“My work has shifted from thinking about portraiture as a definitive thing, and more rather like portraiture as an ongoing, underlying source for the work”

Exposure presents 40 works mainly from Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio, in which Sepuya uses red lights, props and mirrors to question the dynamics of studio portraiture. Begun in 2017, the series stretches beyond the traditional boundaries of the photoshoot, disrupting the hierarchy which places final image over process, setup, and the relation between artist and sitter. The show represents an evolution from casual domestic portraiture to something more self-referential, but without losing the intimacy of Sepuya’s early shoots. “My work has shifted from thinking about portraiture as a definitive thing, and more rather like portraiture as an ongoing, underlying source for the work,” he tells me. “It’s about the complications that are produced in the making of portraiture.”

Sepuya’s practice began at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he studied for a BFA in photography and imaging until 2004. The early 2000s was a raw time in New York shaken by the September 11 attacks. Artists were at the forefront of the queer and cultural revivals. Sepuya mentions Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s 2022 documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom as “very much the place I was in New York” – a daring Williamsburg counterculture where people partied and marched together against the US’s wars in the Middle East.

With ambitions to become a fashion photographer, Sepuya began shooting friends in his apartment, capturing the intimacy of his social circle. Looking back, the pictures appear as domestic portraits, but not necessarily “the way a subject is revealed through not only figure but also an eye into their surroundings,” he explains. After all, the subjects were in his home rather than their own, allowing him to break the association between person and prop and instead strip the setting, gesturing towards studio arrangements. “It took a while for me to realise what I had taken for granted – that I was photographing in my home, a place where I was already very comfortable,” Sepuya says. He would use blank walls and show just the edge of a table or bed, anticipating the manipulation and obscuring of surfaces in later work.

The queer scene gathered momentum and Sepuya’s portraits found a home in BUTT magazine and his own SHOOT zine, in which he published a single male portrait session each session, often featuring nudes. “These portraits that I was just making for myself started to circulate in a way that I hadn’t anticipated through social media – they became quite notorious,” he explains. “I was thinking about the way in which portraiture is wrapped up in this economy of exchange and solicitation – particularly by gay men in homoerotic spaces.” AA Bronson founded NY Art Book Fair in 2006, giving the scene new exposure and expanding Sepuya’s list of friends and subjects. The period triggered a new way of interpreting visual culture. “How do images work in the world?” Sepuya wonders. “How do they circulate and transform relationships? How do they come back?”

If New York inspired the male poses and careful bodily observation in Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio, its treatment of studio spaces has nomadic origins. As more friends began making portraiture around 2010, Sepuya would turn the lens on their shoots and his own, creating a literal introspection. He mentions a Cecil Beaton photograph of Pavel Tchelitchew painting his muse Peter Watson with poet Charles Henri Ford also present – a conscious layering of friendship and artistry within the frame. Sepuya became interested in “recognition and the way that photography is positioned,” he explains. “The camera as a vector pointing outwards and allowing you to understand the position of the artist, the author, the photographer through those things that surround them.”

Residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum, Harlem, and on Fire Island allowed Sepuya to gather props and explore rephotographing using images from correspondence with friends. He learned how to shoot on digital during his MFA at UCLA and began incorporating mirrors in his compositions. This enabled him to integrate images made while travelling in Europe and Mexico, fixing prints to mirrors and puncturing the presumed boundaries of the studio.

In Exposures, images feature mirrors littered with research material – “a studio space that could be both the recurring background for an image but also would slightly change over time,” Sepuya explains. Gold fabrics were important for referencing Modernism and Surrealism, while Black velvet maintained the sexual gestures of mid-20th century homoerotic photography while also nodding to 19th-century large-format dark cloths. The combination of black fabric and mirrors “opened up new ways of thinking about the idea of Blackness in terms of material – and the necessity of Blackness for making latency visible,” he says.

Sepuya has exhibited extensively over the past seven years, a form of stress testing for images in constant dialogue with their predecessors. A small show at Team Bungalow, LA, in 2017 was a debut for his darkroom images, which then went to Document in Chicago the following year. Inclusion in MoMA’s Being: New Photography 2018, the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the Barbican Centre’s Masculinities: Liberation through Photography (2020) confirmed his position in the new curatorial focus on queer reflexivity. Recent forerunners for Exposure were shows at Bortolami Gallery, NY; Vielmetter, LA; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and last year’s twin Peter Kilchmann display in Zurich and Paris. “Where the ideas come in is always responding to observing what happens once the work is made,” Sepuya explains. So viewers in Nottingham will engage in many kinds of spectatorship: with the artist, his subjects, the studios – and previous audience perceptions.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Exposure, is at Nottingham Contemporary until 05 May

“I’m concerned with the final image, thinking about how it’s going to sit in the world”

Lee originally studied marketing at Bowie State University, Maryland, but quit his job a decade ago to pursue a life in art. Beginning with street photography and becoming interested in people’s stories, he then took an MFA at California College of the Arts. Lee’s graduate show was a precursor of sorts to the SF Camerawork exhibition, focusing on the iconography of the Marlboro Man – the tobacco marketing character played by real cowboys, which helped propel Marlboro to industry leader in the 1970s.

