La Jetée is the story of a man marked by an image from his peacetime childhood, an image of a female face that stays with him throughout and beyond World War Three, into a desperate era in which Paris has been rendered uninhabitable by atomic violence. The strength of this mental picture makes him, a prisoner trapped underground in the catacombs, a prized candidate for his keepers’ experiments, which propel him through strata of pastness and ultimately toward the fatal instant on the observation jetty at Orly Airport that had marked him so deeply as a child: the moment of his own death. La Jetée is also, famously, a film made almost entirely of still photographs, save for a few seconds shot on 16mm that appear immediately following the line quoted above, in which Châtelain is framed in close-up, her head resting on a pillow. As the sound of chirping birds swells on the soundtrack, a series of dissolves between stills creates a sequential propulsion that strains toward motion; then, in what feels like a miracle, Châtelain definitively breaks free of the necrotic stillness of photography and blinks. Vitality, presence. Time regained. No longer is it necessary to imagine what it must have been like for those nineteenth-century spectators who saw motion pictures for the first time, for now this astonishment has been made our own—improbably, disarmingly. It is as if she were the first woman to come alive in light and shadow. 

First Living Woman takes this moment of movement, which dazzles not despite but because of how small and fleeting it is, and returns it to a photographic eternity made monumental. Schneider played back a few seconds snatched from Marker’s tale of looping time on her iPhone, creating paper negatives that she then exposed frame-by-frame onto an expanse of chromogenic paper, the factory-standard size of Fujifilm’s jumbo roll, to create a richly layered positive. The exposed roll was then sent to Vienna to be processed, since no US lab was willing to attempt the difficult feat of printing. In Venice’s Arsenale, the results of this undertaking appear as three curving rows of serpentine ruffle that amount to a kilometer in length when taken together. Châtelain’s face is there again and again in serial form, as if a filmstrip had been unspooled and then coaxed into an irregular, creaseless concertina, held in place with magnets. Although Schneider makes use of a clip found online—a relic of private, digital fandom—her use of iteration evokes the material substrate of photochemical film, recalling that La Jetée’s exceptional few seconds of animation, like all filmic images, are at their base nothing other than a series of frozen frames. This relation to the moving image is concretized in the further iteration of First Living Woman, shown simultaneously in New York at David Peter Francis Gallery, which reanimates Châtelain within a looping Super 16mm film.

Across the many folds of the installation in Venice, the blinking woman from peacetime stares out from an iPhone screen held in place by hands with nails lacquered in orange—part of the palette of vibrant color Schneider uses to rework La Jetée’s black-and-white images and an index of her intimate encounter with the material. Châtelain is sometimes more, sometimes less visible, whether because she is hidden within the buckles of the paper or because of the manifold manipulations to which Schneider has subjected her image. She is awash in paint, punctured by holes, affixed with bits of tape, cut into confetti pieces that resemble digital artifacts but importantly are not. A whole vocabulary of analog operations has been brought to bear on these images of a YouTube bootleg of a 16mm film playing on a digital device, putting photography’s graphic and painterly dimensions into play alongside the ghostly haunting of the trace. If this layered density at times makes it difficult to discern precisely how Schneider has worked her darkroom wonders, something of a tutor text can be found in the single frames of her Deep Like (2020–21) series, selections from which are displayed in Venice on study tables in front First Living Woman, offering the visitor a more anatomized encounter with the various elements of what Schneider has called her “alphabet.” 

That this alphabet is so avowedly analog endows the installation with a posture of recalcitrance vis-à-vis the homogenizing thrust of digital imaging tools. Seen on an iPhone screen, Châtelain is an emblem of a remediated cinema without walls, one which is made miniature and possessable, able to be paused and endlessly relayed. Schneider pulls her out of this digital flood, rematerializing her image within a play of volume that denies all regularity and exceeds the small frame of the phone and laptop screen. If the scale of First Living Woman is commanding, it is without any hint of the flat slickness of billboard format. The installation is an architectural mass of prepossessing tactility, graced with a sensuousness that feels like a critical rejoinder to the crispness of the overlapping desktop windows that appear in another work of painted fingernails, Camille Henrot’s 2013 video Grosse Fatigue, which was on view in the same venue thirteen years ago in Massimiliano Gioni’s Biennale exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace.

As Marker did before her, Schneider fixates on the female countenance as a site of revelation and affective intensity. The motif is not new for the artist: Her previous projects used similar in-camera processes to engage with the faces of Romy Schneider and Mariah Carey. But unlike them, Châtelain is no kind of celebrity. Even if she is the star of a cult classic so beloved that cinephiles the world over make pilgrimages to the Tokyo bar named for it, the replication of her image remains far from the brew of spectacle, technology, and commodification that simmers in the earlier works, imparting to them the flavor of rescue missions. First Living Woman carries forward Schneider’s interest in producing photographic monuments to fascinating female performers while introducing a new set of concerns that radiate from the specificity of her source material. It is never clear in La Jetée, purposefully so, whether Châtelain’s character is the mother, lover, or friend of the beleaguered protagonist. She is simply the one to whom he clings, the one who belongs to a time before catastrophe. Presented in a Biennale exhibition that searches for possibilities for rest and healing within modernity’s wreckage, and at a time when the war and environmental devastation of La Jetée feel less like a science-fiction plot than they do unnervingly real, Châtelain’s image figures as kind of talisman warding against darkness—an icon of longing for a lost, better time.

In Minor Keys, the 61st International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, is on view through November 22, 2026.

After graduating from Central Saint Martins in 1983, Foxton initially started his own short-lived label, Bazooka!, with fellow graduate Cheryl Eastap. His connection with i-D began somewhat tangentially with a freelance commission from art director and i-D owner Terry Jones to design a small capsule collection for Fiorucci. It developed more directly through an invitation to style a page for a magazine editorial— alongside his peers, stylists Caroline Baker and Ray Petri and the design duo Bodymap—shot by Mark Lebon. The styling process proved a revelation—“a bit of a lightbulb moment,” as Foxton recalls.

Terry introduced him to the young photographer Nick Knight, and the two “clicked” immediately, beginning a decades-long partnership that would produce some of i-D’s most memorable fashion moments, including an iconic fiftieth anniversary issue cover featuring Sarah Stockbridge. “When I started in about 1984, styling wasn’t really a recognized career path, so you had to make it up as you went along,” Foxton reflects. “The ‘style press’ was also in its infancy back then, so there was a great deal of experimentation and trial and error. We learnt on the job. We had a great deal of freedom back in those early days, no constraints of having to use particular credits or pander to advertisers’ needs. We just used whatever clothes we could beg, steal, or borrow. A lot of it looks very homemade and tatty now, but there was a rawness and an energy to it which I still like.”

Foxton’s approach was instinctively eclectic. “I have always had a rather magpie approach when it comes to image-making and styling, taking bits from disparate sources and combining them in hopefully new ways,” he says. “I’ve always looked at my own styling more as image-making rather than fashion styling—the image was what was most important for me.” His casting choices were equally natural, championing diversity not from a political standpoint but simply because he was “reflecting the London I saw around me in clubs and bars and on the streets.”

This included discovering a very young Edward Enninful on the London Underground at Hammersmith. “He just kind of shone. He has a sort of inner light,” Foxton recalls. Enninful became both a model for a number of i-D shots and Foxton’s assistant. Foxton’s 1991 i-D shoot with photographer Jason Evans, featuring Enninful and his friends, all young men of color, and shot on suburban roads near his Ealing home, has endured. Both the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum have acquired editions for their permanent collections. Foxton’s talent for recognizing and nurturing emerging creatives extended to future luminaries, including fashion director Jonathan Kaye, magazine founder Elgar Johnson, collaborator Nick Griffiths, and even artist Steve McQueen, whom he convinced to model as a student.

Meanwhile, Foxton and Nick Knight’s collaboration has extended far beyond the pages of i-D into the present day via notable campaigns and editorials for magazines like Arena, including the acclaimed Faith series—shot around 1990 using a 8-by-10 inch plate camera positioned inside a transit van to capture panoramic countryside backdrops. “Every shoot with Nick is exciting and challenging,” Foxton reflects. “He likes to push himself and those around him to be as excellent as they can be.” 

Now retired from the worlds of commercial and editorial fashion, Foxton has been experimenting with AI for the past two years, purely for his own personal pleasure. He’s been playfully tapping into the themes—including masculine imagery and style—that have long inspired him and informed his creative practice. His exploration serves as a catalyst to transport him and us to imaginary worlds both past and present, enabling him to travel the globe, explore different subcultures, and creatively reinterpret the past through fictionalized narratives—all through his artistic lens and without ever leaving his suburban home in West London.

Foxton was introduced to AI by his friend, the hairdresser Matt Mulhall. He started experimenting with Midjourney, which has continued to be his AI generation tool of choice. “What I immediately liked about it was the immediacy,” he says. “You could have an idea, type in the prompts, and within seconds you have a result. The path of least resistance has always been my preferred route.” He continues, “It was exciting, and somehow the process felt organic. My main approach is to convey a sense of realism. Of course, I know that it is the absolute opposite of that, it is totally digital and manufactured, but I want my images, for the most part, to be plausible.”

