s radical concept of a citizenship — a contract between human beings, mediated by photography — is predicated upon the statelessness of Palestinians. It’s applicable to all kinds of photographs of all kinds of people; but it came directly out of her analysis as an Israeli thinker, that Palestinians may not have citizenship or statehood, but photography might offer a different kind of belonging. That’s the hopeful thread of her argument, and the challenge.

AZ: I’ve been thinking about the way that images seem absolute in ways that text doesn’t. The current refrain of the reticent goes, ‘this is a really complicated issue, I’m trying to understand all the sides’ — it feels like writing, for some reason, is more susceptible to this kind of response, where images feel unarguable, or absolute. A photograph of a dead child is a photograph of a dead child; it’s harder to resist with arguments about complexity.

JG: Yes, the history of this conflict and occupation is really, really complicated. But the present is not. It is stark and straightforward how unequal this fight is, and what is at stake. The images are there. This is something that photography can do. 

AZ: Then again, it also feels like the flipside of that absolute quality of images is the possibility that images can be quite crude instruments, communicating best in extremis. Does constantly seeing images of devastation, bodies, etc, eventually result in only one kind of violence being able to capture our attention (as opposed to the structural violence of the occupation, which has been going on for far longer)?

JG: Types of violence that unfold gradually, slowly and without spectacle — ‘slow violence’ — pose a challenge to photography. On the one hand, Rob Nixon, who is credited with coining this term, associates it fundamentally with invisibility; with changes that are imperceptible or out of sight. But others, like Thom Davies, argue that it is usually only ‘out of sight’ or ‘invisible’ to the privileged — it depends who you ask and whose experiences you pay attention to.

This has been one of the failures of photography in the history of this conflict, as in all conflicts. It is not good at capturing structural things; only symptoms, superficial out-workings and surfaces. A really clear historical example of that is the fraught use of photography to cover famine. Famine always has a complicated, multifactorial set of causes, but photography can only photograph the graphic symptoms that occur when it’s already too late. Not only is prevention impossible by that point, but those simplistic images also simplify its causes and absolve viewers of any responsibility, reducing it instead to nothing more than an ‘act of God’. 

And in Gaza, it’s not just that photography has not been good at capturing the slow, structural violence of the occupation, it’s that it’s been ignored and marginalised as a story. In many ways it is too late, but in other ways, these photographs have a shocking futurity to them as well; an urgency. They’re not just showing us a spectacle of violence that we can no longer do anything about, but of violence that is yet to come. 

AZ: What happens when an extreme moment passes and there aren’t new images aren’t coming out about bombardments happening an hour ago, and the images go back to being harder to visualise, and structural?

JG: One answer is that, thankfully, we live in an increasingly diverse image and media ecosystem. There are photographers committed to staying with this story, just as there always have been. And there is photography that is pushing boundaries in terms of photographing structural conditions; finding new and creative modes of address that really engage the viewer’s imagination. Those types of photography tend to reach a smaller audience — they won’t appear on the evening news — but I remain grateful that they exist. 

Another answer, however, is that once those immediate images start to fade and the news cycle moves on, this, precisely, is part of the structural violence. It’s the apparatus at work. Invisibility is part of the violence, and the oppression.

AZ: Is there anything we can bear in mind when trying to learn to parse images that come to us on Instagram with little context? Is there a framework that a typical social media user — especially one who’s not in the photography industry and hasn’t spent much time thinking about photographs, ethics, etc — can use to think about the images they’re seeing, a way of improving visual literacy? I’m thinking about how easily images can be used to spread misinformation, as well as the kinds of ethical frameworks that we come to understand in photography education but that are perhaps less intuitive or less well understood outside that context.

JG: I’ve always been an advocate for visual literacy, for slowing down our process of seeing and receiving images, to make room for critical reflection and questioning. On the one hand, we’ve already seen that this is now more important than ever. But on the other, we don’t need to fact-check every image or question its source to be impacted by the greater truth that’s in front of us; the more urgent imperative is to respond to the images which we know are showing us a humanitarian catastrophe in progress. 

Part of me wants to encourage people to spend their valuable time writing to their MP rather than verifying an image source. Part of me would almost rather not advise people about how to be boundaried against being traumatised by images. Part of me would rather say: let yourself be traumatised. We have a responsibility, perhaps, to be affected by images of future violence in a way that we don’t so much by violence that we know is in the past. But at the same time, I want to acknowledge with compassion what it means to face these images. And I also know that traumatised audiences are of no use to Palestinian children.

AZ: Could you speak more about this idea of futurity, about the way these images speak of future violence?

JG: What I mean is that all of the theory that I have at my disposal, about how to respond to images of death and catastrophe, has to do with aftermath. But this is not aftermath. During previous humanitarian disasters — the most pertinent one in this case being the Nazi Holocaust — the photographer’s role was to prevent us as an international community from looking away, to ensure that the same could never happen again. This situation is different, for many reasons. But one of the differences is that the images are not coming to us afterwards, revealing the true scale of something that we were told was happening but could not be sure. We are being told in no uncertain terms that this bloodshed will continue, it will escalate, it will get much, much worse. One of the conventional limits of photography is that it cannot show the future; cannot imagine, fantasise, or foretell. It cannot have a role in revolution because it can look only at what was and what is. But in this case, it is showing us the future. And so the stakes are very different. 

