The show is gargantuan; not only the space itself (a disused aerospace hanger), but the show takes 192 minutes, or around three hours, to view in total, with each slideshow lasting between 15 and 42 minutes – and with heavy viewing material, one needs to be committed to this journey. Though the work can be overwhelming when viewed consecutively, the space is cleverly designed so that viewers can find peaceful, empty spaces between slideshow structures in the main ‘foyer’ space. 

Before any of the slideshows, we walk through the ‘prelude’ in the Navate space: a soundscape designed by experimental sound art collective Soundwalk Collective, conceived in close collaboration with Goldin, named Bleeding (2025). The ambient work is moving and inviting, despite its lightness, and transports us deep into Goldin’s psyche. 

The duo, made up of artist and composer Stephan Crasneanscki and composer Simone Merli, have collaborated with Goldin since 2015, creating soundtracks and immersive soundscapes for projects including All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, and The Women’s March, 1789 (2019) at Versailles. Their new commissioned composition, Bleeding (2025), draws on ambient recordings gathered from earlier iterations of This Will Not End Well in Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Berlin, weaving them into an atmosphere that extends Goldin’s images into sound.

The slideshow format is an homage to Goldin’s entry into photography and entire artistic practice: in 1973, whilst in Provincetown – a queer community on the American East Coast, near Boston – on sabbatical from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she had no access to a darkroom in order to print her works, so she began presenting them as slides. This soon mushroomed into her now relied upon format. 

Present at the opening, Goldin made it clear where she wanted our eyes to be looking as she presented ‘Gaza’, a short film made up of collected footage from journalists and civilians on the ground in Gaza, Palestine. Though this is work that is reserved as a footnote, or aggressively censored, by the institutions Goldin works with, she said, at the opening: “I could talk about elegant things, like this work. But really, [Gaza] is where my mind has been for the past two years.” 

Her vocality and directness is unsurprising in this context (especially for anyone who attended her Kering Award acceptance speech in Recontres d’Arles 2025): Goldin has been using her art as activism since she began making images. Her most important slideshows such as The Ballad and shows such as Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, 1989, New York City, documented not only the AIDS crisis that decimated Goldin’s community of friends and art workers, but the political inaction towards the health crisis at the time. Her later work on the American opioid crisis prompted her to form the direct action group P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and followed the Sacklers – the family linked to the devastating opioid crisis – into bankruptcy court, and successfully removing their name from Museum walls, such as the Met. In 2019 Goldin staged a viral protest in the Guggenheim, dropping thousands of fake prescriptions into the museum’s atrium, protesting the institution’s acceptance of donations from the Sackler family. 

This Will Not End Well was first conceived alongside Fredrik Liew, chief curator at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, where it debuted in 2022. It then travelled to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam (2023) and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2024). After Milan, it will travel to Paris in 2026 at Grand Palais. The Italian iteration features two additional works, You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (both reedited in 2025), displayed in a museum context for the first time in Europe (Stendhal Syndrome received displays at Gagosian in New York, including framed works, before playing at Recontres d’Arles this year). 

In Milan, Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004 – 2022) occupies the Cubo, a vast space whose 20-metre height recalls the architecture of La Chapelle de la Salpêtrière in Paris, where the work was first shown in 2004. At Pirelli HangarBicocca, the installation is restaged in a form true to the original, complete with two structures depicting Goldin’s younger sister in a bed, and a male figure on the other side of the room, visible from an elevated platform that invites viewers to experience its full vertical intensity. It is part of the show’s effort of using personal narratives to break walls between artist and audience, translating universal emotions, and the idea that the past is always shaping our present. 

This Will Not End Well is on at Pirelli HangarBicocca until 15 February 2026 

“It’s a hopeful piece about change”

Despite being awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship during this period (in 1986, making her the first Latin American woman to receive the accolade), the work wasn’t exhibited publicly until 1989, with a book published Zona Editorial the following year featuring testimonies from the series’ protagonists, collated by Donoso. It attracted little fanfare at its launch – selling just one copy – however in 2013 the work was acquired by Tate, and a revised edition of the book was later released to include more images (at the Barbican, notably, a photograph of Evelyn fronted much of the exhibition’s marketing materials).

Earlier, in 1973, prior to the coup d’état that inserted General Pinochet and the severe 17-year dictatorship that followed, Errázuriz had been working as a primary school teacher. When her home, shared with her two young children, was raided by the military just days after Pinochet had seized power (owing to her being part of a union), she began to focus instead on photography (previously a hobby, picked up while studying in the UK), and the creation of a body of work foregrounding those otherwise at risk, both physically and of being forgotten. Shared by several other photographers, this perspective and desire to distribute an ‘alternative’ image of Chile, additionally saw her co-founding the Chilean Association of Photographers (AFI) in 1981. 

“For me, it was a form of activism,” reads a further wall text from Errázuriz, alluding to the harsh political landscape against which much of her work was made, and which all ultimately engages with, albeit with varying distance. “Photography let me participate in my own way in the resistance waged by those who remained in Chile. It was our means of showing that we were there and fighting back.” 

