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The Everyday Miracles of Rinko Kawauchi

Aperturewp — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:14:46 +0000

If you take a slow train and then an occasional ferry to Teshima, in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, you’ll find yourself on a long-forgotten fisherman’s island that moves at a human pace. Board the island’s only small bus, and fifteen minutes later you come to a grassy hill overlooking the still blue waters in the distance. Walk around the slope—birdsong, rusting maples, flashes of bright sea—and you will arrive at a huge cave of sorts, the Teshima Art Museum, shaped like a drop of water.

Across roughly two hundred feet there is nothing—you gradually discern—but drops of water coaxed out of the ground in a work the museum houses, Matrix by the artist Rei Naito. On each side of the large space is an opening in the ceiling, through which you can follow crows, scudding clouds, perhaps light drizzle. There’s nothing there, and everything. You could spend a day in the emptiness and the view through both openings would never be the same. The droplets running across the ground and forming small puddles become a world in themselves.

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I can never help thinking of the Teshima Art Museum when I meet Rinko Kawauchi’s exquisite spots of time. Not just because she sometimes gives us drops of water, but more because her gaze is always turned to all that is larger than we are, and smaller. Much like Utagawa Hiroshige, she regularly places humans in a natural setting, so that you can see how much they are a part of something vaster. And as in a classic haiku, she takes the smallest of moments or objects and finds in them a universe. The artist passes her unwavering attention on to us.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2020, from the series M/E

Attention, sometimes likened to prayer, arises out of stillness, and I sense a tremendous stillness in Kawauchi’s work, the stillness of one who has no need to race around to find or generate her transports. I also sense the transformative innocence I associate with my neighbors in Japan, among whom I’ve lived for thirty-eight years. They have no longing to be fancy or striking or theoretical; simple, clear observation is enough. Nor is there any need to distinguish between high or low, significant or trivial: Every object—from snail to leaf—is created or sanctified by the eye one brings to it. It’s no surprise to learn that Kawauchi made some of her work in an Okayama forest where, as she writes, “stillness and movement, light and darkness” coexist. Other uncanny images came to her in Iceland, and in the bitter cold of Hokkaido. Our lives, she might be telling us, are made by how we look at them.

Kawauchi’s eye I imagine to be wide open as well as rigorous and precise; I suspect she looks past nothing in any room through a wish to alight on what’s important or essential. She is showing us what’s important, which is to say almost everything. In Japan more than in most places, the artist knows that her task is less to find what she loves than to love whatever she finds.

The first time I visited Teshima, I wondered why I had to walk around the hillside, taking a long, roundabout course before entering the empty cave. Now I realize that the walk is a form of preparation, a way of slowing down and emptying yourself out so as to receive most fully all that awaits you. Perhaps the same kind of cleansing should precede an encounter with Kawauchi’s work. In every one of her images, she seems to be giving solidity to what looks flimsy and permanence to what seems to be just passing.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2024, produced by Forest Festival of the Arts, Okayama

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2020, from the series M/E

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2022, from the series M/E
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

A Sacred Forest with a Secret History

Aperturewp — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:20:43 +0000

For the past several years, Gayatri Ganju, who was born in 1989 and lives in Bengaluru, India, has traveled south into the dense Nilgiri forest in Tamil Nadu to take pictures among the Kurumba people, one of the several Indigenous groups inhabiting the land. Her companions are two Kurumba men: Murthy, who is in his thirties, and Subbu, in his sixties; both serve as her guides and translators. Ganju needs a translator because she makes images only after close listening. During her treks, she asks the Kurumba to share their stories about the forest, this forest that is sacred to them and the site of their ancestral habitation. These meetings enact a ritual, with everyone sitting in a circle, sharing what they remember, and often what they are forgetting.

It is not always easy; there has been some suspicion of Ganju as an outsider. Early in her project, Ganju participated in a discussion with Kurumba representatives, and it was decided that the stories she collected would remain behind, among the people. Ganju was given permission to take only one story out into the world. This is the story that she received—a story about how the forests came to be born:

God made the world and then told the birds that there were no trees yet, and he was going to give them seeds to take back and put into the soil. The birds began their journey, but a wicked giant had overheard the conversation, and, as he didn’t want any trees, he took the seeds from the birds. The giant put the seeds in a big, hot pan and began to roast them so that they would die. There was one very clever little bird called the pirikki who understood what the giant was doing. She dived into the pan to save the seeds. In the process, some of her feathers were burned and turned black, and that is how the black-and-white pirikki got the marks on its feathers. The pirikki carried the seeds in her beak and planted them in the earth. These seeds turned into huge thriving forests.

