Pfeiffer met these ephebes while cruising the streets of Zurich and Paris, and his portraits of them formed his 1986 series and book Das Auge, die Gedanken, unentwegt wandernd (The eyes, the thoughts, ceaselessly wandering). Think of it as a gay answer to W. G. Sebald. The curators for this survey, Simon Castets and Nicola Trezzi, have installed the work to imitate the layout of the book—though, as they note in a wall text, Pfeiffer described the experience of shooting it as a search for “El Dorado,” the city of gold. The viewer’s eye follows the faces like a line on a map; it’s unclear if this particular road leads to riches or to perdition. 

Perhaps in this case the two are the same thing. The road leads right back to where it started. It always does with Pfeiffer, who has returned to the same subjects again and again over more than fifty years. He has produced lifelike portraits of products and people as well as lush landscapes and still lifes throughout his career. The aesthetics of fine art and of fashion photography intermingle in his work with the strategies of conceptual art and of commerce. Small dates below the pictures, which are not displayed chronologically, offer some clues to these abiding obsessions, but there is little formal unity save Pfeiffer’s use of a film camera and a flash. 

There are the bracing bedroom shots from the 1970s, taken in the years just after gay liberation, of men entwined, mid-coitus, on couches and beds—and one photograph of a hand tugging at a young twunk’s hairy “happy trail” in a bathtub that is utterly soaked with tenderness. (An older Italian woman beside me gasped at a close-up from 1979 of a cock going into an ass.) A boy with an upturned chin shot in 1974 as an homage to Man Ray’s 1929 portrait of Lee Miller, Anatomies, resurfaces in an image from 2013 with the sultry addition of a trail of cigarette smoke. 

There are lithe, partially sheathed bodies: a man taking off a sweater, another lying on a beach towel, a cluster of legs in knee-high red-and-blue socks. Pfeiffer also seems to have his favorite sitters: a chiseled blond who always appears wet (here emerging from the surf, there dipping his butt into a sink) in pictures taken throughout the 1980s and supermodel Eva Herzigová, who rolls around on the carpets and zebra-skin rugs of the Meurice Hotel in a 2009 shoot for Vogue Paris. 

And there are the kind of pictures you’d expect from a European itinerant—hotel breakfasts, kitschy gift shops, spectacular train views—but always from a startling perspective. The curators have wryly paired many of these pictures. Hung beside a beautiful mountain vista, a graying Swiss sausage in a bun appears almost comically emasculating. Bejeweled clocks sit atop an ornate bureau like a crowd of the painted ladies who look on from other photographs in the same room. A sharply illuminated picture of tourist bric-a-brac—miniaturized versions of classical marbles stacked in a shop display—appears above a photograph of a crate of raw shrimp, equally pale and glistening.

The curators have organized the show in five thematic groups that seem almost entirely arbitrary and interchangeable: Isn’t all of Pfeiffer’s work an “Atlas of Desire”? Doesn’t it always exude a “Helvetic Glamour”? All these perfect piles of commodities—inert, almost preserved in aspic—confront us with our own gluttony like late twentieth-century vanitas paintings. Consumption has rarely looked so grotesquely good. Still, Pfeiffer never moralizes. As with El Dorado, sensorial pleasure is always haunted by the inevitability of its disappearance. 

Pfeiffer has often called himself an amateur, perhaps to insist that he always shoots from the hip. His are not staged photographs, despite their improbable levels of perfection. It’s difficult to think of a photographer who is so stylistically—and stylishly—promiscuous: That may be one reason why Pfeiffer has never enjoyed the celebrity of some of his imitators, such as Wolfgang Tillmans or Juergen Teller. 

Of the various themes, “El Dorado” proves the most durable, a specific body of work that offers a view out from Pfeiffer’s practice as much as a way in. That erotic journey is also a good way of thinking about Agnelli, based in a former Fiat factory where Italian industry flexed its muscles for over sixty years. Pfeiffer doesn’t seem much interested in cars or other machinery—his eye mostly lingers over the mechanics of the human body, taut beneath pale, young flesh—but after a stroll on the museum’s rooftop pista, a former racetrack that’s now Turin’s answer to New York’s High Line, walking through the exhibition feels like a joyride. Your eye leaps across decades in the span of a single wall as it cruises Pfeiffer’s work at the speed of life. 

Walter Pfeiffer: In Good Company is on view at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, Italy, through September 12, 2026.

Deluging the visitor with example after example of the conjunction of bodies and machines, whether in Expressionist portrait, deadpan document, or an animated array of sci-fi gadgetry, New Humans poses the question: What is a human in a high-tech world? Its findings, at least as presented by the specimens on view, are often frightening and not especially auspicious. The show appropriately begins with various responses to the mortal ravages of World War I and largely follows this trajectory of the long-simmering Promethean dread concerning humanity’s compulsion to invent ever more devious devices for self-destruction, culminating in the current fears surrounding artificial intelligence.

Anxieties about AI haunt the show as well as the essays collected in the handsome and hefty catalog. This newest and seemingly most powerful prosthetic extension of human faculties has considerable implications—as anyone who has navigated through the online sea of deepfakes knows—for questions of artistic creation and visual representation writ large. Numerous recent works in the show employ mimetic avatars and mutant monsters, as in Cao Fei’s disturbingly placid animation of an octopus-woman hybrid, Oz (2022), or the computer-generated Kim Kardashian look-alike who provides intermittent bien-pensant metacommentary on the perils and promises of AI in Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s engrossing video installation-cum-photojournalistic portrayal of the Tamil independence movement in Sri Lanka, The Finesse (2022). Hito Steyerl provides another example of this new form of artistic muckraking with Mechanical Kurds (2025), a video installation that exposes the hidden human labor behind AI, giving voice to a number of Kurdish workers based in a refugee camp in Iraq who classify images for Amazon.

A great deal of the imagery generated from AI, at least for current versions, is conceived as primarily photographic. (If you ask AI for a picture of a person, for instance, what results is most likely based on a photograph or rendered in a photographic style unless otherwise prompted.) This aspect of the technology is slyly registered in an unassuming—and notably uncredited—collection of black-and-white images that, according to the accompanying wall text, were “curated” by Google Gemini. Half of the ten framed inkjet prints are film stills from visionary movies such as Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), and Ex Machina (2014), which, according to the text (itself generated from the Gemini algorithm), illustrate the “prehistory of our technological anxiety.”

The medium of photography, with its chemical basis, precision optics, and push-button expediency, holds a special place in this technological prehistory, and New Humans contains numerous examples of how the camera’s celebrated objectivity has been marshalled to invest almost anything it documents into a startlingly surreal reality: from the fantastic juxtapositions of bodies and machines taken from the mass-market press in Hannah Höch’s photocollages to Frank Gilbreth’s equally surreal “cyclegraphs” (ca. 1914–16; represented in the show as exhibition prints), which sought to scientifically record Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies for workplace efficiency. As is often the case, the most seemingly inartistic documents are the most uncanny, for example the twenty-seven anonymous black-and-white photographs drawn from the collection of the French National Office for Scientific and Industrial Research and Inventions. Created between 1925 and 1938 to document inventions in the years following World War I, these photographs of mechanical devices, presented in meticulous detail against blank backgrounds, creepily suggest the blurred boundaries between domestic and military uses of technology, so that a pair of “acoustic horns” that would extend from a wearer’s ears to amplify sound seem as sinister as a grenade or bomb.