With Dare to Look, which marks only her first major solo show in the UK, upward of 170 photographs are presented, made over a 40 year-period (some of her more recent projects include Dolls: Chile-Peru border from 2014, and Blinding light, made between 2008-10). “Protest, women’s rights, ageing bodies, minority ethnic groups, gender, disability, and ideas of resistance and change – they’re themes that are ever present,” notes Blanchard, highlighting the significance and foresight of the photographers’ practice. 

“Her work isn’t done in isolation,” Blanchard continues, “she’s usually working with a scientist, a poet, a journalist, a linguist, and we wanted to bring their voices into the exhibition, as well as some of the critical reception, bringing in nuance. There are ethical issues, for example a series in a psychiatric hospital [Antechamber of a nude, 1999] and Errázuriz  doesn’t shy away from that; she wants to acknowledge that, and the tension there to do with consent. She’s incredibly trusting, and there’s a confidence – she’s very willing for it to have a life; for people to speak about it and come to their own conclusions.”

Typically working with subjects steeped in politics, the quieter elements of Errázuriz’s photographs can sometimes be overshadowed suggests Blanchard, who spent two years immersed in the work while putting the show together. “There’s so much context, so much subject, when you’re looking in print or digitally, you overlook the formal beauty,” she shares. “You need to really spend time with [the images] to see they’re so beautifully composed. And the work in colour too, is also under recognised – just how extraordinary her work in colour is. Errázuriz says she didn’t know if she was shooting in colour or black and white – film was rare, she had to take what she could get – but I’m not sure I believe her. It is so beautiful in its use of colour, I don’t know if you could do that accidentally.” 

Dare to Look is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, until 5 October

“Technology, while seemingly neutral, is never neutral, especially in the hands of humans with all our biases and the culturally ingrained stereotypes that we knowingly or unknowingly carry”

Once I coupled these thoughts with work that I had been doing investigating the enduring impact of Greek Statuary on the Western psyche, the project just flew. The history of Greek statuary (and the Roman reproductions which followed) is complex and it would be flattening to only point out those which conform to the dominating Classical Period – where men were portrayed as buff and women as passive and timid. Nevertheless, these are the binaries that have stuck with us and shaped a rather rigid western concept of beauty and worth.

I started to imagine a work which might challenge this binary, not through confrontation, but through intimacy. I wanted a story of rewriting, together and differently. A story of equality. A story of becoming.

DA: I’m very interested in the use of military or surveillance technology being subverted to portray queer bodies. Can you expand on this and speak to the role of surveillance and technology in the lives or queer, trans and non-binary communities?

YM: Technology, while seemingly neutral, is never neutral, especially in the hands of humans with all our biases and the culturally ingrained stereotypes that we knowingly or unknowingly carry. Medical and military technology and thermal imaging particularly is formed by biases towards normative (and let’s face it almost exclusively heteronormative male) assumptions. There’s been some interesting writing on this by Toby Beauchamp in his book Going Stealth in relation to the trans community, where he writes about systems like ID checks, airport security and the like singling out trans and non-binary people ‘as threats’ whose bodies don’t match normative expectations. Cal Biruk has written on fitness wearables and how they embody binaries and conventional metrics of progress. There’s been similar work done on school surveillance programmes. It’s clear that we have a severe misalignment between state-of-the-art tech and trans, non-binary and queer rights.

Military thermal technology is principally an instrument of dehumanising tendencies and is regularly used to identify people who are hiding at night or undercover via their heat signatures. I’ve been working with this technology since 2010. At the time I was involved in the world of social science, where I was investigating representation in lens based (film, photography) work. I started to use the technology myself artistically as part of an auto-ethnographic project on my own childhood migrations (which had been particularly traumatising for me). I just loved the idea of subverting this awful tool of domination into something that could create a thing of beauty, commonality and compassion instead.

I adore the way these ‘cameras’ call into question everything we have been taught about how to read an image, compelling us to look again. And how in picking up heat patterns, rather than surface details, they allow us to look below the surface at our commonality. They’re a perfect fit for this project. If these cameras are used to detect ‘abnormal’ bodies and to single them out as threats, then I thought, well, I can find a way to subvert this to instead celebrate and open up binary rigidity. In picking up heat over light, the camera roots my ideals of equality in science – the body as heat, as energy, as shared animal fact. In that radiance, we stand equal, and therefore I have also included cis women and men in the project – this is a series about all of us and my total conviction of the beauty of plurality.

DA: Tell me a bit about the link between Classical European sculptures and statues and your photos. Why is this connection important?

YM: Well, as I mentioned before, it was really one of the starting points for the whole series. I’ve been doing work on Greek statuary for a couple of years now, all the time fascinated by their enduring impact on Anglo and European notions of beauty. While any reading of Greek sculpture has to acknowledge its complexities and nuances, the idealised forms of the Classical Period – the heroic, virtuous, muscular male; the passive, beautiful, sensual female – continue to cast a long shadow on our collective imagination.

Artists have, in various ways, engaged with the dominance of Greek ideals before, but it remains an urgent conversation, especially so now as we return to an algorithmically induced obsession with ‘ideal’ and normative bodies. I’m using the thermal camera very deliberately to penetrate surface and superficial judgments. I’m also very deliberately breaking with Greek notions of balance, or contrapossto, or in fact leaning into these ideas to subvert them. And then of course the people I am portraying turn any notions of gender or female submission and passivity on their head.