Foxton achieves plausibility through visuals that embrace candid and familiar documentary approaches, such as outtakes, behind-the-scenes shots, casting photos, and direct portraiture.

Foxton is well aware of the irony in his choice of adjectives to describe his process and goals, yet paradoxically they perfectly capture the essence of the resultant images. There’s a certain subtlety and nuance in Foxton’s AI work—an artfulness informed by his deep real-life understanding of photographic language, collaborative practice, and authentic casting—that lends his fantastical imagery a sense of verisimilitude.

Foxton’s AI work spans architecture, illustration, and innovative reinterpretations of historical events. However, the work that truly defines Foxton’s oeuvre is the AI imagery that ties back to his core interests, referencing queer male imagery, LGBTQ themes, club culture, and style. He achieves plausibility through visuals that embrace candid and familiar documentary approaches, such as outtakes, behind-the-scenes shots, casting photos, and direct portraiture.

“The documentary, ‘recording’ style of photography was something that I always liked,” he notes. “It was more about the subject and less about the photographer. It always felt more honest to me in some way.” This approach has been evident in his work from the early i-D magazine street photograph “straight-ups” to his later projects.

Throughout his career, a fundamental element of Foxton’s creative process has remained unchanged. “I’ve always collected images; in the past, I’d tear out magazine pages and create scrapbooks,” he says. “These books inspired ideas, juxtaposing styles and codes that sparked photoshoot concepts. Today, I draw from this archive and new images to inform my AI work.” Foxton begins by scrolling through his collected images, identifying correlations and stories, and then distilling his thoughts into words to inform his written prompts.

Many of Foxton’s images, where fiction borders reportage, purport to be sourced from the invented archive of the fictional photographer Boss Tweed (a pseudonym Foxton had previously used as a stylist for work he preferred not to be directly credited for). This persona and the accompanying fake descriptions that Foxton employs on his Instagram account (@simonfoxton) reflect his playful and tongue-in-cheek approach while adding an additional layer of depth to his creative narrative. But Foxton is careful to point out that deception is not the intent, and he accordingly tags his content with an AI disclaimer.

Despite the attention his AI work is now receiving, Foxton’s primary motivation remains personal enjoyment and experimentation. However, he recently collaborated with longtime collaborator and friend Nick Knight on a major fashion editorial using AI for the inaugural issue of Numero NY, published last fall. “I always enjoyed the collaborative process because quite often something new and unexpected would arise from it, which was always exciting, and the camaraderie of working in a creative team can be very inspiring. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I am very much enjoying my autocracy when it comes to AI. Just me and the computer, with no one else to answer to.”

“I’m retired now, and loving it! The thing I did with Nick is just creative fun,” Foxton adds. “I’m not interested in making a career out of it—I think that might take away the pleasure.”

Into this scene steps Louis Mendes, eighty-five years old and impeccably dressed in a beige suit, oxblood turtleneck, and brimmed hat. Around his shoulder, a massive vintage Speed Graphic press camera fitted with old-style flash bulbs, a relic from a bygone era. In one sense, Mendes is just another participant in this street-side economy, offering his wares to passersby. Yet he also stands apart. A New York fixture since 1959, he has mastered what he calls the place “where commerce meets art.” Mendes no longer hawks his services as he once did, when he would call out to strangers, “You could get a picture right away! Take a look at what I could do of you!” Now, his very presence is his sales pitch.

Louis Mendes in New York, October 2025

Louis Mendes in New York, October 2025

Curiosity draws people toward him. Many ask about the old camera. “Google me,” he tells a woman who stops to chat. When she does, she smiles and says, “It’s an honor to meet you.” Others want to photograph him, and he strikes a subtle pose while keeping his eyes peeled on the crowds. “It happens every day,” Mendes said. “And I capitalize on it as much as I can.” He often proposes a trade to the curious person who thinks their quick snap has gone unnoticed: “I let you take a photograph of me, now let me take one of you.”

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This afternoon, a middle-aged Black man with a camera around his neck approaches to shake Mendes’s hand. He tells him he grew up in New York and remembers seeing him in action decades ago. After a brief exchange, the man disappears into the crowd.

Such encounters point to a long, storied career. Mendes was born in Jamaica, Queens, in 1940. He started taking photographs in 1954, when his older sister, the family photographer, handed him the camera so she could be included in a portrait. “A week later, I got the results back, and I liked what I did,” he recalled. “That’s when the bug hit me.” By 1959, he had begun photographing parties and weddings. That same year, he bought the camera he still uses. One night, he was working a party at the famed Audubon Ballroom, in Harlem. “This camera can make a living for you if you use it that way,” a man told him. Mendes took the advice to heart: “I’ve been using it that way ever since.”

As Mendes learned the trade, he made the street his studio. Those early years taught him the physical and creative demands of the job. “You try to do both day and night, you kill yourself,” he said. “A little day, and a little night, and you got the week done.” The street itself is both teacher and collaborator. “The street is always difficult,” Mendes told me. “There are so many different people, constantly interacting. You learn more, and you do more.”

Mendes once used Polaroid film but now works with Fujifilm Instax Wide. His archive includes decades of test shots and outtakes. But most often, the client leaves with the only copy of the photograph. “I have the memory and the money,” he said. Occasionally, those memories return. A photograph he took of Gordon Parks and gave away resurfaced years later, and others reappear online when clients tag him on Instagram. These moments show what Mendes’s practice is about: a simple commercial transaction that becomes a shared imprint, the material trace of a fleeting connection.

Mendes’s work has evolved in step with the city itself. He photographed through the pandemic, even when Times Square was nearly empty. He has adapted to an increasingly cashless society. Yet the core of his work remains unchanged. His compositions are consistent, and his focus has always been on people, capturing something essential about the humanity of everyday life. “I photograph everywhere I can,” he said. “Every day, nine days a week.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 262, “The End of Nature?”, under the column Studio Visit.

This early, perhaps apocryphal image of Nakahira nevertheless crystallizes a few key aspects of his work: a sustained interest in leftist politics, a field of view extending well beyond the borders of Japan, and also something of an impulsive streak. The writings that are collected in At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira—the first collection of Nakahira’s essays to be published in English—might be called the result of the encounter between these expansive concerns and the specific medium of photography. That is why, even today, his written work invites us to consider photography not only as a creative medium but also as a means of questioning power.

After graduating college, Nakahira worked in Tokyo as an editor for the left-wing journal Gendai no me (Contemporary eye). This work put him in touch with major cultural figures of the day, including the poet and underground theater director Shūji Terayama and the photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu. Through Tōmatsu, Nakahira came to meet other prominent photographers like Yutaka Takanashi and Daidō Moriyama, as well as the critic and editor Kōji Taki. Soon enough, Nakahira quit his editor job and became a photographer. Along with poet and art critic Takahiko Okada, Nakahira, Taki, and Takanashi collectively founded the magazine Provoke in 1968, with Moriyama joining for two of its three issues. Setting out to reject established modes of photography, the members of Provoke published black-and-white images full of grain and contrast that pushed the bounds of visual legibility. While the novelty—and, in fact, the internal consistency—of the magazine’s photography tends to be somewhat overstated, Nakahira is best known as a photographer for his Provoke-era work, which he collected in his 1970 photobook, For a Language to Come.

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Photographs by Takuma Nakahira. Edited by Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard.

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The first English-language collection of Takuma Nakahira’s influential writings on photography.

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira in English for the first time. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). Throughout a decades-long career, Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. As part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, literature, politics, television, and more. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.”

Details

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 164
Number of images: 12
Publication date: 2025-11-04
Measurements: 5.2 x 8.2 x 0.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597115780

Contributors

Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015; born in Tokyo) was a photographer and writer. He graduated from the Department of Spanish at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1963. In 1968, he cofounded the magazine Provoke with Kōji Taki, Yutaka Takanashi, and Takahiko Okada. His photobooks include For a Language to Come (1970), A New Gaze (1983), Adieu à X (1989), and Documentary (2011). He was also the author of many critical essays and books on photography, media, art, and politics, including Why an Illustrated Botanical Guide? Collected Writings on Images by Takuma Nakahira (1973) and Duel on Photography (1977). His work has been the subject of large-scale retrospective exhibitions at the Yokohama Museum of Art (2003) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2024), and is included in the collections of other museums around the world.

Daniel Abbe holds a PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is a lecturer at Osaka University of Arts.

Franz Prichard is an associate professor at Florida State University, author of Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (2019), and has taught at UCLA, Harvard University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Princeton University.

Related Content

From the Archive

How Takuma Nakahira’s “Circulation” Breathed Life into Photography

For all the attention paid to Nakahira’s early photographs, his photography practice evolved together with his extensive work as an essayist, critic, and theorist. Nakahira raised questions about media and politics in print at a feverish pace, publishing more than one hundred essays between 1965 and 1977. The eleven essays here, written between 1970 and 1976, show Nakahira testing photography’s capacity to help reimagine how we know and inhabit the world. They teem with the urgency of his historical moment, as the Cold War played out unevenly across the planet and irrevocably transformed the Japanese archipelago. Nakahira was part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo in which artists, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, theater directors, dancers, architects, and novelists were all engaged in discussing the relationship between art and power. While our selection introduces only one slice of Nakahira’s career, the range of venues in which these essays were originally published—a literary review newspaper, an art magazine, a jazz magazine, and a photography magazine—shows just how far beyond the boundaries of photography Nakahira was thinking.