As you and I are speaking today, we’ve just been told of an internet blackout in Gaza. There is a coming void of invisibility, and so we have to trust the images that came last week, foretelling what would happen this week and in the days to come. This is the test of photography’s civil contract. Photography is holding us directly to account in our response as an international community. If this becomes, as many are predicting, a true genocide, we will not be able to say, as we did in the case of the Holocaust of the 1940s, or Rwanda in the 1990s, that we did not see or did not know its true scale until afterwards. Photography is showing us, in effect, the present and the future at the same time.

Jennifer Good’s recommended reading:

The Plague: Living Death in Our Times — Jacqueline Rose

The Civil Contract of Photography — Ariella Azoulay

A huge thanks to Jennifer Good, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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Years ago, when I first came across Ribeira’s work, I remember finding it troubling and feeling I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t know what I was meant to be seeing or thinking. I began to look closer at the unease I felt, my reaction to what I perceived as confrontation. Why did I expect to be informed and reassured by looking at pictures? It felt as though the work was revealing something about me: the separations and categories that exist in my own mind, my craving for certainty and tidy narrative. I feel now that this is exactly the point — her work is confronting precisely because it doesn’t dictate a particular reading. Her subjects retain their essence.

The images in Subida al Cielo are full of energy and tension. They challenge rather than soothe. By stripping away the gloss and narrative shaping that we’ve come to expect photographs to provide, Ribeira is reaching for something more elemental, even archetypal. Her gestural photographs — produced during intense collaboration with her subjects, with whom she forms close relationships — begin to seem like symbols, as potent as they are overtly simple.

In her own words: 

"I am interested in nuns, thieves, and gardens. In the rotting body, witchcraft, hotel receptions, and heaven’s gates. Phantoms, funeral directors, and gravity.”

This short artist statement works just as Ribeira’s images do. It makes no claims about intention or effect. Like the photographs, the list of nouns is stark and direct, yet it’s in the friction between them — the different directions they pull in, the imaginative effort that we have to make to move from nuns to thieves, and so on — that the work is found. All of the tensions the list provokes pull on each reader in different and unpredictable ways, and this ambiguity is at the heart of Ribeira’s project. She doesn’t hold the viewer’s hand or assert her own view, instead letting the work happen in each of us.

Alice Zoo: I thought it might be interesting to start by talking about Arbus, who is especially on my mind at the moment, and who we were messaging about briefly earlier this week. What were some of your earliest encounters with her work, and do you remember your reaction to it? Have your feelings about her work changed throughout your own development as an artist? I'm thinking about Aristócratas, of course, but also the way that you seem to be a natural inheritor of hers in general, in your interest in the elemental and the mythic.

Lúa Ribeira: I remember feeling that her work was asking, in a very open-ended way, uncomfortable questions, and it was stimulating and challenging, like a source for me to reflect. Also the way she understood the work — it was beyond the medium of photography, and more connected to a philosophical search. I felt connected to that search and admired her responsibility towards a certain honesty that I think is not easy to devote yourself to.

My feelings have not changed: to look at her work is always inspiring and overwhelming, as if the images have all the possible tenderness, all the pain, all the masks and whatever is behind them.

I work very instinctively, and when I was studying I shot a lot in order to see what I was doing. Then it was a matter of deciphering what was happening during that less conscious process, and I think it was, and still is, something about encountering people and making images together, united by something. I was also drawn towards images related to the mythical, the archetypal, something that may transcend the anecdotal and temporal, which had something rooted about us… and Arbus was a master of this.

AZ: Yes — and it feels as though you’re also similar in the way that you value the encounter itself, and its intensity, so highly. The images almost seem as though they transcribe that intensity more directly than the people and landscapes themselves — as with the feeling of adrenaline that was the thematic centre of Los Afortunados.

I know you often spend a long time with people, in their environments, before you find a way to begin photographing together — you only began making photographs for Aristócratas during the third summer you spent time there, for example. I’m wondering if there have been times when your encounters with potential subjects haven’t led to photographs — when a way to photograph never became clear? Or when the photographs didn’t reflect the encounter in the way you had hoped? What happens when a certain intensity is unrealised or untranslatable? Do photographs — or even whole projects — ever get abandoned, or fail?

LR: I think, up to a point, it is always untranslatable and unclear. There is a big gap between my experiences working and the final image the viewer sees, which holds so much ambiguity. I am very resistant to sharing testimonies or information because I always find one question behind another, so at the end it is more about the images and what they can do to us. 

Often there is that long period before the images happen, and that long term encounter is what informs the work. For instance Aristocrats takes place in the context of an institution that takes care of neurodivergent women, or Los Afortunados, on the Spanish-Moroccan border. The possibility of sharing time and space outside the productivity or charity systems that could have lead me to work or be in those places is very important for me. It’s more intimate: it’s about togetherness as a form of transgression; and clashing with structural separations, the barriers between us; and seeing how strong and fragile those separations really are. 

In terms of expectations, I know that the encounter will be the accident that provokes the images, and I am looking for images I can't imagine yet, so I am very aware that whatever preconceived visual is in my mind won’t be as interesting as the image resulting from the real experience. 

I am not very insistent. When there isn’t the right feeling I quickly move on. And yes, the work is full of failed attempts, of fear, shyness and walks that take me nowhere. I often exhaust myself but later on also comes a moment of acceptance and hopefully a bit of lucidity. I have abandoned past project ideas that were too formulated — they were already resolved, and didn't lead to exploring something beyond what I already knew.

