Encounters with exhibitions in which photographs, objects and spaces become ways of reading the world, its transformations and the stories contained within the things we make.
Two months in Mauritania, 200 photographs, and a wooden box designed to hold the exhibition. Bringing Camp Erech to Milan still required replacement panels, a trip for nails, and a long night of work.
Years ago, I wrote a small field guide about photographing people whose lives were not mine. Some of its rules I would write differently today. The question behind them has not changed: what do we owe the people whose lives enter our frame?
In LIMINA, photographer Anna Nagy looks at a corner of western Rome where family photographs, old houses, gardens, reeds, and apartment blocks occupy the same uncertain territory. Her work asks a deceptively simple question: when does private memory become the memory of a place?
Seven years after photographing Foto/Industria in Bologna, we returned to images that appeared to document an exhibition. What we found was a larger story about matter, labour, memory and the temporary forms we create from the world.
Walking through fifty years of Graciela Iturbide’s photographs in Uruapan, I found myself thinking less about photographic style than about something harder to preserve: the ability to encounter the world without already knowing what the picture should be.
Walking through Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia, I entered as an admirer. I left still moved by its beauty, but carrying a harder question: when photography makes us care through wonder, what might that same beauty leave outside the frame?
