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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rahim Fortune, Bronco Rider, Longview, Texas, 2024

Govenar: How many different locations are in these photographs?

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

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

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

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

Govenar: What kind of music do you play?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Description

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

Details

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

Contributors

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Govenar: I mean, what is truth in photography?

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

Rahim Fortune, Freedom Fashion, Dallas, Texas, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rahim Fortune, Juneteenth Parade, Houston, Texas, 2024

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

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

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

Rahim Fortune, Freemasons, Houston, Texas, 2024

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

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

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

Rahim Fortune, Mike, Dallas, Texas, 2025

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

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

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

Dionne Lee, Untitled (Wound), 2020

Dionne Lee, True North, 2019

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

Dionne Lee: I call that the conflict of belonging.

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

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

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

Hill: Yeah.

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

Dionne Lee: Currents

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Dionne Lee: Currents

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

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

Details

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

Contributors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dionne Lee, Still from Currents II, 2024

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

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

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

Lee: There is a link to drawing.

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

Lee: Yes, totally.

Hill: But it’s like learning without a—

Lee: A lesson?

Hill: Without a lesson.

Lee: Lesson plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lee: Well, first I think about petroglyphs.

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

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

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

Dionne Lee, Untitled Rock Drawing III, 2023

Dionne Lee, Fire Bed, 2019

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

Lee: For sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Lee: Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

Hill: Right.

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

Hill: Yes. Your collages are small.

Lee: Small.

Dionne Lee, trespass is the most beautiful word, 2018

Dionne Lee, a plot that also grounds, 2016

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

Lee: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”?

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

Lee: I don’t always believe in art.

Hill: Yeah.

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

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

Lee: Yes!

Hill: And that’s your inner self.

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

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

Lee: It is.

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

Lee: Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dionne Lee, Lapse, 2019

Dionne Lee, Contact (A Muscle Memory), 2020

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

Lee: And why is it slow?

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

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

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

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

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

Hill: But not entirely.

Lee: But not entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warner: What about the most recent one you bought?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warner: And why the title Portrait of J?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover of Tokyo Suburbia (Korinsha, 1998)

Cover of Tokyo Olympia (Nieves, 2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fe Avila, Masculino Dócil, com Helio Siqueira, São Paulo e São Sebastião, 2017

Fe Avila, Marcéu, Pena e Alvim, “Na sua pele consigo tocar o céu,” São Paulo, 2023

In another world, Avila might never have made these photos. The eldest of three siblings, they grew up in São Paulo in the 1980s under Brazil’s military dictatorship in a conservative culture where rigid masculinity was pervasive. As a teenager, they attended an almost entirely male technical school with some forty boys and only three girls. Reconciling a nascent attraction to men with the world around them soon became a private struggle. “Masculinity has always been a hard issue for me,” they told me. “Why are men so cruelly castrating? Why do they want to domesticate? Why do they want to curb desire, whereas animals do not?” Their body of work attempts to answer these questions—and is now gaining broader attention in North America at the fifty-ninth edition of the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

Among Avila’s most important influences are their own family members. Two maternal aunts taught them to paint in childhood, cultivating an early sense of composition and framing. Their uncle Juju, who had been sent to a seminary as a young man, left the path to the priesthood to become a full-time artist. He moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked as a cartoonist for O Pasquim, an independent newspaper famous for its satirical jabs at the dictatorship. It was Avila’s aunts who introduced them to art, but it was their uncle that taught them to take art seriously, to see it also as a political act. “My uncle was really repressed,” they said. “In a way, I feel like the continuation of him.”

Fe Avila, Casa de São Lázaro-CIESL, Praia Grande, 2019

Fe Avila, André e Raphael, São Sebastião, 2019

After completing their degree in art history at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in 2017, Avila took their camera to the streets. Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff had been ousted from power amid an economic recession, corruption scandals, nationwide protests, and the emergence of a far-right movement nostalgic for military rule. The country felt as if it were coming apart. In the streets of São Paulo, Avila captured this turmoil: riots over rising bus fares, demonstrations after the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco, marches led by trans and Indigenous activists, clashes with the police.