AZ: It takes a great deal of nerve to work with such a high level of ambiguity, and push hard beyond the known and understood. I often feel that one of the reasons that images are so hard to control is because they're beyond language — they have an inherent volatility. That’s something I struggle with and struggle against, and so I really admire the way that you work with this volatility, using it as a source of power.

Speaking of the unknown — ideas of transcendence and religiosity are very present in your work, as well as in the way you talk about your own philosophy and working methods. I’m wondering whether you see and experience these things — like magic, witchcraft, and the divine — as real forces in the world, beyond their interest as ideas to explore in your practice? Why are you drawn to them?

LR: For me that volatility, and even futility, can be hard but also a relief at the same time. A gap that allows the search to continue.

We have a tradition of Catholic art in Spain, both painting and sculpture, which appears ubiquitously in religious celebration, folklore, architecture, etc. We also have the Baroque, with all the gestures and representation of experiences connected to pain or suffering, and the dramatism of it all. I think it does something to us — when we stare at certain images for a long time in a church, for instance. It’s almost like a way to train ourselves to deal with the unknown, the idea of death and what that may mean. Something that is transcendental, important. I guess to answer you, my interest in those questions is what defines my practice.

I am not sure I’ve experienced magic in terms of witchcraft or the divine in a straightforward way, but I think I am open to other people’s experiences of life, and somehow I don’t have the need to define where a certain idea of reality ends and fantasy — or another idea of reality — begins. It is often the ones perceived as mad who express the most lucid thoughts, isn’t it?

AZ: I feel as though there’s a certain amount of the numinous in the gap itself: the search for an image or the right set of symbols. How is it that a project doesn’t seem to be working, and then suddenly it does? It feels like there’s magic in that, or at least a force that we don’t fully understand, but can absolutely feel and experience whilst making work. Another reason that I find photography so challenging is because the surface of things feels like such an impossible point of access for all the mysterious interior forces that interest me, and yet surfaces are the material that photographs work with. It feels like trying to produce a dream to be interpreted.

What you said about training ourselves reminds me of something I’ve heard you say about your practice of gathering reference images. Subida al Cielo is unusual and generous in the way it includes a glimpse of your process: your drawings, paintings you’ve been looking at, film stills, and so on; I read that you think of collecting these images as a “ritual of preparation” for your work. Can you tell me some more about that? And can you imagine making works entirely in another medium one day, as part of your practice — painting, drawing, sculpture, performance?

LR: You are right, there’s something that clicks and we’re never quite sure why. Also, related to what you’re saying, I really like something John Berger wrote about Spanish art and how it was often designated as realist because the surfaces are rendered with great intensity and directness, but with the awareness that there’s no point in trying to see through appearances: “Let the visible be visible without illusion. The truth is elsewhere.” 

Subida al Cielo contains five different series that merge into one within the book and define a way of working I have been developing.  Whilst working with the publisher, we were thinking about how to include the reference images I use: from painting, vernacular, film stills, as well as sketches and text fragments. They all work together in relation to the questions I am facing in each series. It has been very interesting to see how people engage with this part of the book, and we’re considering making a companion that expands on it. 

I would say it’s a ritual because it’s not too useful technically. I’m not preparing the images; it’s like a false attempt. I work too accidentally, and with what happens in the moment of photographing, so all these previous ideas are ready to be broken from the start. But still, there’s something very important in them, like a starting point of confidence; the notion that something is possible, and a way to train oneself, perhaps subconsciously. 

I see that some of the sketches have the same energy as the photographs, and I have done sculpture before as a separate thing, but I like the idea of devoting myself to photography, not to give up on the medium whilst I drink from literature, painting, cinema and of course daily life.

AZ: Oh, that Berger quote is great. I went back to read the essay it comes from, and this line also made me think of your work: “The Spanish painters, with all their mastery, set out to show that the visible is an illusion, only useful as a reminder of the terror and hope within the invisible.” It makes me think of Arbus, too, actually.

I’ve been wondering  — do you feel part of a tradition of Spanish art? To what extent does your creative identity feel connected to your nationality? And beyond that, does your work feel connected to your identity in general, or does it feel separate, like its own entity with its own character?

LR: I am not sure if I feel part of a tradition like that. It’s complicated, relating the medium of photography to fine art. I feel inspired by some of the Baroque literature and art. I’m obsessed with Goya, but I guess everybody is. Italian Baroque is also fascinating, and so are other movements and artists that came later. I feel I have my “maestros” that I can always go and look at, and they all relate to each other somehow — even though they come from different times and movements. 

The nationality question is tricky because I am Galician; we have a different language and heritage. The fascist dictatorship in Spain ended in 1975, and Galicia was one of the territories which suffered a harsh repression in relation to our own culture, and this is still very problematic. The consequences are also palpable in my generation, and I know the themes I have been mostly dealing with in photography come from an identification with, or certain sensibility borne from, those systems of oppression and what they cause. I often say the work comes from a political motivation and it’s only later on that it turns into something more fragile, more connected to deeper questions and uncertainties. But yes, the work is totally connected to the place I come from.

All images (C) Lúa Ribeira, from Subida al Cielo, published by DALPINE, 2023.

Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

Lúa Ribeira’s recommended reading:

Sweet Nothings — Marlene Dumas

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe — Carson McCullers

The Thief’s Journal — Jean Genet

A huge thanks to Lúa Ribeira, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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In the syrupy heat of Arles at the beginning of July, a queue was forming early every morning. Friends were strategising, advising one another to go first thing, or straight after lunch, or at the end of the day, conferring as to when they wouldn’t have to stand for an hour or more to wait for entry to the ground floor gallery at Luma.

You chose a strategy, and had to stand in the queue anyway, fanning yourself. When finally you walked into the room, you were met with a vast steel web, seeming to extend endlessly. The atmosphere was hushed, thinned by air conditioning, and you saw a kind of tangle, framed images caught in the web like flies. Blacks, whites, greys. Photographs were hung on tall metal structures, some a few inches from the ground, some that you had to crane your neck to see. The exhibition text invited a “labyrinthine journey”, its irregularly-sized and -angled structures offering no obvious route. When you made your way deep enough in, approaching what felt like the centre, you’d suddenly catch sight of something familiar: yourself. A floor-to-ceiling mirror had doubled the room, making it seem twice as vast. This moment was a relief.

The exhibition, Constellation, consisted of 454 photographs by Diane Arbus. The collection, acquired by Luma in 2011, is the complete set of proofs printed by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorised to make prints of Arbus’s work after her death. There was no exhibition catalogue; the Arbus estate keeps a famously tight rein on the distribution of her images. Attendants quietly circling the gallery were quick to whisperingly admonish you for taking any photographs, so my phone stayed in my bag, and I wrote my notes on the back of the programme.

The varied heights of the images required the viewer to crouch if they wanted a close look at the lower ones, or to lean back and push onto tiptoes to try and reconcile the ones hung high (many were too high to inspect closely — and the frustration of this made up part of the emotional landscape of the show). There were mirrors on the back of many of the frames, so that when you moved to the other side of a particular grid, you’d suddenly be confronted by a haunted face and little black eyes, your own, stricken by the work, and made crude by the reflective surface. A common defence of Arbus is that she holds up a mirror to the viewer, exposing their own judgements, rather than making judgements herself; the presence of mirrors in the show, the way they were used to trick and surprise you, was a reminder of this.

Overall, the exhibition was designed in such a way as to remind you not only of yourself, but also of your body. It’s rare to be in a show which requires you to move so dynamically, crouching and reaching, turning so many corners, doubling back on yourself intentionally and unintentionally. I felt like Arbus might have done as she photographed: adventuring, exploring, but also having to work for what I saw — not drifting through a white cube as a floating consciousness, but a breathing thing, reliant on muscles and bone; a thing growing tired, ageing. 

Back in the heat, in the Place du Forum or wherever, I didn’t care what else I saw. I felt completely filled up by Arbus, completely sated, and was clinging tight to the impressions I’d gathered, already fading and becoming strange without phone snaps to remind me what I’d seen. I was surprised to find that some people hated the show. She’d hate all her work up there like that, she was so careful about her edits, reluctant about their dissemination. It’s true, she was reticent when alive, turning down certain opportunities for exhibition and publication. But true, too, that she was an immensely ambitious photographer — this ambition perhaps a defining characteristic. Wouldn’t she have loved being the talk of a festival, such an expanse of her work so lauded? 

Perhaps this kind of speculation opens up the question of what exactly we owe to an artist after their death — to whom does the work now belong, the artist or the audience? And what might Arbus have made of that particular discussion? Would she have respected the propriety of death, or would she have wanted to see the notebooks and the contact sheets, the full scope of the work, even chosen by executors rather than the artist themselves? (I think of her photographs made at morgues, of autopsies, of bodies labelled by a tag on the toe.)

The elegance of the curatorial strategy of Constellation was its so well matching the form of the show to its content — to Arbus’s photographic mind. The sense of overwhelm, of chaos and sprawl, feel just like the sense transmitted by Arbus’s oeuvre as a whole. I’ve never been in an exhibition which enveloped me so successfully, the physical experience of being there matching the aesthetic experience of the images themselves; not only reproducing Arbus’s tireless search for pictures, but also her pictures’ point of view.

A photographer’s vision isn’t a copy of the world, but a compaction of a feeling about it. Arbus’s world was off-kilter, uncanny; a world of extremes, disorientating. Constellation reproduced this world, containing me in it. I felt all this in the gallery, trying to make sure I’d seen all the pictures, trying to maintain my waning focus through the hours I spent there. A frantic feeling that I might not be able to see it all — not only because of the show’s scale, but because of the purposive disorganisation — that I might miss something. The shock of first coming into the enormous and endless-seeming room, doubled by the mirror. The austere angles of the black metal structures. The monochrome. The thin air.

Beauty is a joke, I thought, as I looked at the photographs. Beauty is seedy, a moth-eaten rug, a threadbare consolation for all of life’s darkness. It feeds on itself, the primping and polish only showing the darkness up more strongly. This is beauty as Arbus sees it: the teenage beauty queen with the coat of dark hair from shoulder to wrist; the children with old people’s faces; the looming wax figures of celebrities and politicians; Mae West baring her teeth in her terrible, shiny bedroom.

Arbus said: “Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe… Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.”