The threat of war has long been a prompt for calls for new humanisms. This is most evident in a gallery stacked salon-style with paintings of ghoulish heads and a phalanx of sculptural figures that re-create the sort of art that appeared in two landmark postwar exhibitions of nuclear-era malaise: This Is Tomorrow (1956) at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and New Images of Man (1959) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. But it is another exhibition, unnoted in the show or catalog, that arguably best captures the humanist unconscious of this show: MoMA’s 1955 blockbuster photomural extravaganza The Family of Man. Like this earlier “theme show” (to borrow Barbara Morgan’s memorable description from a review published in the pages of Aperture), New Humans delivers a decidedly global purview of the state of humanity with a noticeable focus on those seemingly universal aspects of life such as birth (exemplified in Lennart Nilsson’s weirdly beautiful color photographs of human fetuses originally published in Life magazine in 1965), family (most strikingly captured in Aneta Grzeszykowska’s 2018 Mama series depicting her daughter interacting with a lifelike silicone torso of the artist that is in many ways more disturbing than Sally Mann’s still-scandalous portraits of her naked children), and death, especially as it is dispensed by war.

But whereas the central theme of The Family of Man was, as Morgan argued, “the universal passion to live,” this newer iteration offers something more morbid, more historical, and, at times, more political. Informed by theories coming out of Indigenous and Black studies and ecocriticism that seek to decenter the human within larger ecological systems and question its very basis as a Western technique of control, New Humans stresses the need to reconsider, if not reject, established concepts of humanity even as it repeatedly asserts the human body as the inescapable constant with which any consideration of these factors must contend. Replacing “Man” with “Humans” might propose a more capacious understanding of this predicament, but as the objects on view declare again and again, the problem of being human remains with us, whoever we humans are and might yet become.

Since its founding, FotoFest has organized its proceedings thematically, with past years examining topics like climate change, photography from particular geographies, and social crises. This year’s biennial, Global Visions: FotoFest at 40, which opened in March, marks a different kind of ambition, taking a step back to offer a celebration of FotoFest’s own history. Curated by cofounder and former artistic director Wendy Watriss and executive director Steven Evans, alongside cocurators Annick Dekiouk and Madi Murphy, the 2026 biennial is organized chronologically across FotoFest’s twenty previous iterations from 1986 to 2024, reconstituting landmark exhibitions and presentations that have defined the festival’s four decades. Over 600 works from previous biennials adorn the Silver Street and Winter Street Studios in Arts District Houston’s Sawyer Yards, bringing together over 450 artists from more than fifty-eight countries. What emerges from this retrospective of four decades of FotoFest is a testimony to photography’s capacity to bear witness to, provoke, and respond to the world. For Watriss, Baldwin, and now Evans, the biennial has served as potent outlet for photography’s ability to record and interrogate the pressures and crises of the historical moment.

1980s

The first biennial, in 1986, established FotoFest’s goal of presenting works by non-American artists in order to garner them visibility and international attention. The main exhibition revolved around six young, contemporary British photographers who were documenting a period of intense social and economic change in Thatcherite Britain. Among them, Paul Graham and Martin Parr, both in their early thirties, exhibited their groundbreaking, color-soaked visions of Britain’s social climate: A-1: The Great North Road and The Last Resort. Forty years on, it’s still a pleasure to see Graham’s vision of labor in the north and Parr’s observations of leisure in the south. Both of these now canonical projects anchor the biennial’s socially curious outlook, but also its prescience.

1990s

Save for the Prague Spring in 1968, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia maintained tight control over cultural and artistic life in the country from 1948 until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, determining what could be made, shown, and circulated. Photographers navigated this climate by working in two distinct registers: images destined for state-sanctioned publications and institutions and a separate, private practice, making work for themselves and a small circle of trusted peers that was kept carefully out of sight. Perspectives, Real and Imaginary, the main exhibition of the 1990 biennial, marked the first time many of these clandestine bodies of work had been seen in the United States. A particularly striking dual portrait attributed to Ivan Lutterer, Jan Malý, and Jiří Poláček pairs an older man and woman against a plain studio backdrop. The man’s face is the photograph’s quiet center of gravity, worn but gentle, guarded but friendly, its ambiguities of age and gender resisting the straightforward readings the composition seems to promise.

The 1994 biennial saw a shift toward marginalized artists within the United States. One of the marquee exhibitions, American Voices: Latino Photography in the United States, was widely recognized as a groundbreaking presentation of photography by Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American artists. Of particular interest are Max Aguilera-Hellweg’s and Sophie Rivera’s sumptuous, flash-lit, black-and-white portraits of their respective communities. Aguilera-Hellweg’s large-format Polaroids from Mexico City and East Los Angeles reflect a searching for identity across borders, while Rivera’s radiant portraits of strangers, staged and shot in her own home, reveal a disarming trust between photographer and sitter in her local New York.

2000s

The turn of the century brought with it a reckoning with the medium as new technologies and techniques gained popularity and developed rapidly. The release of Adobe Photoshop in 1990 ushered in a new era of digital manipulation and, by the early aughts, had further complicated the quagmire of photographic truth. FotoFest 2002 staged classic analog photography—pictorialism, studio portraiture, and documentary street realism—against images made with new digital processes and early computer technologies. One early experiment, Kingdom Road | Exploding Cubes, by the pioneering husband-wife duo of Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill, working together as MANUAL, combines grids of thirty-five digital photographs above abstract, computer-generated landscapes extracted from the photographs. The result is a questioning of photography’s relationship to time, the gaze, and the seductions of new digital forms of expression, an emblematic experiment for how artists of the era grappled with questions of media.

Environmental concerns came into sharp focus with the 2004 and 2006 biennials, which focused on the global water crises and the environment and violence, respectively. (Climate as a topic would recur as an organizing theme with increasing urgency, notably in the 2016 biennial Changing Circumstances: Looking at the Future of the Planet.) Taking an expansive view of photography, the 2004 iteration invited not just photographers but architects, policy experts, and other thought leaders to address the status of water resources. Yet the work that continues to feel the most poignant is the most abstract, and therefore the least didactic—Jungjin Lee’s gorgeously wrought seascapes reflect a more contemplative and enduring reflection on our relationship to and fascination with water.

2010s

By the 2010s, FotoFest was ready to turn a critical eye back on the political climate of the United States. Deep into wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the public support that had been so fervid in the wake of 9/11 had slowly curdled into exhaustion and disillusionment. With no clean exit or easy sense of “victory” to satisfy the pollsters, the cataclysmic costs—human, financial, moral—had become untenable. The marquee exhibition at the 2010 biennial, featuring work by artists like An-My Lê, Trevor Paglen, and Richard Mosse, bore the title The Road to Nowhere?, precisely reflecting the growing frustration, fatigue, and pessimism around these “forever wars” and America’s morbid obsession with conflict.

The 2014 biennial was the first edition to focus on photography, video, and mixed-media art from the Middle East and North Africa. By 2014, much of the Arab world had been in turmoil for years, after Mohamed Bouazizi’s act of extreme defiance sparked the widespread protests and civil action across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen that would become known as the Arab Spring. Against this backdrop of conflict, revolution, and civil war, View from Inside, the primary exhibition of FotoFest 2014, opened as what was then the largest presentation of contemporary Arab photography ever shown in the United States. Sama Alshaibi’s Between Two Rivers is particularly powerful—her stalwart, black-and-white self-portraits work to counter the common Western narrative that US interventionism and war would bring increased freedoms for Iraqi women.

