“If I’m knocking on the Pearly Gates and they say, ‘Okay, mate, what have you done? Just show us one book. See if you can get in,’ I’ll still go for The Last Resort.”

Parr accepted that The Last Resort would forever be his calling card. And, after his passing, the talking points returned to his position as an interloper from the Home Counties poking his lens around the detritus of a working-class seaside town in Merseyside. Few ever mention that he was living in Wallasey at the time, of which New Brighton is a suburb.

“If you think about the early days of Martin’s work, he was photographing the areas where he was living and working,” says Dewi Lewis, who has known Parr since the mind-1980s and published many of his books, including the first reprint of The Last Resort, which had initially been self-published in 1986. “When he was in Hebden Bridge, he was doing local stuff,” most memorably with the series, The Non-Conformists shot in Calderdale’s Methodist chapels, published by Aperture in 2013, some 33 years after it was completed. “And New Brighton was local.”

Time has smoothed the edges off The Last Resort’s very palpable rupture from the dominant humanist documentary tradition. Yet it’s easy to see how the photographs appeared different; not just because they were shot in colour with the clarity of medium format, both of which were more closely associated with commercial imagery, but because they were unromantic. “Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience,” wrote David Lee in Arts Review when it was exhibited at Serpentine Gallery in London. “They appear fat, simple, styleless, tediously conformist and unable to assert any individual identity.”

Parr’s defenders argue that the ugliness in the pictures lay in the eyes of the beholders. “I was brought up in Rhyll in North Wales, which is very similar to New Brighton,” says Lewis. “I worked in the amusement arcades. I did all the summer jobs that you do in that sort of place. So I knew all those people. And I knew that there was no sense of it being exploitative.”

Neil Burgess showed the work at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, before the Serpentine exhibition, alongside Tom Wood’s photographs of New Brighton. “It was seen by some as taking the piss out of the working classes, which to a certain extent it was. But I don’t think the working classes gave a fuck, really. They came into the show and thought it was hysterical. We didn’t have any complaints from people who saw themselves in those pictures at all.”

Parr remained grateful that the work was still being talked about decades later. The show at the Serpentine and then at Rencontres d’Arles festival in 1986 put him on a new trajectory towards the figure we know today. He is one of the few photographers to transcend his medium and become not just an internationally celebrated artist, but an instantly recognisable figure in wider popular culture. However, The Last Resort tends to overshadow the work he made over the next 15 years, when he was at his prolific peak, putting out an extraordinary series of books, including The Cost of Living, One Day Trip, Signs of the Times, Bored Couples, Small World and his magnum opus, Common Sense. 

Published by Dewi Lewis in 1999, Common Sense was — and still is — a wildly original and audacious take on consumer culture, focused in extreme close up. It’s the book he said he’d be holding in reply at the Pearly Gates, in case they asked for another chance to get in. “It’s when I put together the experimentation I’d done with the macro lens,” he recalled in the Zoom talk in 2020. “One of the dangers of being me is that I get lazy and complacent and repeat myself ad infinitum, which I could do pretty easily. So the thing is to give yourself challenges. I’ve always used the beach as my experimental lab. I first started the medium format pictures in New Brighton. I then applied the macro lens to the beach. Then I thought I’d challenge myself and use a telephoto lens [for Beach Therapy, published in 2018] because in the world of art and documentary photography, it’s generally frowned upon.”

Lewis says that even Parr was unsure about Common Sense, and that it might have all been different. “He said that he had a new project that he wanted to show me, but he wasn’t quite there with it. He was still weighing up in his own mind whether it was something that he wanted to keep going on…. Before things really started taking off for him, around 1997 to 98, he was getting properly interested in book collecting. He turned to me at one point and said, ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with photography, but I really love books. I should go and open a bookshop.’ How serious he was, I’ve no idea. And within two or three months, he started making films. That must have also been about the same time that he was developing Common Sense. So, in a sense, it all ties in that he hadn’t quite worked out where he would go next with work.”

He persevered, and this time the world was ready to embrace the shock of the new. Alongside the book, Common Sense opened as a simultaneous exhibition in 41 venues around the world, from Janet Borden in New York, the first commercial gallery to fully represent him, to the Australian Centre for Photography and the House of Filmmakers in Moscow. Parr would be the first to admit that his very best work was now behind him, but he remained prolific, especially after becoming a full member of Magnum Photos in the mid-1990s, embracing a new role as an in-demand fashion and commercial photographer. Meanwhile, his public profile grew far and wide, much of it on the back of his 2002 retrospective initiated by Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum, curated by Val Williams, which toured Europe for the next five years.

In this next overlapping phase of his career, Parr turned more of his attention towards curating and collecting. He was Guest Artistic Director for Rencontres d’Arles in 2004, and arguably that edition of the festival has never been bettered. The same year saw the publication of the first volume of The Photobook: A History, a serious and scholarly research project completed with Gerry Badger, challenging the dominant narrative of the medium. Parrworld opened at Haus de Kunst in Munich in 2008 featuring his collection of objects, postcards, prints by other photographers, and his vast archive of photobooks, later acquired by Tate and the Luma foundation. 

For many in the photography community, this is his most important legacy. “Martin is the reason for the photobook revolution,” says Lewis. “Someone may have come later, but it’s really all down to Martin and his enthusiasm for the book form. And, if you think about it, who else could it be? He got it going.”

The sale of his photobook collection, for a middling seven-figure sum, helped pay for the focus of the third and last phase of his career, opening a foundation in Bristol supporting emerging, established and overlooked photographers who have made and continue to make work focused on Britain and Ireland. The Foundation’s collection holds more than 5000 prints, from postwar figures such as Marketa Luskacova, Charlie Philips, Tony Ray-Jones, Joy Gregory and Chris Killip, to emerging artists from the last 10-15 years, such as Clementine Schneidermann and Rene Matic. International photographers are represented with major works shot in the UK and Ireland, such as Eugene Smith’s Three Generations of Welsh Miners, alongside book maquettes which includes dummies made in the production of photobooks such as Chris Killip’s In Flagrante and Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh.

“In a strange way, Martin’s work has been slightly overlooked at the Foundation because he was so eager and excited to discover and promote the work of others,” says Jenni Smith. “We hope to spend time exploring Martin’s archive and exhibit more of his work in the gallery in the future. At the moment his Common Sense work is on display in the Foundation toilets, which he always found amusing. There is so much work that remains unseen. During Covid, Martin spent time revisiting his contact sheets and selecting new images, so scanning those negatives feels like a good place to begin that exploration.”

Find out more about Martin Parr and his Foundation here martinparrfoundation.org

Sorelle d’Italia: The Luxury of Resistance © Matilde Piazzi and Nadia Del Frate.

“Renewal means the transformative potential of unity,” say winners of Female in Focus People’s Choice 2024

Since its founding in 1954 by Bolognese corset-maker Ada Masotti, the prevailing image of La Perla, Italy’s leading couture lingerie brand, has been one of lace and luxury. Fantasies of femininity finely wrought through the highest quality fabrics; desire and sensuality given shape in delicate designs. While the styles shifted with the decades – from the flower-power palettes of the 60s to the more liberal cuts of the 70s, the suit-friendly lingerie sets of the 80s, and beyond – La Perla remained at the needle-sharp apex of artisanship and glamour.

‘Portrait of Pierangela Cernera, also known as Piera’, the winning photograph in last year’s Female in Focus x Nikon People’s Choice Award, presents a different image of La Perla to the world. Taken by Italian photographers Matilde Piazzi and Nadia Del Frate, it pays homage – quite literally – to the women behind the lace: the workers of Bologna, the brand’s birthplace, who craft the historic lingerie. Submitted in response to the 2024 Female in Focus theme of Renewal, it tells a multilayered story of collective resistance and revival.

The portrait is part of Sorelle d’Italia: The Luxury of Resistance, Piazzi and Del Frate’s multimedia project documenting the “peaceful yet resolute” struggle of La Perla’s workforce to defend their jobs and protest against financial speculation after the company was declared insolvent in 2023.⁠ From the outset, the workers’ movement was rooted in sisterhood and solidarity, with twenty-four women leading the charge and founding the cultural association Unicheunite. Piazzi and Del Frate worked closely with 19 of them to bring Sorelle d’Italia to life. Comprising a 12-panel photo sequence, a portrait series, a video interview, and a written text, the project seeks to platform the workers’ struggle as “a manifesto of contemporary heroic resistance”.

Piazzi and Del Frate’s collaborative approach dates back to 2022, after meeting on a photography course taught by Italo-Palestinian artist Mustafa Sabbagh. The pair quickly developed an emotional and artistic affinity, with Del Frate’s technical skill and contemporary expertise complementing Piazzi’s historical, philosophical, and iconographic research processes. They worked together more closely in La Perla’s e-commerce team before being made redundant at the start of 2023.

“When the company collapsed and we lost our jobs, we knew we couldn’t just walk away. Our collaboration began as a way to support each other as women working in the challenging and still male-dominated field of photography,” they explain. “When we saw that the La Perla workers had taken a stand, we felt that the struggle was shared and that we had to be part of it, despite coming from different backgrounds.”

Piazzi and Del Frate first made contact with the Unicheunite in May 2024 through Stefania Prestopino, a graphic designer at La Perla and a union representative. Shortly afterwards, they travelled to a parish hall in the town of Castenaso, just outside Bologna, to meet the rest of the group in their workshop. The space was crammed with sewing machines, ironing boards, and lace in every shade – remnants of the high-end lingerie the workers once produced – alongside protest banners, hand-painted signs, and sketches of the group’s new logo: a chain of paper dolls holding hands. For the photographers, “It was a story we felt we had to tell.”