Marlboro’s cowboy figures were traditionally white, though, and Lee’s work is about confronting such blindspots and prejudices in American mythology, in the hope of giving viewers a more balanced representation of the country’s history. With family roots in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Houston, Texas, Lee is shaping a practice informed by the legacies of the Deep South and Great Migration, concerned with restoring Black histories while tracing current aspirations. The cowboy project is ongoing, with the current aim to widen the scenarios and contexts the subjects are captured in. A recent trip saw Lee venture to rural Louisiana, where he met the only Black competitive rodeo rider in the state’s high schools. “I want to document every aspect of each subject’s life on the ranch,” Lee says. “I want to move away from just person and horse – diving into what this lifestyle is and the layers within it.”

Lee returns to a term used by Ghana’s Akan tribe to summarise his philosophy – ‘Sankofa’, meaning ‘It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind’. “We are here and we have been part of this American Dream too, even though we haven’t had the opportunities to enjoy the American Dream,” he says.

Charles Lee, Sweat & Dirt is at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, until 03 February

The exhibition title foregrounds the artistic and social relationship Lê has maintained between the Mississippi and the Mekong. Delta (2011) shows Vietnamese women in New Orleans and Ho Chi Minh City, vibrant colour portraits that emphasise similarity as well as difference. New York City is home to around 20,000 Vietnamese Americans, 60 per cent of whom were born abroad. Showing these works at MoMA speaks to Lê’s global consciousness; she mentions the dislocation of diaspora life, as well as the shakiness of the US’ democratic experiment. “Living through the war and being a refugee continues to reverberate today with immigrants from Latin and South America,” she says. Her past becomes a vehicle for empathy, the photographs public tokens of solidarity.

Lê spent the period between 1999 and 2004 tracing the ways in which war is alive in the American psyche, whether real or imagined, imminent or deferred. In Virginia and North Carolina, she photographed men who re-enact the Vietnam conflict for Small Wars, while in the arid Californian desert, she made intense studies of military training exercises on the eve of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for 29 Palms (2003–04). Films relating to both series appear at MoMA. Events Ashore shows the prowess of the US Navy, the colour shots gesturing towards a sense of misplaced adventure. (Lê was invited onboard by a colonel). People often ask whether she is fetishising the military. “Of course not,” she tells me. “People throwing that word around without understanding what it means” motivated her to explore the history of erotic imagery, the thin line which can separate desire and violence. Gabinetto (2016) – pictures of erotic artefacts from Naples’ Secret Museum – and new porn-inspired embroideries explore this at MoMA.

“I’m thinking about what it means to group together a multitude of pictures inspired by poetics, rhythms, dissonance and breaks – remembering the first image and carrying that impression on to the next photograph”

While visiting her mother in Orange County during the pandemic, Lê began returning to the Twentynine Palms training base, nearly two decades after she first observed exercises there. She had access to a raised viewing point, the swirling dust drifting across the desert as it had done in her black-and-white shots of mortars and gun drills. “I had a quasi out-of-body experience and remembered why I was there,” Lê recalls. “I saw the span of my mother’s life flashing across the landscape, from her birth in Hanoi in the early 1930s and through various occupations.” Lê’s mother had been awarded a scholarship to study in France in the 1950s, returning to a divided Vietnam after the Geneva Accords in 1954. But her health was now deteriorating, accelerated by Covid isolation. “She would shuttle back and forth with this fragmented life defined by American geopolitics – which was also my life,” Lê says. As the vision faded, helicopters circled and another training exercise began.

Lê describes the experience as confusing, but was struck by the power of a 360-degree vista. She began discussing the potential for a new immersive work with Marcoci. The resulting installation, Fourteen Views, consists of vertical panels stitched together from Lê’s “library of clouds”, inspired by the work of JMW Turner and the sublime. The cyclorama is derived from negatives, but Lê used Photoshop and other digital tools to stitch images together, a departure from her typical hands-off approach. The new work helps answer a genre query often put to Lê, whose method is sometimes compared to photojournalism or documentary. “There was always this question of ‘Where’s the art?’ and ‘Where does the art reside?’ in my work,” she says. “It’s an open question… with Thomas Demand, you know where the art is.”

Between Two Rivers showcases Lê’s mixed-media practice in a way that her first US institutional solo show did not. On Contested Terrain featured more than 125 photographs organised in juxtaposing series clusters, opening in 2020 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art before travelling to Fort Worth and Milwaukee, concluding in March 2022. Speaking now, Lê views the show as something of a research exercise in anticipation of a more experimental outing. “That idea of looking at the work on the wall is always very clarifying,” she explains. “I was able to see clearly the connections between my ideas and my concerns throughout projects – some are different iterations; some are completely new ideas; and some are extensions.”

