“If we can’t see where we’re from, maybe we can invent a homeland”

That informal education helped the brothers forge a style unburdened by documentary conventions. “Because we didn’t go to photo school, we didn’t get too obsessed with reportage or journalistic truth,” says Jibril. “Our lens was always through cinema, where fiction is welcome. We were more interested in creating worlds that invite imagination.”

Their earliest experiments in Los Angeles were inspired by the analog revival of the early 2010s. After discovering medium-format film on Tumblr, they met British photographer Tyrone Lebon at a Q&A, a pivotal encounter that introduced them to darkroom printing and led to their first editorial work for i-D Magazine. “We sent him our images, and he gave us feedback,” Jibril recalls. “Eventually, he introduced us to the team at i-D, and we got our first commissions, profiles on Rejjie Snow and Keith Ape.”

As their editorial work developed, the brothers began reflecting on how their itinerant upbringing shaped their outlook. “Being exposed to so many cultures has been a gift,” says Jibril. “When you’ve actually seen the world, your vocabulary for images widens. What we used to see as displacement, we now see as a tool for maturation.”

In 2017, revisiting their family photos from the Caribbean proved transformative. “We realised that what moved us wasn’t just other people’s aesthetics,” says Jibril, “but the warmth and sunlight we grew up around. We decided to use those techniques to tell stories about the Caribbean, about tropical identity. That’s when we stopped imitating and started defining our own voice.”

Movement has defined the Durimel blueprint and seems to continue to colour their visual worlds. Their subsequent move to Paris expanded their exploration of occidental design and African diasporas. “We were struck by the African presence in Paris,” says Jibril. “At first we thought we’d photograph the diaspora there, but after speaking to people we decided to go directly to Africa.” Travelling to Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal deepened their ongoing book project, Quiet as the Country (a working title), a long-term body of work that weaves portraiture, landscape, and costume into a fictional yet emotionally grounded world.

“We wanted to make a photo book based on a fictitious tropical republic,” Jibril explains. “If we can’t see where we’re from, maybe we can invent a homeland. Through that make-believe, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves.”

The project, which has been in progress for nearly nine years, began partly out of frustration with the commercial fashion system. “Fashion can be too hierarchical and too fast,” says Jibril. “It was limiting. The book became a cry for autonomy – a way to rediscover creativity without deadlines.”

The brothers now work with small crews, relying on natural light and minimal styling. “We love bare makeup and simple materials.  Coconut oil, sunlight, the park at sunrise,” says Jibril. “We like to keep things light: a bag of clothes, a reflector, and our cameras. It’s about letting the image feel like it’s already happening.” That simplicity mirrors their broader creative philosophy: “We try not to over-manipulate,” says Jibril. “We want the photos to feel natural, effortless.”

Their latest project, Lundambuyu’s Mobility Program features Habiba Hopson as ‘Lundambuyu,’ a fictitious mobility trainer, it’s an ode to the able body. Here, the goal is beauty in the pursuit of dignifying our everyday lives, Durimel printed a limited run of 500 posters from the series that was shared for free at Climax Books in New York City, the first public reception of their work, on 27 October. 

Nature itself has become an essential part of their visual and spiritual vocabulary. “We look at nature as the idea of God,” Jibril reflects. “The best art feels like God made it. When you look at a tree or stones in a river, there’s effortlessness. That’s what we try to achieve – something that feels organic, like it already existed.”

Recently, they have been experimenting with still lifes of natural concretions — stones that form without human intervention. They realised they were always drawn to the images that felt untouched. Jibril says, “that’s when it clicked. Even in our portraiture, we’re searching for that same natural expression.”

Despite their shared vision, collaboration remains a careful balance. As one can imagine, working with family can’t be a straightforward feat. “Working together is a social journey,” says Jalan. The brothers have had to learn how to communicate better, but admit “it’s something we’re still figuring out,”, says Jalan. Their process now gives each twin autonomy within their shared practice. “If one of us has an idea, that person leads the shoot,” Jalan explains. “The other assists completely. It’s about surrendering power so ideas can flow.”

Both brothers are also cultivating individual practices: Jibril has returned to drawing and draftsmanship, while Jalan is teaching himself music and songwriting. “Having our own outlets has been liberating,” says Jibril. “It makes the collaboration healthier.”

Now based in New York, they are continuing work on Quiet as the Country while seeking the right publishing and gallery partners, aiming tentatively for a 2026 release. “We don’t know exactly when,” Jibril admits. “But what the project has done for us – for our relationship, and for how we understand image-making – has already been enough.”

At the centre of their work is a commitment to transformation – a belief that art is not only about making something beautiful but also about becoming through the process. “Art is metamorphosis,” says Jibril. “Each project teaches us who we are. We just want to make something beautiful that makes people feel something.”

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“As a curator, I want to ensure that photography is no longer used as a tool of violence, no matter how naïve that ambition may seem”

When I first read these words, my skin prickled and my mouth ran dry. This reflection reaffirms my hesitation about returning to live in America, in my body, with my identity, and amid the lack of real leftist political representation. My parents came to the United States in 1994. It was not money or social welfare that drew my parents from Germany, but the idea of America itself. Twenty years later, I found this evidenced in the slide film my father keeps in our garage: the Twin Towers, the Statue of Liberty, emulsified as proof of a private faith. While the fear I feel is fickle and mostly unfounded, as I exist with the privilege of a white woman, other parts of me – my queerness and values –  were already largely rejected by my family, part of what made me leave the United States four years ago.

Yet, I feel a strange sense of patriotism, as if I need to return and bring my body “home,” to help balance some kind of scale. The act of forgetting, of trying to return to a certain past, or propel ourselves toward an uncertain future, seems to be at the core of American-ness. In my feature on Diana Guerra, she writes a quote that reads like a battle cry when placed next to her self-portraits: “Apparently, in America, we have forgotten that our bodies prevail over any social or political structures.”

