“The reception of the exhibition by families of immigrant origins from the neighbourhood has been incredible, far beyond my expectations”

Dalia Al-Dujaili: After showing the work in Rencontres d’Arles, why did it feel right to collaborate with Union de la Jeunesse Internationale in Paris this year?

Jean-Marie Donat: First and foremost, it is important to put the photographs presented in the exhibition Ne M’oublie Pas into context. These photographs come from the archives of Studio Rex, a small photo studio in Marseille located in the Belsunce district, wedged between the old port and the Saint Charles train station. This is a very working-class neighbourhood that for decades welcomed migrants arriving by boat or train. For almost 80 years, Studio Rex documented the passage of these migrants who stopped for a brief stay in Belsunce before leaving to work all over France. Many of these men eventually settled in Paris, in the Goutte d’Or, Barbès district neighbourhood in the 18th arrondissement of Paris.

After Arles, Berlin, and Marseille, the exhibition Ne M’oublie Pas is also coming to Barbès at the invitation of Youssouf Fofana, founder of the Union de la Jeunesse Internationale (United Youth International). Ne M’oublie Pas is being shown in the former TATI stores, a huge “ocean liner” of low-priced clothing and household accessories that was frequented assiduously by the working classes and immigrant families living in the neighbourhood for more than 40 years. So, this location makes perfect sense. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better place to present my work than this legendary place. The UJI gave me carte blanche, and I am grateful to them for that. Fifty years later, these photos have followed the same path as their owners. The reception of the exhibition by families of immigrant origins from the neighbourhood has been incredible, far beyond my expectations.

DA: Tell me about the story behind Ne M’oublie Pas – how did the story emerge, and what drew you to it?

JMD: My artistic practice is variable; it can be purely the product of my imagination, or it can be part of a political and social reflection, which is the case for the subject that interests us today. Ne M’oublie Pas does not tell the story of Studio Rex: by presenting this archive, I am showing a history of immigration told by the protagonists themselves. These intimate photos bring to the forefront women and men who have been invisible for too long.  If we take the time to look closely, we see the heartbreak of separation, the wait for a hypothetical return, a hope for the family left behind. Above all, we understand, and this is very important, that for these men, the ticket was a one-way ticket. Their survival and that of their families depended on it. The Studio Rex archives provide an implicit reading of Maghreb and sub-Saharan immigration in the 1960s to 1990s.

DA: I loved the curation and design of the show in Paris – can you tell me how the design aspects were developed? Why did you go in this direction for the curation? For example, the light box in the second room, and the ID photos stuck to the wall individually.

JMD: Not being a photographer myself, I use the photographic medium, and mainly vernacular photographs, as material for my creations. The book, the performance, the exhibition is the work itself. For this exhibition, the scenography is fundamental. Putting more than a thousand documents – “wallet” photographs, photomontages and colourisations, administrative photographs, and studio photographs – “to music” is above all a work of reflection. The multitude of photos that make up the archive (more than 400,000 prints and negatives) must serve to demonstrate the point.

The three monumental frames composed of more than a thousand “wallet” photos (souvenir photos of loved ones who remained in the country) complement the light boxes displaying the negatives of more than a thousand portrait photos taken in France for administrative purposes. The enlargements of 16 portraits made from two 13/18 negatives were not chosen for their aesthetic appeal. These 16 portraits (one woman and fifteen men) explicitly show the male majority that made up the immigration of the 1970s.

The film Les fantômes de Belsunce [The Ghosts of Belsunce] consists of 30 portraits assembled in a morphing sequence lasting over 20 minutes. Thanks to the imperceptible transition from one character to another, this film demonstrates in a very simple way that we see but do not look at these men who are part of our daily lives.

The photos in the display case are framed with boxes of photographic paper (Ilford, Kodak, Agfa). Grégoire, the photographer at Studio Rex, kept the negatives of administrative portraits in these boxes for over 40 years.

DA: Finally, what do you hope the audience will take away from this show?

JMD: Showing people what they need to see to understand, revealing the humanity that emanates from these photographs from the past, will, I hope, serve to change the way we see things today. That is what I have tried to do with this exhibition.