This makes the MoMA show a pivotal moment, a chance to disrupt a linear way of looking, whether via series mash-ups, embroideries or digital alterations. Silent General (2015–ongoing) epitomises this; a roving, agile series suitable for state-of-the-nation New York Times picture essays and shots of high-school students alike. The work moves in motion with the country, as it did when debates around the southern border shifted either side of Trump’s election in 2016. The task at MoMA is to capture that variety without drifting.

“I’m thinking about what it means to group together a multitude of pictures inspired by poetics, rhythms, dissonance and breaks – remembering the first image and carrying that impression on to the next photograph,” she observes. Lê’s mindset suits river flow or current analogies. “I’ve been around long enough to see that history is cyclical,” she says. “We always talk about how the Vietnam War was a lesson learned, but it wasn’t.”

An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giua hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, is at MoMA, New York, until 16 March

Can you start by telling me about The Fury, especially the decision to write on the photographic prints?

Everything I do is about woman, but also women’s bodies. This work is a departure in terms of the images but also the use of calligraphy. In all the previous series I’ve done, especially Women of Allah, the figures are more iconic – they have always been under the veil. The women were also armed. The veil is a symbol which shows oppression, but also faith and, for some, a symbol of independence. My subject was the female body in relation to political ideology, religious values and the submission of women to fanaticism. And so the poetry and literature I used was very specifically about the 1979 revolution. 

The Fury is almost one hundred per cent opposite. It unveils the woman. It is no longer about woman in relation to religious or political ideology, but woman as a subject of desire – but also violence. The way that the female body provokes temptation, and equally can be a subject for violence. The calligraphic writings are almost microscopic, because I felt that what became more important in terms of tension is the gaze of the woman. I didn’t want to overwhelm it or dominate it with big calligraphy. I started with straight lines of poetry, but then they started breaking. It’s almost the collapse of words – a much more emotional and expressionistic use of calligraphy that is legible, and then not. The style punctuates the emotions and theme; it’s not just arbitrary. The photographs become sculptural.

And so what is the relationship between the bare and the inscribed body?

Several of the photographs represent women who are completely confident, defiant, proud, feeling beautiful with their bodies regardless of size, age or ethnicity. And so the logos on the prints are poetic extracts of poetry which extend these themes. It by no means is about pain; it’s about the absence of pain.

At the beginning of the film, the woman is dancing seductively: she’s comfortable, she’s in control, dressed almost like a prostitute. But then she goes into the street and people are looking at her, but when she sees the man again she is naked. You see the woman as a seducer, but at the same time she is a victim. So in different mediums and languages, we’re telling the same story.

“When it comes to activism, you distinguish between what is wrong and what is right; who is evil and who is good. In the art world you don’t”

There is very little touch in the film, even though sexual violence is implied. How does dance negotiate this?

Dancing in public was completely forbidden, and so has recently become a symbol of protest in Iran. The Fury was made before the Woman, Life, Freedom protests [beginning in September 2022], but I’ve studied dance for a long time. Dance is a pure expression of art because it is very ritualistic. There’s an intention – a meaning. It’s not just for entertainment. The power of dance is the use of the body to express yourself. That’s the same in India and the ceremony of African dance too. And so this dance on the street is a dance of protest and of showing anger. But for those men, Persian dance is a form of entertainment. 

Something that recurs in The Fury is the act of being observed – by the men or later when the woman goes into the streets. How do you relate that to the implicit observation within photography?

There is an element of choreography, even with the photographs. I begin each series with a rough plan. I asked my subjects to improvise, but even that improvisation is choreographed; I am going after what they’re doing with their bodies, and I’m catching it as they do it. I don’t instruct. In Women of Allah, the hand over the mouth is very important – the woman’s inability to speak, the submission. For me, it’s the body’s simple postures or gaze which are dance-like. You can convey a lot with them and they speak to me in a very emotional way – and I trust my gut when shooting.

This was the first time that I’ve ever photographed nude subjects. I was really concerned that they would feel uncomfortable. But they were so comfortable. They said, ‘We don’t have to wear our underwear.’ This is from Iranian women to Indian women. That gave me chills, because they knew that the work’s subject was sexual assault. I really believe that every woman has been molested sexually at some point in their lives – I have – and men too, we just don’t talk about it. And here they were being photographed and being really honest about it. It was really empowering to be around them.

What about the military context of The Fury? 

The Fury is about patriarchy. It’s about male power. It’s about men in uniform. It’s about all the countries where men in uniform rule. When she’s dancing, the men look at her with the same intensity as when she’s on the ground. The expression doesn’t change, and that is really important. These men are looking at her both as a seductive animal, but then as this dirt on the floor.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been very afraid of men in uniform. I’ve had a lot of trouble with the Iranian government and getting out of the country. From airports and immigration to police cars, I have grown up with fear. I haven’t been back to Iran since 1996. And in The Fury, the uniforms are not Iranian, they are universal. It could be the FBI, it could be the Russian soldiers. It’s symbolic. 