I’m driven to take space for those who are otherwise marginalised. Each portrait stands at almost 3.5 m height – that’s very deliberate from me – I want to put queer and trans bodies into public spaces, into a space they deserve. Additionally the Greeks saw monumentality as a sign of the divine and I love that for this work too. We are all part of the divine. The monumental no longer has to serve nationalism, masculinity, or control, but becoming, softness, multiplicity.

DA: Let’s talk a bit about your upcoming show, Speaking in Dreams, at Compton Verney. Can you tell me about your interest in folklore and the natural world, and how this was translated into a project on dreaming?

I was born in an era and in a culture where dreams and folklore were still relevant. Hungary has one of the most symbolically rich and spiritually ambivalent folk traditions in Europe, where dreamworlds are saturated with longing, threat and metamorphosis. This has profoundly shaped my artistic life. Not nationalistically I hasten to add – so many folklore traditions have been co-opted for nationalism – but in an artistic sensibility and understanding of shared dreamworlds and non-literal texts.

Actually, throughout my whole childhood – but especially after my mother and I moved to the UK – I lived more in a dream world than the real world. I became semi mute for a couple of years, my dream world becoming a tool of self-preservation that allowed me to navigate a national and linguistic change that I found so utterly overwhelming and alienating.

What I like most about dreamtime is the liberation from goal orientated agendas. The relentless industrial agenda has diminished the value placed on non-linear and obviously ‘productive’ work and time. Dream time is such a rich explorative and revealing state.

DA: What modern anxieties exactly are you exploring?

YM: I wanted to start with that overwhelming anxiety that produces paralysis – where it’s lost its roots in any one particular problem, but has bled out into a shutting down. I feel that’s happening across the board these days. How can it not when we are fed an endless stream of algorithmically induced clashing, pitting humans against humans. Crows – which appear in my piece – symbolise warning almost universally across folklore traditions. Their urgent call couldn’t be louder.

The Church of Our Becoming runs until 24 August, 2025 at Dover Street Market, Paris. Speaking in Dreams opens in October 2025 at Compton Verney, Warwickshire.

At its core, everything stems from the collective desire to imagine and demand a freer world – even though we understand that the idea of freedom today is blurred and often co-opted by the very system that oppresses us. Faced with that, documenting our stories is not just about memory: it is also a radical way of affirming our existence and sustaining the hope for transformation.

DA: What has changed about Issue 11 from other issues?

LJ: Everything has changed. Each edition of Balam is always conceived from scratch. The only thing that remains the same is the physical format of the magazine. I often say that the project can’t be linear nor straight, because those of us behind it are queer, politically incorrect people who don’t follow a straight or normative logic. This allows us to step in and out and to propose what feels most coherent based on the materials and stories we gather.

What makes Issue 11 particularly unique is that we brought to the centre something that had previously been more implicit: the archive. Throughout Balam’s history, we have always worked with archives, but in this edition, we decided to do so explicitly – highlighting queer archives as living documents created and cared for by their own protagonists. These archives not only record; they also claim a place of power and autonomy in the face of academic and official narratives that have historically silenced or distorted us.

This issue reflects on crystallisation as an essential act to document our passage through time, but it also questions the romanticisation of the idea of archiving and challenges the notion that there’s a single formula for how it should be done. These archives arise not from an institutional or pedagogical mandate but from a vital need to come together and exist.

“My process has a lot to do with asking why we were never shown or told about things in a certain way. Morality plays a big role in understanding why some topics were left out of dominant narratives”

I believe this edition also mirrors my own practice as an editor and curator: a practice that doesn’t follow established formulas for how a magazine should be made but instead seeks to create spaces that resist the appropriation and extractivism of our realities. Rather than aiming to teach, we accompany and amplify voices and stories that have historically been marginalised.

DA: Tell me about the practical difficulties of publishing Balam; what obstacles are you facing?

LJ: It’s very complex. This year marks Balam’s tenth anniversary, and keeping the project alive for so long has meant investing an enormous amount of physical, emotional, and creative energy, while still struggling to achieve the stability we’ve never quite reached. Printing in Argentina has become increasingly expensive. Over the years, we’ve watched many independent publishing projects become obsolete or simply disappear because they can’t sustain themselves financially. This forces us to constantly rethink our strategies to stay afloat. That’s why it’s so important to build alliances with colleagues and other projects that can give us space and help us expand our reach.

The project usually survives thanks to cultural grants and long-term support from our audience. However, this year, due to the current political climate, we didn’t receive the grant that historically helped cover a significant part of the costs, and sales have also dropped considerably. On top of that, contemporary photography projects in Argentina – especially those with a queer perspective – are often pushed aside. There are no cultural policies or institutional support structures that truly understand the value of what we’re doing. Photography in Argentina remains largely white and centralised, and Balam is a critical response to that reality.

Every new issue is produced without knowing whether we’ll be able to publish the next one. We work issue by issue, making a huge financial, emotional, and mental investment each time. It’s a big risk, and we’re also working with a kind of photography that unsettles, that challenges, and that doesn’t align with hegemonic values, which makes it even harder to get support from large institutions or traditional funding bodies. Yet that same difficulty also reinforces the political meaning of the project: insisting on existing, creating, and trying to be there in time to give space and visibility to colleagues and artists who, perhaps, might not be able to be present tomorrow.

