McCartney’s studio is testament to her varied and visually alert career. Tucked away on a quiet cobbled mews in West London, its three floors combine all of the practical needs of a working environment – office space, shoot backdrops, an extensive range of herbal teas – with the white-washed atmosphere of a gallery.

The space is festooned with McCartney’s images: some in a state of completion, printed at huge scale, others attached to a large silver board with magnets, covered in felt tip notes. A monobrowed Tracey Emin (as Frida Kahlo) stares down from one wall. Mark Rylance dressed as Olivia from Twelfth Night from another. Celebrities face off frogs and white horses, reigning over the neatly arranged piles of contact sheets and books. On the floor, a photo of neon lights has been turned into a rug.

“When I first came here, it was all offices,” McCartney explains. “I just stripped it out… It’s nice to have it quite clean.” We are sitting at a huge round, wooden table that used to belong to McCartney’s mother, Linda. To one side, a bank of windows reveals a bright-ish winter day – all that glass crucial for a photographer who prefers to work with natural light. In the background members of her team drift up and down the stairs.

McCartney has been here for more than two decades, using it as a hub for photographing, post-production, exhibition organisation, ideas generation, and more. For her most recent publication – a plant-based cookbook-cum-portrait project called Feeding Creativity in which she captured figures including the Haim sisters and David Hockney eating her meals – she had two large armchairs installed near the kitchen so that she had somewhere comfortable to sit and write. 

“It became my friend. What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera”

The table is not the only thing McCartney has inherited from her mother. Also a photographer, Linda McCartney was responsible for providing Mary with her very first camera, a Leica R7. After grappling with the challenges of shutter speeds and light meters, it quickly offered a new window onto the world, travelling everywhere with her. “It became my friend,” McCartney says. “What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera.”

In her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, Virginia Woolf dwelled on the pleasures of walking through London. She describes the process of becoming extra-observant, distilled to “a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” For McCartney, the camera crystallised a similar feeling – preserving and making concrete the fleeting details she had been noticing since childhood. “It can be this big scene, but you see one little flower or something within it and it then seems like a photograph.”

As an ambassador, McCartney works frequently with Leica cameras, whether an SL for “all singing, all dancing” projects that might end up on a billboard, or the Q “if you’re out and about, or at a party.” She also has “a little compact Leica” which fits in her bag – another portable eye.

This range of models speaks to the breadth of her work, spanning portraiture, fashion, landscape, and documentary (both static and film), as well as more commercial endeavours. A particular light comes into her eyes when discussing portraiture: the delicacy of creating a rapport, knowing when to speak and when to be silent, the skills both personal and technical that go into reaching something “deeper than surface level.”

“If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy”

Some of McCartney’s portraits are made here in the studio. “If I’m shooting here… it pares it all back,” she observes. “It’s really about the pose, the connection, how you’re feeling with the person. There’s less space to hide.” Really though, one suspects that she is happiest out and about where her gaze can rove.

“I love going into somebody’s environment,” she confirms, explaining her interest in what people’s possessions and personal clutter betray about them, “like how Pre-Raphaelite painters would have little symbols.” She references a 1996 photo of hers titled ‘Mum’s Side of the Bed’, a patch of sunlight falling across beautifully embroidered duvet and pillows. “If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy.”

This image is currently sitting as a sizable print on the ground floor, resting against the bookshelves. It is magnificent up close, the scale revealing every wrinkle and stitch. It was recently featured in her 2023 Sotheby’s show Can We Have a Moment?, part of a trilogy of solo exhibitions that began at the Château La Coste in France and ended at A Hug From the Art World in New York last November.

Each taking a different theme, this trilogy gave McCartney free reign to revisit her archives from the past three decades, drawing new threads between her intimate, playful images – family portraits, rubbing shoulders with snogging couples, muddy festival-goers, fleshy roses, and performers readying themselves backstage.

The pleasure of a photograph is not just in the taking, but in its continued afterlife. McCartney’s studio points to the ongoing physicality of a photograph, whether it is a question of tweaking colours and rebalancing shadows or drawing out fresh details in the chosen scale and opacity of a print. In an exhibition setting, too, new conversations can be created as disparate images speak to one another across time and genre.

Towards the end of our conversation, McCartney brings up a fortuitous encounter she had with Magnum photographer Eve Arnold in the 1990s while overseeing a show of Linda’s work in a museum in Bradford. Arnold was working on her own in an adjacent gallery. “She was incredible… She looked like the lady in the [Looney Toons] Tweety bird cartoons. But then when you observed her hanging the show, she knew exactly what she wanted. She was very direct, feisty in a really good way.”

