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.

Sophia Wilson, Talya & Tyler, 2023, from the series Lovers & Friends

Sophia Wilson, Cam & Pat, 2023, from the series Lovers & Friends

“I’m just trying to have fun,” Wilson says. Her work, drenched in color, joy, and maximalism, has an approachability and intimacy created in part by her penchant for shooting analog. A film camera often requires its operator to get closer to get the image they want, but in her work, the closeness, the sweetness, is genuine, earned, and doesn’t feel manufactured: It’s the photographic equivalent of agave syrup, not saccharine. Through her lens, friends perch on fire escapes sipping coffee in tiaras, cuddle pink teddy bears in knee-high socks, and share tattoos and kisses, often with New York itself as a backdrop. This style appears in her series Lovers & Friends (2023), completed with her friend Izzy El Nems, which features native New Yorkers photographed in their homes and bedrooms as they face the growing pressures of gentrification. “I’m trying to make people really feel something and celebrate and enjoy it and see themselves in the work,” she says. She takes this intention into her work with her client list, which has included brands like Nike, Google, and Gap, as well as magazines like Vogue and Parade.

Sophia Wilson, Personal, 2022

Sophia Wilson, Chloe Cherry, 2025

Wilson got her start by cold-pitching her images to hundreds of publications. She was still only a teenager, but those cold emails quickly caught the eye of Elizabeth Renstrom, then the photo editor at Vice, and Kim Hastreiter at Paper magazine. VFiles followed while she worked around her school schedule, so she’d get out at noon to photograph people like Rick Ross, Khloé Kardashian, and Teyana Taylor. It just kept snowballing from there, though Wilson’s family wanted her to attend college. Already shooting high-profile Nike campaigns, she went to college anyway but continued to travel for work—much to the university’s chagrin. Wilson eventually dropped out to continue with the career she had built, which included a brief stint as a subject of The Come Up, a reality show about twentysomething New Yorkers building creative lives.

Wilson’s aesthetic, unapologetically girly and vibrant, stems from her youth in New York. It’s in part deeply inspired by her relationship to the city in the early 2000s, when she says downtown felt like a bubbling, colorful neighborhood, filled with local businesses where people knew your name. It wasn’t what it is now, dotted with corporate retailers usually found in suburban malls. “I think that it made me definitely drawn to color and drawn to maximalism, which has seeped its way into my work,” she says. “My photos are so jam packed with everything that’s going on in my brain, and I think that that is because of growing up in Union Square.”

Sophia Wilson, Quen Blackwell, 2024, from the series #GRWM

Sophia Wilson, Quen Blackwell, 2024, from the series #GRWM

Her aesthetic development was also a response to what she thought girlhood had to look like as a young person—the preppiness of the J.Crew attire and boat shoes she saw at school. Raised on the eclecticism of downtown, she pivoted in the opposite direction, becoming an “extreme tomboy,” she says. It’s only now that she feels she’s been able to embrace her femininity, and this appears in her work as well. Wilson’s next major personal project will be a book coming out later this year entitled #GRWM, an acronym for “get ready with me” used on TikTok. It will explore femininity and feature Black women at its core. With Wilson’s signature palette and joyful vision, it will also incorporate the self-awareness, the humor, attached to the beauty processes women put themselves through.

“I feel like I didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy being a girl growing up,” she says. “Now that I’ve found a way to experience it, it’s still me. It feels so powerful to me, and it feels like I’m finally finding myself.” She thinks most of her work is about femininity now, whether it’s in the colors—where purples, pinks, and aquas abound—the styling, or the settings, like bedrooms and bathrooms, the places where girls become.

In this vein, it’s also important to Wilson to center Black women in her work. She didn’t see nearly enough representation as a young person, which harmed her self-esteem, she says, and she hopes to create for young Black women an opportunity to see themselves. “I want to do it with my own lens, photographing girls that look like me or that remind me of myself, photographing people that are eclectic and that don’t necessarily fit in, but they’re not trying to fit in,” she says. “I really don’t take that responsibility lightly.”

Sophia Wilson, from the series Black Female Bodybuilders, 2024

Sophia Wilson, from the series Black Female Bodybuilders, 2024

Sophia Wilson, Lula & Michael, from the series Lovers & Friends

Sophia Wilson, Lula & Michael, from the series Lovers & Friends

Sophia Wilson, Sukiibaby, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Sukiibaby, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Angel & Armani, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Gabby Richardson at home, 2025

Sophia Wilson, Amy & Jules, 2023, from the series Lovers & Friends
All photographs courtesy the artist

Sophia Wilson, Sasha, Jess, Toshi, Alex, Nya & Faith, 2024, from the series Lovers & Friends

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

El Bahja was so upset by her parents’ request that they bought her a new digital camera to convince her to join them. It worked. With the equipment in hand, she began taking photographs and recording vlogs documenting the travel she had previously refused.

“At the time, I wasn’t excited about it at all, but it ended up becoming one of the best travel and self-discovery experiences of my life,” she says. For El Bahja, it opened a new path toward becoming a self-taught professional photographer.

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Morocco, 2025

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Morocco, 2025

Having a camera she could call her own was new for El Bahja, though she grew up around cameras. Her father had cofounded a photography cooperative with friends in Rabat that was active between 1977 and 1981; they trained budding photographers, experimented in a darkroom, and organized photography excursions. He also worked at Morocco’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs in the cultural-heritage division, where he documented the country’s monuments, cultural events, and traditions. His reverence for Moroccan culture and its people found its way into his daughter’s work.

El Bahja’s images aim to showcase the diversity of Morocco through a blend of heritage and modernity. “I really love my country,” she says. “We tend to go with modernity [in my generation], but our roots and our history—we shouldn’t forget about that.” To keep her country’s roots alive, she deliberately incorporates traditional aesthetics with influences from the West.

