In his series, Fortune hoped to strike a balance between showing both youth and elders in landscapes that felt familiar to him, and the resulting images spark conversations across generations about the broader relationship people have with the land. “I am thinking about how memory functions concerning image and sound,” he says, “and how it may be all we have to hold on to in the face of loss.” Raised between Austin and the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma—“on about a seven-hour strip of the IH-35,” as he puts it—Fortune has a deep reverence for the community photographers in Texas who photographed local events and pursued a level of excellence in their printing, among them Earlie Hudnall Jr. In this conversation with Alan Govenar, Fortune speaks about family heartbreak, blues music, and the meaning of truth in photography.

Rahim Fortune, Prairie View Homecoming Parade, Prairie View, Texas, 2024

Rahim Fortune, Wall of Sound Marching Band, Dallas, Texas, 2025

Alan Govenar: Why did you choose the subject matter that you did for this book, and what was your approach?

Rahim Fortune: I always make a joke when I’m giving lectures, where I say I walk up to a guy in Dallas or Houston, and say, “Hey, I’m doing a photo project about Texas history.” And he says, “Oh, I’m from St. Louis.” When I’m working on my projects, things can lend themselves to ambiguity, or maybe abstraction. And I sometimes feel that the word community is thrown around in a way that begins to lose a bit of its essence or soul of what it really means to be within community.

So I was thinking, What are the pillars of this community, historically, within this archive? I thought a lot about the Black churches in Texas, which have always been places for meeting and community, and for political organizing. And about the various events, such as the parades and the rodeos, and these annual traditions that do take their roots back to the turn of the twentieth century. I decided to focus on the Juneteenth pageants that happen around Texas yearly and the MLK parades. A lot of this was an extension of things I had already been photographing for nearly a decade, so that was a motivating factor.

There’s one photograph included that shows a West Indian tradition in the Acres Homes district of Houston. I was also interested in a more modern vision of a Black Houston experience, one that is maybe more diasporic in its scope. With photography, there’s no formula. You’re also at the whims of what works out and what happens on the day, to be able to represent the music, the spirituality, the youth. I’ve photographed quite a bit at Prairie View, which is also represented in the archive. I had some moments that were very special to stumble upon.

Rahim Fortune, Juneteenth Pageant, Texas City, Texas, 2024

Rahim Fortune, Bronco Rider, Longview, Texas, 2024

Govenar: How many different locations are in these photographs?

Fortune: There’s Austin, Dallas, Houston, Bryan, and Prairie View. There’s one image of a young cowgirl surrounded by children. That was made at the Fort Worth Stockyards. There are the images of the cowboy in the chute. Those were made in Longview. I’m always on the road photographing. If there’s something where people are getting together, I’m there with a camera and a pair of boots on—and a sweat rag. As you know, Texas is very, very hot. I drive an old ’98 SUV. I guess nothing about it is slick. And that, to me, is a big part of it.

Both of my parents have passed on, so I think a lot about them. Extended family and community is something that I don’t take lightly. I’m very grateful to be a part of an older family. My dad was born in the ’50s and was definitely a product of the soul era. He was a musician, and I’m also a musician, so it’s all in there. I just got to see a legendary Texas musician last week. His name is Swamp Dogg. He’s a great songwriter. He wrote “She’s All I Got” for Johnny Paycheck and was signed to John Prine’s label. So, yeah, it’s just what I love.

Rahim Fortune, Willie Chapel Primitive Baptist, Austin, Texas, 2025

Rahim Fortune, Greater Faith Church, Bryan, Texas, 2024

Govenar: What kind of music do you play?

Fortune: I’m into flat-picking, bluegrass guitar, and a little bit of blues guitar. Old country music is what I normally play on guitar. I’m trying to learn some flat-picking and soloing stuff now, but it’s like learning a new language. I’m not quite fluent yet, but I’ve been playing my whole life.

Govenar: I can tell you’re that kind of person who’s engaged with the people you photograph. In terms of the sustained interaction that you have with subjects, how do you proceed?

Fortune: For a lot of my work, I tread lightly. I don’t overstay my welcome with too many folks. I’m a bit of a wallflower when I’m making my work. I don’t stay with one family or one particular place. That’s also a bit of how I am. I’m not extremely extroverted. So when I’m working, I don’t really take up that much space, and I’m not directing people. But I try to maintain a close connection with everyone I photograph to be able to get them back their photograph or give them a print. There are instances where I have someone who works as a fixer for me. I’ve had cases where someone says, “Hey, come here, and make photographs of my family,” and then that’s more of a situation where I split profits for print sales. One of my better-known photographs was made in Edna, Texas, and it is titled Praise Dancers (2020). It’s a photograph of three women doing the Baptist tradition of praise dancing. And one of the women is the mother of one of my good friends. So that’s a situation where we split profits. My work is more so a labor of love than it is about sales.

Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive

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Celebrating the rich history of photography made by and for Black communities in Texas.

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Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive

Edited by Nicole R. Fleetwood and Brian Wallis. Contributions by Annette Gordon-Reed and Alan Govenar. Foreword by Deborah Willis. Photographs by Rahim Fortune.

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Description

Celebrating the rich history of photography made by and for Black communities in Texas. Kinship & Community presents an inspiring example of collective self-representation from the final decades of official segregation in the United States. With more than 150 images of everyday Black life—created by Black photographers for Black communities across Texas—this collection celebrates a proud but overlooked regional culture while testifying to the power of photography as a social tool. These photographers, typically operating small businesses that provided portraiture, promotional images, and event documentation, worked with their communities to develop an enduring vision of hope and uplift. Many also contributed photos to newspapers, magazines, and civil rights organizations, sometimes focusing on political leaders and protests. But their primary subject was the everyday expression of a vibrant and self-sufficient Black culture—an exhilarating achievement in the wider context of entrenched racial oppression. Completing the book is a vivid new photographic essay by Rahim Fortune that takes up the archive’s legacy and places it firmly in the present tense. Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.

Details

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 240
Number of images: 155
Publication date: 2026-03-03
Measurements: 8.5 x 10.8 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115636

Contributors

Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art, cultural history, aesthetics, photography, and documentary studies. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and she curated an exhibition of the same name for MoMA PS1. She was also the guest editor of Aperture magazine’s Spring 2018 issue “Prison Nation.”

 

Brian Wallis is executive director at Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), Kingston, New York. He was deputy director and chief curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, from 2000 to 2015. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (2020), African American Vernacular Photography (2005), and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003).

 

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of On Juneteenth (2021), “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016), and Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002). Her 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in History.

 

Alan Govenar is a writer, folklorist, poet, playwright, photographer, filmmaker, and director of Documentary Arts, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1985 to advance essential perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of more than forty books, including Come Round Right (2025), Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues (2010), Untold Glory: African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement (2007), Deep Ellum and Central Track (1998), and Stoney Knows How (1981).

 

Deborah Willis is university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, she has written numerous books on African American photography and culture, including The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (2021), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits (2008), and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000).

 

Rahim Fortune is a photographer from Austin, Texas, and the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. His books include Hardtack (2024) and I can’t stand to see you cry (2021), which was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook of the Year and winner of the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

Govenar: If history is a commodity, what is it worth, and how do we determine its value?

Fortune: One of the most famous documentary photographs is Migrant Mother. Dorothea Lange didn’t even take down the woman’s name, and the woman later came out to say, I wish you would’ve never made my picture. Photography has a complicated relationship to truth. I’ve always felt as though I am carrying out my work with the utmost intention and love, from the good of my heart. And there is sometimes a separation between intention and impact. You can be well intended and still have a negative impact. But to be so weighed down with some of this theory—if you wanted it to be a perfect world, you might never make a photograph.

Govenar: I mean, what is truth in photography?

Fortune: There are so many ethical qualms within the work that Walker Evans did, and sometimes the careless nature with which he handled people. But does that make his archive less valuable or less interesting? One of my all-time heroes in photography is Milton Rogovin, who has been the shining example of ethics and commitment in photography. He was committed to one neighborhood for his entire life. Someone like Paul Kwilecki, who photographed in Decatur, Georgia, for forty years. Sometimes monetary exchange isn’t the end-all. Even thinking about certain Native Land Back movements, sometimes the almighty dollar can’t heal these wounds. You have to grapple with that truth of what we do.

Rahim Fortune, Freedom Fashion, Dallas, Texas, 2025

Rahim Fortune, St. Luke Missionary, Hempstead, Texas, 2024

Govenar: I’m glad we’re talking about this important issue. In my book Portraits of Community (1996) the focus was on photographers and their long-term commitment to the communities in which they worked. If you are a documentary photographer, you bear a sense of responsibility, and what is that responsibility?

Fortune: What makes a photograph work is beauty. Sebastião Salgado photographed extremely difficult global topics, and what is convincing to an audience is the beauty of it. But that can be a bit of a troubling dynamic. I tend to stray away from images of overt poverty, things that we have enough images of in the visual lexicon. I mostly gravitate toward photographs that are inherently about love and about family. The fundamental nature of photography is the human spirit, and that goes beyond racial lines. And so, within this conversation and within these bodies of work that we’re speaking about, there is a specific Black American context, which is one of the cultural backbones of this nation. Same with Native American culture. There was a moment where the Native Americans became an emblem for resilience, and an American resilience, after completely being conquered by colonial forces. It’s a tough thing to have a total one-way viewpoint about.

I also sometimes tell students that you are accountable for what you publish. Being able to edit and thoughtfully put together collections of photographs is where some of these concerns are addressed. And not being too eager to share out photographs, especially in the digital age. That’s why I typically sit on my photographs for a long time. I still work in analog, and I have a lot of reverence, as much as I can, for the people I’m photographing. There isn’t the ability of just photographing and printing out a 4-by-6 the same day. It’s something that has to be thoughtfully processed and thoughtfully printed. For me, that’s a way of paying respect to people allowing me into these intimate moments of their life.

Rahim Fortune, Willie Chapel Primitive Baptist, Austin, Texas, 2025

Rahim Fortune, Prairie View Homecoming Parade, Prairie View, Texas, 2024

Govenar: For the photographs for this commission, which format did you use?

Fortune: These were done in 35mm, with a small handheld camera.

Govenar: There is an interesting synergy of balance and tension that happens, because obviously you’re aware of the way in which you’re making the photograph. It has, on one hand, a snapshot quality, but on the other it’s carefully composed.

Fortune: And this was a big inspiration. I mean, this is the first major body of work I’ve done in color that will ever be shown. I had some very early photographs from Oklahoma that were done in color, but this is my first serious time publishing my color photographs. It was a great honor to work on, and it did inspire me to continue working in color, and that’s when I decided to switch back to the medium format and to continue working.

Rahim Fortune, Former Miss Prairie View, Prairie View, Texas, 2024

Rahim Fortune, Prairie View Homecoming Parade, Prairie View, Texas, 2024

Govenar: Could you talk a little bit more about the connection between your portfolio and the photographs in the archive? What do you hope people come away with when they look at these photographs?

Fortune: I always say that photography plays with three different aspects. One of them being light, which is the most obvious. One of them being time. Photographs change as time passes. And the other is memory. When people look at photographs, they approach them with their own set of biases, baggage, memories, be they fond or negative. Those are things that I really think about in the context of the archive.

These photographs in the archive are made in a very unpretentious way. They have the benefit of time. Maybe it’s something about the way in which people responded to cameras in these previous generations. The things that make these photographs work present challenges in a modern context. People are so much more aware of themselves on camera. They’re so much more aware of the dissemination of images in this modern idea of virality—the idea that a photograph can be made and then viewed thousands, if not millions, of times online. So it changes people’s perception of the camera and how they want to present themselves or be perceived by photographs.

Typically, what I like to do when I’m photographing is return to the same places, year after year, to give myself some rootedness to them and be able to observe the changes within. I really love when I can photograph somebody—whether it’s in the case of a rodeo or someone who is maybe school age—and see them growing up a bit in my photographs. Or maybe now the younger sibling is the person who’s in the pageant. That passing of time, to me, is really important in this kind work. The rigor of what I’m doing, that isn’t something you could do with your eyes closed. I’m constantly studying these technical aspects and this fine line between directing and not directing, and how you come away with the photograph you want to say something with, rather than a surface-level snapshot. Often if you ask somebody, “Hey, I would like to make your photograph,” a big smile is presented, maybe a thumbs-up, and maybe a peace sign. So in which ways can you make these photographs more collaborative? There’s no formula to doing that. It requires a lot of time.

Rahim Fortune, Juneteenth Parade, Houston, Texas, 2024

Rahim Fortune, Bill Pickett Rodeo, Fort Worth, Texas, 2024

The commitment of the people in the TAAP Archive to these individual neighborhoods is so deep. I don’t necessarily identify as a community photographer. It’s not my job to do that. For me, that is for history to remember and for time to decide the importance and the impact. I always liken it to a song that you completely play out, and you’re like, Man, I just wish I could hear that song for the first time again. I feel that way about photography. I’m always out looking for that feeling or that moment that it does something for your spirit. I’m also sometimes a bit of a sappy person. I love ballads, and I love songs of heartbreak and of love. A lot of that goes into my photographs as well.

There’s also participation from the people within my photographs. They’re also not unaware of these histories and this music. For me, it’s always been about the ability to participate in the retelling of Texas history. So I think of things like this archive, and I aspire for my work to stand as a testament of reality. But also, I feel as though country music, blues, Western, noir have always been about over-the-top reimagining and retelling of the past. So why can’t we also participate in it? That implies the people I’m photographing aren’t these extremely creative and artistic folks themselves. It’s very apparent in the way they present themselves: the dress and the ritual. I’m not the only artist in the situation.

Rahim Fortune, Freemasons, Houston, Texas, 2024

Rahim Fortune, Prairie View Homecoming Parade, Prairie View, Texas, 2024

Govenar: Music seems to be a big part of your life. So much of what you’re talking about, in terms of the feeling of making the photograph, and what you’re really after in terms of love and family and a sense of community, is this total immersion in that moment. Do you find that’s true for yourself? When you’re making photographs, what are you feeling?

Fortune: I think a lot about music. One of the singers I really enjoy is the country music singer Keith Whitley, who passed far before his time. And people like him or Vern Gosdin or George Jones—these great ballad artists are people who I really enjoy. My mother took her own life in 2007, and when I was in middle school, my father passed of Lou Gehrig’s disease. So my life has been full of heartbreak. Merle Haggard says, “Someone [told] my story in a song.” And I think about that with my work: “Someone put my story in a song.” My mother is from the Chickasaw Nation, and my father is African American. I’ve always lived in this in-between. And though I joyfully embrace both of my cultures, I also sometimes argue, Is anyone an insider? We’re all somewhere in the in-between. And does anyone ever truly feel a sense of belonging? I’ve always talked about this idea of not walking around wearing your insecurities and feeling as though the world is thinking the worst things about you that you maybe think about yourself. We’re all full of these insecurities, and there’s always a sense of, maybe the grass is greener on the other side. That’s one of the beautiful things about life, and it’s that kind of anguish that makes joy or beauty so worth having.

Rahim Fortune, Mike, Dallas, Texas, 2025

Rahim Fortune, Open Road, New Sweden, Texas, Texas, 2024
All images from the series Between a Memory and Me, 2024–25, commissioned by Documentary Arts for Aperture. Courtesy the artist

This interview originally appeared in Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2026).

This is not a conversation about answers. It’s a record of thinking-with—a kind of slow mapping of grief, repair, and return. What emerges is a model for art-making that is less about output and more about orientation, less about what is made and more about how we come to understand ourselves through the act of making.

Dionne Lee, Untitled (Wound), 2020

Dionne Lee, True North, 2019

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill: You’re making work on Indigenous lands, as am I. And both of us, in some ways, are not from the lands that we’re making the work on, right? Me being Cree, I’m making work on the lands of Musqueam and Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh most of the time. But I also feel like this resonates with you as a Black American. So much of my work is about, in a way, this very slow moving toward thinking about that beingness of not being from the land I live on and realizing that on a deeper level every year.

Dionne Lee: I call that the conflict of belonging.

Hill: Belonging is kind of scary to people. I’m curious about how you navigate that understanding of Indigenous lands and Indigenous rights on the lands.

Lee: Growing up in New York City—Lenape land—Indigenous history felt very distant. Since the East has been colonized longer than the West, and New York City is a highly built environment, the imprint of Indigenous life feels really invisible.

