Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 Shortlist © Matthew Joseph

Portrait of Britain returns with a shortlist of 200 photographs reflecting a nation caught between change and continuity.

Dartmoor, though beautiful, is an eerie sight. A place rich in folklore, where the pixies and will-o’-the-wisp exist, one where it is possible to be miles away from  the next closest person. In this vast, quiet moorland stands a young man. Dressed in a gandoura (a traditional Moroccan garment), trainers and other streetwear, his presence creates a powerful contrast to this rugged, quintessentially British landscape. In Jaiyana Chelikha’s photograph, ‘Jounaid, Go Back To Where?’ there is a convergence of an ancient, elemental landscape of this nation with a portrait of a second-generation immigrant. It makes a clear statement of belonging. This young man’s interaction with the land is just as emotional, just as connected, as a person whose family has been here for countless generations.

Britain in 2025 is a complex place. It feels ever more frenzied and more contested for those that live here. Amid growing division, this year’s Portrait of Britain Vol 8 photobook explores and celebrates the many identities that create this land, showing that it can be a place of harmony, humour, beauty and life. The 200 shortlisted photographs making up the book – which this year is sponsored by WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer – will be available to pre-order from mid November. In January, 100 of the images will be awarded as winners and presented in a public exhibition in partnership with JCDecaux.

‘For me, a photograph doesn’t have to define Britain – that would be impossible – but it should feel like it’s in conversation with it; questioning, complicating or expanding the idea of what Britishness looks like and who gets to be included in it.’

– Rene Matić, Artist and Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 Judge

Elsewhere in the shortlist, a person is dressed in a wintry outfit, their shoulders and head covered in a black tent of fabric with an orange-billed bird’s head atop – its beady eye dazed. The costume features in the traditional ‘hoodening’ wassailing ceremony in East Kent, enacted in January to bless the apple orchards for a bountiful harvest. It is a joyous ritual, one that is part of an ongoing project by Leonie Freeman to capture modern Britain’s relationship to ancient traditions. Further north, a thriving tradition is present in Joe Gelder’s portrait of the robust but straining figure of a natural stone lifter in Glencoe, Scottish Highlands. The use of black-and-white creates a sense of timelessness about this pursuit, of which the lifter Harley, when asked why he participates in the sport says: ‘It’s just primal innit’.

Amongst this year’s judging panel, made up of Sophie Parker, Dennis Morris, Claire Rees, Mick Moore, Alice Zoo and Vivienne Gamble, is Turner Prize 2025 nominee, artist Rene Matić. I asked Matić what it is that they are looking for a photograph to communicate about Britain when considering this year’s selection? “With my work I’m always searching for what these things are – identity, place, belonging – and I was searching for the same thing when looking at all the images. I’m interested in how Britain reveals itself through people’s relationships to it: whether that’s love, frustration, estrangement or pride. For me, a photograph doesn’t have to define Britain – that would be impossible – but it should feel like it’s in conversation with it; questioning, complicating or expanding the idea of what Britishness looks like and who gets to be included in it. I was drawn to images that held contradictions, that felt lived-in and specific, yet spoke to something collective and unresolved about this place we call ‘home’.”

Something that feels universal to many who inhabit Britain is the living room. So much of our lives play out in our homes – perhaps harbouring the truest version of ourselves, the secrets and the love. In Sean Hardy’s giddy family portrait of his three children, there exists two planes of reality. While his daughter and youngest son – who is non-verbal and autistic – rough-and-tumble on the sofa, Hardy’s eldest son is unaware of his physical surroundings, with a virtual reality headset over his eyes, utterly engrossed in this other world. It is an electric, dynamic image of everyday family life in all its usual scruffiness. But there is a poignant undercurrent. On the wall behind them hang three William Morris prints – the designer and activist once said: “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” It is a line that could easily thread through every image in this Portrait of Britain shortlist.

It can be rare to feel relaxed when we are outside of our homes, and in Britain community spaces have been on a sharp decline for many years. In Matthew Joseph’s image ‘Skate Break’, taken in a Tesco car park, we see a group of skaters: laughing, smoking and using the supermarket trollies as a place of rest. What it captures is the potential for subculture and community to flourish, even if that means making the fluorescent strip-light ceiling of a London car park your shelter. Joseph describes the community as a “sacred place where warmth, acceptance and dedication thrive – a true testament to the power of community”.

For some, their community existed in (quite literal) ecstatic escape amidst hundreds of undulating limbs and pulsing sonic vibrations along the M25 orbital. AboveGround captures a handshake with ‘Dave the Rave’ through an open car window, an ode to Essex’s oldest raver. Debbie Todd captures a young boy, sporting an expression of wisdom beyond his years and a suave slicked hair-do, at the Appleby Horse Fair. The annual gathering of Romany and Traveller communities in Cumbria is a rich and vital opportunity for a section of society that can often be ostracised or wrongly stereotyped to come together.

The Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 Book is sponsored by WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer and will be available to pre-order from mid November.

“It’s this whole subculture where boys meticulously colour-coordinate a tracksuit with their trainers, then top it off with a fresh trim”

The idea took root during conversations with her brother about the often- overlooked grooming rituals of Moroccan youth. “We’d talk about how crazy the hairstyles were – but no one really documents them,” she says. “It’s this whole subculture where boys meticulously colour-coordinate a tracksuit with their trainers, then top it off with a fresh trim. It’s all curated.”

As Abelque continued her research, the project deepened in complexity. Hairstyles, she realised, reflect political realities. “There’s this stereotype that these boys are just idling all day,” she says. “But they’re creating joy and purpose for themselves. A footballer debuts a new style and suddenly everyone’s talking about it, running to the barber to get the same look.”

In a country where youth employment is scarce and public recreational spaces are limited, the barbershop emerges as a vital hub. “Hair and beauty become a means of self-expression,” Abelque says. “But it’s also a social ritual – a way to find identity and belonging among young men.” Abelque shoots in the barbershops too, and the images festooning their walls provide a joyfully chaotic foil for the quieter portraits taken against a clean space. Abelque sees the barbershop as a boy’s bedroom in public, walls covered in football posters, streetwear brand logos and mirror selfies. “It’s where their interests live.”

Abelque is particularly drawn to aesthetic contradictions. “To see an Arab man walking around with a massive mohawk – that image is so layered,” she reflects. But she adds that their pride is also palpable. She was overwhelmed by how excited the boys were to have their portrait made, the images perhaps validating the care taken over their appearance, and further encouraging them to attract a healthy attention. “When I asked to take their photo, they’d light up,” she says. “They’d pull out pictures of their best fits, their favourite cuts. They’re proud of how they present themselves.”

@zeeeeeea

“Having lived abroad for many years, the mountain has come to symbolise my own nostalgic longing for the place where I grew up. This personal connection was also a reason why I chose this image as the backdrop”

SVE: The title of your project prompts me to reflect on the significance of the term ‘free’. Free for whom? What meaning are you attributing to this term? Are people surprised by the ‘Fotos Gratis’ sign?

DM: The title of the project plays on the meaning of the word ‘free’. While it’s true that participants leave with a ‘free’ photograph, I am also able to capture their portrait and, thus, get something in return. This give-and-take dynamic mirrors the concept of ‘ayni’, a principle deeply embedded in Andean culture, including in places such as El Alto. Ayni emphasises the importance of reciprocity in everyday life. Without romanticising the project’s process, my intention is to distance myself from an extractivist approach to image-making, and attempt to create another space around the photographic act.

The sign ‘Fotos Gratis’ also plays an important role in catching people’s attention. The style of this sign is commonly seen throughout the city, in public transport, stores, restaurants and among street merchants, including those at the Feria 16 de Julio. Most passers-by who encounter the sign find it amusing, though many approach with scepticism. Until the photograph emerges from the printer, there is a sense that everything could be just a fabrication. The proof is the photograph.

SVE: It’s compelling to shift perspective and explore the role of the ‘participants’ in the photographic act, namely the photographer who observes the subject, who in turn observes the photographer, while others watch them both. This approach helps us understand the complex relationships intertwined in the making of a photograph. How long have you overseen the studio, and what are some of the most memorable experiences you have had there? Who are the individuals depicted in the photographs?

DM: I have set up the photography studio on four occasions over the course of two trips to Bolivia, and I plan to continue the project. The goal is to create an open space for any passer-by who wants to have their photograph taken. As the sessions have progressed, I have noticed some patterns: many small children, brought by parents eager to capture a new memory; several middle-aged men who find amusement in being seen and participating in the project; and rarely any women on their own.

There have also been moments that have deeply touched and amazed me, such as when a mechanic, holding a political science book, invited me to his repair shop to discuss politics, or when a drunken participant thanked me for his photograph by later bringing me small pears. One particularly memorable moment was witnessing a man kiss his photograph and hold it to his chest as he walked away.

These stories are not exterior to the project but rather constitute a central element of it. I have always viewed this project as a performance, with both the participants and myself spontaneously playing roles. I am interested in this sense in how an artistic gesture in the public space can become an anecdote, a rumour and, in some cases, an urban myth. The work of Francis Alÿs, particularly his performance When Faith Moves Mountains [2002], has been an important inspiration for this aspect of the project. It is also the reason I consider the video documentation of it so important. The art lies in the process. The photographs themselves become almost just an excuse for certain interactions to take place.