“Take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

The two got to know one another and McCartney learned an important lesson from this woman who had coaxed extraordinary candour from the famous: that the subject should always come first. “She had so much trust with her sitters,” McCartney reflects. Sometimes the perfect image might arrange itself in front of the camera as if conjured – but if it ruptures that sense of trust, it is not worth it. This sort of mutuality seems to define McCartney’s work, which often has a grounded, contemplative edge, full of quiet warmth. Really, it is very simple, she says. When you lift a camera, you “take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

Images taken by Alice Zoo with Leica’s SL2-S, with 35mm, 50mm, and 90mm lenses

“I feel that to be able to comment on someone’s work, I have to earn my place, and that has to be through the relationship we build together”

The word ‘diversity’ is circulated a lot, and there is wider representation than before. Things are slowly changing. But even now, you’ll find lists with maybe 10 to 20 per cent of the artists from outside the west. Very rarely do we see majority representation, say to the tune of 80 per cent [as in the Arles Discovery section this year]. I felt we needed to have that precedent. It is very important we have a majority of non-European, non-American representation, allowing for nuances to emerge rather than generalised perspectives.

While working with artists in the Global South, the possibilities are very different. Of course, the whole sociopolitical context completely differs, but I mean more in terms of resource. We don’t have patron institutions in the same way as the west, and we don’t have access to the same technical equipment all the time. For example, when we were working with printers in New Delhi or in Quito [for Discovery] the options for printing depended on availability. When paper is often imported, it is either at limited availability or at unaffordable prices. There are huge disparities in the production process itself.

Can we ever really have an equal world? That feels like utopia. History has shown us that things are always shifting, and the once oppressed can also become oppressors. For example, India was colonised but now it has colonised places like Kashmir. India’s independence was from British rule, but the postcolonial landscape continues to have caste hierarchy that was already in function for thousands of years. For the oppressed, it marked only a shift in the oppressor – from the British coloniser to the dominant castes – not a true moment of liberation. We all continue to have complex identities. In the west I am seen as a person of colour, a minority voice, but back home I am from a dominant caste. For me, these complex positions can inform our movements towards equity.

“Visiting an exhibition can be a collective experience. Everyone’s having this private viewing, but you’re also aware that there are others around you”

There are so many layers in the power relations of making an image. What happens in that encounter? There is this assumption around the power of visibility, the idea that people will get justice because they will be seen. But does becoming visible ensure empowerment? I’m not convinced about that. I’m interested in the simultaneous notion of refusal, that we get to choose not only what (part of us) we show, but also what we refuse to be seen.

Visiting an exhibition can be a collective experience. Everyone’s having this private viewing, but you’re also aware that there are others around you. It’s similar to when you go to the cinema and everyone laughs together. There’s power in that collectivity of the public. I’m interested in entering into a dialogue with the audience, I believe they have agency. People are intelligent, if you give them the space they want to respond.

What you do with the image, the activation of the work is crucial. If we think of photography as a portal, perhaps the exhibition can offer one point of encounter for a dialogue.

“We’re interested in everything – what motivated the photographer, what were the challenges of their particular time, what else was going on, what were their political interests?”

Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian, the head of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, which date back over 400 years. After a 20-year stint with the institution, Ovenden was appointed its lead in 2014, and has spearheaded a new interest in photography. Shortly after he was appointed, the libraries acquired the William Henry Fox Talbot archive, which encouraged others to donate or deposit Talbot-related work. In the last decade, the Bodleian has also acquired archives by photographers including Daniel Meadows and Bern Schwartz. In 2014, Martin Parr was commissioned to make new documentary work in Oxford, while in 2022, Garry Fabian Miller was the first fine art photographer to be awarded an honorary fellowship by the library.

The final instalment of Miller’s lectures at Oxford took place at the end of 2023. He has also published a book, Dark Room, with Bodleian Library Publishing, and showed his work in an exhibition at the institution, Bright Sparks: Photography and the Talbot Archive, which paired contemporary artists with the photography pioneer. The show was curated by Geoffrey Batchen, an Oxford history of art professor and photo specialist. He also drew on the Bodleian’s collections to create another show, A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800–1850, which ran at Oxford’s Weston Library earlier this year.

Even though the Bodleian is now actively pursuing photographic artists and their works, both have been part of the libraries since the medium was invented, Ovenden explains. The Bodleian is a legal deposit library, meaning it is entitled to receive a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland. This includes photobooks, so the centre holds an edition of Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature – the first commercially published book to include photographs. It also has copies of classic publications and supplements like The Sunday Times Magazine. Older gems in the collection include The Illustrated London News, one of the first periodicals to reproduce photography.

Many of the Bodleian’s regular books include photographs too – what Ovenden calls a huge “latent” collection yet to be mapped out. The archives of UK institutions including the Conservative Party and Oxfam are here, and they include many photographs. There is so much, in fact, that in 2022 Ovenden secured endowed funds to appoint a first curator of photography, Phillip Roberts, who was charged with collating what the libraries hold. Case studies are vast in number and Ovenden estimates there are over a million photographs. “We have an album of 120 Julia Margaret Cameron prints because we have the archive of Henry Taylor, who was one of her close friends, so she gave this album to him,” he recalls. “Another example is the archive of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel – all these Victorian clergymen out in the world had cameras, and when they came home they put lanterns and slideshows together and showed them to raise money.”