2020s

FotoFest 2022, titled If I Had a Hammer after Pete Seeger and Lee Hays’s folk standard, reconsidered photography’s role in social justice and civil rights movements—a biennial shaped unmistakably by the anxieties of the first Trump era, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dorothea Lange’s wartime documentation of Japanese American incarceration and Tōyō Miyatake’s clandestine photographs made from inside Manzanar still ground this exhibition in photo-history, while Bruce Yonemoto’s portraits and Reynier Leyva Novo’s eerie images of empty podiums bring the show’s political discourse into the present.

FotoFest 2024, Critical Geography, pursued related questions through a different lens, exploring photography’s role in constructing and critiquing our conception of place across a notably international program of more than twenty artists and collectives. Along with the 2022 biennial, these two previous editions of the decade cast FotoFest’s global ambitions in a sharper, politically urgent light—reaffirming photography’s ongoing power as a tool for change.

What Global Visions makes legible, across forty years of exhibitions, is that FotoFest has never been concerned with abstract themes. Rather, it has constantly responded to what photography has been asked to do at any given moment: Expand the canon, reckon with new technologies, address crisis. That responsiveness is FotoFest’s most durable quality, and it makes the new and notable commissions from Shavon Aja Morris and André Ramos-Woodard, presented at Project Row Houses, feel like more than a gesture toward the future. Even within a retrospective frame, the festival continues to ask what photography is being called upon to do in our given moment.

Global Visions: FotoFest at 40 is on view in Houston through May 10, 2026.

This year’s Circulation(s) is directed by Caroline Benichou, Carine Dolek, Laetitia Guillemin, Marie Guillemin, Emmanuelle Halkin, Ioana Mello, and Lucille Vivier-Calicat, an all-women collective of photography curators. They prefer to forgo a unifying theme and instead look out for common threads among the eight hundred or so projects submitted to their open call. Participation is limited to photographers who have roots in Europe—or at least reside in the elastically defined continent—but their subjects can be further afield, such as in Brazil, Argentina, and Iran, which come into sharp focus at this year’s festival. Issues of identity, belonging, political upheaval, and memory arise often, as do experiments in new, hybrid forms of image-making. “When we come across a certain style, or a particular new visual language, it can occasionally feel a bit unsettling,” the curator Emmanuelle Halkin says. “But if several works are exploring it, we often think it’s worth showing.”

This spring, the festival brings together twenty-four idiosyncratic projects from artists early in their careers. Inside the chartreuse-green exhibition cubes near the entrance, photographs are largely outnumbered. Besides video, the other work on display skews toward craft, including a number of overpainted traditional Polish earthenware dishes and abstract beaded textile hangings that sway and shimmer in the dark. In a room highlighting Ireland, a pop-up hair salon has materialized in front of Ellen Blair’s work—a lyrical series on DIY haircuts in Belfast’s queer community. The ambitious, often eye-catching installations throughout the show reinforce the notion that this is a generation of artists intent on untethering art from the phone screen and yet alert as ever to what looks good on it.

One standout is the Reykjavik-based duo of North Carolina-born artist Sadie Cook and Polish artist Jo Pawlowska’s ongoing project Everything I Want to Tell You. The result of a yearslong weekly practice exploring class, gender, sexuality, and illness, the hypnotic work conceals and fragments as much as it confesses. A dizzying installation of about six thousand images in a space not much larger than a parking spot, it tugs viewers into the rip current of private anxieties and fantasies that overwhelm the artists’ minds just before falling asleep. Entwined limbs and eerie liquids glow with electric colors that give everything a digitally corrupted feel. Poster-scale prints drag on the cement floor beneath self-portraits mixed in with medical records and distorted screenshots stapled roughly to the wall while translucent images hang so high above they can barely be seen. If you don’t watch your step, you might scatter loose confetti-sized photographs of who-knows-what littering the ground. 

In some of the most intriguing works on view, photography is a starting point for connections of another kind. In Black Carnation Part Three (2024–26), Konstantin Zhukov constructs an imagined narrative of Soviet-era queer beaches in his home country of Latvia. “Queer history is a relatively new subject in Latvian academia, being written as we speak,” says Zhukov, who drew inspiration from the mid-century diary entries of a local closeted gay man. He prints his diffuse, gray-toned images of erotic encounters on disposable surfaces like newsprint or receipts. Making art with the kind of thermal printers that generate flimsy restaurant bills, Zhukov points at the contradictions he sees in these moments, at once transactional and infused with the warmth of human touch.

For the Paris-based photographer Marine Billet, the camera functions as a way to get to know a group of girls in their late teens, whose tender, meandering voice notes play through headphones beside her photo and video series Reliées (2025). Billet, who is thirty-four, thinks of the project as being like time traveling. “I wondered what it would have been like to have been born when they were,” she says. In painterly, medium-format tableaux, she captures the teenagers in a stylized mode between fashion choreography and their natural way of being, as they crowd together in a cramped bedroom or gaze into their phones around the dinner table. 

The stars of Reliées came to the opening weekend of the festival—and took pictures in front of their portraits—as did about three thousand other visitors who attended not only the exhibition but also an array of live performances and readings, all free and open to the public. Throughout the day, people were doing and making, whether in the form of haircuts and temporary tattoos of photographs on view or studio portrait sessions organized by local photographers. The rapper T2i, who had collaborated on a project with artist NouN about a mythical mermaidlike figure from Guyana, gave a lively performance. Visitors followed along on a large screen as the Swiss artist Nathalie Bissig drew in red gouache atop her wry, raw, and sometimes ghoulish images depicting the folk traditions of the Canton of Uri. There were no quiet corners with photobooks for sale. You could only purchase the festival catalogue, which was slimmer this year due to a decline in sponsors. But the curators and the large team of volunteers remain as committed as ever to this communal, militantly inclusive, and often freewheeling endeavor. As one artist told Halkin recently, any other venue might let him “hang photographs in a straight line,” but only Circulation(s) would help him take risks in front of a real audience.

Circulation(s): European Young Photography Festival is on view in Paris through May 17, 2026.

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes, an exhibition currently on view at David Zwirner in New York, is a suite of the final dye-transfer prints ever to be made from his negatives—and is as bittersweet as its title suggests. It arrives fifty years after his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and includes previously unseen work from the early 1970s, when he first adopted the analog printing method that yielded uncanny, vivid prints. Color was rare in art photography then, but to view these pictures now, in a world inundated with screamingly loud, bright images, Eggleston’s range of color still feels remarkable. The intensity is not only a matter of simply turning up the temperature of the image, but also discovering a kind of precise, emotional saturation—a feeling close to music (he is also a talented classical pianist). For Eggleston, the early ’70s were the years when color had become existential, essential to the whole of the photograph—“as if the blue and the sky were one thing,” as the MoMA curator John Szarkowski wrote.

By the time the MoMA show opened in 1976, many of the once-foreign sights in Eggleston’s pictures had invaded the psychic geography of the Delta as insidiously and quick as kudzu creep, becoming assimilated, normalized. Perhaps this is why Hilton Kramer of The New York Times, among those initially reluctant critics, pronounced Eggleston’s pictures “perfectly banal.” Perhaps Kramer’s vision was obscured by the times, for in these pictures the apparently benign is revealed as ignominous and slippery and strange, resulting in images lodged somewhere between the mundane and the utterly surreal. 