Born from this expansive moment of creative and critical encounters, Nakahira’s writings developed through a ceaseless process of questioning, boring into the depths of specific concerns to pursue the contours of the world as an incomplete totality open to indeterminate possibilities. Throughout the nebula-like relations among Nakahira’s writings, certain intertwined threads of questioning emerge. Each brings into view a different facet of entangled problems and potentials. Readers will surely find their own threads. To start, we might suggest the following three:

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from the series Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from For a Language to Come, 1970

LANGUAGE AND IMAGE

Nakahira’s writings interrogate the reduction of the world to representations of a human-centric outlook. To that end, he questioned photography’s role as the mere illustration of existing language, or what he called the personal images of artists. Nakahira wagered that since language itself had become a code ordering the world, photography had the potential to break through this code and provoke, so to speak, new forms of relation. Although he originally aspired to be a poet, it was through photography that he set out to obtain a mode of language capable of bursting through the static and dualistic schema of self and world that is enshrined within the bourgeois subject. Like many thinkers of his era, Nakahira wrestled with the limitations of existing leftist political vocabularies and conservative humanist orthodoxies that became increasingly divorced from the actualities of the grinding destructive forces of corporate and state power. At stake in the evocative title For a Language to Come was not a self-enclosed system of photographic meaning, but rather an encounter with the silences of worlds that were emerging from the collapse of modernity’s liberatory promises. Always pursuing the tension between image and language, Nakahira’s own photography and writing trace the myriad forms of violence—and transformative possibilities to counter them—that give shape to the world that we now inhabit.

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from the series Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from the series Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971

EMBODIED GAZES

Nakahira connected photography to unconscious and sensorial aspects of human experience, often describing it in corporeal terms. For example, in “Why an Illustrated Botanical Guide?,” he stated that “looking cannot happen apart from the body.” He consistently wrote about the bodily effect that images—whether in printed media, on the wall, or broadcast on television—have before they reach the level of cognition. And yet, Nakahira’s essays also demonstrate that he was an extremely cerebral writer who engaged with the intellectual currents of his time. Why, then, this concern with the body, not the head?

Several answers are possible, including Nakahira’s abiding interest in Surrealism. As “The Will Toward History—Surrealism’s Potential Power” shows, he was interested in reclaiming this movement’s zeal for the “twinned liberations of sensation and society.” And by thinking about the body in political ways, Nakahira was in fact very much of his moment. After all, the energies of liberation that emerged around 1968 in Japan were not funneled toward narrow or procedural political goals. In a more expansive mode, they held out the possibility of rethinking the very nature of experience. This was particularly true of women’s liberation movements in Japan at this time, and although Nakahira did not seriously account for gender in his writing, he was interested in embodied forms of difference. Perhaps that is why, soon after writing that “looking cannot happen apart from the body,” he claimed: “To look is also to expose the self to the gaze of the other.” In this way, Nakahira hints that photography might prompt an embodied exchange, in which the photographer must relinquish some of the power that would otherwise accrue to them through the camera’s one-sided gaze.

Takuma Nakahira, Tokara Islets, 1976

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from For a Language to Come, 1970

LANDSCAPES OF POWER

The urgency of Nakahira’s writings speaks to the fact that he was considering photography’s role across disparate landscapes of struggle. For Nakahira, diffuse networks of the nation-state and capital constituted an emergent “landscape” of power—a term that he theorized in parallel with the activist film theorist Masao Matsuda, and which appears in the essay “Rebellion Against the Landscape: Fire at the Limit of My Perpetual Gazing . . .” Here, Nakahira tried to think beyond urban space, which he called a “uniformly plastered-over ‘landscape’ sustained by power itself.” As the essay “The Illusion Called Document” shows, he also considered the mass media itself as an environment of power, noting that a weeklong, nationwide television broadcast of a police siege on leftwing militants unconsciously reproduced bourgeois morality in its viewers. He brought these concerns to bear on the harsh realities of Okinawa, with which Japan had renewed colonial relations in 1972 following its reversion to mainland rule. Although Okinawa appears as the subject of only one essay included in this collection (“My Naked-Eye Reflex—1974, Okinawa, Summer”), Nakahira’s later writings and photography address the possibility of working under and against Japan’s extractive colonial relationship with the islands. He returns again and again to photography’s role in both securing and unsettling capitalist modernity’s varied landscapes of power, and to their environmental and human toll.

While aspects of these three overarching concerns can be found across the work collected in At the Limits of the Gaze, it should be noted that Nakahira’s essays are not the product of a comprehensive system of thought. Nakahira was not a full-time critic, much less an academic of any sort. He was a working photographer, and the essays in this volume were written freelance. Much like his photographs, then, Nakahira’s essays could be thought of as performances in real time, in which he responded to the specific context of a particular journal, its audience, and the questions and sensations that struck him at that moment. While they may not add up to a complete whole, the reader can connect these different points, like stringing together the stars of a constellation.

This scattered quality sometimes extends to Nakahira’s prose. His sentences have a tendency to twist around themselves, becoming extraordinarily long, while others are brusque and choppy, for bombastic effect. Although we have broken up most of these long sentences in our translation, we have also tried to preserve the rhythm and tone of his writing wherever possible. (While Nakahira never wrote a footnote in his life, for the sake of legibility we have converted his own inline citations to footnotes. Any additional notes were written by us.) In an era before word processors, Nakahira would have written these articles by hand, on a specialized kind of paper called genkō yōshi, a grid of small squares, each of which accommodates one character or punctuation mark; the sheets were then handed over directly to a magazine or newspaper editor. At times, one can imagine Nakahira filling up the genkō yōshi, thinking in real time, following his own stream of consciousness.

Takuma Nakahira, The Streets, or Traces of Terror, Marseille, 1976

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from For a Language to Come, 1970
All photographs © 2025 Gen Nakahira and courtesy of Osiris

As traces of a lifelong practice of questioning, Nakahira’s writing emerged through a transformative confrontation with a changing world. After a fever-induced coma in the fall of 1977, Nakahira experienced memory loss and partial aphasia that brought an end to his writing career. From that point on, he continued to raise new questions through his practice of photography, which he pursued for the rest of his life. In his later years, Nakahira once remarked that he smoked the “Short Hope” brand of cigarettes, noting: “There is also ‘Long Hope,’ but now is not an age that seeks world revolution.”

The questions that Nakahira prompts may resonate even more acutely today, within the cascading violence and catastrophe of this world still at war with itself. While the moment of correspondence with Castro may belong to the past, perhaps contemporary readers can find forms of “short hope” in Nakahira’s essays, which both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world. At the limits of the possessive gaze perturbed by his ceaseless questioning, Nakahira shows us other ways of seeing and sharing the world with photography.

This essay originally appeared in At The Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira (Aperture, 2025).

Situated on the mountainside behind her house, Ractliffe’s studio was luminous against the day’s gloom, the white-plastered brickwork reflecting the diffused light from three large industrial windows. Black-and-white test prints for Landscaping (2023–24), a study of slow industrial destruction, were gathered on a white table. On a gray magnetic board were loosely arranged images from The Garden, commissioned for a solo exhibition called Out of Place / En ces lieux at the Jeu de Paume, the Paris museum, which opened in January.

In cabinets that line the opposite wall, an archive of gelatin-silver prints traces her continued engagement with the mute traumas of the past latent in the present. Over four decades, Ractliffe’s focal point has been not the spectacle of violence but its aftermath—absence as evidence—as in her oblique documentation of the Angolan Civil War in Terreno Ocupado (Occupied Land, 2007) and As Terras do Fim do Mundo (The Lands of the End of the World, 2009–10), where seemingly “empty” settings are revealed by their captions to be sites of conflict, death, and dispossession.

Above the studio’s cabinets, four words are hand cut into the topmost bricks: WERK, TREK OF VREK (“work, move on or die” in Afrikaans). These were made by an artisan in a small Karoo town along the national highway featured in Ractliffe’s “inventory of the road,” as she describes NI: every 100 kilometres (1996/99), and near where she photographed the dead donkey in End of Time (1996/99) that has become a symbol of all the implied yet unpictured violence in her photographs.

Over four decades, Ractliffe’s focal point has been not the spectacle of violence but its aftermath.

In the week before my studio visit, Ractliffe was burgled, her computers and photographic equipment stolen. The event was reminiscent of a previous burglary, in 1990, that proved formative to her practice. Unable to replace her cameras at the time, she made do with a plastic toy the thieves had disregarded: a vintage Diana camera. To Ractliffe, the resulting images—darkly vignetted, murky, imprecise—reflected something of the uncertainty preceding South Africa’s first democratic election, in 1994, and worked against the assumed transparency of the social documentary tradition. “That burglary was a perverse bit of luck,” she said in a 2020 interview with the collector Artur Walther. “It gave me a new tool to work with photographically.” The Diana survived this recent break-in too.