In her hands, the desire to be beautiful or glamorous reads as pathetic, a desperate scrambling for something, a sham. What you can’t help people knowing about you. This assessment is visible not only in her pictures of people, but also in her landscapes: the house on a hill which is just a facade, the scaffolding propping it up visible behind, looking imposing and trivial at the same time; the fake Disneyland rocks on wheeled pallets. So much of what looks impressive at first glance, in an Arbus picture, is a simulacrum: the image of something, not the thing itself. For much of her career, she photographed people inside their homes, in their living rooms. Their furniture, pictures, and personal effects are as much a part of the portrait as the person themselves. We all try to bolster ourselves with images, with trinkets, putting frames around pictures as ballast against life, hoping our clothes or living spaces will reflect the kinds of people we try to become. Arbus isn’t fooled. She sees what we’re trying to do. The images remain inert. What’s apparent, instead, is our striving.

If she is cruel, as is often said, then this is the way she is cruel: on the subject of beauty, luxury, and fortune; on the impossibility of trying to beautify life, to sanitise it; on the failure of trying to seem different than we are. Arbus was the child of wealthy parents, the owners of a Manhattan department store. She grew up in The Great Depression, though it didn’t touch her. “I was confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could only feel as unreality,” she said. Her vision of the rich is so biting because her earliest experience was of privilege holding reality at arm’s length. Her pictures exposed the hypocrisy and hubris of such a position. In her search for what she came to term “the forbidden” — the circuses, the eccentrics, the freak shows — she was looking for what was hidden from her as a child. If the showy world of riches was all phoney, then this forbidden world seemed, by contrast, authentic and real. This was the backstage, the place where performance dropped, where there was real intimacy, real truth.

In the last two years of her life, she was working on a new series in Vineland, New Jersey, in and around a residential school for the developmentally disabled. For the first time, her subjects move through wide open space, leading one another by the hand in their nightgowns and fancy dress. In these pictures, Arbus is warm. Her ruthless eye for domestic detail has relaxed. In the outdoor landscape, her subjects are her pictures’ centre. They are photographed playing together, convivial, wearing Halloween masks. Despite their costumes, it seems as though Arbus had found subjects who weren’t trying to convince her of anything, or trying to pretend beauty and glamour. Their playfulness is an authentic one. It feels as though Arbus saw this as the only way to be free: to drop the pretence and the polish, the need to be perceived a certain way, the need to be perceived at all.

Arbus wasn’t free from this need, of course. She wanted to be perceived. When her images were on the wall at MoMA for the first time, as part of John Szarkowski’s New Documents show, she’d go and loiter at her display, listening to the conversations people had about her work, and writing them down. Here we find a kind of self-portrait: her witnessing of being witnessed, writing it down unsparingly, just as she might have photographed it.

From her notebook, January 1967:

Man: They’re nothing.
Woman: What?
Man: Nothing. I could go out and do the same thing.
Woman: Well why don’t you?
Man: You don’t think I could?
Woman: I believe you. I just want to see you do it.
Man: Do you think that’s good photography?

Diane Arbus: Constellation is open at LUMA Arles until 31st December 2023.

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I live close to Davey, and I’ve been spending a lot of time in her garden recently as she makes photographs during the third and final summer of the project. The effect the garden has on people is uncanny — it’s visible in the portraits, of course, the way that so many of Davey’s subjects spontaneously ask to be photographed nude; the variety of people who find their way in; the peace, courage and vulnerability in each gaze — but it’s especially striking to see these encounters happen in real time. When a passer-by stops to admire the garden, telling Davey how beautiful they find it, she asks if they’d like to come in to be photographed there. Invariably they agree immediately, without any further explanation, as though they’re arriving at a long-held appointment. As Luke describes it, seeing the undeniable and profound effect that such an exuberance of natural beauty has on people feels close to miraculous.

Over the past two years, Davey has also been running a series of group workshops called the Creative Body Process. Drawing on her background as a psychotherapist, as well her more recent experience as an artist, and taking place in and around her home in Devon, the workshop acts as an intense creative reset. Davey leads each group through a series of practices of embodiment and uncompromising inner enquiry in order to reconnect each participant with their creativity, and help them to find the narrative purpose that has been lost or dimmed by the pressures and alienation of contemporary living. The workshop is cameraless, and its exact methods remain necessarily shrouded in secrecy. Past participants won’t reveal what happens on the workshop, instead simply encouraging others to do it if they feel called to, and see for themselves.

For full disclosure, Siân is a friend, and we’re both members of a group of photographers called The Emmas, which also includes Lúa Ribeira, Clémentine Schneidermann, Alys Tomlinson, and Abbie Trayler-Smith.

For this conversation, I took inspiration from Alexander Chee’s essay The Querent, part of which was shaped around the drawing of three tarot cards. Siân and I committed to using the tarot as an anchor for our discussion, conducting our conversation as a kind of reading. Siân shuffled the deck and then I spread it out on her kitchen table. She drew three cards, and we turned them over in the order they were drawn.

Alice Zoo: Oh wow, all wands.

Siân Davey: That’s so interesting! It’s all about creativity. 

AZ: Golden and gorgeous and shining, every single one. 

SD: So what is this first card? Page of Wands. It’s the beginning.

SD: That’s what I thought it was — it’s about the birth of a new enterprise, isn’t it. That’s really interesting.

AZ: So maybe we could talk the beginning of photography for you — how it came in, and what was going on then?

SD: Yes. I think I felt almost hijacked, or ambushed. I hadn’t been looking for a significant change in my life at the time. But what’s been constant in my life is the inner work, and I think when you commit to the inner work you get signposted. 