This tension, between bodies and politics, care and control, also echoes through Maggie Shannon’s series Safe Haven, about which she writes: “Apparently, in America, care is rationed while cruelty is abundant. The most intimate moments of our lives – birth, loss, healing – are legislated, surveilled, and politicised.” Her images, taken inside a Maryland abortion clinic post-Roe, witness bonds formed between patients and staff that transcend politics. Within those walls, care becomes an act of resistance.

A friend recently unfollowed me, along with 500 others, while they were applying for a student visa to study in the States, as if politics were contagious. My personal photography has faced censorship, and I recently chose to delete an entire project from my website because its protagonist is a DACA recipient. The images could put them in greater danger, especially considering how ICE is kidnapping people off the streets. What people do not realise is that we have always had to shrink ourselves. I have seen people detained at the border crossing in Tijuana for nothing more than having an orange in their backpack. A.I.A. would be a better reason, at least.

As Aldo Cervantes writes, reflecting on the in-betweenness and scapegoating of immigrant life: “Fear is their favourite weapon, but resilience is everything, omnipotent when we look after each other.”

In curating this platform, I have ruminated on how contemporary photography feels to me as if it leans away from fascist rhetoric. Perhaps this is the result of the critical thinking required to conduct research and piece together visual stories and histories independently, which draws many of us toward leftist frameworks. As a curator, I want to ensure that photography is no longer used as a tool of violence, no matter how naïve that ambition may seem. There are painters like Jon McNaughton, working from photographs to memorialise Trump as a great leader as we speak, but those who continue to engage in unethical photographic practices are increasingly falling out of my view.

My engagement with my camera saved my life. The art photography world has taught me about elusive concepts like emotional regulation, empathy, and the willingness to sit with complexity. If a meme distorting JD Vance’s face is capable of deportation, we have to take photography more seriously than ever. A friend’s photography project once reunited her with her long-lost half-sister, and I see images making tangible impacts like this every day. So when we talk about a “post-photographic” world, I refuse to believe that our urge to image our realities can, or should, be replaced.

I open my Instagram feed to see a DSLR encrusted in mud and blood. The caption reads: “The weapon Israel fears most.” A jarring reminder of photography’s position in the world, a medium born from surveillance, yet constantly reclaimed as a tool of agency and resistance. Of course, we, the people of photography, align ourselves with the decolonial and radical revolutionary love. At least I do. As conversations about who is represented by whom, and by what means, intensify, I return to William Camargo’s haunting words: “Apparently, in America, we have forgotten that the body is policed, surveilled by the invention of the photograph and camera.”

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All images © Elizar Veerman

The Dutch-born Moluccan artist is interested in how class creates solidarity among immigrant communities through tender images of young men in Europe

When I call Elizar Veerman, he’s at his father’s house in Maluku, an archipelago in the eastern part of Indonesia, far from where he grew up in the Netherlands. During the 17th century, The Dutch East India Company exerted significant control over Maluku with the aim of controlling the spice trade. Today, the result is a large diaspora in the Netherlands, a country which not only has a strong and flourishing immigrant population but also has less than welcoming policies towards migrants. As with any urban area, cities like Rotterdam have designated areas for migrants.

Born and raised in a small village near Rotterdam, in a “big Moluccan diaspora and immigrant community”, Veerman enjoyed taking street portraits heavily inspired by Bruce Davidson’s seminal photo book Subway. The reference is immediately evident in his work which is often intimate and textured. Though, Veerman tells me he began to feel he was quickly being boxed in as a ‘Moluccan photographer’.

“I was basically just imitating these [street] photographers, my work was quite naive in that sense. At a certain point I had quite a big street portfolio and I started to realise that I wasn’t really able to conceptualise my work,” Veerman tells me. “Aesthetically I was able to take a nice street portrait, but I couldn’t really put it in a broader context.”

After Veerman was accepted into the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague he started to study documentary photography under Rob Hornstra and began to tie his work together to form a larger tapestry: “I started to realise that these street portraits were actually part of a bigger diasporic story. It was quite autobiographical. I didn’t know that yet but I was doing it subconsciously.” During his time at the Academy, he developed two long-term projects, You Huddle to Keep Warm and Moluccan Legacies, the former focused on diasporic youth, mostly male, in cities like Marseille and Amsterdam, and the latter focused on Moluccan families in domestic spaces in the Netherlands.

Being Moluccan in diaspora is a two-fold effort in visibility and agency. Not only are these communities demoted to the ‘migrant class’ by wider Dutch society, but Maluku had to fight for its own independence back home where it was integrated into the Republic of Indonesia.

Moluccan Legacies is very much about remedying this imagistic legacy. The work presents Moluccan families at home in the Netherlands, in a portraiture tradition and purposefully filled with Moluccan identity symbols. In one image, three children pose in traditional dress, a sincere expression on their faces, backgrounded by a map of Maluku. It is a celebration of heritage but also of a shared struggle for independence in diaspora and on native soil. “I was always very frustrated about the way the Moluccan community was being portrayed in Dutch media,” continues Veerman. “The image language that was always being used by Dutch newspapers and Dutch media was always imagery of protests or of the train hijackings,” of Moluccans as “angry.” 

The more I speak to Veerman, it becomes apparent he seems to be deeply self-aware of himself as a photographer and of his camera; of the fact that many immigrant communities are exploited for aesthetics without compensation, of the fact that entire trends have emerged capitalising on young men of colour in European cities without taking their wellbeing into account. He’s concerned with not reproducing the harmful image-making practices of his contemporaries. Veerman’s work does not separate identity politics from class politics. For him, it’s impossible to illustrate the immigrant experience without questioning the role class plays in the communities he photographs, and his role in it, too. 

“My friends and family always say that I’m basically photographing myself indirectly – not in the literal sense that I’m taking self-portraits or that I’m literally looking aesthetically for someone who looks like me,” says the artist, “but definitely the interest for my work and the focus of my work starts with how I was brought up: as a man of colour in a white society with a postcolonial identity.” 