SVE: Bolivia, shaped by mining since colonial times, now sees El Alto as the centre of Indigenous political struggle and cultural empowerment. The Aymara’s blending of traditional and modern elements challenges simplistic views of Indigenous identity, and the western extractivist way of life. Conscious of these complex realities within the continent, the critic Gerardo Mosquera has reflected that Latin American art has ceased to be ‘of’ and has instead become art ‘from’ Latin America. How does this reflection inspire your work?

DM: Mosquera’s reflection raises an important question on how artists position themselves in Latin America. He argues that we have become so insistent on showcasing our own identity that we fall into the trap of self-exoticisation. I try to bear this in mind as I work in Bolivia, a territory which continues today to be represented through clichés and stereotypes.

Two Bolivian thinkers, René Zavaleta Mercado and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, have influenced my perspective on this matter. Their concepts of ‘sociedad abigarrada’ [Zavaleta] and ‘ch’ixi’ [Cusiquanqui] provide valuable insight on how identity in contemporary Bolivian society is shaped by the coexistence of multiple cultural differences. For instance, the person sitting before me might identify as Aymara and embrace local cosmologies, while simultaneously being fully engaged with globalised popular culture.

SVE: In your project, a backdrop featuring a painted representation of the Illimani by artist Kate Araoz is prominently displayed. The Illimani, a significant Andean peak visible from the city, has both geographical prominence and strong symbolic meaning. In Aymara culture, Mallku, or the Lord of Great Altitude, represents the summit and hierarchical authority. This deity, central to rituals such as the sacrifices of the Capacocha, is associated with sacred mountains which are seen as vital sources of life-giving water. The depiction of Illimani in the photography backdrop thus reflects both spiritual significance and the cultural landscape of El Alto. How do you perceive the influence of the Mallku in your own images?

DM: Bolivian poet Jaime Sáenz once wrote that the mountain is not something that is seen but rather “the mountain is a presence”, an energy that is felt in everyday life. When I decided to have the Illimani as the image for the backdrop, I was indeed thinking of its importance in local beliefs. I also thought about how the representation of the Illimani can be found everywhere there, from advertisements to paintings and television. It’s an iconic figure that I felt people would immediately relate to, and that could perhaps even contribute to creating a sense of pride and dignity as they sat under it for their photographic portraits.

At the same time, the Illimani is an inseparable part of the landscape of my childhood. Having lived abroad for many years, the mountain has come to symbolise my own nostalgic longing for the place where I grew up. This personal connection was also a reason why I chose this image as the backdrop.

SVE: When I see the landscape backdrops I’m reminded of the early 20th century, when anthropologists used early mobile cameras to photograph the Americas. Initially focused on urban settings and European-style societies, these photographs eventually included Indigenous peoples, with ‘neutral’ backdrops serving an ethnological purpose well into the 1950s. In your project, however, the backdrop doesn’t remain neutral. Instead we observe the folds and creases in the fabric and the clamps on each edge, drawing attention to the artificiality of the set-up. Given this, how do you view your role in the project when photographing individuals?

DM: While developing the project, I was interested in exploring the profession and societal role of the photographer. An important reference in this exploration has been the book Los Ambulantes [1984] by Ann Parker and Avon Neal, which documents itinerant photographers in Guatemala from an anthropological perspective. The photographs in the book beautifully capture various aspects of the itinerant photographer’s life along with the rituals and gestures sitters perform around the photographic moment, such as combing their hair, straightening their clothes, or sitting upright. My project’s video component highlights some of these gestures.

In Bolivia, photographers are often seen on the streets wearing cargo vests and carrying portable printers around their necks, covering events such as festivities, weddings and graduations. Photography is perceived primarily as a service, and this is exactly how I feel during the project – as a professional providing a service. I never feel more like a ‘photographer’ than during those times when I set up my photography stall for the project.

SVE: Itinerant photography, seen in the works of Ann Parker, Avon Neal, or Antonio Quintana in Yumbel, relied on landscape backdrops. They also displayed photos around their wooden camera to attract first-time clients. This not only shaped image production but also offered insight into the discourse of photographic exhibitions. Have you considered this in your project?

DM: I find this observation very interesting. In fact, the first time I set up the photography studio I decided to pin a sample photograph on the sign so people could see what the portraits would look like. This ties back to what I mentioned earlier on the importance of this photographic ‘proof’ for those unsure about participating.

Looking ahead, I also envision exhibiting prints of the portraits within the market itself. The goal is to return the images to the space where they were originally created, by setting up an exhibition stall on the street. I can also imagine including a sign that reads ‘Exposición de arte abierta’ [‘Open art exhibition’]. In this sense, I am interested in raising questions about the value of art exhibitions and their intended audience. I feel this would bring the project full circle.