The title of the MoMA catalog, William Eggleston’s Guide, positioned both book and show as a kind of travelogue to a realm that Eggleston made his own, just as the great writers of place in the South had done. Here was a territory in which reality is skewed as fiction in order to ring as truth: where a revolver is trained on a patchwork quilt, where a child’s tricycle looms resplendent and larger-than-life, where a lone dog roams through a former plantation, where discarded white bottles (the size and shape of containers of bleach) roll in the dirt like trashed tumbleweeds. 

The inclusion of that debris in the frame, Janet Malcolm wrote in a belated and more nuanced appraisal of the show, is what gives Eggleston’s photographs a “Proustian reverberation” of a sensation of memory: “We can feel that we have been there, on that piece of road, on that day, with those clouds and those plastic bottles.” All of it, whether we want it or not—the oneness of blue and sky, the grotesque history embedded in those plantations—now belongs to us too. Eggleston described his aims more succinctly. His oft-quoted phrase, “I am at war with the obvious,” serves as a complete and concise artist’s statement. For more than a half century, one of his most crucial weapons has been color, and never more resonantly than in the form of the dye transfer. His name has become synonymous with it.

Before he first tried the method in the early 1970s, Eggleston had encountered the effects of the dye-transfer method without knowing it by name. The rich hues it produced made it appealingly ubiquitous in commercial printing and, from the 1920s through mid-1970s, in Technicolor films (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II was among the last to use the method). In The Wizard of Oz, dye-transfer Technicolor accounted for ruby-red slippers, the yellow-brick road, the Emerald City. But most influential for Eggleston were the indelible tones of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly North by Northwest. You can feel the imprint of Hitchcock’s film everywhere in The Last Dyes, from an airplane parked in a field to the haunting glow of a toilet, to the solitary figures in Eggleston’s painterly interiors: a man sitting on the end of a motel bed or a young woman slouched on a mustard-brown carpet with her cigarette, the shade of the cushion below her echoing her box of Marlboro Reds. 

“William, color is bullshit,” Eggleston’s hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, once told him at a party. But for Eggleston, adopting the dye transfer was transformational: It instigated his embrace of color photography as his primary mode. To make a dye-transfer photographic print, three color separations are created from the original negative. Each is then transferred to a film matrix and bathed in a dye of cyan, magenta, or yellow. Finally, the three film matrices, coated in light-sensitive material, are rolled out consecutively onto the printing paper, in light, overlaid precisely. Everything is done by hand. “Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one,” Eggleston told curator Mark Holborn in 1991. 

Sometime after 1994, when the Eastman Kodak Company stopped producing the last of the dye-transfer materials, Eggleston and his sons, Winston and William III, began to procure and stockpile all the remaining supplies they could get their hands on. Eggleston made an arrangement with his printers, Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, the husband-and-wife duo behind CVI Labs, who agreed to make dye-transfer prints exclusively for him. This was nearly three decades ago. (A video produced last year for the exhibition shows the printers in their lab in Vashon Island, Washington, commenting on the process.)

Over time and across numerous exhibitions, retrospectives, and dozens of books, not all of which were produced in dye transfer, the reserve of materials began to dwindle like waning light. “It was like watching an hourglass,” Winston told me recently. Scarcest of all was the gelatin-coated fiber paper itself. They exhausted the stock of 16-by-20; then 20-by-30. Finally, all that was left was 20-by-24, and it became clear that there was enough paper left only for about a suite of about fifty prints, in small editions (five each), with a margin for error. These “last dyes” would be the last of their kind. 

Choosing fifty was difficult; for the photographer himself, impossible. “All of my pictures are my favorites,” Eggleston declares the video, as he inspects a box of prints. The choices and deletions were guided by others and by other factors. They returned to the beginning, 1970 to 1971. “It’s my favorite period of Dad’s photography,” said Winston, who supervised much of the printing of The Last Dyes. Many beloved favorites reappear here—that luminous freezer, a young Dennis Hopper at the wheel, a self-portrait of the photographer lying in bed—along with some, according to Winston, that hadn’t been given their utmost justice in previous editions.

Some arose from discoveries in the archives, yielding unconscious echoes of the Guide. A glass of iced tea on a diner table, appearing to glow from within, recalls an iconic photograph of a mid-flight cocktail catching the sun as the plane cuts through the clouds. Here, in Mississippi, is another vibrant flowered sofa, only now it is Eggleston himself in the seat, in the tall riding boots he favors. Here is a station wagon on a suburban street. “The color, the sky, the temperature, it had to have been made the same day as the tricycle,” Winston said, referring to his father’s famous 1969 photograph (which was not printed in The Last Dyes), also made in a newly developed neighborhood, of a heroic-looking child’s tricycle. 

And it is impossible to see the lone bulb dangling from a ceiling whose blue color extends to the walls without thinking of the red. Untitled (Red Ceiling) (1973)—my own introduction to Eggleston, via Big Star’s Radio City album—is lurid, radiant with danger—“wet like blood,” Eggleston has described it. The red ceiling is in the primary bedroom of a house owned by Greenwood, Mississippi, dentist T. C. Boring, Eggleston’s best friend, who shared his affinity for wild times, the absurd, and a general rebuke of conventionality in all forms. Boring, who died in 1980, appears in several of Eggleston’s images, sometimes memorably nude and smoking next to an oxygen tank in a dim room, surrounded by spray-painted graffiti, or in his 2005 film Stranded in Canton (originally shot in 1973) of the nocturnal and Quaalude-fueled Delta demimonde. The red-ceiling photograph was made under relatively relaxed circumstances: While lounging on the bed below, Eggleston saw a picture. He pointed his camera upward. 

After years of looking at the red, it’s a revelation to encounter the blue. The blue and the sky are one thing, as are the walls and ceiling, save for the electric wires from the bulb, the top edge of a curtain and white trim and a braided belt hanging by a doorway, all the color of clouds. The predominant hue is closer to Marian blue, associated with the Madonna. Though the composition is similar to the red image, down to the reflection of the bulb, the feeling of these rooms could not be more opposite. Yet they had to have been in the same house.

Winston confirmed this. “We went through edits over the years, and we always knew there was a ‘Blue Ceiling,’” he said. “I’m so happy we printed it. T. C. was so eccentric—I’ve seen other pictures where he’d painted a room some crude-green glossy green; pictures of an open medicine cabinet. But he had this backhouse, and that’s where he painted each room all a different color: red, yellow, and blue.” Perhaps T. C. appreciated the irony of the religious color. Perhaps he was aiming for a version of the primary dyes: cyan, magenta, yellow. Perhaps he was just having a spur-of-the-moment good time, wild with paint. 

No “Yellow Ceiling” photograph is known to exist, but the trio of colors recurs in the next gallery. A single white loaf remains on an otherwise emptied grocery shelf. Its brand name, Wonder Country Style, is doubly ironic and accurate to the extrasensory feeling that is transmitted by Eggleston’s pictures. The packaging is dotted with circles of yellow, red, and blue.