DA: Is there a place you started your visual research, and what is your general research process? How are you finding images?

LJ: My training has been – and for now still is – self-taught. In reality, it’s guided by a very clear driving force: working with what isn’t part of the “official” history. Photography becomes an excuse to gather and make visible works that resonate within that marginalised or displaced visual imaginary. But beyond the aesthetic, what interests me is the social act this can provoke within the art field and my community.

My research starts from the many threads that shape the way we feel in community. It always begins with something personal, but with the intention of turning it into something collective. When that happens, it expands enormously, allowing me to bring together works and archives that speak to each other and acquire shared meaning.

My process has a lot to do with asking why we were never shown or told about things in a certain way. Morality plays a big role in understanding why some topics were left out of dominant narratives.

That’s how I find these images: scattered, hidden, or fragmented. And I think it’s important that they keep some of that dispersed or fragmented nature, because that’s where their power and essence lie. Keeping them partially outside the hegemonic order or the public allows them to remain provocative gestures – something that invites discovery, questioning, and the opening of new conversations.

DA: Finally, tell us why you wanted to create the Nan Goldin zine insert.

LJ: My declaration of love and admiration for Nan Goldin has been one of the fundamental reasons I work in photography. For me, she will always feel close to the South – a figure whose work resonates deeply here – and this issue felt like the perfect moment to invite her to collaborate. Goldin has inspired many of us who work with images from outside the centres of power, and collaborating with her is something I never imagined possible coming from Latin America.

What makes this special is that, for the first time, we contextualise Goldin’s work from a Latin American perspective – placing it in conversation with a trans archive. We paired her series The Other Side with photographs from the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT). In doing so, we discovered strong parallels: both bodies of work capture lives shaped by marginalisation but do so with striking authenticity and intimacy.

This dialogue challenges conventional ideas of authorship and photographic practice, highlighting images created by the trans women themselves – people who didn’t see themselves as photographers, yet documented their realities with raw honesty. It opens new ways to think about photography and the power of archives, questioning who gets to tell these stories and reminding us of the importance of preserving these voices from the margins.

Balam No 11: Radical is now available for pre-order.

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

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

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

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

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

@nimiewil

“At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance“

– Hannah Darabi

BJP: Congratulations on winning the Prix Elysée. But it’s also a difficult moment, because we are speaking not long after the US attacked your home country, and Iran is currently at war with Israel. Has your family been affected?

Hannah Darabi: My family is there, and we are very worried, because they’re in Tehran and today one of the streets near to their house was attacked. We are living in a very uncertain moment. 

BJP: Do you go back to Iran often?

HD: I haven’t been back since 2019. My parents are very old, and I felt it would be a risk if I went back during Covid. Afterwards, there was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and everything was unstable again. Also, the government started making threats towards artists and activists in a kind of random manner. It didn’t matter if you were political or not, which I think was a strategy – to alarm people, [to scare them into thinking] that if you do something, you will be caught. 

BJP: What memories do you have of growing up in Iran?

HD: When I was born [in 1981], it was the time of the Iran-Iraq War… Sometimes, life was horrible. We would get a red siren to go to the bunkers, and a white siren to come out. But in between we lived life. There were still parties and get-togethers, and those were the moments that kept us sane and alive. There were shortages of many things, and we had [rationing]. But, at the same time, we had dinners, and there was music, and there were people dancing. And then, after the war, dancing became really important.

BJP: That relates to your project, Soleil of Persian Square, and its connection to popular music within the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles.

HD: Some of the people were like superstars in Iran, where they had all the equipment, studios, poets – everything to make ‘proper’ music. And then when they went to LA, they lost everything. So, the music changed because of that, but also because, when they emigrated to the States in 1979 after the [revolutionary] war, they would do all this sad, nostalgic music, and they realised that people were sick of it, and they wanted to dance.

This specific music emerged; a mixture of ‘good’ pop music, and the popular cabaret-like music that was [previously] considered really bad and not at all interesting. In Los Angeles they mixed it up. They created this fantastic new genre, which developed in relation to their situation, and which took in other influences, such as Latin music and music from Arab countries.

Then they sent that music to us [back in Iran]. When I was growing up, I was a shy kid, so my parents put me in a dance class. We would do Iranian popular dance, but there were also all these new tunes that we received, as well as new choreography. And one of the choreographers from these times in LA was Mohammad Khordadian, who is one of the three figures that I was inspired by [and whose work I investigate] in Why Don’t You Dance?.

BJP: I read that you felt that it took moving away from Iran to reflect critically on your homeland. How did that manifest?

HD: It took nine years to make peace with myself as someone who has this geographical distance from home, but who still has the need to discuss it. I wasn’t really feeling at home in Paris [where she initially went to study]. So I decided to go back and make peace with Tehran [through my work], even though I thought it would be impossible; it’s too chaotic, there are too many people and too many buildings. But then somehow I saw the beauty and how photogenic this ugly city could be.

And then came Enghelab Street, a Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983 [shown in Paris in 2019 at Le Bal, who co-published a book with Spector], which I wouldn’t have talked about if I was in Iran, because the Iranian government identifies itself as being in a constant revolutionary mode. You get all these ideas and propaganda around the revolution, especially in the form of everyday images. But I really wanted to keep aside my own feelings. I didn’t want to make a statement with my work.