The essential challenge of Ovenden’s post is how to organise the photography collections in a meaningful way within the library’s wider project. “My problem was how we could make this more purposeful, to become a more distinct and visible part of our collecting,” he says. “And how we could develop a strategy to identify areas where we could do things that other institutions couldn’t.” The fact that the Bodleian is a library makes a difference. Unlike institutions such as the V&A or Tate, the Bodleian is not just interested in prints; it is concerned with the entirety of an archive; the details which might seem peripheral but which flesh out the circumstances in which photographs are made. This includes notebooks, finished ads and business records for commercial photographers, or casts, seed packets and political records within the Talbot archive.

“We want everything that documents the life of an individual and their work,” Ovenden explains. “This is necessary because we’re a universal library. There are people using our library for purposes we don’t even know – academics from scientists and medics to social scientists and those in the humanities, but also people from outside. One user was the set designer for Doctor Who, who came in with all sorts of weird and wacky requests.”

“Dealing with an archive is expensive for an institution, whether it’s a library, archive, or museum. You have to commit to that cataloguing and conservation work, but also exhibitions, publications and seminars, and all those things require resources”

Being the Bodleian has other advantages too. Renowned the world over, it is able to attract donations such as the “transformational” £2million gift from The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, which funded Roberts’ position. At a time when other institutions are struggling, the Bodleian is an attractive institution to place work. Daniel Meadows’ archive was originally held by the Library of Birmingham, which put together a world-class photography collection before running short of funds. Meadows’ archive was mothballed, alongside other photographers’ collections, until the Bodleian Libraries stepped in to ensure Meadows’ back catalogue remained open to the public. This cautionary tale is one of the reasons Ovenden was keen to permanently endow the curator’s position. “To take Meadows as an example, I didn’t want to say yes until we’d got the money to catalogue the archive properly, so that it wouldn’t just end up as boxes in a basement,” Ovenden says.

Ovenden points out the Bodleian is not the only library to do this kind of thing – University of St Andrews Library holds work by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, while the National Library of Wales acquired the Philip Jones Griffiths archive in 2011. Institutions prioritise archives which make sense for them, so it was logical for the National Library of Wales to collect the work of Jones Griffiths’, who was famous for his projects in Vietnam but was a Welsh native. Meanwhile, the Bodleian holds a smaller archive of work by Dafydd Jones because it was made at Oxford student social events from 1980–1991.

Institutions liaise to make sure they do not collect the same items, Ovenden says, but there could be more collaboration and joint purchases, as happens in other media. (He helped organise a joint acquisition of the Franz Kafka archive in Germany). Photography is also collected in a fairly dispersed manner across the UK’s public institutions, with no overarching strategy to co-ordinate what is essentially a national collection, albeit one spread across various homes. “Some national strategic thinking could play a role in making sure that gaps are not created,” he says. “Dealing with an archive is expensive for an institution, whether it’s a library, archive, or museum. You have to commit to that cataloguing and conservation work, but also exhibitions, publications and seminars, and all those things require resources. While there’s a degree to which institutions can prioritise, I think it’s better to grow the cake rather than to argue about how slices are divided up. As this generation of photographers starts to move their work out of their homes, the public funding bodies need to come together.”

This institutional support for photography is a “no-brainer” for Ovenden because photography is so important – a key medium of communication ever since its invention, in prints and art institutions but also in books, magazines, pamphlets, ads, posters and more. He includes digital communication in this remit, with the Bodleian now collecting digital files and even archiving UK webpages. Ovenden has established a legacy that will continue at the Bodleian – and hopefully beyond – long after his time at the libraries, to ensure that his efforts are not just a personal passion that ends with him.

Even so, it is a personal passion. Ovenden’s sister was a professional black- and-white printer and showed him around the darkroom; as a young man, he tried for a place at the Polytechnic of Central London and was interviewed by the formidable Victor Burgin. “That wasn’t easy, so I ended up going off to university instead,” he laughs. “But I was the photographer on the student newspaper for a while and just always kept up the enthusiasm. I went to the Royal Academy’s Art of Photography exhibition in 1989 and realised the sheer depth of the history, and carved out a role as a curator of photography from there.” It is a profession that has served him well, but more importantly offered a legacy that benefits the entire nation.

“Not complying with the rules of a heteronormative world is a deeply emotional, sometimes shattering and isolating experience” – Bérangère Fromont

The politics of visibility have long been the purview of portraiture for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, who have used the medium to provide evidence of their love and lives since its inception. As a visual strategy, photography has been a tool for radical coalition and solidarity, building and nurturing self-regard and togetherness. While portraiture as a mechanism may seem deceptively simple to a cis-heteronormative audience, existing through images is not just a survival strategy for Queer people. It is proof of existence in a world in which law and institutions continue to deny our fundamental human rights.

As Boulos’ work reminds us, portraiture has been central to the ideology of resistance. Yet, the tension between visibility and safety is increasingly complex, especially in the context of social media, where identities and personal information can be easily accessed. “Since the revolution, I’m very conscious that images can put us in danger,” she explains. “It’s not the right time to bring the book to Lebanon. In the last month, politically charged, anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns have drastically reasserted that homosexuality is against the law and the consequence is the death penalty. We’ve also seen increased attacks by radical groups as intimidation tactics. It’s too risky for me and my collaborators to be seen now.”

