“If we have more working women photographers in Iraq, we don’t just achieve greater gender equality within Iraq’s photography industry, we also gain greater equity in storytelling”

Over two intensive workshop days in Baghdad in November 2024, Garthwaite worked closely with IFP members on everything from image sequencing and pitching, to navigating identity through the camera. “We had women joining from around Iraq, supported by family members,” she says. “When women gather, we uplift one another, and we seek solutions. We soothe one another. Creativity is not reserved for the lucky few; it’s within us all. What we often need is the confidence to pursue it, and this is a driving force within IFP.”

For Raghad Kisam, a film-maker and storyteller with over eight years of experience, IFP offered “a real boost of confidence” and a community rooted in a shared mission. “I deeply believe in the power of visual storytelling to create change, challenge stereotypes and celebrate resilience,” she says.

Her work often draws on memory, culture and identity, creating personal narratives that speak to larger truths. One of her most poignant projects, Unseen Bonds, explores the impact of decades of war on family relationships in Iraq. “I have only one digital photograph with my late father,” Kisam says. “Because of the wars, our shared memories were never captured and that absence stayed with me.”

She reimagines a family album that never was, constructing images from light, objects, and the quiet spaces of memory. “Unseen Bonds reflects how conflict doesn’t just destroy infrastructure, it quietly reshapes how we remember, connect and grieve across generations.”

This kind of intimate, emotionally layered storytelling is emblematic of IFP’s ethos. For Salam, her first documentary project Shadow – developed during a visual journalism workshop with VII Academy – marked a milestone in her practice. 

“It explores what is expected from women versus what they truly want to pursue,” she explains. “I love this project deeply, it was my very first documentary work.” While the creative energy is palpable, the challenges remain stark. “One of the main challenges is the lack of genuine support and trust among individuals,” Kisam points out. “We need to build real connections based on encouragement rather than competition or undermining each other’s work.” She also stresses the “major need for financial support, especially for long-term projects”.

Garthwaite explains that greater opportunities for women create a ripple effect for Iraqi storytelling on the international stage. “Male photographers are unable to enter many parts of homes in Iraq, but women photographers are permitted to do so,” she notes. “If we have more working women photographers in Iraq, we don’t just achieve greater gender equality within Iraq’s photography industry, we also gain greater equity in storytelling.”

And storytelling is at the core of everything IFP does. “Our discussions and the advice we exchange have been truly valuable,” Salam says. “Through the IFP workshop and exhibition, I was able to present my very first documentary project.” As the collective moves forward, armed with resources and female solidarity within a blooming industry, the women of IFP are shaping not only how Iraq is seen, but who gets to do the seeing.

@ifp_iq_

“I am forever in love with the process of light transmission”

Where Neshat’s photos attend to certain sexual politics, Brahim’s turns to ritual and gendered resistance, the desert itself both stage and collaborator in her images. “It reminds me of my father,” she tells me. “For as long as it can be traced, his family lived from this land and desert.” He became an archaeologist, visiting sites that now appear in her work, and she grew up circling around his photographs and stories – stone formations, sand shapes, and ancient marks – asking to see them again and again. These early encounters gave Brahim a sense of time as layered and porous, with past and present held in tension. 

Brahim started dancing at three, which she describes as her “first language” and a way to be in the world without words. Movement became her way of translating feeling through the body, and she carried that through studies in San Francisco and London, performing and choreographing full-time – even after she went on to study medicine in Oregon. 

Brahim found herself fascinated by breath during that time, “this constant, elementary movement, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, sometimes sounding, sometimes silent.” Heartbeats, pulses, the inhale and exhale: she believes that these rhythms could be made to inhabit space through her art. Brahim brought this idea to life at Paris’s Grand Palais earlier this year, where performers’ breaths animated delicate, hand-blown glass sculptures shaped to echo the shifting contours of AlUla’s desert. Each exhale pulsed through the objects and across the room, tracing body, landscape, and memory in one continuous gesture.

In Brahim’s latest monochromatic series, the desert feels harsher, almost menacing at first glance. Most of the images are printed in Platinum Palladium, a process that soaks up the light and pushes the blacks to a striking depth. Figures and landscapes alike emerge from this high contrast terrain: shadows stretch across the dunes and the horizon dissolves. Light – or the lack thereof – renders her figures like spectres in the sand. For Brahim, though, this absence is not emptiness but fertile ground for experimentation: a space of communion between bodies, temporalities, and topographies. 

Where bright, white light conjured corporeality in her recent installations at the Bally Foundation and Noor Ridyah Light Festival, darkness is the generative medium here. Both subject and artist, Brahim walks in forty-five degree heat and traces circles in the sand, lying within them to create her own refuge. Rather than positioning herself as separate from its environs, her work moves within them to figure the body as the light that makes space legible. “I am forever in love with the process of light transmission,” she tells me. “Looking at humans as beings of light, presence then becomes the strongest form of sculpture.”

Brahim believes that “the desert challenges our perception of time and rhythm in a specific way”, she suggests, which always interests her to return. “It’s a level of expanse we can feel mirrored in the body, too.” Working within a culture that circumscribes women’s movement, this expanse becomes a measure of possibility for Brahim. For her, the body holds both story and witness; the line between silence and voice is a fragile one.