At first, the workers were surprised by the proposed collaboration, hesitant about becoming “the faces” of the cause. But after lengthy talks about the vision behind the project, they began to embrace it. “They welcomed us as equals, which allowed us to build trust gradually, forming a meaningful bond,” says Del Frate. “From then on, we shared every step of the process – production, design, development. We’re truly honoured when we hear them refer to us publicly as sisters.” 

True to Piazzi’s research-based approach to image-making, the project takes its cues from Italian art history. At the heart of the series is a sequence of 12 photographs portraying the workers in procession, hand-in-hand. It draws inspiration from Aurora (1614), a legendary fresco by Bolognese baroque painter Guido Reni. The scene depicts the Roman goddess of dawn as she brings forth a new day, leading the way for Apollo and the goddesses of time. “The metaphor felt especially apt to represent the La Perla workers’ ongoing struggle; months of remaining united, practising mutual aid, and holding fast to one another,” Piazzi explains.

The duo also looked to Mexican muralism, “both for its political clarity and its capacity to merge realism with imagination”, as well as the photographic work of Lewis Hine, August Sander and Diane Arbus. “Our references are never merely decorative – they’re always interpreted through a feminist and working-class lens, in tribute to a living, contemporary story.” 

The winning image, one of 11 individual portraits in the series, spotlights Pierangela Cernera, a central figure in the Unicheunite, who has worked in La Perla’s cutting department for 24 years. On the day of the shoot, the photographers asked each woman to bring an object from her workspace. “Piera brought scraps of La Perla’s world-famous lace and playfully draped them over her head, almost covering herself completely. In that gesture, the image emerged,” Piazzi recounts. “She would become our Madonna of the factory floor, with tailoring scissors in place of the cross, and her hand raised in a gesture of indication – an image suspended somewhere between Antonello da Messina’s Madonna and the cinematic figures of Aki Kaurismäki.”

Ruby Nicholson, Senior Communications Manager at Nikon, believes the portrait captivated voters of the Female in Focus People’s Choice Award (2024 was the first time the category was introduced) with its striking and enigmatic qualities. “Within this single frame, we clearly see the strength and conviction of Pierangela Cernera, yet the lace partially concealing her face invites curiosity and leaves her story tantalisingly unfinished,” she says. “There’s a balance of revelation and mystery that draws viewers in, encouraging them to connect emotionally and wonder about the layers of identity and purpose behind her gaze, and the cause for which she stands.”

Female in Focus was relaunched last year after a two-year hiatus, making the theme of Renewal even more fitting in Nicholson’s eyes: “By inviting photographers to explore renewal, the award celebrated the power of the medium to document hope, progress, and the infinite possibilities that come with starting anew – values that resonate deeply with Nikon’s own spirit of creativity and continuous evolution.”

More than two years since the workers began their fight, a fresh start appears to be on the horizon for La Perla. In June, the company was officially acquired by American entrepreneur Peter Kern, saving it from liquidation. The Unichuenite’s story is far from over, however, with the workers continuing to advocate for more inclusive design principles and for the value of ethical and sustainable labour practices. As they wrote in their manifesto, a text exhibited alongside the photographs of Sorelle d’Italia and also voiced in a recording – “We, workers of La Perla… fight for the survival of a company founded by a pioneer of female entrepreneurship and for the preservation of a world of skills and knowledge passed down through generations.”

“As the workers have often repeated, this long dispute taught them that alone nothing moves, but together everything does,” say Piazzi and Del Frate. “Renewal, for us, really means the transformative potential of unity.”

The 2025 edition of Female in Focus x Nikon is now open. An international jury of industry leaders will select 20 single images and two bodies of work, which will be exhibited in a group show at Photo Ireland in Dublin and 1014 Gallery in London.

Thanks to our partnership with Nikon, the photographers behind the two winning series will also receive a Z Series mirrorless camera and two NIKKOR Z lenses of their choice.

Photographers may submit one single image free of charge. To maximise your chances, become a Digital Access or Full Access Member to submit up to 10 single images or one complete series.

© June T. Sanders

Trans people have historically been on the margins – threatened by healthcare policies and ostracised by social norms. The arts have been a place to find communal solace, a space to express concerns safely whilst finding joy.

Today, in the US, the community faces a new threat; lack of funding in the arts as a new administration is heralded in. How are trans American photographers reacting to the changes in policy, both socially and culturally?

In this long-read, Danielle Ezzo speaks to four trans photographers in the US at a time of insecurity, calling in to question how these issues could eventually spiral out to affect several wider communities

Under the new federal administration in the United States, support for the LGBTQIA+ community now comes with an increasingly explicit cost. The cultural funding landscape is shifting, and programming and research that fall under vaguely “improper ideology”, as stated in one of the The White House’s executive orders Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, are being sidelined through grant restrictions and behind-the-scenes institutional compliance. For many photographers centering identity as a theme of their practice – particularly trans photographers – the changes signal a compound set of potential issues.

As it stands, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will be eliminating funding that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion and underserved communities in the 2026 fiscal year. New administrative requirements, including mandated certifications that recipients do not promote “gender ideology”, have effectively excluded queer- and trans-centered programming from eligibility. At the same time, major institutions such as the Smithsonian are threatened by impending restructuring, with leadership appointments signalling a retreat from diversity-driven programming.

The pressing concern right now is, what happens if and when institutions that had once embraced queer artists pull back support in all its various forms? This is not solely a funding issue – it’s an order of operations issue. Before an artist can apply for a grant, print a portfolio, or ship work to a gallery, they must first be able to access healthcare, keep up with rent, and navigate complex systems that may or may not recognise their existence. For many trans photographers, the question right now isn’t how to fund the work, it’s whether the conditions for care will be met.

“It’s just another level of my basic needs not being met,” Pia Guilmoth, a trans woman photographer based in rural Maine, shares. She’s currently navigating the anxiety of potentially losing access to hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery that was covered as recently as last year and is now subject to growing uncertainty under both state and federal policies. “There are weeks where I spend all my time on the phone with health providers and state agencies just trying to convince them I’m eligible.”

“If institutions platform queer and trans artists when it looks good, but drop them the moment there’s risk, then their commitment was never real”

– Leah DeVun

The artist and scholar, Leah DeVun, describes the atmosphere as one of “anticipatory obedience.” Her recent series, Resemblance – photographs of her partner, a transgender father, and their child – was at risk of being pulled from a group exhibition after being deemed “too risky”. Not because of nudity or content, but because of what a hypothetical backlash might infer from the sight of a trans parent holding their child. “It’s only because there’s a transgender person in the photo that we’re even having this conversation,” DeVun mentions. “Artists have been making nearly identical images of straight and cis families.” 

This kind of preemptive censorship – made in fear, not policy – may be harder to call out than budget cuts, but it’s no less insidious. As DeVun points out, “If institutions platform queer and trans artists when it looks good, but drop them the moment there’s risk, then their commitment was never real.”

Jesse Bandler Firestone, an independent curator in New York City notes, “When queer and trans artists are included only in the name of progress, it’s easy for institutions to quietly back out the moment that symbolism becomes inconvenient.” For trans photographers, especially those in early or mid-career stages, these changes compound existing barriers: less institutional support, fewer exhibition opportunities, and a growing sense that support of any kind is conditional.

What’s unfolding is not a single decisive rupture, but a series of drastic and subtle retractions alike. Artists self-censor for fear of their rights and livelihoods being curtailed. Several artists I interviewed were unwilling to speak on the record, in fear of what ramifications might be in store if they voiced their concerns. Institutions pivot toward “safe” programming. Donors quietly apply pressure. And these costs are not just affecting creative expression, but morale. It requires energy to keep insisting that one’s work matters when the systems around you suggest otherwise.

For June T. Sanders, a trans artist, writer, educator, and curator in rural Washington State, this moment has underscored not only the fragility of institutional inclusion but also the endurance of community-based models. As co-founder of From Here On Out, a grassroots publishing collective, she’s long worked outside traditional funding structures, relying instead on mutual aid and informal networks of support. “We’ve never had a budget,” she tells me. “And maybe because of that, we’re not in the line of fire.” 

That self-reliance now feels less like an alternative and more like a necessity. In Sanders’ teaching, too, they’ve begun to rethink their role – not as a fixed authority, but as a responsive figure, one who can meet students where they are. “I’ve never had strong boundaries between who I am and who I am in the classroom,” she says. “I live in a small community – if I can help a student outside the institution, I will.” 

It’s a model that resists detachment and instead embraces care, proximity, and adaptation as political strategies. “We’re at a point where we need to stop pretending everything is normal,” she tells me. “But that doesn’t mean we stop. It means we start imagining differently.”

While national arts organisations scramble to reorganise in the face of political pressure, some curators are returning to a more fundamental question – who really makes culture? For Jesse Firestone, it’s not major museums. “Large institutions aren’t responsible for generating culture,” he tells me. “They capture it. They canonise. But it doesn’t begin there.”

This distinction feels crucial right now, as many of the country’s organisations scrap DEI initiatives for fear of political retaliation or donor withdrawal. Their caution underscores a broader truth: that real cultural production, which is reflective and responsive to the zeitgeist, has never truly depended on federal funding or museum commissions. Instead, it’s found in smaller spaces, regional arts centers, artist-run collectives, grassroots queer organisations, and even nightlife. 

“There’s power in the nimbleness of mid-size and small-scale institutions,” Firestone says. “They’ve learned to do more with less – which, paradoxically, gives them the freedom to take bigger risks.”

Many trans photographers are turning toward other models of community-making – publishing zines, forming collectives, and relying on mutual aid. But these strategies, while resourceful, are not new. They belong to a longer lineage of queer survival and don’t just see photography as a means of cultural production, but a form of defiance. “It’s a model I’ve employed in my rural community too,” Sanders says, “where we have different forms of collectives all the time that are doing communal work or arts work.” 