Ne M’oublie Pas is on show at Union de la Jeunesse Internationale, Paris, until 4 January, 2026. The book is available via delpire & co

“I do see all the photographs as these portals to different times and space”

He prints everything and returns for a second visit, when those memories are taped and draped across the furniture and fixtures of each flat, forming a temporary installation that he then re-photographs as a single, dense tableau “I don’t create a like a mock up before I enter into the space to do the installation,” he says. “It’s merely between the relationship of my eye, my cameras, the viewfinder – creating a conversation through that in the physical space.”

On screen, the pictures read as busy, collage-like interiors: photographs within photographs, rectangles layered over beds, wardrobes, windows, and radiators. In person, they feel stranger and more exhilarating than that description allows. A bathroom mirror seems to contain a photograph of itself, reflecting a space that might be the same bathroom at a different time. A rental window blooms into an impossible vista, stacked with a printed New York skyline, a waterfall, and yet more images of elsewhere. Veneer wardrobes, laminate counters, and battered doors are so flush with ink and colour that they stop reading as furniture at all.

The effect created from this abstraction is almost four-dimensional: there is the object in front of you depicting objects and places from different times, transforming the work’s material implication. Are they photographs of spaces? Are they archives of time spent? Are they disruptions and tears in time? 

He admits, “I do see all the photographs as these portals to different times and space.” Resident Aliens extends that strategy into other people’s rooms. Most of Xu’s collaborators are immigrants living in spaces that are emphatically not “forever homes” – dorm rooms, sublets, tiny studios – and yet bear the full weight of a life in transition. Their legal status often hinges on bureaucratic performances of intimacy: dossiers of bank statements, certificates, and, crucially, photographs that must convince an immigration officer that a relationship is real, made even more complicated with the works’ explorations of queer immigrants.

“We have to represent ourselves in bureaucratic forms which are just a stack of documents,” Xu says. The visual collages reinforce the scattered, fragmented, and transitional nature of the immigration process. The home is inherently both timeless and mounted in ongoing memories of places far away. 

“If you look closely enough,” Xu explains, “some photographs have folding marks that have to fold because they’re too big to fit into my suitcase.” Once these paper histories arrive in someone’s apartment, they flood the space. Tiny 4x6s cluster around an electrical outlet; a large landscape slides down a headboard; a snapshot of a family dinner hovers beside a bottle of cleaning spray. The installations exist only for the afternoon of the shoot, but their residue lingers: some collaborators later hang the final photograph in new homes. The work is ever-reimplicated within the space as an artistic act, both forgotten and unfinished.

If the classical immigration photograph presents a subject as knowable and neatly contained, Xu insists on the opposite. His images are too layered and contradictory to resolve into a single, legible identity. They’re not depictions of one moment – they are tablets containing coordinates to places and stories that feed each other’s momentum. They are information banks; they are star systems, all from the same origin.

And, as I explain to him during our conversation in which I was overwhelmed by the work’s metaphysical nature, I try to centre them through the metaphor of the mudroom. Those little airlocks of domestic life are built to catch the mess of the outside world before it reaches the soft interior of the home. They bring together objects that are in flux between their coming and going. They are spaces that otherwise don’t exist if there is no one to come and go. What is the tenement apartment in the hours the alien worker labors to keep his status? Is it a home or a space to hold what from outside cannot yet be accepted within? 

And does it exist if not to hold memories? To welcome in loose ends that cannot be resolved until we leave? Do these spaces contain memories – or are the memories necessitated by the inhabitant’s movement? “It’s almost like I’m a median right,” he says. “I’m this in-between person and I create an in-between space through image.”

Resident Aliens is on view at Yancey Richardson, New York until 20 December, 2025

Niyū Yūrk is structured somewhat chronologically but also tries to group work into loose themes, using only material from the library’s Middle Eastern collections. Using photography as well as film, sound and print media, Abid says she “wanted it to be a proud celebration of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) cultures, of their contributions in different fields, from businesses that serve daily lives of New Yorkers, to the earliest music recordings in New York City.” She references artists such as Iranian-American theatre director Reza Abdoh, “and these are things that you probably don’t expect when you go see an exhibition like this. You probably expect it to be these timelines of immigration to New York. But I wanted to show the breadth of all these contributions and in areas where you probably didn’t expect MENA people to be at the forefront of theatre or electro-acoustic music.”