This is what happened: I went up to the Tate, from Brighton, for the Louise Bourgeois retrospective. I walked in, and I can remember looking at the work, at those extraordinary mannequins she made, the pink ones sewn together and wrapped around each other, and somewhere it connected to my sexual abuse as a child by my grandfather. And also by my father, the absence of healthy boundaries, how he invaded me.

When I came out of that exhibition, I burst into tears. I felt really quite broken, and said to my partner at the time, “I’ve got to be a creative.” I did my first degree in painting, many years ago, but actually I was never a painter — I’d never considered myself a creative. What happened in that moment was a transmission. I had no idea what it would look like. 

And then, two or three years later, I don’t even know why, but I picked up the camera. I rustled together a camera club, me and my mates, to go out taking pictures, only so I could keep saying “how do you do this?” I found a camera that I could stick on auto, and that was it. And then it kept getting magical. I knew that I was being looked after. 

Very soon after that, I’d moved to Devon and applied to go on to the Plymouth MA, because I knew I wanted to make my own work. I was working with David Chandler and Jem Southam. On the first day we were in, we were given a different photographer to take home and present in the next session. I didn’t know a single photographer, because I wasn’t a photographer; I’d only taken a few pictures.

The person they gave me was Julia Margaret Cameron. She didn’t begin photography until she was the age that I was at the time, and she had four children like me. I had these shivers up my arm, and I was like: she’s standing next to me, and she’s giving me permission. She’s validating something here for me, that was it. So the magical kept happening. 

And then it was a love story. I fell deeply, deeply in love. I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever really felt in love with a partner before, but I had fallen in love with photography. I was off. And it was the perfect beginning. These two women: Louise Bourgeois, Julia Margaret Cameron. And later on, my love for Arbus’s work. I was surrounded by these super cool women who were doing great stuff.

AZ: That’s so funny about Julia Margaret Cameron, because I feel like there are many similarities between you and her.

SD: That’s what Michael Hoppen, who represents my work, has always said. But I don’t study photography — in fact, I rarely look at photography unless I go to an exhibition. You’ll never see me looking at books and online at other people’s work — I have to see the print. Within the print you get the transmission. You get the DNA of the authors, don’t you, in a print. So I’ve never studied her work.

AZ: Can you tell me about moving to Devon?

SD: Some people just see risk, and other people don’t. I don’t see risk. If something pops in, I just say let’s do that — I’ll deal with it later. Sometimes that can be problematic. I said right, in two years we’re going to move the whole family down, and we moved exactly two years later, almost to the day. I was so bereft about not being in amongst concrete, in chaos, in that very low vibration of city life. I always lived equidistant between the police station and the hospital; I was sandwiched in-between the sirens. So I found it very disturbing to have all this space, and this high frequency that you have living out of a city. 

Everything was really ruptured, moving here; I was very distraught. But when your boundaries are ruptured it gives rise to possibility. We have no idea, really, of what we are capable of doing. We live in a very limited view of ourselves. So it exploded my boundaries, ruptured them, and when we’re ruptured we need to resolve something quickly. Something needs understanding. And I think photography really facilitated that transition; it helped me understand it. And it also threw up so much about my history around belonging, and connection, alienation; always feeling a bit on the outside. I really was an outsider. I’ve lived as an outsider, and I’ve always challenged what’s around me.

AZ: What you were saying here about rupture, and then suddenly feeling away from the concrete, it reminds me of this scene on the Page of Wands. Do you know what I mean? Because it’s quite stark, as well as being very potent.

SD: Yes. But the Page of Wands is holding this golden wand with this light coming out of the top. That transmission, that signpost, was my light. I had no idea what it was going to look like. I have a very strong faith, and my faith led me, and I had to let everything unravel around me. The dots had to join.

I just stayed open. It’s like: show me what I need to see about my evolution. We lead the world through our thinking mind, and we don’t work so well, in the Western world, in our intuitive body, which is why we struggle as creatives. 

It was at this time that I gave birth to Alice. I gave birth to a child with Down’s Syndrome, and at the same time I was really picking up the camera. I left Brighton, and then came here to Devon, and took this enormous risk. I didn’t know anyone, nothing felt familiar, and I’d left my practice as a psychotherapist. But I knew that I could not be encumbered by my past; that I could not stay where I was, just because I had friends. It wasn’t enough. There was an evolution I had to deal with. There was something else I had to find out about being here.

AZ: Shall we move to this card, the Three of Wands?

SD: I think it’s about my creative practice. The Page of Wands is the beginning, and I’m changing; and the Three of Wands is me landing in this whole world of practice, and of my projects. The Queen feels like it’s about the Creative Body Process, and me embodying myself as a woman.

AZ: Yes. “This is a good time to publicise your creative accomplishments. You may find yourself shipping your goods and products to a distant location.”

SD: Yes, that’s all about my practice. These cards tell a story about my creative life: the Page is the birth; the Three is me working, and my work moving all round the world; and the Queen is me actually standing in my garden. It’s the manifestation.

AZ: I’m wondering how you relate to the idea of success, and being rewarded by institutions. You’ve had a lot of it over a very short time. How do you feel about that?