The logic is one of sustainability over visibility – working locally and making art not as content, but as a form of care. For Lindsay Perryman, the recent policy shifts only sharpen the stakes. “I see this decision affecting me by making the work more crucial for today’s climate,” they tell me. What began as a personal process of understanding their own identity has become a broader effort to affirm and archive trans and nonbinary existence. 

Their series Tops, soon to be published as a book with Palm Studios, emerged from that drive and blends intimate self-portraiture with images of healing and interdependence. “The people that I engage with and follow [online] are who I make the work for,” they explain. 

For years, platforms such as Instagram offered artists access to a global audience, but now that the platforms and their owners’ allegiances are more transparently political, photographers like Sanders ask, “what does visibility actually mean for a marginalised community, when the platforms themselves are tied to fascist billionaires?” 

DeVun echoes the same concern: “Visibility has always been a double-edged sword. There’s power in being seen – but there’s also surveillance. There’s always been risk.” Increasingly, trans photographers are moving toward encrypted channels, private newsletters, and closed groups of one form or another. The goal is no longer just to reach as many people as possible, but to protect the conditions under which images can still be made and shared safely.

At a time when social media feels unreliable at best and unsafe at its worst, many small arts organisations are going back to the basics. Philo Cohen, founder and director of Speciwomen, a non-profit based in New York City, has long been skeptical of social platforms as a primary tool for visibility. “I try to turn to the physical as much as I can,” she says. “I don’t believe that digital visibility is safe right now.” 

Instead, Speciwomen’s model centers around print publications, residencies, and in-person programming. In response to broader instability, Speciwomen launched an annual membership program that allows patrons to pledge $100 a year in exchange for receiving all the titles they publish. “It was really important for me to do the membership model so that everyone could participate – and also receive something beautiful and simple in exchange.” 

Beyond publishing, careful documentation of public programs has also become a strategy of protection, both for archival continuity and to safeguard the presence of artists whose work might be vulnerable to scrutiny or violence. Trans photographers have always worked at the edge of institutional recognition, invited in during moments of cultural cachet, and at times, abandoned when the political winds shift. 

“We’ve never needed them in the first place,” Sanders says of large museums. “They’ve always, in some way, been a trap for us.” The pull of recognition is strong, but its cost is becoming harder to ignore. What’s emerging in its place is not a retreat, but a pivot: one that is slower, less virtual. Visibility, in this sense, is no longer about putting every part of your identity on display, but a practice of intimacy and of being seen by the right people, in the right context.

Light Work, a nonprofit in Syracuse, New York, was born out of student protests in 1973 and a need for a community darkroom during the Vietnam War. That ethos remains embedded in the organisation’s mission to represent a range of under-recognised lens-based artists who are in need of support. “We’re lucky,” Daniel Boardman, Light Work’s director, tells me. “This kind of programming has been so baked into what Light Work has done for fifty years, we haven’t had to pivot. Supporting artists from diverse backgrounds is just what we do.” 

But continuity doesn’t mean complacency. Light Work takes a deliberate, artist-first approach. “Some artists just can’t share images of themselves,” Boardman explains.

“It might be dangerous. So for us, it’s about asking the artist – what do you want? What do you need? What’s safe for you right now?”

The responsibility for curatorial advocacy and creating space for trans and queer voices is shifting away from legacy institutions and toward those with fewer ties to federal oversight. In response, independent curators, local organisations, and even patrons have a responsibility to steward art. “Collecting shouldn’t just be about acquisition,” Firestone adds. “It should be a form of conservation. A way of ensuring that artists who are most at risk – financially, socially, politically – can continue to make work at all.” 

He goes on to emphasise that collectors have a role to play in shaping a more sustainable ecosystem: “If something moves you, if you feel connected to the work, support it. Buy it. That’s not just a financial transaction, it’s a gesture of belief in that artist’s future.” 

But though many in the art world have an enlivened sense of enthusiasm for and duty towards peer-to-peer support, DeVun reminds me this moment also demands action from those with power. “I do think larger institutions have a responsibility to make a stand,” she says “Even if it’s not going to change anything in the immediate moment, it matters that someone said something – that they drew a line in the sand.” 

Because, as she points out; “These institutions have the attention of the world’s stage. They have the opportunity to signal that they are standing for something, even if it comes at a cost.”

@ldevun, @p_guilmoth, @junetsanders, @lindsayperryman, @speciwomen

© Sakir Khader

The photographer’s meteoric success is a testament to the stark reality of life on the ground in Jenin refugee camp. In this feature, Khader explains why he photographs the dead, bites back at accusations of ‘terrorism’ in his work, and discusses his upcoming monograph and debut solo show at Foam, exploring the role of the grieving mother in Palestine

When Sakir Khader shares his screen with me, he opens the PDF of his latest book, Dying to Exist, and shows me the first few pages. They feature tender, archival baby photographs, placed individually on each page with plenty of white space, which calls us to meditate on each image for a moment. “These are photos of my friends [as babies] who got killed in the Jenin refugee camp,” he tells me. 

Netherlands-based Khader began documenting his homeland of Palestine in 2021 as part of his documentary filmmaking-career, which has also taken him to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. His real first experience of photographing was in Syria in 2018-19 using a “cheap point-and-shoot 35mm camera.” And later in Iraq in 2019 with his first professional camera, shooting behind-the-scenes as part of his documentary series The Ruins of Iraq, about the aftermath of the battle against ISIS. In 2021, he started photographing in Beita – his grandmother’s village – during the uprising of Sheikh Jarrah in Palestine, making shots which launched him into the world of imake-making. Though he’s not been taking photographs for long, Khader has already amassed awards, interviews, a loyal following, and, in 2024, a place at Magnum as the agency’s first Palestinian nominee.

Dying to Exist is not an easy book, but it depicts a reality for many Palestinians and, therefore, is a necessity. The first image taken by Khader in it shows Amjad Al Fayed, who he photographed as a young child in 2019. The boy was killed in 2022. “I promised him that I would come back and make a film about [him], but I never fulfilled the promise,” Khader recollects. After Al Fayed’s death, Khader became curious about what would have been, had he had the chance to become a man, “What would have become of him, and what’s the environment he would have grown up in?” 

Israel’s war in Gaza has been described by journalists and aid workers as “a war on children” because of the strip’s high population of under 18-year-olds – and that sentiment applies to the whole of Palestine. Khader’s book couldn’t be clearer evidence. The next image is a photograph of Al Fayed’s grave, the child’s face on his tombstone. The book then elaborates from this starting point, and depicts life in Jenin refugee camp.

In another scene, Khader takes a considered and poetic portrait of a young man smiling at the camera – Yassine Ahmad al-‘Areidi, whose face is close to the lens and whose body is turning to us, in a welcoming gesture that beckons us closer still. The next images are of the same man three days later, his body is lifeless and his face bearing blood instead of a smile. Many of the boys and men photographed in the book are shaheeds – martyrs – a term which has been conflated with ‘terrorism’ by many media stories. In fact, the violence present in so many of Khader’s images has become a point of controversy for some, who see his photography as endorsing aggression. His practice thus begs the question of what the industry deems permissible to photograph and disseminate en masse.

Khader attempted to travel to the US in 2020 and, on being denied entry, discovered he had been placed on a terror watch list. He’s also been arrested several times in Turkey and deported back to the Netherlands, “for being who I am”, he tells me. “And I still don’t know the reason why I am on this list. For me, being a Palestinian, being a brown man, being a Muslim, they don’t need a reason.” Khader chose to keep this private for years, out of fear for his safety – but now, he wrote in an Instagram post in summer 2024, “refuse[s] to stay silent any longer, because silence means surrender”. 

“Over the past years, I’ve been regularly imprisoned, beaten, inhumanely interrogated for long hours, deported, forced to unlock my phone, taken by intelligence agencies, and banned from several countries while always hearing the same accusation: terrorism,” he continued. “And if this isn’t disturbing enough, I recently found out my name is on the United States terror watch list […] We will fight this in court, and my name will be taken off the list. I’m speaking out and fighting back, because if something were to happen to me, I don’t want this unjust label to be used as a justification.”

Since receiving his Magnum status – after a suggestion from fellow Magnum photographer Myriam Boulos – Khader hopes being with the agency will grant him more leeway to travel, aiding his reputation as a legitimate photographer rather than an ‘amateur’ photographer. “I’m very happy to be with Magnum as it gives me a protective status,” he tells me. “When I cross borders, I’m not just a guy with a camera. Before Magnum, when [I wanted] to get things done, it was really hard to get industries to believe in me or give me an exhibition.” Now, he says the recognition offers him a level of privilege. And he hopes that, as the agency’s first Palestinian photographer, he can offer Magnum something new too, “an important perspective which doesn’t only see the world from a Western lens.”

Even so, no agency can protect Khader from “Israeli bombs,” he tells me, reminding me of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by Israeli forces whilst in her press vest and covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in 2022. Since 07 October, 137 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, making the war the deadliest conflict for journalists that the Committee to Protect Journalists has seen. Of the dead, 129 were Palestinian, two were Israeli, and six were Lebanese. 

“I was for a long time scared of [getting] cancelled,” Khader tells me of the content of his images, “because once you’re outspoken in the Netherlands and they start to chase you, you really get in trouble. But why should I be scared of these people [who] claim you’re a terrorist for just showcasing Israeli war crimes?” The outpouring of support, both professional and by fans of his work, has encouraged Khader to remain outspoken against the double-standard treatment he receives from authorities and the media.