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Rooted, 2025

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Rooted, 2025

A year after receiving the camera from her parents, El Bahja began experimenting with street photography using both her camera and her phone, and eventually she organized her first conceptual photo shoot. A second shoot in 2018, in her hometown of Rabat with dancer Karim Ennoury, resulted in an image used the following year as the cover of the local magazine Sortir. Throughout this period, she continued to capture street scenes and document her life with her phone and camera.

Also in 2019—a year El Bahja describes as “formative”—she cofounded Tafanoun, a creative studio for youth expression, with her now husband, Walid Machrouh. El Bahja produced and edited all the videos herself, which gave her a crash course in postproduction and creative direction. Her filming stopped abruptly in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In January 2024, she says, she realized “it was time to focus fully on photography.” To nurture that resolve without access to formal training, she took online courses to learn technical skills including color correction, practiced through multiple photo shoots, and, in the process, “gradually discovered my love for fashion and art photography.” During her first year as a professional, El Bahja organized at least two photo shoots a week. Over time, with more experience, she decided to shoot less and instead focus on creating narratives that blend Morocco’s past and present.

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Re-Connected, 2025

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Re-Connected, 2025

In the project Re-Connected, part of her series Marroki Export (2024-ongoing) depicting different swaths of Moroccan youth, El Bahja photographed two models—styled as imaginary siblings—who live outside Morocco but are deeply connected to the country. They are dressed in upcycled Adidas outfits and pose against the Old Medina of Rabat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The photographs from Re-Connected were also partly shot in a traditional house to represent a “grandparents’ home,” as El Bahja’s puts it, and the importance of elders as permanent symbols of belonging, despite histories of migration or alienation.

El Bahja always has extensive conversations with her subjects before photographing them. Their personal stories are as much a part of her shoots—and influence them as deeply—as the stories of the cities that serve as her backdrops. She also works as the communications and marketing director of Rabat’s Moroccan Center for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship, a nongovernmental organization that supports young entrepreneurs and creative changemakers.

There is a tension in Morocco, El Bahja says, between tradition and reinvention. In some ways, her images hope not to resolve that tension but give it the attention it deserves. Her ultimate goal is to “stay authentic,” which to her includes emphasizing rather than downplaying the unresolved aspects of modern Moroccan youth culture.

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Atlas Aesthetics, 2025

Sophia El Bahja, from the series Rustic roots, 2025
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

Completed mostly in 2024, the same year that citizens of several African nations took to the polls in fateful elections, It’s Not Going to Get Better homes in on the squandered promises of long-held incumbency. It’s a familiar story throughout the Frontline States (the clutch of southern African countries, including Zambia, Botswana, and Angola, that collectively opposed apartheid), where the wheels of democracy have turned full circle, quickening expectations while heightening the sensation of free fall. In Botswana, Makepe’s home country, the Botswana Democratic Party enjoyed fifty-eight years of uninterrupted political power until November 2024, when a three-party coalition led by Duma Boko won the popular vote. Once considered one of Africa’s more stable economies (diamonds were discovered in 1967, a year after independence), Botswana endured the tumult of Seretse Khama Ian Khama’s rule from 2008 to 2018, and the ensuing years that tore that legacy asunder. 

Thero Makepe, Confusion, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Lerato, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Born in 1996 to parents who both worked as accountants, Makepe studied photography at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, where he began to refine a visual language that includes staged portraiture and reenactments that sometimes reference fables, current affairs, and family history. His dynamic, long-form approach offers viewers multiple entry points to the maze of political, professional, and personal ties that preoccupy him, flattening the boundary between South Africa and Botswana. 

Makepe’s maternal grandfather was Hippolytus Mothopeng, a jazz musician who left apartheid South Africa for Botswana (then called Bechuanaland) in 1958 and worked in both Francistown and Gaborone. Hippolytus’s uncle was Zephania “Zeph” Mothopeng, a teacher and president of the liberation movement Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, a man with unflinching eyes fittingly nicknamed “the Lion of Azania.” Zeph’s son, Johnny, played with the influential Afro jazz bands Batsumi and Marumo. With so much of this lineage to unpack, the long-form essay has been Makepe’s preferred mode of operation, encompassing diorama, immersive installation, and lighting experiments, both in reference to photography’s history and as commentary on the present. Forlorn afternoons and twilight are recurring motifs in Makepe’s oeuvre, evoking interiority as opposed to illuminating his scenes.

Thero Makepe, Kereke, 2022, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Makgadikgadi Pans, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

It’s Not Going to Get Better, initially conceived for a solo exhibition at Vela Projects in Cape Town, is a departure point for the artist. Brevity replaces the speculative sprawl of series such as Music from My Good Eye (2019) and its companion piece, We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here (2020–ongoing), which both grapple with the legacy of his matrilineal family’s twin heirlooms, music and resistance. This tighter focus led him to present the work as midsize prints. “I’d never made work in that format before,” Makepe told me recently. “I knew that, okay, these are the sorts of themes that I want to touch upon. These are the different people I know in my life, and I’m drawing upon their real lives and their situations.”

The seed for It’s Not Going to Get Better was planted in 2023 through Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning. “I was like, Wow! This feels a lot like Botswana, in terms of the conservatism that you have in [South] Korea; the military influence, the surveillance on people, and the way in which Koreans are very within themselves.” Makepe says Burning also offered a searing take on the elusiveness of class ascendancy, which surfaces in his images as both an embodied angst in his peers and a kind of intergenerational fallout.