During my residency with Land Arts of the American West [at Texas Tech University, Lubbock], we drove through a lot of reservations, and one of the sites we went to was Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Chaco Canyon is a national park, but it was a major cultural center for Ancestral Puebloans. It has these impressive sprawling, city-like structures with different degrees of preservation. It was amazing to be somewhere that was that ancient and of such a direct importance to people who still live nearby. But then I was like, What am I doing here? I got really agitated—I couldn’t reconcile my outsiderness and my “right” to be there. I eventually realized my agitation was grief. I don’t have any place like that to go to and connect to a deep ancestral past, and wherever my ancestral lands are, I wouldn’t be able to access it with the specificity I witnessed at Chaco Canyon.

Hill: Yeah.

Lee: I don’t think to belong somewhere is an entirely cozy experience. It’s fraught and complicated. Or to belong here, I guess, in America. Technically a lot of Black Americans would say, Well, we belong here more than anyone because we built it. I don’t know how to recognize that as true and in the same breath say I don’t think that that necessarily means that I belong here.

Dionne Lee: Currents

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A powerful meditation on the land as a site of refuge and loss.

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Dionne Lee: Currents

Photographs by Dionne Lee. Text by Eric Booker and Camille T. Dungy. Interviewer Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill.

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Description

Dionne Lee (born in New York) works across photography, video, and collage to examine interwoven histories of land, power, survival, and Black identity in the American landscape. Lee’s formal interventions and innovative darkroom techniques—including rephotographing found imagery from wilderness survival manuals and using graphite pencils to create inscriptions on her photographs of the landscape—weave together new narratives that address themes of dispossession, loss, survival, and resilience. Dionne Lee: Currents, the artist’s first monograph, brings together key works from over a decade of Lee’s career alongside essays by award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy and curator Eric Booker, as well as an interview with the artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, offering a deeper look at a visionary artist reshaping how we see­—and choose to imagine—the great outdoors.  

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 160
Number of images: 88
Publication date: 2026-04-21
Measurements: 8 x 10.5 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115988

Contributors

Dionne Lee (born in New York) is an artist whose work explores power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and New Orleans Museum of Art; among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Lee is assistant professor of fine art and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.

Eric Booker is associate curator at Storm King Art Center, New York. Formerly, he was assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem and held positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Calder Foundation; and National Academy of Design, New York.

Camille T. Dungy is a Colorado-based writer. She is author of the award-winning book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (2023), five collections of poetry, includ­ing America, A Love Story (2026), and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers (2017). Dungy is a university distinguished professor at Colorado State University.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a writer and an artist whose sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to investigate concepts of land and property in a capitalist economy. Hill is a member of BUSH Gallery, an Indigenous artist collective that decenters Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art.

Hill: I think that’s the tricky thing when talking about not belonging. There’s a way that can be weaponized against people who have been brought here against their will, enslaved, or economically forced through various colonial powers to migrate and have their bodies used violently.

Would you say that idea influences how you think of your work as research and your relationship with the land? And photography?

Lee: Yeah, I think so. Either way, I think, belonging is something to be cultivated.

In regard to photography, I’m very aware that images of land teach us how to relate to land. This is true from fine art photography to advertising and technical images. A perspective that’s distant or aerial, et cetera, all tend to reinforce our role as “conquerors.” I’ve been looking at and sourcing images from geology books for the past couple of years—geology is a field very much tied to extraction, so it’s not surprising that even in those photos, it’s a similar kind of visioning.

Hill: It seems like the history of photography is very linked to extraction—

Lee: People thought originally the cameras were taking their souls.

Hill: Yeah. I still think about that. When you take an image of something you have power over that thing. So it is an act of power. I’ve thought of photography as an extractive process, especially for people who have been photographed in a way that was meant to be visual proof of why we don’t need or deserve land or rights. One thing that I was curious to talk to you about is how you use your process of making work as research. What is your making process?

Lee: I think it’s different if it’s a photo or a video or a collage. The collage is usually started by collecting a lot of physical things and having them around and trying to figure out how to make a picture from the pieces. Photographing is different. I don’t take that many photographs. Part of it is, I think, trying to figure out when it makes sense to do so, both conceptually for the work, but also how I’m relating to a place. I got interested in making rock drawings, and at first, I was putting things on rocks and photographing them. And then I was at this creek by my old house, and I was like, Let me use this water as a drawing tool. And that was a great moment because I figured out how to make a drawing that would leave no trace because the water would evaporate. The “leave no trace” strategy has also translated into my more recent videos. I have one where I let a string float on water (Currents II, 2024), and another where I film dowsing-rod shadows (the series Walking Sticks, 2019–ongoing).

Dionne Lee, Still from A Use for Rope or String, 2017

Dionne Lee, Still from Currents II, 2024

Hill: That’s what showed at the Whitney Biennial?

Lee: No. Challenger Deep showed at the Whitney. I made that in 2019. That was my first dowsing-rod video. Walking Sticks came later. My first one was made after I moved to Columbus in 2021. I think I was trying to figure out what this new place was. I walked around my neighborhood documenting shadow for about twenty minutes. Sometime after I realized I had made a piece. But there is no climax or thing that happens. I joke that I make videos like a photographer, because I tend to just point the camera at one thing. It’s just a wandering shadow.

Hill: It sounds like it has a similarity to the video of the string floating on water—Currents II—in that there’s a link to dance and to drawing.

Lee: There is a link to drawing.

Hill: And it’s the small act that is clearly an act of learning.

Lee: Yes, totally.

Hill: But it’s like learning without a—

Lee: A lesson?

Hill: Without a lesson.

Lee: Lesson plan.

Hill: Or the lesson is maybe more something that you feel rather than that you can name. It’s an action that’s about learning.

Lee: Yeah. That feels really accurate. I do feel like there’s a link to drawing, but I never know how to talk about that or figure that out.

Hill: Yeah. It’s like drawing, but it’s animated, or it’s a moving drawing.

When I saw Currents II, I was really thinking about that because you’re watching a line. A lot of people have said, especially when I first started making sculptures, that there’s such a link to drawing. What is drawing? You’re often trying to make a shape to understand it. Or if you’re thinking about something like portraiture or drawing—even the land—you’re trying to understand it through the line. And I’d say there’s a relationship there to Currents II because you’re watching this line, and the line is interpreting the land, in a way.

Lee: It also makes me think about how we orient ourselves through mapping or the line that your steps make when you take a walk or what line comes from meandering. And that spiral form—it’s such a classic shape that has a lot of attachments. I like thinking about all those associations.

Hill: What are the associations that you’re thinking of?

Lee: Well, first I think about petroglyphs.

Hill: Oh, are there a lot of spirals in petroglyphs?

Lee: Yeah, that form shows up a lot all over the world. Going back to that experience at Chaco Canyon, there is a petroglyph of a spiral there that functioned as a calendar, where line and shadow line up just so to mark the [spring and fall] equinoxes and [winter and summer] solstices. This part of Chaco is closed to the public now because it received too many visitors—the ground beneath it sunk. The line and shadow no longer line up. There is a lot there . . . human intelligence and ingenuity, the power of line and shadow, and the “rights” of visitors to places never meant for them.

I see the spiral shape as this way that represented how I was feeling at that time at Chaco during that whole field experience and afterward. I was literally spiraling [in my thoughts], but I also think a lot about orientation, particularly with the dowsing rods, which I don’t use for water-finding. I think about them as navigational tools. What does it mean to come from a diasporic people, through forced migration, and try to make a home? It’s like you’ve been rotated through other forces. There’s also a therapy version: Where can you place yourself in the spiral? Are you spiraling down, are you climbing out, and how?

Dionne Lee, Untitled Rock Drawing III, 2023

Dionne Lee, Fire Bed, 2019

Hill: I was also thinking there’s a meditative aspect of it.

Lee: For sure.

Hill: I was thinking about how the spiral ties into the idea of research, too, the kind of research that we’re talking about. I think I told you recently, I’ve been writing this application where I’ve had to completely transform the way I think about research in order to fit their guidelines and the expectations of research mandates. Like your research, mine is personal, and it’s not meant to blow the minds of the scientific community forever; it’s meant to change my life. It’s also not linear, and it doesn’t have an outcome that is publishable. And it’s not always new ideas. There’s not a focus on the new for me, which research always has—to be contributing something, there’s this idea of discovery. It makes me think of what you’ve said [from Aspen Mays, who teaches at California College of the Arts] about artists in a pond working together without even necessarily convening.

Lee: Yeah, totally. But the pond is the—

Hill: What’s the pond? Is it knowledge?

Lee: They’re not convening; it’s like you’re swimming past, but you’re all making this ecosystem together.

Hill: Yeah, I think so. I struggle to figure out how my own work communicates to others. Not that it needs to. But people always want that neat, tidy package at the end. And for me, I’m like, No, I’m just coming up with ideas and thoughts. And I think that’s how knowledge is created. It’s created because we talk to each other, like this. We look at each other’s work; we read each other’s writing. I think of knowledge as really formed communally through experience.

Lee: Totally.

This addresses the conflict of belonging—you may not belong to a physical place, but we do all belong to a lineage.

Hill: I like the aspect of impermanence in your work. It’s something that I relate to and is sort of interesting in the art world, because the art world is so much about preservation and the stability of the object. What are you attracted to about impermanence?

Lee: I think on some level I do make things permanent, because I photograph them. I could have done the water on the rocks and had a nice experience with it and not photographed it. But I made it into something that can be sold and has been sold. But I think when I can opt out of that—like [my installation of cyanotype rocks] at Storm King, no one can buy that work. They did ask me if I wanted to keep the work. Honestly, it would have forced me to sell it. I decided I didn’t want it to belong to anyone, so instead the rocks will be flipped over and returned to the land. I’m interested in trying to figure these things out: How do I make work that can have a life outside of commerce? How can mark-making inform how I choose to live in the world as a responsible human? Essentially, how do I leave the smallest footprint?

Hill: I like the smaller scale that I work in, but I also feel like there’s a gendered and racialized way that people take up space.

Lee: There’s an argument that we should be taking up more space.

Hill: Right.

Lee: Or it’s taking up the space the work demands. I’ve never used a large-format camera, which I think surprises some people since my focus is landscape. I don’t see a reason why I would use that right now. Not saying I wouldn’t ever, but the work isn’t asking for things to be made that way.

Hill: Yes. Your collages are small.

Lee: Small.

Dionne Lee, trespass is the most beautiful word, 2018

Dionne Lee, a plot that also grounds, 2016

Hill: I read the Audre Lorde piece that you sent me, which was so beautiful.

Lee: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”?

Hill: What do you think about the worth of art? Who’s it valuable for?

Lee: I don’t always believe in art.

Hill: Yeah.

Lee: I mean, I do believe in art, but I think it wavers. Believe is such a loaded word. There are a few essays by Toni Morrison where she talks about this too. She’s really saying it sustains life. And I think that that’s true. What do you think?

Hill: What Audre Lorde talked about that struck home to me was something that we’ve been saying, which is that art is a way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking that accesses something that the world wants to delete in you.

Lee: Yes!

Hill: And that’s your inner self.

Lee: Yeah, it’s aiding in accumulating knowledge, but also the way you described it, something the world wants to delete in you also goes back to the effects of colonization. All of those are modes to delete that source—that source is also what helps you sustain life. It’s all connected.

Hill: And for Audre Lorde, she’s saying that force is also what will lead you to the actions, which I really do believe. But I think art now, it’s so separated from the rest of life.

Lee: It is.

Hill: And I think that’s a problem. There’s this idea that some people are making better art than others, which whether this is true is so not important. It’s the making that’s important to me.

Lee: Totally.

Hill: I think the way that I was schooled was that knowledge is in the brain, and then art taught me the knowledge that’s in your body, right? And not just as a metaphor or something, but as in literally, your body stores experiences from your ancestors, that through movement, you have different types of ideas.

Lee: Which came up a lot in my earlier work that I made right out of grad school—I was thinking about the ancestral body, and I was studying survival and wilderness skills. Learning to make a fire from scratch taught me that I had latent muscles in my body I didn’t even know were there because they haven’t been used that way for generations. Or even carving into the rock. I mean, I felt a little guilty making the work for Storm King, literally altering the face of rocks. I gave myself permission to do it when I remembered it is one of the early forms of human expression. Somebody did this in my ancestral lineage. And maybe this addresses the conflict of belonging—you may not belong to a physical place, but we do all belong to a lineage.

Hill: Every year I start to know more about how much I don’t know, and how in terms of my separation from the land, how deep that separation is. It’s something I’m coming to understand more now. I think I always understood it as political rights, land rights, but now I’m starting to think about it as a knowledge base.

What I realized through making my exhibition M***** was there’s the knowledge in your body, but there’s also the knowledge in your relationship to the land and in your ancestral relationship to the land, right? And that is a whole amount of knowledge that I don’t think I would’ve ever thought about if I hadn’t been an artist and been able to hang out with my friends at BUSH Gallery—like Tania Willard, Peter Morin, and Jeneen Frei Njootli—and do art activities that started to connect me to a different way of thinking.

Lee: There are two photographs I made that I turned into collages, where I was holding my hands in a position that would help one measure the sky and locate the North Star (North and True North, both 2019). That, to me, was one of those things where it felt very much like an ancestral portal, obviously because of the significance of the North Star for people escaping enslavement.

But in terms of my own ancestry, what’s funny is that I haven’t really made work in the American South or spent much time there. That is the plan for my Guggenheim [Fellowship] years: to spend some time down there.

Dionne Lee, Lapse, 2019

Dionne Lee, Contact (A Muscle Memory), 2020

Hill: Well, I feel like we’re on the same path. I’m 100 percent there. I’m going back to Treaty 6. I feel like that’s where I’ve been taking these slow steps to.

Lee: And why is it slow?

That’s my question. I’ve been wondering for myself: Why has this taken so long? I went out West because an old boss of mine was like, You’re into landscape photography? You should go to California! Which I understood—the state plays such a huge role in the canon of landscape photography. I did learn a lot, but then how do I apply that to something that is personal to me but also feels so distant because my family has been in New York City for three generations?

Hill: I’m honestly shocked at the slowness, because I’ve always been a part of a really amazing group of friends who live in their home territory and who have been learning these things decades earlier than me. But I was friends with them through that whole time, so why did it take me an extra decade or more? For me, at least in part, it is that extremely violent history of expulsion and separation.

Lee: And then we embody that. That separation has an impact. You follow it even if everything in your being wants to be against that.

Hill: Even if intellectually you know that that’s fucked, I still had a sense of not really having a place to go back to.

Lee: Because the separation and expulsion worked. It all worked really well, and that’s why—

Hill: But not entirely.

Lee: But not entirely.

Hill: Which is why we are doing what we’re doing, because it didn’t work entirely, and that’s the thing that I hold on to as hopeful.

Lee: And how amazing that we get to that place through art-making.

This interview originally appeared in Dionne Lee: Currents (Aperture, 2026).

Takashi Homma, Marina, model, 2020, from Portrait of J (2025)

Takashi Homma, Moka, fashion stylist assistant, 2024, from Portrait of J (2025)

Marigold Warner: What was the first photobook you ever bought?

Takashi Homma: It was a collection of photographs of Momoe Yamaguchi, a legendary pop idol in Japan. I bought it when I was in high school, and only later realized the photos were taken by Kishin Shinoyama. At the time I had no idea—the only reason I bought it was because I wanted to see photos of my favorite idol.

Warner: What about the most recent one you bought?

Homma: I haven’t bought any books recently. I definitely don’t buy as much as I used to. Half of this room was once full of books, but I’ve cut it down to a small collection. I think the biggest reason for that is the internet. I’m publishing a new text-based book on photography soon, and whereas before I’d have all these photobooks to dig through for references, now I can just look them up online.

Warner: Were there any books that you felt you absolutely had to keep?

Homma: The thinner photobooks, and the rare ones. Definitely not the big hardcovers from major publishers. I don’t like things that feel too authoritative or prestigious, like they were made by an important person. Overseas, they call these coffee-table books. In the end, they just become interior decorations that sit on a fancy living-room table. I prefer the slim books that an artist might put out just for an exhibition at that specific time. Jack Pierson once made this small, zine-like book called Angel Youth (1992). I bought it in the ’90s, and I’ve kept it ever since.

Warner: Who do you see as a real master of bookmaking?

Homma: I’ve always respected Nobuyoshi Araki. He’s published more than five hundred photobooks. A lot of people, especially designers and architects, want to make these grand, heavy books. What I like about Araki is that there’s a kind of lightness to his work and attitude. As people become more famous, they get heavier, more serious, more rigid. But people like me and Araki—real Tokyo people—I think, crave a certain lightness.