SVE: It seems to me that this photographic ‘proof’ implies also a sort of social contract, whereby the photograph produced is of shared property. How do you see this question of ownership in your project?

DM: This question ties closely to the earlier discussion on the exchange aspect of the project. Each shoot produces two photographs: one taken with an analogue camera for the project, and another with a digital camera for the sitter. This leads to an intriguing scenario where neither I nor the sitters necessarily know where these images might end up. I often find myself thinking about the ‘lives’ of the photographs kept by the sitters – whether they are displayed on a wall, stuck on a fridge, framed on an altar, or perhaps forgotten in a drawer or box. Similarly, some sitters likely wonder the same thing about the photographs I keep.

This is also why I am interested in setting up an exhibition stall in the market and creating a meeting point or convergence between the ‘artistic’ photos I keep and the context in which they were produced.

SVE: When looking at your project, I am reminded of work by photographers such as Anthony Luvera and Federico Estol, who challenge the notion of the solitary genius by exploring the potential of photography as a collective and community-based practice. Recent publications such as Photography For Whom? [2019] and Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography [2023] have also highlighted this topic. How have these approaches influenced your work to date or future projects?

DM: The project has prompted me to reflect increasingly on the value of collaboration and participation in photography. I am particularly interested in how such strategies can broaden the discourse around ‘documentary photography’. This often involves, as you mention, artists becoming less preoccupied with their status as the sole authors of a project.

Recently I have also been questioning more deeply the role and place of the artist in society. I am curious about how an art project or action can foster meaningful social interactions among a group during the process, turning the artist into a ‘facilitator’ or in some cases an ‘educator’. Artist Pablo Helguera refers to these practices as “socially engaged art”. A notable example that I often revisit is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ performance Touch Sanitation [1979–80], where she shook hands with 8500 sanitation workers of the New York Sanitation Department, saying, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive”. The art was in all the interactions taking place, in the conversations and the sharing of different stories. This is one direction I would like to move towards, dedicating part of my practice to projects where the artistic value lies in the process itself rather than in the finished product.

danielmebarek.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

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

“I was interested in how John and Funmilayo were going into these domestic houses and crazy interior designs and crashing patterns and how they took that same formula onto the street”

Studio portraits offered a way for city-dwellers to show their newfound wealth and aspirations to family and friends. In one portrait, a woman wears a new outfit that’s clearly been newly unboxed with creases down the front where it’s been folded. Others read detective books from abroad or look seriously at the camera in their favourite sunglasses. “Everybody would receive these images almost like postcards,” says Ohiri, whose mother had her own portrait taken at Lucky Star Studio in Lagos before she emigrated to the UK. Across West Africa, the portraits took on a distinct quality: the black and white portraits of clients dressed in their finest were taken against chequerboard floors and floral patterned curtains. “They look the same but that’s really nice to see because it’s a constant reminder that it’s all part of the human condition,” says Ohiri, “they’re all chasing the same dreams and aspirations and same things.”

Young people would pose with their new phones and radios or their scooters and guitars — adopting the trends of an era. It was a time of music and creativity with British and American rock bands finding popularity in Nigeria, as well as local Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, King Sunny Adé and Victor Uwaifo. At home, teenage boys were photographed in their bedrooms with images of naked girls cut out of magazines on their walls. “With film there’s this relationship between the photographer and the sitter, which is really about just the moment that we’re having. There’s more styling and there’s more time to compose the shot.” 

“You see this idea of kinship and community and how these different people that were there were known to John and Funmilayo, and you see the warmth in the way they capture the essence of who they were,” says senior curator Bindi Vora. “I think there can be some misconceptions about African studio photography being of a very particular volition but what we are seeing here is the fashion, the culture was everywhere: it was at their homes, in the street, in the studio. It was how they were.”

John and Funmilayo Abe were a power house couple, raising their eight children with the help of their many studio assistants. John would go out to funerals, weddings, naming ceremonies, and freedom parties (a right of passage ceremony); while Funmilayo would hold down the fort. She’s one of the few female practitioners to have been credited so prolifically in such a male-dominated field. “We’ve always had this idea about reinserting some of these histories that have been obfuscated or left out of the canon when it’s not about discovering them, it’s about saying they’ve existed and these are the missing chapters,” says Vora.

“I was interested in how John and Funmilayo were going into these domestic houses and crazy interior designs and crashing patterns and how they took that same formula onto the street. It was telling a bigger story about what it was like to run a commercial studio at that time and how you were constantly having to adapt and constantly change,” Vora adds. But the images were never supposed to be seen in the context of a gallery space, so the framing of the photographs reveals more to the viewer than what would have been presented to the customers: the different floor types, props, lamps and backgrounds. “I think that’s one of the interesting things in many ways is how we readdress these images.”