This celebratory tone is carried throughout the show to the photographic series by Mahka Eslami, Bodega Boys, highlighting moments of daily life and joy in Yemeni corner stores around New York City. Elsewhere in the exhibition, there are clips from In My Own Skin, which documents the aftermath of 9/11 as experienced by five young Arab women living in New York.

When Abid began her role in 2022, she was asked to identify the library’s earliest Arabic diasporic materials from New York City, items that have been collected since the founding of the Oriental Division in 1897. The institution’s initial request for the exhibition – to focus on early 20th-century immigration – felt too narrow for Abid. “I considered that wouldn’t be inclusive of the more diverse waves that came later after Christian Syrian immigration,” she explains. “I really wanted to tell that story, especially at this moment now when there is a need to be seen, to be represented in these institutions.” Her insistence expanded the exhibition all the way to the present day. 

The process also raised questions about institutional responsibility. The library, Abid says, has taken seriously the matter of who shapes these histories. “We’re a public library and the library had to fight and advocate to have a Middle Eastern curator,” she says. “It was a priority… to have someone from a Middle Eastern background to tell these stories.” That work includes addressing inaccuracies inherited from earlier cataloguing. Images by immigrant-era photographers like Lewis Hine and Augustus Sherman often arrived with limited information. “These photographs… were collected as they were described by these photographers,” Abid explains. “But today we’re in 2025. We have curators with subject expertise. We also hear from the public.”

One example is a portrait long labelled “Armenian Jew,” corrected only after the man’s descendants contacted a museum exhibiting the photograph. “They said this is our great-grandfather and he’s a Yemeni Jewish rabbi from Jerusalem,” Abid says, and the record was later updated. “That’s very important,” she adds, “because all these identities are conflated under one label. It’s our responsibility to complicate these histories… and that’s also what the exhibition is about.”

Some histories required different approaches altogether. Abid searched for materials documenting the Muslim experience in New York after 9/11, a defining period for many MENA communities, and found few. “Our collections had gaps in that regard,” she says. But she discovered In My Own Skin. “It allowed me to tell that story,” she says. “The experience of those who were identified as Muslims in that moment of New York history that extends to the present day.”

Working with early ethnographic portraits also brings mixed feelings for her. “Yes, they are very ethnographic and they sometimes bother me,” she admits. But she finds value in using them to address cataloguing practices and inherited narratives. “What do we do with these materials? I love the challenge to almost subvert them and use them in a different way… than the stories we’ve heard already.”

Visitors have been responding strongly. “I was surprised to see friends or visitors getting very emotional,” Abid says. “They said we never felt seen or represented and here we’re on the walls of a New York institution.” For many, the library’s grand architecture can feel imposing; the exhibition seems to loosen that. “I’ve never seen this much diversity in the building,” Abid notes. “People who might feel intimidated by that majestic building… now see themselves here.”

And in that shift, the exhibition speaks not only to MENA communities but to many others whose histories in the city have been under-recognised. These are stories of contribution, erasure, cultural work carried out quietly, brilliance that has gone uncredited. “Absolutely,” Abid says when I suggest the show connects to a broader immigrant experience – the hidden labour, the silenced identities, the people whose influence shapes New York while their stories remain unnamed. Here, those stories are given space. The Algerian man on the wall is no longer a footnote. 