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Warner: Tokyo has been a subject of your books since you started out. How do you feel about your home city now?

Homma: It’s love and hate. When I was in my thirties or forties, I probably had a different answer. I thought maybe I’d live abroad again, but at this age, it’s more about what I can do now, within the current situation. Tokyo could be hit by a huge earthquake tomorrow. We all know it’ll happen eventually. When it does, and if I’m still alive, I’ll have no choice but to photograph it. That’s kind of where I’m at now.

Warner: What do you think it is about Tokyo that attracts photographers to make work here?

Homma: In terms of the urban landscape, there’s really no other capital with this level of scrap and build. I was just in Milan and Paris recently, and everything there is built from stone, standing for over hundreds of years. Take Shibuya, for example. This area of Tokyo is constantly under construction, changing so fast it feels like a different person. So, it’s inherently photographic, because photography is best suited to capturing change. Most photographers, I think, take pictures because they love something, or they’re emotionally attached to it. For me, it’s different. For instance, I have a photobook of waves. Everyone always asks me: “Homma-san, do you surf ?” I don’t. Then they ask, “So, you like the sea?” Of course I like it, but that’s not the reason I photograph it. Waves come and go, crashing in differently each time. They’re never the same. I stand there, and when they come, I shoot. Each one is different. That’s the concept that fascinates me.

Warner: Your latest book, Portrait of J, presents a collection of images you’ve been taking since 2002. You’ve photo graphed celebrities, friends, children. Is there any particular shoot from the book that stands out to you?

Homma: Not really. They’re all equal to me. For me, famous people and my friends’ children have the same value, and that’s why they’re placed on equal footing in the book. There isn’t anyone in particular who stands out more than another.

Warner: How did you decide on the cover photograph then?

Homma: The cover photo is of the architect Kazuyo Sejima. Wolfgang Tillmans made a photobook of portraits, and his cover features the architect Rem Koolhaas. Mine is kind of a subtle response to that. I’ve also known Sejima-san for a long time, and I knew I definitely wanted the cover to feature a woman.

Warner: And why the title Portrait of J?

Homma: Because we’re Japanese. Also, there’s a guitarist named John Williams who released an album called Portrait of John Williams, in 1982. I thought that was really cool, and that the title was something I could use someday.

Warner: You published the book with Dashwood in New York. Was there anything you wanted to communicate about Japan to an international audience?

Homma: That’s a very Japanese-minded question. Japanese interviewers always ask questions like, “What do you want to communicate?” Well, whatever the artist wants to say is already contained within the work. They made it because they didn’t want to put it into words. Still, if I had to say one thing, last year Japan’s population dropped by almost a million. If this continues, Japan will soon experience a super-aged society unlike anything the world has seen. The Japanese could even become an endangered species. In that sense, I think this book could be important.

Warner: Has the way you make or think about books evolved from when you started?

Homma: When I started, publishing a book wasn’t something you could just do. You couldn’t make a book unless a publisher wanted you to, which is completely different from now. These days, every year there are so many publishers asking me to make something. I just respond to those opportunities and keep publishing. When I was in my twenties, I remember thinking it would be enough if I could publish just one photobook. I never imagined I’d end up publishing sixty.

Since I started, I’ve always decided on about 90 to 95 percent of everything myself. The sequence, the title, the cover—everything. That’s been consistent since my very first book. There are still lots of photographers, especially in Japan, who just throw all their photos at the editor or designer and let them build the whole book. There are definitely a lot of really talented editors and designers here, but I’m more interested in the conceptual side of creating the whole thing, rather than just being a photographer. Wolfgang Tillmans is similar in that sense. He always says in interviews that the actual photographing part is quick. The real time is spent thinking deeply about how to present the work, how to exhibit it, or how to make it into a book. I think that’s natural, but in Japan it’s different. When I first started working that way, Japanese critics and editors said terrible things about me. Kōtarō Iizawa, a once-prominent critic who has totally lost his influence now, once said something like, “Inside Homma, there are two people, a photographer and an editor. And that is not good.”

Cover of Tokyo Suburbia (Korinsha, 1998)

Cover of Tokyo Olympia (Nieves, 2023)

Warner: In your view, what makes a good photobook?

Homma: First of all, it needs to be easy to read and easy to open. Some designers get too obsessed with special bindings, putting it in some annoying plastic case, or tying it up with strings. I like books where you can access the photos directly, and light ones, like zines. When I was living in London in the early ’90s, there was a photobook store that sold these really thin books of about sixteen or twenty-four pages called “loose books.” One of them was by Nigel Shafran, I think it was photos of his wife before they got married. It’s too thin to really call a photobook, but it’s good. That’s what makes a great photobook—when it’s good on its own terms.

Warner: Some of your older photobooks are now sold as rare items at high prices. What do you think of that?

Homma: Photobooks don’t usually get reprinted, that’s just how it is. So, they naturally become rare. Even though I’ve published over sixty photobooks, I’ve hardly received any royalties. Most of the time, it’s payment in copies.

Warner: I suppose making books isn’t something you do for money.

Homma: I was just talking about this the other day, and the question is always, “Why do you do it,” right? For me, it’s just part of daily life, like eating or exercising. It’s not something I have to do. It’s something that has to happen.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 262, “The End of Nature?”, in The PhotoBook Review.

While Satolli often made thousands of images on assignments across the Middle East, North Africa, and Ukraine, only a handful were selected for each dispatch he published. There was more to the story, and to his experience on the front lines. How could he give form to what remained unseen? Late at night, whether in Mosul or Raqqa, Beirut or Bakhmut, he would review images to send off to his editors, and the rest would be stored on his computer. That vast archive is the source for his book, That Thing That Never Vanished (2025), a harrowing chronicle of war and conflict that covers ten years of Satolli’s work, much of which hasn’t been published previously. Printed on a heavy, uncoated paper stock, the images are sequenced without captions, dates, or references to locations. The idea, Satolli says, was to attain some distance from the imperatives of journalism and to stage for the reader a visceral experience—to allow for clues to emerge from the landscape about where and when the events he witnessed took place.

I recently spoke with Satolli about his career covering conflict, how newspapers prepare photographers to work in war zones, and why it’s essential to see difficult, even horrific images in a photobook. Satolli was in Doha, Qatar, days before setting off for Iraqi Kurdistan, where he began reporting on how the Kurds have become involved in the latest war in the Middle East, the one the United States and Israel are waging against Iran. In our conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, he explains that the theme in That Thing That Never Vanished is the consequences of war for those who survive and the choices civilians and soldiers are forced to make. The book concludes with a contemplative yet forceful essay by James Marson, the Ukraine bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. “Thousands of years have passed, and the purposes of war haven’t changed: defending a homeland, a people, a resource—or seizing someone else’s,” Marson writes. “What sends someone to war also remains the same: money, pride, loyalty, ambition.”

Brendan Embser: The images in your new book are printed without any captions indicating locations or dates in the main part of the book. Instead, the readers can refer to an illustrated index at the end, which has dates and locations and sometimes longer, narrative-style captions. Why did you want to present your work in this manner?

Emanuele Satolli: I work as a journalist. And the main thing as a journalist is that you have to give the location, you have to be very strict about the dates, where you take the picture, the names of the people. But when I had the chance to do the book, I wanted to give back my own reflections about what it means to experience war. I wanted to give the reader the possibility of going from one page to another page without knowing if you are in Ukraine or you are in Iraq or in Afghanistan—the feeling that despite the time and the countries, the experiences of the human condition during war are the same.

For instance, when I’m in Iraq or in Ukraine, I am very surprised when I see soldiers or even civilians who are conscious of the real possibility of dying. Sigmund Freud, during the Second World War, wrote a about the meaning of dying during wartime. And he said that all of us know that our destiny is to die at one point, but we live our life as if we won’t die. You don’t think about dying all the time. But Freud said in war, you have to believe in this destiny. This is what I experienced in all the different conflicts. So, I want to give this sense back to the readers. That’s why I didn’t put the captions. That’s why I want to give the suspension that war evokes.

Embser: Many readers probably will have never been to Iraq or Ukraine. Do you feel it’s okay that, as you go through the book, you don’t really know where you are at first and may feel a sense of confusion?

Satolli: That’s the aim, actually—to have this confusion. You have to feel what is behind the news. I wouldn’t totally avoid the text and the captions. They are at the end. So, let’s say you do your “trip” page by page, and then at the end, you discover everything. But the first step is just a suspension, the visual narration of the work.

Embser: Were the majority of the images in the book originally published elsewhere? Or did you go back into your archives and pull things that maybe had never appeared in a magazine or newspaper?

Satolli: When I work with a newspaper or magazine, they want the pictures every day. I shoot and then I go back to the hotel, I make a selection, I use Lightroom to fix a little bit of color or the tone, and then I send the pictures with the captions. The pictures are related to what works for the journalist, for the needs of the photo department. For the book, I said to myself, Okay, if I want to do a book now, which is going to be different, I have to see the archive again from the beginning, and I have to make a new selection. After the first talk with Stu Smith, the designer from GOST, I spent more than three months on my own looking at the raw files from the beginning to the end.

Embser: How many were in the raw files?

Satolli: Thousands. This was something that I did almost every day for almost three months. I saw some pictures that I hadn’t seen for ten years and some people that I didn’t even remember that I met. It was also important to choose some pictures that were abstract. For instance, there is a picture of this box of cigarettes that I took in Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. They are inside the machine where you go down with the claw. I didn’t send it to any editor. I thought they will never publish this picture because it says nothing about the war. But in this case, for me, it says a lot. It gives the sense of the time that had passed and that, because of the war, things are abandoned.

Embser: In another image, you show a picture of Bashar al-Assad’s face scratched out.

Satolli: This is one of the pictures I shot for The Wall Street Journal, but they didn’t publish it. But I wanted to put it in my book also because it’s the attendance book for a classroom. That scratch on his face was something unthinkable even two weeks before, when Assad was in power. I was working with a fixer after Assad fell. When I entered Syria and we passed in front of a military base, the fixer said, “Here, two weeks ago, you couldn’t even point with your finger at the military base. Otherwise, you would’ve disappeared.” And the same probably would have happened to the kids, to the family, to the parents of this kid who scratched the face of Bashar al-Assad. So that picture with the scratch of the pen on it was super strong because it was something showing that, after fifteen years, the people were finally able to deface the dictator. The meaning behind it is very deep.

Embser: You also have several violent and disturbing images in the book, and there’s even a warning on the publisher’s website about your book containing graphic content. Why was it important to include those very difficult images in the book?

Satolli: My task is to document. So, if there are dead bodies on the ground, I take a picture of the dead bodies. I know that most of the time, the newspaper won’t publish images that are too violent, but I take them anyway. If a picture is too strong, nobody will see it. It is just in my archive. In the book, there is one picture of an alleged ISIS fighter with his head cut off next to him. I wrote an email to Stu and I said, “I think this picture is too strong. I’m not sure I want to put it in.” But he said, “War is also these things. The book is also a chance to show this part of the war.” In a war, on one side is the real possibility of dying. But on the other side is the real possibility of killing.

When I covered the Mosul operation, I was with the Iraqi army, and sometimes I slept with them in the field near a destroyed building. The Iraqi army members, they were doing video calls with their daughters in Baghdad, and they were saying, “Habibti, habibti, my love, my love. I love you. How are you?” They were super kind. And then in the morning, they wake up and they start fighting. And some of them, when they got an ISIS fighter, they would treat them very, very badly. I mean, they were very evil. That picture of the alleged ISIS fighter with his head cut, the belly open—I mean, it was a sign of how far the human condition can go. When you are in a war, you can become everything. This is my idea.

Embser: Could you talk a bit about the editing? I’m particularly interested in your decision to include gatefolds and sequences that give you a cinematic take over the course of multiple frames of one scene. And in the index, for those moments, you also have much longer narrative captions that explain what’s going on. How did you arrive at that concept for bringing the reader through this journey?

Satolli: At the beginning, we agreed that we didn’t want chapters. We didn’t want to divide by country. We didn’t want to divide by time. So, we mixed everything, but then we said, Okay, we have some sequences that they are quite strong. Then we decided to put together these gatefolds. They are like a break inside the narration. And for these sequences, I wanted to add my direct experience. 

Embser: Did you write those captions at the time in the form of a journal or a diary? 

Satolli: No, when I was reflecting for the book.

Embser: The gatefolds provide an opportunity to bring the reader into a very intense event in a way that you probably wouldn’t be able to do in a newspaper or magazine where there’s limited space. Is that right? For example, across eight images in a gatefold and a narrative in the index, you describe a harrowing scene in Sulyhivka, Ukraine, in 2022 during which you and James Marson, the Ukraine bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, followed a group of specialists called upon to retrieve casualties in no man’s land on the eastern front. As you moved single file through a field, a soldier at the front of the line triggered a land mine, and you photographed the ensuing chaos.

Satolli: Exactly. When we published the story in The Wall Street Journal, they included only a few pictures from the event. In the gatefold in the book, some pictures can feel like a repetition because they’re quite similar, but they’re not, and the sequence is very strong. It’s like you’re walking on the minefield.

Embser: For me, one of the most emotional images in the book is from Ukraine in summer 2022. With an incredible sense of drama, you capture a scene of two people on a grassy lane discovering the body of a person intertwined with a bicycle. And when I read the extended caption, I learned that this person was a thirteen-year-old girl named Nastia.

Satolli: I was with a colleague at a school being used for civilians to get food, to get aid. One of the guys who was working there said, “Look, one girl was just hit by a mortar.” He said, “She was here this morning because she was volunteering here. She’s a young girl.” And we said, “Can you show us where it happened?” Google Maps showed us the position. We went there by car, and we arrived together with her relatives. The girl was hit in front of a house, and the people living in the house covered her with a blanket. When we arrived, the relatives removed the blanket. When they recognized her, I was there, and I took this picture because it was a very strong moment. This girl was killed just going home after working in the school helping civilians.

Embser: I wanted to ask about how you got started in photojournalism. 

Satolli: I studied journalism in Turin. It was two years. It was mainly writing, but I didn’t really like writing. And I felt that writing was not my way to tell stories. So, when I finished school, I was already into photography on my own. I was developing in a darkroom on my own, but mainly I was taking normal pictures of friends, of the landscape. And then I said, Okay, I should use photography to keep working as a journalist because that’s what I want to do. So, I said, I have to develop a portfolio. And I started doing stories in Italy.

I ended up in Russia doing a story about a drug known as krokodil. It was a story about drug addiction in Yekaterinburg, which is a big city in Russia where there was a problem with people addicted to heroin. They were going to the pharmacy to buy painkillers, which they were cooking with other chemicals at home to make an opiate. And then they were injecting it. I went to Yekaterinburg on my own, and I stayed there for almost forty days. It was at the beginning of my career. This was at the beginning of 2013.

Then, in September 2013, I decided to go back. I applied for a new visa, and I bought my ticket. In September, Time magazine published a little story about a few cases of krokodil in Chicago. I wrote to the photo department and said, “Look, you wrote this story, and I did this story in Russia, and I’m about to be back.” On October 15, the day before I left, the editor wrote me back and said, “What’s up?” And I said, “Look, I’m leaving in eight hours.” And then the last email was “Do you want to go for us?” Basically, I got the first assignment from Time magazine eight hours before going back to Yekaterinburg. I did the story and then they asked me to also do a video. 

After that, I flew to New York to meet the editors at Time, and then I moved to Istanbul. At the beginning, I didn’t have any clue about how to cover wars, to be honest. But, if you work in the Middle East, you end up covering war because that’s the main news there. That’s what’s going on. When I moved to Turkey, there was a new war between the Turkish army and the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party], and then there was the Mosul operation, then there was Raqqa, and then there was Libya, Afghanistan. That’s how I started covering war.

Embser: How do you prepare for an assignment and how do your editors prepare you?