Ohiri and Kassinen are on a mission to preserve as many photography archives, like Abi Morocco’s, before it’s too late. With the heat worsening and the summer’s humidity threatening the negatives; Lagosians getting pushed further from the city’s centre; and studio owners dying (shortly after they finished their project and research, John passed away) — the portraiture that defined an era is at risk of being destroyed. “I didn’t want this cultural heritage to be lost,” says Ohiri. “There were only a handful of photographers that were there.”

Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos is on show at Autograph Gallery until 22 March 2025

“Oftentimes, there’s a middle space between photography and painting, and each has its own powerful properties”

My first encounter with Thomas was in 2019, in the circumstances relating to Tillet’s text. Back then I was editor-inchief of Foam Magazine, and working with Mariama Attah on what would be the Play! issue, a publication themed around playing, its subversive potential, and its relation to how we experience the world and its power structures. That year had been an incredible one for Thomas – she had just been honoured with the Pioneer Works Visionary Award, and at the Muse Aperture Gala for “her brilliant use of the photographic image to assert new definitions of beauty and Black female identity, celebrity and sexuality”

Her works were also already in the collections of MoMA, the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Attah and I had both been following and admiring her work for a while, since Aperture published her first book, Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs, in 2015, followed in 2016 by a solo show at the Aperture Gallery titled Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête. That was the moment she established a different relationship with photography in her practice, and not only because Muse was one of her first exhibitions to contain exclusively photographic work, beyond her well-established oeuvre in painting. In fact, the large-scale photographs, collages and Polaroids included in the show were all produced between 2001 and 2015, testimony to her constant involvement and experimentation with the medium since early on.

The tête-à-tête section of Muse, a mini group show within the show, was the second instalment of the namesake exhibition Thomas curated in 2012 at Yancey Richardson Gallery. Inspired by the Conversation: Among Friends symposium held at MoMA, Thomas felt pressed to question ideas about collaborative work. As the press release for the show explained: “Mickalene Thomas was interested in the performative way in which male artists use their physical presence and body in relation to the viewer, and the way many female artists see themselves through the gaze of another (often male)”. The artists she selected included LaToya Ruby Frazier, Hank Willis Thomas, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Clifford Owens, Mahlot Sansosa and Malick Sidibé, among others, next to a selection of Thomas’ Polaroids.

The Aperture tête-à-tête was oriented towards her approach to collaboration, her celebration of artists she thought had helped nurture her own practice, whose work she felt was in deep dialogue with her own. Remarkably, this edition included works from Carrie Mae Weems, an artist she has always mentioned as deeply important in bringing photography to the core of her art. The Aperture show and accompanying publication were an adjustment in framing, in composition. That was the moment in which all the crucial elements and themes of her poetics aligned, took stage, and started to echo her practice at large – the celebration of the Black female body, its power, beauty and sensuality; the importance of the community, and the necessity to give back, share, empower and create space; the continuous relation with the past and how it informs our present, the gratitude towards the giants’ shoulders we stand on, and the urgency to rewrite and heal the violent narratives plaguing generations.

Mixing up Media

Thomas was initially known for her paintings, works that ventured into imagination and experiments with mixed media, allowing her to build the physicality and structures to bring that imagination into the world and outside the frame. Photography brought in a sense of the real. I ask what each craft does to the other, and how she balances them out to get exactly where she wants her images to go. “They’re different tools in which each medium provides a different access into visibility, and in how we experience the work,” she says. “I really think about how the power of those tools could make a difference and will convey the idea in the best way possible – by executing it through that medium.

“Oftentimes, there’s a middle space between photography and painting, and each has its own powerful properties. And for me, painting allows for a space of visual fantasy where you can do whatever you want. You can provide narrative to both. Photography lends itself to something that is more believable. We take it as it is. There’s an element of truth. We are more familiar to the subject. But all of it is still performative. The familiar artifice of the image allows us to believe all the elements of the photo image and its truthfulness. There’s this play between reality and fantasy, an intersection that I integrate into my work. This is the space I enjoy working from. You have these elements that allow you to manipulate the visual perception of the work. That’s what creating art is – an illusion. But we often have the illusion more in photography.”

The idea of an intersection between reality and illusion is powerful when applied to the remediation of archival and vernacular imagery, used not only as a stylistic reference but also, and especially, in a critical way. There is the radical mental and aesthetic act of representing and celebrating the Black body, in a way that recalls and reappropriates the majesty of French classical portraiture. Then there is the rehabilitation of archival imagery, and the confrontation with the narratives and tropes they possess and convey, from 19th-century plates to 1950s French magazines.