A landlocked country of fewer than 2.5 million people, Botswana has a GDP of 19.4 billion dollars and an unemployment rate of nearly 30 percent—a figure president Duma Boko characterized as “a ticking time bomb.” The country’s shrinking economy (it registered negative three percent growth in 2024) has been overly reliant on diamonds at the expense of broader economic development, resulting in instability as synthetic diamonds increasingly erode their value. Botswana exported around five billion dollars worth of diamonds in 2022, but since then global prices have fallen by around 40 percent. Mining Weekly reported that Debswana, a joint venture between De Beers and Botswana’s government, saw a 52 percent drop in sales during the first nine months of 2024—all while the government pushes for a controlling stake in the company and a diversification of its economy.

Thero Makepe, Kalamore, 2022, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Sello, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

“In my lifetime there’s never been a more hopeless time when it comes to what you can get from politicians,” says Makepe. “There’s always been some sort of symbol of hope. It started with Nelson Mandela, and then, by the time I was a teenager, came Barack Obama. And then, you know, from my late teens to early twenties, there hasn’t ever really been a hero or icon figure like that. So when I listened to a song by rapper billy woods, whose father was part of the Pan-African struggle in Zimbabwe, he says, ‘It’s not going to get better,’ I was like, Yeah, that’s it. There’s a sense of grounding in not pretending.”

While Makepe draws from a wide pool of references—Alex Webb’s densely composed street scenes or his fellow artists of TBP Artist Collective, like Rrangwane, Kim Karabo Makin, and Legakwanaleo Makgekgenene—he always cites South African artist Lebohang Kganye, whose work has been on view recently in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Fotografiska Berlin. “She was instrumental to my development as a photographer and what I perceived as what could be done within this medium—that you don’t have to just be a traditionalist,” he says. Makepe’s earlier work, particularly Monna O Montsho (2018), which uses cardboard cutouts and miniature furniture to reconstruct mythological tales from his childhood, borrows from the trajectory of Kganye, who has increasingly incorporated theatrical sets, three dimensionality, and variations of scale into her work. For now, Makepe is certain that he wants to continue in the vein of experimental works like Fly Machine/Mogaka (2018), which uses diorama and a camera obscura to reconstruct the 2018 plane crash of Botswana Defence Force pilot Major Cliff Manyuni. “I want to get back to doing things that are a little bit more surreal,” he says. Given the burden of shared histories between Botswana and South Africa, perhaps this decision is as much about creative expansion as it is about self-care.

Thero Makepe, Under Surveillance, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Sharpeville, 2021, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Moral Compass, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, Father and Daughter, 2022, from the series We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here, 2020–ongoing

Thero Makepe, Shattered Dreams, 2023, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, Modimo a mo Tlamele, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, The Place that Dried Up, 2023, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

Thero Makepe, Re Mmogo Akere?, 2024, from the series It’s Not Going to Get Better, 2024

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

Coers, a photographer based in Rotterdam, doesn’t know why his grandfather’s passing made the papers. His grandfather died of a heart attack, not of the deadly new disease that was then ripping across the globe. “He was just a regular guy,” Coers told me. But Coers suspects that his death caused alarm because he was technically a foreigner. His grandfather had lived most of his life in the Netherlands, after he and his mother fled the Indonesian National Revolution that erupted in the wake of World War II. He had returned to Indonesia in 2015.

Sander Coers, Holiday Scene II, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Golden Hour (Asleep), 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Coers’s grandfather almost never talked about his childhood. Born to a Dutch colonial soldier and an Indonesian mother, he was interned with his mother in a concentration camp by the Japanese, who sent his father to Burma, where he died of an illness while working on the infamous “death railway,” a 258-mile train route between Thailand and Burma, the construction of which resulted in the deaths of 90,000 Southeast Asian civilians and 12,000 Allied prisoners of war. Later, he was persecuted by his Indonesian countrymen as they attempted to purge the islands of any trace of colonial occupation, including mixed children. After his grandfather’s death, Coers’s family discovered an extensive archive of photographs and documents that he had compiled: pieces of a family history shattered by war and upheaval. His return to Indonesia had been a part of a quest to hunt down the ghosts of his past. 

When his grandfather died, Coers was finishing his master’s degree in photography at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, where he was working on a project, Come Home, that dealt with issues of masculinity, self-discovery, and memory. Another project, Blue Mood (Al Mar) (2021–22), with similar concerns, followed shortly after his graduation. Dreamy and sun drenched, these pictures are precociously self-assured and emotionally resonant, recalling the atmosphere of Éric Rohmer’s summer idylls. Coers explained that the work sprang from a reckoning with the nostalgic pull of his provincial hometown of Terneuzen, which he grew up longing to escape. By returning home and attempting to capture something akin to the memories of his youth, he sought to revisit and reimagine the story of his life.  

Sander Coers, POST, 2023. AI-generated imagery

Sander Coers, POST, 2023. AI-generated imagery

Coers began a new pair of projects in the wake of his grandfather’s passing, POST (2023–24) and Eulogy (2024–ongoing), in which he expanded the ambit of his fascination with the slippery nature of memory and identity to encompass his family’s history as well as his own. In POST, Coers fed photos from old family albums into an AI model, which then spit fragmentary facsimiles of a past that never existed: a dark-skinned man frolicking in a field of flowers; a white boy splashing through the surf; the slope of a man’s suit jacket shoulder. Coers’s interest in masculinity, which anchored his earlier work, is broadened here to include the question of cultural heritability. 

“The way I view AI is that it’s sort of a collective memory of humankind,” Coers told me. But he is aware that AI constructs our collective memory strangely. It produces images that are more archetype than archive, assemblages of our collective fantasies about ourselves. Underscoring the constructed nature of these AI images, and, by extension, the cobbled together quality of both masculinity and memory, Coers UV printed the pictures from this project on plywood, adding extra material and metaphoric dimensions to his work.    