For this is also a show of blues; the Last Dyes has to contain a bit of melancholy. Consider another gas pump, its blue-and-orange sign in a storm-lit parking lot, its emblem lettered Gulf, suggesting an isolated abyss. Consider the horizons; the cars; the dramatic gray-blue sky contrasting the brilliant red of a child’s sweater; the chlorinated blue of backyard swimming pools; the reemergence of a truck partially concealed by flowering wisteria, yet still visible, like a little kid who believes they are hidden. And finally, consider the blue light pooling over a Hitchcockian nighttime parking lot, casting over the nearby walls and cars, a lone white streak (“a light leak as he advanced the camera?” Winston wonders) pointing out the dazzle of asphalt glitter below. Picture it as the floor of the blue ceiling, an outdoor room.

It was a complicated image to print, Malli says in the exhibition video, describing the day she went into the darkroom to expose the last set of matrices, before handing them to Stricherz, who died last year, for processing. Dye transfer is “so rarified now,” Stricherz says, but it used to be a “big industry in the graphic arts”—silkscreens, magazines. Both, suddenly, were conscious of the arrival of a long-anticipated conclusion, printing the last dye transfers for the man who had made them famous. “It was a little sad,” Malli acknowledges. A minor-key feeling hangs in the air: the finality of the moment. The end of an era.

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes is on view at David Zwirner, New York, through March 7, 2026.

The exhibition Casa Susanna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario and Les Rencontres d’Arles, showcases this image alongside some 160 other works made by and for a community of cross-dressers in New York and beyond throughout the 1960s. (While many of these folks identified as “transvestites,” the exhibition’s curators use the term cross-dressers, and this text follows suit. All identifying pronouns are used per the curators’ direction.) This community had a series of hubs. The first was a wig shop on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, run by Marie Tornell. One day in the mid-1950s, Humberto (Tito) Arriagada, who had moved to New York after serving in the United States’ Foreign Information Service during World War II, walked into the shop. It was love at first sight between Arriagada and Tornell—and love at second sight when Tornell met Susanna Valenti, the person Tito had been cross-dressing as since teenage years. The pair transformed Tornell’s shop into a dear, clandestine resource for cross-dressers at a time when New York’s so-called masquerade laws still criminalized wearing clothes associated with the “opposite” gender. 

Once this close-knit underground community had the looks, it needed somewhere to show them off. Tornell and Arriagada—now free to be Susanna Valenti more regularly—made their apartment a safe space. In a photograph of “Susanna standing by the mirror in her New York City apartment” (1960–63), the home is a charming hall of mirrors. At the forefront, Valenti poses seductively in a lavender-pink dress not far from the shade of the painted walls, her eyes burning with confidence through the chromogenic print. Behind her, her reflection shows off the elegant cut of her lavender dress; farther back still, another woman stands in front of another mirror, bent over some distant domestic task as a lamp gently illuminates the back of her neck. That lamp, too, is reflected, forming a pair that frames the woman’s dark hair. These photographs are charged. They are proof that their subjects could live as they wanted, happily. They electrify the viewer. They urge the viewer to take charge of their own lives.

The exhibition design groups photographs of women engaged in similar pursuits—posing in front of televisions, for example, or for Christmas cards complete with girly, curliecue well-wishes in ink. The subjects assert their identities through action. They are women because they look and act like women. Femininity is an achievement, and these photographs advertise the spoils. In these images, “wish I was her” becomes “wish you were here.”

Arriagada and Tornell certainly took charge of their own lives. In 1960, they began transforming a humble cluster of bungalows and a barn in the Catskill Mountains into Chevalier d’Éon—named for the eighteenth-century cross-dressing French spy Chevalière d’Éon—and invited their community to visit and stay. A photograph of “Susanna and Felicity in the kitchen, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY” (1960–63) shows two women thrilled to be in their element, the former camping it up with her leg on a stool while the latter, cross-legged, laughs and cuts her food as if at dinner theater. Like “Lili on the diving board, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY” (1966), taken at the second resort Arriagada and Tornell set up in 1964, these are holiday snapshots. They’re proto-selfies. But they’re also performances: moments of people willing themselves into the kind of person and life they desire. 

Casa Susanna surrounds these photographs with others taken in their friend Gail’s Greenwich Village apartment, along with copies of the groundbreaking Transvestia magazine, founded in 1960 by Virginia Prince to connect and celebrate cross-dressers across the country. Arriagada starred as Susanna herself for its December 1961 cover. The ephemera, alongside the photographs, help shape our contemporary understanding of transgender identity. Some of these individuals later took further steps towards living as women—medically and legally. Whether or not all the people in these images fit our current categories, the community they built offered the chance to experiment and escape the narrow confines of gender before the modern gay rights movement exploded.

Moreover, the exhibition emphasizes how Transvestia and its photographers seized the means of production: Before the DIY freedom of the Polaroid arrived, they must have had to find sympathetic photo-lab workers to develop their chromogenic and gelatin-silver prints. They certainly kept these photographs safe. Although countless images have been lost, much of this show draws from a cache discovered at a Manhattan flea market in 2004. The pictures are in such exemplary condition that there’s no doubt they were held dear, and perhaps close to the vest. This exhibition is proof not only that people have always refused the despicable gender laws now resurfacing in this country, but also that remaking the world in your own image is possible, vital, and a hell of a lot of fun. 

Casa Susanna is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through January 25, 2026.

The exhibition Tokyo Underground 1960–1970s: A Turning Point in Postwar Japanese Culture, recently staged at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, explored this movement through its ephemera: movie posters, flyers, magazines, books, festival programs, admission tickets, brochures, handwritten correspondence, vinyl records, and archival photographs. Cocurator Kei Osawa, a research fellow at the University Museum, University of Tokyo, drew the materials from his personal collection, amassed over some twenty years. “When I started, postwar ephemera went unnoticed and I became interested in printed materials that weren’t collected by libraries or art museums,” he said.

The printed matter, organized in glass displays and wall-mounts snaking around a gallery with black walls and high ceilings, was augmented with detailed chronologies covering momentous years of social turmoil: the start of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution; the Beatles’ Japan tour; the arrival of a US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at Sasebo port amid fierce opposition; protests at the University of Tokyo; the Apollo 11 moon landing; the first women’s liberation demonstration; the restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and China.

Films catalyzed the Tokyo scene at this time. On June 29, 1966, filmmaker Kenji Kanesaka organized “Underground Cinema,” a screening of experimental work from the United States. The venue was the Sogetsu Art Center, the epicenter of experimental art in Tokyo, where Yoko Ono had first performed her legendary “Cut Piece,” in 1964. From there, countercultural ideas rapidly spread across music, art, manga, theater, butoh dance, and film.

The Mori exhibition revealed Tokyo’s underground to be both interdisciplinary and international. “We don’t feature photography as a discrete field,” Osawa noted. “Photography, like graphic design, was a medium that permeated every area.” At a time when avant-garde art was increasingly non-object based, performative, and politically charged, printed matter served as a tool of transmission.

The bustling nightlife district of Shinjuku was the primary stage for this cultural ferment. As a major city center within the megapolis—a place where many train lines converge—Shinjuku is a diverse, transitory space. During this period, its plazas, cafes, stores, and event venues held impromptu gatherings and theatrical performances. The independent production company Art Theater Guild, for example, converted the basement of their cinema in Shinjuku into the Scorpio Theatre, and the underground movement coalesced around this screening venue and gathering spot. Its importance was evident in Tokyo Underground, where two dozen framed posters of films and theater plays covered a far wall, floor to ceiling. The posters’ screen-printed designs, several on metallic paper, presented a range of eerily fresh typography and graphic styles.  