We talk about the process that led to her most recent series je t’adore, presented at Yancey Richardson, which includes 13 large-scale mixed-media photo collages, inspired by the imagery of Black female erotica featured in 1950s French publication Nus Exotiques and Jet magazine calendars. I ask about her relation with researching archival materials, and their historical reception and narratives.

“I pull from archival images to seek subjects from the past, then with new images change the viewer’s perception of what they knew. These complicated, complex and challenging histories need to be brought forward,” she explains. “In a way, it’s like being an archaeologist. You’re discovering information, excavating and bringing that up to the surface so that the new generation can understand particular histories, moments and visual aesthetics. It’s really the need to see myself in others.

“Discovering that really excites me. I have to feel something from it. And when I feel something from it, it resonates with me in a way beyond the physical. It becomes very visceral, in a way where I feel like there’s a story that could be told. There’s a narrative here, there’s things that have been unspoken and there’s a new platform of agency that can be provided for these images. A new context taking French erotica from the 1950s and paying it forward to the present public, showing ways in which we see ourselves, or how we can see ourselves cross-Atlantic, or how the Black body has been seen within the diaspora.

“Oftentimes, and particularly in America, we want to compartmentalise the notion of what the Black body is, ignoring the diaspora of how Black bodies have moved through the world and what those relationships were and are now. I love juxtaposing the Black body from spaces that are not as familiar to me to familiar ones, like Jet calendars, and create a complex conversation for people to look at the differences of how we were being seen, or how we were being looked at. And it’s not necessarily about subjugating or exploiting, but really celebrating. Celebrating our bodies, because the bodies and images in those particular times, they look and appear so different than today.

“I think it’s really important, especially for young girls, to see that there are bodies of various shapes and sizes that are just beautifully natural and they may look different. Loving all aspects of it; life, sickness, scarification from motherhood, and ageing. I think the notion of body positivity comes through some of these archival images. And it excites me, the act of pulling, excavating those images and presenting them in a way that could be a new, unexplored perspective for young girls to see themselves other than what they’re getting from Instagram or social media platforms or magazines. There’s a power in these images and I’m so grateful for them.”

“As an artist, it is very important for me to create impact and explore a transformative way of how we can see ourselves”

Expressions of gratitude

The urgency with which Thomas talks about representation runs very deep. I keep thinking, when does representation become celebration? I admire how, not only pose, but also materials come into play in her works as adorning elements – when I look at her works, in whatever medium they were made, words such as celebration, beauty, pleasure come to mind. There is also the idea of ‘gratitude’ as an ultimate form of love – I see you, thank you for existing.

Thomas’ images are acts of love, as are her curatorial and mentoring activities. She recently opened the exhibition Portrait of an Unlikely Space at Yale University Art Gallery, which again revolves around the idea of the Muse – this time represented by a single object, a portrait miniature of Rose Prentice, a domestic worker, painted in around 1837. The exhibition addresses imagery of Black people from the pre-emancipation era, and puts rare miniatures, daguerreotypes, silhouettes and engravings in dialogue with the works of eight contemporary artists plus Thomas.

The other artists are the youngest branches of a family tree, as Thomas described it in an interview to The New York Times, and include the likes of Lebohang Kganye, Adia Millett and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter. The show, especially Thomas’ 2011 Polaroid series, referred to as Courbet images, and Baxter’s Consecration To Mary, give us the chance to talk about the more problematic aspect of archival and historical imagery – the artist’s responsibilities. In Consecration to Mary, Baxter worked on two 1882 photographs by Thomas Eakins, for example, which exploit a young Black girl posing naked. Baxter inserted herself in the images as if protecting the child, shielding the view to her exposed body.

Thomas explains: “Working from images like Eakins’ photographs directly points at the idea of subjectification, the notion of her reclaiming herself. It’s almost like saving her, going back in time and sort of uplifting and carrying her out of that picture. And to me, that’s what makes it so powerful. It’s like the superhero come in and say, I see you. And now I’m going to claim this space and protect you. I think we have a responsibility when we put images out in the world. As an artist, it is very important for me to create impact and explore a transformative way of how we can see ourselves. And even claiming or reclaiming images through archival printed matter, that’s a way for me to make sense of this, to put forth, to feel empowered socially and politically. There’s a vulnerability to creating art, but I also feel there’s a sense of responsibility.”