And so, Dying to Exist is a fitting title for a project whose claim becomes increasingly apparent, by a photographer who is struggling simply to be in a world in which the odds are stacked against him. The book had its official launch at Offprint during Paris Photo on 07 November and now Khader is looking forward to his debut solo show at Foam in February, Yawm al-firak, covering themes of loss, motherhood and martyrdom. “It’s about mothers saying farewell to their martyred sons. I don’t think I would have gotten that exhibition before Magnum,” Khader muses.

Khader is often inundated with messages asking why more women don’t feature in his images. But for many Muslim women who wear the headscarf, being photographed is uncomfortable or simply disrespectful. As a man, Khader tells me, he cannot “wander around and just photograph women. Why are people obsessed with our women?” However, this project does focus specifically on the pain of women and mothers. “Losing your son in a car accident is as painful as losing them by war. Losing your son is losing your son,” he claims, hoping the project speaks of the universal pain of grief. One image shows two women in a desperate embrace, their faces contorted by a wailing you can almost hear. Another frame, shot from above, shows many women wearing different expressions of the same sorrow. 

After winning The Silver Camera in 2023 for his photo series The Life on the West Bank before 7 October, Khader’s work was exhibited at the Museum Hilversum in spring 2024.  It is the most prestigious prize for documentary photographers in the Netherlands, and he had previously won it in 2022, for his photograph of an 11-year-old Afghan boy selling his kidney to feed his family. He was then invited to participate in Breda Photo Festival in autumn 2024, with an exhibition titled I Have No More Earth to Lose, curated by Mohamed Somji. The title takes its name from the Mahmoud Darwish poem A State of Siege, in which he writes: “Here, Adam remembers the clay of which he was born / He says, on the verge of death, he says, / “I have no more earth to lose” / Free am I, close to my ultimate freedom, I hold my fortune in my own hands / In a few moments, I will begin my life / born free of father and mother.”

Khader’s Breda exhibition, where I saw his work exhibited for the first time, was immediate, sobering, and a contrast to his upcoming work at Foam. For here, we were presented with a story that was also colourful and hopeful. Curator Somji advised Khader to vary the exhibition, the photographer says, that if he wanted to “tell people a story that is really touching, you cannot show people only weapons. You cannot show them only dead bodies at funerals”. “At the end of the day, we are living on the land in Palestine,” Khader adds. “And of course, you have a bit of violence, a bit of grief, because that’s the reality. But at the end of the day, I wanted to show who we are as Palestinians. We are not just victims. We are people living in our dignity, and that’s what we want, and that’s what we’re fighting for.”

In one scene we see a lady dressed in traditional tatreez, standing in a lush grove with an olive tree, a symbol of Palestinian resistance, in the background. She is glowing, Khader’s high flash bringing out the white of her dress so she looks angelic, eyes gazing upwards and headscarf flowing in the wind. The image is complemented in the exhibition by a parallel image, depicting a scene where a divine light is shining through a large tree, reminiscent of the story of Abraham receiving the image of God in the form of angels under an oak tree in Mamre (now Hebron, West Bank, Palestine). 

Khader’s images are immediately recognisable, he’s got his style nailed down. His portraits are his most striking medium. One image from his Breda show presents a young boy looking back at us, with an expression far wiser than his years; he’s Mohammed Amjad al-Jo’os, and is ten years old. A sniper killed his brother, who was then crushed under an army truck. Khader is a master of shadows, the blacks are dark and the whites are bright under his heavy contrast. And we’re very close to al-Jo’os, as we are with many of his portrait subjects: the Palestinian-Dutch photographer has never photographed with zoom lenses. “I want to be close to the people to feel really in their inner circle, instead of being an outsider, photographing from a distance,” he tells me. 

“Sometimes I just buy a very experimental cheap camera. The colour ones are shot on a 20 Euro camera,” Khader adds, of some of his colour shots from the exhibition. One scene shows a family of six children and a father in saturated reds and blues. The setup is almost theatrical, Khader making full use of the frame with two girls downstage left, two girls downstage right in their traditional dresses, one boy far upstage, and the last boy sitting centre on a well-behaved sheep. “If you look at your whole life through the same viewfinder, your whole life will look the same,” Khader explains to me. “I have my main cameras that are monochrome. They don’t shoot colour, but I also use Polaroid and I shoot 6×6. I try different things so I can keep looking differently at my own people and the region.” 

Photographing so much death, it’s difficult for Khader to be detached from those he documents. He spends significant amounts of time with his subjects, forming bonds with them. “We survived everything together,” he tells me. “When people open up their house for you and guarantee your safety and feed you, when you eat from the same plate, you sit around the same table, you sleep in the same room, and the next day, suddenly, that person is killed, it’s as if a part of you got taken away. And every time someone gets killed, even if it’s a kid in Gaza I don’t know, it’s already a part of me, because it’s a part of my homeland.” 

Sometimes, in fact, Khader is so affected by witnessing death that he chooses to “photograph with [his] eyes”. It’s testament to the emotional toll of his work, he tells me; “I find it important to look at that person with my eyes, not with my camera.”

sakirkhader.com

Dying to Exist is available at 550bc.com

Yawm al-firak will open at Foam Gallery, Amsterdam, 07 February – 14 May 2025

Dreamland © Mounir Raji

Contributing artists Mounir Raji, Tina Farifteh and Rosângela Rennó discuss their projects with BJP as responses to questions around home, migration, and colonialism

In a country making sense of its future following the recent election of a right-wing government, BredaPhoto Festival 2024 presents a timely and necessary conversation about identity, power, and history. The festival brings together global as well as local voices to create a chorus of photographic inquiry. 

This year’s edition of the festival, themed Journeys, encourages its contributors and audience to reckon with the lasting impacts of colonial legacies. Through photographic explorations, artists take on questions about historical narratives, memory and displacement at the locus of the various diasporas present in the Netherlands. 

Breda is a quiet city in the southern Netherlands, about two hours from the capital, Amsterdam. It seems an unlikely place for a photographic festival of this scale, and of this nature. The festival has been platforming both Dutch and international photographers since its inaugural 2018 edition. This year, the festival feels particularly charged. With the election of a conservative government that has taken a hardline stance on immigration and multiculturalism – the far-right Freedom Party, which won most seats in the November elections, is headed by Geert Wilders who pledged to ban the Quran and close Dutch borders – the work showcased in Breda underscores the political tensions running through Europe at large. The question now looms: what role can artists and photographers play in reframing national identity and addressing a problematic past?

A Romanticised Notion of Homeland

Mounir Raji’s Dreamland, shot over the last five years and culminating in a book in 2023, is a personal tribute to the Morocco of his dreams and memories. Born and raised in the Zaan region of the Netherlands to Moroccan parents, Raji spent his childhood summers in Morocco. The familiar diasporic experience of the annual pilgrimage to the homeland has shaped both his identity and artistic output. Raji, a graduate of Amsterdam FOTOfactory, has exhibited at institutions in the Netherlands including Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Unseen Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum. 

Raji captures a sun-soaked Morocco in the warm hues of the late summer atmosphere. The photographs are imbued with a sense of nostalgia, evoking his childhood memories of reunion with family, playing freely outdoors, and the boundless feelings of freedom, trust, and hope that marked those summers. “It is my own romanticised view,” Raji explains, acknowledging that the Morocco he portrays in his images is not entirely grounded in reality, but a reflection of his personal, idealised version of the country.

“I was walking in Marrakesh and I saw the title Dreamland on a big billboard for a new complex they were building,” Raji tells me. He shows me around the circular outdoor installation by beginning with an image of his grandmother, who passed away last year. “Morocco is my dreamland, and I make it look perfect, while I’m pretty aware that not everything is perfect over there.” Raji was keen to show people, particularly those with little connection to Morocco, “how amazing the colours and the people are, the freedom you have. Because we in the West are quite structured, and everything is for an agenda. Sometimes I miss the freedom we have there.”

Struck by a lack of misrepresentation about Morocco from Dutch communities around him, Raji says that in the Netherlands, many think that “Moroccan kids, they’re troublemakers”. In 2014, one of his first projects highlighted Slotermeer, “the ‘bad’ neighbourhood where they put all the migrants, like the Moroccan and Turkish migrants,” says Raji. Through stylised images, he aimed to capture the playfulness and joy Moroccan kids find on the streets, with little space to go elsewhere. 

The images from Dreamland portraying the drier Moroccan climate are presented in stark contrast out here in a Dutch semi-rural location. One image taken at an Eid celebration in a large, sandy playing field shows a couple with their faces obscured, turned away from the camera, in matching blue garments. “People are afraid of Islam, [but] when they see this, they’ll probably think, ‘Oh, that looks cosy, and they’re looking beautiful’.” Raji says he ‘stole’ the shot after catching them in a mirroring stance, with a complementary flash of green from the plastic bag. It’s a relaxed, romantic scene. 

Raji’s work oscillates between documentary and dreamscape, crafting images that evoke longing for a land that may never have truly existed – at least not in the form he remembers it. The project is a meditation on home and belonging, but also a commentary on how memory and nostalgia shape our perceptions of place. In a world where migration and the diaspora constantly reshape individual and collective identities, Dreamland invites viewers to consider how much of ‘home’ is built upon memory and imagination.

The Sun, the Moon, and Borderless Visions

In Tina Farifteh’s cinematic installation piece When I Saw the Sun and the Moon at the Same Time, the focus shifts to the experience of migration and the fractured sense of identity it leaves in its wake. Iranian-Dutch artist Tina Farifteh embarks on a deeply personal exploration of belonging and identity. Born in Tehran and having moved to the Netherlands at the age of 13, Farifteh has long navigated the complex interplay between displacement and the search for home; graduating from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, her project Kitten or Refugee? was selected for the Debut Competition and premiered at The Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) 2023. 