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When I first encountered the pictures in Ganju’s series The Pregnant Tree (2016–ongoing), they appeared mysterious. The story that Ganju had heard among the Kurumba offered an explanation. Even now, these images seem to belong to a play; they are staged, a dramatic moment caught in a long performance. However, as I looked at them more, it began to seem that the real silence that the photographs hold within them is the silence of the forest itself. Ganju told me that official records indicate that over the last two hundred years, there has been an 80 percent loss of the Nilgiri grasslands mosaic. This is an ancient, prolific ecosystem with 3,500 flowering plants and 1,500 endemic species; it is recognized by UNESCO as one of the world’s most biodiverse areas. We do not witness in Ganju’s work the depredations carried out in the name of development, or the lives of the people forced out of the forest and now living in urban slums—displaced people, like seeds being roasted in a pan over a fire. This, too, is a part of the silence and mystery of these photographs. They possess the quiet calm of trees in a forest. There is much for the viewer to learn and find moving in that world that is still there.

All photographs by Gayatri Ganju from the series The Pregnant Tree, Tamil Nadu, India, 2016–ongoing.
Supported by Magnum Foundation and Museé du Quai Branly

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

The Remains of a Handmade Utopia

Aperturewp — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:20:55 +0000

When we think of pioneers, the image that probably springs to mind is that of a migrant on a covered wagon crossing an endless prairie—a vision rooted in the myth of manifest destiny. But there was a second wave of pioneers, less mythic yet no less ambitious. From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, thousands of young idealists, disillusioned by the Vietnam War and industrial capitalism, left the cities for the fringes of the American wilderness.

The back-to-the-land movement was a global phenomenon, but according to the Los Angeles–based photographer Michael Schmelling, its spiritual home was Northern California, in the wooded enclaves of Mendocino and Humboldt Counties. “This was the epicenter of the movement for the entire world,” he told me.

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For the last five years, he and his collaborator, David Jacob Kramer, have traveled thousands of miles of back roads in Mendocino and Humboldt, collecting images and oral histories of those pioneers for their book Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California, which will be published this summer. “You had people going north into this huge stretch of territory,” Schmelling said. Driven by the idealism of the era and the do-it-yourself ethos articulated in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, these transplants purchased parcels and set to carving out simple lives far from the urban throngs. “A lot of the land had been completely clear-cut. So big parcels could be bought for cheap. And on top of that, there was a lot less regulation,” he explained.

Schmelling’s photographs are saturated with the deep greens and dark earthen tones of the Pacific Northwest. Rectangular cabins, geodesic domes, yurts, kite-shaped barns, and myriad other unconventional structures—many tacked together from planks of rough-hewn pine—seem to have sprouted from the rugged hillsides of the Coast Ranges.

Traces of the counterculture run through the architecture: a stained-glass window in the shape of a psychedelic four-leaf clover; a yellowed newspaper urging the government to “lace the air with LSD.” Yet Schmelling insists the movement was not mere escapism. “Back-to-the-landers were early adopters of solar power, organic farming, and sustainable living,” he said. “They helped lay the groundwork for modern environmentalism.”

Though no two houses are the same, the dreamlike edifices, inspired by “hippie modernism,” form a cohesive style of architecture. Trees were cut and milled on-site; windows and doors were salvaged from demolition sites. The aesthetic is defined in equal parts by necessity, imagination, and willpower. Despite the rough edges, the homes in Schmelling’s photographs exude an undeniable sophistication. Some hover on stilts over lakeshores. Others teeter precariously on steep hillsides. All are of a piece with the local environments in which they were built—a rarity in an age dominated by carbon-copy tract homes.

But Schmelling and Kramer’s interests run deeper than architectural oddities. It is the personal stories of the men and women who built these homes that most interest them. There is Frannie Leopold, a Berkeley anti-war protester who came to the forests of Humboldt County for a party and found a vibrant community. There is Laird Sutton, a minister from San Francisco who, before moving to the woods, distributed instructional videos in hopes of educating his congregations about the many variations of human sexuality. And there is Tom Hessler, a former weed grower who lays out, in simple terms, his rationale for his many years in the woods: “I wanted to get away from everyone. I wanted to get the hell out of there. All the bullshit.”

Schmelling’s project is driven by a sense of urgency. “These people are aging out,” he said. “We felt the need to get up there and document them before they are gone. Most of the people we photographed, like their sons and daughters, have moved back to cities. Most of these homes are empty already. You can see how they’re kind of getting taken back by nature—they are going back to the land themselves.”