Veerman grew up with the heavy influence of street culture, “chilling at the skate park. That’s also how I got into graffiti culture and all these subcultures that were around Rotterdam mostly occupied by these migrant youths.” He was raised alongside Caribbean, North African, and various other migrant youth; what connected them was not their shared heritage but their shared experiences of being young racialised men, stereotyped and vilified.

Thousands of Moluccans fought in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army after the Dutch government promised that they would eventually get their own independent state, the Republic of South Maluku. After the Indonesian National Revolution, Moluccan soldiers and families were forced on a government command to The Netherlands by 12 ships in 1951  (Veerman’s family was on the first ship: Kota Inten), “the community was displaced against their will,” he says. Moluccans were told that their stay would be temporary, that with Dutch pressure, a Moluccan nation which they could return to would be established. This promise was never fulfilled. 

Veerman is interested in capturing this solidarity between racialised and demonised communities, “how these different cultures are indirectly intertwined with each other, how they are redeveloping themselves within public space and emerging within subcultures. I always thought that my work was purely about culture and more about these diasporic themes and about my community – which it is on the surface – but especially the last year I started to notice that my work is more and more about social class and that’s the culture.” A thinker like Martinique-born philosopher Édouard Glissant would call this the creolisation of diasporic communities that become alike by the very nature of how they are apart from one another in a dominant western society. 

In You Huddle to Keep Warm, young black and brown men are positioned in masculine intimacies, asking us to consider the role of friendships and loyalties in communities where these young men are constantly fighting against social processes such as ghettoisation and segregation – but also everyday racism – in cities like Amsterdam and Marseille. Men touch hands whilst spinning on a motorbike creating a cloud of smoke, or two boys lean on each other in the warm sea water. These interactions are purposefully tender and oppositional to mainstream media’s obsession with classing immigrant youth as criminal, antisocial and troublesome. 

In one scene, in the southeast of Amsterdam, a father poses with his baby daughter on a yellow motorbike – the scene is particularly warm not only due to the colours but owing to the comfortability of Veerman’s subjects. The father spotted Veerman photographing his yellow motorbike. He started screaming at Veerman in street slang, asking why Veerman was taking photographs of the bike. “You can only photograph it while I’m on it,” the father said before coming down with his daughter. The duality of this interaction, being both suspicious yet forthcoming, is echoed in the image of a strong masculine figure contrasting his small feminine daughter. 

Motorbikes are a recurring theme in Veerman’s work, something he’s been reflecting on. In another scene in the Netherlands, a group of young men seem to accidentally match the colours of their bikes with their t-shirts as they perform tricks on the asphalt. At once, these bikes come to represent so much; youth, masculinity, urbanism, status and aesthetic. In Moluccan culture, “the motorbike is a very big thing,” says Veerman. “We have these motor clubs, the most famous one is called Satudarah which means ‘one blood’ in Moluccan-Malaysian. When I was younger I always used to go to these bike ride outs with my father which were happening in Moluccan neighbourhoods.” 

The photographer found the same culture in Marseille, “guys driving on Yamaha bikes in working-class migrant communities. It’s also very practical and functional, especially in the south of Europe. But from a more sociological point of view,” continues Veerman, “I think it’s also a way for men to show themselves and almost celebrate themselves.”

Today, Veerman is shifting his gaze back to the homeland. After five years of shooting diaspora around Europe, he feels a desire to make more work his Moluccan identity. He’s currently working on a “very personal project” about his relationship with his father while “combining that with still lives of the village and of the land.

“I find it very interesting that he grew up in certain circumstances in the Netherlands after being in exile and now moved back to the land where he’s from,” says Veerman. “I find it a very beautiful metaphor.” 

@elizarveerman

“We are getting information through a process that is very artificial and with massive manipulation. And the way we are getting this news and information makes it seem very separate to us, like it’s a bubble that is hard to touch”

A strange mix of left-wing politics and right-wing establishment bias, this case fascinated Thaddé Comar, a young French-Swiss artist then studying photography at ECAL, Lausanne. Curious about the representation of the so-called saboteurs, he went to Paris’ Palais de Justice and saw Jérémie Assous, the lawyer defending one of them, speaking to the media outside. Smartly dressed and standing in front of a former royal palace, Assous was surrounded by an enormous press pack wielding long-lens cameras and microphones.

“It was the first time I had witnessed so much media surrounding one lawyer, and I found it fascinating,” says Comar. “I had seen images, but now I was living it myself. When you’re wearing this black suit, with this tie, and behind you, you have this grand courthouse, it is all a staging process – a way of staging information and power, a theatre. I wasn’t really interested in photographing Assous, because I didn’t have to sell my pictures [to a newspaper], I was more interested in this whole hustle. So I put myself as high as I could and tried to get different angles on the media machine.” 

Back in Lausanne he started to assemble the shots in a single image, surrounding Assous with a nest of journalists and equipment that was absurd, yet at first sight also credible. Comar wanted to make an image that was “spectacular and catchy, so that anyone who looked at it would have to look twice”, and the impulse became an ongoing project. From 2019 to 2024 he returned to the Palais de Justice in Paris and to the French National Assembly (part of the French Parliament), photographing powerful politicians and lawyers as they spoke with the press; back at home he amassed them into seamless fictions.

Ranging from Marine Le Pen to Pierre Laurent, the speakers come from across the political spectrum, and represent a wide range of views (while being strikingly white and predominantly male). But they also have access to an enormous media network, broadcasting words far beyond their immediate circle. The sheer number of cameras and microphones in Comar’s images is exaggerated, but in terms of a wider truth it barely scratches the surface.

Comar recently made a book of these images, titled Aujourd’hui (‘Today’) and published with Éditions 7L, winning the opportunity after being awarded the Photography Jury Grand Prix at Hyères Festival. The prize also gave him the chance to show his work during Paris Photo, where he displayed his images in a darkened room, picking out the politicians and lawyers with spotlights. The floor of the gallery was littered with pieces of paper, emitted by a small printer; hooked up to various newspapers’ online bulletins, it was spitting out 24/7 headlines.