And it was the same with popular music. I hated it [when I lived in Iran]. For me, it was too nice. At the time, Iranian punk didn’t exist, but [something like it was] necessary to express our anger… Then, when I left, I had other tools, and I understood the value of this music. I had been looking at it from a very snobbish, intellectual viewpoint. 

BJP: How and when did your work evolve to this form of expanded photography, encompassing your research, and including more collage.

HD: The collage form came from the research into archives and from the materials I found, putting them in conversation with my own photographs, or trying to add some other possible readings, activating the materials. So there is a clear photographic approach, and then there are these archival materials that are treated the same way, and then maybe another visual element, all working in dialogue beside each other.

There isn’t a lot of cutting and gluing going on. Everything is very clean. There are forms of books and pictures, but instead of putting them separately on the page, they’re all together. It comes from my practice in exhibition spaces, using one image as a wallpaper and putting the other on top of it to make a more intimate connection.

BJP: What do these materials look like?

HD: One chapter of the project is based on a book by a dancer called Mahvash, who made a fictional autobiography called The Secrets of Sexual Fulfillment. Everything comes together around the ideas in the book. It starts by mostly giving advice on sexual education to boys and girls of the time. We don’t know if she’s an expert, or if she’s had lots of experiences, and you see this change in Iranian society to a heteronormative mode. 

Then at the end, she starts to unfold her experiences. And it’s subversive. That’s also why I love this book, because it contradicts itself at the end. So, everything we see [in this chapter of Why Don’t You Dance?] is in relation to things that are discussed in the book. It can be questions about polygamy, or questions on how women are seen in popular culture. It’s exploring all these popular ideas: the ones that persist, and the ones that change. It also reflects on different moments of the Iranian women’s movement.

BJP: Tell me about how your last work, Soleil of Persian Square, fed into this latest project.

HD: It’s always like that – the next project comes out of an old project, something that I had noticed but which needed more space and concentration. And when I was doing Soleil of Persian Square, I was looking at all these clips, and dance was so present in them. 

At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance. Popular music and popular dance had never been considered political beforehand. My generation would disobey what’s supposed to be conventional behaviour, but we didn’t know that what we were doing wasn’t just a foolish reaction. The generation after us completely changed how we look at resistance.

I thought it was fantastic how they invested [resistance into] this art form, [creating] a solution for a protest that was unthinkable. Protest, getting together, was not possible anymore. There was no possibility of organising, of writing or making posters. So, it was very interesting to me that this specific form of art suddenly became very useful for the purpose [of resistance].

BJP: The prize provides you with the support to focus on completing your latest project, Why Don’t You Dance?, for which you are working on three chapters based around three key figures. You have completed much of the work on the first chapter, based around Mahvash. And you have already mentioned Mohammad Khordadian, the dancer and choreographer based in LA, who is the third chapter. What can you tell me about the second chapter and who it is based upon?

HD: Jamileh was very active as a cabaret dancer in the 1960s and 70s. She represents this moment of shift. Cabaret dancers were seen as deviant… [Yet] she appeared in most of the popular films of her era, always playing this role of the belly dancer. There were all these social conflicts around the figure of the cabaret dancer, but what I really liked is that she represents to me a kind of feminism that is not from the middle class. She [represents] this kind of popular feminism. 

In one film she played the role of a good woman, hiding her real identity to marry a very upper class guy. At some point, she’s sick of it, and she dresses really provocatively. She is in this beautiful house, she is drunk, and she says to the musicians, ‘Hey, play me a tune!’ Then she comes down the staircase doing this provocative dance, and all the bourgeois people are shocked. She was a feminist, but not like an activist. It just comes out in her daily behaviour. 

BJP: You will focus on the jâheli dance, of which she was a pioneer.

HD: The dance reflected and also depicted this group of men in a particular neighbourhood [of Tehran]. They had very specific clothing, and a particular style of talking and walking. They were like protectors of the neighbourhood, and protectors of the weak, but also they would get involved in petty crimes, and were sometimes used by the government to [break up] protests. 

These people were jâhel. It was a subculture, very present in popular films. They wore fedoras, white shirts, black costumes and scarves, but they never put their coats on properly, just on their shoulders. And they did the jâheli dance. But Jamileh made it a dance for women.

This was a very masculine world, in which women were considered weak specimens. And she got that and [met it] with humour. That’s what I really like about her behaviour…. She just did it for fun, and she laughed because she just loved that dance. But it became a political statement. She incorporated something that was absolutely masculine and took it to another dimension.

prixelysee.ch/

“I always felt like the way the city was being portrayed – sunny skies, Big Ben, all neat and shiny – just didn’t match the London I knew”

BJP: Can you tell us a bit about how your photography journey began?

Ron Timehin: Photography found me early on, I’m fortunate to say. I used to love taking photos of my family, but it was when I started travelling and performing as a young musician that it really took hold and became my way of documenting the world around me – capturing moments, telling stories, and just making sense of everything I was experiencing. It felt like this perfect balance of creativity and memory-making.