Ractliffe’s studio hews closely to the one designed for her Johannesburg home, where she lived for twenty-five years beginning in 1990: a generous, gable-ceilinged space with a darkroom at one end and a storeroom at the other. Originally from Cape Town, Ractliffe returned to the area in 2015, nine months before she sustained a debilitating injury. The Fish Hoek studio doubled as a physio’s office (a Pilates reformer is still kept beneath a worktable for occasional use), while the darkroom was relegated to a second storage space until nearly a decade later when, at the end of 2024, the artist made her first analog print for Out of Place—the Paris show.

Curated by Pia Viewing, the survey offers “a different way of looking at my work, beyond the idea of ‘landscape,’” Ractliffe said. “Often, my photographs are understood as spaces of violence untethered from place—they become something strange and abstract. But for this show, we’re anchoring the images to their settings.” Toward this specificity of context, the exhibition includes more than a hundred previously unexhibited photographs, “expanding an understanding of both my practice and places that I have been repeatedly drawn to.”

As a tender counterpoint to these many overlooked and “leftover” spaces, The Garden centers on a cast of self-possessed protagonists—keepers of backyard lawns, arrangers of rockeries, composers of salvaged bric-a-brac, amateur horticulturalists, and land activists—set in the bleak terrain of Ractliffe’s perennial subject, South Africa’s West Coast. While incidental figures appear in her images of peopled places, few of her posed photographs have been published (indeed, she has long expressed discomfort at making and sharing portraits).

For this new work, however, portraiture felt imperative. “I have to contextualize them, their specific stories,” she said of her subjects. “They’re the makers of these extraordinary spaces.” Showing me pictures from The Garden, Ractliffe recounted an anecdotal history of these marginal spaces pitted against the harsh South African environment she knows well: “It’s windy as hell. Nothing grows. The light is unforgiving.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue,” under the column Studio Visit.

This February, the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, will open the first museum survey dedicated to Plumb’s work, with around one hundred photographs created between 1972 and 2025 revealing the photographer’s clear-eyed vision of California’s unsettling sublime. The show’s curator, Gregory J. Harris, discovered Plumb via her first book, Landfall (2018), which features images made between 1984 and 1990. The book’s tone is established by a bare-bones text by Plumb: “I remember having insomnia for a time when I was nine years old. My mother said there might be a nuclear war.” After having a visceral reaction to Plumb’s sun-bleached landscapes and enigmatic portraits, Harris got to know the artist personally in 2021 at a portfolio review in Montana. “How on earth did all of this amazing work get made, and yet it’s hardly ever been shown?” Harris remembers thinking. “It seemed like a crazy omission to me.”

Plumb’s images burn with prescience. Crises that were just beginning to percolate when she made the Landfall pictures—a rightward shift in politics, extreme weather events—now saturate daily life. “Mimi’s work is not about climate change, per se, but it is about the experience of what it’s like to live in an unstable world,” said Harris. “Her photographs are united by a sensibility about the anxiety of the world spinning off its axis and falling apart.”

Plumb spent her youth hiding from the blazing sun in Walnut Creek, then a rapidly developing East Bay suburb. In the mid-1970s, while studying photography at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), she returned home to create a self-portrait of the alienation and boredom she felt coming of age in an inhospitable suburban environment. “I was always interested in what was going on outside of my world, but I always related back to how I felt about it,” Plumb said of her early pictures, which were later collected in her book The White Sky (2020). “It was very personal in that way, but it usually wasn’t about specifically looking at myself.”

Plumb’s pictures of San Francisco from the ’80s and ’90s suggest the decay of the American dream.

By the early 1980s, Plumb’s fragile optimism had curdled into dismay thanks to Reagan, Chernobyl, and the cultural and social contagion of capitalism: “The feeling that we could really change the world that I felt back in the ’60s and early ’70s had definitely faded.” Plumb returned to SFAI for graduate school, intent on photographing her environment and investigating how power is used and abused. “My teacher Larry Sultan thought that the work needed to get hotter, meaning that all this anxiety that I was feeling wasn’t showing up in the pictures. So I started combining the landscape pictures with images of my friends,” she explained.

Unlike the more detached New Topographics photographers, Plumb portrays the communities left to contend with these “man-altered” environs. She also began using flash, amplifying a feeling of tension and anxiety. Take Tang (1987), which features a girl at a bowling alley. By photographing the figure from behind, as she often does, Plumb evokes the German Romantic Rückenfigur, the flash illuminating every strand of her subject’s nearly floor-length hair. She appears to be hesitating at the edge of a void; a slight push, and she would tumble forward into the unknown.

Made primarily with a 6-by-7-inch medium-format camera, Plumb’s pictures of San Francisco from the ’80s and ’90s suggest the decay of the American dream. Here, California’s cloudless skies are obscured by telephone wires and mountains of industrial waste. An image of Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic inexplicably hanging in a desolate lot is an uncanny slice of strangeness. A square of white picket fencing clings to a scrubby hillside as if suburbia itself is an invasive species. A colonial revival mansion shrinks to a dollhouse beneath a Treasure Island freeway, the sharp facade looking amazingly inflexible compared to the promise of the looping cement overhead. While her images may be “grounded in the language of documentary photography and realism, they’re not documentary projects,” Harris noted. “They’re much more ambient, creating an experience or a sense of something rather than telling a concrete story.”

The High Museum show includes selections from Plumb’s most recent series, Reservoir (2021–25), for which she received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her austere photographs of cracked lake beds and silent skies depict the effects of a mega-drought and are, in their own quiet way, Plumb’s most explicitly political work. Traveling to the Receding Lake II (2022) shows people trudging across a parched expanse, a plastic inflatable their only shade from the oppressive sun.

Is this impulse to seek pleasure and relief in nature even in the face of climate disaster a heartening affirmation of resiliency or a symptom of miserable indifference? Plumb doesn’t look away. As Robert Adams once observed, “All that is clear is the perfection of what we were given, the unworthiness of our response, and the certainty, in view of our current deprivation, that we are judged.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue,” under the column Backstory.

“She” was Lucia Moholy, the Czech-born photographer whose mid-1920s images of the Bauhaus campus designed by Gropius in the German city of Dessau have long been regarded as archetypal depictions of the modernist aesthetic. Her precise, beautifully composed photographs of the school’s architecture, students, teachers, and their work still define our perceptions of the Bauhaus as a progressive, empowering bastion of cultural and social idealism. They swiftly became more famous than the woman who made them.

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus workshops, chess table by Heinz Nösselt with pieces by Josef Hartwig, 1924
Courtesy Galerie Derda, Berlin

László Moholy-Nagy, Head (Lucia Moholy), ca. 1926
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Lucia Moholy: Exposures, an exhibition presented in 2024 at Kunsthalle Prague, in the Czech Republic, and at Fotostiftung Schweiz, in Winterthur, Switzerland, this past spring, sought to change that by exploring the full scope of Moholy’s work in writing, editing, and documentary filmmaking as well as photography. But why was such a gifted and charismatic woman overlooked for so long? And why, for much of that time, was she not credited for her most important body of work? The answers lie in the misogyny and geopolitical turmoil of mid-twentieth-century Europe.

Born Lucie (she later changed her name to Lucia) Schulz to nonpracticing Jewish parents in Prague in 1894, she had a comfortable childhood thanks to her father’s successful law practice. As part of the first generation of European women (albeit only wealthy ones) to be encouraged to attend university, she qualified as a German and English teacher in 1912, then studied philosophy and art history at the University of Prague. After spending much of World War I in Germany, first in Wiesbaden, then Leipzig, she settled in Berlin and worked in book publishing while writing experimental literature under the male pseudonym Ulrich Steffen. By then, she was part of an avant-garde group of intellectuals, artists, and activists who were devotees of a Mazdaznan sect, which advocated meditation, strict vegetarian diets, and a bracing exercise regime of wild swimming and hiking in the countryside.

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In 1920, Schulz fell for a recent arrival to Berlin, a young Hungarian artist and activist named László Moholy-Nagy. A few months later, they married, and she changed her surname by adopting the first part of his, becoming Lucia Moholy. At the time, László was focused on applying his work in painting and collage to securing radical political change. During their country walks, he began experimenting with photography, then widely dismissed as being too sentimental and commercial to have cultural value. Lucia contributed heavily to his program for what he called a “new vision” and swiftly developed photographic concepts and techniques of her own. As well as collaborating with László to create photograms by printing images of objects, or their shadows, on photographic paper, she explored innovative ways of presenting daily life using a camera. They both believed that photography was an exciting means of documenting the speed and urgency of modern life, and its dangers.

Subsisting on her modest wages, they had so little money that they could not afford to heat their apartment in the brutally cold Berlin winter. Their fortunes changed after the success of a 1922 exhibition held at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, which included László’s “telephone pictures,” made by a sign factory in accordance with instructions he relayed by phone. Among his new admirers was Walter Gropius, who was so impressed by László’s intellectual vigor that he invited him to teach at the Bauhaus, which was then in Weimar.

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus Dessau, workshop wing from the southwest, 1926
© ProLitteris, Zurich, and courtesy the collection Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus Weimar, director’s office, 1923
© ProLitteris, Zurich, and courtesy the collection Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur

When the couple arrived in 1923, the four-year-old Bauhaus was in chaos. Under attack by conservative local politicians, who derided it as a hotbed of subversion and depravity, it was still scarred by a long-running conflict between Gropius and a charismatic teacher, Johannes Itten, who favored a mystical approach to art and design education. As Itten ran the foundation course, which was compulsory for all incoming students, he exercised considerable influence until Gropius ousted him in 1922.