“‘Donald Trump est le dernier avatar de la révolution conservatrice américain’. L’historienne Helene Harter analyse la victoire du candidat républicain et revient sur les sources de la popularité de ses idées” (“‘Donald Trump is the latest avatar of the American conservative revolution’. Historian Helene Harter analyses the victory of the Republican candidate and reviews the sources of the popularity of his ideas”) read the ticket I picked up, an uncannily apt snippet from French newspaper Libération.

Comar’s Aujourd’hui also includes images of TV news studios, shot when empty of people or updates; as with the images of talking heads, Comar was interested in the stage, not what goes on it. These studios are set up to deliver certain images and messages, he points out, information stripped of the wider context in which it is gathered, such as the media scrum, or the bastions of power promoting certain points of view. One of Comar’s studio shots includes a blank screen, for example, a frame and surface on which selected reels are projected; in the book this image is printed on a green page, rendering it almost a void.

“We are getting information through a process that is very artificial and with massive manipulation,” Comar points out. “And the way we are getting this news and information makes it seem very separate to us, like it’s a bubble that is hard to touch. We are being informed, yet this information is kind of protected or removed.”

In the exhibition of Aujourd’hui, Comar suggested this sense of hermetic seal by displaying his images inside perspex boxes; transparent yet also a barrier, these cases were both a metaphor and a nod to a very physical manipulation of space. In the TV studios, he was struck by the sets, which are flimsy yet also powerful, organising information and the way we perceive it. Similarly, one of his early projects is titled Shaping Informations, and focuses on plexiglass lecterns. He met a man based in northern France who makes such lecterns, he explains, adding that they are popular with Republicans in the US because they lend authority to the speaker yet also imply he or she is transparent and therefore trustworthy.

The manufacturer let Comar take his archive of publicity shots, “already interesting because he is staging the objects on a blue background”, and, scanning them, Comar warped them into airy abstraction, removing sections to create “very light, linear objects that sit between 2D and 3D”. “I wanted to try to convey something of the nature of it, this kind of floating direction and information coming to us,” he explains. “It’s coming at us and yet it’s less and less traceable, you never know exactly how it is built.”

It is an understanding that evokes The Invisible Committee, and a section in The Coming Insurrection on environmental collapse which states: “What surrounds us is no longer a landscape, a panorama, a theatre, but something to inhabit, something we need to come to terms with, something we can learn from”. But this insight also nods back further, to France in May 1968 and to Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” writes Debord, “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”

It is a tradition Comar has obliquely referenced, titling one of his series May 2018. Shot exactly 50 years after May 1968, this was a whole project on TV studios (which he drew on for Aujourd’hui). May 2018 also included images of trade union protests, however, actions which seem positive – in that they are people being active, not just consuming or spectating – but which Comar worries might just be feeding the press machine. “May 2018 is an investigation into the relationship between the media system and radical news,” he writes in his introduction. “Media elements are activated, information converges, temporalities are distorted, and a reality is revealed between transparency and opacity.”

Similarly his series 2017 won’t happen records anti-globalisation protests in Paris in 2016 and 2017, and specifically a new approach evolved in the face of police crackdowns – the ‘black bloc’. Dressing entirely in black, protesters aimed to evade identification and surveillance, but also create a powerful mass presence for the watching media. “It interests me that, if you do a protest, you want to create a spectacle that will be recorded by the press,” Comar explains. “But they wanted to avoid being identified personally. So on the one hand they are trying to court attention, but on the other they are also aiming to avoid it.”

This tactic also recalls The Invisible Committee, both its name and because of its rejection of the ‘representation’ often cited by contemporary image-makers. “When leftists everywhere continually make their cause more ‘visible’ – whether that of the homeless, of women, or of undocumented immigrants – in hopes that it will get dealt with, they’re doing exactly the contrary of what must be done,” reads The Coming Insurrection. “Not making ourselves visible, but instead turning the anonymity to which we’ve been released to our advantage, and through conspiracy, nocturnal or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack…

“To be socially nothing is not a humiliating condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition – from whom do we seek recognition? – but is on the contrary the condition for maximum freedom of action.”

Comar is perhaps less optimistic than this text, writing in his introduction to 2017 won’t happen of “the war of images between police forces, demonstrators, and the media”, and stating he is isolating fragments to “enable viewers to recompose an image of their own”. For him, the media – and surveillance – have evolved so far that trying to evade them is futile. Instead we have to become more aware, and perhaps more actively involved. His interest in this ‘war of images’ took him to Hong Kong in 2019, partly because it was familiar, and partly because what was happening felt like Europe’s future.

“It seemed very much related to what I was seeing in Paris, and I knew from forums that people in Hong Kong were looking at what was happening in France,” he says. “They had the Umbrella Movement in 2014 but that was very quickly repressed by the police, so they were looking for the means to continue, and watching Paris riot videos online to learn tactics. But at the same time, the level of surveillance and repression [by the Hong Kong police], I thought ‘OK, maybe that’s the next step of response in Europe’.”

Spending four months in the territory, Comar recorded the protesters’ efforts to evade surveillance – and pepper spray – with face masks, goggles and umbrellas; he also recorded the lasers they employed to disrupt police cameras, and the drones used on both sides to gather intelligence. The protesters in Hong Kong also faced eavesdropping and infiltration, so they developed codewords to protect themselves, referring to protests as ‘dreams’, for example. Comar liked the metaphor – and the sense that a dream can be a nightmare – and titled his work How Was Your Dream?.

The series went on to be published by Mörel in 2022 and it is a semi-hallucinatory affair, printed with extra UV inks on glossy pages and drawing attention to itself as a medium, gathering fingerprints from whoever reads it. It is not a straight celebration of the protesters, because Comar is wary of the “gradual erasure of individuals” implied by the tactics they were forced to adopt. And it also is not the kind of straight documentary that aims to be a ‘window on the world’, because Comar knows that is impossible, particularly as a young Franco-Swiss man shooting abroad.