A big turning point came in 2014 when Instagram offered me a two-week feature. Every new user who signed up during that time would see my account – and the response was wild. Overnight, I gained 25,000 followers, and suddenly brands were getting in touch. They were looking for fresh photographers to shoot everything from editorial to campaigns and social media. Fast forward, and I’ve spent over a decade working with some incredible brands – shooting photography, directing video and helping to shape and bring relevance to their creative concepts.

BJP: Were there any early experiences or mentors that shaped your creative direction?

RT: Absolutely. My early years as a musician really taught me the value of practice, patience, and putting myself in uncomfortable situations in the name of growth. Music was my first love (as the old song goes), and it taught me that art can connect people deeply – beyond language, beyond backgrounds. I think photography does that too. A single image can spark emotion, inspire change or just start a conversation which could end anywhere.

In terms of mentors, I’ve been lucky. Misan Harriman has been a huge influence. Watching how he moves through the world – with integrity, strength, and a deep commitment to impact – has helped me navigate my own journey as a Black creative. He’s also big on planting seeds in other people’s gardens, which really stuck with me.

Tom Oldham is another person I deeply respect. He opened my eyes to the power of long-form storytelling and thinking beyond social media “content.” Coming from an era where most images are seen for two seconds and then gone, Oldham reminded me of the power of printed work, legacy-building, and telling stories that really matter. He’s also a master of commercial photography, so getting insight into that world – especially as someone who’s self-taught – has been invaluable.

BJP: What draws you to urban environments and moody lighting, particularly rain and fog?

RT: In my early days, I was mostly shooting street and cityscape photography, and I was always thinking, how can I make this feel different? I started thinking about music again – specifically jazz. It’s soulful, emotional, sometimes melancholic, but also incredibly beautiful. Fog and rain feel like jazz to me. There’s mood, atmosphere and subtlety.

Growing up in London, I always felt like the way the city was being portrayed – sunny skies, Big Ben, all neat and shiny – just didn’t match the London I knew. This city can be raw, complex, and sometimes quite lonely. Fog and rain capture that side of it. Since 2015, I’ve been checking the weather religiously, waiting for those rare foggy mornings. There might only be a handful each year, usually just after sunrise, and when they happen – I’m ready.

BJP: You’ve worked with brands like Apple, Adobe, and Nike. How do you balance client work with personal projects?

RT: When I first started landing brand jobs, it felt amazing – like real validation for all the years of hard work. It also meant I could leave my full-time job and go freelance, which was a massive leap. The ride has been exciting, challenging, and sometimes scary – but I feel incredibly lucky to be doing what I love for a living.

That said, over time, I realised I needed more than just paid work. I needed to tell my stories too. That’s where personal projects came in – they’re a way for me to dig deeper, explore what matters to me and create with complete freedom. No briefs, no feedback loops – just pure expression. And funnily enough, those are often the projects that catch the attention of brands (which often results in more harmonious commissioning). 

Having ambassadorships and long-term relationships with brands such as Adobe and Sony has helped propel my career and allowed me to pitch personal projects, which has been incredibly valuable!

BJP: What was the process like putting together your book London Fog?

RT: It still feels surreal, to be honest. Holding London Fog in my hands for the first time was one of those full-circle moments. Years of early mornings, walking the streets of London in the cold and damp, waiting for the right light – and then suddenly it was all there, bound together in a book.

Trope Publishing reached out to me in 2019, and we spent about a year planning and curating the work. When the book was released, it got a great response – it was even named The Times Photography Book of the Year. It ended up on national TV and featured in a bunch of magazines. Seeing that kind of recognition for something so personal was really special.

BJP: What’s next for you – creatively, professionally, or personally?

RT: Right now, I’m leaning hard into portraiture. People, connection, identity – that’s where my heart is. There’s something powerful about sitting with someone, hearing their story, and finding a way to honour that through a photograph.

On a personal level, I’ve been exploring what it means to be gay, especially as someone who grew up in a very masculine South London environment, and with African heritage. It hasn’t always been easy to navigate that space – but it’s a big part of who I am.

That exploration has turned into a new project called The Black Rainbow – a portrait series spotlighting the experiences of being Black and queer in Britain. The project looks at the challenges, the beauty, and the layers of this dual identity. It’s broken into themes – Black masculinity, family, friendship, relationships, and faith – and each of these pillars features images that reflect shared experiences, struggles and hope.

For the Faith section, I photographed Jide Macaulay, an openly gay Nigerian priest in the Church of England. The shoot was especially significant for me as it showed that despite the obstacles, there are people doing important, healing work in these spaces.

At its core, The Black Rainbow is aimed at young Black LGBTQ+ people. Through the work I want them to feel seen, to know they’re not alone, and to understand that their identity is something to be proud of. I’ll be sharing more from the project soon and I can’t wait.

@rontimehin

© June T. Sanders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Leah DeVun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a choice to be true to oneself”

Tayachi also draws his artistic work narratives from the restrictions and threats faced by him and the queer community in Tunisia. Through photography and art, he aims to create a safe space for individuals to express themselves and share their personal and professional practices. “It’s a choice to be true to oneself and the other,” he says, addressing the courage it takes to be an artist willing to express personal traumas and present oneself in the public sphere in an environment where freedom is nothing but something longed for. This position of the artist should not be overlooked, as it pertains to their role as advocates for rights, especially when physical and virtual realms are restricted, censored, and unsafe.