Farifteh’s latest project, developed specifically for BredaPhoto Festival, is centred around a 24-hour journey along the Sedyk (sea dyke) in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands, presented in a 24-minute multimedia installation. The work traces her move from Amsterdam to the village of Sexbierum, prompted by the unaffordability of urban life and a feeling of being perpetually unmoored – unable to return to Tehran yet struggling to find her place in the Netherlands. When I Saw the Sun and the Moon at the Same Time becomes a metaphor for her complex relationship with the idea of belonging in a boundaried world. 

Despite the rural isolation, Farifteh’s connection to the landscape is profound. The birds, sheep and elements she encounters in Friesland become metaphors for the human desire for freedom, even as we remain confined by social constructs and borders. “Sheep are blocked by the cattle grids and fences,” she notes, “we as humans want to be free, but we keep each other framed and limited, like what we do with the sheep.” 

Her encounters with nature reveal a deep connection to the world beyond the human-centric, transactional approach that modern societies often adopt. “We don’t see nature as something of value unless there’s a transactional benefit for us,” she says, underscoring how capitalist and colonial systems determine value, even in the most remote and ‘empty’ of spaces. “Who decides what has value? We say there is nothing there, but for the birds, there is a lot there.” The work is engrossing with its bright and deeply exaggerated light and shadows, set across a huge, asymmetrical three-channel screen. 

Farifteh’s reflections often move between the deeply philosophical and the intensely personal. As she walks the sea dyke, listening to Iranian music, she feels the tension of belonging and rejection. “People think I’m crazy, listening to Iranian music in the north of the Netherlands,” she remarks. Yet in moments of simplicity – seeing the sun and moon together in the sky – she finds peace in the universality of the human experience: “When I saw the sun and the moon at the same time, I realised I am at home because I’m here. No one can tell me I don’t belong.” 

In this project, Farifteh asks larger questions about the nature of home and identity in an era of migration and displacement. She interrogates the pressures of assimilation, particularly in conservative parts of the Netherlands where, she explains, “you have to assimilate and forget your background – it was a very violent assimilation,” she remembers of her upbringing. Farifteh also suggests a parallel with the country’s own shifting identity, noting that even these rural communities, in their resistance to change, may themselves feel like they are being forced to assimilate to a ‘new Holland’.

Archival Activism and the Politics of Memory

Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó brings a distinctly archival approach to her exploration of colonial legacies. In co-production with the Grote Kerk Cathedral, Rennó presents a site-specific solo exhibition, interrogating the potential murkier history of the Grote Kerk and presents this new work in combination with existing work. Last summer, Rennó received the prestigious Women in Motion award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. 

Through a series of multimedia installations, including photography and video, Encounters | Encontros draws attention to the little-known, interconnected history of Brazil and the Netherlands. Rennó’s work delves into historical archives to unearth forgotten or suppressed narratives, recontextualising them through contemporary interventions. Her contribution to the festival investigates how colonial powers have shaped the production and preservation of knowledge.

“For me, archives are not neutral spaces,” Rennó explains. “They are sites of power. The act of collecting, classifying, and storing information has always been political. My work aims to deconstruct that by questioning what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.”

Encounters is a series of reappropriated colonial documents, maps and photographs that Rennó has altered or distorted. The images are faded, often difficult to decipher, as if the weight of history has worn them down. This intentional blurring forces the viewer to confront the fragility of memory and the role of colonial powers in shaping what is remembered.

“In Brazil, like many countries in Latin America, our history is still deeply tied to colonialism. The ways in which we understand ourselves and our past are shaped by these imperial forces. My work looks at how these narratives are embedded in the archives themselves. Who owns history? Who decides which voices are heard and which are erased?” says Rennó. Her use of archival materials serves as a way to make visible the systems of power that control historical narratives and challenges the viewer to think critically about how knowledge is produced and preserved, and whose interests that serves.

A Photographic Intervention

The timing of this year’s BredaPhoto Festival could not be more significant. As the Netherlands, like much of Europe, wrestles with the rise of nationalist sentiment, the festival’s focus on decolonial image-making feels like a necessary intervention. The festival’s work serves as a sobering reminder of the challenges facing Europeans from migrant backgrounds, while remaining aesthetically attuned to technical brilliance and beauty.

Taking over the city of Breda, the festival also encourages a more physical approach to, and intervention of, photography. The spaces we enter range from quaint residential streets lined with large image installations of Breda’s historic North African migrant communities, to unused industrial warehouses near the canal housing Farifteh’s film, for example. The festival’s dispersal of bikes are thus a very Dutch welcome to exploring the city. 

With a sense of urgency, the festival positions itself as a site of resistance to dominant narratives. The artists at BredaPhoto Festival 2024 are blurring lines and pushing the boundaries of where photography takes its viewer. 

BredaPhoto Festival 2024 opened on 13 September and runs until 03 November 2024.

bredaphoto.nl

Living Room Vape, 2016. All images © Farah Al Qasimi. Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai.

The photographer grew up gaming in Abu Dhabi and has drawn on her experiences of virtual worlds and multiple cultures to create her surreal images

“Historically, the thing that almost everyone demands of photography is the truth,” says Farah Al Qasimi. We are reflecting on photography and reality, noting the medium’s age-old burden of (apparently) showing the world as it really is. Even now – particularly now – as the ability to amend, enhance or completely re-render visual realities becomes ever easier to accomplish and understand (if not always embrace or desire), the promise and expectation of faithful photographic representations persists.

This confusion is understandable. The camera, and indeed photography itself, was originally pitched as a neutral recording tool, incapable of interpretation, only representation. But while this may have been a feature, it was not a limitation. Photography has always been open to subversion, and has always embraced it, creating moments that did not quite happen, capturing history in ways that were not directly experienced, and layering time in impossible ways. What does this freedom allow? What are the boundaries that imagination and technology can broach, and what is to be understood in the difference between an accurately photographed moment and an augmented reality?

In her current and recent projects, Al Qasimi uses portraiture and incidental images of the everyday to explore how photography and the visual culture of gaming can create and control identities in virtual realities. The uses and possibilities of photography have evolved, enabling the editing together of landscapes, contexts and communities to create other worlds in which people can thrive, find connection and live in simulated utopias that have yet to arrive. Al Qasimi suggests embracing this flexibility “makes photography especially interesting because we get to play with truth as material”. This insight is a useful reminder in thinking about the malleability of photography and reality, but also the lightheartedness and flexibility with which she has approached some of her projects.

“This idea of virtual reality being less solid or material or less believable than actual reality as an embodied experience is getting more blurry, as we have a deepened relationship to artificial intelligence and as we become more connected to our devices,” Al Qasimi adds. There are elements to be explored around the physical connections we have – thumb to phone, or finger to shutter release, fingertips to keyboards – alongside the emotional connections they enable, augment or replace. The physicality of in-person connections can now be replaced with the tactility of interfaces, screens and equipment.

The virtual realities Al Qasimi speaks of and works within can easily allow a ghostly, disembodied perspective – peering over shoulders, studying computer screens, poring over physical tokens related to online lives – that otherwise would have remained in the private landscapes of our minds. We briefly talk about the lockdowns during the Covid pandemic, and the abrupt reminder that great swathes of the global population lack access to natural, outdoor spaces. Against this backdrop of fear, death and loss of connection, some of Al Qasimi’s friends turned to gaming, namely Animal Crossing, as an analogue for proximity to nature. In this game of growing food and making friends, a virtual utopia lifted the players out of reality, offering temporary relief from the everyday.

We also discuss how resources have been mined from physical landscapes to make these virtual landscapes a reality; a disturbing relationship between the quest for connection and nurturing digital nature held up against the inevitable destruction and severing of actual nature and environments it requires. It is a reminder that virtual realities have very real impacts on the natural world. “It’s this full circle, capitalistic dream,” says Al Qasimi. “Ultimately what we want has always stayed the same and that’s a relationship to the land where we feel that there’s a symbiosis and that we can nurture a part of it that will in turn nurture us. It’s interesting that there’s a great deal of damage being done to the environment because of these devices that we seem to need… People have a fetishistic obsession with new technology and the materiality of it.”

The title of Al Qasimi’s most recent project, Abort, Retry, Fail, references the error message displayed by her family’s faltering computer when it attempts and fails to connect with the outside world. For years, the computer was a beacon signalling outward, but now it sits on the dining room table as a failed portal to other realities. Al Qasimi grew up playing on gaming consoles, projecting beyond her immediate reality and encountering landscapes radically distinct in register to her daily life in Abu Dhabi. The colour palettes and motifs she encountered were far removed from her own sense of place, while pirates, plumbers and gorillas were regular companions when venturing into Pirates of the Caribbean, Super Mario, Donkey Kong and other virtual spaces.

Picked out in vibrant, primary colours, the ability to pause, save or start again also presented an otherwise unachievable level of control and, while being able to practise the correct sequence of actions over and over is enviable, it further emphasised the teleportation into a non-reality. This back and forth between escape and control presented itself further because Al Qasimi always chose the characters who most closely resembled her, controlling her self-image and adopting a version of herself in a context she could only temporarily and digitally inhabit. I ask about video games that did share an aesthetic from her early years, but this list turns out to be very short. Al Qasimi mentions Desert Strike as one example, noting that games of this nature often have not-so-subtle tones of western war propaganda. The sense of utopia is pushed further out of reach when you resemble “the bad guys”.

Even so, for Al Qasimi gaming was a tool to find connection and form relationships, enabling friendships and encounters beyond distance or circumstance. It is a reminder of the early online chat rooms, where a standard opening was to ask the age, sex and location of your fellow conversationalists, then marvel at the range of responses over the course of a 5 day. “People see gamers as lonely… but the computer became a place where I went to meet people,” says Al Qasimi.