Cartographies of Presence is on view at Albion Jeune until 04 October

@sahrab

“I really want to emphasise that the curation and the editing, I didn’t do it alone. No one does anything alone”

And, like DeFeo and real roses, it also kept adding layers. Kurland, Miller Meigs and Werbel wanted to make a catalogue but, adding more artists – and realising that some of their featured artists were excellent writers – ended up creating a wider photobook, The Rose: A Circular Genealogy of Collage, which is now being published. Along with curator Marina Chao, Kurland has also put together a new version of the exhibition, now on show at CPW (AKA the Center for Photography at Woodstock, which relocated to Kingston, New York, in 2022). Chao, who was at the International Center of Photography before joining CPW, has added new artists and more ideas, says Kurland, not least the concept that, as they are constantly code-switching, women and other minoritised people live their lives as a kind of collage. “I really want to emphasise that the curation and the editing, I didn’t do it alone,” says Kurland. “No one does anything alone.”

The idea of group work runs through The Rose. Joiri Minaya’s #dominicanwomengooglesearch is included in every iteration, for example, made by the artist by quite literally searching ‘dominicanwomen’ on Google. The images that pop up show bikini-clad ladies and veer towards soft porn, a queasy sexualisation that also suggests the thin line between tourism and colonialism. Minaya blows up and cuts out body parts from these images, then invites curators to install them in 2D/3D mash-ups, in which visitors can reassemble figures if they stand in the right spot. “The instructions are just to hang the body parts so they correspond to the viewer’s body parts,” Kurland explains. “You can do whatever you want, but the head is at eye level, the torso is at torso. So not only does it deconstruct the image, it creates an analogue of virtual space, these body parts rushing at you on the interweb highway.”

Kurland was keen to engage with the sense of the body in The Rose, a perception “of how we move as we go in the world, from our internal sense of our embodied feelings to how we participate politically, culturally and societally in the world”. The exhibition also includes work by K8 Hardy that “is about sexuality and pleasure and the way we present ourselves in the world”; Kurland notes she was keen to include images in which women represent their own sexuality – rather than being commodified – because “there’s so much shame associated with it”.

These embodied experiences also pick at the medium of photography, which represents the world via a disembodied single plane, and without engaging with other senses. This factor also flickers through the work of Wendy Red Star. An Apsáalooke multimedia artist, her collages show her community’s visual and material culture as it is formally displayed in ethnographic museums. “Since the time I left the Crow reservation I have encountered my tribe’s material culture in every city I have exhibited or occupied, and often in institutions which frequently display these historical artefacts improperly or impersonally, deprived of their context or function,” says Red Star, quoted in the book The Rose. Her collages include handwritten notes or her own hand holding objects, Kurland points out, reinserting the personal, the tactile, and the wider environment exorcised from the museum vitrines.

With this sense of the personal, and the very personal experience that kick-started The Rose, it is perhaps surprising that Kurland has not included the SCUMB Manifesto in any of its iterations. But that is a deliberate choice. “I’ve been showing my work for a long time and I have a really big platform,” she explains. “I feel very lucky about that, but it’s like in teaching – I am slowly learning to not talk so much, so that other people can feel encouraged to speak. In a collaboration or a shared space, it’s often the person who has most visibility who has to back off the most. I have already had a lot of opportunities; I don’t want to become the man I am criticising.”

The Rose is on at CPW Kingston, New York until 31 August, 2025

“I think there has been some reluctance to touch the mystery of magic of Carrie”

The subtext here taps into concerns Weems often refers to: a flattening of her oeuvre as exclusively Black art. She is equally concerned with notions of gender, gender dynamics, epistemology and collective memory, state violence, history, faith, bodies, place, ownership and rights. This is of course all channelled through her lived experience as an African American woman, yet one feels a tension when Weems, or her illusive, often-faceless ‘muse’ (played by the photographer herself) is seen as a metaphor for just – or nothing but – the Black experience.

One gets the feeling that this muse, described by Weems as a “witness, an agent, a being”, is a universal avatar, one representing all women, all people. Yet critics, scholars and curators tend to hone in on the melanin, failing to see the muse for all she is – a “stand-in for other possibilities”, as the artist describes her. It goes without saying that Weems is Black and proud, yet this conundrum begs a question, why the Black body, and artist, is restricted to only relay meditations of Blackness, while the white artist can dabble in a non-centralised intersectionality. Why can’t a Black woman represent us all? 

Through the exhibition, this seems to be Meister’s concern. Weems is not one of the most important Black American women artists of our time, it argues, she is one of the most important artists. “It emerged from the possibility of putting Carrie herself, her physical likeness, her voice, her family history, her spiritual journeys… putting these at the centre was both a way of considering her career in a way that hadn’t happened before, and touching on a lot of incredibly important work made across it,” says Meister. “I don’t want to throw shade on other curatorial colleagues, but I think there has been some reluctance to touch the mystery of magic of Carrie.” 