Satolli: The editors at The Wall Street Journal are really aware of my security. Every three years, they offer me the EFAT [Emergency First Aid Training] course—a course for journalists who are working in a war zone. They teach us how to stop bleeding, how to do CPR, how to recognize if you’re working in a minefield, how to move. And then they run a simulation where they do a kidnapping. I mean, they train us to face some of the situations that you can face in a war zone. When I go for The Wall Street Journal, we have a security team. And I normally have a former soldier who is with me and the correspondent for twenty-four hours, all the time. He stays with us, he’s responsible of our security. The last decision about how long to stay in a place, where to sleep, is on him. If I say, “Look, I have to go to take some pictures in Aleppo,” for instance, he will decide which road to take, where to stay, how long we can stay. And then we also have the security team in New York, in London. We talk with them; we check in every two hours. So, we feel quite safe in this sense. Also, we have an armored car, which is something that as a freelancer you cannot afford because it’s quite expensive. For the Journal, I normally work with the same three or four correspondents who I trust, and we have become friends. We are a good team.

Embser: What about when you’re on your own?

Satolli: When I go on my own, I always try to team up with other colleagues because, for instance, hiring a fixer is super expensive. In some countries, they are asking for about five hundred dollars per day. If you go on your own, you can work three, four days, and then you have finished your money. It’s better to stay with other people to make the right decision—shall we go, shall we not go? Shall we trust this guy or not? It’s better to share with other colleagues.

Embser: And what about emotionally? Having witnessed so many very difficult scenes, are you able to keep some emotional distance from the places that you’ve photographed?

Satolli: The first distance that I have is the camera. When I’m there and I’m in front of some strong situation, my first thought is to get the picture. And with respect, sometimes a subject will say, “No, no”—and I don’t take the picture, of course. But my first thing is about documenting. This is like a filter between me and what happened, but it’s just a temporary filter. Several times, I was sitting in the hotel room in front of my computer, seeing the pictures again, and I had some emotional reaction, quite strong. When I finish and I go home, it can seem a little bit schizophrenic, but I try to do whatever helps to go back to normality. Sometimes, the day before you are in the middle of chaos, where you see people and you deal with their pain and their situation, and then two days later, you are with friends drinking in a bar. But I don’t have to feel guilty, because it’s something that helps me to—

Embser: Have some balance?

Satolli: Yeah, to have balance.

Embser: When Ukrainian journalists go home, they also need to have some balance—but their country is at war.

Satolli: Yeah, exactly. I have this lucky situation where, with my passport, I can choose how long I can stay. This is a big privilege for me, for sure. When I witnessed this minefield accident, it was quite an intense situation. The editors at the Journal really took care of me. At some point, they offered to pay for a therapist for me.

Embser: Your book concludes in two ways. There’s a visual index with your captions, where you give all the locations and the stories about the images. Following that, there’s another sequence of images that are portraits of Iraqi servicemen. Why did you make that decision in terms of the design of the book—to set apart these portraits of mostly injured Iraqis? 

Satolli: When we designed the book, the pictures of the injured soldiers were before the captions. After the sequence of the war images, they didn’t really match together. So, I was thinking, like in a movie, you have the credits at the end, and then sometimes you have something extra. I wanted to put something extra that was a bit different from the rest of the book. It was also a personal project. I went back to Iraq after I documented the fall of ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. I wanted to meet the people who will pay the price forever for fighting against ISIS. You face the war, you’re willing to die, you are willing to kill also. But then what remains? What is the consequence for your life? Is your life changed forever? And when the story’s over, nobody’s going to talk about death anymore. I wanted to put a light on these people whose lives changed forever because of the liberation from ISIS.

Embser: Well, it also connects back to the question you’re posing to the reader: Could you kill or could you risk being killed?

Satolli: The willingness of the people to face one of these perspectives is something that really struck me all the time.

Embser: Finally, the title of the book, That Thing That Never Vanished. Where does the title come from and what does it mean to you? Especially now, given that you’re in the Gulf states preparing to cover another war? Is war the thing that never vanished? Is it memory?

Satolli: Yeah, exactly. When I had the idea to do this book, I started a conversation with an Italian philosopher, Federico Leoni. I want to keep some distance from journalism. I didn’t want to talk with journalists again about our job or what the meaning of war was for us. He said that we have this relative calm of peace in Western countries, but in reality, questa cosa non se n’è mai andata. He said, “That thing never vanished. The war never vanished and probably will never vanish. It’s something that we keep repeating.”

It’s something that unfortunately we are going to repeat. And maybe we have to keep in mind this view to try to understand how to see the conflicts. I think peace is like a balance of energy that stands still until there is another war. War is more normal, unfortunately, than peace. You know what I mean?

Embser: Even if the condition is that the war never vanishes, is it perhaps the role of the photographer to keep a record, would you say?

Satolli: Of course, it’s to keep the record and to keep documenting it. I don’t want to say that I’m pro-war. But I want to be realistic. There is a new war in Iran, and then this war expanded to the Gulf. Even if it ends, then there is the Lebanese war, and then there is the West Bank war, the Gaza war. We are never unemployed, unfortunately, as war photographers. That will never vanish.

That Thing That Never Vanished was published by GOST in 2025.

Tillmans had only visited Fire Island once, in the mid-1990s, until the summer of 2015, when a last-minute trip to the Pines made at a friend’s invitation unexpectedly opened a new chapter in his life and artistic practice. In this interview, conducted at Tillmans’s home on Fire Island for the book Fire Island Art: 100 Years (2026), the artist reflects on how his decade as a mem­ber of this community has impacted him, renewing his interest in making music and deepening his engagement with nature.

Michael Bullock: The first image I ever saw of Fire Island, before I knew what it was, and before I knew who you were, was your famous pic­ture of a man and a deer on the beach (Deer Hirsch, 1995). I first saw it in the early 2000s, and it burned into my memory. It looked like another world. If you have never been here, it’s not easy to understand. 

Wolfgang Tillmans: The photo has a mysterious yet universal quality because it could be almost anywhere on Earth. There are very few markers. But if you know Cherry Grove, it’s difficult not to say that it is Cherry Grove. There’s no other place I know where deer live on the beach. So the image is a bit fantastical and yet so realistic. That was a special moment in my photographic image-making. In the mid-1990s, there was this quest for a newfound authenticity in photography. The man in the picture, Jochen Klein, was my boyfriend at that time. I was very much inspired by the multitudes that our identities were constructed from. We grew up in the ’80s, and we were the first generation that fully grew up in postmod­ernism. What we were experiencing in our formative years was the puzzling together of cultural components from different eras and decades, reconfiguring our identities without needing to be pure or original. 

Bullock: Authenticity wasn’t the goal in the ’80s? 

Tillmans: It wasn’t. And then in the ’90s, I became known for this new authenticity, which peo­ple were longing for. There was this desire for singular readings. And so there was this purity bestowed onto me, which I actually rejected. Even though I wanted a new sin­cerity, a new realism, it didn’t mean that I rejected this idea of multiplicity—that you can, on the one hand, be into drag, and on the other, enjoy going to an S&M club. You’re never read in just one way. 

The way we experienced our lives was always as this composite of things that seemed staged but were actually happen­ing, and other things that were staged but looked very real. The well-known photos of Alex and Lutz in the tree were com­pletely staged scenarios that looked real, but they were seen then as documentary. Deer Hirsch looks completely staged—peo­ple have asked, “Is it a stuffed deer?”—but it was actually a documentary moment. There was nothing arranged for it at all. It was just Jochen and I taking a walk on the beach. We’d fed all our food to the deer. Jochen was showing his empty hands to the deer. I saw it and said, “Stop, don’t move.” I stopped time for a couple of seconds, took the photograph, and then we carried on with our leisurely afternoon. 

I love how the photo looks highly styl­ized, but it was just a moment from real life that I was able to catch. It serves as a coun­terpoint to the fantasy naturalness of Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees (1992), which is also an encounter between man and nature. Here is Jochen, a man encountering the animal kingdom, attempting to communi­cate with its creatures.

Bullock: Was that your first trip to Fire Island?

Tillmans: It was almost my one and only. In that period, Jochen and I both lived in New York. We went for a couple of nights and stayed at the Cherry Grove Hotel. It was nice, but we didn’t feel like it was this magical place, the way I think of it now. We moved back to Europe in ’96, and I didn’t come back for twenty years. Nothing about it had left a deep impact. We didn’t know anybody here. I think that seems to be the thing—you need to have some point of entry, and then it all unfolds in a completely different way.

Bullock: When did you come back again after that first time?

Tillmans: In 2015. I wanted to spend August in New York City, prior to the install of my show at David Zwirner. A couple of days before my arrival, my friend, the curator Stefan Kalmár, texted, “Do you want to come to Fire Island?” My initial reaction was, “Why would I do that?” I thought that I preferred to be in the city, and not in this superfi­cial party community. Then, fortunately, I changed my mind. The month was meant to be a free-spirited moment, without obliga­tion. If a friend invites you, why not accept the invitation? Once I arrived, I got so into sitting around in the evenings with my lap­top, editing and writing, experiencing the quiet of Fire Island. I decided I wanted to stay another week, so I asked the estate agent if I could extend, and he said, “No, it’s high season. There’s nothing.” But then he found another house just a few doors down. I loved my extra week there even more. At the end, I spoke to my friend Paul [Bernstein] and told him that I wanted to come for the full season the following year, stay three months by the ocean, and really treat it almost like a sabbatical. We went on a tour of houses that were available for rent the next year. The tenth house was the house I was already staying in, and I ended up buying it.

Bullock: What shifted since the first visit that made you want to make a commitment to this place? 

Tillmans: I guess this came exactly at a time when I was ready for something new. But I’ve always been fascinated by the Atlantic, and I’ve just never seen a place where you could be so quietly and peacefully close to it. Plus New York City is just two and a half hours away; there’s the security and the friendliness of the LGBTQ+ community, and one of the best grocery stores within walking distance. Once I met people here, I realized how interesting many of them are. For me, it felt like a retreat where I could be on my own, but not alone. People respected that I was actually working here, and it wasn’t a party spot for me. A lot of my time here I spent thinking about the MoMA show, a lot of it was conceived of and designed here.

Bullock: Your house is located at the far end of the Pines, somewhat isolated, perfect for work­ing, but because there is a constant flow of artists visiting the island, you can be alone without ever being lonely. 

Tillmans: Yes. When BOFFO presented the first pre­view of my film Time Flows All Over (2024) at Whyte Hall [in August 2024], I wrote down a few notes of acknowledgment before­hand, and I realized that I really wouldn’t be here without that organization. Their artist residency program is like a metro­nome or pacemaker, continuously injecting interesting, unexpected people into this community. It gives me a sense of connect­edness to New York and other art scenes. If this were the same beautiful natural setting without any art connections, I don’t think I would be here. And of course, I want to mention FIAR [Fire Island Artist Residency in Cherry Grove], the other residency that brings artists here. 

Bullock: Over the last decade, these organizations have transformed the island into a place where artists continue to return, there is a lot of casual connection, you can randomly meet people whose work you have always loved from afar. It’s inspiring. Being here has allowed you to explore new forms of experi­mentation. You even built a music studio. 

Tillmans: Yes. It’s one bedroom of the house, which has three bedrooms. I immediately thought when I got it that I wanted to use being phys­ically away from my normal practice, and this could be the place where I develop my recently resurfaced interest in music. 

Bullock: Where did your band name, Fragile, come from? 

Tillmans: When I made music in the ’80s, as a teen­ager, my artist name was Fragile. From an early age, I felt that embracing my own fra­gility was not a weakness, but a prerequisite for a happy life because it protects you from disappointment. 

Bullock: A wise concept, unusual for a teenager. 

Tillmans: It’s strange, but I have always had this pairing between my obsession with astron­omy and science, and on the other hand, a spiritual interest paired with the aware­ness of AIDS that stuck with me. Sometime in the mid-2010s, I felt ready to embrace music again. And that’s how the protec­tion of this island, the friends here and the environment, led me to reconnect with my performative side—which was always there, but which I’d translated into my photography and installation practice. 

Bullock: It makes sense that this could happen for you here. It’s a very Fire Island thing—it hap­pens on different scales for everyone, but in this place, people are able to experiment with who they are. They push themselves further than they would normally go. It can sometimes be talked about in a funny-crude way, but I have witnessed profound personal breakthroughs here. Fragile debuted at the BOFFO performance festival. What was it like to perform for the first time in twen­ty-something years?

Tillmans: It was a great communal moment for the whole band. Anders Clausen was co-art directing. He, T.M. [Davy], and others built a beautiful stage. It was amazing being on the beach with great acts like Eartheater and SSION, who performed before us. And we wore these tie-dye costumes; it felt amazing. The audience thought that we were a legit entity. They could not tell that it was the first time we had ever performed publicly. We were even invited to play in the city. We did two nights at Union Pool in Brooklyn. And then we took it to Tate Modern in London and performed there as part of this larger sound installation that I made. 

Bullock: I’m told Fragile’s 2018 performance was an even bigger success. 

Tillmans: Yes, Faris [Al-Shathir, BOFFO’s founder and director] invited us to play another concert. We really prepared well for that one. We played that concert here with the band inside the house, which we filled with dry ice. We played the first few songs behind closed glass doors. The deck was packed with over two hundred people. When we opened the doors, all the dry ice poured out into the crowd. I am proud to say that the set was very tight—so much so that I included one song from it on the album I released this year. That same night, the artist Martine Gutierrez performed on a plank that we placed for her across the pool, and DonChristian and T.M. Davy also performed. It was a fantastic lineup. A magical night. We had Pines-party-sized loudspeakers on the deck. The volume was just so insane—without a license, with­out permission. It happened one week before I turned fifty, so I sent notes around to my neighbors saying that this was my fiftieth birthday party, which it wasn’t. 

Bullock: I regret that I missed that one. That must have been the biggest event you’ve hosted here? 

Tillmans: I mean, it was really a night! It’s interesting though—as fantastic as that was, I still feel the need to almost apologetically explain that this place is not only the hedonistic party place that people think it is. It has this completely different side.

Bullock: Well, let’s not completely erase the hedonistic. I think that energy permeates the atmosphere. It’s an important ingredient for bonding and collaboration. It grounds the place in a sense of openness and experimentation that impacts everything. The first time I read one of your interviews, you said something that stayed with me for years. You said that for you a nightclub is a place where you can really think deeply. Hearing that from you gave me permis­sion to embrace the significance of those types of experiences. Growing up, you’re taught they are frivolous, but they are so essential to gay life and development. 

Tillmans: Absolutely. For me, nightlife has always had a depth to it. Those places allow for differ­ent types of experiences to coexist. It’s rare to have such metropolitan energy in such a beautiful, natural setting. 

Bullock: You even, surprisingly, made a music video at Sip-N-Twirl [one of the three clubs in the Pines]. Can you tell me more about that song? And the lyrics—“I don’t want you to see me change”? 

Tillmans: Yes, “He wants to change, but not be seen changing. You can’t escape into space. You’re in it.” Most songs I write in Berlin, and this one we actually recorded at the height of the pandemic in April 2020. When I was releas­ing it, I needed a video and realized that in 2019 I had made footage at Sip-N-Twirl on a Sunday night before closing time. I sometimes love being on my own alone on the dance floor, watching the disco balls spin in an empty club. I’m very aware of how to capture a staged reality, which in this case is a slightly tragic nightclub that never really takes off, even in the best of times. 

Bullock: For those who haven’t seen it, the video shows the disco ball lights hitting the differ­ent spaces of the empty club interior for the entire song. 

Tillmans: I didn’t capture that footage with the pan­demic in mind, but when I released it, it was obviously highly connected to the closure of nightclubs during the pandemic. 

Bullock: I have been focusing on your music, but how has this environment impacted your primary medium? 

Tillmans: Most of the works I’ve made here are pho­tographs of nature—of the ocean and the shoreline in particular, where liquid meets solid and air: the vapor, the clouds. These three elements meeting at night, in the day, lit by the moon, lit by the sun—all twenty-four hours of the day. This house is really exposed. It’s almost like living in the ocean. This situ­ation has made me very attuned and allowed me to take pictures that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. 

Bullock: Can we look at some of the ocean images together? I’d like to understand why some­thing resonates with you. Can you define the qualities that move you to choose what images become a part of your body of work? 

Tillmans: Yes. For example, this one is called Kleine Welle, “small wave.” I’m not interested in only the grandiose spectacle of the tallest wave. When the incomprehensible nature of liquidity reveals itself—that’s what interests me. What moves me so much is how little we understand of it. It’s entirely different from the world of solids that we obviously navi­gate and inhabit every day. In the early 2010s, I embraced a new camera technology which allows me to photograph that liquidity at a film speed that shows the waves as these sculptural forms, completely frozen in mid-air. Most film couldn’t record this in the past. These pictures show a degree of detail that the human eye could never see. It’s an amount of information than you could never remem­ber. That’s something I find humbling—that there’s always more going on in the world than one could ever comprehend. 