Gropius hired László to replace Itten, judging correctly that he would have a very different vision for the school. László reinvented the Bauhaus in accordance with Constructivist principles by urging the students to deploy art, design, science, and technology to improve the lives of the masses. He also allowed women to study the same subjects as men, rather than being relegated to supposedly “feminine” courses, principally weaving.

Unlike many “masters’ wives” who were uninvolved with the school, Lucia played an active role at the Bauhaus, notably in her unofficial capacity as resident photographer.

As for Lucia, she began a two-year apprenticeship with the photographer Otto Eckner, who was then responsible for documenting life at the Bauhaus. When the school moved to Dessau in 1925, she enrolled in photography classes in nearby Leipzig, and set up a darkroom where they could continue their experiments in their home, one of the tellingly named “Masters’ Houses” designed for Gropius’s almost all-male teaching staff.

Unlike many “masters’ wives” who were uninvolved with the school, Lucia played an active role at the Bauhaus, notably in her unofficial capacity as resident photographer. Her still lifes of objects designed by the students—including Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel B33 chairs, Marianne Brandt’s silver and ebony teapot, and a corsage made by the Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stölzl—defined a radically new style of industrial photography. Using primarily an old plate camera for 18-by-24-centimeter glass negatives, she made the object the sole focus of the image, always positioning it against a neutral backdrop. As the design historian Robin Schuldenfrei noted in a 2013 essay, “The products’ modernity is underscored in the photographs themselves: in the shiny reflective surfaces, lit so that they gleam but do not over-reflect.”

Lucia Moholy, Set design by László Moholy-Nagy for The Tales of Hoffmann, Kroll Opera, Berlin, 1931
© ProLitteris, Zurich, and courtesy the collection Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur

Lucia Moholy, Corsage for a Bauhaus festival by Gunta Stölzl, 1926
Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Lucia applied a similar methodology when documenting the evolution of the Bauhaus Dessau, starting with its construction before focusing on each completed element, including the learning spaces, theater, canteen, student apartments, and teachers’ houses. Each of these immaculately composed photographs was taken in a painstakingly planned, seemingly dispassionate style that depicted the school as a series of stage sets, devoid of people. (Lucia also photographed the stage sets designed by László at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House.) They convey a sense of elegance, modernity, and discipline that has defined the Bauhaus, and modern glamour, ever since.

Her portraits from this period share many of those qualities, not least by tightly cropping her subjects’ faces to emphasize nuances of their characters while forging a rapport between them and the viewer. In her 1939 book A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939, Lucia cited the extreme close-ups used by Sergei Eisenstein and other avant-garde Russian filmmakers as an inspiration, despite the misgivings of some of her subjects. “They find it interesting and worth discussing,” she wrote, “but few of them wish to have their portraits taken in the same way.” Tellingly, many of her most cooperative sitters were women, often friends, such as the German photojournalist Edith Tschichold and the New York–born artist Florence Henri, who arrived at the Bauhaus as a painting student, only for László and Lucia to convert her to photography.

Equally enthusiastic were the occupants of Schwarze Erde, a feminist commune in the Rhön Mountains where Lucia often stayed. Like her, they were ambitious, highly educated Neue Frau, or New Women, who had thrived in pre-Nazi Germany. Lucia captured their strength and dynamism but also their idiosyncrasies in seemingly spontaneous photographs that contrasted sharply with her Bauhaus Dessau still lifes and architectural images. She was equally playful in a mid-1925 portrait of László dissolving into laughter while raising a hand toward the camera, as if to stop her from proceeding.

Lucia’s role as the Bauhaus’s unofficial photographer gave her a sense of purpose at a time when she felt increasingly unhappy with her life there and her marriage. “I simply can’t stand it anymore,” she wrote in her diary on May 27, 1927. “I need something that I’m not finding here.” She and László left Dessau and returned to Berlin the following year. It was a welcome change for Lucia, who relished being back in a big, culturally dynamic city. Resuming her photographic experiments, she participated in exhibitions. After she and László separated in 1929, she taught photography at a Berlin art school run by Itten.

By then, Lucia was approaching photography almost as a craft, though not in a conventional sense. She regarded industrialization as an indispensable tenet of modernism, as did her friends. As a result, most Bauhaus teachers and students were committed to designing for serial production, and succeeded in persuading like-minded German companies to mass-manufacture the furniture, ceramics, glassware, textiles, and other products developed at the school. The industrial element of photography was part of its appeal to Lucia, yet the deeply personal nature of her experiments in the darkroom, not least in devising ingenious ways of printing her photographs by hand and of producing images as photograms without recourse to a camera, evokes the intimacy and idiosyncrasy of craftsmanship.

As the Nazi Party gained power in Germany, Lucia’s position as a foreigner, a Jew, and an activist made her increasingly vulnerable. It became untenable in August 1933 when her lover Theodor Neubauer, a Communist politician, was arrested at her home and imprisoned for subversion. (They never met again, and he was executed in February 1945.) Terrified, she fled to Prague to join her family, leaving her possessions in her Berlin apartment except for her archive of prints and 560 glass-plate negatives, which she entrusted to László and his new partner, Sibyl Pietzsch, whom she had befriended.

Over the next few years, Lucia moved to Switzerland, Austria, and France before settling in London, where she combined photography with writing, culminating in 1939 with the publication of her book, A Hundred Years of Photography, one of the first histories of the medium in English. She also continued to work in portraiture by documenting politicians, academics, authors, artists, and other influential Britons, ranging from the peace activist Ruth Fry to the socialite and anti–women’s rights campaigner Margot Asquith.

It would have been easier for Lucia to forge a career in photography after leaving Germany if she’d had her Bauhaus Dessau images. When World War II began, she applied for a US visa, supported by László and Sibyl, who arranged for her to be employed at his recently opened design school in Chicago, and invited her to stay in their home. Yet her application was rejected, so she remained in London. After the war ended in 1945, she asked László to return her archive. He explained that he had given it to Gropius for safekeeping before he and Sibyl left Berlin. Unbeknownst to László, Gropius had shipped it to the United States with other Bauhaus artifacts in 1937, when he began an academic career at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

László Moholy-Nagy, László and Lucia, ca. 1923. Reproduction copy printed in 1979 by Lucia Moholy
Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus workshops, table lamps by Carl Jakob Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, ca. 1924
Courtesy Galerie Derda, Berlin
All works by Lucia Moholy © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. All László Moholy-Nagy works © Estate of László Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Given the turbulence of the time, neither man behaved unreasonably. The problem was that Gropius then used her “Bauhaus photographs” in numerous projects, without asking her permission or crediting her. He made the same omissions when releasing her images for use by others. When Lucia wrote asking him to send prints for her to screen in a lecture, he advised her to contact a British architecture journal instead. She then discovered that he was also storing her negatives, which, until then, she believed had been destroyed, and demanded their return with compensation, eventually hiring the lawyers described in Ise Gropius’s letter to help her. In 1957, after three years of fraught negotiations, Lucia recovered most but not all of them. Two years later, she left London for Switzerland, where she lived until her death in 1989, writing on art and the Bauhaus.

Plucky, resourceful, and talented, Lucia Moholy was a remarkable woman who led an extraordinary life. Why is her work better known than she is? A prime factor was misogyny. Like all gutsy Neue Frau, she faced gender discrimination at every turn. She had been lucky in marrying such an enlightened man as László, but her early photographs were routinely misattributed to him. Like him and many of their friends, she faced repeated struggles to rebuild her life in various countries during the turbulence of Nazism and World War II, but for her, those challenges were aggravated by anti-Semitism. She was also unlucky in facing such a powerful, well-connected opponent as Gropius. Lucia emerged victorious, but only after a long, painful battle. A cruel irony is that had the archive remained in his Berlin house, as László and Sibyl intended, it would have been destroyed when the building was bombed during World War II. And had Lucia kept it after leaving Berlin, it would have suffered the same fate, as her first London apartment was ravaged by fire during a 1940 air raid. In either scenario, those precious Bauhaus photographs would have been lost.

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

To devotees of the mall brand’s “vintage” 1980s aesthetic (Ivy League, Nantucket, Caucasian) referenced by these images, the choice felt like a betrayal. Here was a brand cannibalizing its own history, sloppily regurgitating it and feeding it back to consumers like some malformed lunch meat. Worse, it was a machine making a mockery of their nostalgia. Their self-styled taste was revealed to be so flat as to be replicable by algorithm.

“I think the thing that mostly annoys people about AI is it’s sometimes really good and sometimes really bad,” Charlie Engman, a photographer whose engagement with AI straddles commercial and art practices, told me. “It fails a lot, and I think the failures are actually very instructive and tell you what we care about. And then when it succeeds people get upset because then they feel manipulated.”

Screenshots of J.Crew Instagram

Screenshots of J.Crew Instagram

The debacle was similar to one a month earlier involving a Guess ad in the August edition of Vogue, a two-page spread featuring a lissome model dressed in two looks from the brand’s summer collection. Here, too, there were inconsistencies: The model’s face subtly morphed across the images, her skin giving off the plasticized matte finish native to residents of the uncanny valley. This time, though, Guess wasn’t trying to fool anyone. In small print at the top of the page appeared the words “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.”