All photographs by Michael Schmelling, from the series Handmade Utopia, 2021–25
Courtesy the artist

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

Hashem Shakeri’s Portrait of a Climate Hotspot in Iran

Aperturewp — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:28:55 +0000

Editors’ Note: This story was assigned before the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, which have since escalated into a regional crisis that puts tens of millions of people at risk—including those depicted here and the photographer, who is based in Tehran.

We reached out to Hashem by email at the start of the war, and after a few days of silence due to limited internet access, he responded. “I’m glad that when wars are driven by political power, we can still keep a dialogue through art,” he wrote. “Perhaps it’s one of the few ways left for those of us who believe in peace.”

If Hashem Shakeri’s recent and ongoing series of photographs were a novel, its main characters would be a short-snouted crocodile and a resplendent kahur tree. Both are native to the wetlands of Balochistan, a region pounded by drought, covering the far southeast of Iran as well as southern and western portions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, respectively. Both carry heavy meaning for the people who live there.

The kahur, which grows in dry, salty soil and is able to thrive with minimal water, embodies the resilience and endurance necessary to withstand a climate of extreme heat, pervasive aridity, and brutal seasonal winds. The crocodile, known locally as gando, symbolizes life, blessings, and survival. The presence of healthy gandos is taken for a sign that water is plentiful. If gandos die or disappear, it is considered a bad omen, a warning “that the land has become thirsty,” said Shakeri. Local residents consider gandos sacred. Some go to great lengths to care for the gandos and ensure their livelihood. Others are justifiably afraid. “A few years ago, I met Hawa, a ten-year-old girl who had gone to fetch water for her mother when a gando attacked her and tore off her right hand,” Shakeri said.

The gando and the kahur face each other with sly majesty in a pair of images from Shakeri’s series The Kahur Does Not Fall Unless the Earth Wills It (2018–ongoing). The crocodile, which lives in rivers and ponds and finds refuge in deep pits when water is scarce, is half submerged in an eerie green pool edged with tall grasses. The kahur, set against a sun-blasted landscape, is rendered in a vivid, electrifying red. A man in dramatic silhouette stands on its low branches. The red was initially a glitch that appeared on Shakeri’s screen while he was at home in Tehran, scanning negatives.

This was during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. “The people of Balochistan, especially in Zahedan, the provincial capital, joined the movement with remarkable persistence,” Shakeri explained. “Every Friday, under the pretext of Friday prayers, they gathered to protest against injustice and oppression.” During the first demonstration, Iranian security forces opened fire on the crowd, killing at least ninety-six people. The crackdown intensified, and protests across the country waned. But not in Balochistan. For Shakeri, the man in the kahur tree represents “the stubborn will to live under the most unforgiving conditions,” and Balochistan itself, “parched and wounded, yet unyielding.”

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Shakeri often describes himself as self-taught in photography. “My formal education is in architecture. I also have a background in theater.” He explained that soon after entering university, “I saw an image from the Iran-Iraq War in a conference hall, and it affected me so deeply that from the very next day, I saw myself as a photographer and devoted myself to it with immense passion.” That was nineteen years ago, and since then, Shakeri has proceeded largely through cycles of self-study and intuition. For nearly a decade, he has been pursuing a long-term project on the effects of drought, resource deprivation, and climate change among marginalized people living in the Iranian province of Sistan and Balochistan.

One component of that project is a trilogy: The first part is An Elegy for the Death of Hamun (2018–ongoing), about the seasonal lakes and reservoirs that dried up due to drought and the mismanagement (some would say corruption) of water resources in Sistan. The second, Cast Out of Heaven (2016–ongoing), looks at the housing crisis on the outskirts of Tehran, where people find themselves abandoned in so-called new cities that are ill-conceived and far away from the jobs the residents depend on to get by. The third, as yet untitled, considers the place of oil in the history, ecology, and culture of Iran. As proof of how capacious Shakeri’s working method has become, The Kahur Does Not Fall Unless the Earth Wills It is also part of the same ongoing project.

Thousands of years ago, Sistan and Balochistan were covered by forests. For generations, these were agricultural lands. People lived by fishing, farming, and animal husbandry. Now, the drying lakes and wetlands have pushed the local population far below the poverty line. This situation appears in Shakeri’s work in two ways. He forms deep bonds with inhabitants of this region, allowing him to capture the conditions of their lives, as seen here in the pictures of women doing laundry, men cutting each other’s hair, and youngsters swimming in brown waters. Shakeri also tends to photograph in the middle of the day, so that the blinding intensity of the noontime sun sweeps across all his images, lending them a clear aesthetic. Shakeri describes his photographic world as melancholic, populated by “human beings who, after relentless exploitation of nature, now find themselves defeated by it.” His narrative, his novel in visual form, pin-points a crucial intersection between suffering and beauty: “To me, art is perhaps the only reason we can endure so much ugliness and monotony in life.”