“I felt I was living through something very special, but also like I was some European lost in an Asian country,” he says. “At some point I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’. What was happening was so important for the people there, and having this European point of view, trying to photograph what I was interested in, felt very rude. But this idea of the dream felt like, OK, everybody is having their own experience of this, this could provide a way in that allows me to give my personal view, without implying I am giving the whole story.”

Cut to Paris in 2025 and the idea of the subjective take still interests Comar, as well as the desire to include photographers – and himself – in his work. He is keen to get back to taking photographs, having spent many hours on his computer assembling images for Aujourd’hui, but the projects he is researching still centre on the gap between reality and our vision of it. He is interested in photographing agriculture, for example, as – despite bucolic marketing material – we are already facing an industrial scramble for resources. He is also interested in photographing Paris, in contrasting his experience of living in the city with its promotion by tourist and luxury brands.

“It’s just an idea, but I feel it could be important,” Comar says. “We have such a chic, luxury approach now [to the city], it would be good to have a counterpoint. I’m interested in making more raw reportage but at the same time, I don’t have to produce images and sell them in the next 24 hours [to a newspaper]. I am more free, I have the opportunity to have this critical or funny vision. I feel that is a real chance and I want to grab it.”

Comar is not The Invisible Committee, and has not sabotaged any railways; he questions the drive for anonymity, particularly for members of the media – and includes himself in their number. But if “sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks”, perhaps he is also aligned with some Committee insights. In his own way, he is filling screens with white noise – or at least, drawing attention to the screens themselves. “There’s a very clear debate now on what is truth and what is post-truth, how truth is used by politicians, and the media, and the people who own the media,” he points out. “These issues are making it more obvious to everyone that we are manipulated by the media and by images. There is a lot of work to be done.” 

thaddecomar.com

“What I prefer is the more human side, the less performative side. I’m rarely influenced by fashion photographers”

She also travelled to Russia around this time, setting up an impromptu studio and shooting only women; on graduating she did not immediately pursue photography though – or at least not as a career. “A lot of my peers started being photographers but I just kind of disappeared,” she says. Actually she was still working, without showing anyone, shooting outside her many freelance jobs. By 2019, she was living in Ramsgate, a coastal town two hours from London, and intensively making images. “My main thinking was, ‘I just need to earn enough money to be able to keep on making this work’,” she says. “I could have done that forever, just kept working quietly – I was just really into the work, and felt like it was feeding me. It was very internal, like a conjuring, which is a strange word to use but I had a real push to have that feeling of satisfaction.”

Swan was drawn to making portraits, and in particular to photographing people “over and over again” – siblings Toni, Nikita and Odin, who she met in a bowling alley, and Brody, who lived on her street. Hiring a boat club 10 minutes from her house, she would shoot them, and then their families, comfortable in a space that cost £10 to hire and that everyone knew was neutral territory. It was low-pressure, crafty, fun, there was “no ego about it”, she says; her subjects were there out of curiosity and for their own enjoyment, though she gave them the images. “That made it too, because I didn’t want to be cajoling someone into something they didn’t want to do,” she says. “It was experimental, working out ideas.”

Initially Swan used a borrowed camera and loaned 1960s studio lights; she eventually bought her own lighting kit, “a really rubbish home studio set” and, though she originally learnt to shoot on film, a simple digital camera. “It wasn’t about having technical knowledge or expensive kit,” she says. “It was about being able to make images quickly and cheaply, without any barriers.” Deciding to push further, she found an empty shop in Scarborough, on the North Yorkshire coast, that she could use as a makeshift studio. “I wanted to find a space that was more public and busier, that would allow me to do the same thing I had been doing [in Ramsgate] but in a much more intensive way,” she says. “It was quite a clinical place, 1990s depressed architecture; I found it a safe place to base myself, where people came by and used the loo or bought a birthday card. It was very calm and accessible, but busy and full of life. I was trying to create a moment where it’s like seeing someone in the street, but there’s this very formal environment around them. I wanted people to not have the chance to move or change themselves, but be in a studio setting.”

These portraits were successful and helped bring Swan wider attention; it is an approach she has returned to since, setting up temporary studios in shopping centres, train stations and London’s financial district. Working this way allows her to see public faces and hone in deeper, cutting out the visual noise of the street to focus on the individual. She is interested in how people’s bodies both conceal and expose their feelings and personalities, in the socially constructed gestures that allow us to conform, and the quirks that (sometimes involuntarily) mark us out. Swan’s gaze is comprehensive yet somehow not judgemental; something in her omniscience is warm. 

“I want to see people,” she says. “The way someone is with their body is definitely something I pick up on, and then other things come out – all the good, hidden stuff. There’s a formality I really enjoy [in a portrait session] and there’s an attention that’s there from them. But I don’t want to ask them to come back next week. Then they’ll sort out their hair and face, they’ll get rid of all the things that they think are not OK, but which I find so beautiful.”

It is something she has managed to maintain in her commercial work, which also took off in 2021 when she was signed by London agency Mini Title. Commissioned for a Givenchy ad campaign, she maintained small ‘imperfections’ on the models’ legs, for example, which to her are not imperfect at all. “Someone said to me once, ‘Do her a favour, take the spot away [with retouching]’,” Swan says. “The concept of that I find quite hard to get my head around. Those signs of life are the centre of everything my work pivots around.”

This sensibility does not preclude post-production. For Swan, retouching is about directing attention, creating an interesting image rather than ‘perfecting’ a body, making blocks of colour to emphasise shapes or shadows, or creating an overall palette or feel. She is into early colour photography, Paul Outerbridge or Erwin Blumenfeld, though she adds that she discovered them later, and has always had her own sense of colour. Guy Bourdin seems an obvious touchpoint for some images but she is not enthused; the subjects in his work are models being fantasy-posed by a man, she says, and are presented in such a polished way. “What I prefer is the more human side, the less performative side,” she explains. “I’m rarely influenced by fashion photographers – Sally Mann, August Sander, Helmar Lerski, Alex Prager, Rineke Dijkstra, Gérard Schlosser, Roni Horn, William Mortensen are big influences.”