The exhibition also documented the era’s anti-establishment protests, including opposition to the Vietnam War and the Osaka World Exposition, in 1970. A long, horizontal poster commemorated the “Anti-Expo Black Festival,” in 1969, organized by the performance troupe Zero Dimension. The image shows a tangle of naked bodies evocative of Dante’s Inferno. Activists viewed the Expo as an attempt to smooth over the imminent renewal of ANPO, a controversial security agreement with the United States that allowed for an indefinite American military presence on Japanese soil.

The West Exit Plaza of Shinjuku Station was a key gathering spot for young people, artists, entertainers, and activists. In an attempt to reclaim public space and quell spontaneous gatherings (often protests), the government officially rezoned the area to prevent people from assembling. In 1968–69, protests in the city, as well as in other parts of the country, were relatively common. Japan’s largest university, Tokyo University, was often a veritable battlefield with students pitted against riot police. By the mid-1970s, however, the protest movement waned and the country entered a new phase of economic development. The underground effectively disappeared. Former participants dispersed—some pursuing spiritual paths, others adapting to new cultural currents or entering the mainstream arts.

The exhibition effectively preserved and revived this history through its material record. “What digital images lack, beyond texture, is a sense of scale,” Osawa said. Indeed, the physicality of the objects in Tokyo Underground reflected the politically charged atmosphere of these years and how those ideas were communicated. Considering the ephemera today, one becomes aware of a shift in how cultural movements form and spread, prompting questions of where—in our current era of surveillance capitalism and platform-modulated expression—are today’s spaces that resist regulation and homogenization?

Tokyo Underground 1960–1970s: A Turning Point in Postwar Japanese Culture was on view at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, from February 13 to June 8, 2025.

For Resistance, Steve McQueen, an artist who is best known internationally for his films Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), brought together photographs spanning one hundred years. Works started from the year 1903, which heralded the Suffrage movement for women’s rights, and ended in 2003 with protests of the war in Iraq. The exhibition and its accompanying book explore the ways that British people have “challenged the status quo.” Respected social-documentary photographers were featured, including David Hurn, a Magnum photographer known for his reportage across the United Kingdom in the 1960s; Janine Wiedel, who documented life in the industrial county of West Midlands during the same period; Vanley Burke, who captured the social awakening of Black Britons in Birmingham; and Tish Murtha, celebrated for her powerful depictions of working class life in North East England during the late 1970s and early 1980s. McQueen also leaned on the knowledge of a research group helmed by Paul Gilroy and Stella Dadzie to bring anonymous works and lesser-known events to the forefront, such as the National League of the Blind’s 1920 march—“a pivotal moment in the fight for disability rights” according to the show’s organizers—and the hunger marches of the 1930s, protests against poverty and high unemployment.

But why did the exhibition stop in 2003? This is the year the writer Mark Fisher identifies as the end of the future—the point when neoliberal capitalism fully triumphed, ushering in what he calls “capitalist realism” and resulting in cultural stagnation. Smartphone footage of the 2011 London riots, Just Stop Oil demonstrations, internet-powered movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter—all missing from the galleries. In their absence, the exhibition lost the opportunity to connect modes of resistance in the old world and attempts at resistance in the new, when it feels like there are no viable alternatives emerging.

That’s not to say the iconic moments in Resistance don’t need to be seen again and again. These include Syd Shelton documenting pop culture powerfully kicking back against the rise of the far right in Britain at the 1978 Rock Against Racism carnival, and Christine Spengler’s striking portrait of a young girl in Belfast at an IRA funeral procession. As Gilroy reminds us in the accompanying publication, “Unequal access to historical knowledge combines with growing political illiteracy and disengagement. Together, they promote a weakening of imagination that incubates the loss of hope.” Yet, instead of stirring the imagination, Resistance offered mostly familiar tropes of the past.

There seems to be a certain nostalgia for monochrome in political photography, perhaps stretching back to Robert Capa’s famous photographs of the D-Day landings and further entrenched by the iconic images of the struggle for Civil Rights. Of the hundreds of images included in the exhibition, it is astonishing that not a single photograph appeared in color. The fastest film stock for photographers in the revolutionary postwar period was black and white, but the curatorial selection implied that every ensuing struggle after looked the same. This approach to all subsequent political events—which frames the previous century as spilling into this one—risks aestheticizing and antiquating political struggle. Even the show’s typeface called to mind postwar propaganda posters and 1960s espionage movies. If a documentary is made of Resistance, I could predict the soundtrack: The Specials, followed by the Clash, and maybe some Bob Marley, accompanied by Ken Burns–style zooms into the photographs.

For an exhibition that claimed to be timely—and indeed, resistance is as urgent as ever in this era of neoliberal algorithms, resurgent fascism, and growing inequality—there was an odd lack of urgency in its presentation. I’d worried that a show about the fight for justice would seem out of place in a gallery setting, and in the end the show seemed all too comfortable in its surroundings. I saw little correlation between people’s lives today and the historic modes of resistance being represented. There was no attempt to reconcile the familiar aesthetics of protests of the past with the contemporary moment: it was London-centric and “back then,” with not much speaking to what Linton Kwesi Johnson once called “the Lumpen elements”—everyday people who are uninterested in revolutionary politics.

The lack of an imaginative bridge between old and new forms of resistance left the exhibition feeling incomplete. What it needed was curatorial connective tissue to address our current moment, in which dissent feels increasingly ill-equipped to tackle powerful lobbyists with endless money and coercive tech at their disposal. It is striking, too, that there weren’t any curatorial interventions that might have activated these historical moments—the images were hung in the classic white-cube-gallery format, one after the other, horizontally, in simple black frames. How might young women dealing with online misogyny spearheaded by the likes of Andrew Tate draw strength from this show? Or the tired-looking men standing outside McDonald’s with large, boxy Just Eat and Deliveroo backpacks, waiting for their smartphones to tell them what the next order is? Or the working class men and women of Margate I saw populating the area around the Turner Contemporary? Resistance clings to older, more familiar methods of resistance set against older, more familiar forms oppression.

Such pictorial disjunction between past depictions and current problems in a neoliberal age is something the French writer and publisher François Maspero noticed in the late ’80s, as he traveled the Parisian banlieue with the photographer Anaïk Frantz to produce their masterpiece Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990). In the book, Maspero writes: “The squalor is disappearing and unemployment is rising. Each generation has its own forms of poverty which maybe only the next generation will know how to comprehend . . . poverty for outside exhibition from the golden age of the picturesque (thank you Robert Doisneau) . . . is now only the fate of dropouts, tramps and drifters . . . but how do you photograph all the poverty behind the smooth walls, the silent walls of depression and fear, of all the strains of everyday life, of so much loneliness?” The same could be said of modes of resistance. We live in a moment of unprecedented flux, with such existential crises as artificial intelligence, climate change, and a new, even darker form of capitalism the French economist Arnaud Orain has called “the capitalism of finitude.” Photographs of outraged crowds are no longer enough.