All photographs by Hashem Shakeri, from the series The Kahur Does Not Fall Unless the Earth Wills It, Balochistan, Iran, 2018–ongoing.
Supported by Magnum Foundation

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

John Chiara Illuminates the World’s Simple Mysteries

Aperturewp — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:40:24 +0000

Some three hundred years ago, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico came to a humble conclusion that still startles today—that one can understand only what one makes. Perhaps it’s true to say that the claim grows only more astonishing as the centuries accrue and technology evolves at such a breakneck pace that very few, if any of us, make anything for ourselves anymore. The paradox baffles the mind (or does so if we take Vico at his word): in the twenty-first century, when any one of us has in the palm of our hand all the knowledge the world possesses, we are secretly immersed in a new dark age. We know it all, but we understand none of it. The “cloud” memorizes the images we take, a strange archive of experiences we ourselves have lived, edited, and filtered, accessible when we want to remember what it is we’ve lived—a life, or a kind of life. Proof we were there, wherever there is, digitized and stored away and shareable. . . . But I’m haunted by the suspicion that not one image of it all is a thing we’ve made, truly made, ourselves.

John Chiara and his camera, Treasure Island, August 2025. Photograph by Tom Bollier for Aperture

It’s a bleak thought, but one that must be confessed, that our own life is something we don’t understand—one that must be addressed, to see an art such as John Chiara makes. Since the age of sixteen, Chiara has maintained a darkroom, a way of developing for himself the images he’s taken, but a process ornate enough that he began to suspect it interfered with the direct experience of vision and memory driving his artistic inquiry.

He sought another way, one that is extraordinarily labor-intensive: Chiara builds the cameras he uses, and they’re large. Imagine a Hasselblad box magnified to the size of a small house, towed on a trailer behind a truck and in which the photosensitive paper on which the image is made is put in the camera by stepping inside the camera itself. These cameras reach back through time to the beginnings of the art form itself, the camera obscura, light inverted through a lens and the upside-down image cast back onto the paper for hours. The handmade camera invites in leaks of light and breeze as an inherent part of a process that seeks anything but to be merely in control.

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Not simply a framer of a scene, Chiara is an experimenter in time, calling into question vision’s instantaneousness, showing us the eye entangled with light by which it sees, light that the photograph puts on miraculous delay—a delay that feels to me nearly philosophic, almost metaphysical, attuning us to awe and error, making seeing itself something we can no longer take for granted, a reinitiation into the mystery in which we live the hours of our wakeful lives. In photographs larger than our own bodies, a perspective that quietly quickens the child within us, is that fear and marvel of feeling how small one is in relation to all that’s in the world, a fact the adult too easily forgets.

A gift initiated Chiara into his work, a camera his father gave him when he was eight years old—a Nikon the family couldn’t really afford. Rather than promoting a separation from the world, the camera became for Chiara a tool of intimate entanglement with it, as if the lens with its auto shutter taught the child the nature of his own eye. Chiara goes back to those earliest photographs, “the ones of birds far distant in trees or cats rolling on garden hoses and close-ups of grass,” and feels a worthy pride. His work has taken him across the nation and abroad, from his native California, where his love for his art first was fostered, to a recent residency in Georgia.

But it’s Northern California, where he trained his eye to see the world around him, that continues to exert a touchstone fascination, as if he hasn’t yet seen what he means most to see. I find myself returning to the series Treasure Island (2020–24), sepia in tone but more golden, full of ancient honey, of the bay and San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. The sun’s light tunnels through the water. The water gleams with a gathered glow the foreground stones of the shore can’t claim. And in haunted silhouette, the cityscape and the lacework bridge, temporary witness to a process of light and substance that has existed as long as light and substance themselves have existed, and will outlast any witness to them. This series focuses on Treasure Island, a landmass as handmade, in a certain sense, as Chiara’s cameras, and sharing their exceptional scale. Built from 1936 to 1937 to host the Golden Gate International Exposition, Treasure Island has gone from world’s fair site to World War II naval base to residential, shifting from monthly rentals to million-dollar condos. What shade is there is cast by nonnative trees: palms, eucalyptus, Italian cypress. It’s a strange thing—how place teaches us how to see.