For Eulogy, an ongoing project he began in 2024, Coers delved deeper into his grandfather’s past, and the legacies of colonialism and conflict that shaped it. As in POST, he continued to work with both AI-generated images and archival materials, but he also journeyed to Indonesia to make pictures of his own. The resulting works, some of which are printed on hand-glazed tile as well as plywood, provide gauzy, evocative glimpses of a past both idealized and indistinct. It is a time that Coers knows only through pictures, that his grandfather sought first to forget, and then, perhaps, redeem through remembrance. 

Coers is continuing his grandfather’s final project, but he’s doing so with the knowledge that it is a futile one. Looking at these works, I am reminded of a passage in a letter written by the fictional protagonist of Chris Marker’s great cinematic disquisition on memory, San Soleil. “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,” Marker writes through his character, “which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”

Sander Coers, Jens (Calvin Klein), 2020, from the series Come Home

Sander Coers, Three Brothers Climbing Rocks, 2020, from the series Come Home

Sander Coers, Warm (View on Salt Mountains), 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Waving Around a Flower in the Sun, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, David in Pink with Cyan, 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Sunburnt Car, 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Jens in White with Blue, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Shade, 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Holiday Scene, 2021, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

Sander Coers, Pink Stop (Salt), 2022, from the series Blue Mood (Al Mar)

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

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Office), 2025, from the series Untitled, India

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Water), 2025, from the series Untitled, India

Famously hostile to its women, Delhi’s landscapes, especially in times of unrest, can thwart their access. “The street does not favor me as it does a man,” Bhushan says. “And I think that that’s where I’m starting from.” This disadvantage might propel a young woman photographer toward elaborate tactics, such as staged reconstructions of past events. Over the last year, Bhushan spent her summer and winter breaks doing precisely this, shooting every day in Delhi, using two different cameras, a large-format 4-by-5 “not commonly seen in India” and a 35mm. She staged locations covered by the international press during the heatwave that wracked India in 2024. The idiosyncratic criterion was a way of asserting control over an “unforgiving” geography. Collaborating with aspiring actors from Delhi’s informal street theater communities, who were largely migrants from smaller towns and villages, she photographed young men playing the roles of the policemen and protestors who could well have been part of, for instance, the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act five years ago.

The nature of the camera influences the choreography and distance between Bhushan and her protagonists; the photographer’s body becomes a focal point. Elaborating on how she set up the shots, Bhushan says, “I photographed while the actors perform the seemingly ‘actual’ event; they do not know when I will choose to make the photograph. I was also often pushed, shoved, and me and my camera hit by lathis during the making of these.”

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear (I), 2019

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear (III), 2019

The untitled series, shot with the 4-by-5 camera, depicts the characters of the policemen in medias res at the untended, vaguely industrial, and desolate frontiers of Delhi. Bhushan composed the images without a viewfinder, shooting without seeing. She gave little direction to the participants, because “once the film is in and you’re exposing the negative, you’re not looking at anything. I don’t see what I’m doing as I press the shutter. I am positioning my actors, but they’re not standing still. And standing still is very important to the 4 x 5.” On the other hand, in the series Waiting on images that won’t appear, the fluidity of the 35mm camera places Bhusan—and by extension the viewer—in the thick of what resembles a first-person record of police brutality. Shooting these images, she felt like a photojournalist, “because I’m moving while the performance is happening and there’s multiple times where I have gotten hit because I’m so within the moment.”

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Soldier), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (The Moment Before MY Camera Is Taken Away), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

The landscape, too, was in conversation with the camera, becoming yet another participant. “I had to wait for the landscape to perform for me,” Bhushan explains. “The dust, for example.” There were no fixed roles—actors played both policemen and protestors depending on the day’s schedule—destabilizing fixed notions of identity over the course of the series. Nor were there scripts or pre-planned scene blocks, leading to Bollywood-inspired improvisations: “You want to let the actor be the actor. What’s really interesting is the take on masculinity when they’re in uniform. I think there’s a shift in power.” In one photograph, a policeman stands arms akimbo in the dust-hazed background, while an out-of-focus colleague prowls towards the camera, once again casting Bhushan in the role of intrepid photojournalist, recalling the risks that chroniclers of state violence often take. “In this emulation of a journalist, that image is the last one before my camera’s taken away from me,” she says. “But in reality, I would never have access to it.”

Vani Bhushan, Archival Photograph (1), 2024

Vani Bhushan, Darkroom Print (in collaboration with the Lens Media Lab), 2024

This play with facticity, an increasingly common mode of image-making in the post-documentary era, runs through Bhushan’s work. A bleak off-highway wide shot, a decrepit airplane, and tear-gas-misted policemen offer clues to an ominous but irrecoverable chain of events. During her darkroom experiments, Bhushan printed these photographs from the untitled series on paper aged in an environmental chamber, bestowing on them an unsettling vintage quality, as though they’d been sourced from a dusty old police file, or perhaps film stills from a defunct studio’s detritus. The ambiguous effect is enhanced by the archival disaster images found in a box at a secondhand market that intersperse the series—the flotsam of what looks like a tram submerged in monsoon deluge and the scene of motorcycle accident. Bearing the stamp of a famous old tabloid’s art department, they intrigued Bhushan, who wondered if they were actual images or if they had been staged. 

The instability of truth was inscribed by the camera itself onto Bhushan’s images. In the photographs from Waiting on images that won’t appear, the left quarter of the frame is covered by a black vertical strip, the result of inadvertent shutter drag. The effect gives the sense that the photographer was shooting from behind a screen, her visual field occluded and her vision therefore unreliable. “I don’t like the term half-truth,” she says. “A half is when something is divided equally. The black shroud on the left cannot be equated to the event on the right. They both have separate meanings, but are read as one plane.” Perhaps one way to think about the relationship between the two sections is to compare it to that between object and subject, between history as it happened and as it was experienced, when it becomes memory. 