SD: Well I began from an unusual place, I think. I still don’t feel like a photographer, it was just part of my evolution. It was something I had to do. I wasn’t looking outside of me at the time, when I started taking pictures. Looking for Alice really was my first piece of work. Everything was driven by how I was feeling, and I was trying to embody what was happening for me: to resolve it, to understand it, to lay it down. That’s kind of the premise of my practice. I wasn’t thinking about awards and validation. The validation has to come from yourself, otherwise it’s empty, and it disappears very quickly.

At the same time, I was entering things, and they were useful. I think ambition is fine if it’s managed well, and doesn’t obscure creativity. I wanted to exist within this new world. 

AZ: This is what it feels like this card is: it’s looking out to the new land, the distance to travel.

SD: It was exciting. I was travelling with my work, I was meeting very interesting people, I was meeting creatives all the time. Many of my friends, now, are in the world of creativity. There’s nothing I like better than sharing that; many of my ideas do come from those conversations. I immersed myself very quickly in it, and in many ways, I took refuge within it. I felt like I’d found a home. I felt I had landed. I think many artists do operate as outsiders; you see that within their families, when you speak to them; the middle child, the disruptor. And it’s through art that we make sense of the world. 

I think that really, very clearly, this card references so much about that period of time. And I do see it as a past, actually, now; an extraordinary period of time, and much valued friendships. It always comes down to friendship, and community, and relating, and connecting.

AZ: How do you see your work as a psychotherapist in connection with all of these things?

SD: I did this absolutely extraordinary Buddhist Western psychotherapy training, and that training was the container for the work that I’m doing. It liberated me.

I think ultimately being in that role, in that capacity, what you hear is all about human condition, and non-separateness. You see the lengths that we have to go to not to reveal who we are, due to shame, and what we inherit from family. I know how hard it is for people to make that transition back to self, and love, and connection. This is why we choose to go to psychotherapy, ultimately: to come back home.

AZ: It also feels like it was this long priming of the canvas for all of the work that you’re doing now: the space that you hold in your photography. It feels like so much of your work, and your gift, is about holding space in a particular way.

SD: It’s holding space, but my container is vast. Having very volatile parents, in and out of homeless accommodation until I was 14… I’ve sat down right at the bottom, and I have looked up from the bottom, and have begun to find a way to be here, to bring my spirit here, and not out of my body. Hence all my twenties, taking recreational drugs; I was out of my body, playing. What was so good about that period of time was the dancing. It brought me to connection. But I had to ground myself — I had to bring myself home. So I’ve been leading myself by my hand through different trainings, and different experiences, and different relationships. The psychotherapy was just one part of that, but it was a significant part. The early part was the raw stuff — the material, the richness — and psychotherapy was the integration.

AZ: And then we get to the Page of Wands, the bolt of inspiration, before the setting out — the Three of Wands — and being on the journey.

SD: And inspiration. I mean, all these cards are about inspiration.

AZ: Of course. They’re all about drive, and libido —

SD: And passion and vitality. Everything I’ve done, I’ve made the decision from passion.

AZ: I’m interested in what you mentioned earlier about being led by faith.

SD: My psychotherapy training was Buddhist psychotherapy, but my deeper faith is in God, and I don’t really share that. It’s quite nice Nick Cave’s normalising it — talking about it shamelessly, how it informs his work. He has a critical view of it, as I do too. My faith is very quiet, and doesn’t really need to be shared with anyone. But it’s what’s flows through me and my work. I can see my faith in my work. Faith, to me, is just love. And so I feel huge reverence, because I feel very well. I really trust my mental health. And I really trust that the work is coming not through ego. 

The work that I’m making currently with my son Luke, in the garden, comes from our faith. We both fully respect that the work has been given to us. My understanding of creativity is that there are narratives and themes and stories that anybody can receive, at any point, about that particular time. So the work that we’re making in the garden is a narrative of the time that we’re in, and we were open to receiving it. It came to us; it doesn’t belong to us. Our ego might want to believe it belongs to us, but we were just given the paintbrush.

The work in the garden was another one of those moments of inspiration — a transmission. “Why don’t we make the garden into a place so beautiful that people want to be photographed by you?” This was Luke’s prayer, and an offering to a mother who was sitting at the kitchen table so profoundly distressed by a traumatic event, which I can’t share, that went on for two years. And that moment of light that he blasted into my world — it was like a resounding yes.

The vision was to clear our completely abandoned back garden. The back garden was me; the back garden was us; the back garden was humanity. It was abandoned, and then we chose to lift the shadow. When we lifted the shadow, what we had was love. What we had was nature being the teacher, being the wisdom, calling in people, calling in lovers, and the disenfranchised, and the broken, and the connected, and people needing respite. It spoke to all of us.

It was this extraordinary metaphor for the human condition, and a metaphor for the human heart. Every single project has a natural cycle, and every single project is a teacher; so as I’m drawing to the end of it, the integration is coming, and I’m feeling the ground. I’m ready to offer up my gratitude for the work that I’ve been given, and for me and Luke to have come together in the work, and I’m ready to move on. 

And the moving on has been extraordinary, because something’s coming up behind it: the Creative Body Process. That began about 2 years ago, but it’s only in the last 6 months that it’s really waking up.

AZ: I was just thinking about how on the Page of Wands there are no plants, then on the Three of Wands there are these shoots beginning to grow, and then on the Queen of Wands they’ve burst into these sunflowers that are all growing around her, and sunflowers even on her robes. It’s like there’s been this transformation for you, and all this very literal growing of flowers — and now here you are in this garden that people walk into and cry.