Chiara teaches us to see through the handmade humility that returns to the world its proper wonder. He attunes us to the made-ness of made things—the chromed phantasmagoric spectacle of the metal stands that hold the ropes that mark the lines we wait in; a mooring block of concrete; homes and buildings and the wires and poles that send the electricity that lights the lights within them. Chiara also enlivens us toward the facts of all it is we can’t make ourselves: sunlight, water, land; eyes, mind, life. It puts in my heart a feeling I want to call azure—which doesn’t assure, but describes some instant of the evening sky. Or is it the early morning sky? Either way, Chiara has given us a craft to navigate the terrain: a way of making, and a making that transports us through.

All photographs by John Chiara from the series Treasure Island, 2020–24
Courtesy the artist

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

The Photographer Who Sees with Her Fingertips

Aperturewp — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:19:10 +0000

Like many analog photographers, Aspen Mays makes images in a darkroom. But unlike most of them, she doesn’t use a camera and film. She creates her photograms in complete darkness, without even the red glow of the safelight. For hours, she works with eyes unseeing and often closed, guided by muscle memory, touch, and the sound of dripping water.

In the dark, Mays reaches for objects she arranged in the light. Her fingers find the taped lines on the table directing her to materials. She creases photographic paper, invents celestial patterns with a hole punch, and layers and removes tape to form sunbursts and spiderwebs.

“I’ve always been interested in uniqueness,” Mays said, “working with base materials that rely on hand processes.” Such an embodied approach requires endurance, which in its solitary production sometimes drifts toward entropy. “I’m taking patterns to such repeated iterative extremes that they often start to fall apart.”

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 15, 2024

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 14, 2024

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We typically think about craft in photography as aligned with technical precision, repeatability, and visual fidelity, but Mays’s images defy such virtues. The hand is privileged over the eye so that every photogram shows traces of manual manipulation and darkroom chance—a pinhole, a light leak. Her work invites the viewer into a story of its making. The intricate, imperfect human elements behind her analog image creation counter our greedy consumption of ever-optimized digital photographs.

Mays was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in the Bay Area. Her father was an architect. Before he switched to digital design tools, his home drafting table was a source of endless fascination to Mays, littered as it was with rulers, erasers, pencils, and templates to make almost any conceivable shape. For a recent series produced at the Rauschenberg Residency on Florida’s Captiva Island, Mays used templates inherited from her father and grandfather, who was also an architect. “I love the uniformity and how they standardize space,” she said, recalling how her grandfather’s and father’s hands had traced lines with these tools.

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 16, 2024

Aspen Mays, Bandanna, 2016

One photogram, Blind Pass (2025), captures a semitranslucent template, which was repeatedly exposed on a folded sheet of paper. Mays arranged the template so that the lacy rows of diminishing ovals converge. The composition flickers between an arrangement of ordinary objects and something more galactic, like a supernova.

Cosmic themes thread through her work, connecting acts of the hands with acts of the heavens. For the series Punched out stars (2011), Mays used a perforator to riddle gelatin-silver prints rejected from the University of Chile’s Astronomical Observatory archive, subtracting every visible star. The result is clusters of enigmatic white circles and fabric-like creases. “The cosmic is a totally dizzying thing to confront—the smallness of your experience or the vastness of the universe,” she said. “It’s a way for me to think through the conundrum of experience.”

Tengallon Sunflower (2016) is a more personal, earthbound project. Two bandanas are at the heart of the photogram series: a starburst-patterned textile inherited from her great-grandmother and an indigo-and-white cloth owned by Georgia O’Keeffe. Mays pricked out the starburst pattern with a pin, marring the cotton rag gelatin-silver paper, then dyed the paper using indigo and other blues that resemble cyanotypes and diazo blue-prints.

Mays likes the intimacy of a bandana, how the square of fabric was designed to be knotted ever so snugly around the neck. “Sense memory feels antithetical to photography, which, of course, privileges a visual kind of memory,” she said. Her work is a meditation on the nature of touch. Not in caresses or gestures that require an artist’s hand—folding, pinning, punching, dyeing—but in the way a stray fingerprint or scratch flouts photographic mores and disrupts a pristine surface. Her transgressions in the dark remake the ordinary into something strange, transcendent, and beautifully otherwise.