How does The Fury reverberate beyond the gender and military contexts?

I think art can have a lot of power in this culture. We’re talking about a common humanity; an African or Asian or white person can relate to this condition of a woman in New York. They could relate to her pain. The victimisation of people and the pain is contagious. Israel, Palestine, Iran. And I believe in making work that speaks to people outside of art galleries and the commodification of art. I love filmmaking because it refuses to be an object. But my photography is just as loud as the video, though it is nevertheless an object to buy. 

I’m also an activist. And I’m very careful about how I distinguish between my art and my activism. I don’t want to just belong to the art world. I’ve been active in protests, the media, organising, from hunger strikes to events and exhibitions. When it comes to activism, you distinguish between what is wrong and what is right; who is evil and who is good. In the art world you don’t. And I think that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but I refuse to do that. I don’t want to make work that points the finger, but as an activist, I do.

Shirin Neshat, The Fury, is at Fotografiska Stockholm until 18 February 2024

Tish intersperses Murtha’s photographs with interviews featuring her mentors Dennis Birkwood and David Hurn; friends Ethel Cass and Daisy Hayes; siblings Carl, Glenn, Mark and Eileen; and photographic contemporaries Mik Critchlow and Killip. Many of the conversations are anchored by Ella, who acts as an intermediary between her mother and the contributors, offering personal reflections which steer the narrative. Sng uses Murtha’s photographs to illustrate her eviscerating political writings, creating a didactic force while showing the full scope of her practice, from Juvenile Jazz Bands to the lesser-known London By Night, a depiction of the lives of Soho sex workers.

Some of the most powerful moments in the film occur when Murtha’s siblings look back on their own lives in her images. Glenn describes their father sending the boys out to collect scrap metal, while the camera pans across a picture of a boy standing shrouded in smoke over a molten lead fire. The audience is seemingly caught between eras: the Dickensian poverty shown in the images on one hand and Glenn’s memories on the other, balanced by Sng in a single sequence.

​​Using a documentary format to tell the story of a documentarian presents a paradox. There are several artistic and social perspectives to contend with. “When you’re making a documentary, you’re beholden to the truth,” Sng explains. “Not just your truth – and the integrity of what you’re trying to say – but the participants that you’re working with.” Then there is the truth of the pictures, social conditions frozen in time. The British Chinese film-maker drew inspiration from Murtha herself, he says. She made sure to give a print to all of her subjects, as much an act of courtesy as collaboration. “I try to at least spend a bit of time with someone before turning on the cameras,” Sng says. “Knowing that Tish did that informed our process and practice in terms of transparency.”

“Presenting Tish as a photographer, an activist and an artist was our mantra”

Past lives

Tish is as much a political history as a biography. The film opens with a voiceover in which Murtha surveys her surroundings, her diary entries and writings narrated by the actor Maxine Peake (as in the rest of the film). “High levels of unemployment have always been a hard and constant feature of life in the West End of Newcastle,” Peake declares, channelling a conviction as present in Murtha’s prose as in her pictures. The young Murtha was a sharp commentator on poverty’s ideological underpinnings – the abandonment of a whole generation captured in Youth Unemployment and witnessed first-hand with her own brothers.

“What is becoming clear to the generation now approaching maturity is that our society has no solutions for their problems; can give no direction to their lives,” Peake reads. Tish’s sound design accentuates these rhetorical moments. A steady drumbeat rises behind Peake’s voice as she delivers the lines, turning the observation into a damning judgement. At other points operatic arias soar over the pictures – a nod to the Murtha family’s culturally rich upbringing. Carl had ambitions to become an actor; Ella was named after Ella Fitzgerald.

Sng first encountered Murtha’s work when editing two photography books: Invisible Britain: Portraits of Hope and Resilience (2018) and This Separated Isle: Invisible Britain (2021). Ella wrote him a blurb and they began discussing photographers for the second volume. The idea of a documentary about Murtha’s life eventually came into focus, with Sng finding an affinity with Murtha’s story in his own working-class upbringing. ‘It’s me and you against the world’ was a familiar phrase his mother would use during his south London childhood, Sng says. He was a young boy when Murtha was documenting the effects of deindustrialisation in the north-east, but his value system closed the distance between them. “I can remember my mum telling me when I was seven years old that Margaret Thatcher was a bad person,” he laughs.

Sng’s 2021 documentary Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché was made in collaboration with the musician’s daughter Celeste Bell-Dos Santos, but his new work was not about searching for another mother-daughter story, Sng says. “It was wanting to make a film about an artist who was an outsider, but was able to challenge the status quo. Somebody who was fierce and didn’t compromise, and as a result of that was probably marginalised more than she might have been.”