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear, 2025

Vani Bhushan, Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear, 2025

Bhushan considers her work a record of recollections, both unauthorized and official, rather than hard realities. Considering the figure of the photojournalist and the artifice of the archive, she questions the medium’s claims of verisimilitude and the integrity of photography collections. In discussing her work, “truth comes up a lot, document comes up a lot. I think the word ‘document’ is flattening, both formally and conceptually.” Bhushan is interested, instead, in the camera’s ability to reveal truths, citing revelations yielded in the darkroom off the blindly shot 4-by-5 negatives scratched by Delhi’s dust, or the accidental shutter drag of the new 35mm camera. “I learn from the medium when I make the image . . . I think of the photograph as a didactic device.” The word document comes from the Latin docere, to teach. There are lessons in revisiting well-documented narratives of contemporary state violence. Bhushan’s practice reflects on how history (and, indeed, truth), as she puts it, “exists in imagery in one way, and then within memory in another.”

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Plane), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Dust Storm), 2024, from the series Untitled, India

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

Photography was merely a hobby then, a way of documenting life in college, his friends, and his city. After some encouragement from an uncle who saw his pictures, Protick decided to enroll in night classes at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in 2009. Established in 1998 by the photographer and activist Shahidul Alam, Pathshala was (and still is) unlike any other institution in South Asia, founded with a strong documentary focus. When Protick arrived, he was surrounded by photojournalists from the region, but it wasn’t until he saw the work of Robert Adams and William Eggleston, another photographer-musician, that he felt a deep resonance. “This is what photography can also be,” he recalls thinking. “This is what I wanted to create.”

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing

Protick splits music and images as two distinct parts of his journey as an artist, but over the last fifteen years—and across projects spanning photography, video, and sound—he’s built a career out of listening. His work uses historical frameworks rooted in Bangladesh and the wider Bengal region to unpack questions about photography’s relationship to time and memory. Combining deep research, a patient eye, and an intuition for visual rhythm, his approach negotiates the impulses of the photojournalist with those of the musician. “Musical composition is such an editorial process; you build a logic through it,” he says. “That selectiveness is vital, and it came to me naturally as a photographer.”

Protick’s compositions are quiet and spacious, inviting a wide field for association despite their highly specific context. In one of his earliest series, Leen (Of River and Lost Lands) (2011–ongoing), he photographs the Padma River that cuts through Bangladesh. Waterways dominate the country’s topography, and the river is embedded into its national and cultural story. In college, Protick read the novel Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman of the Padma) by prolific Bengali writer Manik Bandopadhyay, which exposed him to the narrative potential of the river, an artery signaling both life and destruction.

Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. & Mrs. Das, 2012–16

Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. & Mrs. Das, 2012–16

He later drew a connection to the American highway, and the work of Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, and Stephen Shore from the 1950s to ’70s. “In the US, the entire country is road,” Protick says. “But it’s not the same here. The traveling mode is the river, and it’s always been the lifeblood.” On the riverbanks, land and livelihoods are at perpetual risk of being swallowed up by flooding. Over multiple trips, Protick observed the Padma’s eroding embankments with great care, using a subdued photographic palette to represent the calm yet alarming ticking of a geological clock.

In the series Mr. & Mrs. Das (2012–16), Protick telescopes into a single apartment in Dhaka, where he photographs his aging grandparents in their final days. His images of sparse interiors contrast with archival imagery of his subjects’ life as a young couple. The whitened, near-clinical palette reappears, isolating seemingly nondescript objects—telephones, vases, frames, loose wires, suitcases—to tell a larger story through fragments. As on the river, Protick attempts to grasp time’s pervasive crawl, and from this stillness honors the ordinary, intimate details that furnish a shared life.

Nature, memory, and time gradually became thematic tentpoles for Protick. His video work Raśmi (2017–20) projects these ideas onto a cosmic scale. A montage of images creates a constellation of flashing associations between light and dark, abstract and figurative scenes, and planetary and microscopic degrees—all layered over music composed by Protick himself. We move from lightspeed to the lumbered march of historical time in the series Jirno (2016–ongoing), meaning “ruins” in Bangla. Here, Protick uses serene, long-exposure compositions to depict abandoned feudal estates, once owned by Hindu landlords from pre-Partition Bengal, now decayed and returning to the landscape.

Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21

Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21

The images, shot in black-and-white and often in hazy conditions, force dense greenery to flatten against the buildings’ architectural contours. “There’s always an extra thing happening, even in a very static, still moment,” Protick says of his approach. “Nature becomes more present in the photograph.” The colonial-era buildings stand as frozen testaments of the region’s transformation (or lack thereof), and the place of the past in the present. If the story of Bengal over the twentieth century is in some ways the story of migration, Protick mines for what is left behind.

Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing

Sarker Protick, from the series Ishpather Poth (Crossing), 2019–23

The marks of movement reemerge as a theme in Ishpather Poth (Crossing) (2017–23), which traces the built legacy of the Bangladesh Railway, once part of the sprawling train network that traversed the historical Bengal region. Following two partitions—of India in 1947 and Pakistan in 1971—many lines on the railway were severed from their ends. As in Jirno, Protick expresses historical time through the stoic language of the built form; industrial remnants of colonial rail workshops and power stations, abandoned offices and bungalows, and aging railway towns.

In one image, the steel mouth of the Hardinge Bridge opens into a mile of track over the Padma. The bridge—which evokes the twin legacies of colonial engineering and the Bangladesh Liberation War—also appears in the Leen series, this time from the perspective of the Padma below. Both projects brought Protick back to the Pabna District in central Bangladesh, home to one of the largest railway junctions in the country, and to the Padma. “Every time I finish a project, I somehow find a layer for another,” he says.