Shall we move to the Queen?

AZ: It feels like this is you holding the process.

SD: I never imagined there’d be another evolution for me. Yesterday I was thinking “I wonder if I’ll take pictures anymore”. And with that came a certain quality of grief, and also grasping. But remember when I started my photography I had to give up psychotherapy because I didn’t want to dilute my practice, I had to deeply commit. There’s a quality about that with the Creative Body Process. I look forward to every single group that I run. I’ve embodied the whole process, and so something might have to give. But it doesn’t matter, that’s the point. We imagine it matters, our ego says it matters, but it doesn’t.

The Creative Body Process came about because I believed that people needed a place to be with their creative practice. They needed to get behind the scenes, and be heard.

AZ: I know it’s important that the details of the process are withheld, but can you talk about it in more general terms?

SD: A couple of years ago I was asked to deliver a workshop, and I thought well, if I just go in and say “this is how you take a portrait”, it’s the way I would take a portrait. You can never get away from your own authorship. I thought actually, I don’t want to take away anyone’s agency, so let’s find out what else is going on that they’re obscuring, or that they can’t acknowledge. Let’s use the group to enable them to see what they can’t see. I wanted a group where they’re all invested in each other. 

I walked into the space, and I said, “this is what we’re going to do”. It certainly wasn’t considered; it happened as I was approaching the room. What happened was extraordinary, and it’s the same with every single group I've run since. There’s something about not having to make work. The artists don’t have to perform, or come with an edit, or with a camera, or whatever medium they’re using. What I noticed instead was a coherent sense of responsibility towards each other’s creativity. 

The Creative Body Process is premised on the idea that we, in the West particularly, are all meeting the world from our minds, and that we are struggling to access the intuitive body. So, to make that journey from the mind to the intuitive body we need unravelling. Within the process of the group, we fast track it. It’s a bit bumpy, but we get there, and when we get there, it’s liberating.

AZ: A fast track into the heart.

SD: Yes — a fast track into the creative body, into the intuitive body. The more we are in our intuitive bodies, the more we will hear what work we need to make, and how we need to make it. That’s the premise of the course. It’s a therapeutic course, but actually it’s about creativity, because my belief is that creatives need help, and they need all the help they can get — because when we’re not being creative, we don’t feel well. Creativity is the path to wellness. It’s our libido, it’s our vitality, it’s all of it. It’s where we hold our passion. We have to put our creativity on an altar, and we have to give it space, and we have to be reverential towards it, and be holy about it, because the creativity is us. We have to kind of turn the mirror onto ourselves, and say “here I am.” Put the brakes on the outside world, and all the “I must, I should, I could”; to quieten everything down, and listen to our inner narratives.

The union is with yourself. The relationship is with yourself. And that’s where all our practice should come from, not what one believes other people expect of you, or what you think is responding to the current narrative you see around you. That’s the liberation in the work. I feel so well whilst in the workshop, I feel so well afterwards. The workshops have a constant waiting list, and people don’t even know why they’re coming, but when they arrive, they go, “actually, that’s why I’m here”.

It’s a strong process, but because it’s strong, what you have is this extraordinary sense of solidarity in the group. What we don’t experience in the art world is much solidarity. I know that, because I see the vulnerability and the anxiety and need for approval; but when you get a group of creatives together who are only thinking that they want that person to do well, it’s an extraordinary thing to witness.

They’re reigniting their practice. The groups are really tight with each other still, for months after, because they’ve been through the process. They’re often exhausted on the course, but when we’re tired there’s less resistance, so that really works — because what we’re dealing with is resistance to change, resistance to meet ourselves, resistance to understand what we need to say about being here. We go through this process, we take them into the night, owls are called down to them, there’s time for self-reflection, and then I work with these exceptional writers that ground what’s happened. 

The quality in the group is that there’s just one heart. There’s no splitting, there’s no separation, there’s no looking over each other’s shoulders, it’s a democratic space. There’s no judgment. It’s a rebirthing of purpose — an absence of purpose drives us into despair. By the time the workshop finishes, everybody’s found their beans again. They’ve got their chemistry back. When you see the aliveness, that means that we can fully access our creative narratives.

AZ: And that’s the Queen of Wands.

SD: And that’s the Queen of Wands. Her heart’s open, she’s embodied, she feels really well. She’s found her purpose. I think we can all access that. When you see that happen within the group, it’s an absolute joy.

Every month I’ll be asking each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.

Siân Davey’s recommended reading:

The Passion — Jeanette Winterson

Paradise Lost — John Milton

A huge thanks to Siân Davey, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:

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For the first paid offering, I’ve put together a list of recent reads (and two films), all of which have some relationship to photography, and all of which I sincerely loved and found particularly meaningful or thought-provoking. Each one is informing my current practice in some way; many of them have shaped various essays in the newsletter so far.

I’ve tried to stay relatively off the beaten track so that the list feels fresh and interesting: no Sontag or Barthes to be found. Essays, novels, memoir, a book-length conversation. All of them have much to offer for a photo-interested reader, whether you’re a photographer or not. As I wrote my notes for the list, I noticed a few common themes: frequent reference to, and quotation from, other works; extended reflections on that writer’s own artistic practice, whether in writing or in another discipline; and six of the eight books listed contain photographs, though none of them is a photobook.

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