Bullock: And in a way, the more information you have—the clearer it is—the more abstract it becomes.

Tillmans: Some people could roll their eyes and think, “What are they waffling on about?” But it’s super important because it’s very con­nected to the times we’re in, the information saturation that surrounds us. I think these works have had relevance to people because they were inspired by a sense of hyper-in­formation: this time when we, as cultural citizens, can’t comprehend all the informa­tion that is thrown at us. We have to learn to filter it, not to let it wash over us. That’s where I see these pictures connecting to contemporary society. 

Bullock: That’s an interesting perspective, especially given how environments like Fire Island are used to escape from that constant flood of information. Will you think of these years as your Fire Island period?

Tillmans: I’m a bit skeptical of those books that showcase artists who became attached to different places, like how Matisse or Van Gogh became obsessed with certain regions because of a particular type of light. . . . I always take them with a pinch of salt. And now I’m talking about this myself—the particularity of Fire Island with its two water masses, the Atlantic on one side and the very shallow bay on the other, and the sky above. As a visually aware person, I’m constantly noticing what’s going on, for instance how the moon has a strong presence here. Even so, in most of my exhibitions and publications, I don’t explicitly feature Fire Island.

Bullock: Why is that?

Tillmans: For me, being in this book and talking about my house here is a bit of a first. The nature of my work is making ordinary and extraordinary things equally accessible—turning them into something that you feel you could have seen with your own eyes. So, the idea of an exclusive community is the antithesis of how I like my work to operate. Fire Island comes up in titles occasionally, but I don’t identify all the pictures that I took here because I don’t want people to think they have to travel here to see these things. They can see them wherever there is an ocean. 

Bullock: That makes sense—that’s one reason why your images have a universal quality. Before we finish, I would like to circle back to your start here and your thoughts on how the con­text of gay life has changed. It’s interesting that you first came here during the height of the AIDS crisis, and you came back after gay marriage was legalized in America and PrEP was approved—completely different circum­stances: psychologically, pharmaceutically, politically, spiritually. 

Tillmans: And of course, the year that I came back, in 2015, Trump declared he would run in the United States, and there was this populist wave that washed across Europe.

Bullock: It’s a pretty extraordinary set of political circumstances—the most freedom that gay people have ever had in America and the least fear of disease, paired with a far-right takeover of the government. 

Tillmans: The way you put it is pretty spot on. It makes you wonder why they are coinciding, and why gender and sexual equality and freedom are so unbearable for some part of soci­ety, why it riles them up so much that they are willing to vote for a demagogue. In my work, I always talk about wanting to include. I don’t want to exclude anybody, but at the same time, when we celebrate people real­izing themselves and their wishes and their dreams, it seems somebody does feel left out, and we can’t help them. As long as we don’t hurt anybody or hamper anybody else, we can’t all tone down our quest for happiness after years of suppression just due to fear of somebody’s envious gaze. 

Bullock: Well, I certainly have packed a lifetime of happiness into the last few days. That seems like a meaningful place to end our conversa­tion. Thank you for this. 

Tillmans: Yes, exactly. I think so too.

This interview was originally published by Monacelli in Fire Island Art: 100 Years (2026), edited by John Dempsey​.

Noa Lin: I wanted to start by asking you about these past twelve months. Over the past year, you’ve photographed Mahmoud Khalil for Dazed. You photographed Mayor Zohran Mamdani for Vogue. You’ve opened your first solo exhibition at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York. And you have been included for Greater New York at MoMA PS1. What’s it been like for you to have this meteoric rise?

Dean Majd: I’ve been working professionally for about ten years, but I’ve been making photos since I was seven. I feel like I turned up the dial in the last few years. There’s been a palpable shift for me, but because it’s been such a long grind, it also feels like something that’s actualized and meant to happen at this time. I am really glad it took so long. If I had found any version of this success in my late twenties or early thirties, when I wanted it, I would’ve completely fallen on my face. It also affirmed to me my belief in God’s plan, or the sense that everything happens for a reason, which can be really hard to maintain faith in. You have to believe in what you’re setting out to do, even when no one else does. I’m not hyper-religious, but I’m quite close to my faith, and it feels like things are meant to happen when they’re supposed to happen.

I’ve been recently very emotional too. I’ve actually been crying a lot since the opening of the show because I’ve just released so much emotion that I’ve been carrying for ten years around this extremely difficult body of work, but also the hard work to get here in my career. And there were so many times where an opportunity, like the solo show, almost happened and it didn’t happen, or I would get a major opportunity to make a certain project and it would fall through. At some point, I accepted that it wouldn’t really happen for me, and I just was making work for myself because I loved it, which was the most important thing. So right now, I’m just trying my best to enjoy the moment and get the work done.

Lin: I’m curious, do you have a sense of why, or why you think this is now—why everything happened all at once in this way? How have your experiences prepared you for it?

Majd: I had a lot of failed opportunities and a lot of rejections in 2024. I was supposed to have a solo show around my work Separation that was made in Palestine, but it fell apart. By the end of the year, I was really down, and I just decided that I am going to give it my all. I was turning thirty-five and I felt like it was now or never. At the same time, I can’t deny that there’s a lot of attention on Palestinian American artists post–October 7, 2023, and during the genocide.

A lot of issues that I face as a Palestinian American artist regarding racism and Zionism are being confronted in the art world. I also feel that not many artists at large, but specifically photographers, were open about their beliefs around the genocide, and not many stood up for Palestine. I felt like being Palestinian American and speaking about the genocide publicly garnered me a lot of support, not just for my work in Palestine but also my work across the board. There was a lot of attention on what I was doing because there was a lot of attention on Palestinian American artists. Because of that attention, because of the projects I was building up to, the skills I had acquired over the years and my being vocal publicly about the kind of state violence that people are experiencing globally at the hands of our administration, I felt all these things were coalescing.

I also was pitching and taking on very serious projects about these subject matters that I don’t think many people were pitching and were willing to explore through their work. So many artists were facing backlash for speaking up for their beliefs. I didn’t have much of a career to lose, and I’m Palestinian, so I already faced these issues prior to October 7. I wasn’t scared to talk about it. It’s my people. I didn’t even think twice about it.

Lin: Right. This is part of who you are, and you’ve been making work on these subjects for a long time. But, just to back up, can you tell me a little bit more about your background and how you got into photography? How you ended up where you are now?

Majd: My mother gave me a camera when I was seven, and I haven’t stopped taking photos to this day. I grew up very poor, and my mom would develop the film at Genovese, which was like a Duane Reade or a Rite Aid. When she developed the film for me, which we didn’t have much money to even do, she would get mad at me because she would never see photos of me. I was already only taking pictures of my friends. As a kid, I was very quiet, so I used the camera to connect to the people around me. It was also an expression of love and care, even at that young an age.

My parents were immigrants of, refugees of, Palestine. My mother was born in a refugee camp in Jordan after my grandparents were expelled in 1948. My father is from the occupied West Bank. When they came to this country, they spent all their time working. So, my brother and I were left to our own devices and fell into Queens, New York’s skating and graffiti scene, at a very young age. I have photos from 2002 from this era where we were drinking and doing drugs and staying out all night and partying and sneaking into bars and concerts. I asked my parents when I was eighteen to go to art school, and they laughed at me, so I left that world to pursue a degree in international relations and to work to help my family financially. I mean, I had literally never seen an Arab American, a Palestinian American, a Muslim American, be a successful artist or photographer. Nothing indicated that I could, in magazines or in TV or anything like that, and so I just did it for myself because I wanted to. Around that time, I discovered Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). I didn’t understand what was going on in the photos, but I just saw someone love their friends so much that Nan Goldin made it into an art form. I felt that if she could do it, I could too.

Lin: And you’ve been working on this series, Hard Feelings, for ten years now. How did you go from just being in that skate and graffiti scene, just taking photos of your friends, to making this particular body of work as it stands? Or did it happen naturally?

Majd: In 2015, I had started hanging around the skate park in Astoria and with some friends that would skate and do graffiti. I reconnected with a childhood friend named James at Astoria Skate Park, and I took his portrait. We made a plan to hang out, but then a week later, he tragically died in a subway accident. It was tragic because anyone who knew James knew that he had a really big heart. And I mean, to me, he was the coolest person in the world. To lose him was quite tragic for me and all our friends. And through his passing, I became very close to his best friends, and we bonded over the grief of his loss.

At that point, I was casually shooting about sixty rolls a year, but by the end of 2016, I was shooting over three hundred, and I maintained that for years. I invested all my money and free time into it. And if you know anything about the graffiti and skating world, it can be hypermasculine, drug- and alcohol-fueled. It’s very violent. It can be very toxic and self-destructive, but these people who I felt were outcasts like myself were deeply loving to each other, and I was inducted into a family.

And, by the end of 2016, I proposed to them that I would like to take pictures of everything—the good, the bad, the ugly, everything in between—and I wouldn’t hold anything back. No one refused. Actually, almost all of them encouraged it. My goal was to create a record of truth for us and only us. I was deeply inspired. It felt like having twenty-five muses at the same time, and they gave me everything.

Lin: I’m curious how you approached shooting such intimate moments with your friends—were there any specific challenges you had to navigate while you were starting to shoot this seriously in a way that you didn’t think of at the time?

Majd: I think we were all making up the rules as we went along. I would take all these photos and I wouldn’t put them anywhere. I would sit with them for a while and reflect on them, and then we would have these open discussions about where they would go and if certain photos should stay archived, if certain photos could circulate between us or if they could go online. There was a trust that we built together, almost like a rule book, and that rule book became the foundation of my practice. But I’m constantly rewriting that book, and it’s constantly evolving.

Photography is inherently voyeuristic, but I try as much as possible to not approach making the work that way. I very much affirm that this is my story, that these are my friends, the people I call my family. I don’t even call them subjects. I very much lay myself completely on the line for the work.

Growing up Palestinian, I understood grief at a very young age. I understood pain and loss. My family has experienced so much racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism. At a young age, I learned that empathy and pain go hand in hand, and it helped me develop a deeply empathetic nature. And that’s how I navigate my life—and photography. When my friends gave me access to their lives, I didn’t realize at the time that that would dissolve all boundaries between me, them, and the camera. For a long time, I navigated the photographic experience without boundaries, which left me with a lot of wounds and then subsequently a lot of scars.

Lin: In the context of you and your friends, these images are a record of your experiences. But as these photographs circulate, they take on new meanings to different audiences. For outsiders looking in, words like trauma or violence become attached to these portraits of people you know and care about. How do you and your friends continue to think about the work, especially as it gets more exposure in art-world contexts?

Majd: I actually don’t even think many of them care. Originally, it was just a record of truth, and I was quite ambitious about my work and what I was attempting, but I genuinely didn’t think anyone would care. When the work became public and it gained an audience, I didn’t expect the work to change.

After reflecting on it though, I realized the work was about masculinity, brotherhood, and how trauma and cycles of violence manifest. I realized the work functioned as a mirror and as a space for me and my friends to be vulnerable, when in reality, we are so often told as young men of color that we need to be invulnerable to survive.

In 2018, I had a really powerful acid trip in which I saw my friends as Greek gods. I realized us sitting around passing around a bottle of Hennessy or tequila was a ceremony no different than those of mythological beings. I really began to frame Hard Feelings around the idea of an odyssey; these masculine rites of passage. I wanted to elevate these unseen lives to the place of mythology and high art. I wanted to create a legacy for those who are told their lives don’t matter. The work really became this place for these young men to face their own shadows, and it became a mirror for strangers to do the same. I studied Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic style, and her use of allegory in relation to violence and faith really informed the way I think about the work. These real moments between me and my friends became representational images that depict big themes and ideas.

Lin: In Hard Feelings, women often appear at the margins of the narrative. One of the only images of a woman alone in the Baxter St show is the photograph of a young woman with a black eye, which feels especially devastating. How did you think about women’s presence—or absence—across the work?

Majd: Foundationally, I was just trying to honor the story of someone I love, and someone that’s really important to me, someone I consider family. And I wanted to be honest about the experiences of women in relation to this kind of expression of masculinity. It’s important to note that none of the men that I photographed, and no one I knew personally, perpetuated or were the perpetrator of the violent acts done to her, but that isn’t to say that men in the work do not contribute to systems that perpetuate violence against women.

I never wanted to paint these men as perfect victims of their circumstances. The violence enacted on them is internalized and then transferred to the people around them, to themselves and often towards women. The image itself sits in the show in relation to other images that present internalized violence and the violence against other people. I wanted to put everything out there because the overall mission of the work is to forge a path towards healing. And if this part of the experience is ignored, I don’t think we’ll ever get there.

The woman in the image, Rissa, and I have been in constant communication before and after the show about the image. She gave me her blessing to include it months ago, and it’s been handled with the utmost care and respect. She couldn’t make it to the opening, so she came by a few hours before and we walked through the show together, and we cried together about the overall show, but specifically when looking at that image. There’s an alchemic exchange in my work—I get to make these really intimate images, but I absorb and hold on to the emotions of the people I photograph. I’ve been sitting with the pain of this photo, really of all these photos, for years, and presenting them was cathartic for us, Rissa included. We’ve somehow turned that pain into a love that feels infinite, and hopefully this image of Rissa, and these images of violence, can help other people find healing.

There is a moment in the show of small-scaled images of couples around empty beds. The beds themselves refer to addiction and recovery, but I wanted to open a discussion about healing and how it’s often extracted from women in male-female relationships. It’s a vague notion, but I wanted to speak to how grief and violence affect couples’ relationships. In general, I didn’t want to contribute to the erasure of the experience of women under patriarchy by excluding these images.

Lin: Yeah. We can’t talk about patriarchy without acknowledging the violent ways it manifests.

Majd: I started going to therapy in 2022, but I really felt like I started healing in 2023. Part of that was realizing that this work could help other people. I started framing the work with a mission that it could help heal those who are willing to engage with it.

I mean, I’m completely self-taught. I never went to school. I never had a mentor. I never interned. I never assisted. I’ve never even taken a class, although I really want to take a class. I worked really hard to acquire skills with which I can understand how to present the work in a way that can probably honor the work itself, the experiences of the people in it, but also create a space for this healing.

Lin: Did you have any reservations as you were shooting this work or as you were planning on showing it? Or did you always know that this was important for you to talk about?

Majd: I felt so much of an outlier within my community that it didn’t matter to me. I was always scared, but I always fought through the fear. I feel a certain shame and stigma, and for a long time, that kept me quiet about my experiences and issues with alcohol and drug use. There’s a lot of grief I’ve been dealing with.

At the end of 2021, I decided to put the camera down because I developed this irrational fear that if I photographed one of my friends, a week later, they would die. Just because it had happened so often in the past. I mean, it paralyzed my day-to-day life, let alone my art practice. At some point, a really good friend of mine insisted that I go to therapy. It completely changed my life.

I went on this healing journey, which completely reshaped everything for me. I was able to pick up the camera properly again and work through these traumas and to be open about these situations. What I realized is that many men in the Arab community, and many men of color in general, rarely even think about going to therapy or work through their mental health issues because it’s so looked down upon. It’s so stigmatized. There’s so much shame around it. I got really lucky that a friend who I photograph, Dallas, who is also Arab, told me, “You should try it.”

Lin: They seem like a good friend. A lighter question—if Hard Feelings had a soundtrack, what would be on it?

Majd: For the last few years, I considered how the thousands of photos that were made for the series could play as a slideshow, and what that soundtrack would be. I made a playlist of that soundtrack for the opening of the show. There’s a lot of Young Thug, Chief Keef, Kid Cudi, Pop Smoke, and Future. On the other side of the spectrum, there was FKA twigs, Blood Orange, Lana Del Rey, Kelela, Jeff Buckley, Fleetwood Mac, Taking Back Sunday, and Paramore, and even something as joyous as Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The title, which I named on a whim, comes from a Lorde song that was really important to me called “Hard Feelings/Loveless.” There are these really poetic pop, indie, and rock songs with this kind of tough rap, laced with some yearning R&B. There’s this interplay between hardness and softness even within the music we listened to.

Lin: As someone who’s been to one of your openings, I can attest to your incredible community of support. People really show up and show out for you, and your openings always seem to have this incredible, vibrant, downtown energy that feels increasingly rare these days. It makes me curious—what does Dean Majd’s New York look like?