Tish arrives in a films-about- photographers tradition with two distinct formats, while also continuing a lineage of left-wing social documentaries. The elevation of war photographers into hero figures has made them ripe for dramas and biopics, with Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White (1989) and The Killing Fields (1984) among those centring photographers on screen. A steady stream has continued in the last two decades. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006) stars Nicole Kidman in a factually imaginative portrayal of Arbus’ career, while more recent big-name titles include Minamata (2020), with Johnny Depp as W Eugene Smith, and Life (2015), in which Robert Pattinson plays Dennis Stock on assignment to shoot James Dean. The fashion-to-war-correspondent narrative also lies behind Lee (2023), with Kate Winslet playing Lee Miller.

The documentary format is less glitzy, but allows for a deeper exploration of politically woven stories such as Murtha’s (though Tish does include a few short, dramatised vignettes, with Murtha played by Shin-Fei Chen.) At several points, Sng creates mixed-media diptychs, showing colour footage of Silver Jubilee street parties and evenings in the pub alongside Murtha’s photographs of similar scenes. Recent documentaries have also received critical acclaim where their Hollywood equivalents have struggled. David Morris and Jacqui Morris’ McCullin was Bafta-nominated in 2012, while the Oscar-nominated Finding Vivian Maier was funded via Kickstarter shortly after John Maloof began circulating Maier’s pictures, playing a key role in spreading the word about her work.

In fact, the combination of activism and artistry makes Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) another antecedent for Tish, albeit not an obvious one. Nan Goldin’s activism is inspirational, as is Murtha’s legacy. Exploring Murtha’s art posthumously means that the film becomes a process of re-activism, the documentary a microphone for its subject’s views. Sng was drawn to the relevance of Murtha’s beliefs – and anger – today, mentioning UK child poverty in particular. “What’s changed in that time?” he asks.

“This photography world, and those who operate it, really make you sick at times” – Murtha

Murtha had her own clear ideas about media and motivation. “My use of photography and my approach to it, is based on the conviction that the fundamental value of the medium is its capacity to provide direct, accurate and vital records of the conditions, events and experience that shape our lives,” Peake reads from her diaries. This conviction made including Murtha’s photographs, and decisions on how to do so, easy, Sng says, adding that Ella had the best eye for placing her mother’s pictures.

Murtha was also critical of the photography industry. Killip recalls enjoying support from Northern Arts and Side Gallery, but she received nothing and keenly felt these slights. “This photography world, and those who operate it, really make you sick at times,” Murtha wrote after quitting Side. She had felt the gallery was pushing for her work to fit an anaesthetised “philosophy of working-class culture”, which she disdained.

Tish is about honouring Murtha’s role as part of the community she photographed, Sng says, and she is constituted by others’ memories as well as her pictures – deepening the overall portrait and keeping her memory alive. “Presenting Tish as a photographer, an activist and an artist was our mantra,” Sng says.

In the latter stages, Tish gives way to a moving reflection on Murtha’s achievement and death. Ella gently leads the interviewees and the film into more emotional corners, particularly while discussing the impact of her own birth on her mother’s career. All agree that Murtha’s feistiness dissipated as life took its toll. She was a product of tough times as well as a chronicler of them, and eventually succumbed to the forces her images portray. Ella recounts the anguish of realising that, towards the end of her life, Murtha had not turned the heating on for fear of the cost. And there is pain and anger when Peake reads the job applications Murtha sent to the likes of Sodexo and the local retail centre in her final months. “I like gardening and also grow my own fruit and veg,” one reads. “I’m also a keen photographer – and develop my own photos.”

Tish opened in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 17 November. Elswick Kids and Youth Unemployment are available from Bluecoat, priced £22 each

I started writing my theories, which I call An Architecture of Disappearance. This is a body of work in many manifestations. My work is rooted in the language of architecture, because it’s the only language I really know. My medium still isn’t photography, though I’ve worked with many photographers. Part of campaigning for Shahidul was to engage the arts community. That’s when I first began to be connected with his international photography network. They were amazing, holding protests for Shahidul in Mexico, then Peru, India and Argentina.

One hundred and seven days later, he was released. By then I was an activist (though I find it a clumsy term). I was working with South Asia Solidarity Group, a UK-based anti-imperialist, anti-racist activist group, when the Shaheen Bagh protests broke out in India. While Shahidul had been in jail, I’d run a Free Shahidul installation at the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, where we showed his Crossfire photos of extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh. That had happened spontaneously, thanks to the artist Tania Bruguera.

When the Shaheen Bagh protests broke out [in 2019], I thought, ‘Let’s try and do something in the Turbine Hall again’. We need to use these spaces in different ways, not just curators planning long-term projects and deciding which artists get to use the space. I planned this whole protest that was going to happen with artists, musicians and activists. Many of these themes are relevant to artists beyond just India and Bangladesh: fascism, authoritarianism, ethnonationalism.