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24

Take a step back and a greater tapestry emerges. The river, the ruin, and the railway become interconnected protagonists in a story spanning centuries and national borders. Protick’s latest series, Awngar (Ash to Ash) (2024), recently exhibited at C/O Berlin, adds another layer. Made across modern-day India and Bangladesh, the series explores the linked development of railways and the coal mining industry under British rule. Its images and video works are characteristic of Protick’s style, atmospheric and rich in allusion. Landscape views of marred coal mines and videos of explosions juxtapose more meditative scenes of mining offices and coal-black surfaces. Predatory capitalist and colonial extraction have mercilessly shaped Bangladesh’s ecological reality, the series argues. “Awngar” is the Bengali word for coal in a red-hot state, ready to combust, and the series associates this catastrophic, latent energy with imperial and industrial ambitions in the region.

Installation view of Sarker Protick: Awngar at C/O Berlin, 2025
Photograph by David von Becker

Installation view of Sarker Protick: Awngar at Crespo Open Space, Frankfurt, 2025
Photograph by Jens Gerber

Memory is difficult source material. While many of these explorations are historically embedded, they raise universal questions about the power of the image to illuminate a place. These questions do not end behind the camera for Protick, who has been on the faculty of Pathshala since 2013 and acts as the co-curator of Asia’s longest-running international photography festival, Chobi Mela, which will return for its eleventh edition this December, in Dhaka. Across his work, Protick frames the past with the present, where looking constitutes both remembering and recomposing. Robert Adams once said of his forty years of work on the American West, that, “by looking closely at specifics in life, you discover a wider view.” In his stillness and attention, Protick composes his own.

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24

Sarker Protick, from the series Awngar (Ash to Ash), 2022–24
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

David Gilbert, Drama at Sunset (Summer), 2013

David Gilbert, Solar System, 2023

Photographs are comprised of three essential elements—light, fixative, and ground, usually paper—which freeze-frame the ever-changing world in simplest matter. Since Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844), the medium has been understood as an index of loss. The simple stuff that Gilbert photographs isn’t meant to last: drawings and collages on paper that are usually destroyed by the time their image circulates. Instead, they’re preserved in the paper stock of his photographic prints. In Gilbert’s studio, the lens always comes last, even though it’s the first thing we see. “The camera is the glue that holds things in place,” he says. This recursive tendency is part of what makes his photographs more than they seem.

David Gilbert, Hereafter, 2022

David Gilbert, Window Frame, 2023

Fox Talbot’s first photograph was of the slanting light through the window at Lacock Abbey, transferred from paper negative to salted paper. Conforming to the pictorial standards of his time, he composed his images like Dutch genre paintings. There’s a similarly Vermeer-like quality to Gilbert’s window photographs, several of which appeared in Flutter, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, which was presented last year at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem. The checkered wallpaper in Hereafter (2021) recalls the floor patterns in old master scenes of domestic life, while the play of natural light and shadow endows the photograph with its alluring sense of depth. The light is much flatter in Stencil (2021), but in this respect it mimics the titular paper cut-out at the picture’s center, and the way that photographs themselves are produced from negative images. The chiaroscuro in Window Frame (2023) is so intense that it’s difficult to tell negative from positive, solid from air.

Installation views of Flutter at the North Carolina Museum of Art, 2024
Courtesy the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem

In contrast, other photographers have used paper to render architectural features as simulacra. The meticulously constructed paper sets of Thomas Demand, with their flat, matte surfaces, mimic the photo paper upon which their images are printed. Casting no shadows, they appear unnervingly real. James Casebere’s paper architectural models are dramatically illuminated with studio lights, but are likewise too perfect to be entirely convincing. Such analog art, situated in an uncanny valley, seems to predict the advent of AI-generated imagery. And then there’s Gilbert’s Night, Night (2015), with its crudely-painted cardboard building model sitting before a set of clashing curtains decorated with butterflies and stars. Such assemblages, by contrast, are full of jagged cuts, curls, and other hand-hewn imperfections, which lend them an almost comical pathos. Gilbert’s work wears its heart on its sleeve.

Its decorative elements are the marks of a tender obsession. The unapologetically kitschy Cloud Clutter (2018), with its tableau of fake birds and flowers, colorful mugs and tins, straws, feathers, marbles, and a wide variety of store-bought art supplies, could be a queer bedroom collection or the aftermath of a crafting party. Several of his photographs depict sets with painted or patterned backdrops and bright footlights—Constellations (2020), Full House (2019), and Center Stage (2019)—like living room theaters where the performers have just left the stage. They recall Jack Smith, who used mass-produced materials to transform his East Village apartment into a queer fantasyland for renegade films and performances, or James Bidgood, whose long-lost cinematic masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971), remastered this year by the Museum of Modern Art, made horny harems, docks, and country idylls from cut-up prom dresses, tinsel, and beads. 

David Gilbert, Small Erotic Picture (Spring), 2013

David Gilbert, Grand Dame, 2019

In Smithian spirit, Gilbert scatters camp, erotic Easter Eggs throughout his pictures, like painted penises both big (Pink Thing, 2019) and small (Small Erotic Picture (Spring), 2013). Gone Girl and Grande Dame (2019) could be portraits of Harlem Renaissance queens by Carl van Vechten, but with no bodies, just drag. As critic Matthew Schneier observed in the catalog for Heaven and Earth, Gilbert’s 2023 exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York, “Gilbert is a consummate squirreler of set pieces, and the studio is a stage.”