The Heart of the Matter sprawls across the labyrinthine underbelly of the Gallerie d’Italia, an impressive space now housing five chapters of Weems’ expansive career. Including works such as Roam, Leave Now! and the iconic Kitchen Table series, Weems also showcases new work. In Preach, the artist turns her documentary-adjacent lens on her church community in Syracuse, NY. Preach is spiritual, ecstatic and jubilant; Weems traces the short walk from Black American Church life to the struggle for civil rights and Black emancipation. “Dr King and Malcolm X both began in the Black Church,” she says. “The Black Church and the civil rights movement grew out of one another. There wouldn’t have been a movement without the Church.” The magic Meister mentions is afoot. 

A lot has been said about Carrie Mae Weems, but that is not to imply that more cannot – should not – be said. Reflecting on the exhibition, practice and intent, Weems knows what drives her: “Hope. Hope and hunger. And mystery.” Both Meister and Weems hope that at The Heart of the Matter, audiences will see Weems, and her muse, as a universal being. Her body, and by extent body of work, can and should be read as a default, an ambassador for humanity, and not only for the other, the subaltern, the minority. At the heart of the show, Meister and Weems stake that exact claim. Or, as Weems surmises: “We are all human. We are all crawling towards ourselves. Every day we crawl towards humanity, life, new ways of being.” 

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter is at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, until 07 September 2025

“Many Black and African women photographers are unfortunately typecast into covering topics solely related to Black culture, social justice, or race”

The database now serves as a resource for industry gatekeepers, including photo editors, directors, curators and art buyers. But it also provides members with community, funding, mentorship and professional development, including free webinars, workshops and portfolio reviews. That sense of community matters, says Irungu, who admits that, “At times, there’s a feeling that I have to ‘prove myself’ more than others, or that my work is underestimated based on my race.” BWP also launched the free annual Black Women Photographers Summit and the Black Women Photographers Podcast Network, and has partnered with brands including Adobe, Flickr, Live Nation and World Athletics. 

One of the big prevailing problems in the industry is pigeonholing, which limits both what Black and African women photographers are asked to shoot, and when. “Many Black and African women photographers are unfortunately typecast into covering topics solely related to Black culture, social justice, or race,” says Irungu. “Often, they’re only recognised during Black History Month and overlooked during Women’s History Month. This limited perspective hinders broader recognition of their skills and versatility as photographers. Black and African women photographers excel in a wide range of assignments, including outdoors, sports, music, fashion, editorial and commercial work.” 

The historic lack of representation also means stories relevant to Black communities or Black women have often been told by white or male (or both) photographers, usually with an outsider’s perspective. “The value of having Black women photographers document stories within the Black community, or African women photographers cover issues on the continent, can’t be overstated,” Irungu argues. “Their deep cultural understanding and lived experiences bring an authenticity and nuance that often fosters a more respectful and intimate approach to storytelling. This perspective results in narratives that are not only more accurate, but also resonate with a depth that might be overlooked by someone without the same background or cultural connection.” To date, BWP has also provided over $185,000 in financial grants, as well as $60,000 in new camera gear. Grace Ekpu, a Nigerian photojournalist and documentary film-maker, based in Lagos, was the recipient of a $10,000 BWP and Nikon grant for her Bridging Pain project, which focused on people with sickle cell anaemia and the disparities in healthcare access in different regions. “Being part of BWP has helped me feel part of a community of like-minded creatives,” Ekpu tells me. 

“It’s strengthened my views on how important it is to tell our stories and my resolve to continue to be a voice of change through my art.” Ekpu is particularly interested in socially-driven stories, including the impact of climate change on vulnerable people, especially women and children. “It’s important that as a Black woman, I’m able to freely tell the stories that affect me,” she says. “Stories about women’s issues, for instance, can only be told from the lens of a woman who can relate and can give it the best attention, and can also make the subject comfortable sharing their experiences. In my work around women who were former brides of Boko Haram terrorists, the women were able to share their stories to us fellow women and were comfortable in front of my camera. We need to eliminate the male gaze and do more stories that speak to the soul of our characters. We, as women, can also document historical events and shouldn’t be boxed into one corner. There’s a lot we can offer as Black women.” 

Tobi Sobowale, a British-Nigerian photographer based in London, found that joining BWP opened her eyes to the wide range of career opportunities. “Seeing people who looked like me in these roles inspired me to expand my perspective, helping me refine my focus and clarify how I wanted to evolve both my creative vision and my work,” she says. Community membership has brought many practical benefits, including Capture One sponsorship. “The software’s become an essential part of my creative process, especially in experimenting with and enhancing the use of colour in my work,” she says. “For the past three years, I’ve also had biweekly accountability sessions with Whitley Isa, a photographer from Belgium, who I met through the community. We set goals, support each other in achieving them, and reflect on our progress at the end of each year.” 

Sobowale strives to redefine Black beauty in commercial and fashion spaces. “Mainstream media often limits the portrayal of Black women, but through my photography I aim to highlight their vulnerability, strength, power and youthfulness,” she explains. “One example is my series Efflorescence, which explores the softness and delicacy of Black women, symbolising the transformation from a seed to a flower in bloom. As a Black woman myself, I approach photographing other Black women with intention and care.” 

Irungu has also had a busy period. Alongside running BWP, she worked at the White House for three years as the official photo editor for Vice President Kamala Harris, and as a photographer in the Biden-Harris administration. “Photographing in such a prestigious and high-profile environment has been the honour of a lifetime,” she says. “It’s been an opportunity to break barriers and be part of history, but it also comes with the weight of representation. Every time I walked through the doors of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or the West Wing, it was a reminder of how far we’ve come. Before myself and Cameron Smith, there had only been one Black woman photographer at the White House Photo Office: Sharon Farmer [hired in the early 1990s to photograph President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton].” 