Thomas moves through words, references and topics just as she creates her artworks, and again, a powerful and benevolent Durga springs to my mind. She is a multitude. As she talks, I see New York City unfolding through the window of the car now carrying her along – a familiar sight, another layer of energy adding to hers. Her thoughts feel like hands with various tools, each of them razor sharp and working towards the same end result. Perhaps this could be summarised as ‘doing the work’. Creating artworks, curating exhibitions, mentoring young and underrepresented artists (she co-founded the Pratt>Forward programme in 2021 to support and provide mentorship and peer-advice emerging artists), buying a train ticket for a stranger at the station; these are all parts of the same practice, one that cares and takes care, that feels the embodiment of bell hooks’ visual politics, infused with love.

“People always ask, how are you able to do all these things?” she tells me. “You do it because you can, because you care, and you just make it so much easier for someone else. I’m where I’m at because someone, somewhere, made it easy for me to develop, to create art – they opened the door. At some point, whether inconsequential or consequential, whether I can see it or not, someone made a difference. Someone made a decision that I was deserving of this space and time to not have to work at a retail store, so I could work in my studio and make art. That is crucially important.”

Reinventing portraiture

Over the years, Thomas has built a practice that has deeply challenged and reinvented the way we think about portraiture, especially in photography. Quoting Carrie Mae Weems, she is doing “What it takes to turn a whole visual narrative, an art history, upside down rather than simply inserting the Black body in it”. In her large-scale tableaux she has created, or rather recreated a space for existence, an ever-changing setting in which her sitters, muses or subjects are celebrated and adorned, reinvented and recognised, empowered and rediscovered. As she eloquently explains her practice, I am reminded of Mark Sealy’s thinking of jazz as “disruptive, unanchored space” in which unlearning and reprocessing can happen, at the same time healing and revolutionising.

“I think that does relate to me”, she replies. “And I think not only jazz, but hip-hop and avant-garde. That’s where I feel like collage comes out of. It comes out of the juxtaposition, the intersection, the zigzag, and creation within disruption, making sense of many things that are happening simultaneously. Just like our world. Whether or not we respond or acknowledge the disparity of others that we see when we walk through the world, we see them. And so we become aware of it. James Baldwin said it very poignantly, that we are everyone, whether we acknowledge that or not. The people that we see in the world, we too are them. We are a reflection of each other.”

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is on show at The Broad, Los Angeles (25 May – 29 September); The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (20 October 2024 – 12 January 2025); and The Hayward Gallery, London (11 February – 05 May, 2025)

“In the west, you’re taught to deny yourself and deny India. It’s my duty to make a body of work romanticising it”

Sood etched or painted on several of the prints, echoing the DIY techniques studio owners used for subjects who lacked the means to buy lavish saris and tunics. The Studio also traces photography’s mechanical evolutions, nodding to ambrotypes and tintypes as well as the bright fabric backdrops favoured as when digital cameras became widespread. Sood drew inspiration from prints in Indian family albums and on glass plates, which she found in flea markets in India and Europe. She also referenced imagery from Africa, another big market for portrait studios, and mentions Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Bollywood hairstyles and poses also found their way into her series, which has a distinctly theatrical air, the models like actors rotating through various roles as if posing for promotional pictures from a multi-act comedy.

Born in France to a Punjabi family, Sood attended boarding school in the Himalayas before studying performance art at Central Saint Martins. After travelling in India to research The Studio, she began to critique the western perspective she had absorbed in London and Paris. “When you’re in Europe, everybody seems to have their blinders on [when thinking about India],” she says. “They can’t see past the chaos – there’s this need to dilute things.” She wanted to pursue a project that celebrated the country’s visual culture and ingenuity, factors rarely recognised beyond its own borders. She also sought to represent everyday people without resorting to poverty porn, and the familiar depictions in which working-class Indians are defined solely by their living conditions.

Sood is planning two other series in this vein, constituting what she terms a chapter-by-chapter survey of India’s “dying arts and artistry”. The next body of work will document magicians in the country, whose tricks are often dumbed down when emulated in the west. After that she plans to follow the country’s dwindling equestrian scene, tracing regional nobles and breeding practices which stretch back centuries. The Studio is about positivity through complexity, about layers of references that move beyond the equation of an Indian model or “brown facPoe” as adequate representation for a vast, heterogeneous country. There remains a postcolonial hangover in the diaspora, Sood says. “In the west, you’re taught to deny yourself and deny India. It’s my duty to make a body of work romanticising it.”

“I believe the nude is the greatest expression in figurative art”

The photographer first engaged with the nude at art school, in lectures that unravelled its significance in the history of art, in studios lined with marble statues of nudes. One of the first photography exhibitions he ever visited was a Robert Mapplethorpe show in Venice, where Moni was struck by “his strength in black-and-white; the cleanness of the lines, and the sexuality that transpired from the images”. Mapplethorpe joins a long list of references, including August Sander, Jim Alinder, Peter Hujar, Collier Schorr and Ansel Adams, all of whom have inspired Moni to employ the body as a site of expression.