The personal is political

Boulos is not alone in her safety concerns. The UK prime minister regularly promotes preaching anti-trans rhetoric and health bans in the United States are fundamentally altering the material reality of transgender people. This summer, Italy removed the parenting rights of non-biological lesbian mothers, and Hungary instigated a law encouraging citizens to report same-sex families for violating the constitution; meanwhile, parts of Poland still uphold LGBT-free zones.

Despite the many hard-fought freedoms won over the last 100 years, the rise of the far right foreshadows a future in which the LGBTQIA+ community is increasingly marginalised in violent and insidious ways, rendering hyper-vigilance the only way of life. Where do we stand now? How are the politics of representation shifting? How does portraiture function as a care modality? And perhaps most pertinently, what does it mean to make work in an era in which visibility is both liberating and dangerous?

While the representation of the LGBTQIA+ community in culture is evolving, Queer image-makers are rarely recognised for their contribution, and most mainstream storytelling is still told from an outside perspective. “We are fetishised, objectified and routinely targeted by hate speech. How can we possibly build a sense of self in such conditions?” says French artist Bérangère Fromont, who uses her work to reclaim space and fill representational gaps. “I’m fond of the idea that Queers anywhere are responsible for Queers everywhere.”

In L’amour seul brisera nos cœurs, Fromont’s recent book, the artist celebrates dyke identities, creating an “archive of our memories, our imaginations and our dreams for the future”. The project, published by À La Maison Printing, presents a monochromatic patchwork of lesbian love through a playful exchange between Fromont’s images and poetic texts by Elodie Petit. Focusing on the representation of lesbians at the intersection of several forms of discrimination, the duo use gesture and proximity in their fight against Queer women’s erasure in wider culture.

“Not complying with the rules of a heteronormative world is a deeply emotional, sometimes shattering and isolating experience,” explains Fromont, who considers photography a space in which marginalised groups can share knowledge and build a survival network. “Staying in the shadows doesn’t have to be an obligation. I wanted lesbian love stories to be shown and enacted by people who experience it, for whom it is a physical reality.”

For the last four years, Jesse Glazzard has been documenting his transition in Testo Diary, a deeply personal exploration of his life after top surgery. Through the images, we witness Glazzard finding himself anew, with the loving support of his then-partner, Nora. The project was initially born out of boredom, during the London-based artist’s six-week recovery post-surgery. But over time it became more mission-led, an opportunity to address the lack of trans portraiture in the UK.

“We are living in a weird time,” says Glazzard. “We can exist freely but equally face so much backlash. On the one hand, the community is bigger now. It’s been powerful to witness the changes in my friends over the years as they are transitioning. But with greater visibility comes risk and hostility.” For many individuals, the journey to gender euphoria is not linear, and is deeply affected by sociopolitical contexts. “Some friends take testosterone, then they will go off it briefly. Even for me, sometimes I think I should go back because it’s so scary right now. This experience is just one of the reasons why we need to tell our own stories.”

Self-portraiture is just one facet of Glazzard’s practice. In Camp Trans, he collaborates with a community festival that exclusively hosts trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people in a safe space, encouraging joy and rest from the binary pressures of everyday life. In his latest work, Soft Lad, he reclaims the northern slur in a series of luscious portraits of transmasc individuals resting and relaxing at home and in nature.

“I’m only documenting the private spaces of people I’m close with, and most of the time, the work doesn’t become public. And if it does, it’s consensual,” says Glazzard of the delicate ethos of his practice. “I’m not sure I will ever be able to show the Camp Trans work, but it felt important to make it.” For Glazzard and others, building the archive and centring care in a practice is more important than showcasing the work, though it is work that also explodes our understanding of the linear, contained and sequential conventions of the cultural production of photography.

“As Queer people, we can’t wait for laws to change; for someone to tell us we can do certain things. We have to take chances, embrace our desires and express ourselves” – Janina Sabaliauskaitė

Create safe spaces

Contemplating modes of display and circulation which best serve the community is also integral to Devyn Galindo’s practice. A non-binary Mexihkah transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, they opted to launch their first book in a space in which those who had participated would feel most comfortable. “I feel like I’ve been very centred on ‘by us, for us’ from the jump,” says Galindo. “I try to keep it more for the community, even to the detriment of my work being seen more broadly.”

While these values hold true for the artist, the rising violence across the US is also something they have experienced first-hand, and that has motivated a change in approach. “Right now, the work needs to reach beyond our community because we’re living in such an isolated echo chamber; the ramifications of that charted with the rise of hate crimes. I’m optimistic that if the work has a wider reach, it could create more safety and understanding about our community, instead of divisiveness.”

In God in Drag, a project Galindo has been working on since 2017, they explore their gender journey alongside their transmasc siblings in a multifaceted, intimate series made across the US. Like Glazzard, Galindo’s collaborators embody trans joy and speak to a new era of body positivity in which masculine femininity and feminine masculinity are not just seen but celebrated. In particular, God in Drag speaks to the sweet and tender friendships accompanying the tougher masculine aspects of taking testosterone, creating a remarkable contemporary portrait.