Even viewed in its own political context, Resistance is a limiting prism. Much was omitted. Early-2000s grime music, which took the crumbs of socioeconomic ruin and created a twenty-first-century version of punk, was vernacular testimony against the gross inequalities of East London. What about early-web hacker culture that fought against the corporatization of the internet, or the tireless work of Doreen Lawrence—mother of Stephen Lawrence, a young Black British man murdered by white youths in a racist attack in 1993—which culminated in a stronger awareness of institutional racism and amplified questions about policing nationwide? Photographs of these moments exist, and they are within the show’s curatorial parameters; they would have offered something other than black-and-white photographs of protest.

A show about resistance could have leapt off the wall, played with high and low culture, and challenged received notions of good taste. As Elaine Brown, the one-time chairwoman of the Black Panther Party, once quipped about the men in the organization, “We didn’t get these brothers from revolutionary heaven.” What was missing in Resistance was naughtiness: the playfulness, subaltern creativity, and energies that refused to bow to the status quo and middle-class etiquette. This was all flattened in the Turner show, and as I wandered through it, I thought of two exhibitions at London’s Somerset House that trod similar terrain—The Horror Show! (2022–23) and Get Up, Stand Up Now (2019), curated by Zak Ové.

Both exhibitions contained ingredients similar to those in Resistance but mashed them up into something new and exciting. The Horror Show! used the figures of the monster, the ghost, and the witch—respectively assigned to the social unrest of the ’70s and ’80s, the haunted ’90s and ’00s (which gave birth to the internet era), and the 2010s (the post-financial crisis years of austerity)—to tell an alternative history of the past five decades in Britain. You came out shocked, disoriented, and charged up. Get Up, Stand Up Now showed resistance in full color, with Afrofuturist sculptures and exuberant footage of the Notting Hill Carnival. Ové described the exhibition as a “place beyond boundaries where we can dare to dream without being limited.” The show was a training ground: It armed its viewers with counterintuitive tricks and cultural technologies that might be applied now. Resistance, by comparison, felt like an echo, an exhibition stuck in the past, looking back at a struggle that has already been lost. Instead of leaving the exhibition buoyed by the energy of resistance, I left with the weight of what felt more like an elegy for it.

Resistance was on view at Turner Contemporary February 22, 2025, to June 1, 2025.

Born in Chicago in 1957, Hemphill moved with his family to Anacostia, a segregated neighborhood in Southeast Washington, DC, in the 1970s. He was awakened spiritually and erotically by the closeted Harlem Renaissance literature of Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Richard Bruce Nugent, and emboldened by the clarity and poise of public intellectuals such as James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. These figures served as guiding lights over the corporeal realities of poverty, racial and gendered violence (by state or kin), and the crack and AIDS epidemics. “I live in a town / where pretense and bone structure / prevail as credentials of status and beauty / . . . where everyone is afraid of the dark,” Hemphill writes in “Family Jewels” (1992). Cabs speed past him, refusing service. Meanwhile, “My mother’s flowers are wilting / . . . Our dinner is cold / by now.” In taking up poetry and performance, Hemphill found a path to dignity and self-liberation.

Fashioning an alternative to the American dream deferred was by no means a solitary endeavor. In DC, Hemphill was part of a vibrant literary, performing and visual arts scene. He founded the Nethula Journal, a platform for young writers of color, with Kathy Anderson and Cynthia Lou Williams. With his friends Wayson Jones and Larry Duckette, he formed the spoken word group Cinque. His early work appeared in Joseph Beam’s revolutionary In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986), the first of its kind to center Black gay, lesbian, and trans perspectives. When Beam died of AIDS in 1988, Hemphill published the follow-up Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991). For a constellation of underground communities along the East and West Coasts, this period in the ’80s through early ’90s was a veritable Black Gay Renaissance, more creatively free, more academic and brazenly political, more unapologetically Black, queer, and sexual than the movements that came before.

Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings, a group exhibition curated by Camille Brown at the Phillips Collection, in Washington, DC, commemorates the bygone era in which the poet thrived, and celebrates the dream that he kept alive for the next generation. Brown gathers multimedia works by friends and creative partners, and those of younger artists whose practices engage with Hemphill’s writing. In a town of memorials set in stone, the show pulsates with optimism and collective life. It is dedicated to someone who was of these streets and who, hard as the powers that be may have tried, refused to be rendered a ghost or statistic, and did what he could to save others from that fate.

Hemphill’s poems have been collected in a new volume by Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene, Love Is a Dangerous Word (2025). To read them—a selection is projected in the main gallery over a cabinet of self-published chapbooks and performance programs—is to become entangled in a bed of blood, sweat, tears, spit, and spunk. That is, to be swept off your feet by unrelenting waves of desire, rage, sorrow, and, despite everything, tenderness. Much as the speaker is looking for love in back rooms, underground clubs, and public parks, he is cruising time itself for redemption in the past or hope for the future. He is discursive, provocative, witty, and lyrical, Mercutio playing jester to the hypocrisy of the American enterprise. In “American Wedding” (1986), Hemphill delivers his vow: 

I place my ring
on your cock
where it belongs.
No horsemen
bearing terror,
no soldiers of doom
will swoop in and sweep us apart.
They’re too busy
looting the land
to watch us.

Across the way in the gallery, among a set of haunting black-and-white photographs, is Living Monuments (1980s), by Sharon Farmer, which Hemphill paired with “American Wedding” in “Dear Muthafucking Dreams,” his landmark interdisciplinary and collaborative “unrhymed poetry concert,” performed most prominently at Franklin Furnace, in New York, in 1988. In the photograph, a hooded figure strides across a bridge in front of the Washington Monument. From the viewer’s perspective, the walkway is at eye level with the pyramidion of the 555-foot obelisk. Farmer evokes Orientalist motifs, conjuring an empire bearing down on itself. Or is the figure rising to meet it? Notably, during the Clinton administration, Farmer became the first African American woman appointed White House photographer. She captured, among many historic moments, the handshake between prime minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, in 1993. 

Another piece Hemphill integrated into “Dreams,” the painting Someone Different (1987), by Joyce Wellman, shares the same wall. As posited by the title, and expressed by the freestyle whorls and patches of frenetic Twombly-esque brushstrokes, the painting suggests transfiguration, as in the Christlike mystery in the paired poem “Black Beans” (1984): “Our chipped water glasses are filled / with wine from our loving. / And the burnt black beans— / caviar.” The pursuit of “the good life” recurs throughout Hemphill’s work. Set in biblical terms, it is the quest for salvation. If not granted by God or state, the hope is that it could be found in or offered by one another. But, as lived by Hemphill and other gay men of his time, the road to paradise is rife with straying paths to danger and self-destruction.

In photographer Lyle Ashton Harris’s Watering Hole series, ephemera tacked on a wood-paneled background are lit with a red neon glow, as in the bathroom of a gay bar or the basement lair of a closeted recluse. Alongside pictures of protesters, male models, and divas—Donna Summer, a Venus in white fur; Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra—hang newspaper clippings of Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis and murders by the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Stuck on throughout each frame are precarious yellow Post-its, notes of a dysphoric mind. The clandestine scene queer people called “the life” allowed for improvisation and indulgence, a desperate break from the mainstream. With so much of the life to live, moderation and safety were often checked at the door.