For Swan the apparently awkward is actively interesting, pointing towards the subject’s life, and what they do off- camera. When she shoots people in-studio in public places, she arranges it so they have some privacy, and therefore feel less self-conscious; she sometimes asks them to pose, but only because she is trying to help them relax. “Sometimes they’re so scared, you have to kind of let them into their body,” she says. For fashion photography and commissions she may have to exert more influence, but still prefers making suggestions to giving orders, and often just asks people to pause their own gestures. Even so, she says shooting commissions is very different to her personal work – the sitter has been chosen, and is often a model, there is a large team in the studio, a desired outcome, and very little time. But increasingly commissioners are coming to her because she includes that sense of the person, or even a slight sense of rawness, and these quirks are making it into the final images. “That’s always a win,” she says.

Swan’s outlook means she is as interested in hands, or legs – or any other part of the body – as she is in faces; for her, portraits do not have to show faces, and in fact she sometimes crops them out. “It’s just splitting up the body and letting those other parts speak,” she says. “There’s a level that’s enjoying taking away the ingredients of the face and having the poetry of the body and how that hand is, letting something else speak other than the eyes or the lips or the face.”

This is especially evident in Swan’s self-portraits, which she started making in 2020; they allow her to do “body work”, she says, without having to push someone else’s boundaries. And push someone’s boundaries they might, because they are often obliquely sexual, showing armpit stubble, or a nylon-clad crotch, or stretch marks. The idea of the ‘female gaze’ is often bandied around as if women see intrinsically differently – and although the idea is that women adopt a ‘male gaze’ in patriarchies – but perhaps there is something intrinsically female about Swan’s self-portraits, about the clash between her intimate knowledge of inhabiting a female body in 21st century Britain, and her in-depth understanding of photography. “I’ve never really said these photographs are self-portraits because I don’t even feel they are,” she explains. “It’s just a way of being able to use a female body without limits. To almost be the photographer and not be the subject.

“There is a grotesque element which feels slightly animal, which purposefully undermines the immediate perception it’s this shiny, sexy image. I’m reluctant to gender it too much, but I did feel like I was speaking to women, and that they would understand why. Seeing that armpit, or that stretch of skin, for women it feels like home rather than something that’s terribly out of the ordinary or difficult to look at.”

It is an insight that suggests something punky, and Swan loves the idea that her sitters – some of whom are now A-listers, contemporary icons of femininity – will see this work. But it also suggests another strand in her practice, which circles around looking at looking. Swan is well aware of the power of photography, and particularly portrait photography. She likes to shoot in-studio because her subjects know they are being photographed and can form a relationship with her, no matter how brief. She is uncomfortable with the idea of sneaking a photograph, with “snapping away when they’re not quite primed for it”.

Her images are also sometimes obliquely critical, often including a stereotype that queries this kind of photograph, why it is so prevalent, and what that says about our culture. It will be interesting to see how much irony she can maintain in her commercial work, but so far the balance is struck. “For years I thought I would just work by myself for the love of it – which was success to me,” she says. “But to realise that others are going to share in that intensity was really liberating.”

She is also continuing to push, recently making more work outside, exploring how landscape can exist in her practice, and shooting a series of shorts titled PLAYS. All three shorts focus on small moments, and particularly on body language; one shows a mother and child, physically close in the way that parents and young kids often are. The girl plays with her mother’s hair, puts her fingers in a hole in the woman’s tights; it is staged but they are a genuine mother and daughter, and that shows. Opposite this pair a couple passionately kiss, demonstrating another kind of physical intimacy – their embrace was also carefully staged, based on a 1950s, old Hollywood tryst, but so unrealistic and abstracted it becomes sexless and almost absurd. Swan wanted the kiss to be as a little girl might see it, she says, how she remembers (un)comprehending adult intimacy as a child.

Swan also continues to photograph herself, and Brody, the boy – or now young man – from her street in Ramsgate. These days he is studying in London, and Swan says their sessions are different but still compelling. “I have known him for a long time, and he is special to me,” she says. “He had a trust in someone who was quite random, and I just find his face incredible, and the way that he is so grounded and unbothered by things. I could take his picture forever.”

@jet.swan

Interweaving bodies, time, and place, Pearce captures their reciprocal influences: despite the ongoing struggle to survive the city’s economy and the country’s political environment with a tense upcoming election in November, the subjects portrayed continue to actively transform the city, infusing it with their own magic. “I want the work to reflect both survival and the desire to thrive”, Pearce tells me. A second image of Ellington, taken a year later, captures them in full shadow, revealing only the faint growth of facial hair, the subtle movement of their shoulders, and the glint of a golden chain. “I denied the viewer the exact description of them to make certain qualities stand out”, the photographer adds. By obscuring the rest of their features, Pearce emphasises the value of wearing that specific piece of jewellery, choosing to withhold a full depiction and moving away from the precise exposure and timing typical of traditional photography.

Stepping back from the more common strands of straightforward and self-evident queer image-making, Pearce’s portrayal of their queer community in Brooklyn aims to add nuances to the pursuit of being seen: Is visibility automatically good? “That body of work is essential and urgent”, the artist tells me, “but I believe that given our historical moment, we have to think carefully about our relationship to the complexity of visibility, and the belief that the straight photograph is the only solution. I am constantly negotiating this as I find alternative ways to make portraits, photograph space, and make images that have an emotional resonance”. The surge in attacks on the trans and queer community in the United States, backed by the strengthening of the European far-right, amounts to a crisis of trans and queer rights. In this political climate, a deeper reflection on what’s at stake in visibility is a fair concern.