Abort, Retry, Fail brings together photographs and moving images to deliver tales of other worlds in bright, relentless tones. Again, the colour palettes suggest a sideways step out of reality. Portraits of gamers are balanced against images of small details, moments that add to the familiar yet off-kilter vibe. Faces tilt back, lit by the glow of computers and displays, while background clues hint at the range of cities represented. Al Qasimi positions these gamers as “living in some sense of digital or virtual reality where their attention is being held by a world beyond a screen that we as viewers can’t access. There is a level of control that people seek when they’re gaming that often does not reveal itself in our daily lives. There is a sense that you can find utopia in these worlds that you build.”

Al Qasimi has also created a short film in the style of a video game cut scene (a segment in a game that presents information and introduces players to quests). Her imagined scene presents the challenge of finding a source of water in an apocalyptic landscape. In the photographic work, meanwhile, the audience takes on Al Qasimi’s perspective, standing at gamers’ shoulders as they immerse themselves elsewhere. 

In Anood Playing House Flipper we see Anood seated at her glowing gaming PC, which is lit up like a terrarium of bright, snaking LCDs. One hand rests on a keyboard, while her monitor shows an image of a laptop on a desk. The image unfolding outwards of computer on computer is like a digital glitch showing us what we have already seen, or like the ghostly pattern left when dragging a window across an old, slow-to-respond screen. 

In Pink Soda, a wine glass sits in the centre of the frame. The glass reflects a pink pearlescent tone, leading the eye to the machine at the heart of the project. The text “General failure reading. Abort, Retry, Fail?_” can be seen on the family computer. It sits on a faded floral tablecloth as it fails to reach out beyond this domestic space. The possibilities once contained within the chunky box, angled upwards in a similar pose to the portraits, have shrunk down to this repeated, impassable question. But there is a persistent hopefulness in this ever-blinking phrase, as well as in Al Qasimi’s repeated decision to retry the command as it declines access to the brightly coloured video-game lands.

The relationship of control and reality is less overt in Al Qasimi’s earlier projects, but here too she plays with inserting alternative perspectives into narratives. In 2020’s Back and Forth Disco, she captures portraits, fragments of people, and in-between moments, presenting them as larger-than-life installations on bus stops throughout New York City. Again, her work offers viewers the ability to step through the photographs into other temporary places, in which experiences, instances and realities are presented from different angles. Pedestrians are photographed from behind, arms pointing into frame, mirrors endlessly reflected in mirrors, out-of-place chandeliers and hidden faces.

When thinking about portraiture, Al Qasimi tries to “remain as close to the truth as possible”, adding, “When I’m out in the world, I’m just witnessing what’s already happening.” Recording and taking a neutral position, she frames the portraits as questioning the contexts in which they find themselves, rather than confirming answers.

List Projects (2019) also explores this theme, masking portraits and leaving them open to interpretation. Al Qasimi compiles fragments from the two sites informing her identity – Abu Dhabi and the US – to create a third space which confuses, borrows, controls and provokes how we think about the creation of identity and reality. In one image, colour, texture and pattern fill the frame. The patterns of the walls, floors, furniture, sitters and decorations jostle for attention. A standing figure, half in view, points, leading the gaze through the calamity of colours to a seated individual. Another obscured face, this time from a puff of vapour, blots out their expression. A similar cloud-like shape hovers in the painting hung above this individual’s head. Al Qasimi’s series is both dislocating and bridging in its clever combination of cultures and cities, but it maintains a playful lightness throughout.

Thinking about the ability to choose characters, designing cut scenes or playing in worlds that reach through to others so easily, inhabiting different contexts and backdrops so deftly, I ask Al Qasimi about the role of code switching in these spaces. We talk about the restlessness of moving between countries and continents, about how this abrupt landing can impact in ways that continue to ripple, sometimes almost imperceptibly so. The camouflage and concealment that come with snapping into different versions of oneself can be unsettling.

Al Qasimi says she recognises this feeling of restlessness, and actively tries to impart it in her projects, describing it as a driving force for resolution and self-discovery. She does not feel she belongs in either Abu Dhabi or the US, she says, but embraces this unsettled state. “[It] allows me to be an insider and an outsider at the same time”, she points out, and being both inside and outside the frame has given her a perspective on reality and photography, setting and resetting boundaries of reality, with a fluidity that runs through her practice and interior world. As Al Qasimi concludes: “There is something to be said for being the product of difference.”

Farah Al Qasimi has an artist room on show at Tate Modern, London, until November 2024. tate.org.uk

A Life After Kafala © Aline Deschamps

Following those who have endured years of domestic servitude in the Middle East, A Life After Kafala unearths tales of strength and resilience as exploited workers return to their homeland and families

Standing in a field of tall grass, Lucy Turay holds her six-year-old son, Patou. Her expression is relaxed yet focused on the path ahead. Patou looks at the camera, but his face is in shadow, drawing our attention to the casual way he wraps his limbs around his mother’s hips. To an outsider, Patou’s body might look precarious – shoes dangling off his feet while he leans back, sitting low on Turay’s spine – but their bodies effortlessly coalesce. Despite a two-year separation, they return to each other, changed by events but not by the passage of time.

Like many of the images in Aline Deschamps’ latest series, A Life After Kafala (2022), the photograph lays bare the nuances of familial relationships – particularly the extremes a mother will endure in service of their child. Turay had just given birth to her second child when she was groomed by human traffickers who promised her a teaching role in Lebanon with double the salary if she signed up to kafala. Like many mothers caught in the system, Turay understood the opportunity to be a short-term sacrifice to grant her children a future of freedom and independence that would otherwise be out of reach.

For decades, kafala has propped up local economies in the Middle East by recruiting migrant workers and placing them in conditions that are woefully paid, unsafe and – in some cases – deadly. Extortion begins in the home country, where families rack up considerable debt for their wives and daughters to enter the system, assuming that kafala is an opportunity for professional growth and financial security. This fee, around $800, is just the beginning of a constant value chain where traffickers extract money from workers at multiple points until the women reach their destination.

Then, in the host country, the life of a migrant worker is tied to their kafeel (sponsor), who controls their legal residency status in exchange for wages, food and board. It is common for sponsors to withhold workers’ passports, even if the worker wants to leave their job, as a power play to keep the individual trapped in the system. If their relationship breaks down, access to justice is beyond reach for the worker, rendering them undocumented, homeless and unable to return home.

Once Turay arrived in Beirut, she was trapped in an endless cycle of domestic servitude. She went months unpaid, her phone was confiscated, leaving her with no way to communicate with her family. One of her employers even tried to electrocute her. When she returned to her sponsor, desperate for help, they sequestered her for days without food or water, eventually forcing her into another employer’s house before she escaped to live on the street. Simultaneously, her husband cut ties, losing hope after months of no communication that his wife would ever return. Turay had unknowingly entered a world of profound suffering and disempowerment, and the only thing keeping her alive was a duty to survive for the sake of her children.

Tragically, Turay’s story is not an isolated incident. Every woman Deschamps met had their own horror story under kafala. And yet, despite the growing pressure on governments to reform the system – described by critics as ‘modern slavery’ – it continues to be a financially lucrative industry that serves public and private interests. “In Lebanon, migrant domestic workers compensate for the lack of infrastructure – but it’s also a social status,” Deschamps explains. “It’s not just a luxury of the elite – it transcends all classes. Postwar, many Lebanese wanted to show their status with aspirational things, and migrant domestic workers were part of that.”   

Deschamps, who is French-Thai and lives in Beirut, first met Turay in spring 2020. They were introduced at a small safe house in Tariq el Jdide, a southern district of Beirut, where 15 Sierra Leonean women, who had all escaped abusive working conditions, were living together, grappling with varying mental and physical trauma. The situation was made more desperate by a global pandemic and Lebanon’s economic collapse. “Three years ago, many of these women were on the brink of suicide,” Deschamps explains about her early encounter with the group. “These women were caught in limbo; they had no idea they could return home one day. Their only string of hope was their kids.”

Show of strength

Slow, nuanced storytelling that destabilises a single subject is the creative force of Deschamps’ work as a photographer. Her approach – which combines images and text made in collaboration with her sitters – brings multiple voices together, enabling many interpretations and perspectives to surface. In I Am Not Your Animal (2020), Deschamps’ previous body of work, she made intimate portraits of Turay and the group of women documenting their strength, resilience and newfound sisterhood. The images, presented with handwritten letters from the women to their families, offer a nuanced and reflective portrait of their lives – a sharp contrast to the one-dimensional victim narrative pervasive in the global news cycle.

A Life After Kafala continues to examine the consequences of human trafficking; this time Deschamps documents the women as they return home and attempt to reintegrate into society after years of entrapment. Contrary to their families’ expectations, the women come back penniless after much unspeakable abuse, only to encounter rejection from the loved ones they left behind. Escaping the kafala system and returning home should be the ultimate resolution for migrant domestic workers. Instead, for many women, it marks the beginning of a set of new challenges to regain the trust of their families.

“Repatriation doesn’t mean reintegration or freedom at all,” Deschamps says. “On the contrary, there are a lot of challenges. Over half the women coming back face some rejection. Suppose they don’t get a reintegration package [typically $1,500, skills training and emotional support]. In that case, some women don’t return to their village because of the weight of shame and guilt of returning empty-handed.” Even for women who secure support, the reality of coming home is bittersweet. “For some, their families don’t believe they were not paid for their labour, publicly branding them as liars. Others believe the women saved the money and didn’t want to share it. They are marginalised in the Middle East and come home and face it again.”