Majd: Yeah. I mean, thank you. I’ve been told that before and I resist any praise around it. I’m sure there are many people who found out about the show from the network of the photo community. But the truth is probably more than 80 percent of the people who came to the opening are people who have seen me grind for across those ten years. There’s a lot of love in the air from people who have encountered me throughout time, who have worked with it together, or who I’ve photographed both casually or seriously.

It’s also indicative of the world I photographed. I stand on the shoulders of these communities that have seen me work this hard because they created the culture in which I photograph. The show very much feels like our show; it feels like a win for all of us, and that we all did this together, every person in every community that has been a part of the work and has supported the work. It felt like a very open and loving space. Because I wouldn’t have gone here without their support, without the kind of culture of New York that I’m a part of. And that culture stems out to graffiti, skateboarding, music, cinema, paint, other forms of art. But also the Muslim community, the political community that really shows up for me, the Palestinian community. I really don’t take credit for this. It’s really because my friends are incredible people.

Lin: Totally. And this is such a New York story in a lot of ways. What other New York stories—photo, film, or otherwise—were inspiring to you as you made this work?

Majd: Like I said earlier, when I was eighteen, I discovered Nan Goldin’s Ballad, and it changed my life. Her work and activism, specifically for Palestine, have remained as my North Star, and meeting and working with her has been a dream. When I was in middle school, my brother and I discovered Larry Clark’s Kids at Blockbuster and essentially hosted screenings at our friends’ houses. It felt like this thing I wasn’t supposed to have seen, and it completely seeped into my subconscious. Other films include John Cassavetes’s Husbands, which felt like a premonition of my future; Abel Ferrara’s King of New York; and Charles Stone III’s Paid in Full. In middle school, I listened to Nas, 50 Cent, and Dipset, but also Taking Back Sunday and all these emo bands from Long Island. I romanticize cold winter nights listening to jazz, and after COVID, I’d stay up all night listening to Miles Davis and imagine my friends were doing graffiti to Kind of Blue. 

Lin: What work are you showing in Greater New York? What’s it like to be showing at MoMA PS1?

Majd: Well, PS1 is my favorite museum. It’s the museum in my neighborhood. It’s really shaped my existence as an artist. I’m living my dreams, straight up. I never thought that this could happen. The curators at MoMA PS1, Ruba Katrib and Elena Ketelsen González, have been so supportive of my work and my practice. I’m interspersing two bodies of work. One is called Separation, which was made in 2018 of my family in Palestine. And the other is Birthmark, which is a new body of work around Arab American identity.

Essentially, I’m interspersing landscapes and family photos from Palestine with these portrait sessions I’ve been doing with Palestinian Americans in their homes. They are going to be hung in a collage form, almost like a constellation, to speak to the connection and disconnection between Palestinian Americans and Palestine as a result of occupation, expulsion, especially of those of first generation, second generation—or even recent refugees and migrants. It feels like a risk, and I’ve never done anything like it before, but MoMA PS1 is an experimental space after all.

Lin: How are you feeling about the future otherwise? Do you have any feelings, fears, plans, ambitions, for what’s to come?

Majd: Cinema has defined my life, yet somehow I’ve never directed a film. And I’ve always talked about directing a film, and I always thought photography would lead me to do that. But in general, I feel like every artist needs to get away and be quiet for a while and figure it out and let the ideas come. I need to fall in love. And I’m really excited to fuck off and go to the beach.

Hard Feelings is on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York through April 8, 2026. Greater New York 2026 is on view at MoMA PS1 from April 16 to August 17, 2026.

Accompanying the book is a related touring exhibition I curated, which first premiered at the Gallerie d’Italia, in Turin, and opened this month at the Fotomuseum Antwerpen. Here, we revisit our conversation (condensed and edited for clarity) from last April in Turin, in which we discuss translating five decades of work into an exhibition, how spirituality and artistic vision are interwoven, and the multifaceted layers of self.

Carrie Mae Weems, Wifredo, Laura, and Me, 2002, from the series Dreaming in Cuba

Carrie Mae Weems, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna—Rome, from the series Museum, 2006–ongoing

Sarah Meister: So, first, I just want to say thank you, Carrie. Thank you for the joy of working on this show. Thank you for sharing these works. We are going to make this a true conversation, although because I’m a photo nerd, I have questions written down.

The esteemed American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted in 2012 that there is “little space between Weems and her work.” I think what he meant was that Carrie is someone who lives her life intertwined with her work in ways that bring it particular power and meaning. In some ways, that was the inspiration for the structure of this show, putting that “little space” at the heart of the conversation. With that personal spirit in mind, I want to begin by asking, How are you feeling? This big show just opened last night. Here we are in this amazing room surrounded by your work. How are you doing today?

Carrie Mae Weems: I’m really exhausted. I’m really tired. And I’m also really excited. I think the thing that’s most interesting for me in doing any exhibition, first of all, is that I get a chance to see the work because I don’t have wall space in my home big enough to see most of my work. So it allows me to really see the work, and it allows me to see the ideas. It also really allows me, as I feel as though I’m a part of the audience, that I’m not simply the maker but that I’m the audience experiencing the work along with you. And there’s something interesting about that, right? That sense that you’re right there, that there is very little separation between me and the work. And so, I am always operating in some way as a participant-observer in the work, that I am both in it and outside of it.

And being outside of it allows me to see it. It allows me to see the problems, but it also allows me to see the resolve. And it also allows me to see a kind of persistence of vision that has happened over a long period of time. And so, to that extent, I’m really grateful for the opportunity to be showing the work and sharing the work here at Gallerie d’Italia. It’s really exciting and more than I actually anticipated.

Carrie Mae Weems, Welcome Home, 1978–84, from the series Family Pictures and Stories

Carrie Mae Weems, Van and Vera with Kids in the Kitchen, 1978–84, from the series Family Pictures and Stories

Meister: That persistence of vision was actually part of my second question because while this is a retrospective that covers five decades of achievement, there are certain concerns that were central focal points from the start. I’m thinking of Family Pictures and Stories, for instance, which is installed here next to Leave Now!, which was made much more recently. Each of these engages with your family history. And I’m curious when you think about how much time has passed since the person you were in 1978, when you started Family Pictures and Stories, and now. Can you reflect back into where you were when you started this journey and how it feels to see those works now?

Weems: Somehow, I’ve always had this feeling. I wonder how those of you in the audience also feel. I’ve always felt that I was exactly the same person. I remember being eight years old, about seven or eight, sitting on the back porch of my house at sunset, looking out at the sky, wondering who I was and what this universe was, what this world was that I happened to be living in. At eight years old, I already felt like an existentialist. But this sort of feeling that you are who you are, that you are who you are and that the thing that you are changes over time is simply you growing deeper into yourself, and you’re learning to express yourself more specifically, in more complicated ways as you age. But that feeling, the feeling that I’ve always had has been very, very persistent. So the ideas of beginning with something like Family Pictures and Stories and ending with something like Leave! Leave Now! or, for that matter, Preach, they’re all out of the same package. They’re all out of the same suitcase. It’s all out of the same luggage, right?

I am Carrie Mae Weems, the daughter of Myrlie and Carrie Weems. I have six brothers and sisters. I am and we are the children of sharecroppers. And that understanding of where I come from, where my family comes from, how my family evolved, and their relationship to other families is socialization that has simply been a part of my imagination for a long period of time. And so, while Family Pictures and Stories was made forty-five years ago, it looks exactly like Preach, and Preach looks exactly like Leave Now! And all the material is essentially the same because all the material is really coming from someone with a very particular kind of DNA. And I just want to say one other thing about this, this idea that you have this sense that you are who you are, and you are that from the very beginning. And the thing that’s changing all the time is your ability to express who you are now, who you are now, right? So you’re growing deeper into yourself. But the thing that’s amazing and extraordinary to me about who we are as individuals and the power of that is that every single thing that you have touched in the course of your life carries your DNA. That seat that you’re sitting in will carry your DNA. This layer upon layer, upon layer, upon layer, upon layer, upon layer, upon layer will carry your DNA. And that idea of tapping into the possibility of understanding the magnificence of this, that you are leaving behind remnants of yourself everywhere you go is really a fascinating and extraordinary idea.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Great Expectations), 2016

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror), 1990, from the Kitchen Table Series

Meister: Wow. It’s interesting. I’m not sure if I have ever thought of myself as the same person I was as an eight-year-old, but I think there’s a real truth to that. Part of what I’ve loved about this project is that, for all that I can read about you and all that I can study about the work, it feels like there’s always something more to learn. That wasn’t how I thought you were going to answer that question.

Weems: What did you think I was going to say?

Meister: I guess I was approaching it from a more art-historical perspective, in terms of how you were using a documentary-style image and text to approach, to question, the very authenticity of a language of family albums and photographs. And then, I see those same documentary photographs reemerge in Leave Now! in a very different way. But I actually prefer your analysis. That just wasn’t what I was expecting.

Weems: No, you’re not wrong. I think that there was something . . . It’s really interesting to look at, to compare Family Pictures and Stories, for instance, with Kitchen Table Series. At a certain point, one of the things that became important to me as an image maker was that I was not interested in moving through the world and just taking photographs of people indiscriminately, that there was really a method, and that there was a respect for people in the world, and that it was inappropriate really to simply take someone’s photograph and put it on a wall and claim it, right? That there had to be another way. And so, finding that way, finding a way to use the material, to use the tool of photography as a way of inscribing became very important, but also how to bend it using documentary, using that mode, right? Using that kind of expression, but then developing something like the Kitchen Table Series so that it feels as though it’s a documentary, a set of images, but really it’s simply highly constructed.

So that actually became the challenge of how do you make an image now, knowing what you know, having your moral ground where it stands. How do you then interact with both the subject and the object of the photograph? And so, that, of course, then led me into using my own body as a site and as a ground for that kind of exploration, moving from documentary, paying attention to documentary as a wonderful and powerful form, a narrative form that had such ability and expansiveness, but then bending it in a way that allowed me to play with the field and the form in, I think, a rather unique way.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter

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Critical insight into the mind and eye of an artist renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power.

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Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter

Photographs by Carrie Mae Weems. Edited by Sarah Hermanson Meister. Text by Jeffrey Hoone, Dawoud Bey, Dr. Erich Kessel, Dr. Tiana Reid, and Dr. Megan Kincaid.

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Description

Critical insight into the mind and eye of an artist renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power.

Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter puts the artist—as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys—at the center of the discourse. Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. A comprehensive monograph, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1981–82) to her most recent series on the Black church. Throughout the book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the iconic artist’s mind and eye. Newly commissioned essays and additional contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars across generations underscore the singular value of Weems’s vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter will accompany a related exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, opening in April 2025.

The book is copublished by Aperture and Allemandi Editore.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 264
Number of images: 170
Publication date: 2025-07-15
Measurements: 8.5 x 10 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115841

Press

“Weems is at the heart of everything she does. But these artworks are not ‘about her’: they are for every woman, every Black individual, anyone who knows what it is like to face inequality or have their voice silenced. That is what makes The Heart of the Matter so important.”—Aesthetica

Contributors

Carrie Mae Weems (born in Portland, Oregon, 1953) is a widely influential artist whose work gives a voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. She has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the US Department of State’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London. 
Sarah Hermanson Meister is executive director at Aperture. She worked in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art for more than twenty-five years, where she curated acclaimed exhibitions on the work of Josef Albers, Bill Brandt, and Brazilian modernist photographers, as well as Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and many more. 

Jeffrey Hoone was director of Light Work, Syracuse, New York, for forty years and is a working artist. He has written extensively on photography and served on peer review panels for the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is married to Carrie Mae Weems.

Dawoud Bey makes groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bey’s many books include the Aperture titles Class Pictures (2007), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (2019), and Elegy (2023).

Dr. Erich Kessel is assistant professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. A scholar of contemporary art and critical Black studies, Kessel has published essays on Jacob Lawrence and Jacolby Satterwhite. He is coeditor of a collection of sketches entitled An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989 (2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LBGTQ Nonfiction. Kessel received his PhD in the history of art and African American studies from Yale University in 2023. 

Dr. Tiana Reid is assistant professor of English at York University, Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include Black literature, gender, and labor. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Art in America, Bookforum, Frieze, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, among other places. She is a former editor at the New Inquiry and Pinko. In 2021, she received her PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. 

Dr. Megan Kincaid serves on the faculties of the Cooper Union and New York University. Her scholarship reconstructs the history of Modernism in the Americas through the lens of critical refugee theory and mobility studies. Her writing has been published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Duke University Press and has appeared in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Gagosian Quarterly, among others. She has organized exhibitions of José Antonio Fernández-Muro, Cauleen Smith, Frank Stella, and others. She received her PhD from New York University in 2024. 

Meister: Another thing that I learned about you over the course of this project is that you are a deeply spiritual person, that religion plays more of a central role in your life than I had understood. I had an inkling when I first read this quote from an interview you and Deb Willis did for To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Aperture and Peabody Museum Press, 2020). You said, “I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown miraculously.” And I think that word muse has a particular meaning we can get to—“The muse evolved out of my resistance to photographing people without permission. And in the process, I discovered an entirely new way of working and indeed discovered myself. Praise God.” And it’s really only over the course of doing this project that I realized that that wasn’t just about you grappling with questions of consent in photography. That was what suggested to me, like Skip Gates’s quote, that centering your self could be the organizing principle. You weren’t just a leitmotif. You as a muse, you as a guide, also feels like where you’re pulling us into Preach. Would you tell everyone here a little bit about how this new series emerged?

Weems: I’ll try. I’ll try. In one way or another, I’ve been photographing . . .  I’ve been stepping in and out of churches for a long time, stepping in and out of churches for a very long . . . I’m actually not a deeply spiritual person.

Meister: Really?

Weems: I’m a big sinner.

Meister: You can be a sinner and be spiritual.

Weems: Right? Yes. No, right? I appear to be that way, right? It’s a wonderful trick.

Meister: You fooled me.

Weems: No, but I’m interested in it. And of course, as I age, as I age, this question of mortality is looming large. I wake up every morning like, I’m really still here. I am still here.

Carrie Mae Weems, Leave Now!, 2022

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled, from the series Preach, 2024

Meister: Thank goodness.

Weems: Thank goodness. And I have all these questions. And I think in part, I go to church. I have a church that I go to, and I very much like my pastor. It’s a very progressive church. The church in the Black community is unique. I have a couple of things that I’d like to say that I think are important that maybe haven’t become clear. I think of Preach as being a great sign and Family Pictures and Stories and Leave! Leave Now! as being extraordinary sites of resilience, of incredible resiliency.

So, when I started looking at the church, I’d been photographing, as I said, in and out of the church for a very, very long time, thirty-five, forty-five years. The first photographs I made were actually in a Black church. The Black Church is a social organization. It’s a social tool. It’s not just for religion. It was really the fundamental way in which Black people in the United States primarily organized themselves for resistance. It was the one place where you could be safe. Every major civil rights movement in the United States was essentially organized within the Black Church, not the quote, unquote, “Black community,” in a sort of broad way, but rather in a very specific way.

So Martin Luther King Jr. arises out of the Black Church. Rosa Parks arises out of the Black Church. Malcolm X arises out of the Black Church. Muhammad Ali arises out of the Black Church. It’s a very important and, again, safe place. And at the same time, of course, the Black Church was always a church under attack. So they were bombed, they were burned, they were destroyed, they were hunted, and this, of course, continues to be true. The number of bombings that happen around Black churches continuously throughout the South is real. It didn’t happen fifty years ago or twenty years ago. It is an ongoing occurrence, right? Throughout the 2000s, there were Black churches bombed all throughout the South, burned all throughout the South. It doesn’t make a lot of news, but that is the reality.

And so, for me, going to the Black Church was not simply a matter of my spiritual practice, but rather going there as a site of community, as a space where Black people are allowed to be who they are in a society that ultimately does not welcome them and as a place where they are able to organize in a more consistent and persistent way. It’s a really important aspect to how the Black community and how Black people have actually formulated themselves in the United States. And it’s really very, very important. So, this idea about resiliency, about the ability to overcome, is one of the reasons that the church has been so important. And, of course, the great song “We Shall Overcome,” right? It’s anchored in the very root of the church and this idea that we should overcome. And the song is there for us all to know and all to hear. So, yes, I am a big sinner. I drink, I smoke, I curse, I swear, I hang out, and then, I go to church on Sunday and talk about it.

Meister: I suspect a few of us can relate.