Aspen Mays, Webs, Windows, Templates 18, 2024

Aspen Mays, O’Keeffe, 2016
All works courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures

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

A Bittersweet Ode to the Teenagers of 2000s Seoul

Aperturewp — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:19:39 +0000

Korean high schoolers spend on average twelve to sixteen hours a day at school, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at Sung Jin Park’s series Kid Nostalgia (2001–9). Here we see them cutting class, sneaking cigarettes, and recovering from fist fights (one kid gingerly sports a bandaged hand under his school uniform). For this work, Park turned Seoul into his photography studio, capturing public high school students in alleyways, clearings, and other banal public spaces of various outer-borough neighborhoods. The series is photographed like an editorial, with the subjects often looking straight at you; we meet their gaze as teenagers ourselves and are transported back to the thrilling desperation of youthful indiscretions and the hope that they’d puncture the seemingly endless expanse of adolescent boredom. Through the scowls and the smoke, these kids, with their untucked shirts and hiked-up skirts, strike poses with assured nonchalance, as if the tumble of emergent self-formation were the most effortless thing in the world.

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“Looking back, I can only get a glimpse of what I was looking for,” Park told me in Korean (the translations are mine). “These were kids who were striving to express themselves in the most naive ways—cutting their own hair, cutting their own clothes. It’s endearingly awkward. I’m interested in the moment before those impulses are confirmed. I was looking for the kinds of kids I liked, I guess, the ones with a certain style or attitude. In a country where everyone believes that education is the only way up, these were the kids from the bad schools in the wrong neighborhoods.”

Park, who had followed his older brother to New York for high school and stayed on to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, returned to Seoul some years after college. It wasn’t long before he began Kid Nostalgia, scoping out subjects on the margins of the metropolis for nearly a decade. The photographer spoke of deriving a vicarious satisfaction from finding these students and their attitudes of refusal. I wonder what fantasies or desires drove Park to sustain this project throughout his thirties, and if they relate to my own immediate sense of identification with his subjects. Was he searching for recognizable parts of himself in a place where he feels both enmeshed and estranged—a way to mark not just a coming home, but the construction of a home? The nostalgia that drives this series is the photographer’s and the viewer’s, a nostalgia unmoored from any real memories. Kid Nostalgia might more accurately be titled Adult Melancholia, for it is essentially a body of work that seeks to retrace that which can’t be located or recognized, a loss without object.

All photographs by Sung Jin Park from the series Kid Nostalgia, 2001–9
Courtesy the artist

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

Photographing the Night That Shook Seoul

Aperturewp — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 19:27:15 +0000

In the midday sunlight of upstate New York, I had no way of knowing how cold the night of December 3, 2024, was in South Korea, how dark and long it had been. With a fourteen-hour time difference, martial law in South Korea felt incomprehensible to me, like seeing the future of my homeland. But for the Seoul-based photographer Yezoi Hwang, it was the present. The words martial law, heard while having dinner, communicated something she couldn’t believe without seeing with her own eyes. So she picked up her camera and went out into the square.

Hwang often uses her camera in an effort to understand the incomprehensible. After making series that focused on her family—capturing, for example, stories of conflict and reconciliation in Season (2016)—she gradually redirected her lens toward people on the margins, people who often bear invisible wounds. She developed a gaze of care, and as a result could see more clearly that she lived in a fragmented society masked by a fantasy of unity. Flashback Diary (2024–25) is Hwang’s documentary photography series of the protests from the moment former President Yoon Suk Yeoul declared martial law to his eventual impeachment.

Hwang witnessed: While men clashed with their bodies and raised their voices in combative protest, middle-aged women stood at the front lines to protect younger women. The uniforms of the police blocking the National Assembly and confronting the protesters failed to absorb light, reflecting it instead, turning them into ghosts. In contrast, hopeful handwritten notes, ribbons, and tiny, solidaristic snowmen became fixtures of the cityscape. So did the voices of countless women beyond the frame, through whom Hwang discovered what care truly means. And just like the lines in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 novel Dictee that the artist continually returned to, it was “MAH-UHM,” the spirit: “It is burned into your ever-present memory. Memory less. Because it is not in the past. It cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts. It burns. Fire alight enflame.”

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Only seven years after the Korean War armistice, Koreans rose up in the April 19 Revolution of 1960, under martial law, to oppose the fraudulent election and dictatorship of the Syngman Rhee regime. In the October Restoration of 1972, former President Chung-hee Park imposed martial law to replace democracy with authoritarian rule in South Korea. In 1980, the Gwangju Uprising erupted in resistance to Doo-hwan Chun’s coup and the imposition of martial law, leading to mass killings. Martial law was present at every major political turning point in the country’s history. Because it granted “special measures” over freedom of the press, publication, assembly, and association, martial law was used as a tool for the government to wield coercive power over the basic rights of the people. It left indelible, inherited scars. A foreign journalist once said that democracy blooming in Korea is as unlikely as a rose sprouting from a trash can. Yet Koreans never hesitated to bleed red if it meant that rose might bloom. For more than sixty years, the people of Korea have protected that rose; the sudden reemergence of martial law was tantamount to its trampling.