Niyū Yūrk: Middle Eastern and North African Lives in the City is on until 08 March, 2026 in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at the New York Public Library

“Here in Norway, the culture is to be outside and be in nature and it’s something that Somali aunties have adapted to”

She explains that, before WhatsApp, her community relied on cassettes and photographs to keep up with each other’s lives. “People back in Somalia used to film themselves in a cassette and then send them over to Norway, or England or America…and that’s how they would remember each other.” Abdi emphasises the value of putting effort into creating a memory. In Oslo, domestic settings became the backdrop for wearing one’s finest clothes – an inspiration for her early editorial work that blended the home with African studio portraiture. “When I do studio work, I take a lot of inspiration from the effort people used to take in taking photos of each other. How people used to get dressed and the whole ritual behind it,” she says. There was a shared consensus that smelling your best was as important as looking your best. Relatives across the diaspora and the motherland perfumed the envelopes before mailing them, turning each one into a sensorial vessel of memory. “People will smell you through the photo, people will smell the emotions”. 

Abdi approaches documentary with care, softly enough to capture intimacy while remaining cognisant of the sensitivities of her work. Being welcomed into communities is a part of her process, and people willingly permit her to share their narrative. Rarely are her photos taken, they are gifted. Working strictly with film is a patient process just like these interactions whether it’s a tender moment between a mother and child or between friends.

Abdi tells me that one portrait taken in Nairobi was where Family in Focus found its start. Serendipity took the photographer to an orphanage in Kangemi where she met Priscilla holding her neighbour’s daughter – while the neighbour had her hair braided by Priscilla’s daughter. In the portrait lies an enchanting parable of community and entangled lives, a defining metaphor for the Family in Focus canon which continues in her moving image work.

Abdi’s understanding of film as a universal medium for storytelling began in her adolescence watching Bollywood movies void of subtitles. Drawn to dramatic colour palettes and choreography, she realised that feeling was the only metric that mattered to her and why she intently uses minimal dialogue in her films. On Tip Toe is a performance film co-directed by Abdi and Dina Al-Makhrami and follows the ballet dancers of Na Ponta dos Pés, an art school built by their instructor and matriarch Tuany Nascimento. Set in a haven in the favelas hanging over the city where youth feels truly sacred, we see a dream-like sequence of girlhood. A dance between play and performance, before falling into Nascimento’s embrace.

This fascination of matriarchal communities begins at home for Abdi. In My Heroes, Abdi spotlights Somali women in Oslo, including her mother, whose instinct, like Priscilla, is to lean on her community. In this microcosm of Somali womanhood we see their capacity to show up for one another, to play and reclaim the outdoors.

“Here in Norway, the culture is to be outside and be in nature. It’s literally ingrained in Norwegian culture and it’s something that Somali aunties have adapted to.” With a process rooted in rapport and invitation, Abdi plans to keep translating personal stories of the diaspora through pop-up studios and an upcoming Family in Focus book.

@ayyanabdi

“The hidden narratives in these personal archives have been suppressed by larger institutional histories”

“I think we sometimes mistake what we’re seeing as a physical photograph for truth and for record,” Vora says. “With these artists, what you’re seeing them do is challenging the authority of that. And I think that calls into question the role of archives and collections.” Indeed, the idea of photographic truth and our understanding of a photograph as testimony are repeatedly tested in this exhibition. The idea that emerges is both frightening and exciting: what if the images on show here, manipulated using methods ranging from traditional cut-and-paste collage to generative AI, contain more truth than those in history books? “When I look at traditional photography, I don’t always see it as truth,” Tirvengadum tells me, “because it’s about perspective. And [my work] is my perspective.”

To wander through the show is to look at thirteen different places and moments from thirteen different perspectives. They come together, whether their subjects are familiar or not, to reaffirm how much of this world’s history is misunderstood, undocumented or both. There’s Wendimagegn Belete’s video work Unveil (2016), a composite portrait of hundreds of people involved in Ethiopia’s resistance to Benito Mussolini’s invasion in the 1930s, making Ethiopia the only African nation to successfully resist European colonisation. Elsewhere, Thato Toeba’s Man on Fire (2017), a photographic collage reproduced here as a large-scale wallpaper, refers to the story of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a Mozambican man who was burned to death during a wave of xenophobic violence in Johannesburg in 2008. In both cases, where photographic records fall short, collage is a way to correct the archive.