I’m not sure of the alchemy behind why the packets artwork have been so popular. I found the first packet on the streets of Dhaka in February 2018, before my uncle was in jail. I was with my mum and I was hungry, so I bought some samosa on the street. I noticed that the packet was made from court lists of cases of the state against citizens. There were so many thousands of these cases in authoritarian regimes that they were now appearing on throwaway food packets. Food was very important during the Shaheen Bagh movement; it is said that even the policemen loved the food there. The greeting wouldn’t be ‘How are you?’ – but ‘Have you eaten?’.

I printed the images on throwaway paper from my mum’s house. Then we were going to fill them with rice and display them in this circle in Tate Modern. Two days before the protests happened, the Tate had to shut for the Covid-19 lockdown, and the Shaheen Bagh protests were shut down by the Indian government. But by then the Instagram platform was up and running. Soon we were campaigning for other political prisoners, and artists continued to send their work. Now these samosa packets are living their best life independent of me.

Nepal Picture Library and Photo Kathmandu were hugely supportive during the Free Shahidul movement. There was a memorable time when we were trying to raise Shahidul flags wherever prime minister Sheikh Hasina visited. I was then contacting local activists and asking them to send me pictures of the protests. That was my form of ‘curating’ the images. I’m by no means a curator in the traditional sense. One of my favourite packets is by Ishan Tankha. It’s not even overtly political. It depicts coffee houses in India, where you can sit and talk about politics. I found those really beautiful. Another is by Robert Gerhardt, who has been photographing Black Lives Matter since 2014 and also showing Muslim lives in America.

“My medium still isn’t photography, though I’ve worked with many photographers. Part of campaigning for Shahidul was to engage the arts community”

None of the artists had an issue with me printing images on a home inkjet printer. The preciousness of the print – and what the print is – seemed to disappear. When I served food in the packets, a couple of photographers then did have an issue with it and said, ‘I don’t think I want my work used in that way’, which was totally fine. I’m quite clear about how these are uncontrollable objects, and they will be reproduced and the print quality will be whatever it is.

In Arles this year, there was an exhibition by Editions JOJO where people made their own packets, and earlier this year the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry did a workshop where kids and families were making samosa packets and cooking samosas. The V&A ‘acquired’ 20 packets, which we ended up donating rather than selling. They were never meant to be commercial objects, but it’s important that they’re in a permanent collection as a testimony of the struggle and the way artists have responded to it.

Photography was just one tool of many. I’m not very technical; I go to the darkroom and I know how to do what I need to. Not understanding exactly how it works keeps it interesting and magical. I’m really drawn to sculpture and its possibilities. The fact that it could be a cast or found material. It ruptures a lot of conventions that people want to assign to art – and its relationship to the body and the way it envelops it.

When I was at graduate school at Hunter College, photography was listed separately to art. In the early 2000s, there were galleries, and then there were photography galleries. I thought that was weird. Because of my family’s Colorado pictures, I honed in on this question of whether landscape photography could be contemporary. Could it be more than just an Ansel Adams image, or the romanticised image?

I was interested in the way those images would carry in a built environment like New York City. I loved the beauty of landscape imagery, but was frustrated by the photograph’s inertness – the fact that it was always being held behind the frame. There were so many conventions around photographic display, which I found ridiculous. I wanted to question, break and push back against them. There is so much possibility after the image is printed.

After graduate school, I decided to go back to the darkroom and integrate colour photography into my work. Printing my own photographs made the material less precious. I would be very playful, investigating the materiality of the C-print. 

When I moved to New York, I worked at Artists Space gallery, where I learned how to build walls. Understanding how walls sit in a space and thinking about hanging artworks are really important. A simple gesture or cutting a hole in a wall or photography surface can be powerful. I think a lot about what’s behind a photograph. I cut holes in drywalls and conceal gallery windows so that light comes through the space. What happens when you break these surfaces that are assumed to be untouchable? In each project, I’m trying to create a balance between these iconic images of nature, and a gesture, movement, or force. 

Early on I worked a lot with Styrofoam, then I started choosing materials that had a dual relationship with architecture and nature, like concrete. I began asking, ‘What’s more natural – concrete, the image of nature, or the plastic surface? The texture of rock on an image, or the actuality of it?’ 

With my concrete works, I eventually arrived at a process where I was taking C-prints and folding them and pouring concrete on the face or back of the print. The plastic nature of the paper resisted the concrete. A piece like Colorado Sunset Concrete Fold is a tenuous balance between form and the heavy material. It’s out of my control; I don’t know how they’re going to turn out. There’s this letting go – a trusting of the material process.

“What happens when you break these surfaces that are assumed to be untouchable? In each project, I’m trying to create a balance between these iconic images of nature, and a gesture, movement, or force”

In the last few years I’ve been adding materials to my vocabulary: steel, metal, UV printing. My ‘photo extrusions’ take an image from the photograph and create a giant sculpture from it, using it as an outline. Ghost of a Tree was my first architectural photographic piece in a gallery. I’d taken this photograph of a giant pine tree on a road trip during a residency. I then scaled the piece so the tree is the same size as the column.