In both these cases, the images were realistic, that is, they spoke in the language of photography—naturalistic lighting, figures that credibly read as human. Objectors (there were plenty) noted the bitter irony of billion-dollar companies undercutting skilled labor to produce something that looked like what they normally do anyway. In fact, that was less ironic than the entire point.

The idea that advertising is unscrupulous is by now well understood. Fashion advertising in particular has a well-recorded history of emotional and technical deception. More than a decade ago, Photoshop caused an epistemological crisis—suddenly the waistlines of models in advertising and consumer magazines shrank to unnatural degrees, and cheek fat dissolved with the swipe of a cursor, leaving so much body dysmorphia in the wake of the healing brush tool. Even celebrities—the already beautiful—were not immune to the retoucher’s gaze. The boundaries of visual reality were compromised. The public learned that photographs could now lie, and probably were.

The fashion image’s elastic relationship with truth stretches further back than the advent of Adobe software. Artifice was part of the deal from the beginning. Edward Steichen, the godfather of commercial fashion photography, introduced tricks of lighting, focus, and long exposure to manipulate the texture of fabric or flatter a face. As technology has become more sophisticated in pursuit of the same goal, AI’s total artificiality is, in many ways, more honest. Andrea Petrescu, the twenty-five-year-old cofounder of Seraphinne Vallora—the marketing agency behind the Guess ad—articulated, perhaps inadvertently, a philosophical loophole. “We don’t create unattainable looks,” she told the BBC. “Ultimately, all adverts are created to look perfect and usually have supermodels in, so what we are doing is no different.” The fashion industry, long maligned for promoting unattainable standards of beauty, would seem to reach its logical endpoint in AI: a standard of beauty that cannot be accused of being unattainable, because the beautiful people don’t exist.

The idea that advertising is unscrupulous is by now well understood. Fashion advertising in particular has a well-recorded history of emotional and technical deception.

From a world-historical view, AI is simply the latest entry in industrialized automation. The increasing accessibility of AI tools means what once took dozens of specialized roles can now be achieved (or approximated) by one person clicking around in Midjourney. Some of the most conspicuous uses of AI in advertising have been commissioned by multimillion-dollar companies, which by their nature must adhere to capital’s ruthless logic. Finn, for instance, is credited with AI imagery for mass-market apparel brands like Ugg and Skims that is, like his J.Crew work, relatively tame compared to the nightmarish stuff he’s cooked up for Alexander McQueen (gargantuan beetles) and Gucci (a psilocybin-soaked AI sequence shoehorned into last year’s The Tiger, a bizarre fever-dream-as-brand-showcase directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn and starring Demi Moore). For brands that wish to telegraph an edgy persona, AI reads like shorthand, if not compulsory.

Laura Dawes, a director at the London office of Webber Represents, a creative agency that manages photographers as well as stylists, set designers, and art directors, told me that navigating demand for AI is an evolution of what she’s always done as an agent, which is to manage expectations. “The thing about artists is that everyone is so unique,” she said. “I’ve had some really embrace it, and that’s usually in a controlled studio setting, something that’s more, say, constructed. But then in an uncontrolled environment, with natural light, that can be quite hazardous.” Dawes said she has seen clients use AI to build mockups for campaigns, which invites an intolerable level of risk: “You’re making an artificial image and using that as a guide and selling that to stakeholders on set when it’s not physically possible.”

Commercial adopters of AI are seduced less by the technology’s supposed mystique than by its labor efficiencies. It’s a short leap from fast fashion’s already algorithmic enterprise to AI’s promise of cost optimization. A recent report from the International Advertising Bureau projects that generative-AI creative will reach 40 percent of all ads beginning this year, confirming what anyone who watches YouTube videos or regularly rides the subway could already predict. It’s easy to see why AI would appeal to J.Crew, a company that filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and seems to be working through a prolonged identity crisis. “In a way, you can’t fault companies like Guess or J.Crew for doing this, because it’s just following profit models that have always existed,” Engman said. “Having worked in a lot of these jobs, you know, the creativity is very marginal. From a conceptual standpoint, it’s like, yeah, sure, make the J.Crew catalog.”

“Like it or not, this technology is here,” said Kalpesh Lathigra, who teaches in the MA commercial-photography course at London College of Communication. Lathigra, an artist and documentary photographer who also works commercially, believes that the industry will see what AI can do, but more importantly, what it cannot. “Personally, I’m not interested in AI. I would much rather get out into the world. A machine can give you millions of possibilities, but it can’t give you that elusive, intangible thing that draws us in and holds us, which has remained the same since the dawn of photography.”

Charlie Engman, AI-Generated Image for Acne Studios, 2023

Charlie Engman, AI-Generated Image for Gucci, 2023

Photographers and models, the image-industry jobs with the largest cults of personality, may be at less risk than less visible technical roles. “The people that I’m most worried about are the set designers,” Engman told me. “That’s the job that I feel is already disappearing.” Those roles are being supplanted by the elevated presence of retouchers, some of whom have cannily rebranded themselves into what Engman refers to as AI consultants, “which is a very interesting thing, because historically, retouchers were not seen as a particularly creative part of the process.”

There’s general resignation to the idea that AI is hastening entropy in a certain part of the medium. “The race to the bottom I feel will only apply to the basics of image-making—what was once referred to as ‘pack photography,’ home catalogs, basically, but today is product imagery for e-commerce,” Lathigra told me.

Dawes agrees. “When friends of mine were entering the industry, there were a lot of entry-level gigs mainly based around e-commerce, where people could do those kinds of jobs and have the ability to shoot their personal work on the side,” she said. That was only a decade ago. “Now there are brands producing all of their e-com in AI. That for me is quite scary, because that’s such a large section of the industry.” Dawes said she now routinely deals with clients whose entire catalog of product photography is AI-generated.

Engman, who has shot for Prada and Gucci, was an early AI adopter, starting to play around with AI models in 2022. He has an openness toward its possibilities that other photographers might not. It’s an openness that has made him sought-after in the fashion world as an AI oracle; he seems to talk about AI as much as he uses it. A couple of years ago, he estimated that 80 percent of his work engaged AI in some way, like a campaign for Acne that featured statues of vaguely humanoid figures who had seemed to ossify into seashells while shopping. He puts his current AI output vis-à-vis commissions much lower. Did he get bored, or is the flawlessly formed surface of AI’s bubble already deflating?

“I felt like I was participating in the bubble a few years ago, and now I think we’re in the awkward growing pains of moving out of the bubble,” he told me. Engman recalled a recent shoot with Coach, which had commissioned him based on his AI work but then realized that wasn’t actually what it was interested in. “What they wanted to do was much easier and more effective to do in CGI,” he said.

The taste of AI has already coated our mouths enough that it may not matter if it’s actually present at all. Vogue’s December 2025 cover features an image of the actor Timothée Chalamet dressed in Celine jeans, cream topcoat, and untied motorcycle boots, inexplicably posed on top of a swirling nebula. It calls to mind the kitschy roll-down backdrops of school picture day. The portrait, shot by the perennial Vogue contributor Annie Leibovitz, is not AI, but with its disproportionate scaling and goofy premise, has the same acrid aftertaste. In many ways, that’s worse. If we’ve reached the point where humans are aping machines aping humans, especially unconsciously, we’re further down the valley than we realize.

If you were Berenice Abbott, say, or Robert Frank or Stephen Shore, you might go on a road trip—cut through the country, using roads that crisscross the land, sometimes in ways that replicate how Native Americans and early European colonizers traversed it—as a way of mapping the nearly unmappable: not just the space but the place, the sum of geography and politics and culture and economy and power and history that shapes it. For Abbott, it was a trip down US Route 1 from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida, and back again, in 1954. Abbott made it with the hope of recording what she suspected would be imminently lost: namely, the small-town ways of life, and even the culture of larger cities, in the face of the expansion of the Interstate Highway System. For Frank, it was a tour across the country in 1955 and 1956 with the aim of recording every stratum in American society, where his outsider view—he was a Swiss immigrant—gave his pictures an air of critique, a refusal of romanticism and nostalgia. They registered disapproval, even, of the ways in which the harrowing class and racial disparities of American society were—and still are—papered over by the shiny optimism of the new that defines American consumer culture. And for Shore, it was a 1972 trip along Route 66 that turned into a photographic diary—“every meal I ate, every person I met, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used, every town I drove to”—shot not in black and white, but in color.

Anastasia Samoylova, Jesus Saves, Charleston, South Carolina, 2020

Anastasia Samoylova, Historic Reenactor, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2024

Like Frank, Anastasia Samoylova has an immigrant’s view of the United States, one conditioned by a life outside it. But in 2023, when she began roughly retracing Abbott’s route from the tip of Florida, her adopted state, to Maine, her status as an “outsider” documenting aspects of American life was conditioned, too, by the photographic history of the American road trip. It functioned as both an inspiration and a foil, the way, say, Walker Evans’s photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) functioned for Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958). To get in the car with a camera in hand now, not quite two hundred years since the invention of photography, is an act of looking outward, yet it’s also looking inward to the very terms of the medium and its past.