Often, as in Tirvengadum’s case, the stories being examined are directly linked to the artists’ own lives, existing at a nexus of personal and national histories. Three woven works by Arpita Akhanda combine portraits of her grandparents with reclaimed maps, reflecting on the couple’s displacement following the 1947 partition that created India and Pakistan. “In weaving – as a process, as a tool as a language – there are these two planes: the warp and the weft,” Akhanda explains, “For me, they are like the personal and the institutional, and when they meet together, what kind of narrative do they bring? The hide-and-seek that they play is a language that I use as a metaphor for the hidden narratives in these personal archives, suppressed by the larger institutional histories.”

This hide-and-seek dynamic is at play across the whole exhibition; ostensible historical truths are questioned and unexplored, often deeply personal, narratives are brought to light. Collage becomes a way to display realities that can’t or haven’t been rendered by the camera.

Vora says that she’s long understood collage as more than just a method of assembling and overlaying images: “I’ve always thought about it in the multiplicity and abundance it creates.” Such abundance unfolds dizzyingly across I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies, an exhibition where images, events, places, people, personal histories and global narratives join to form a new kind of photographic archive; less traditional than most, perhaps, but certainly no less truthful.

I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies is on show at Autograph Gallery until 21 March, 2026

When Tariq came across slides of negatives of an Essex family from the 1960s in a charity shop in Cambridge a year ago, he began manipulating the images, effacing them in different ways. The images depicted “their general life, a quintessential English family holiday in Mallorca; it’s all there.” He started to take the slides apart, “and I feel a bit bad, but I scanned the images before, then I started disrupting the images.” For Tariq, there was a sense of complicity within the images: “I think seeing a quintessential English family for me during the 60s, when I have images of my grandparents at the time engaged in hard labour, working factories and understanding the context of what they were going through while this family in England were by the sea… it made me uneasy.”

Onto one of the images, he scratched a St. George’s flag with a pin; “I don’t know who this family is,” he says, almost sheepishly. “So I do apologise to whoever they are! I’m sorry your images ended up in a charity shop and they found their way to me,” he laughs warmly. Though the act of disruption is simple here, Tariq attempts to point to something more complex, to the idea of complicity with a “colonial decadence, that the context of [the family’s] lives was built by years and years of subjugation of racialised bodies around the world.” 

From there, the artist developed a glass slide with a red cross – the flag of St George and England’s national flag – and placed it atop the images, making the colonial context of the scenes apparent. He began employing the glass device over other images from his collection of photo books. 

“I enjoy the fact that the device is glass because it feels as if,” Tariq says, “without any image behind it, it’s depicting the fragility of nationalism, how it can just shatter. The times this symbol has been adopted by the far right and by English nationalists and white supremacists is such a fragile patriotism because they’re kind of calling for things that are their own demise.”

100 Glass Cruciforms also highlights the fragility of a the national identity of England itself when one considers that St George, whose flag England has adopted, never set foot in England himself and was in fact a Cappadocian (modern day Turkey) Greek soldier, who is highly venerated both in the Levant’s (Palestine, Syria and Lebanon) Christian communities and in Islam. 

And Tariq’s glass ‘cruciform’ is also a device which makes manifest the colonial question of photography which, as a practice, was developed in large to document and categorise indigenous populations in European colonies around the Global South. Images which were then, and still are to a large extent, housed behind glass panels, cases and vitrines in the West’s major art galleries, which often have historic imperial or defense-industry ties themselves such as the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum, both in London.

In one black-and-white living room scene, we see children playing with each other using a gun; titled by Tarq as ‘Colonial Play’, the image was shot by Judah Passow and depicts Palestinian children reenacting the Intifadah in Fahme Village, west of Jenin, Palestine in the 80s. Another image by Zineke Diikstra shows a high schooler in Liverpool, England, with the flag set over his eyes. “There’s always a little bit of some tension between the image and the symbol. It’s very often that nationalist movements are heavily youth-led. Especially by young men and boys. So putting this symbol over his eyes speaks to how Europe had the Nazi youth or, in this country, we have a lot of white supremacist groups who are recruiting children,” Tariq explains, interrogating the ways in which children are implicated in global, neo-colonial conflicts in which Britain is implicated.