Weems: So, this idea that there’s this crooked road, it’s very important. It’s very important. It’s very important to understand.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled, from the series Preach, 2024

Carrie Mae Weems, Road Sign, 1991–92
All photographs courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Meister: That crooked road image is a recurring motif, a picture you made in the early ’90s, but that more recently has been integrated into Leave Now! and Preach in different forms.

Weems: One of the things that’s always interesting to me is trying to understand. I realized, for instance, that this work is very much in dialogue with my audience here, that it has the same kinds of questions that I’m asking or being asked here, perhaps in a slightly different way, but the issues and the ideas are fairly consistent.

I was wondering for you and for Antonio [Carloni, deputy director, Gallerie d’Italia, Turin], when did you decide that you really wanted to work with me. What was it about the work that you thought might translate well in a larger exhibition? What were you trying to get at, and why did you think that this work might be important to share with a larger audience?

Meister: Well, I’ll start by saying I think that now is a moment where being willing to ask where you’re coming from with respect to the most critical issues we’re facing as a society is important. The need to be brave and vulnerable, to hold to your convictions, but also, to actually listen. I think these are skills that you don’t have to be young or old, American or from anywhere else, Black or white, to know that these skills need our urgent attention. And to my mind, there is no artist whose work points in directions that all of us can follow to get us there more than yours.

Weems: It’s so interesting.

Meister: Ultimately, I think that when you put yourself at the heart of the matter that is not only an invitation to each of us, but it’s also an expectation. It’s asking us, “What are you doing?” And I think there’s a bravery in that. There’s a centeredness in that, and I think that, honestly, every human being on this planet would benefit from being in that space, from asking oneself the questions that you’re laying down. We should be picking them up.

Weems: And then, I’ll just say this as well. I’ve tried to very much live my life in a multifaceted way. I enjoy having friends from every conceivable walk of life. And so, my friends are Black, and they’re white, and they’re Jewish, and they’re Italian, and they’re French, and they’re Japanese. And it’s through that mix of having this dynamic life that matters to me. If being engaged with the politics of difference is important, then I really need to live my life in that way, right? That I need to have friends from and be in dialogue with a multiplicity of people in order to evolve. And so, to the extent that we are narrow, to the extent that our lives are built around the thing that makes us most comfortable, which is usually people that look exactly like us, is to the extent that we’ve lost sight of the deeper complexities of our humanity, that everybody looks like me. Everybody looks like me.

So, this, I think, is really important. How do you then live your life? If you want change, then how do you live your life? If you want diversity, then how do you live your life? How do you bring diversity into your life? This is my question. And it’s the question that really then is instilled in all the work. If you are interested in diversity, then how do you bring that in a dynamic way into your life. And diversity among many, many different kinds of things, not simply along the boundaries of race but also along the stratospheres of reality and possibility.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter is on view at Fotomuseum Antwerpen through August 23, 2026.

Lemaire’s creative codirectors, Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran, acknowledge the history of the site but are careful to resist mythologizing or essentializing an idea of French fashion epitomized by la Parisienne. Instead, they remain endlessly fascinated by a concoction that is the essence of Place des Vosges: a person seen walking in an arresting outfit of the finest fabrics but also wearing something of the street, in startling combination. Lemaire launched his brand in 1991, before pausing it in 2002 to work on clothing design for the French sportswear company Lacoste and the luxury goods firm Hermès. The opening of the first Lemaire store in 2008, followed by Tran’s joining as co–artistic director in 2010, brought new focus to the endeavor.

While a Lemaire collection might at first look like a set of classic garment styles, closer inspection reveals a sensitivity to volume of shape, textile surfaces, and high-specification finishing. Lemaire has stores in Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, and Chengdu, and one opening in Shanghai in 2026. While Paris remains the starting point in Lemaire’s creative process, the brand is networked to a global understanding of the varied and rich approaches to dressing with style. On a shimmering summer morning, I met with Lemaire and Tran at their atelier, where we spoke about the role of photographic images in their designs, the narrative power of clothes, and the enduring allure of chic.

Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran in their office in Paris, 2021
Photograph by Estelle Hanania, courtesy Lemaire

Bookmarks in Christophe Lemaire’s copy of August Sander’s People of the 20th Century (1980)

Alistair O’Neill: I want to begin by asking you about a quote in your manifesto, which I really admire, where you explain how French style interacts with global influences. You say that “French style is much like Paris today, a mixed fabric that draws strength from diversity.” What do you mean by this?

Christophe Lemaire: Well, because sometimes the city is portrayed a little bit like Emily in Paris, a kind of caricature of Paris—Paris becoming Disneyland, if you will. And some fashion brands may have a little bit too much exploited this idea of la Parisienne. For us, that approach is so limiting, as we grew up in a much more mixed Paris, in Belleville and in the northeast of Paris—with influences from Africa, the Middle East, the Maghreb, China, Vietnam—it’s a melting pot.

I think it’s interesting that we always find older people very stylish. So, we will very often refer to the very chic Arab grandfather in Belleville. And this sense of dignity is something very inspiring. Or it might be an elderly Chinese or Vietnamese lady, they will have a specific way of wearing their clothes.

Sarah-Linh Tran: Comfort is the most important factor, but somehow it becomes very chic, very dignified.

Lemaire: And, of course, there’s a tradition of the Parisian intellectual bourgeoisie, who we’re also inspired by. There is a specific tradition of being stylish and somehow quite classical, in a way, but with a free mind.

Tran: There’s a sense of effortlessness.

O’Neill: But it also comes with a sense of detachment. It’s almost as if it’s not conscious.

Lemaire: Yes, but it’s also very rooted in literature and cinema. When I think what it is that we like a lot about a book called Cheap Chic [published in New York in 1975 and written by Caterine Milinaire and Carol Troy], it is this idea of collage, clothes from different parts of the world but also from fashion history.

O’Neill: It’s an approach to dressing that is irreverent—so it appreciates the qualities that make some things very expensive, but it’s also about understanding what to value in the inexpensive.

Lemaire: And also accepting history, difference, and memory. In a time of amnesia, maybe it’s important to be reminded that creation doesn’t come from scratch. It’s always the layers of references, and knowledge about history.

Tran: You can find diversity in our silhouette, especially this season [Spring/Summer 2026]. I think there is something a bit like cadavre exquis.

O’Neill: The Surrealist game exquisite corpse.

Tran: So, like the game, we draw the arche-type of a trench coat, and then the bottom is like a áo dài, a traditional Vietnamese dress; or you have an Arab skirt that is very oriental worn with a Western cowboy shirt. We always try to mix the influences in clothes, to blur the differences.

Lemaire: At the end of the day, style has a kind of mystery about it. You see someone in the street passing, and you’re like, Who is this person? Style is very much about that. It’s a bit unknown, it’s not easy to categorize.

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Sarah-Linh Tran’s desk, spreads from Cheap Chic and Taishi Hirokawa’s Sonomama Sonomama: High Fashion in the Japanese Countryside (1988) and an early bag design by Carlos Peñafiel for Lemaire

Bookshelves in Christophe Lemaire’s office

O’Neill: It might well be because it doesn’t necessarily make visual sense when you look at it. So it is like an exquisite corpse, it is like a cheap-chic idea. It’s a collage of visual sources. A lot of this thinking about dressing arises out of the 1970s. It reminds me of Anna Piaggi and the eclecticism of what she wore, with her style being both a history of fashion and a history of all the outfits she ever wore.

Lemaire: Yes, there is a certain eclecticism that we do love. And we are very much interested in traditional clothing from everywhere around the world.

Tran: We also talk a lot about layers. We have this image of a cute onion, pulling a layer to leave a second skin, then another layer, then another layer, then another! Yes, that’s built into the ethos of Lemaire.

“At the end of the day, style has a kind of mystery about it.”

O’Neill: How do photographic images function in your design process?

Lemaire: Well, it’s a document. We are very much using and watching images, both photographs and film, as inspiration.

Tran: I agree. I think what’s interesting to point out is how much the use of images has evolved. When we started the brand around sixteen years ago, fewer images were available online. There was no Pinterest, but there was Tumblr. There was the library, and there were books. So you had to take a photograph and then print it to make use of the image. It really became an action, a choice that was very considered. And it’s true that today we refrain from the pile of images, because we get lost in them. If you look at the wall in Christophe’s office, it’s always the same figure that stays there. We want to stick with this energy. We’re not so much into mood boards.

Lemaire: There are images and photographers that we constantly go back to.

Tran: Cheap Chic, or Denis Colomb.

Lemaire: Or August Sander, or Avedon. So, it’s being a little bit stubborn.

O’Neill: And it’s not just images, it’s the books as well. So, it’s not a library, it’s more like a shelf of key works.

Lemaire: Yes, exactly. Another is East Meets West [about the work of the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake].

Aurore Clément in Chantal Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna, 1978
Courtesy Janus Films

Still from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red, 1994
© Miramax and courtesy Photofest

O’Neill: Irving Penn as a reference is hard to beat. My favorite is the book that he made of early twentieth-century couture. It was based on the Diana Vreeland exhibition The 10s, the 20s, the 30s: Inventive Clothes: 1909–1939, and they’re really cropped, detailed shots.

Lemaire: We look a lot at photography books but also cinema. So sometimes we do screenshots in a movie, because generally it’s what we are inspired by. For a time, we were really into the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Tran: And also the actress Aurore Clément. It’s just a way to look at women walking in the city, transferring from one place to another. Moving images help understand that rhythm, that dynamism.

Lemaire: At the very start of our design process, we always put the simple reality of why do we cherish certain clothes? What do we expect from the clothes? When we wake up in the morning, we have to dress. We don’t have much time. So, it’s a very down-to-earth approach of what makes certain pieces of our wardrobe so precious for us. What is this special quality? It’s about the cut. It’s about the way it ages. It’s about the depth of the pocket. It’s about the story it tells.

O’Neill: I wanted to ask you about a photography project by Osma Harvilahti you staged as an exhibition in your Paris store last year titled A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, a Sense of Tune. What I really liked about the photographs and film was the visual sense of velocity, of clothes moving against the elements when worn by scooter riders in a way that was really focused. For me, it was a clever way to resolve the problem of visualizing clothes that have a degree of subtlety to them. How did it come about?

Tran: I realized a lot of things about this project after it was done. We were fascinated by the way people dress, protect themselves from the rain, from the sun, on the scooters, and the density of people. I think what we do here is tell people how to look at things a bit differently. With this project, we wanted to show a part of the world where people move differently. It was a bit audacious because, of course, Vietnam is not associated with luxury. But I think we did it in a way so there isn’t a discrepancy between the people who modeled and the brand. We wanted to showcase the freedom we felt, because for the Vietnamese people in Hanoi everybody has a scooter. You have to have a scooter, otherwise you cannot move from one place to another. And I think when we’re talking about the experience of dressing people in the atelier, and when we are discussing shooting a project, we really have to ask, “Are we going to enjoy the process? Are we going to learn something out of it?” This is why I like to start from reality or a sociological approach, for example, because it anchors the project, and it makes you discover a different dimension. The experience, I think, was like collecting a memory, and images have to be anchored in this physicality.

Lemaire: We love style, we love fashion. But from our own experience, style is passing someone in the street who has a way they move, or a way to walk. It can also be the certain way someone moves their hand, or stands. So that’s why the range of images we now produce allows us to show the clothes from different points of views.

O’Neill: We operate in a visual culture that commodifies the fashion show in image terms. It’s about how it works on the iPhone on Instagram—straight up and down, in two dimensions. So subtlety, texture, and quality of make are often compromised. I agree that you have to find other solutions, to try different ways of presenting things. So, do you see your stores as being a forum for engaging with photography as much as ceramics or other types of designed objects that you sell to complement your clothes and accessories?

Tran: That’s the forum it would be great to have. You know, we’re going to open a store in Shanghai as well. We have a lot of ambition to make this space very lively and generous.

Christophe Lemaire’s desk

Sarah-Linh Tran’s desk, with books including Éditions Siegelbaum-Tran’s Carlos Peñafiel (2025) and Carol Troy and Caterine Milinaire’s Cheap Chic (1975)
Photographs by Nhu Xuan Hua for Aperture, 2025

O’Neill: And how is your new publishing venture going to sit in relation to that kind of activity?

Tran: I don’t know. We did the first book on the Chilean artist Carlos Peñafiel because I think it’s important for Lemaire to portray the people we work with, by going deeper into their artistry, showing people like Carlos who have an erotic sensitivity.

O’Neill: You’ve worked with Carlos Peñafiel over a number of years, so it’s about honoring a long-standing creative relationship. It used to be something that was more valued in fashion. So for me, it’s a very generous statement to start with.

How do you see the publishing house moving forward? Do you have ideas about the kinds of books you’d like to publish?

Tran: There’s so many different things! I have many projects in mind, dealing with architecture, new editions of existing books. I’m also passionate about children’s books from the 1970s.

O’Neill: It’s actually quite refreshing to hear that you’re being intuitive about it, and that you’re letting that guide you.

Tran: I was very impressed by the exhibition on the visionary French publisher and curator Robert Delpire, staged in 2009 at Rencontres d’Arles, France, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. It was so emotional. He said that for him, publishing is like collecting memories for someone who has amnesia, or something like this.

O’Neill: I interviewed his widow, Sarah Moon, last month as I’m writing a chapter about her for an anthology of women fashion photographers. They had an incredible life together, and he was important to the development of her work, as he published a number of her books.

Tran: There’s a lot of freedom in the way Delpire navigated through his varied book projects. It is beautiful and inspiring to openly resist fitting in a box.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue.”

Matthew Leifheit: Here we are in your show. How did this come to be?

Jack Pierson: They approached me like a year and a half ago, told me about the series that they were doing called The Miami Years, and knew that I had spent some time here in the ’80s.

Leifheit: Oh, it’s a series of exhibitions called The Miami Years?

Pierson: Yes. Because the last one was Rachel Feinstein who grew up here. And then Nam June Paik spent time here, which I didn’t know. The last ten or twenty years of his life, he kept a studio here. I had no idea. And so this is the last of the series.

Leifheit: You started coming down here in what year?

Pierson: I came down Christmas ’84 and wound up kind of being stranded until June of ’85. Came down for Christmas vacation, had no intention of winding up here, but I ran out of money and started to really enjoy it. So we took jobs.

Leifheit: Who did you come down with?

Pierson: I came down with Andre, who’s the subject of this cloud of snapshots.

Leifheit: And Andre was like a boyfriend?

Pierson: I was trying to force him to be my boyfriend. And ultimately, I had some success, but it took a long time.

Leifheit: What was the resistance?

Pierson: He just wasn’t as into me as I was into him, but I finally wore him down.

Leifheit: Where were you staying at first?

Pierson: That’s the first room we landed in—a hotel room on Ocean Drive, way down near Third Street across from the park. We had driven straight through and just crashed for two days. When we woke up, I took that picture of him.

Leifheit: And the rest of these photographs?

Pierson: The rest of these are from that time between Christmas and June. Or New York—some are from New York before we left. This is his first day. I got a job at Wolfie’s, which was a delicatessen. He got a job being a busboy at Joe’s Stone Crab, which was across the street from the apartment we moved into. Which is now a parking lot. When we came back a few years later, we found it torn down. 

Leifheit: Tell me about the installations where you recreate pieces of that apartment—the kitchen table and the bedroom. Why do you want to go back to those places?

Pierson: The bedroom piece I made specifically for this show. The building had a central courtyard; it was called the David Court. And we moved in there. I wound up making these pieces about it. There’s another piece that’s the kitchen table. These two installation pieces that I made really early on were based on the setup here.

Leifheit: You were already nostalgic by then.

Pierson: In ’91, ’92—only six years later—I was already like, Those are the best years of my life. I want to see them again.

Leifheit: What made that time in Miami so good?

Pierson: I had so much fun. I met all these people. My friend Christine who was a social worker. Stewart became my friend, but I met him because he was a client of hers. We wound up taking a trip cross-country. It was not without drama.

Leifheit: And these photographs became your first New York show.

Pierson: Yes. These photographs were what comprised, in 1990, my first show ever in New York. It was at Simon Watson. They were just made at a photomat for ten dollars and pinned to the wall with pins. Even though it was 1990, I had taken all these in ’85 and was building my library of images since I graduated from art school and lost all connection to darkrooms.

Leifheit: You went to school for performance art, I remember, but you were trying to be a photographer.

Pierson: I was trying to be a real color photographer. Do you know what I mean?

Leifheit: Who were you looking at then? I know Jason Byron Gavann was an early influence.