Throughout his brief career as a visual artist and fashion photographer, Tayachi has sought to balance beauty and technical precision while embodying the emotional depth of his work, stating, “emotions are a language in itself, understood globally.” Acknowledging the hyper-aesthetic language of fashion films and photography, Tayachi’s artistic and personal work blends evocative environments, stunning visuals, and relatable narratives, all produced with the support of a close-knit community of like-minded creatives, from models to makeup artists and friends. His visual language features highly-contrasted and saturated beautiful faces and bodies hinting at Avedon’s stylistic plasticity. Tayachi’s eye for intense gazes and volumes and ability to capture his sitters’ energy result in graphic photos celebrating diversity and self-esteem. 

At the core of Tayachi’s practice lies the fostering of a safe space to communicate and co-create, supporting each individual’s pursuits through a community-driven approach that transforms personal narratives into collective ones. Creating has become for him a way of normalising certain emotions and impulses –  a form of therapy intended to legitimise self-love, deep listening and to connect with others, both in the production and in the restitution phases.

Working towards a major involvement in installation art, Tayachi finds the interactive, technological dimensions to be a necessary vehicle of connection to themes, environments and subjects of exploration. “For me, to engage with technology is key to expanding my own growth as a visual artist and the publics’ possibilities of connecting with my art practice,” he explains. And experimenting with the interactivity of art means Tayachi has to be open to embracing the unpredictability that comes with giving the public major involvement and closeness to the personal narratives he unveils. 

Tayachi’s most recent show within the Jaou Biennial programme marks not only his first solo show but also his personal commitment to undertake a journey of self-exploration and more ambitious projects, which he hopes to pursue in Europe, through education programmes and a constant confrontation with a foreign art market and public outside Tunisia.

@bachir_tayachi

All images from Akram Zaatari: Objects of Study: Hashem el Madani/Studio Practices, 2004–2007 and Footnotes, 2018. Photographs by Hashem el Madani, Saida, 1950s–70s © Akram Zaatari. Courtesy of the AIF/Beirut.

Opened by Hashem El Madani in 1953 in Saida, the studio documented many sides of the Lebanese community, a legacy that Akram Zaatari is on a mission to preserve

Lebanon, 1950s. Two young men imitate a newly-wed couple. A young woman wears sunglasses and holds her bike, moving towards the camera. A resistance fighter poses with his gun, gazing up and out of the frame. On the Arab side of social media, images from and references to Studio Shehrazade have filled timelines and platform pages for years. Never intended to encompass a wider imagination of Arab visual culture, these images have nevertheless become central to the conversation around photography in the SWANA region.

Born in 1928, Hashem El Madani began photographing his hometown Saida’s inhabitants in 1949, from his parents’ house in the old city. His services were advertised in the grocery shop nearby. Later, when Madani had raised enough money to open his first studio in 1953, he moved to the first floor of a commercial building, named Shehrazade. Subjects were liberated from being under the watchful eye of Madani’s parents, free to pose as they chose, but they were mostly inspired by what they watched in the cinema; Egyptian and foreign films, love stories, dramas, suspense and comedies. Studio Shehrazade peaked in popularity in the 1960s and 70s, when Madani took up to 100 portraits a day and, according to his own estimates, he photographed 90 per cent of Saida’s population.

Akram Zaatari is a Lebanese artist also from Saida (the city takes its name from the Arabic word for ‘fishing’, owing to its historic fishing industry) who co-founded the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) in 1997 with Fouad El Koury and Samer Mohdad. Since 2017 he is no longer associated with the foundation but he continues to publish and work on the outcome of his research (1997–2002) preserved at the AIF. The book Studio Practices accompanied Zaatari’s first exhibition of Madani’s work at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2004. It was co-published by The Photographers’ Gallery, Mind the Gap and the AIF, revealing and exploring Madani’s work on a large scale for the first time, taking the images from the sidelines of history to a major body of work. 

“These photos would be seen as a solution that tricked the forbidden to illustrate the kiss, enabling its figuration by staying in line with social norms”

Zaatari met Madani in 1999 through a mutual friend when Zaatari was working on an exhibition and book for the AIF, The Vehicle: Picturing Moments of Transition in a Modernising Society, which retraces signs of modernity in photographs. Upon entering Madani’s studio, Zaatari realised the older photographer had amassed around half a million images, taken from 1949, through the opening of Studio Shehrazade in 1953 and up to the early 80s, using various formats and cameras. “I could see how he was learning and advancing and could see his mistakes in the early days,” Zaatari tells me. He made audio and video interviews with Madani extensively between 2000 and 2008; the entire fieldwork extended from 1999 until the last scene Zaatari filmed in Madani’s studio in December 2013, while making the film about the photographer, Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem.

Although the scenes in Madani’s images are confined to the studio, they sometimes echo the environment outside, with now widely popularised images of Syrian and Palestinian resistance fighters in traditional dress wielding guns. In some images, men imitate scenes of violence with fake knives, fake guns, and expressions of what look like stage-fright. The 1970s and 80s were a period of upheaval not dissimilar to today’s Lebanon – while writing this article, I am unable to speak with Zaatari due to the Israeli invasion, and we must conduct the interview through email.