Galindo sporadically appeared in their previous bodies of work, but in God in Drag they centred themself as much as their collaborators, reconfiguring the power dynamics of the work. “I’ve hidden behind the camera for so long,” says Galindo. “The only way to push through this heightened fear is to create work where I can [also] see myself through the lens of my community.”

Being vulnerable in front of the camera is just one of the evolving aspects of creative practice for artists such as Galindo. The lateral experience of kin-building is also central, and goes beyond film and photography production to engage with all kinds of community work, from art collaborations to a monthly dance party. “I’ve been trying to think of all of my life as part of my art practice these days,” they explain. “The fear just motivates me to go even harder.”

Building community

For Queer artists, manifesting care goes beyond the politics of representation or their photographs alone. It is an intrinsic part of the work. Janina Sabaliauskaitė is an image-maker but also an educator and archivist, who curates festivals and runs a black-and-white darkroom in Newcastle for the Queer community. In her hands, photography is a tool for organising, as well as an act of resistance, reflecting her desire to build safe environments for creativity and play.

“Amazing things can happen when you empower somebody to use a camera or develop film and print pictures,” the Lithuanian artist says. “The most important thing is that people have the tools to start archiving their own lives.”

In Sending Love, an exhibition of Sabaliauskaitė’s work at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, earlier this year, she presented sensual and erotic collaborative photographs celebrating a sex-positive perspective on masculine femininity – a love letter to her transnational LGBTQIA+ community. The project features Sabaliauskaitė exploring her identity as both an immigrant and gender non-conforming lesbian, and is a provocation to listen to the experiences of Queer folks from a wider geography.

For Sabaliauskaitė, inclusion and collaboration are vital, and she is committed to participating in other photographers’ work as much as her own. She hopes this gesture of “building visibility together” will create a chain reaction, helping others feel safe and empowering them to take risks, to push the boundaries of how Queer bodies can be seen and represented. “I always make work with the intention that it will be visible,” she says. “First and foremost, because in Lithuania, there isn’t much. As Queer people, we can’t wait for laws to change; for someone to tell us we can do certain things. We have to take chances, embrace our desires and express ourselves.”

If the past is any indicator, the significance of today’s visions of Queer life will go unrecognised for years. Yet, these artists instinctively understand how vital it is to create a living archive of, and for, LGBTQIA+ people, and the endless and vital ways in which queerness is experienced and performed. Queer culture, like photography more generally, is entering an era in which the mechanics of cultural production are perhaps more meaningful than the final shot. As we contemplate the role of images in our lives, my focus has shifted from ‘Is this good?’ to ‘What might this do for someone?’

My first experience with art censorship was not on social media, it was at a Walmart supermarket in rural US. As I waited for a set of self-portraits at the photo desk, the clerk excused himself and a manager replaced him. In a voice loud enough to alert surrounding customers of my indecency, I was told that my prints would be destroyed and that “we usually call the police in this situation”. Genuinely surprised and more than a little confused, I pressed the manager who had threatened me, asking why. Eventually, the answer was, “It shows your nipples”.

After witnessing my artwork reduced to illicit material for the mere fact that I was a woman and my nipples were showing, I was struck by the sheer inequality of the premise. If a man had taken the same self- portraits he would be walking out with them in his hands, whereas I walked out with only anger and shame. Stalking back to my car, I devised my revenge plot: I would put my nipples everywhere.

One nipple sticker at a time, I would prove that a nipple alone is not just harmless, but genderless. The idea was amusing, serious and popular, and soon it would acquaint me with the boundless joys of art censorship on social media. As post after post was removed for that very same ‘it shows your nipples’ rationale, I found that my skirmish with content moderation was just one battle in a long war over nudity and women’s bodies in art online, a war that has destroyed far more art and artists than any prudish Walmart manager could dream.

“If a man had taken the same self-portraits he would be walking out with them in his hands, whereas I walked out with only anger and shame. Stalking back to my car, I devised my revenge plot: I would put my nipples everywhere”

Let the fight begin

The first battle began in 2008, when a Facebook group of new mothers grew sick of their photos being removed for ‘pornography’ and organised a ‘Nurse In’ at the company’s California headquarters. With chants, songs and breastfeeding both in person and online, the ‘Lactivists’ took a powerful first shot at Facebook’s treatment of the female-presenting body.

From the 2008 protest to 2014, Facebook slowly allowed more breastfeeding images, an increase that coincided with rising support for public breastfeeding in the US. Acknowledging visibility to be an influential factor in public acceptance, the US Surgeon General wrote in 2011: “Although focusing on the sexuality of female breasts is common in mass media, visual images of breastfeeding are rare, and a mother may never have seen a woman breastfeeding.” The coincidence of more visibility on social media and a bump in public acceptance is notable, and suggests that ‘real’ lives are not just reflected online, but influenced by online interactions.