Samoylova notices these relics of the past without falling into the trap of nostalgia.

This self-referentiality shows up in the way the past bumps up against the present in Atlantic Coast. It is a comment on the way this country has never truly reckoned with the original sins of its founding—slavery and genocide above all—so that the past appears, like the return of the repressed, in many of Samoylova’s images. But it is also an engagement with photography’s development over time. One could point to Historic Reenactor, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for example—a woman whose outfit looks to be out of the 1940s, pin curls and headscarf, white collar and jolly printed apron—behind the counter of an old-fashioned sweet shop. Samoylova doesn’t underline the artificiality of the scene or give us any means to recognize it as a fiction; there is no obvious “tell” to let us know that this isn’t a historical photograph, other than the title and the technical qualities of the photograph and print themselves. Samoylova takes up the documentary approach of someone like Abbott or Frank or even Evans; she takes up the challenge of the road trip with all its historical freight, but even more, she allows her subject to occupy a time closer to those forebears than her own.

Anastasia Samoylova, Reflection in Black Thunderbird, Palm Beach, Florida, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, Two Cars, East Harlem, New York, 2024

Automobiles play a large role in this confusion of timelines. The massive, grumpy hog in Hog, Old Lyme, Connecticut, stands in the back of an old-timey pickup truck. A vintage blue Oldsmobile sedan looks out from a shed like garage in Brunswick, Georgia. A rusted-out jalopy is parked next to equally antiquated gas pumps at an abandoned Esso station near Lubec, Maine. (The levels of obsolescence here are myriad—the place is falling apart, and the company itself, long ago absorbed into ExxonMobil, no longer exists in the US.) Palm trees are reflected in the hood of a lovingly maintained Thunderbird in Palm Beach. An out-of-date hearse sits forlorn, “For Sale by Owner” sign in its windshield, near Orient, Maine. In East Harlem, Samoylova picks out two old cars parked nose to tail—Cutlasses, I think—whose colors (cream and copper brown) echo the depressing, small-windowed, low-income housing aesthetics of the brick apartment blocks behind them. Even in her photograph of a diner in Raleigh, North Carolina, the view is dominated by the pictures on the wall rather than the work going on in the kitchen, which is seen through a framed cutout on the lower left. Of those pictures, the most prominent is a painting of a man posing proudly by his 1950s-era blue truck.

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In Atlantic Coast, Anastasia Samoylova retraces Berenice Abbott’s 1954 photographic journey along the Eastern Seaboard, documenting dislocation, loss, and a shifting American dream.

Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations on life along US Route 1 and on the seventieth anniversary of her project, the Florida-based photographer ventures on her own journey to revisit those communities forever transformed by the interstate. In this photograph, Samoylova turns her eye to a medley of roadside Americana: the undulating American flag, the bald eagle, a powder-blue Corvette, and their eccentric juxtaposition. A nearly shadowless light lends the scene a timeless quality, one punctuated by a stark reminder of nostalgia’s bewildering allure.

Details

Anastasia Samoylova
Blue Corvette
Archival pigment print
12 x 15 in.
Edition of 15
Signed and numbered by the artist

About the Artist

Anastasia Samoylova (born in Moscow, 1984) is a Miami-based photographer who explores the intersections of environmentalism, consumerism, politics, and the picturesque. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; C/O Berlin; Victoria and Albert Museum, Dundee, Scotland; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid and Barcelona; Amerikahaus Munich; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; and Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna. She has published four critically acclaimed books: FloodZone (2019); Floridas (2022); Image Cities (2023), published in conjunction with her winning the inaugural KBr Photo Award; and Adaptation (2024).

It’s not that there weren’t lots of late-model cars to photograph—Samoylova’s eye was caught by them, too, but in fewer numbers. Rather, she seems to have been interested not in the relentless sameness of American consumer culture that she was inevitably confronted with during her travels (a feature that Ed Ruscha pushed to the extreme in his 1963 photobook Twentysix Gasoline Stations) but on the singular detail. She notices these relics of the past without falling into the trap of nostalgia. Yes, the repetition of old cars, old churches, old movie theaters, old houses throws us back to the 1950s. This is more or less the heyday of what we now imagine as Americana. But in Samoylova’s hands Americana is portrayed not so much as a golden age but as a ruin.

Anastasia Samoylova, Fifth-Generation Farmer, Garysburg, North Carolina, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, House by Water, Lubec, Maine, 2024

Ruination is not simply the entropic erosion of the past but a condition of life in the present, according to the photographs in Atlantic Coast. Witness the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, a shocking failure of infrastructure that caused havoc for weeks in 2024 near the I-95 corridor (a successor to US Route 1), and among the most heavily trafficked interstates in the country. Or a wire clothes hanger that has been twisted to read “Affordable Healthcare,” dangling from a metal pole against a twilit sky in Miami. Or denim jeans drying on a fence in Fort Lauderdale, in a yard that has been flooded knee-high due to climate change. Or a leaflet taped to a pole near a marina in Bar Harbor, Maine, that reads: “LOOKING FOR WORK.” “Healthy, Hard Worker, Sober,” it continues. All of these are records of the insupportability of daily existence in the now.

Anastasia Samoylova, House Flag, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, Sculpted Hanger, Miami, Florida, 2025

We are living in a state of collapse. We also live among ghosts. We are haunted. A wall in West Palm Beach shows the barely visible remnants of decals that have been removed: “Sell New & Used Guns Ammo.” In Charleston, we see the removal of a statue of John C. Calhoun, vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832, slaveholder, and ardent defender of the institution of slavery. A church spire in Savannah, viewed through an elevator window, is blurred, made inchoate, like an imperfect memory, by layers of dirt and peeling, weathered glass coating. If these are manifestations of history at large welling up in the present, there are moments when art history does, too, most strikingly in House Flag, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where a figure is partially obscured by an American flag and backlit, so that we see only their silhouette. The image is a subtle echo of one of the most famous images from Frank’s Americans in which two women watch an unseen parade from adjacent apartment windows, one of their faces obscured by a large flag floating across the facade.

Anastasia Samoylova, Ruin, Barboursville, Virginia, 2024

Anastasia Samoylova, Civil War Reenactor, Fort Knox, Prospect, Maine, 2024

I’ve emphasized the bleakness that Atlantic Coast portrays, and perhaps that is because of my own experience of this country as a person of color. I am uneasy, even low-key terrified, when I look at the stained glass window in a church in Pooler, Georgia. Three bomber planes roar above an angry—perhaps even vengeful—Jesus; a coat of arms for the 448th Bomb Group sits at the top of the composition, in tribute to its actions during World War II. Below the armorial, their motto reads “Destroy.” I feel the same sense of unease when I see a close-up of a woman’s hand resting on her woven American flag shawl. Her wrist is adorned with friendship bead bracelets, and her index finger sports a ring in the form of a rhinestone-encrusted gun. I feel it again when I meet the steely, suspicious gaze of the Civil War reenactor whom Samoylova encountered in Fort Knox, in Prospect, Maine. This is the America that I fear—the one that cannot let go of the idealization of war, whether wars of the past or an imagined war of enemies within. In the face of these encounters, unlike Frank’s, Samoylova’s point of view is not explicitly critical or judgmental—but ironically, this makes her pictures all the more troubling. While Frank took stealthy snapshots of people going about their business (showing us, in effect, what they were doing when they thought they weren’t being observed), Samoylova photographs people who are active participants in their self-presentation. They want to be seen this way.

Anastasia Samoylova, Woman in Pink Hat, Homestead, Florida, 2025

Anastasia Samoylova, Fireworks, Fort Knox, Prospect, Maine, 2024
All photographs © the artist

But there is vividness too—reminders that life persists in the United States, that joy persists, that pleasure persists. An extravagantly flowering wisteria tree growing from inside an abandoned blue brick building in Baltimore, reaching out from a broken window. A young man, shirtless, soaking up the sun in front of the White House, and in another image, an older woman in a Barbie-pink Western getup—suede cowboy hat, satin shirt fringed with beads and sequins—doing the same in Homestead, Florida. And then there are two women, both Black, one in Darien, Georgia, and the other in Miami. The woman from Georgia looks up to the sky, eyes fringed by press-on lashes and a mouth in a wide smile as she shows off her utterly fabulous sweater with an appliquéd design of a nineteenth-century Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcut print. We see the Florida woman only from behind, as she poses in a sexy contrapposto, wearing a shimmering, formfitting dress cinched at the waist by a wide belt. The color here is sublime, equal parts heaven and hell: the crimson of her garment, the indigo of the shadows framing and defining her figure, the orangey yellows and teals and greens seen further afield, and over her shoulder, the deep darkness of silhouettes of fellow partiers; her Afro is like a halo. If so many of the images in Atlantic Coast make me painfully aware of the America I live in, these crucial few offer a picture of what America could be—a place that celebrates uniqueness, individuality, and the pursuit of happiness.

This essay originally appeared in Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast (Aperture, 2025).