Turay, who now speaks out against human trafficking at conferences worldwide, is intent on helping women return home to their families and themselves. Upon her return, she founded Domestic Workers Advocacy Network (DoWAN), a support hub for survivors that includes group counselling and professional skill workshops, to help ease the transition back into the community.

“DoWAN is trying to make a home away from home for these women,” explains Deschamps, who visited the office in March 2022. “Turay also raises awareness of kafala by setting up anti-trafficking protests in the markets that brokers use to recruit. By gathering survivors together, standing up and raising their voices, they are reversing the power dynamic – refusing to live in fear of these men anymore. On the contrary, these brokers should be afraid of them as they are helping save other women from their brutal trap.”

While Turay is an outlier in all she has achieved since returning home, she still faces complex challenges in Sierra Leone. Her bond with her son Patou remains strong, but her daughter Ugyatu, who was one year old when she left, no longer recognises her and considers Turay’s auntie as her mother. This is a reality Turay has had to accept, with the knowledge that one day, when Ugyatu is older and can understand, she will share her story.

The paradox of motherhood – the life-defining collision of extreme love and devotion with great desperation and compromise – underpins the entire project. Deschamps presents contemplative portraits of each woman, pictured alone or with their children, rerooting them in their community. Interspersed are moving letters written by the children to their mothers, unravelling their unseen struggle navigating life without knowing if or when their parents might return.

“Since starting this project, I wanted to document the latent violence we don’t see,” Deschamps says. “I always envisioned it as an epistolary exchange. By juxtaposing their family’s letters with images of their daily life, the project highlights their connection to their homeland, the resilience found in exile, and the incredible bond of motherhood which enabled sacrifices despite the distance.”

For many of the women Deschamps collaborated with, coming home is an opportunity to heal themselves and their relationships with loved ones. And yet, some women, mired in stigma, migrate again, holding on to the hope that the experience will be different this time. “I came to Sierra Leone with the expectation that this journey had come full circle – yet the reality is much harder,” says Deschamps, who is now planning to document these new roads of migration. “And yet, I want this project to be a message of hope that incredible support systems are emerging and important work is being done. There is life after kafala.” 

@alinedeloscampos

Kuzmanović was in high school in what is now Bosnia when the political situation began to deteriorate. At the age of 16, he was only two years away from being drafted into the military. “There were all these crazy guys coming back from the war and the first mass graves were being uncovered. There were [detention] camps 30 minutes from where I lived,” he recalls. “Everyone was drafted… and if you were drafted, you had to go. I knew if I had to join the military I would never get out. So we decided I would try to leave [in order not to be drafted].”

Kuzmanović caught a bus with his mother, and travelled out of the country through Bosnia, Serbia and Hungary. “They had checkpoints so you couldn’t easily leave, but I managed to sneak out and avoid military service.” As he departed, Kuzmanović photographed the scenes he witnessed from the bus window. Young soldiers, destroyed buildings, the everyday decline in civic society. His camera formed a barrier of sorts between him and the horrific reality that was unfolding on the ground. “It provided me with some distance to what was going on,” says Kuzmanović. “It was a protective layer.”

It was 1992 when he was eventually reunited with his father in Austria. “It sounds like a cliche,” he says, “but after Yugoslavia’s disintegration, I lost my identity.” He continues: “If there had been no war in Yugoslavia, I would have become an architect. Instead I became a photographer. I started photographing for newspapers and I tried to forget about the war.”

The conflict saw the worst human rights abuses in Europe since World War Two. To hold those responsible to account, the United Nations formed the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Though the tribunal was officially founded in 1993, the trials did not start properly until 2002 with that of Slobodan Milošević, a Yugoslav and Serbian politician. It was then that Kuzmanović too began revisiting the past. In 2008 he returned to the nascent states of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia to photograph what had become of the country he had left 16 years before. For the following decade, Kuzmanović embedded himself in society, documenting social, religious and political events across the former Yugoslavia.

The result is Signs by the Roadside, a new photobook that Kuzmanović self-published in late 2021 to critical acclaim; the publication made the final selection for the Encontros da Imagem Photobook Award, and the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards. The monograph addresses the past, the present, and the legacy of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, and how they have affected contemporary national identity. It is a multilayered book in which personal narratives, ethnic identities and political histories rub up against each other. These layers overlap and intertwine, hinting at how the traumas of the past are apparent in the memories of the present.

Signs by the Roadside comprises three main visual themes: the photographs from Kuzmanović’s first bus journey out of the country, screenshots from the ICTY trials, and the images that Kuzmanović made of life in the independent countries over the last decade. The ‘bus images’ are the rawest. The photographs are printed at the top of the page, with white space below. They capture parked tanks, burned-out buildings, very young soldiers, and street signs pointing the way to towns that would later be known as the sites of massacres. A sense of unease permeates the images. In some ways, they represent surveillance footage – snapshots caught on the fly through smeared windows, capturing old ladies and wary youths gazing at the bus that they are not getting on. But in the surrounding destruction, the military personnel, the guns, the artillery and the collapsed buildings, there are also undertones of the violence that is inundating everyday life. It was what Kuzmanović was escaping.

Then there are the screenshots of the ICTY trials, revealing images of some of the people responsible for the most grave atrocities of the war. One screenshot shows an image of a faceless man with his knees tucked up to his chest. His arms are tied and drawn upwards, while the end of the cord is held in the hands of another. It is an image that suggests torture and suffering. There are pictures of people like Radovan Karadžić, a former Bosnian Serb politician, convicted by the Hague court for crimes against humanity, and Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb colonel general ultimately responsible for the Srebrenica genocide. The men are shown playing chess together. There are also screenshots from inside the courtroom of lesser-known faces, and stills of suited, bound bodies, lying still on the floor. It is the banality and bureaucracy of evil, and the universally male faces of the perpetrators of this violence.

Kuzmanović gained access to the ICTY archives, enabling him to take these screenshots. “As I was making [the images], I realised that [the archive] was really essential. When I started going back to what was once Yugoslavia, everywhere I went, I had this footage in the news. It was like [watching] the weather. If you went to Serbia you’d see it, and if you went to Bosnia you’d see it. The same man who was a war criminal in Bosnia was a war hero in Serbia. The images can be read in different ways. It’s a collective memory.”

Yet the memory varies depending on which ‘side’ you are on. This idea of a division of memory is also apparent in the third layer of images; the pictures that Kuzmanović made when he started travelling to Bosnia, Serbia and the other nations of the former Yugoslavia in 2008. In this way, Kuzmanović familiarises us with life after the war. We see images of religious festivals, of military manoeuvres, of people watching football, and events celebrating the memory of Yugoslavia’s unaligned communist past. There are graveyards, soldiers and memorials to the victims of massacres. Different forms of banal nationalism blend as a multitude of soldiers, festivals, marches and political events merge.

An Unclear Truth

As an outsider, the overall feeling I get when looking through the book is one of a male-dominated, nationalist view. A group of hard-looking, short-haired men in leather jackets in one country is not so different to a group of hard-looking, short-haired men in leather jackets in another. Their values are the same, the country they associate them with is different. This blurring of the lines is compounded by Kuzmanović’s refusal to pin the images down with captions. “This work is about a personal encounter with my history and the history of former Yugoslavia,” he says. “As a photojournalist, you produce stories, and with that you have some sort of stand. That’s something I didn’t want to do with this book.” Instead, Kuzmanović says, “I wanted the viewer to make [their] own interpretation and reconstruct the reality of what’s going on.”

He adds: “By photographing in former Yugoslavia, I realised how fragile peace was 30 years after the Dayton Agreement [1995 peace accord between Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia that led to the end of the Bosnian War] and how present the idea of identity and ideology was. The more I dug into it, the fewer answers I got.” The lack of clarity is written into the visual narrative of the book. It does this similarly to Gilles Peress’ Telex Iran, a publication that is ostensibly about the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, but is also about the utter inability of Peress to understand what is happening around him as he photographs. Peress writes his shortcomings as a narrator into the book, and thereby questions the practice of photojournalism and news reporting.

In Kuzmanović’s book, the truth is unclear in places, but it is pinned down by the horrors of fact. Apart from one picture of a skeleton from a massacre site, there are no graphic images of violence. Paul Graham’s Troubled Land or Jens Liebchen’s Stereotypes of War work on similar principles of suggesting but not showing brutality, but Kuzmanović goes one step further to show what happens as a result of it; violence is suggested by rows of coffins and headstones, graveyards and mass funerals.

At the back of Signs by the Roadside there is a pamphlet with a series of texts. One is by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić. It details the experiences of those on trial at the ICTY in The Hague, as they live out their lives behind bars at Scheveningen prison. There are Serbs who massacred Muslim Bosniaks, there are Bosnians who tortured Serbs, there are Croats who killed Serbs. These are the people responsible for the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and for hundreds of thousands of war crimes. But in the confines of the prison, they cook together, they read Yugoslav newspapers together, and when one of them dies, they write letters of condolence to the man’s family.

Drakulić writes about their night-time routines and concludes, “Before falling asleep… none of them will think about the Scheveningen Paradox: the fact that, after all, it is actually a small version of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavia of ‘brotherhood and unity’ still exists, albeit only in prison… But if ‘brotherhood and unity’ among the sworn enemies of yesterday is the epilogue of this war, then why did all of this happen? Looking at the cheerful guys at the Scheveningen custody, the answer is clear: for nothing.”

Signs by the Roadside by Miro Kuzmanovic is self-published. 

“I think it is especially hard for the creative people to become parents and lose the passion for everything else for a while. The shift of identity and the strength of energy to create.”

