“My dream was to get out of New Haven,” writes Jim Goldberg in his 2017 photobook, Candy, a coming-of-age story that tracks his 1973 move west and the beginnings of his life as an artist, a seeker, and a man in near-constant motion. Goldberg’s eye wa

Like the writers Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Édouard Glissant before her, Cédrine Scheidig is, to borrow the words of Glissant’s American translator, a distinguished theorist of “Caribbean self-formation.” Born in 1994 in the Seine-Saint-Denis su

The Razor’s Edge, directed by Edmund Goulding and released in 1946, is a movie I repeatedly return to for solace and respite from contemporary life. Based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel of the same name, it tracks the odyssey of a World War I fi

As a high school student in Puerto Rico, around 2005, Christopher Gregory-Rivera grew active in student movements that fought university tuition hikes. His mother wasn’t happy about it. “She would say, ‘Cuidado, te van a carpetear,’ which meant that

It is 1994 in Tokyo and Mariko Mori is angry. She has just come out of a business meeting, and is appalled to find that intelligent women, with degrees from leading universities, are being made to serve tea while working at the office. She has recent

“This stocky, unrevealing box stands 3 ft. high without stockings or feet and lights up like a Xmas tree no matter what I show it.” So begins an entry about the photocopy machine, typed on a small placard, by Pati Hill, the American artist and writer

Recently, moving to New York from Miami, after living there for over two decades, with each box I packed I wrestled with what to let go and what to keep. There was no hesitation about the family photo-albums, many of which I’d inherited from my mothe

A gray-haired woman looks upward intently, her gaze fixed, head tilted back, and face mask lowered to amplify her shout—a picture of defiance. Taken by the Polish artist and photojournalist Agata Szymanska-Medina, it’s among the striking portraits in

What could an archive of the future look like? What creative possibilities are offered by the gaps, absences, and silences in historical records? How can artists engage with histories that weren’t photographed? How can found images contribute to a fu

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland features numerous photographs, including one of Dolours Price, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer who was photographed in the 1970s for the Italian publication L’Eu

Amid the radical imagery of Alice Proujansky’s project Hard Times are Fighting Times (2023), the presence of something as conventional as a baby book stops you in your tracks. One of many objects the photographer has held on to from her childhood, th

In a pivotal scene in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which tracks the strategic operations of the National Liberation Front during the early years of Algeria’s war of independence against France, three female militants clandestin

In Bombay, the restless metropolis that houses India’s twelve-billion-dollar Hindi cinema industry, the 1990s were a moment of roiling change. The cultural and visual excesses that had dictated the medium for the last decade were winding down, but th

For much of last summer, the mountains on the North Shore appeared to buffer Vancouver from the smoke of forest fires that had engulfed the rest of Canada. Even with its summer breeze of cedar and sea, the city felt uneasy. In particular, the infamou

When Yu Lai Wai-ling’s son disappeared from Hong Kong into China, she embarked on a tireless investigation to find him. The photographer Billy H.C. Kwok has assembled an archive related to her search—piecing together a twisting story of grief and res

Ari Marcopoulos’s personal library reflects kinetic engagements with subcultures of the world that connect to his own wide-ranging work. “Already, look, we’re surrounded by them,” Marcopoulos, a photographer and filmmaker, said during a recent visit

A leading photographer and critic, Takuma Nakahira had a lasting impact on Japanese art after World War II, from his poetic images to his perceptive writing on art and his work as a founder of Provoke—an influential, short-lived magazine of experimen

A vast and variegated holiday destination, a bottomless repository of cheap Black labor, and a site of bitterly fought wars of resistance against colonial dispossession—South Africa’s Eastern Cape is as beautiful as it is unknowable. The province occ

The German photographer Heji Shin is drawn to complicated, at times fraught subjects. She has intrigued, and provoked, audiences with her images presented in galleries and at the Whitney Biennial, and through her work as a sough-tafter fashion photog

The opening pages of Oliver Frank Chanarin’s A Perfect Sentence (Loose Joints, 2023; 240 pages, $60) relay a set of rules to the reader. “Don’t reduce me to tears as a form of control.” “Don’t capture my image without consent.” “Don’t walk with your

In the spring and summer of 2020, as COVID-19 restrictions halted travel and kept millions of people indoors, cities began to get wild again. Deer grazed in the streets of Nara, Japan, and dolphins were spotted in the canals of Venice. Nature seemed

A cool breeze blows in from the wide-open windows on both sides of the artist Jonathas de Andrade’s modernist flat in Recife, a city in the northeast of Brazil. It’s June, the end of autumn in this part of the world, but it feels more like the peak o

An experimental collaboration between a legendary Japanese graphic artist and novelist, a book of decorative glass panes, and another with a slipcase in the shape of a cigarette pack. The diversity of books at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metr

Maybe it’s just because it’s our first meeting, but Ishiuchi Miyako frequently deflects from herself when she speaks. She relishes asserting, several times over the course of the afternoon we spend together at her home in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, abo

Nakeya Brown began making still lifes in 2012, after her baby was born. Motherhood changed Brown’s relationship to time, forcing her to fit a practice into fragmented days and corners of her home. In arranging the Afro pick in Nu-Vogue (2022) or the

In Polk County, Florida, Nabil Harb arranges his calendar around nights when the light turns green at dusk, how the shadows look blue in spring, or how the cicadas start to hum as the temperature reaches a hundred degrees. To live here is to know the

For nearly fifty years, Kosen Ohtsubo has run roughshod over the idea of ikebana as a stately practice of arranging flowers in a vase. He is known for using vegetables, when he sticks to plants at all, and he often sets his compositions in unconventi

By turns luxe and austere, sometimes both in the same image, the work of Paul Outerbridge occupies a special vantage in the sleek, vexed space between modernism and Madison Avenue. In the black-and-white Ide Collar (1922), which was made the year he