Koo, a slim, gregarious man in his early seventies, traces his impulse to observe and collect to his childhood. The self-described shy one in a family of six children, his introversion drew him to become a diligent gleaner while growing up in Seoul, excavating shards of porcelain, pocketing peculiar rocks, pieces of colored paper, boxes, and other street detritus. He would assemble small collections of castaway treasure only to have his mother, concerned about space in the crowded family home, toss them into the trash bin. One acquisition, though, points to when his twin arts of collecting and photography first became intertwined. A 1964 brochure for the Tokyo Olympic Games—acquired by his father, who frequently traveled for his job in the textile industry—made an early impression about the allure of visual storytelling and, perhaps, Korea’s fraught relationship with its nearby island neighbor.

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Although Koo studied business administration at Yonsei University, in Korea, he moved to Germany in 1979 to pursue art at the Hamburg Fachhochschule für Gestaltung (University of Applied Sciences for Design). He thought he might become a painter, maybe a graphic designer. A life as a photographer hadn’t yet occurred to him, nor had the idea that anyone might pursue this as an occupation. Even so, he picked up the camera and began capturing, in both color and black and white, the abstracted textures of European cities. His professors, in response, encouraged him to bring more of himself, his own background and subjectivity, into the work. When he returned to Seoul in 1985, having encountered the work of Joseph Beuys, Irving Penn, Josef Sudek, and others, he embarked on projects that rejected the then-dominant style of social documentary. He experimented with photograms, Polaroids, and photo collage, stitching images together into elaborate tactile patchworks that emphasized the physicality of images and their capacity for personal expression.

In 1988, he organized an exhibition at Seoul’s Walker Hill Art Center titled The New Wave of Photography, participating as one of the artists. “It was considered a decisive turning point in the history of Korean photography,” said Hee Jean Han, curator at the Photography Seoul Museum of Art, who recently organized a retrospective of Koo’s work and credits him with fostering experimentation in the Korean photography scene. “Amid the politically repressive 1980s under Korea’s military dictatorship and the rapidly transforming city of Seoul, Koo’s personal feelings of anxiety and alienation became a catalyst for his exploration of self and society. It was ultimately a journey that established him as a pioneer bridging photography and contemporary art in Korea,” Han explained. Although Koo only taught for around two years at Kaywon University of Art & Design, his expanded notion of photography would serve as a model for younger generations.

Bohnchang Koo’s studio, Seoul, 2025

Bohnchang Koo, Yeouido Hangang Park, Seoul, ca. 1985

Koo’s penchant for formal experimentation, however, didn’t mark a complete abandonment of an observational way of working. He made a body of work on Seoul, rendered in saturated color, around the time of the 1988 Olympic Games. The city’s multibillion-dollar civic project saw the construction of new highways, subways, stadiums, and the cleanup of the Han River. This was an era also marked by political change and street protests, as the country evolved from dictatorship to democracy. Koo’s read of urban space in this transitional time, despite the punchy Ektachrome and Kodachrome colors, is melancholic. Six years abroad afforded critical distance. Missing the calm gray days in Germany, all he saw was color, sometimes in garish expressions. Picnickers find refuge on a solitary patch of green grass in an expanse of dirt; a family poses in front of the river with a partly constructed bridge in the background; pedestrians pass under a monolithic elevated highway; a rack of women’s shoes is left abandoned. The air of optimism is deflated by an undercurrent of uncertainty. Koo recalls this period in Seoul as one of change and chaos; it was not uncommon to hear tear gas being fired onto the streets somewhere off in the distance.

South Korea would chart a future of economic ascent, realized in the ubiquitous clusters of high-rises that today dominate Seoul’s skyline. As his city transformed into shimmering glass and steel, Koo began to look closely at what older surfaces transmitted, seeking trapdoors to the metaphysical in the everyday. A series on his terminally ill father, Breath (1995), a kind of memento mori, homes in on textures and details: his father’s leathery skin, a stopped pocket watch, a decaying bird—among inky images of nature suggestive of temporal ebb and flow.

Bohnchang Koo, Concrete Gwanghwamun 01, 2010

Bohnchang Koo, Horse Riding Kkokdu 02, 1998, from the collection of the Ockrang Cultural Foundation, Seoul

Koo continued to shift toward still life, isolating objects he viewed as messengers from the past. After encountering, in the late 1980s, a photograph of the Austrian Anglo ceramicist Lucie Rie posing with a Korean moon jar, he became preoccupied with ceramics, especially white porcelain, as conduits of history. “The vessel seemed to me as if it was waiting to be rescued and yearning for its hometown,” he said. Years later, an encounter in a Japanese women’s magazine with images of Joseon dynasty– era porcelains inspired a similar feeling. Why were these pieces so far from home, residing in collections abroad? Koo began to seek out and photograph vessels displaced from Korea in museum collections in Japan, Europe, and the United States. In 2006, he photographed the moon jar, now held in the British Museum, in London, with which Rie had posed. Widely exhibited and published, his photographs would popularize white ceramics that had previously been overlooked as pedestrian, fueling a revival of interest among artists and collectors.

Bohnchang Koo, Gobdol JM-GD 14-2, 2006, from the collection of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum

Bohnchang Koo, Vessel OSK 22-2, 2005, from the collection of the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka

In the recently collected compendium of essays The Beauty of Everyday Things, the Japanese art historian and poet Soetsu Yanagi, a leading thinker behind the mingei (often translated as “arts for common people”) movement, praises humble everyday objects made by anonymous producers for their marriage of aesthetics and functionality. Yanagi founded the Korean Folk Art Museum in Seoul in 1924, and the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo in 1936. His essays ponder and celebrate the aura of patina, pattern, embroidery, and clay, invoking Zen expressions such as “the inelegant is also the elegant.” In 1920, in response to Japan’s ongoing occupation of Korea, which began in 1910 and lasted for thirty-five years, and its repression of the March First Movement in 1919, he penned “A Letter to My Korean Friends,” an earnest, heartbroken apology in epistolary form, which appeared, albeit as a censored version, in the Japanese magazine Kaizo. Among his calls for spiritual and cultural common ground to resist a cult of imperial conquest, Yanagi praised the character of Korean ceramics of the Goryeo Kingdom (918–1392) and the utilitarian forms of the Joseon era (1392–1897), describing them as “sorrowful objects” of the everyday that offered comfort. (His conflation of Korean ceramics and “sorrow” would later be critiqued as a colonial read.) For Yanagi, the form of an object was imbued with meaning. “It is line,” he wrote, in reference to Korean porcelain, “that vividly chronicles the pathos of life and the trials and tribulations of history.”

This observation might be applied to Koo’s photography. He became interested in Yanagi’s writing in the early aughts and appreciated how he had praised less ornate Korean ceramic traditions that were superseded by celadon porcelain, revered for its lustrous green glazes. However, Koo’s interest exceeds aesthetic appreciation. He sees his still lifes, or portraits, of vessels as a reclamation effort, a way of bringing these works back together, “a reunion through photographs.” These frontal, shadowless images, photographed against rice paper and printed large-scale, monumentalize the delicate forms. They appear vividly charged, leaning toward abstraction with the otherworldly presence of a Constantin Brancusi sculpture and the softness of a Giorgio Morandi painting. The curator Alejandro Castellote has observed that “several types of aura overlap in this series: the aura of beauty, the aura of polyphony emanating from its minimalist forms, the aura of Taoist spirituality, the aura that pertains to the assertion of Korean cultural identity, and the aura of coloniality.”

Bohnchang Koo, Mask Gangneung Gwanno 03-2, 2002

Bohnchang Koo, DMZ, 2010
All works courtesy the artist

Koo acknowledges the politics at play in his work. “I chased the collections of the most important museums in Japan,” he said. “As an artist, I am proud that I have brought their images and spirits into my negatives. Not using weapons, like guns and swords, but with my camera.” He would chase objects close to home as well. A 2010 series on the Gwanghwamun Gate of the sprawling landmark Gyeongbokgung Palace, originally built in 1395, shows the broken remains, propped with metal beams, of an ornately decorated structure that has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times over the centuries due to fires, wars, and colonial dictates. The sections photographed by Koo are from the 1960s reconstruction, after the gate was destroyed during the Korean War. A series called DMZ (2010) is less ambiguous, looking, with forensic precision, at the legacy of the war through items at the War Memorial of Korea. Other series, on traditions of mask making and performance, wooden funereal figures called kkokdu, and golden royal crowns, extend his desire to elevate and preserve elements of Korean history. “His images do not simply document cultural heritage,” noted Sujong Song, of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. “They reanimate it, inviting viewers to reconsider the resonance of history in the here and now.”

On a more workaday level, Koo has photographed the colorful oval nubs of his almost finished soap bars, presenting them as typological grids, marking his own passage of time. Most he retrieved from his own bathroom, but, as a preternatural collector, he acquired others from café restrooms around town. “I am very interested in surface texture,” he said. “Photography and objects both keep time.” Lately, Koo is thinking about photographing Roman and medieval armor helmets: “They attract me a lot. I would like to catch the sweat and the agony of the soldiers who wore them.” He is also at work on a new book, revisiting those early pictures made in Europe at the start of his career, when he roamed the streets of Venice, London, Hamburg, and other cities with a 35mm camera. This editing process has been a means of conversing with his past self, and he has been pleased to discover the continuity, across half a century, of his search for the hidden and quietly surreal in the everyday.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue.”