The correlation between visibility and social acceptance is well-documented, and particularly significant for underrepresented and marginalised groups as it can mitigate stigma and push society forward. In the case of Instagram vs Lactivists, giving visibility was simply a matter of listening to users and adjusting accordingly. This ‘win’ for breastfeeding sketched out a potentially simple solution for the treatment of marginalised groups on social media – less discriminatory content moderation and an interest in protecting freedom of expression. Despite this, the battle over the female nipple sans baby and the sexualisation of women’s bodies has proven not so simple.

In the years following, Facebook (now Meta) cracked down hard on all sorts of female-body related content. The inflexibility of Meta’s stance, particularly its anti-female nipple policy, has for years kept artists from changing the narrative around the female body. This has had particularly frustrating outcomes for the photography community, who, despite a heritage of over 200 years, still struggles to be explicitly represented by guidelines that currently state they “allow photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures”, without defining what “other art” means.

With Instagram’s continual rise as a professional tool, the repeated erasure and censorship of these artists has left them with just a few, unsatisfying options: mar their artwork with self-censorship, keep projects off social media, or change their practice to adapt to restrictive guidelines. The end result is a stagnant representation of the art world, limited opportunities for at-risk artists, and entire bodies of work created specifically with gender-based censorship in mind.

Rise of legal issues

Those who complain about discrimination online are often reminded that private companies make their own rules, and until recently that was pretty much true. Over the last few years, however, a worrisome shift is threatening freedom of expression across the internet, and is particularly concerning for artists who have yet to be welcomed on platforms such as Instagram.

Efforts to regulate the internet and control platforms are being legislated around the world. In most circumstances, particularly in the UK and US, these efforts purport to protect children and vulnerable groups by going after CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) and sex trafficking. Noble concerns, but ones that have fed into surveillance and partisan ideology online. Instagram artists first experienced these effects when, around the start of 2021, they began to receive a violation notification of “sexual solicitation”. This new accusation levelled at artwork was more than offensive, it was a signal of something more sinister.

Instagram was responding to pressure from a new US law, SESTA-FOSTA, championed by the powerful conservative organisation NCOSE (previously Morality In Media), which has campaigned against pornography, sex work and same-sex marriage, has supported art censorship and targets women’s bodily autonomy. Now Instagram and other platforms became legally liable for anything users posted, spooking them into purging content deemed even potentially illicit, rather than face penalties. This result, when free expression is hindered in an indirect way, is known as the ‘chilling effect’. Beyond social media, this chilling effect has also resulted in the termination of artists’ websites, online shops, newsletters and payment processors.

Digital-rights groups are sounding the alarm on numerous other impending legal changes, and pointing to the fallout from SESTA-FOSTA as proof of the damage that badly designed and partisan legislation can wreak. Laws that are meant to punish websites for illicit material and surveil users will only push actual bad actors deeper underground and target already marginalised communities, meaning that artists are among the first to be impacted. As digital-rights groups warn of a chilled free expression online, human rights groups are reporting the rapidly increasing rate of art censorship around the world. It is apparent we are seeing a global conservative backlash of anti- sex, anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-feminist values, and that the online culture we have all grown to depend on is a target.

Many of us fight Instagram because we love Instagram – the connection it provides us to opportunities and each other is unparalleled and we want it equally for all. But Meta has only sat down with artists once and any acknowledgment of its mistreatment of artists has been due to public missteps or embarrassment at the hands of the rich and famous. While Instagram’s guidelines correctly note that its policies “have become more nuanced over time”, this progress has been too slow.

Real change in the face of rising art censorship will take the combined efforts of a united art world demanding protection for artists and an end to the “needlessly aggressive gatekeeping” online, as described by anti-art-censorship group Don’t Delete Art (DDA). The DDA manifesto, which aims to bring these voices together, puts it this way: “As social media companies are held to different and changing regulatory standards in the US, Europe and the UK, it will be critical for at-risk artists to be considered and valued as companies adapt.”

With the advent of Instagram and online tools, artists had access to the kind of means and reach they had only dreamed of, an art world finally open to all. In reality though, this access was always obstructed by ingrained sexism and ignorance. Whether torn up in a rural shopping mall or accused of sexual solicitation, art that is restricted by bias will go unseen and artists will suffer obscurity. Through visibility, we can conquer stigma and push our visual narrative beyond the stagnancy we currently risk effecting. Otherwise, if art is not seen, did it ever exist at all? Pics or it didn’t happen.

Emma Shapiro is editor-at-large at Don’t Delete Art, a campaign and resource centre protecting artistic expression across social media platforms

“Generally as curators we are trained to produce final texts that speak with a detached, almost scientific voice,” De Mutiis tells me. “In Permanent Beta we’re bringing in personal reflection and learning. That personal aspect is something that I enjoy, when you hear interviews about the process behind artists’ work. As this evolves over the two years, I’d like to give an insight into the curator as a human being.”

In an audio-led section, curators talk about occasions they have been cheated by an image. De Mutiis recalls absent-mindedly buying a birdhouse from Amazon, only to find out that the giant package was being shipped from the US to his home in Switzerland. “This image suddenly became connected with supply chains, labour issues, carbon emissions, algorithms…” he recalls. “It was like a movie scene playing out in my mind.”