BWP started out with a focus on photographers, but its membership has evolved, and it is now organising “two new verticals” – Black Women Videographers and Black Women Cinematographers. And Irungu has other big plans. “I’m excited about the future of Black Women Photographers and its continued growth as a global resource,” she says. “By our fifth anniversary in July, we anticipate BWP will have distributed $240,000 in grants and $80,000 in equipment. My aspiration is to reach the one million dollar mark in the near future. I’m committed to scaling our initiatives and fostering a thriving community for Black and African women creatives in every way possible.” 

blackwomenphotographers.com

There are individual portraits, like that of welder Anna Marie Rechichi – who looks like she could be in Hackney or Bushwick with her slim jeans, white tank and black hat

The bold act of being photographed is furthered by agreeing to be documented permanently within the book object – despite the peril of being publicly queer. “By courageously choosing to have their photographs and their names in print, these lesbians are definitely out for good, for the good of all of us who need to see ourselves as real people with daily lives and work to do,” JEB wrote in 1987 in her Photographer’s Notes. What JEB gifts the participants is a kind of existential ratification, a celebration of presence otherwise sidelined in mainstream society. The lens examined what those performing their ‘normativity’ overlook, explicitly or implicitly. The power of the camera to legitimise identity is potent: It sublimates comfort and liberates from closeting.

The images and the extensive captions reveal both individual and collective strength as these figures make committed gestures within political movements, civil rights groups, and coalitions for peace. Some of the images feel slightly dated through hairstyles, eyewear, or garments, but mostly there’s a timeless feeling of love, community, and strength. There are counselors for battered women, workers for crisis hotlines, physicians providing health care services, professors in their offices, the solidarity of benefit fundraisers, participants on task forces, demonstrators. 

Women of different races, ages, body types people the pages. There are scenes of lesbian affection: a romantic photo of Archene Turner and Lynn Walker touching foreheads in the backyard of their home in Georgia (1987), or longtime couple Lana Wall and Judith Carr clasping each other in Ohio (1986) or Cindy Miller and Bernadette Ryan kissing in front of a candle-lit table during their wedding vows at The Women’s Group in Texas (1987). There are scenes of leisure, namely a lesbian Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe moment as friend trio lynda lou ease, beckie lee, and Sandra Lambert gather together on a white blanket in the woods (1986). 

There are individual portraits, like that of welder Anna Marie Rechichi – who looks like she could be in Hackney or Bushwick with her slim jeans, white tank, black hat, sunglasses, studded belts, and fingerless gloves. Amie Laird tending a fire at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 1983 – barefoot, naked from the waist up, with a handkerchief on her head and rolled-up trousers – is the embodiment of a woman who is striking and self-sufficient. In one image, JEB and her lover are seen nude, legs tangled, in a mirror self-portrait taken in the Florida Keys in 1984.

In a foreword by Minnie Bruce Pratt, JEB’s aforementioned partner, she notes that being marginalised means wrangling “exclusion, oppression, and loss” but equally “risk, bravery, imagination, and survival, because we stand and look from the edge.” She meaningfully adds that: “This book could not have been made if women had not pushed past fear and been willing to claim their lesbian identity, to be seen and named so.” It is moving to learn the names of these fierce women, who are all explicitly cited and interviewed. To be named and to be seen: that is indeed making a way.

This reissue reveals both political upheaval and communal grace. Rejiggering the historical record, it provides a sense of ongoing lineage as new generations fight for queer rights. This book is not just a spotlight on a community for a community: it’s a socio-historical movement of empowerment that any orientation should embrace. As stated in her 2024 essay, educator and activist Cheryl Clarke concludes: “Heterosexuals are invited”.

Making Way: Lesbians Out Front is available at Anthology Editions

“The work is a response to the physical border which has been created by political leaders. We cannot change the circumstance, but we can change the perspective”

“Dreams are personal,” she continues. “When we are awake, we share moments together, but as soon as we close our eyes and we are asleep, we create a world which is absolutely private. You can let people come in or leave, and I love this life without borders. It is a response to the physical border which has been created by political leaders. We cannot change the circumstance, but we can change the perspective.”

An early job of translating for Iranian migrants as they arrived in England gave Mahmoodian access and insight to the recent journeys that people had made, how they saw themselves, and how they were seen in their new environments. She adds there was a sense of fear that the existing communities felt in the face of immigration. This prompted her desire to document people, and validate their existence in hostile spaces. At heart, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes is a portraiture project of invisible bonds and invisible people.

Mahmoodian’s sense of purpose was clear from the outset in wanting to portray people, to show immigration and its different layers without relying on typical, heavy-handed methods. Instead, we are presented with a body of work which introduces us to people’s inner lives, suggests a sense of their worlds and experiences, offers contexts to where this knowledge has derived from, and asks readers to interpret for themselves who is being witnessed.