Elsewhere, the images are more explicitly violent and the link between British imperialism and global conflict, such as the ‘war on terror’, is clearer, an ideology which Tariq tells me catalysed his research. “I remember seeing this as a child. In one form or another, we all experienced [the ‘war on terror’]. I grew up in Saudi,” Tariq says, “and it was very present in the discourse there. People would always be talking about what was happening in Iraq or in Afghanistan. In the UK, when we had the Trojan horse affair, I remember being in school and being terrified that I was going to get falsely accused by the secret services. That fear as a child is the key starting point for my research and the war in Iraq was part of my visual consciousness.” In a tableau, Tariq groups together four infamous photojournalistic images from the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all shot by different photographers, but all serving as disturbing reminders of the role images played to boost military morale and garner public approval for the invasion. 

The artist not only uses images from popular media or photojournalism but also weaves in personal histories into the body of work to demonstrate how the personal is indeed political. Four images show the glass device pressed over seeds – Tariq describes receiving a jar of seeds from his grandfather – seeds from his village in Pakistan – with a story of how, as a child, his grandfather would work the land from sunset to sunrise, following a spiritual rhythm deeply connected to the earth. This agricultural and Islamically rooted life, centred on planting, harvesting, and selling crops, formed the foundation of his family’s lineage and spirit. Placing a flag over the seeds in his work symbolises the displacement his grandfather experienced when he left Pakistan to immigrate and the colonial propaganda that compelled his migration to the UK, where the violence of the National Front disrupted the lives of his grandparents and parents.

100 Glass Cruciforms was recently on display at South Asia Archive’s pop-up at the Serpentine Gallery on 12 July, 2025. The images were shown in Tariq’s family album – he removed his family’s images and placed the ‘cruciform’ images inside in their place. Tariq is still developing the body of work and research whilst also working on an ongoing project about the muslim woman’s veil – it’s an idea Tariq has been thinking about for some time and is exploring through many mediums, experimenting with sculpture, image and textiles to unfurl the marginalised women at the heart of liberation movements and nation building efforts. “There’s no room for ego or for it to be about myself,” says Tariq of the project. “In the discussion of the veil, both extremes – to lose the veil or to enforce it – are about destroying the agency of the women who are wearing it.”

@mohammadthewitness

In Imperial Valley, Rossi expands, “water is like gold”, a fact he emphasises in his work. In an image of a young woman washing her horse with a hose, water droplets spray and catch the light like flecks of gold or flying sparks. Similarly, in a photograph of the All-American Canal, the largest in the Imperial Valley, the setting sun gives the water the glossy, reflective appearance of precious metal. Water is equally notable in its absence too; Rossi’s desaturated and warmly hued palette reveals a landscape which is palpably dry.

The movement of water is crucial to the geography of Rossi’s work and the valley itself. Many of his images are made in the communities that border the Salton Sea – a prehistoric lake to the north of the valley which was inadvertently refilled by runoff when the valley was first irrigated in the early 1900s. Once a popular vacation resort, a series of environmental changes instigated the sea’s decline in the 1970s. By the 2000s, more efficient use of water stopped all runoff to the sea completely and caused the shoreline to shrink, revealing a lakebed containing a toxic dust composed of ozone and particulates which, combined with exhaust fumes, pesticides plumes and factory emissions, creates a haze which hangs over communities in the valley. Rossi describes how “you can actually feel your skin and eyes burning when you’re on the shore of the lake”.

Despite this, there are still communities living around the lake. In fact, Rossi explains, “because you can buy a lot for $2000, people are actively moving to the area”. One such resident is Doris Dinsmoor, who Rossi photographs in her home of 48 years in Desert Shores, located on the western shore of the Salton Sea. Rossi’s portrait reveals the contradiction between the bucolic fantasies of agricultural life and the reality of the valley. His subject sits at rest on her sofa surrounded by ornaments, artworks, windchimes, a sword, and above her head a print depicting a verdant farmhouse scene. The photograph has the same slightly yellow hue as Rossi’s other images, which now seems unnerving in the context of an interior. A vent in the top right corner of the image is framed by an ominous dark yellow stain. 