Beyond the wall-sized poster and the chain in Ellington’s portraits, Pearce’s visual realm is populated by costumes and found objects, which they use to layer narratives building upon these items as powerful signifiers of queer identities. “I’ve always been obsessed with how important objects are preserved and presented”, Pearce tells me. “I want to see that sort of treatment, that preciousness, applied to queer history”. By incorporating still life as prominently as people in their work, Pearce reintegrates forgotten objects of queer life into visual history, making a vital contribution to the long overdue material archive of lost queer histories. 

The very existence of these objects is a testament to the fragments of stories that survived institutional attempts to erase queer memory throughout Western history, from public local and national archives to cultural conservation sites and productions. For the majority, those stories left no traces. This opens up a state of limbo; stories that could have been but were never documented, leaving us to wonder if they ever truly happened. Because a community’s social consciousness builds on its accessible past, these stories risk falling outside the collective memory. Unless, of course, someone intervenes in the archive, recreating what once went undocumented.

Between archival research and fictional narrative lies a space for reimagining. It’s New Orleans, 1939, and a makeshift cottage on the Mississippi River becomes the setting for a lesbian romance. “Bathing, eating, and loving all occur against the backdrop of a desolate swampland”, writes Pearce to introduce Shadows, one of their earliest series started in 2016 to reenact a love story between two Black women in 1930s and ‘40s Louisiana. Facing the absence of documented Black queer histories, Pearce created the archive they longed to see. Portraits of the two fictitious protagonists – reenacted by the photographer and their partner at the time – appear alongside objects that could have belonged to them, such as love letters, clothes, and personal items. Staged stills from their daily lives fill the void of lost memory: long lace robes hang to dry, someone resting on a green velvet couch, and nighttime lovemaking is reflected on the blurred surface of an oak mirror.

“The way I play with illumination reflects the magical quality I feel about my subjects”

Light is a central narrative tool in Pearce’s visual realm. In one of the most striking images from Shadows, a lover stands in her nightgown, a pulsing red luminescence emanating from the bottom of her skirt. In her oneiric presence, the ghostly figure is our only clue to realising the woman’s fictional nature. As she transcends her role as a flesh-and-blood lover, she comes to embody a multifaceted archetype: she’s the ghost in the archive. “Just like a shadow”, Pearce tells me, “it’s in the room, but we’re not giving credit to its presence”. Until you have to –  when it comes seeking recognition.

The pulsing red light recurring in Pearce’s work is a homage to Toni Morrison’s character Beloved from the eponymous 1987 novel; whenever she reappears, her red aura fills the rooms of 124 Bluestone Road. Weaving their project with the story of a spirit returning to her mother in Reconstruction-era Cincinnati is a testament to all the stories that might have been – for the stories to exit the realm of shadows and be acknowledged. The oeuvre-wide use of dark tonalities and scarlet illumination is not thus to be associated with tragedy; rather, it embraces the complexities of the stories of queer people of colour that inhabit Pearce’s visual world. “The way I play with illumination reflects the magical quality I feel about my subjects”, they tell me. Going back to In The Hours Between Dawn, light is manipulated to reflect the hyper-delicate balance between queer visibility and invisibility in the urban setting.

A wall-sized image of the Brooklyn skyline contributes to another of Pearce’s staged environments. This time, the backdrop is placed upside down behind a double-sized bed, the blankets are creased. On the mountain of pillows, barely recognisable in the dim light, someone is lying supine – dreaming? Pondering? Just resting? Blurred and somewhat dystopian, the city is often gazed at through a window, the barrier separating the viewer from the uninviting urban outdoors. Indoors, Pearce’s staged home environments feel cosy and warm. Here and there, symbolic references peek out: red flowers, a motorbike, a still from the 2005 documentary The Aggressives, the poster of an oily bodybuilder; role models or reminiscences of turbulent dreams. Beyond the warmth, we still sense the threat of housing instability and displacement affecting the city and its marginalised communities.

Lorde’s litany is an ever-present, echoing chant woven throughout the work: “And when the sun rises we are afraid / it might not remain / when the sun sets we are afraid / it might not rise in the morning”. Pearce photographs at night, long after the sun has set and well before it rises again; in the floating hours in between, when the house still offers a sense of safety and dreams have yet to be confronted by daylight. When it’s not dark, Pearce recreates it using a day-for-night technique, selectively exposing parts of the frame while leaving the rest in shadow, a method that recalls the camera obscura technique used by Impressionist painters. As stepping into daylight reawakens the weight of internalised fear, Pearce’s nighttime portrayals carve out a precious space of rest and healing from the community’s constant struggle for existence.

@avionpearce

aviavion.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The London-born Williams has long regarded Stoke-on-Trent as “an extension of home”. It’s a place bound-up with grandparents and cousins, who settled there from Jamaica from the early 1950s. “I was thinking about people in constant migration,” Williams says. “People who leave somewhere and think they might come back, but who never get the opportunity. We don’t really treasure those sacrifices.” 

In many ways, Soon Come was a bid to make sense of, and set right, this reality. “I knew it was going to be quite honest, raw and real, but I never expected it to be so much of me,” he says. “It’s an exhausting process because you’re using up your own resources. But I felt like I had to do it that way.”

This process – an intensive gathering of conversations, interviews and found materials – reveals as much about Williams’ tireless inquiry as it does his questioning outlook. Material for the show hails both from public and private archives as well as recorded encounters of his own – Williams “looking for traces, trying to be privy to conversations,” he says.

But what surfaced was less a trove of treasures, than a sense of the limitations of the archive: of “things being lost and rewritten or covered up,” Williams explains. At one stage of his research, Williams had spent three days examining pictures of pottery workers in the archive of Social anthropologist and photographer Jacqueline Sarsby, before he came across a single black face. There was “something amiss.”

Soon Come therefore exists not only as a showcase of findings, but as a presentation of absences and obscurities. Split across two facing screens, Williams’ newly commissioned film pits the public against the private archive, blending stark digitised landscape imagery with abstract analogue fragments of bodies and identities obscured, sometimes featuring Williams himself on screen.