Nick Mauss echoes this notion in Body Language (2023), his recent study of the photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa co-authored by Angela Miller. “The early twentieth century artist’s studio was a site for the creation of queer ‘counterpublics,’” he notes—a place for collaborative performances, discussions, and intimate exchanges of albums and other ephemera. The gently curling paper cutouts, tinsel garlands and fake flowers in Gilbert’s photographs recall the cellophaned interior of artist Florine Stettheimer’s Manhattan salon, or the studio sets built by Platt Lynes and van Vechten, where both men photographed countless models, lovers, and friends. “A resistance to the effects of market-based public circulation led these artists to specify the terms of their work’s access to a limited ‘inner’ public, not unrelated to the gesture of sharing the contents of their scrapbooks,” Mauss writes. This may be why Gilbert’s work feels so intensely private, like a scrapbook for a tightly knit circle of friends. Its cut, torn, and folded surfaces carry a queer wish for other worlds—or utopias—to emerge from the waste-paper of this one. 

That wish takes full form in Castle (2024), a tracing-paper schloss which Gilbert photographed in beguiling shadow and printed at larger-than-life scale, enhancing its architectural illusionism. But unlike the artificial light in photographs by those architectural illusionists, Demand and Casebere, the slanting glow imprinted on Gilbert’s works is almost always natural, illuminating traces of the artist’s hand that seem just as evanescent. As that light changes and fades, so too will these constructions be dismantled and repurposed to make something new. They bear an entwined melancholy and hopefulness often shared by works that can be characterized as “queer,” in the sense that theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz used it to signify “a horizon imbued with potentiality,” something which has either recently gone or “is not yet here.” These photographs aren’t indexes—they’re dreams. 

David Gilbert, Castle, 2024

David Gilbert, Stencil, 2023
Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

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

Sara Kontar, “Travel Document for refugees allow to enter all countries except: Syria.” As a refugee you had to give up your passport and replace it with a “Travel Document for Refugee,” from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, A view from our home in Paris, 2023

That journey had been hard, and in a way, Kontar was relieved not to have any visual reminders of it. But she remembered it, dreamed about it, and those images started to haunt her. It turned out that making new images, not casual snapshots with her phone but more planned-out photographs with a camera, helped ease her mind. “Since I was young, I wanted a camera, but it was really expensive, and I couldn’t afford it,” Kontar recalled. In Paris, she went to art school and studied animation. A classmate was selling her camera. “It was cheap, so I bought it,” Kontar said, adding with a laugh, “I didn’t choose photography. It chose me.”

Sara Kontar, “If you weren’t here I would have really felt exiled.” My mother and her two friends, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, Someone told me that we carry memories of the past in our hair, so I asked my mother to cut it all, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, An auto-portrait with my mother after she cut my hair, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Kontar’s body of work—across several different series of archival collages, documentary photographs, and experimental films—returns again and again to the question of exile, not only as a metaphorical space, or a set of lived experiences, but also as an adversary, as a tangled ball of bureaucratic red tape. Therefore, I Cut (2023) is both a collection of portraits and still lifes—hands holding a pair of scissors, two passports on a bed—and an unfolding narrative about a group of women who find everyday trust in each other. Them Syrians (2024–ongoing) chronicles the tangled relations between Lebanon and Syria as they play out among the old stones and historical scars of a mountain village. 

In Syria, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, like that of his father before him, was explicitly built to fend off coups. The prison system, the many layers of intelligence services, the brutal structures of an authoritarian state were all constructed to absorb, co-opt, diminish, and defeat any effort to overthrow the government. When protests swept across the Arab world fourteen years ago, unleashing all kinds of hopes and dreams for a better future, Syria was the rocky shore on which those aspirations crashed, deformed themselves, and died.

Sara Kontar, The blurry portrait of Majeda, from the series Therefore, I Cut, 2023

Sara Kontar, Family archive, from the series Paper Home, 2024–ongoing

Assad survived and seemed immoveable. When a coalition of rebel factions suddenly stormed the capital last year, and Assad just as suddenly fled Damascus for Moscow, it was a shock. For the fourteen million Syrians who had been displaced from their homes between 2011 and 2024, half of whom had left the country altogether, it was a shock complicated by laws and statutes that were blind to this dramatic change in circumstances. For the 46,000 Syrians granted asylum in France, returning home would mean voiding their refugee status. That means they are forbidden from going back to Syria, even for a short visit, unless they are willing to leave France forever, or if they are willing to become French citizens first. That is the predicament Kontar is exploring, to powerful and ruminative effect, in the series Paper Home (2024–ongoing), where bureaucratic hurdles stand in the way of real justice and equality.  

Sara Kontar, A family picture captures the essence of unity despite physical distance. Members are scattered across the globe, with some in Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Kurdistan, from the series Paper Home, 2024–ongoing

Sara Kontar, Lava and Kais find themselves in the cramped confines of the 14 cubic meters student room, from the series Paper Home, 2024–ongoing

Four years after arriving in Paris, Kontar suddenly recovered all the images she had lost. By that point she was experimenting with different materials and modes of image-making. She printed the previously missing images as grainy cyanotypes. For the installation Towards a Light (2022), she arranged them over column of texts and wallpaper replicating an image of the sea. Although the texts tell of a harrowing passage—trying to reach Greece by boat, fighting with smugglers—the images that so troubled Kontar for years appear tender, almost beautiful. “After that, I started documenting the lives of people around me,” Kontar explained. “Everybody’s lost.” People are living in welfare associations, with roommates, far outside their norms. “But when they come together as a group, I love this atmosphere. What I love about documentary is that when you live through these hard stories, the camera becomes a third eye, to look [with] and also to appreciate. It’s another relationship with a space, with exile. All photographers are outsiders. But this is my way out.”