During the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990, Israel invaded the country in 1978 and again in 1982, and Saida saw much of the fighting, owing to its seafront location and proximity to both Israel and the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Even so, Madani’s images have a pervading sense of playfulness. In them, one finds both a nation witnessing violence, and a people with an ineffable sense of humour. In one setup, two maids sit shoulder-to-shoulder with large glamorous sunglasses, as if celebrities caught in public by the press.

Five years later, when Zaatari had a gallery, he and the AIF decided to put editions of the work on sale, signing a three- way agreement with Madani for Zaatari’s Objects of Study/ The Archive of Studio Shehrazade project. In 2016, a year before Madani died, Zaatari agreed with him and the AIF to acquire his copyrights, and today remains the copyright holder.

Interestingly, Zaatari insists that the studio remained local and that, at least during his active years, Madani did not circulate his images widely. “We are talking about a local photo studio, the photos of which were mostly printed on inexpensive 6×10cm paper that mainly stayed with their people. Madani was known in Saida… but not elsewhere,” he points out. That does not at all reduce his significance today, Zaatari stresses. Madani trusted Zaatari with his work “entirely”. 

“His business had reached a dead end when I met him in 1999,” says Zaatari. “He would go to his studio and sit all day without any customer knocking at his door… The question for me remains, how to wrap up a practice that spanned 69 years. This is my mission.”

The legacy of Studio Shehrazade therefore comes mostly posthumously, through Zaatari’s ‘archaeological’ and documentary intervention. It also owes something to its accidental queer liberatory visual language. It is hard to find queer imagery from the SWANA region, even more so from the 20th century, so Madani’s images of same-sex kisses have been reappropriated. Yet they have never been what they appear. “Neither kissing between individuals of the same sex, nor the circulation of its photographic documentation later, would be interpreted as an affirmation or celebration of homosexuality in Saida during the 1950s,” affirms Zaatari. “These photos would be seen as a solution that tricked the forbidden to illustrate the kiss, enabling its figuration by staying in line with social norms.”

In other words, it is hard even by today’s standards to visually depict physical intimacy in the Arab world; ironically, queerly coded visuals are a loophole for the depiction of romance. “Kissing would alternatively be performed between friends of the same sex,” says Zaatari. “Men would kiss men, and women would kiss women.”

Lebanon was also at the height of Arab ‘cool’ during the 20th century, despite its period of war. The country was at the forefront of the SWANA world’s interaction with globalised visual media during this time and – with its generally more ‘liberal’ approach to nightlife, music and style – was arguably the first to introduce European fashion and living aesthetics to the Middle East. “I had to make a comparative assessment to understand exactly the changes that photography brought to society, promoting fashion and a mode of living that leaked easily from one culture to another thanks to photographs and films, and the changes society brought to pictures,” Zaatari says of his own motivation to work with Madani. 

“So, part of my interest was in documentation. In general, the life of a photo studio is very similar everywhere in the early-to-mid 20th century,” he adds. “The smell of a photo studio is the same everywhere as well, due to the chemicals used in it. And I loved that smell!”

As an artist and documentarian, Zaatari is fascinated by the ways in which these studios differ also, especially around their size and location, since some places attracted far more work than others, such as Jerusalem or Cairo, “both so heavily visited and fantasised about,” Zaatari tells me. A studio’s clientele, whether local or transient, is key. “My main interest in Madani’s profile was that he dedicated himself to a local working-class clientele, and he built his network closely with his subjects so he became, in a way, their magician,” he says.

In one image, we see a woman with her face scratched out. She was Mrs Baqari, whose jealous husband admonished the photographer for taking pictures of his wife without his knowledge. Mr Baqari insisted the photographer scratch the negatives, so that they became useless in the future. Tragically Mrs Baqari later burned herself to death, after which her husband asked for these damaged images to be printed for him to keep.

Working with the archive is not straightforward. “The question of authorship remains the most essential to me while working on someone else’s images, taken sometimes before I was born,” Zaatari says. “It was essential for me and for the AIF to understand that we are complicating captioning, for example, not because we like complexity, but because authorship is not simple – especially in photography, where the person who clicks the button is the author.”

Zaatari stresses that his work on Madani is not a collaboration with the photographer, but rather an artist’s documentary project that addresses the practice of a local photographer. “It’s like making a film about an artist,” he explains. “This is an artwork about a photographer and his images. So, we had to live with two names, mine and his, two dates, the taking of the photo and the making of the project.”

Currently, Zaatari is working on developing a large cabinet that would represent the life of Studio Shehrazade, including cameras, flashes, photos, postcards, AV material representing scenes from the studio, parts of his interviews, films, and so on. The Madani project runs parallel to Zaatari’s other work; both he and the AIF were heavily impacted by Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2019, and they are still slowly recovering.

Zaatari is currently researching material made by Madani’s brother Hussein, who was a few years older but worked for him as an itinerant photographer in the 1950s and early 70s. “Hussein was a marginal character, who worked only to cover his debts,” says Zaatari, adding that the older brother was sadly run over and killed in Beirut in 1973. He left a substantial number of 35mm film negatives of youngsters, leaving movie theatres after watching Bruce Lee films and practising martial arts. “I plan to work with this material as well soon.”

@akramzaatari
arabimagefoundation.org