To Hwang, the photographs in Flashback Diary are not a record of fear and violence. What she aimed to record with her camera was the strength of invisibles—those who built fortresses of warmth and hospitality against violence, and brought about a slow but democratic victory. The images act as a memoir of the artist as an autonomous woman engaging in dialogue with the social unrest surrounding her. As Hwang told me, “Photography becomes a tool that allows one individual to confront the multitude.” Her lens became a shield against a precarious world, and the resulting photographs became a fiercely burning “MAH–UHM” she carries, ever present.

All photographs Yezoi Hwang, Flashback Diary, 2024–25
Courtesy the artist

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

Silvia Rosi Reimagines the Family Album

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Silvia Rosi picked up photography in her teenage years, documenting friends and family in the northern Italian region of Reggio Emilia, to which her parents had immigrated from Togo in the late 1980s. Rosi’s own move from Italy to England, to attend the photography program at the London College of Communication from 2013 to 2016, instigated a period of introspection about what it means to leave home and put down roots elsewhere. The feeling of being between cultures is at the heart of her practice.

“I was going back to my memories of Italy and looking back at images in family albums that would reconnect me with a sense of my identity,” she told me recently. Far from her familial networks, Rosi, who is still based in London, turned the lens on herself. “You use what you have at hand,” she noted with a wry smile.

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From the series Disintegrata (Disintegrated, 2024), the image Disintegrata con Foto di Famiglia (Disintegrated with Family Photo) shows Rosi standing between two wooden cabinets with framed photographs placed on them. The pictures—a woman in a wedding dress, family snapshots, a black-and-white studio portrait—suggest the ways vernacular photography has been used in the African diaspora as a means of documenting lives in transit. Her work also speaks to visual and oral modes of memory and transmission in family lineages. In Self-Portrait as My Father (2019), Rosi sits on a chair against a blue backdrop, balancing books on her head, wearing glasses and a formal shirt, tie, and trousers, like a clerk about to head to the office. On the ground next to her feet are tomatoes stacked in small pyramids. Here, Rosi steps into the metaphorical shoes of her father, whom she never met, filling in the gaps between his physical absence and the stories passed down about him by her mother. Though he arrived in Italy an educated man, Rosi said, “I know that when my father lived in Italy, he worked as a tomato picker. He ended up being part of the exploitation of migrants. This happened in the late 1980s, but it is also something that is still happening now.”

Silvia Rosi, Disintegrata con Foto di Famiglia (Disintegrated with family photo), 2024

Silvia Rosi, Self-Portrait as My Mother in School Uniform, 2019

In Self-Portrait as My Mother in School Uniform (2019), Rosi carries toothpicks, reminiscences of the items her mother sold at roadsides and markets to passersby as a young trader in Togo, as her mother’s mother had before her. Styled in clothing similar to her mother’s school uniform, with books placed on her lap and her gaze fixed firmly on the viewer, Rosi inhabits the vulnerable yet entrepreneurial spirit of her mother as a young woman before motherhood. In another image, Self-Portrait as My Mother (2019), Rosi carries a radio on her head—a reference to highlife and Afro jazz but also a symbol of a deeply personal memory of her mother’s.

“The radio represents a moment when my mother was working for an Italian family. She overheard on the radio that a law would be passed that would legalize migrants present in Italian territory at that time, which enabled my parents to stay and live in Italy,” Rosi explained. Style and clothing, much of it sourced from secondhand shops, are key to Rosi’s work. In her inhabitations, the glasses or suit her father wore transcend their status as middle-class signifiers to become objects imbued with private meanings. Shutter release cables snake across the floor and lead to the hand of the artist, as if to show she is in complete control.

Rosi’s recent work is openly indebted to West African studio photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, who helped visualize a kind of post-independence modernity. In one photograph, Disintegrata di Profilo (Disintegrated Profile, 2024), the artist, clad in a preppy blazer and khakis, poses with an Agfa-Gevaert book: an apparent reference to the legendary photographer James Barnor, who moved from London back to his native Ghana in 1970 to set up the first Agfa color-processing laboratory in the country. Rosi holds the book up to obscure her face, as if to resist the camera’s capacity to fix identity in place.