The participatory project began with a small group of people in exile and led to dreams being recounted in the form of sketchbooks, poems and videos, slowly unfolding through a series of personal introductions, from one participant to the next, from Pakistan to Iraq to Russia and more until the project encompassed the stories of 16 people. The participatory nature also extended to the involvement of Multistory, a West Midlands-based organisation with a focus on community and connection which facilitated and offered support to the body of research Mahmoodian had compiled.

The slow process of documenting and recording their dreams began as a personal journey which was not immediately shared with Mahmoodian; once the foundation of trust had been established, the sharing began, as well as making introductions to others with similar stories and dreams. This became a network of interconnected experiences and memories of being far from home with Mahmoodian as their interpreter.

This role of interpreter and medium lent itself to photographing the participants with an intuitive and incisive approach. What defines a portrait? A visible face, an identifying feature, the intention to portray the reality of someone with an objective likeness? One Hundred and Twenty Minutes does not respond to these notions of a typical portrait project, however it deeply humanises the collaborators and recalls the other worlds in which they previously existed, through portraits which are both unreal and reflective.

Through parted curtains a diffused light falls onto a figure lying prone on a bed. The absence of a face or many identifying features is subtle yet intentional. The cropping, obscuring and masking of details all serve to guard the identities of the sitters. When faceless and nameless, they can fully inhabit and share these dreams without danger to themselves or the families they have left behind in the regimes they have fled. Exile has not allowed for full expression, but Mahmoodian has gathered and dispersed narratives that are articulate, insightful and specific to these lives and relationships explored throughout the collaboration. The portraits are an act of trust between photographer and sitter, and the force of the portraits is an indicator of the strength of these collaborative relationships.

The series of images are also a distillation of dreams in which anything can happen and different strands of life can co-exist. The portrait of the individual, veiled by another curtain, demonstrates this break in time and narrative. The figure cradles two newborn dolls in a pose reminiscent of virtuous, Mary-like statues. A disrupted state of motherhood is suggested by the presence of the children, potentially acting as placeholders for others who cannot be pictured here for reasons that are not shared.

The lightweight curtain is a barrier between the sitter and her surrogate children, preventing physical touch between them, though the chance for metaphorical reconnection remains possible. The second, heavier set of curtains can still encompass them in a final sweep that hides them from our sight, while bringing them into the same plane. This image demonstrates the many layers of meaning and remove that are at play in these real, and often painful relationships. We can only begin to imagine who and what has been left behind in this life, and what solace the dreams can bring.

The portraits share space with images in this series which possess the abstract, ungraspable quality that often occurs when recounting dreams in the light of a new day. They are like portals to a place that changes the nature of its fabric at every occasion. The images also demonstrate the transition from sleep to wake and renewal. A snapshot furtively taken from the back of a moving car, view partially restricted, lending a sense of hurried escape, or the whorl and creases of a navel mirrored in another image of the bark of a tree, all now impossible to decipher. The series offers fragments, imprints, impressions, moments of people re-enacted and caught up by Mahmoodian.

The abstract nature allows for all the dream threads to tangle together into one narrative, returning to Mahmoodian’s urge to move towards a life without borders. The weaving together is also shared in the collaborative process which became so all-encompassing that Mahmoodian started to dream the participants’ dreams, temporarily becoming them in these third spaces. Mahmoodian noted that, in dreams we do not often see our bodies, that we are fully within ourselves and the point of view is first person. In making portraits of these dreams, a third-person perspective has been added, and it becomes possible to see both body and context in the same view. This, combined with empathy, makes these stories and people more visible.

This line of empathetic, subsuming storytelling runs throughout many other projects by Mahmoodian, which also feature people living at a remove either physically or across time. In Zanjir, she draws upon a set of portraits taken from a museum’s archive in central Tehran to stage an imagined conversation between herself and the Persian princess and memoirist Taj Saltaneh. The two artists are separated by decades, Mahmoodian born over 40 years after Saltaneh’s death, yet they work in tandem to present their poetry, portraits, memoirs and archival images within the context of a contemporary world.

The faces within the portraits allow us to see through fresh eyes, to encounter events for the first time which did not exist at the time the portraits were made, and to enable a type of comparison between before and after. Zanjir, meaning chain, is a link between past and present identities, binding, weighing down, but also lashing together. The project highlights the tangible outcomes of Saltaneh’s activism, outspoken feminism and criticism of the monarchy which was headed by her father. Placing the archival images in a contemporary setting demonstrates the steps taken to lead to the present tense. To achieve this, Mahmoodian has overlaid and performed with the portraits in ways that further close the gap of time.

Mahmoodian has not taken these portraits, but she has created possibilities for them. New narratives are shuffled and shared out in different settings and then rephotographed. In recapturing and re-presenting them, she lends the sitters bodies and temporarily makes them physical. They take up space at the table, a relaxed moment captured in their borrowed jeans, casual tops and everyday jewellery. They are sat in public parks, held by hands which first frustrate and then merge with the view of the contemporary sitters holding them in place. These are double portraits consisting of archival portraits and present-day life, and their overlapping shapes.

The ordinary domesticity lends the images a family album aesthetic. Groupings of possible siblings, cousins, parents and extended family sit, lean, crouch, mimic and are reflected, either in bodies of water, in mirrors, or in the reprinted images which act as the temporary face of the sitter. Alongside this aesthetic are multiple exposures which speak to these many perspectives and positions. A shimmering hand waves a path through the air in one image, while in another a man – Mahmoodian’s father – pivots, turning to face several directions while being photographed, as if contemplating the many possible directions one can take.