 

Titled Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, published by Trolley Books, the book celebrates the need for an honest conversation surrounding the messiness and contradiction that comes with becoming a mother. It rallies against the expectation to constantly maintain an unrealistic vision of strength, joy, and empowerment before, during and after pregnancy. “In the midst of all the vulnerability, the pain, the tiredness and mess, they tell you: ‘Remember to stay desirable too, so your partner sees the same woman he fell in love with.’ How should I stay mysterious? I’m bleeding, leaking.” 

As an artist, Galdi felt an immense shift in identity when she had her baby. She gained a new persona, with new responsibilities, pulling her away from a practice of prolific creativity. “I think it is especially hard for the creative people to become parents and lose the passion for everything else for a while,” she says. “The shift of identity and the strength of energy to create.” She wants to normalise these experiences, so that mothers never feel that they are failing, and are able to enjoy the early precious moments with their newborns without the added pressure of productivity. The book creates a space where that vulnerability can be shared.

“I’m not the first one to talk about it, but for some reason my voice is having a moment,” says Galdi. “And I’m really happy that it is. No one tells you how to do it the right way. Even though I had an incredible support system around me, you’re really alone when this happens. You can’t prepare for [motherhood], however much you read.”

With a foreword written by friend and mothering companion, Charlotte Jansen, the book is just larger than A6 in size with an exposed spine. Designed by Emma Scott-Child, the images are printed on an array of textured paper stocks. “The size of it is meant to fit in a woman’s bag,” Galdi explains. “I want it to be like a Bible that you can pass down to your best friend, to your daughter. Like a codex for mothers and parents.”

 

“Irony is a way of surviving and coping with reality. Every human being has a mother. So when you look at this book, you will know how much your parents have done for you.”

 

As I became acquainted with Galdi’s book, I showed it to my sister-in-law, who has two small children aged three and five. As she turned the pages, every so often she let out a subtle exhale and nodded her head in compassion and understanding. She repeats the words, “Where is my village” written in red marker somewhere in the middle. She also smiles, saying: “Yes, this is it,” pointing to the image of Galdi’s baby crawling towards her as she sits on the loo, and the overflowing, pooey nappy, and the baby dragging itself out of the frame leaving behind a snail-trail of a pee stain on the bed sheet.

The use of candid humour and creativity is an important part of the storytelling. It is the giggle, and the sigh that follows the long, reassuring hug. “Irony is a way of surviving and coping with reality,” says Galdi. “Every human being has a mother. So when you look at this book, you will know how much your parents have done for you.”

Galdi is in the midst of a tour of book launches around Europe. The Hungarian artist has already held events at Unseen Amsterdam with Erika Deak Gallery, TJ Boulting in London, BOP in Bristol and the Martin Parr Foundation. This weekend, she will also be presenting her book at Paris Photo on 12 November, at the TJ Boulting booth, and at Rupture et Associes (Paris) on 10 November.

Our conversation turns to the question of success and timing. The images in the book were made six years ago. Yet, back then, the audience that so enthusiastically receives it today was not as open to the idea. “In the beginning I was told, it’s just temporary, you’ll get over it, and to carry on with making ‘art’,” she recalls. Perhaps it is due to a change in attitude and openness that followed the Covid-19 lockdown, that people speak more openly about difficult, personal experiences. “[The pandemic] made people more vulnerable and more honest, maybe. Many people resonate with my book, whether they have children or not.” Perhaps it is a sign of an expanding space where motherhood and childbirth is seen for all its complexity, without an unnecessary, one-dimensional romanticisation of the experience. Or, that more people are willing to listen. 

“My dream for this book is to show people it’s ok and to help them feel that they’re not alone.”

 

So is this success, a breakthrough? For Galdi, it is important for the book to be seen in traditional spaces like galleries and museum shops; she hopes that she can show the work as an interactive exhibition soon. She believes that only through introducing it into a wider archive, will the book’s message be validated and have a chance at making a valuable contribution to the artistic canon, and widespread sentiment and education. “If I could print another million copies I would send this book to every school in all the world. A book in every library,” she says.

Ultimately, though, the book has a clear purpose. “If my book raises conversations and questions people’s certainty about what they think is right or not… For every time this book made someone smile, I would be so happy. My dream for this book is to show people it’s ok and to help them feel that they’re not alone.” She adds: “I want to see it on a nightstand. My friend texted me to say that she fell asleep with the book. That’s what I want.”

Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared but now I’m Back by Andi Galdi is published by Trolley Books, with a foreword by Charlotte Jansen.

The photographer will be signing copies of the book at Rupture e Associes, Paris on 10 November and the TJ Boulting booth, Paris Photo, on 12 November

For all that it observes life, Hardy’s art is not one of documentary but of storytelling, discreetly blending the candid with the composed. Images are conjured from the characters and objects in her orbit, tableaus arranged from the “reasons and ingredients that promote making a picture”. Often a composition would repeat itself in her mind – a field near her Suffolk home “packed with red poppies”, for example – moving her to set out with steadfast “intention and clarity” with her camera. But there is always a tension, a “schism… a bit of a tearing”, in navigating her tandem role as observer and participant. “If you were a good mother you’d be sitting down and reading a story,” she says. “I was always trying to meld the two… Trying to find a balance that is never findable.” 

It is a balancing act not unlike the dance of family life itself, wavering between the quotidian and the surreal. And indeed, the element of the unexpected is often helpful, she reveals: “I’m only ever really having a go.” But first and foremost, there is conscious endeavour. “I’m not interested in looking at or making pictures that don’t pose a narrative or invite me as a viewer to be curious”, she insists. And even revisiting contact sheets from 20 years ago, her instinct for what constitutes a successful image is unfaltering. “If it’s congruent with your intention, then that’s it”, she says. “Whatever the creative output is – when it works, it works – and as the creator you have to have some agency over that”. 

Permissions deals with the seasons of life. We encounter inky swims and winter flu, we feel the crackle of harvested wheat under foot, the frost on the windscreen. Tomatoes ripen on a sill, berries are picked and pricked, children climb the walls. Time itself warps in the book. Chapters of life are elided, others ratcheted-forward, in the way that memory meanders. In some chapters, images seem to carry the weight of an entire epoch, the breadth of the human condition, while others have a lightness of being that enables them to flicker and fade like fireflies.

Occasionally, the camera is offstage, attentive instead of incidental table-top arrangements and weather-filled landscapes – elements both integral to, yet out of kilter with the temporality of home. Yet “in each, there’s a backstory”, Hardy insists: goggles on the edge of a pool, a cut finger in a doorway, a phonecall on the lawn. Try not to Blink [below] is a spectral confrontation of an image, Hardy’s daughter veiled in white, eyes glazing over in mimicry of the camera’s dulcet focus. It is a photograph that approaches slow motion. Three pages on, the same child is alert, dynamic, insect-like on the floor, absorbed in a game of cards. She is framed not by the steely black of a classic portrait, but backlit with the lights of a living room. And instead of a veil, white curtains flank her figure. Childhood innocence in two frames. “I didn’t make them to share,” Hardy says of her pictures. “They are genuinely personal”. 

“To learn to do a thing, to do it for one of life’s first times is to be unnatural in the activity”, writes Alice Zoo (photographer, writer, and BJP contributor) in the book’s essay. “It is to be a pretender, a performer, as though experimenting with the possible bounds of a gesture, trying it on for size”. Permissions may be Hardy’s first book-making endeavour, but there is nothing remotely naive or performative about its presentation. Instead, there is an unselfconsciousness which yields a fluency to its pages. It was a process of gentle and patient distillation, Hardy describes, “like a bunch of stuff shaking up in a jar, slowly clearly”. 

This spirit rises to the surface most clearly in Hardy’s series of floral still lifes, each titled in Latin, serving as the book’s eight chapter headings. “Eight is an amazing number energetically”, Hardy says. Tulips, Fritillaries, hellebores – all blooms Hardy herself had nurtured and adored, photographed during her last spring in the house. They are photographed splayed on the stone kitchen counter, the central axis to her role in the home, bearing all the marks of its use. It was a “very profound” endeavour, she says. “A real marking of time. A eulogy. I let them lie there so they wilted… It became quite a solemn process”. 

Rhythm, texture and tone are instinctual to Hardy. She is a master of light and colour, coaxing these elements onto the pictorial surface in the way she does with her human subjects – with tenderness and optimism. Her vision comes through the prism of a student of art history, and as an ardent follower of “almost exclusively female photographers” during her early 20s of living in Paris. She cites Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Nan Goldin, and Tina Barney among her biggest inspirations. “I think it’s really hard to make work in a vacuum without any energetic influences”, she says. “In order for a candle flame to light, there’s got to be oxygen–- the oxygen of the world around, the people around bring it to life”. Yet, in spite of these external forces, Permissions refrains from falling into step with any entrenched mythologies of ‘home’, or ‘family’ or ‘motherhood’. Nostalgia is guarded with an intimacy and honesty that approaches the confessional. “I learned so much about letting go, about non-attachment, about a certain freedom”, she says. “But in order to let go, you have to be holding on first”. 

For all its gravity of emotion – grief spliced through with joy – Permissions settles in one’s lap like a child curling up after a meal. It offers a gentle illumination, a loving warmth, but with a glow that lingers long after the event, reverberating into dark corners. Its spirit lies in this gesture as much as its objectivity – in the act of staying until the end, soaking up the last warmth of the candle after the wick has burnt out. It is then that we are given the permission to leave. 

Permissions by Emma Hardy is published by GOST Books.

The photographer will be signing copies of the book at Polycopies, Paris at 7pm on 11 November 2022.

An exhibition of the project will be on display at 10 14 Gallery, London from 01 December 2022 to 27 January 2023.