In another image, Rossi photographs a young boy, Alexis, playing in a barely full paddling pool in the yard of his family’s trailer on the shores of the Salton Sea. The trailer, its awning, gutters, door, the air conditioning unit and an ornamental sun with pouting lips – which resembles the Incan sun god Inti – are painted uniformly beige, giving them the appearance of having been coated by the dust which Rossi depicts in earlier photographs. Above him, a print of Santa Maria, echoing Lange’s Migrant Mother, averts her gaze from the camera.

Fantasies of the West as a place where the American ideals of individual liberty, economic prosperity and ultimately happiness could be pursued seem far from the reality of the Imperial Valley. Rossi remarks on the huge levels of deprivation which exist there: “22% of people live below the poverty line. Lots of people who live in the Imperial Valley aren’t there because they like it. They’re there because of the opportunity and because it’s dirt cheap to live there. Many people I’ve met are from other parts of California where they can no longer afford to live.” In one photograph, Rossi pictures Sydney, a recently unemployed agricultural worker, kissing the leg of his partner Kourtni, which hangs out of the window of the car they both live in. 

In another portrait, Rossi depicts farm worker Raul in Calexico on his way home to Mexicali, one of an estimated 15,000 day labourers who cross the Mexico-US border to work in the valley every day. This kind of insecure and casual labour seems foundational to Imperial Valley, which has a history of conflict between workers’ unions and the agro-industrial corporations that operate there. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term as president, this instability has been compounded by the looming threat of aggressive ICE raids, which are already sweeping nearby agricultural regions like the much larger Central and San Fernando valleys.

The uncertain future of farming in the valley has implications for almost all its residents. In Rossi’s own words, “everyone you meet in the valley is connected to agriculture.” It’s the third largest employer in the surrounding county, trailing only the public sector and healthcare. Under Trump’s administration, the pressure to rewrite the 1922 Colorado River Pact – which overestimated the river’s annual flows and ignored the seniority rights of indigenous groups – has diminished. The promised reinvigoration of the local economy by the discovery of lithium deposits in the area now seems unlikely following the President’s rescinding of tax and regulatory benefits for electric vehicles. It’s difficult to imagine any scenario other than the valley’s continued decline.

Rossi’s images of this decline might seem to echo Dorothea Lange’s FSA photographs, documenting how the same kinds of unsustainable agricultural practices which forced Lange’s subjects westward have now led to the Imperial Valley’s own demise. On closer inspection, however, what Lange and Rossi share is more political. In an interview towards the end of her life Lange said of her work, “it’s not pictorial illustration, it’s evidence. It’s a record of human experience.” After nearly a century of exploitation, Imperial Valley’s fate seems sealed. Rossi’s work is making a record of it, of the people who lived and worked there and the impact of the exploitation of workers and the earth on human life.

@scottrossii

Mostly taken on various trips over a two month period, these images depict Li’s mother, which explains their inherent tenderness. But beneath their surface is a complex web of dynamics and pressures – both internal and external – that complicate their relationship. The images become a record of a world that exists between mother and son. “I’m forever tethered to her and my hometown,” Li explains, “and she’s forever tethered to me and my queerness.”

Transit is a deeply entrenched feature of Li’s identity and his relationship with his mother. His family left their village home in China’s Fujian province in 2007, first moving to Singapore and then, five years later, to the east London suburb of Romford. He was seven years old. Many of his family photographs from around this time were taken on London’s transport system: a sprawling network that represented the beginnings of a new life. These images, taken years later, often imply that a brave new world might be around the corner. Sunlight reflected in windows and concentrated on the travelling figure momentarily bathes her in hope. 

Years after their arrival, as his family settled into the humdrum and often challenging rhythm of life as first-generation Chinese immigrants in London, the city’s now-familiar TfL network, remained a site of transition and the possibility of belonging for Li. Underground trains ferried him to and from the clubs where he explored his queer identity. He would wake up back in Romford, crashing emotionally and physically, among a family that struggled to accept his queerness. In these concurrent stories of diaspora and sexuality, journeys into the unknown are ambivalent experiences where excitement is tempered by the harshness of reality. As Li puts it, yesterday’s dream has a sour taste on monday. “For me the train symbolises an ongoing navigation of a precarious sense of belonging, as someone both queer and Chinese,” he says.