Mahmoodian explains that many of her projects are located within or taken from archives, with the photograph becoming a document of what happened and what remains while demonstrating this process of reinterpretation. This continues in Shenasnameh, in which the documented objects are a series of ID photos. There is yet another personal thread throughout which guides viewers from initial idea to delivery.

A Shenasnameh is an Iranian birth certificate and features a photograph which requires periodical updating; while waiting to renew her photograph with her mother, Mahmoodian could not help but note how the differences between herself and her mother’s identification images had been flattened, and how the similarities had been exaggerated.

This smoothing and cloning effect is the result of Iran’s now mandatory wearing of the hijab, a head covering for women. The compulsory nature removes people’s choice and leaves what can be seen on the surface to be an unyielding template for women to fit into. The scarf made not just Mahmoodian and her mother appear to be interchangeable but also removed the defining surface features of the women portrayed in these collected portraits. The Shenasnameh also features the ID holder’s fingerprint and it is really here, in these unreadable, indecipherable patterns, that women can emphasise their individuality and character.

The scale of the image, the size of a passport photo, something small and easily tucked away or forgotten, also contributes towards a sense that these women have been designed to be insignificant. It is left to the small details to define the sitters within the images. The shape of the eyebrows, the angle at which the woman presents herself to the camera, the warmth of the black-and-white images or the choice or availability of a colour portrait, the creases and stamps all serve to differentiate the women in a way they are not able to achieve for themselves in everyday, non-photographic settings. “Some protests are silent,” Mahmoodian observes.

September 2024 was the two-year anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who died soon after being arrested by the Guidance Patrol for allegedly not wearing her hijab correctly. Iranian police deny involvement in Amini’s death but her passing became one of many galvanising moments in a fight against dictatorship which has spanned decades, this instance notably women-led. This recent wave of protest has adopted the Woman, Life, Freedom slogan from other long-standing, women-led protests and demonstrations. 

Mahmoodian explains that this is another unifying moment for communities facing repression and violence within and beyond Iran, and that in spite of the criticism many have faced – including Mahmoodian – there is a dedication, almost a devotion, to this revolution.

The notion of the obscured portrait is approached from another perspective in the Gereh series. Here, Mahmoodian leans in with the camera and creates portraits of sitters who all engage in the ritual of tying their headscarves as a small flourish of their personalities. The family connection we can now expect to see in Mahmoodian’s projects derives its inspiration from her grandmother, whose own knotted scarves Mahmoodian began to see sported by strangers on the streets of Tehran.

Mahmoodian spoke with people and collected stories and created an inventory of scarves and their wearers. Again, the political and social are tied into this project, and the small acts of personal defiance and visual compliance are put forth for us to see as a recurring motif. The women are young, old, tattooed, made-up, jewelled, or heavily layered. Some knots are tight, unlikely to need retying throughout the day, others are pinned, while some are loosely draped or hang free entirely.

Of note are the three portraits which do not feature knots at all and are fascinating in their use of nature and natural materials to mimic the presence of a knot while removing the headscarf altogether. A bunch of grapes is both fun and provocative in its sparse covering of the body. The lightweight mimicry and draping, the complementary colours of the deep green leaf and red hanging material demonstrate how easily and seamlessly the scarf can be replaced, while introducing ideas of beauty and rebellion. Again, these portraits reveal only half a face yet possess a sense of individualism, and acknowledge a series of personal decisions that have brought these women before the camera.

A thread which runs throughout Mahmoodian’s work is the desire to find and rehome the lost and the irreplaceable. Mahmoodian achieves this through inviting several perspectives which look out, look back, and look beyond the single experience to create empathy and understanding through photography. Without resorting to nostalgia or creating a shrine to those no longer here or unable to be fully present, Mahmoodian has approached the passage of time, memory and people with a lightness and an affinity which runs throughout her collaborative approach. Her portraits are centred on identities that are veiled but still revealing in their nature.

Mahmoodian cleverly makes use of cultural constraints in informing her projects, creating portraits which ebb and flow in their reveals. The sense of a person, their personality, experience, lives and connections are documented in the details of Mahmoodian’s portraits. The collaborative storytelling, the images reimagined through their contemporary connections, the double portraits, the half portraits, the close-ups, all contribute towards enabling understanding of how identities are shaped within political landscapes, and the impact and importance of documenting these acts and these faces. 

amakmahmoodian.com

“I focus on womanhood in the Middle East, exploring the unique challenges, complexities, and strengths that define the experiences of women from my region”

Though Hilal’s work aesthetically varies, displaying a diverse technical skill set, her work features women almost exclusively and explores similar themes throughout. Her pieces also often obfuscate the subject, such as Quartet. “Objects and photographs act as vessels for memories, and through them, I try to capture the subtle shifts in time,” Hilal tells me. “The way a once-clear recollection can become distorted, yet still holds significant weight in our lives.”

There’s something about the fragility of memory that draws Hilal in, and she reflects this “sense of impermanence” in her work. Chronic Tenderness, for example, shows a subject’s pose as a repeated motif, rotating as it appears again and again, with parts of the image missing and reappearing. The work has an unsteadying effect, as if we’re not quite sure what we’re looking at, a reflection of the untrustworthy nature of memory.