Pierson: Mark Morrisroe, for sure. And Diane Arbus, William Eggleston. When I saw Midnight Cowboy, I was like, Oh my God, it’s me and Mark Morrisroe—because Mark Morrisroe walked with a limp and he was dark-haired, and I was at that time trying hard to give a western cowboy sort of thing. And, of course, the last scene of that movie is where they arrive in Miami on the bus and Dustin Hoffman’s character is dead. I was just finding my way. I didn’t ever think of myself as a photographer with a capital P, but I thought it was a possibility. I was trying to take “good pictures.”

Leifheit: I remember you telling me something about your self-portraits, where you said something like, “I know it’s one of that series when it looks like an image I’ve already seen before.” Am I wildly misquoting you? You’re interested in archetypes or something.

Pierson: Yeah. A fancy curator said, “Genre photography.” I don’t think of it like that. I think of it like, This looks like a ’50s movie-star picture, but I took it. It flawlessly recreates like—

Leifheit: Tab Hunter.

Pierson: Yeah. Or something like that. And I took it in ten years ago. So this one’s more recent.  

Leifheit: There are later works in the show that aren’t from that time.

Pierson: Exactly. Later in the ’80s I started shooting for Honcho and other porn magazines. When I took these pictures, it was the same feeling—like, Oh my God. It’s an iconic American blond. I’ve done it.

Leifheit: Do you think there’s any relationship between that and the way that gay people sometimes really attach themselves to pop music, or these things that are kind of culturally shared normalcies?

Pierson: What do you mean?

Leifheit: Or maybe another way to think about it is like clone culture, where people really latched on to these emblems of mainstream society and used them as a way of camouflaging or creating a new language where people in the same community could recognize each other. And I wonder if there’s something similar about wanting to make types of photography that look like an American stock man.

Pierson: Maybe. I don’t know if it’s a difference between artistic and cultural.

Leifheit: Well, you participate in a cultural level because, in my understanding, you do a certain amount of commercial work. Don’t you do the underwear boxes for Calvin Klein?

Pierson: Not consistently. 

Leifheit: I’ve always thought that was kind of powerful, though, because I think some of my earliest self-realizations occurred in the underwear section looking at these generic packages. And I do feel like infiltrating culture on that level, where you’re producing images that don’t exist in an art context, and having them be subversive is hard.

Pierson: I always say yes to magazines because it gets out there. A stack of magazines could hang out in somebody’s attic for forty years, like they did when I was a teenager.

Leifheit: Were you looking at Photoplay?

Pierson: When I was a teenager? Yeah. All that stuff.

Leifheit: I mean, I also like the kind of idea that those boxes end up discarded or those magazines end up discarded, and there’s a certain amount of—

Pierson: Nobody thinks about it.

Leifheit: How do you feel about trash? It seems like in certain instances, you are using things that are trash, or you’re reusing your own images after they have been run through the mill of culture and then lifting them back up again.

Pierson: Or boxes that should by every means be thrown out.

Leifheit: Yeah, tell me about that. 

Pierson: I can’t let go, and because it still seems like good shit to me. And Kodak, what could be more Americana?

Leifheit: And George Eastman was maybe queer too.

Pierson: Oh, I didn’t even know that. 

Leifheit: Well, he was a “confirmed bachelor.” But I think there is something that makes me think of that thing you were saying in your talk with Klaus Biesenbach about finding these objects at flea markets on Second Avenue in the late ’80s, old records and pictures of Joan Crawford, that had clearly come from the apartments of gay men who were dying of AIDS. There’s something about when things are divorced from their emotional significance to people and become trash that I always find to be a little bit, I don’t know, sweet and sad and moving.

Pierson: There’s built-in pathos, which is also known as cheap sentiment. Which— 

Leifheit: Is like the language of my people.

Pierson: Which is the language of our people, but it is not the language of the art world. That’s why even photography is a second-class citizen.

Leifheit: I’m hoping it’s cyclical and we’re just in a moment where people are not interested.

Pierson: Photography entered sanctified or sanctioned spaces in the ’90s through people like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin—

Leifheit: David Hockney.

Pierson: Now everybody’s a photographer with a phone, so it feels cheap again. That’s why these things started occurring in my practice. In an array like this one, you can see all of it at one time, as opposed to editing a video where it goes by fast. I’m showing you different types of color printing. Color Xerox was a moment we had. I personally think that’s as good as any color print, and it’s a color Xerox.

Leifheit: You can see a history of photographic processes, and it engages time in a way that is hard to do in a single image. So this time in Miami had lived in your mind as utopian, in some way. And how does it fit into what more has happened since then? I’m curious to talk about the installation of the bedroom. 

Pierson: I wanted to do it back then, but beds were everywhere in art in 1992—Robert Gober, Felix, Nan. So I didn’t. Thirty years later, I could.

Leifheit: Was it built from memory?

Pierson: Just from memory. I tried to be offhand about it. At the time I was obsessed with jails and serial killers. I wanted it to look like artwork a serial killer would make. Everything had to be useful.

Leifheit: One of the main cultural contributions of gay people is in the realm of interior decorating and that those rooms so rarely get preserved. I mean, I think there are amazing artists who are people who make a beautiful home, and that is their work. That kind of art is almost never institutionalized. Were these interiors important to you in that way where they were life as art? Or is it only in recreating them for the gallery that the artwork happens?

Pierson: I think they were art at the time, but I would never have said that. It becomes lodged in your mind, and you want to revisit it. I have done a number of installations of stages, like this one [moves to another room with blue lighting and a small, checkered linoleum stage in the corner]. I spent years standing in nightclubs at one in the morning, looking at an empty stage and thinking, That’s what I call art.

Leifheit: And what about this giant image of a hunk that is next to it?

Pierson: That’s my present to myself for finishing the show. It feels like bathhouse decoration from the ’70s. I love it. I like this picture, because again, it’s like . . . I don’t know. It looks like from a book of matches, from a gay nightclub or something, or the ad in a gay-bar rag. Something from Milwaukee that would say “Pegasus.” And I love the look in his eyes. I still think it’s an incredibly hot, generic picture. I think it’s very sexy. And so I love the fact that it’s this big in my museum show for no other reason than it gives me a kick and it makes sense of this whole room. 

Leifheit: You’ve rephotographed your own ephemera. A re-scan of one of your older pictures in publication is enlarged to almost billboard proportions.

Pierson: That came after my mother died. She had boxes of my clippings. So I scanned them and made them big. This is the first time I was ever in print—Bomb magazine, 1986. There was a moment, probably like ten years ago, when I was anti-photography. There was nothing for me to photograph in my daily life as an old person.

Leifheit: But you don’t feel that way anymore, clearly.

Pierson: Well, my daily life photography is on my phone, and that’s sweet and cute, but—

Leifheit: You don’t think your cell-phone pictures of your daily life today, of your sweet and cute boyfriend and everything, will not one day end up in an array like this?

Pierson: Maybe one day, because photography to me also takes time to cook.

Jack Pierson: The Miami Years is on view at the Bass Museum of Art in South Beach, Miami, through August 9, 2026.

Last December, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began Operation Metro Surge, a draconian attempt to intimidate, arrest, abduct, and deport undocumented immigrants in Minneapolis and St. Paul. As some three thousand federal agents occupied the Twin Cities, citizen groups organized through Signal chats to follow ICE vehicles, swarming streets and neighborhoods and blowing whistles to warn people in hiding that their lives were at risk. When Renee Macklin Good, a mother of three, was killed by an ICE agent while in her own car during a protest, the story of a city’s fight for its community drew international attention. Veteran photographers like Philip Montgomery and Philip Cheung published dramatic visual reportage for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, respectively, while staff reporters and photographers for The Minnesota Star Tribune filed stories from all corners of the Twin Cities. By the time the Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal immigration agents at a protest on January 24, the combined horror of what was happening in Minnesota—witnessed and broadcast by photojournalists and citizens wielding phones, local reporters and staffers from national media—the consequences of ICE’s actions had sparked near-universal condemnation.

Katie Rausch is the assistant managing editor for photography at the Star Tribune, which employs eleven staff photographers, many of whom have long-standing ties to the Twin Cities. On February 7, the newspaper published “31 Days in Minnesota,” a visual record of a tumultuous period of the city’s history. It’s a period that may ostensibly conclude as ICE draws down their presence, but one that will leave a lasting impact and generational trauma, especially for immigrants and others who had to remain in hiding or alter their daily lives to protect their families. We recently spoke with Rausch about how the Star Tribune covered Operation Metro Surge and the essential role that local photographers play in regional and national media. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. —Brendan Embser and Zack Hatfield

We wanted to talk about your role in producing photography for the Star Tribune with regard to what has happened—and what is continuing to happen—over the last several weeks after the deployment of some three thousand federal agents to Minneapolis. How do you approach this kind of coverage, and how do you work with your staff photographers or freelancers when you’re telling a local story that’s becoming a national story?

Katie Rausch: My role as an assistant managing editor here at The Minnesota Star Tribune is overseeing and directing coverage for the photo team and our video team. We have eleven staff photographers and one full-time dedicated videographer, along with three additional photo-editors. Everyone is on this story at the moment, in different ways. We’ve really been in a kind of all-hands-on-deck situation from the get-go.

Because we have such robust numbers on the photo staff, we don’t really use freelancers consistently. And if I’m being completely honest about that, I feel more comfortable working with our staffers on breaking news stories like this, because we can give them the training and the gear that they need. We have our working practices, and we have safety protocols that are pretty robust, and so we’re on the same page. We’ve had some freelancers that have helped us supplement coverage in other places, but our staff has really swarmed to this story for our coverage in the last month.

Different staff photojournalists work on different parts of this coverage. Richard Tsong-Taatarii and Alex Kormann, for example, have been covering a lot of the day-to-day actions of federal agents. Some people are covering the community response, things like protests, aid efforts, and vigils. And we have journalists working on stories about the people directly impacted by immigration policy. We want to document this time in our community as fully as we can.

What are the internal conversations in the newsroom about the ethical frameworks of covering ICE? Covering ICE as a photographer raises a lot of different questions about protecting the safety of the subject and your staff.

Rausch: Many of our conversations are centered around safety. I’m concerned with everyone’s safety, both our sources and our journalists. I think this kind of coverage does carry some inherent risk for journalists, but our goal is to try to do it in the safest way we possibly can. For us, that meant having domestic hostile environment first-aid training in the middle of all this through the International Media Support Group run by Chris Post. We also invested in a lot of PPE (personal protective equipment), and we have safety protocols so that editors are in consistent contact with photographers in the field. So if we’re in a situation like the day that Alex Pretti was killed or the day that Renee Good was killed, and there are large numbers of people out, protesting in an intense way, and law enforcement might also be responding in a particularly intense way—they might be using chemical agents to disperse the crowd—I’m really concerned about making sure the photographers are able to operate as safely as possible and to mitigate as much risk as they can. 

We are a local news organization. We were here before. We’ll be here after.

Aside from the breaking news coverage, we also do a fair amount of work with sources in our community who might not have documentation or are concerned about their status or have just general concerns around their safety if we print things that identify them. We want to make sure that they are all right with the amount of information that we share. We do things like photograph people in a way that is still descriptive but nonidentifying—making sure they’re comfortable telling their story.

The events in Minneapolis have been covered by not only your staff photojournalists and photographers working for national outlets, but also citizens using their phones. How do you evaluate and verify video footage that you may be linking within a story? And how do you handle the recirculation of bystander-captured images that become absorbed into the media ecosystem?

Rausch: Video has been so important to this story. I think the photos and videos that our team is producing are excellent, and I think we are documenting this moment in our community about as thoroughly as we can. But so many of these incidents with law enforcement happen really fast, before we’re able to get there. So we’re working with much more user-generated video than usual. 

People on the streets are documenting so much of what’s happening. A huge part of the story is that official accounts from law enforcement are disputed by the videos that we’re seeing. So being able to evaluate and analyze these videos has been important. We have done two analysis pieces where we compared several different angles from video taken during these incidents where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed. I think those analysis pieces offer readers a much better understanding of those events. 

We have had tremendous reader response to all of our journalism, and we want to serve them as best we possibly can and to show them the most honest picture of the reporting. We did a live stream last week with a couple of our reporters and one of our photojournalists who’s been covering this to talk a little bit about what that coverage has looked like for them. That included a conversation around one of the pictures that Richard Tsong-Taatarii took of an agent spraying a chemical substance directly into a protestor’s face as they were held on the ground, and talking about just what was the scene like: How did that picture come into being? How was Rich able to be there for that moment? We want people to understand not just the things that they’re seeing, but how they happened.

When a still photograph is taken by a nonprofessional photographer and becomes newsworthy, or even becomes a defining symbol—for example, the image of Liam Conejo Ramos being detained on January 20 in his blue hat and Spider Man backpack—what is the protocol for republication?

Rausch: If somebody were to tweet out a picture, for example, we could embed that tweet into our coverage, and that is not technically republishing that image. If we wanted to take an image and run it in the newspaper, republish it on our website as a stand-alone image devoid of the context of the social media post, we would need to obtain permission from the copyright holder or their representative. In the case of Liam, it was the Columbia Heights School District, with permission from the family, that distributed that picture, so we knew that we had permission to run it. We want to abide by copyright law and protection. So that’s the first stop anytime we’re talking about a reader-submitted photo or a third-party-generated picture.

How do you know where to mobilize your photographers? Signal has become such a huge tool in Minneapolis. Are your photographers on Signal? Are they coordinating with people to find ICE raids through that?

Rausch: One of our photographers, Richard, was in a couple of the Signal chats working with people two months in advance of the surge. He identified himself as a journalist in every situation, and so with their permission, he was following up on a lot of what people were doing. He was checking those scenes out before this was really a national news story in the way that it has become.

Since then, the Signal chats have just exploded. They’re huge. I live in the city, and I was in a couple of neighborhood chats for a few days, and there were just hundreds and hundreds of messages every single day. It’s a lot of information to sift through. There’s an entire protocol—you want to make sure that you are identifying yourself as a journalist and that you’re working appropriately and respectfully and ethically within those spaces. And we do have a couple of people who are still working that way, in part because they’re on assignment to find ICE operations on a day-to-day basis to document them.

Do you see a tension between protecting undocumented people in photographs and the demand that ICE agents stop wearing masks? ICE agents are also in many photographs that we’ve seen in the coverage of this story.

Rausch: Well, we abide by the NPPA Code of Ethics for Visual Journalists and the SPJ Code of Ethics, and minimizing harm is really important to us. Members of law enforcement are public servants. They are accountable to the public—they’re working for the taxpayer—and documenting their actions is a big part of our mission. When we’re working with private people, particularly in their homes or businesses, we are always balancing out the potential for harm against the need to inform the public of what’s going on, to make sure that we are documenting this moment in time. 

For us, it really isn’t about who should be wearing a mask and who shouldn’t. That’s not really our place to say. Our concern is: How do we weigh the need for the coverage that we’re providing to our readership, to our community, against potential risk to sources who participate in that coverage? We want to make sure that private people who work with us are fully informed and that they’re giving full consent, that they understand what we’re asking and how the photographs might be used, and what that looks like for them. Some people decline to work with us, but we have had many people who want their stories told.

As an editor, how does it feel when other photographers come to Minneapolis to tell this story for national or international news outlets? 

Rausch: There have been so many people doing incredible work. There are local freelancers who our photographers work alongside every day that are doing phenomenal things that I really admire—Tim Evans, Jaida Grey Eagle, Stephen Maturen. David Guttenfelder’s been here and has done really impactful coverage as well for The New York Times. People are in the field supporting each other and working to keep each other safe, and, from my understanding from our photographers, photojournalists have been very collaborative overall.

The Washington Post recently decided to eliminate virtually all of their staff photographer positions. What do you think that signals for the future of in-house photojournalism as more outlets decide to outsource their photo departments to agencies and freelancers?

Rausch: It’s really, really tough to watch colleagues lose their jobs and to see storied institutions be in a position where they have to make cuts that are that deep. For us, having a robust visual journalism team is just crucial for the work we do. I would point to Elizabeth Flores, who has been here since 2006 and taken decades to cultivate sources. She’s telling stories with people whose lives are directly impacted by immigration policy; being a long-term member of this staff allows her to really invest herself in this work. It’s been indispensable in helping our readers understand the situation. We are proud of our staff photographers and proud of the fact that we are able to invest in visual journalism. We are a local news organization. We were here before. We’ll be here after.