Though mother and son embarked on the same life-changing journey, their lives and worldviews remain very different, painfully so at times. How does one resolve a relationship like this, with its overlapping textures and unspoken tensions? Li’s photographs of his mother attempt to bridge the gap between them. “It’s about understanding each other without having to communicate with words,” he says, “I think we’re usually really bad with words, we can’t tell each other what we truly think.” Through photographs, and through the act of taking photographs, he facilitates a new kind of exchange.

To describe this body of work is to list locations, outfits, poses and objects. Its emotional content is more difficult to take stock of; it’s unmistakable but wordless. Indeed, there’s no concise way to describe a relationship that carries as much baggage as this one. Through this set of images underpinned by movement, Li shows us – and discovers for himself – “how we can meet in a transitional space.”

@nimiewil

“Accidents are a big part of my work”

Without access to formal education in the field, Moeini turned to YouTube tutorials and hands-on experimentation. “I couldn’t find any schools [in Iran], so I just learnt things online,” she explains. Now at Yale, she juggles formal study with what she calls a “parallel practice”, driven by feeling, intuition and urgency.

Moeini’s visual language is quiet yet insistent. Her images – often black-and-white – are gestural, raw and constructed in collaboration with friends and fellow diasporic Iranians. “I photograph very loosely,” she says, “I just have some ideas and I’m trying to collaborate with people. For instance, for a long time I was thinking about taking a picture of a group of women together and then asking my friends or the women I know who want to be photographed.” All her bodies of work are untitled and purposefully resist categorisation: all images are representative of one larger ongoing practice. 

She resists the word ‘staged’ preferring ‘constructed’ – a subtle but important distinction. “It’s in the real world, and accidents are a big part of my work,” Moeini says. These “accidents” might be the way hair lifts unexpectedly in a gust of wind, or how a gesture between subjects unfolds organically in the moment. “New things happen and I capture that,” she explains.

Since arriving in the US, Moeini’s work has taken on new layers. “In Iran, after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, I found myself not being able to make pictures anymore,” she says. “Before that it was also hard, but after that I became very conscious of it.” Working within domestic spaces and photographing friends behind closed doors became a form of resistance. Now in the US, she is exploring this new freedom – albeit one with its own complications. “Here I’m more free in a way… but it’s also a new landscape for me. I still have to find the things that I like.”

Moeini is currently focused on making portraits of Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles, but in the meantime, her camera is turning inward, exploring personal space and memory. “I’m photographing my friends, and I’m also making self-portraits, photographing objects I brought from Iran,” she says of the fabrics, school uniforms, and state-issued propaganda materials created for children which she brought with her to the US and engages with directly in her work.

An interest in touch, care and physicality runs through Moeini’s work. “I’m interested in gestures of solidarity and togetherness,” she explains, referencing a powerful image of three women embracing, two of them with their faces shrouded. In another photograph, a woman walks on a treadmill in an underground gym. “For a long time, I didn’t feel safe to photograph in public. I thought, maybe I should photograph only in domestic spaces,” Moeini says. “And using flash as an artificial light, I kind of combined these two words: artificial freedom. The freedom that I was feeling wasn’t real.”

“Atefe’s work reminds us to look at the hidden stories that might have been forgotten. She tells these stories with honesty, care and a deep sense of collaboration. Her vision reveals the truths that often remain unseen,” says the artist and educator Amak Mahmoodian, who nominated Moeini for Ones to Watch. 

Moeini’s practice resists resolution or closure. “My work is more like theatre in that it’s live, and every day changes,” she says. These days, she is working on a new project combining archival materials with photography to explore intergenerational memory in Iranian families.

This is an updated version of the article from BJP issue 7922, which contained inaccuracies we are happy to correct. BJP apologises for any confusion caused. 

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