Elsewhere, the artist Dina Kelberman hosts a weekly livestream as part of her ongoing Sponge Project, playing videos of people ripping, squelching and squidging sponges. The sounds – which played alone are designed to elicit autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) – create a fuzzy cacophony, which she organises into a spectrum ranging from ‘soothing’ to ‘abrasive’.

“I’m more interested in seeing what the online space can offer that the exhibition can’t”

The livestreams mimic a recent collaboration between Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers’ Gallery in London called Screen Walks. “These are spaces in which we can see through the eyes of the artist; that could not exist in a physical exhibition,” De Mutiis says. “We’ve also attracted a small community of people who join and interact with the artist. That creates a new kind of participation, and a new space for seeing art as a work-in-progress. So there are many things that open up if we experiment with online spaces.”

It all feels surprisingly lo-tech. Permanent Beta’s aesthetic echoes the online world around the turn of the millennium – think early Wikipedia and dial-up internet – and there is certainly no hint of virtual reality or artificial intelligence. “This was a conscious decision,” De Mutiis explains. “It felt more experimental [to omit these features]. During the pandemic, we saw a lot of museums recreating physical spaces through 3D modelling and CGI. That just felt like copying one space into the other. I’m more interested in seeing what the online space can offer that the exhibition can’t.”

De Mutiis says he still loves the reallife space of an exhibition, but points to its limitations and the fact that, when it hosts online videos, memes and gifs, they are squeezed and stabilised. “A lot of museums have struggled with wanting to be more up-todate with these sorts of contemporary images without updating their infrastructure. That is the starting point of Permanent Beta.”

He would “absolutely” like to see similar initiatives from large public institutions, which would help make their projects more accessible, but questions whether their funding structures would allow it. Few galleries have a dedicated digital curator, though institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and private collections such as the Julia Stoschek Foundation have been leading the field for several years. “I understand why [there are few digital curators], but I find it sad,” De Mutiis says. “It doesn’t take much to start livestreaming. So many lockdown-inspired projects have been cancelled in favour of the physical space.”

Admittedly the experimental, sometimes spontaneous nature of Permanent Beta is brave. The project’s aim, to “show what goes on in the minds of the curatorial staff”, might jar with the authoritative tone sought by major galleries. But the process at Fotomuseum Winterthur leaves space for human error, De Mutiis says: “When you show your process, sometimes your ideas start out wrong or you’re ill-informed. It’s not for everyone.”

Another section, Accidental Discoveries, is a growing list of sometimes concerning phenomena in online image-making, in which curators pull together definitions of terms such as ‘digitised dysmorphia’, ‘cursed images’ and ‘disaster porn’. Many of them are amorphous or difficult to pin down, and the team draws heavily on blogs and news articles rather than academic resources when feels like you’re going exploring,” De Mutiis says. ‘Sludge content’, a particularly elusive example which involves collaged TikTok videos of seemingly unrelated images, is an aspect of social media that De Mutiis finds particularly troubling. “You don’t have any tension build-up or release, you’re just being hypnotised,” he says. “You’re not only passive, but it creates a dependency. We’re letting our brains be mushed.”

Much of De Mutiis’ creative practice involves pondering where the limit is or what comes next – how much more human beings can take before our minds actually turn to sludge. In other words, while the trends could be concerning, there are tools that can empower and inspire artists: “If we think about this as something that we can use and appropriate, it’s very liberating.”

And that, says De Mutiis, is where some in the photography world are going wrong. Internet image culture has long permeated contemporary fine art, but in photography, critics are quick to declare the demise of the medium. “I don’t know if people are afraid of change, but they shouldn’t be,” he says. “After all the developments to the photographic image in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, this medium has much to contribute to the discourse. We almost have a duty to engage with these new forms of images, not resist them. We should be in the driving seat.”

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Often his first viewing of the exhibition is when he arrives to take images, typically on the day of installation. Earlier recces are unfortunately a rarity, because budgets do not allow for it. “Occasionally there are architectural visualisations and sketch up models that I can see,” he admits.

Time is pressurised, both because there is not much of it and because the gallery is on a deadline to open to the public. Initially, Colson simply notes the practical and technical requirements. “I look for the big obstacles to capturing good photographs, such as glass cases or big paintings that are behind a glaze,” he explains. “Objects like that can take a long time to photograph, because you need to have apparatus set up to counter the reflections.”

After that, he works his way through his mental shot-list, which will include wide photographs of each area of the gallery. He systematically documents every wall then gets closer to capture the details. Colson tries to make the Barbican look as immaculate as possible and, although there are always people around when he is working, he prefers not to include them in the images. However, his other commercial career is events photography, and for that he is invariably trying to capture as many people as possible in the space. It is a perfect foil to the installation work. “Event photography is reactive and fast,” he explains. “You’re working with people who are usually in a crowd, happy and easy to work with. The editing can be a huge job, because you’re taking a lot of images to get one good image of a particular group.”