Sara Kontar, Last image of my brother and me, taken by our father in Syria in 2015 on a bus, with the city’s reflection in the window, from the series Towards a Light, 2022
Courtesy the artist

Sara Kontar, An image of my mother embracing my brother upon our arrival in Paris in early 2016, after a two-month journey seeking asylum and crossing multiple borders. My mother had been in France for six months prior, from the series Towards a Light, 2022

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

Yıldıran’s images are polyphonic; their projects overlap. Many photographs are rich with autoethnographic elements. The Dispossessed contains dimly lit scenes captured in the Black Sea mountains and valleys of their ancestry. In darkness, a flashlight exposes a rural woman or a detail in the landscape with such brightness that it turns them into surfaces with newborn vitality. Yıldıran uses flashlights extensively “because this is what women who work and live in those mountains do.” In one image, a woman appears faceless against a dark background. Yıldıran had instructed her to point the flashlight to her face. “I cherish the performative aspect of photography,” they told me.

Yıldıran spent many summers returning to and taking pictures of Çaykara, or “lower village,” which lies in a V-shaped valley in the Pontic Mountains. Nomadic Turkish tribes, Armenians, and Greek-speaking Christians populated the region for centuries. Traces of its history as part of the Byzantine, Trebizond, and Ottoman Empires remain. In 1915, during the Caucasus Campaign of World War I, the Russian Army invaded. The ensuing decade saw the Ottoman extermination of some three hundred and fifty thousand Pontic Greeks. Today, Çaykara has a population of about twelve thousand.

On their visits, Yıldıran tried to embrace and understand the place. Portraying women and animals that for centuries formed “an alliance of mountain creatures,” they said, was a means of announcing, “We’re here to ponder the memory of our homeland.” Yıldıran joined their mother, aunt, and other relatives as they picked nuts. Taking pictures, walking around, and trying to be helpful proved therapeutic. The fog that covered the view created sublime landscapes. A woman burns fallen leaves; four women pray before lunch; a goat is milked in a barn.

In this fairy-tale land, Yıldıran’s dreamy images capture a historical process of dispossession. Yıldıran’s mother, who studied dentistry before returning to her hometown, couldn’t own a house because of an old custom that says only men could buy property there. “I realized my work was about being guests for life. About the desire to belong to a place but being rejected by it.” (The Kuşmer Highland is deeded to 373 households residing in Çaykara, which prevents people who emigrated from the village from acquiring property.) “For some reason, I’m taking all these depressive, dark, uncanny images amidst so much natural beauty,” they said. “When I looked at my photos, I noticed they’re all sad because of this cloud of dispossession.”

As Yıldıran frequented Çaykara in the mid-2010s, social protests were rocking Turkey and testing the patience of its authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Yıldıran skipped class to join protests at Cerattepe, where thousands marched against planned mining activities by cronies of Erdoğan; eventually, because they were failing her coursework, they left college. Women led the charge in these protests against mining: blowing whistles, playing accordions and drums, banging pots and pans. They inspired Yıldıran to spend a month in 2015 tracking, climbing mountains, and photographing local activists, with an eye to “preserve these things and to act as their memory,” they said. “To help me recall how they felt like at the time.”

In 2016, Yıldıran won a photography contest, Foto Istanbul. The winning image shows Burçak, a trans woman walking down a street. Her back naked and straight, she stands tall against several people, primarily men, who consider her from a judging distance. Taken during Trans Pride in Istanbul, Yıldıran’s photograph, part of their Shelter series, distills the Turkish government’s intensifying assault on queer communities, known locally as lubunyalar. As efforts to marginalize and criminalize lubunyalar increased, Yıldıran’s interest in documenting the “self-exploration” of Generation Y grew: One man places his head on another’s naked body, where he takes refuge. Shaving each other’s heads, sharing lights for cigarettes, cruising, and dancing, Istanbul’s lubunyalar opened their bodies and hearts to the photographer. Yıldıran shared those images on Instagram, where they had seventeen thousand followers. Then, in 2022, Instagram closed the account. “It was because of the nudes,” said Yıldıran. “That day I learned not to trust Instagram.” Now, they are focused on maintaining an archive and not relying on social media.

For years Yıldıran mainly used a Canon AE-1 and shot their projects on 35mm film. Pressing the shutter once, instead of fifty times, felt right, and they savored “this serenity of waiting for the right image.” The technique empowered hallucinatory frames where characters seem unaware of being filmed but also act out. One example is Yıldıran’s work on Eleni Çavuş, a rifle-wielding Pontic guerrilla, who spent a year in the Nebiyan mountains in Samsun in 1924, before Turkish soldiers captured her in a cave there. Yıldıran’s mother Ayşe Durgun played the role of Eleni. According to legend, a Turkish sergeant had killed Eleni’s child, so she killed him, wore his jacket and gun, and climbed the mountain, from whence her dead body returned. “What happened to the Pontus people is rarely talked about. It’s a really dark history,” said Yıldıran. “It’s not part of the public conversation, and that pisses me off.”

Haunt the Present, Yıldıran’s first exhibition in the US—recently presented by the organization Protocinema at the Arts Center on Governor’s Island in New York—riffs on previous series, adding new layers. The photographic-sculptural installation tells a semifictional immigration story, imagining a scenario in which Yıldıran’s mother immigrates to the US from the Black Sea. The show includes images of both places, and for the images of America, Yıldıran spent weeks road-tripping from Michigan to the Pacific Ocean, driving up to ten hours daily, visiting national parks. Istanbul’s lubunyalar were an inspiration: Yıldıran observed how they began immigrating outside Turkey in large volumes over the past decade. “I felt oppressed in Istanbul, and to get away and see all the vast vistas opened me up.” The superimposed images explore the possibility of meshing the Anatolian plateau and the American landscapes and ask whether they can converse.

The intermingled fragments of Yıldıran’s vision will endure: the faces of their mother and aunt in costume, details from historic Pontus photographs, and images of Black Sea women who continue to live under the oppression of a patriarchal regime. Their multilayered compositions create new geographies. “This is why I add volume, cut, and shape my images,” they said. “I build my dreamlands.”

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