“I also focus on womanhood in the Middle East, exploring the unique challenges, complexities, and strengths that define the experiences of women from my region,” Hilal tells me. “My work reflects the interplay between tradition and modernity, societal expectations and personal identity, capturing the resilience and power that shape the lives of women in the Middle East.”

Working with her hands, Hilal finds the tactile, physical process to be a necessary vehicle of connection to themes, ideas and subjects of exploration. “For me, there is something so intimate about using my hands to shape, manipulate, and transform raw materials,” she explains. “It’s in this hands-on approach, as it allows me to be fully immersed in the process, to feel the texture, weight, and rhythm of the work.” And experimenting with physical art materials means Hilal has to be open to embracing the unpredictability that comes with experimenting, as “it’s through this process that my ideas truly take shape and come to life”.

Focusing on creating work has been “incredibly challenging” for Hilal recently. With Israel’s invasion on Beirut and South Lebanon, Hilal says that “being here on the ground, witnessing my country in turmoil, facing the possibility of losing my home or loved ones, and knowing that no one is truly safe is deeply unsettling.” But she says she finds solace in daily visits to her studio: “Creating has become my way of holding onto a sense of normalcy – it’s not just work, but a form of therapy that helps me process and persevere.”

Hilal’s most recent show with the collective Hayaty Diaries in London marks her third time exhibiting with them. The all-female SWANA group, founded in 2022 by Kinzy Diab and Christina Shoucair, showcases contemporary women from the region, and Hilal was the sole lens-based practitioner included in their latest exhibition I forgot what you felt like in November. “It’s a privilege to be part of a collective that not only celebrates creativity but also highlights the strength and voices of women from our region,” says Hilal. She’s currently in the research phase for a project which she hopes to exhibit as a solo show in 2025.

yasminahilal.com

“It’s really confronting the gender norms of what this world is expecting of them”

“Women used to compete in bronc riding,” explains McCord, “and then in the 1920s a woman died and everyone [claimed that] women can’t do this anymore. God forbid the poor fragile creatures die. Men have also died. Men are severely injured pretty regularly, I would say,” explains McCord. “Women were banned from competing, and although some women did still compete at local rodeos, sometimes entering under false names, you cannot do that in the PRCA rodeos, which is the big organisational body for rodeo, like FIFA is for football.”

So many of McCord’s personal interests intersect in women’s bronc riding, from female friendships and human connections, to the culture surrounding competitive sport and the western ranch lifestyle, that once her interest was piqued she went down a rabbit hole of research. She eventually landed on the Instagram page of a top bronc rider named Katie Coker. Chatting over DM and then video call, Coker shared her story and information on the current scene in the women’s sport – including the rise of rodeo schools where people can learn to ride safely –  and McCord asked if she could come to an event to photograph it, which eventually led to the series Bronc Girls.

McCord travelled to Deadwood for an event and roomed together with Coker and another female competitor, Ally Bradley, capturing moments of downtime as well as preparation, which resemble scenes of girls getting ready for a night out. “A lot of the girls were putting on makeup, there are hair extensions going in, there is jewellery being added, to go get on this horse for eight seconds that is potentially going to kill you. It’s like a hyper feminine preparation to go do this thing that is very much not [seen as feminine]. It’s really interesting.”

“I love that in the photos,” McCord continues, “you can see them in their underwear and they’re putting on makeup in the mirror, but if you’re looking closely, Ally has a massive bruise on her thigh. They are covered in KT tape that is holding all of their joints together and supporting their muscles. And Ally’s also got a cast on her hand, and Katie has a knee wrap. They are serious athletes, and they are tough, but they’re also girls who enjoy getting dressed up and having fun and being ‘girly’. I love that they can hold both of these things at the same time.”

More heightened than with some other women’s sports, the rigour and the risk their bodies are put through come to represent something more profound in light of the current political context for women’s bodies in the country. “I think the thing that I find really interesting and that really draws me to the project is women’s bronc riding is something that happens in this incredibly conservative environment.”

As women’s bodily autonomy is being debated in all forums, from podcasts right up to the highest courts in America, that these women are putting their bodies at risk, and particularly in the context of the conservative, male-dominated arena of bronc riding, feels radical. “It’s really confronting the gender norms of what this world is expecting of them,” says McCord.

“That is like a real active female autonomy, it’s choosing to do something and being like, ‘I’m not just here to be safe and make babies, I’m gonna go do something that I wanna do that is challenging and demanding and dangerous and that doesn’t align with this very confined idea of femininity.’”

@jrcmccord

“The portrait of her that has been painted is one-dimensional. She did very interesting work on progressive educational institutions in the 1940s and 50s, and photographed poverty in the streets”

Tudor-Hart published work with left-wing publications such as Der Kuckuck in Austria, and Lilliput and later Picture Post in the UK (both founded by Austro-Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant). The Tudor-Harts moved in liberal circles, and in 1933 she was commissioned to photograph the Isokon, a modernist apartment block in north London. “Edith published one of the first stories on the Bauhaus in British print media, and was commissioned to photograph the Isokon’s construction over several months,” explains Stefanie Pirker, an Austrian researcher who has curated an exhibition of Tudor-Hart’s Isokon images, now on show in London. “There was a network of exiled Austrians and Germans and the Isokon became a kind of Bauhaus in Britain – a hub for an enlightened intellectual milieu.” 