My peers aren’t really photographers, they’re painters and sculptors. I felt a little bit of an outsider when I went to the darkroom. My practice is very tied to photography, but my studio practice is very different to what I think of as a photographer’s, because my goals are different. There is certainly a frustration at the image and failure for it to encompass the experience of being at the original site. I also find the barrier between the body and the image strange in photography – how you’re not supposed to touch the print.

 Travelling and hiking are integral to my understanding of the world and thinking about geography, geometry and materials. They’re interwoven. It’s a balance of keeping an image while pushing the form and material. How can surfaces be manipulated through constant experimentation? The reverence for the image is there, but the reverence for the material is not. I’m creating a relationship between my body and the material.

Letha Wilson, Fields of Vision, is at Grimm, London, until 30 September

My work often mixes mythology and autobiography, dealing with the representation of the body on several levels. There is my body making the work – my labour and the repetitive acts of making. Then there are the bodies I represent. The third component is the body of the work itself, often crossing from photography to sculpture. And fourth is the body of the spectator – providing a physical viewing experience is really important to me. I come from a family of cinephiles, and perhaps my interest in bodily fragmentation is related to the filmic image. It is also important to me to picture the bodies around me as they are – without post-production – to push back against beauty standards in mass media.

Shortly after I left the RCA, I showed in Ichor, a group show at Danielle Arnaud, London, which is in a house. You aren’t allowed to put nails in the walls, so with my works Slip/Slit and Bleu, I was thinking about the house as a frame and how to insert photographs in the architecture. In my 2014 residency at the V&A, I was researching the collection, which is where I found X-rays of classical sculptures of gods.

This led to the works in my first solo show, La Femme Fontaine at Matèria gallery, Rome, in 2017. There was a play between the sculptures I made, which I saw as photographs in the sense that they were so detailed – goosebumps on the concrete, for example – and the antique sculptures which became photographs. The idea was to render patriarchal gods flat, see-through and ghostlike.

My Roman Road, London, solo show, Shredded, was thinking about the stereotypes of virility rather than masculinity. It came from my interest in Greek antiquity and mythology, and from living opposite a 24-hour bodybuilding gym, where I could hear screams constantly. In bodybuilding you exercise and judge each body part individually, so I felt it related to my work through fragmentation as well. It’s the perfect intersection between sculpture and photography – the exhibition of the body.

“I come from a family of cinephiles, and perhaps my interest in bodily fragmentation is related to the filmic image”

I really believe in content and form coming together. The way the photographs become three-dimensional links to each subject; I don’t just make images 3D to make them more interesting or sexy. So the inflatables in Shredded were connected to the idea of muscles inflating and deflating, and to an infamous quote [about ejaculation] by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the cult documentary Pumping Iron. In some of the sculptures, which resembled developing trays, I used glycerine, which some bodybuilders ingest before competition to improve muscle definition. That, plus the spotlights in the installation made the photographs sweat. There were water droplets on the prints of their torsos. 

Photography is just one component of my sculptures and installations. Styx – which was adapted for my solo show at MISC, Athens – is a circular structure partly because Styx is a river and a goddess in Greek mythology. She is the boundary to the afterlife. The project was co-commissioned during the pandemic by Photoworks UK and the Ballarat International Foto Biennale; the ceiling of Australia’s National Centre for Photography, where it was going to be first shown, is made of metal from shipyards. So I made the sculpture circular to reference the movement of water. With this project, ideas of ‘going through’ and ‘seeing through’ were omnipresent. Going through an experience – as with the pandemic or mourning – or moving through water spatially, were translated in the installation with the labyrinthine form. With the use of translucent fabrics and X-rays, I communicated this idea of seeing through, too.

Alix Marie, Perasma, is at MISC, Athens, until 20 September

The space is always at the centre of my installations. That’s what inspires me to play with certain materials. The contemporary spaces I choose can take other materials in a way that traditional ones cannot. I build my work in the spaces; I want visitors to feel that the work is made for them – in a particular place and for a specific experience. 

In Switzerland, we have this practice in school where you make your own marble painting and you make a little booklet out of it to take home. I like that familiar element – connecting the viewer to childhood. A Rock is a River was about human perception. I created water and mineral photographs, then came a pictorial gesture to combine the photographs (reality) with paintings (dreams) that looked like the drawings I could find in nature. 

My work is more inspired by painters than photographers – and also mixed-media artists like Pipilotti Rist. There’s also Jonathan Meese, who isn’t abstract at all, but what I like is his expression of something personal – just doing the work, taking the space in a playful way. Meese’s work is cynical but is also funny, and it has a multi-dimensional aspect. You can always go deeper. There’s always more to discover.