“I believe the nude is the greatest expression in figurative art,” he says. “I want the In the House project to be a raw and true look, to train our eyes to the beauty of each person and free us from the conventional aesthetics that the market imposes on us. In my nude photos I would like to convey the idea that we are all the same, even with our ‘little defects’, if that’s what we want to call them. It also consists of other images of objects, landscapes and architecture that, in my head, form a single story around the human figure.”

Cultivating the right environment for his portraits is important. To date, Moni has photographed 60 people of different genders and sexual identities, photographing them against the same backdrop from a desire to present people equally, regardless of how they identify. “I needed to create an equal set,” he says. “I dedicate time to each subject to talk together to understand each other. I think that’s more important than the creative process, to get to the photo, you need to create the right context.”

The images are all made in his home studio, which is located 20km outside of Parma in a converted barn. He built most of it himself, including repurposing the discarded wooden flooring of a 16th-century theatre. For Moni, there is a poetry in knowing that “thousands of artists from all over the world danced on this old and ruined floor”. The studio is also where he keeps his collection of books and magazines, which cover subjects from painting and sculpture to architecture and dance.

He considers his range of influences and inspirations a product of the environment he was raised in, because the region of Emilia-Romagna has a long, rich political and artistic history. It is home to the cultural centres of Bologna and Modena, and Moni grew up amongst a fusion of Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture in Parma’s world-renowned churches, palazzos and theatres. “I have always been surrounded by architectural beauties – that’s a constant in Italy,” he says.

Now, however, Moni enjoys being away from the city. Surrounded by fields and wild animals, the studio allows him to switch off from the hustles of life as a working photographer. He shoots with large format for similar reasons, because it forces him to be in the present. “I’ve been using it for years as a Zen therapy in life,” he says. “It ensures that whatever is in front of me has my full attention.”

In some images, Moni presents still lifes or the studio itself, alluding to the intimate setting of the home but also nodding to the work of photographers such as Ruvén Afanador, Richard Avedon and Jody Rogac, all of whom reveal “small details that can intrigue and give you an idea of the set”. Moni also attributes this to his early days of working in the theatre. “This influenced me for the setting in my studio,” he says, “and for giving away small backstage signs.”

“Honesty makes a good portrait – that moment where they’re confident in themselves, when there’s trust involved. Creating an environment that is relaxed and that has nuances of love creates a great portrait”

“I used to love to go through the family albums as a kid,” he says. “I’m the youngest in my family, so a lot of my relatives had passed away, but to have a way of knowing who they were, of knowing their style, their smile, their eyes, understanding why they were placed in that part of the book, it was all super important to me. My grandmother used to always sit on the front porch too, and go through the family album and offer oral history, which I thought was amazing.

“But I feel like it’s the same for me, that the way I look at Pharrell is the same way I look at my great-uncle in a photo,” he adds. “Not knowing him, but hearing stories about him and being excited about it, especially because the people that I photograph have all inspired me in one way or another.”

Carter’s father was in the air force and was involved in the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers, “able to express himself in the Black is Beautiful movement”, says Carter. Maybe he passed on a sense that everyone has something special because that is what Carter reaches for in his shoots. As his friend and collaborator Tracee Ellis Ross puts it in the introduction to What’s My Name: “He creates a space that is less of a set and more of an exchange; kind of like hanging with a friend in their backyard on a sunny day in that peace that comes after all the food has been eaten, the catching up is finished, and you are just there together without an agenda. This is what he captures – the safety of connection, the beauty of being.”

“You’re just able to be your full self, and not feel ashamed of being a little weird or a little different,” says Carter. “Embracing that is really beautiful. That’s the best, and the most original. If you’re trying to emulate someone else it can feel a little forced. Honesty makes a good portrait – that moment where they’re confident in themselves, when there’s trust involved. Creating an environment that is relaxed and that has nuances of love creates a great portrait.”

Carter’s father died in 2021 and the photographer responded with his first solo show, American Black Beauty, at SN37 Gallery New York, in which he also mixed his own photographs of relatives, family photographs, and professional work. With his book, Carter is keen to continue this trajectory, working on self-assigned projects alongside commissions. He is drawn towards photographing his nieces, he says, towards the feeling of doing the shoot as much as the images.

“I often don’t share the images, it’s my family and I’m protective over them,” he says. “But to see my nieces laugh and smile – to be a little nervous but then, at the end of the session, feel good about themselves because they’re like ‘Wow, I actually am valued’ – I gravitate towards it. But it’s not just from them. It’s honestly everyone that I love to photograph.”

Micaiah Carter: What’s My Name is out now (Prestel Publishing)