Tudor-Hart’s images from this period include shots of her friends Jack and Molly Pritchard, the couple who, along with architect Wells Coates, spearheaded the construction of the flats; she also took appealing images of Isokon’s exterior and interiors, plus its opening party. As a committed left-winger, she photographed the workmen building the flats too, acknowledging their labour and, in doing so, recording valuable information about their construction techniques. The Isokon, which is also known as Lawn Road Flats, was the first reinforced concrete apartment block in the UK, and was pitched as both technically and socially progressive. Promoting “a revolutionary way of living”, the idea was that young men and women of average means would inhabit minimally sized, but fully serviced, utopian flats. 

Tudor-Hart used a balcony shot from the grand opening to make the Isokon’s first Christmas card and Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, bought a stack to send out; he had moved in shortly after the block opened in 1934. Other residents included Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, and (later on) Agatha Christie, while Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were regulars at the Isobar, the building’s basement social space. Another resident was Dr Arnold Deutsch, who Tudor-Hart had known since 1926, a spy for the NKVD (Russian secret service). Other spies also lived in the flats and it is thought Tudor-Hart worked alongside them, recruiting English secret agent Kim Philby on a park bench in Regent’s Park for Deutsch’s ‘Cambridge Five’ ring. 

Pirker says it is more likely she just introduced the two because she was friends with them both, but Anthony Blunt, another member of the Cambridge Five, dubbed Tudor-Hart “the grandmother of us all” in a 1964 confession to MI5. Either way, Tudor-Hart was kept under watch for years – while she and Alex lived in south Wales, where he served as a GP and she photographed deprivation in the Rhondda Valley; and after the birth of her son Tommy in 1936, and for many years after the war. Tommy was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a child (Pirker says now it would more likely be seen as a severe form of autism) and, after Alex quit the UK to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, the couple split up. Edith was left to look after Tommy alone. 

She had to earn a living through commercial commissions, says Pirker, but she was still innovative, for example becoming one of the first UK photographers to publish images of special-needs schools. But her circumstances eventually overwhelmed her and her work, and she had what was described as a nervous breakdown in the mid-50s. It is thought she destroyed many images at that point. “From a modern perspective, it was more likely a depression,” says Pirker. “There are nearly 700 pages of files and letters in the National Archives [on her] and it’s quite sad to read them. She definitely had some misfortunes. She stopped being a photographer in the 1950s, and worked as an antique dealer in Brighton.” 

According to her niece, Julia Donat, her family believed the MI5 surveillance played a large part in Tudor-Hart’s problems. “My mother claimed that Edith didn’t like her and that this was because when the police had come looking for Kim Philby and asked her whether she had any photographs of him, she had burned many of her negatives in the sink and had a subsequent mental breakdown,” Donat writes, in a publication accompanying the Isokon show. “My mother had taken her to a mental hospital.” 

Tudor-Hart died in 1973 and her work has remained underacknowledged, albeit included in shows in the National Galleries of Scotland, Open Eye Gallery and, more recently, Four Corners. The full portfolio of her Isokon images might have disappeared altogether, if not for her brother. Wolfgang Suschitzky died in 2016, and in 2018 his family arranged for his archive to move to the Fotohof in Salzburg. Some of Tudor-Hart’s negatives were with this material and Pirker, a freelance researcher and member of Fotohof, came across them. Another tranche of her archive was at the National Galleries of Scotland, again acquired because of her brother, and researched by Duncan Forbes. Forbes is now director of photography at the V&A however and, the Suschitzkys having lost their champion in Scotland, this material was also moved to Fotohof Archive in Salzburg and reunited with the other part of her estate. 

In Salzburg, Pirker and her colleagues have painstakingly restored and digitised this wider archive of Tudor-Hart’s images; Pirker is now completing a PhD on Tudor-Hart’s work, tracing its progress – and her life – through contemporary publications and records. Pirker also arranged for the Isokon show, which includes some 65 images, and has curated a wider retrospective opening at Fotohof in June. She plays down the espionage angle while conceding it is intriguing; the problem is it has dominated readings of Tudor-Hart’s work, she says, which was actually wide and varied. 

“The portrait of her that has been painted is one-dimensional,” she says. “She did very interesting work on progressive educational institutions in the 1940s and 50s, and photographed poverty in the streets, and you can see the influence of Freikörperkultur [the ‘free body culture’ that minimised shame around nudity] in her photographs of dance. She shot on commission for companies such as Boots, and used images of her son, Tommy, to give this work authenticity. At Isokon flats she photographed the workers on breaks as well as the opening party, really bringing together everyone involved with the flats. “Her background was that of a progressive Austrian from Social Democratic circles, and you can read all that in her work,” Pirker adds. “That is exciting, and she was a fantastic photographer.”

Through a Bauhaus Lens: Edith Tudor-Hart and Isokon is on show at Isokon Gallery, London, until 26 October 2025. The accompanying book by Leyla Daybelge and Stefanie Pirker is published by Isokon Gallery Trust with Fotohof Editions. isokongallery.org fotohof.at