In bringing together the performative elements of self-portraiture and the commitment to preservation found in family albums, Rosi stages a different kind of performance, similar to the ways in which Samuel Fosso used his own body in the 2008 series African Spirits to perform and embody famous pan-African figures, including Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. Rather than reaching toward historical personages, Rosi emulates those who aren’t written about, the lives of immigrants trying to establish themselves in a new country in the face of economic precarity and cultural dislocation. Her images beautifully highlight tender, painful feelings of misrecognition and alienation, and the difficulties of starting anew.

Silvia Rosi, Neither Could Exist Alone, 2021

Silvia Rosi, Sposa Italiana Disintegrata (Disintegrated Italian bride), 2024

Silvia Rosi, Self-Portrait as My Mother, 2019

Silvia Rosi, Disintegrata di Profilo (Disintegrated profile), 2024

Silvia Rosi, ABC VLISCO 14/0017, 2022
All photographs courtesy Autograph APB, Collezione Maramotti, MAXXI and Bvlgari, and Jerwood Arts/ Photobooks

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads.”

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s New York City

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This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” Spring 2021.

Rosalind Fox Solomon found her calling, photography, in her late thirties. Fox Solomon’s teacher, Lisette Model, encouraged her daring and self-confidence. With a camera, Fox Solomon could view life from her own angle, her distinctive vision.

Fox Solomon has traveled widely, photographing in Peru, the American South, Israel, and the West Bank, to name a few places. But, she tells me, “I did not find myself shooting in New York City in a different way. I made portraits of people and imagined their concerns. As I shoot, there is always inner tension, a trance-like state that contrasts with a nice-girl smile. That’s how I work everywhere.”

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Inside the Gate, Staten Island Ferry, 1986

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Seeing Beyond, Staten Island Ferry, 1986

Over the last five decades, Fox Solomon has pictured New York through its events, inhabitants, and objects. Her commitment to social justice animates her choice of subjects, and her pictures often show those who are troubled, suffering, or in crisis.

A young man with AIDS looks solemnly at the camera. He appears resolute, an implacable expression on his face. “It was wrenching shooting people with AIDS,” Fox Solomon tells me. “I met and photographed them, and some died soon after.” Her exhibition Portraits in the Time of AIDS at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 1988, in the midst of the epidemic, insisted on the public’s awareness of the suffering of so-called ordinary people.

People in wheelchairs on the Staten Island Ferry, people standing, all with their backs to the viewer, are looking at the water or the skyline, or inwardly. What they are thinking about, how they feel, is unknowable; but imaginations are spurred to wonder.

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After 9/11, handmade posters of the missing showed up on walls all over Lower Manhattan. “From a poster, I learned about the death of a friend, the artist Michael Richards,” Fox Solomon says. The attack on the Twin Towers was political, but the effects were instantly personal, each poster a death. Fox Solomon’s photograph of the desperate pleas of families and friends, and not the city’s physical devastation, emphasized her concern with wrecked lives, not buildings.

A Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, lying on a street, is a template for interpretation. This poetic image could register a tragic reality: Americans celebrate a family holiday, which elides North America’s first families, almost entirely wiped out by the US government. Or, it might represent the melancholy that comes after the fun ends, or how temporary pleasure is. There are many ways to see it.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Has anyone seen artist Michael Richards? After 9/11, 2001

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Stuck, before the Macy’s Parade, 1977

People can see so differently from each other, so idiosyncratically. Eyewitnesses have different eyes. There may sometimes be a consensus about a photograph—this is a good picture—but judgments about its meanings vary. Photographs don’t reveal themselves, don’t investigate, don’t tell us how to see them. Reactions to any picture depend on a viewer’s subjectivity, psychology, sympathies, sensibility, and more. An understanding of that dissonance inheres in Fox Solomon’s imagery. These photographs are gentle, also tough and unsentimental, sometimes tender yet unsettling.

Fox Solomon’s New York photographs look at the past and augment public and private histories. They are impressions of what compelled her, or disturbed her, about how people lived and what shaped their lives. Her photographs intend an intimacy, a connection and closeness to this place.

Looking at this work now, Fox Solomon says, “I am struck by the fact that my themes and interests are consistent—people, their differences and similarities; relationships; and issues such as race relations, politics, women’s roles, illness.”

Rosalind Fox Solomon, I Love NY, Staten Island Ferry, 1984

Rosalind Fox Solomon, The Artist’s Wife, Meta Cohen Bolotowsky, 1978

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jeff Engleken, Nuclear War?! There Goes my Career!, 1987

Rosalind Fox Solomon, What Lies Ahead?, 1987

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Singing Revival, Washington Square Park, 1986

Rosalind Fox Solomon, High School Chums, 1987

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Cashier, Cozy Soup and Burger, 1984
All photographs courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” Spring 2021.