Diedrick Brackens’s tapestry the night is my shepherd (2022) casts two shadows in melancholy embrace. A faded silhouette in the first panel, and a disembodied arm in the third, luring one of the figures in the central panel, suggests the time-lapse of a doomed affair, or an endless loop of faceless encounters. In either case, heartache. Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s readymade sculpture THE BRASS RAIL (After Essex) (2017), mounted at an obtuse angle, is beguiling and unnerving in its simplicity. Are we going up or down? It’s titled after Hemphill’s poem of the same name about the long-gone “raunchy Black gay club” in DC that was always “bulging out of its jockstrap.” “The Brass Rail,” from the 1980s is  a call-and-response with the readers starting at the opposite ends of the poem. The effect is that of an aural house of mirrors, or a two-man tightrope walk, or, like the Brackens tapestry, a pas de deux heading toward ecstasy and/or oblivion.

CALL: I saw you last night

RESPONSE: Many occupants are never found.

CALL: In the basement

RESPONSE: Many canoes overturn.

CALL: of the Brass Rail.

On the east wall of the gallery, visions of hope. Clifford Prince King’s photographs stage scenes of intentional tenderness and care between Black men. Like Hemphill’s poetry, especially near the end of his life, King’s photographs are salves to the rigid dictums of patriarchal masculinity. The poet’s candor about living with HIV moved King to interrogate his own positive status through his work. The still lifes Night Sweats (2018), which shows a bed imprinted by a night’s feverish bout with infection, and Orange Peel and Biktarvy (2019) render life with HIV rather ordinary. Sonny and David (2019), depicting lovers intertwined in peaceful slumber, is eerily echoed by Shikieth’s adjacent Visiting Hours (2022). A figure wrapped in a white sheet cradles the sleeper. It’s an ancestral visitation or, for those who don’t believe in ghosts, a portrait of self-love.

Hemphill’s legacy was his generosity of spirit, in life and in art. His poetry demands to be performed, shared, and interpreted. One of his most synergistic collaborations was with the filmmaker Isaac Julien. In the film Looking for Langston (1989), a spoken-word fantasia of gay Black bon vivants frolicking in an ethereal 1920s speakeasy, Julien mingles archival footage of Langston Hughes with tracks of Hemphill reading his own poems. In the exhibition, a viewing station for a five-minute B-roll montage of Hemphill recording the audio for the film allows visitors to hear the poet’s rhythmic, emotive idiolect for themselves. Nearby is Pas de Deux No. 2 (1989/2016), a still from Looking for Langston, in which two of the characters are dancing affectionately, breaking through a cloud of smoke. A bouquet of roses adorns the foreground. In the film’s denouement, we would see the dapper revelers fleeing from an armed mob of killjoy straights, running up a staircase lined by a brass handrail. We hear “The Brass Rail” read by two voices in playful repartee, likely belonging to the duo of go-go boy angels guiding the gentlemen’s ascent.

Closing the exhibition, in a secluded room off the main gallery, is a wall projection of Hemphill’s speech at the City University of New York’s “Black Nations/Queer Nations?” Conference, in 1995, just a few months before his death. In dedication to his partner Roger, Hemphill says, “If I had known sooner the true power of love to heal and affirm, I would have left the bathhouses, bushes, and bookstores immediately . . . I would have pursued a healthy way of living with more diligence than I gave to pursuing and busting a nut.” But how could these young men have known any better? What else were they supposed to do? Languishing in the closet may have been an option for some, but for Hemphill and his kind, it was out of the question. It was not these men who were at fault, nor was the pursuit for companionship and gratification the problem. Are those not essential? It was the lack of support and empathy from wider society that sealed their fate.

In a 2019 interview with ARTnews, Lyle Ashton Harris calls Hemphill and the filmmaker Marlon Riggs his “elder brothers.” “There was an insatiable need to try to create a language for something that I felt was there, that was real to me,” Harris said, recalling when he first saw Hemphill and Riggs’s documentary performance film Tongues Untied (1989). “I felt that Essex and Marlon had a language that I did not have. It was a language out of necessity. It was what sustained me.” Borne out of precarity, manifest of tenacity and survival, is the miracle of mortal creation. The convictions and dreams of those who came before made art, these are our blessings. “I ask no more of you / than I ask of myself: / no more guilt / no more pity,” Hemphill writes in “The Tomb of Sorrow” (1992) which is set in Meridian Hill Park, what was then a cruising site Black people claimed as Malcolm X. “Occult risks await us / at the edge of constraint.”

Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings is on view at the Phillips Collection through August 31, 2025.

‘‘I just got the bug, you know, that thing where everyone says the magic of being in a dark room and then you see an image appearing in there,” Perrier said recently. Her work is now the subject of a solo exhibition, A Thousand Small Stories, at Autograph, in London’s East End. As the curator Bindi Vora explained, the title illustrates how each individual experience, no matter how minor it may appear, contributes to a bigger, shared narrative. This concept aligns closely with the sociologist Stuart Hall’s insight that images can express meanings that reach far beyond their immediate surroundings, enabling us to envision and comprehend more than just what is presented in the frame.

The exhibition opens with When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years?, a series from 2024 that delves into the challenges teenage girls encounter as they navigate social media, body image, and misogyny. Perrier’s fascination with the complex politics surrounding beauty is further evident in her renowned portraits from the late 1990s and early 2000s, particularly in Afro Hair and Beauty Show (1998–2003), which emphasize the important role of hair and hairstyles as markers of cultural pride and resilience. The young participants sit there, oozing self-confidence. 

What makes this section special is an installation created with replicas of Black haircare products from the ’90s, on plinths. Perrier has collected these products over the years, and Vora noticed, in her research, that their packaging has often stayed consistent. Vora felt that displaying them would demonstrate “in a very tangible way, the aspirational branding still in use today.”  

In 1995, Perrier made a pivotal trip to Ghana. Until then, most of her images were made in black and white. In Ghana, she gained confidence in using colour. “All the images I was seeing at that time were black and white,” she said, mentioning the kind of photography commissioned for foreign charities. “And I just didn’t want to emulate or recreate the images they were portraying.” In one close-up of a bottle of Cussons baby powder, the pale blue wall in the background complements a white bottle with a picture of a blonde baby and the name of the product in baby blue. Perrier, who regularly used Cussons as a child, sees it as an emblem of neocolonial economics: at the time, the company did not bother to differentiate the packaging for an African market. 

Perrier frequently immerses herself in communities, a spirit of collaboration that resonates in her series Red Gold and Green (1996–97), which was commissioned by Autograph. Here, she joined forces with first-, second-, and third-generation British Ghanaians, friends of her mother’s and extended family, to craft intimate portraits within the comfort of her subjects’ London homes. Perrier’s temporary home studios beautifully reflect the complex blending of modern migrant identities. Symbols from various homelands subtly appear in the background, and vibrant textiles recall longstanding traditions of African studio portraiture. In the exhibition, a vitrine displays ephemera connected to the series, showing, as Vora notes, how Perrier’s “three decades of working as an artist come together beyond just the final images.”

Another celebrated series considers a painful memory. As a child, Perrier faced teasing for the gap in her teeth, a feature she rarely saw in others around her. Aware that it is seen as a sign of beauty in various cultures, she made the series Grace (2000), which comprises images of people with their faces angled towards the camera, facing right and smiling so their teeth are on display. Perrier herself features in a self-portrait along with a portrait of her mother. The personal connection Perrier builds with her subjects goes beyond simply taking their photographs. Instead, a sense of social engagement permeates her work—an alluring reminder that our experiences of love and fear are intertwined, allowing us to perceive them through one another’s perspectives. 

Eileen Perrier: A Thousand Small Stories is on view at Autograph, London, through September 13, 2025.