The resulting photobook, Present Body (2019), draws from Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Hakim Bey’s idea of temporary autonomous zones to examine how bodies resist control. “How could we be out in the streets while, at the same time, facing such intense repression?” Avila told me. Though the work is significantly more documentary than Docile Male, these are not your typical protest photos. Avila imagines resistance as something far more expansive—encompassing moments of joy during Carnaval, the gay pride parade, or underground raves—and, at the same time, more intimate. In one image, we see nothing but the torso and legs of a person in ripped fishnet stockings and what appears to be a leotard. Without setting or context, the body itself becomes the political site.

Fe Avila, Pedro Fasanaro, “Ser da Floresta,” São Paulo, 2019

Fe Avila, Adicael e Heitor, “Ser da Floresta,” Santo André, 2018

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Avila turned inward. For In the Encounter Everything Dilutes (2022), they used an analog camera to photograph friends and acquaintances through their computer screen and, for the first time, asked strangers to pose, almost always nude. The pandemic’s forced stillness and isolation led Avila to reexamine their relationship with their subjects. They came to understand their practice as a slow negotiation of boundaries and trust and photography as a type of performance in which both photographer and subject can embody different versions of themselves, experiencing a kind of catharsis unavailable to either alone.

Avila’s vision culminates at the Carnegie International, where their work finds its fullest expression. This year’s exhibition, titled If the word we, asks what it means to share a world with others and whether “we” is ever a stable concept. In their series for the exhibition, Avila assembles disparate images from their archive to create a state of ontological chaos. Dichotomies dissolve—the boundaries between private and public, sacred and profane, blur until they nearly disappear. The work thrives on this instability. Carefully composed color portraits coexist with grainy black-and-white photographs cut by a harsh flash. Ancient cave paintings meet a classical statue defaced with São Paulo’s pixo. Elsewhere, the iconic ramp of the city’s biennial pavilion emerges, this time with trans artist Ventura Profana crawling naked down its incline, her body on all fours, slightly arched, her head turned to meet the gaze of the viewer.

Fe Avila, Ventura Profana, São Paulo, 2023

Fe Avila, “Auto-retrato Anti-Édipo,” com Nélson Avila, Boituva, 2021

“Avila’s imagery is a testament to the fact that identity is not fixed; there is an expansiveness to it, and at its core, the practice is relational,” said Danielle A. Jackson, one of the exhibition’s curators. There is indeed a utopian quality to Avila’s world. “I think about the liberation of desire, about a body and a being free from the binary gender system, from race, and from the manmade labels that have separated us from nature,” Avila said. It is a world of raw, unmediated freedom where humans are stripped to their primal essence, unbound by hierarchy or control. There are bodies covered in foliage, sex scenes, people dancing in heavy rain, gay lovers kissing, worshippers praying while guided by a transgender pastor.

Avila, too, is part of it. In one self-portrait that is perhaps the most striking in the series, Avila lies naked across the back of a horse while their father stands in contrapposto beside its muzzle, fully dressed, reins in hand, as if guiding both animal and child. The patriarch’s presence anchors the frame while Avila’s body—tender, feminine, and sensual—drapes across the beast.

Fe Avila, Culto da Pastora Trans Jacqueline Chanel, São Paulo, 2022

Fe Avila, O beijo, São Paulo, 2018

Fe Avila, Anhangabaú, São Paulo, 2019

Fe Avila, Caveirão, São Paulo, 2019

Fe Avila, Tarado Ni Vc, São Paulo, 2019

Fe Avila, “Banho de Odôiyá,” São Sebastião, 2018

Fe Avila, Lagoa da Velha, Morro do Chapéu, 2022

Fe Avila, Adicael, “Ser da Floresta,” Santo André, 2018

Fe Avila, Lucy, Rafaella, Halessia, Joana e Mia, “Corpo Presente,” São Paulo, 2018

Fe Avila, Auto-retrato na montanha, Pico das Agulhas Negras, 2019
All photographs courtesy the artist

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, 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?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embser: How many were in the raw files?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embser: Have some balance?

Satolli: Yeah, to have balance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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