I met Simon Baker, the MEP director, around 12 years ago at Offprint, when he was working at Tate. The book is at the centre of my work, so for Poetry of the Earth, we thought it would be nice to honour the printed form, which isn’t always highly valued in the art world but is dear to photographers. For me it’s the most beautiful object you can have in terms of images. I love shows, but they’re ephemeral and don’t have this intimacy with the viewer. Each space in the MEP is one ‘book’, and then other prints and installations correspond to the production period, so you can also follow my work’s evolution. Ten years ago my practice was a lot more punk and violent. Now it’s more contemplative and has a different energy. My work is becoming more beautiful but without being too nice.

There is an invitation to admire natural motives in my exhibitions which I want people to start seeing in the world around them. This is what I would like people to take from the show. So when you sit in your car and water drops on the windscreen, you can enjoy this small but beautiful moment. We could all use a little bit more beauty in our lives. I don’t want to have violence in my work anymore; there is enough violence in the world. I want to give something positive. We need to find breathing space for inspiration – to project something positive for our future.

“I build my work in the spaces; I want visitors to feel that the work is made for them – in a particular place and for a specific experience”

In 2019, analogue nature photography came back into my work. I found a couple who have 20 years’ worth of slides which are really well annotated. Usually I don’t work with found material, but on this occasion I wanted to make them alive again. It’s difficult to look at what’s happening with nature at the moment. How can we make images that make you want to look at nature and it be a pleasant experience, not something where you think ‘We’re all going to die’? 

Performances are an important aspect of my paintings. In my series Living in a Painting, I was thinking about how to share the creative image-making process with the public. I didn’t want to do this digitally, so I found overhead projectors from a school. I started to paint on transparency film, inviting musicians Julie Semoroz, Pyrit and Buvette to perform too. I’m currently making a lot of video collages which are connected to my books and the shows. They create an atmosphere and offer a relaxing moment for the people in the space.

In terms of technique, I like to look into the past and future – not to be lost in something romantic, but to explore what’s possible. There are some amazing digital tools; why not use them if it’s empowering the images? I used to photograph a lot more than I do now. It’s a bit less of everyday life, and I don’t photograph people anymore. I’m stretching photography’s motives in a different way. I like invitations to look twice at what we believe we know already.

Maya Rochat, Poetry of the Earth, is at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, until 01 October

These experiences are similar to those of British Caribbeans who left for the UK from the late-1950s, De Dier tells me. Aspirational, labour-motivated migration to a new country, where arrivals were met with deep racism and inequalities. Hope followed by hostility, and, in the case of the Windrush generation, expulsion sometimes decades after they had made their lives in the UK. “I’m trying to use collage to show how these events are similar,” De Dier says. The Panamanian artist is coming to the end of a two month residency at Delfina Foundation, during which she has delved further into London’s archives in search of colonial-era records. “There’s a sense in Panama that this happened in the past,” she says, “but I don’t want to forget.” 

De Dier uses found photographs and archival materials to re-imagine early-20th century Panamese history from the female perspective. The works often centre on pseudo-domestic spaces, imagining life behind the walls of Caribbean immigrant communities in Panama, like her own maternal family. Other collages focus on the canal site itself, layering white-tuniced labourers while smoke rises from excavations in the background. Photographs from her own family archive are used, but her ancestors’ faces are never shown; where portraits dominate the works, De Dier prefers to centre other women, nodding to the breadth of experience among those who accompanied – and supported – their labourer husbands. The process began when a gallerist encouraged her to dive into her own family archive after a decade spent away from artmaking. What started as a drawing practice morphed into a research-based process.

“I feel like I’m using their image to dignify their existence. Hopefully I’m doing them justice from how they were originally photographed”

“Most of my work focuses on labour – the idea of how Black women were navigating this space that was dedicated specifically for the idea of Black people being here to work, not to enjoy themselves,” De Dier says. But her collages also involve going beyond this premise, an opportunity to imagine spaces and activities of leisure which doubtless took place, but were never documented and preserved: “Rest, enjoyment, and having a space of your own,” she says. In her 2018 solo show El Canto de Amelia [Amelia’s Song] at Panama’s Allegro Gallery, De Dier cloaked her subjects in modern clothing, using visual anachronism as a speculative tool – denim jackets as markers of subculture and self-expression which were absent from the original, more ethnographic photographs.

“I was creating collages that were trying to understand what this surviving – and living – could have looked like, beyond what was being shown in these archives,” she explains. She draws inspiration from her great grandmother, who moved from Barbados to Panama between 1905 and 1908, following her husband who worked on the canal. She bought a house and made a home for herself despite a hostile reception, De Dier tells me. The artist is reluctant to use the term ‘resilience,’ but fortitude is a major theme of her work, as well as ideas of self-expression. In this sense, she takes inspiration from artists Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, but also the likes of Kerry James Marshall and Wangechi Mutu, who use painting to fictionalise elements of Black community.