“Landscape pictures have everything to do with the body, because it’s the body who’s taking the image,” Williams explains. In one improvised passage, a tug of war ensues, hands intimately entwined in an act of struggle. Equal tenderness is afforded to the industrial backdrop of Stoke-on-Trent, photographed with a clarity that reveals “all of the beauty in the rubble.”

“Landscape pictures have everything to do with the body, because it’s the body who’s taking the image”

On one unyielding emerald wall, a figure is bent double, the darkness of the exposure squeezed to the edge of a black frame. In the next room, small landscapes are framed with gaping white borders. Elsewhere, self-portraits float with warped, raw edges. Then there is a low vitrine requiring viewers to stoop over still lifes of bus driver badges (Williams’ grandfather’s), scaled up to match documentary shots of a bottle Kiln in Longport, Stoke. It is about “playing around with ideas of visibility, traces, and what is valuable,” Williams says.  

Contrasts and juxtapositions abound in the show. There are sound recordings made in the annals of an archive – the whirr of newsreels re-presented as the sound of boats rumbling on water. There are conversational snippets with his aunt, mum and (reluctant) uncle alongside footage gleaned from the 2011 documentary film, Caribbean Voices. Williams recalls a highly motivating conversation with the film’s co-producer Monienne Stone, director of the Staffordshire Archive. They discussed her documentary process, and Williams also met one of the surviving individuals from the film.

“Sometimes it sparks joy, remembering things in past lives – it gives us renewed energy,” Williams says. (He admits that he’s an amateur with 16mm film, but combining it with 4k footage gave him the desired tonal contrast for Soon Come). The work emerges as both a vessel and amplifier of the artist’s critical and creative encounters.

Soon Come is a project with roots as wide-reaching as its readings are open-ended. Golden sunsets collide with pallbearers, twisting bodies with industrial wastelands. And in the mode of the show’s title, there is also a lightness of touch, a spirit of warmth and gathering – a testament to “what a community can do,” Williams concludes. Indeed, what communities do best is not unlike a performance: working together to remember, to treasure, and to value the stories of kin.

Matthew Arthur Williams’ Soon Come is a Dundee Contemporary Arts until 23 March

Galeria Refresco

Rua Sara 18, 4º Andar, Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 20220-090

Located in the Santo Cristo neighbourhood in the port area of the city, Galeria Refresco has been operating since 2019, holding exhibitions, workshops and artistic residencies. Its latest exhibition presented work by Rio native Fernanda Liberti, a recent graduate of London’s Royal College of Art and laureate at the Prix Dior de la Photographie. Collaboration is at the heart of the gallery’s mission. For Liberti’s show, it welcomed fellow artists Vinicius Gerheim, Thadeu Dias, Manoela Bencze and Mariana Honório to be included in the artistic production. Previous exhibitions have included a series by trans non-binary artist Rodrigo Masina Pinheiro and Ton Zaranza who exhibited portraits of LGBTQ+ people made on 28 October 2018 – the day far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro was elected president – and how this event resonated in their lives.

Instituto Moreira Salles

Rua Marquês de São Vicente 476, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22451-040

Founded by Brazilian banker, politician and philanthropist Walther Moreira Salles, Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) is a nonprofit organisation with a goal to promote the development of culture in five areas: photography, literature, libraries, visual arts and Brazilian music. Holding an archive of two million images, it is arguably Brazil’s most important photographic institution. IMS was set up in 1992 in Poços de Caldas, a spa city north of São Paulo, and has since established headquarters in São Paulo and Rio. The Rio outpost sits within Salles’ old residence, in the affluent Gávea neighbourhood. Surrounded by the spectacular forests of the Tijuca National Park, the space hosts film screenings, concerts and cultural events, as well as housing music and literature collections. The house and grounds are an attraction in themselves: a prime example of 1950s modernist architecture, designed by Olavo Redig de Campos with landscape design by Roberto Burle Marx. As well as publishing exhibition catalogues and books, IMS prints a biannual contemporary photography magazine, ZUM, and a quarterly publication of critical essays, Serrote. Its current exhibition presents around 200 images by the Brazilian Magnum photographer, Miguel Rio Branco. On view until 26 March 2023, the show traces work made in the 1970s to the present day, reinforcing the originality and relevance of Rio Branco’s restless experimentation.

Galeria 5Bocas

Rua Ourique 1234, Brás de Pina, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 21011-130

5Bocas gallery takes its name from the favela where its founder, Allan Weber, lives. The 29-year-old artist opened the space last year, with the intention of offering new work and leisure opportunities for local people. With group exhibitions and future open calls planned, the gallery is part of a network of independent institutions supporting emerging artists outside the commercial circuit. These concerns are a reflection of Weber’s own practice, which is focused on “representing the lower income social class that with a lot of time, struggle and sweat are achieving their goals, even without access and opportunities”.

Galpão Bela Maré

Rua Bitencourt Sampaio 169, Maré, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 21044-261

Located in the favela of Maré, Galpão Bela Maré is a cultural centre founded in 2011 by Observatório de Favelas – a non-profit organisation that aims to reduce inequality and strengthen neighbourhoods. During its decade of existence, the centre has contributed to the decentralisation of cultural facilities. Its prolific residency programme encourages creatives to reflect on the places they live – the people, the streets, and the stories they hold. The programme not only benefits the participating artists, but aims to provide inspiration for generations to come. Hosting exhibitions both inside the space and along the streets of Maré, it reaffirms the favelas as a fertile stage for contemporary art.

Casa da Escada Colorida

Escadaria Selarón 18, Lapa, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 20241-120

This multipurpose arts centre runs artistic and curatorial residency programmes, as well as exhibitions, workshops and film screenings. The project’s mission is to strengthen the creative community and democratise culture through education. The Casa is also a hub for the annual FotoRio – a 20-year-old festival offering a series of exhibitions and portfolio reviews every November.