“I partially do the editing process when I’m shooting. I’ve usually got a plan for what images I need to get. You’re not chasing moments because the installation is static, and the editing process is more about refining”

By contrast, when photographing exhibitions, Colson edits as he goes along. “I partially do the editing process when I’m shooting,” he says. “I’ve usually got a plan for what images I need to get. You’re not chasing moments because the installation is static, and the editing process is more about refining and delivering pristine images – for example, removing dust.”

Colson also photographed the showcase of Central Saint Martins’ graphic communication design degree course, as well as “the exhibition in motion”. He is an associate lecturer at the university, and says being a practising photographer definitely helps his teaching. The university and commercial work allow him to devote time and resources to his art practice, which is also characterised by a fascination with space. “I have been using a LiDAR 3D scanner to scan London’s streets for the last five years,” he says. “I’m interested in laser scanning as an ‘expanded photographic’ technology.”

This interest has led to two projects – Offshore Capital, documenting ‘ghost’ property in London owned by offshore companies based in tax havens, and London Knowledge, a short documentary film using 3D scanning animation, journeying through the London streets black-cab drivers memorise for their ‘Knowledge’ qualification. The latter was screened in Piccadilly Circus last year; an aptly chaotic, iconic and central location.

Colson enjoys the balance, but admits it was hard to achieve. His decision to move into photography was impetuous, he says, and it took years to get a foot on the lowest rung. For those considering installation photography, he advises talking to people in the area or, better still, assisting an architectural photographer. “I never did and I wish I had,” he says. “Architectural photographers often have budgets to pay for assistants. You’ll also learn about client workflow and how to light interior spaces, and it will set your job expectations.”

Architectural photographers might also have tips on kit, as this is a specialist area in which “investing in equipment is important, and expensive”. He shoots with a Nikon D810 and a good range of lenses, including wideangle, mid-range and telephoto zooms, a wideangle architectural tilt-shift, a macro and two primes. He deems a lens belt as essential, and also takes flashguns, spare batteries, memory cards, a tripod and a laptop.

Getting started can be nerve-wracking, he adds, but it only takes a couple of curators to notice your work to give you a chance. “It was a constant scramble when I started out,” he says. “But I was all right once I got one or two people who keep on coming back.”

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“We see right away this intention to make art accessible, to democratise photography by the act of living with a work, and it’s a very political project because we’re in a region that is still very left-leaning and communist,” she says. “There’s a tradition of popular education. In the 1980s, there was a huge industrial decline, but there was also a sense of cultural push for the society of tomorrow. It was a little utopian. In the 1980s, a lot of money went towards culture and there were a lot of cultural initiatives.”

The area, stretching from the Belgian border in the east to the hills of Artois in the west, is covered with the history of three centuries of coal-mining. The mining basin perimeter is listed as a World Heritage Site and encompasses over 300 features, including rising slag heaps, which are self-sustaining ecosystems and benchmarks of the local landscape. Other regionally representative markers include extraction pits, railway tracks, mining towns and community facilities.

CRP/ is hard to reach by public transport, necessitating an arduous train/tram/bus journey that does not connect well. There is an ongoing discussion about how to preserve the site but make it more accessible. There is also the need to add space to store the collection, amongst other requirements, since only part of it is held on site. The venue hosts three to four exhibitions a year, with attendance clocking in at about 2800 visitors per year, but outside the walls there are over 50 exhibitions annually with 90,000 visitors.

“To people who feel far away from culture, our door seems made of concrete”

“These numbers reflect a double function,” Hoareau says, pointing to CRP/’s reach. When she arrived as a director, with the 40-year anniversary on the horizon, the question of appropriately honouring the collection loomed large. In 2022, the anniversary year, she negotiated exhibitions of selections from the collection in 16 locations in the region. These were in different types of communities, ranging from the Palais des Congrès in Le Touquet (an affluent area where president Emmanuel Macron vacations) to the literary Villa Marguerite Yourcenar (its writing residency served as a collaboration point on text and visuals), to a huge and popular archive of the mining past in the commune of Lewarde’s Musée de la Mine to Lille’s modular contemporary art Espace Le Carré. There were also cultural events in art schools throughout the region with 478 works from the collection exhibited in a variety of regional venues.

“It was a strong push for the 40th anniversary,” Hoareau says. “But it is ramping us up to something we’d like to make ongoing. We’re continuing this dynamic, and though we did it before, this was our most dispersed, widest reach yet… The ease of working with people in the northern region stems from the heritage of this industrial past: the sense of solidarity is a strong value. We’re not competitive.”

This policy of influence – ‘rayonnement’ in French – extends to the local community as well as the wider region. The areas around CRP/ have high rates of unemployment and alcoholism, a sense of purposelessness lingering in the wake of the collapsed industrial past. Sometimes, CRP/’s reach tries to connect with specific groups, including prisoners, autistic children or unemployment offices, but its broader aim is to attract locals of all sorts. “To people who feel far away from culture, our door seems made of concrete,” Hoareau admits of the rift between the average citizen and the average art-lover.

As a means of extending the space and making its activities more accessible, CRP/ built a pop-up pavilion for school workshops called La BOX. The stand-alone building’s frontage is a glass window so passers-by can see what is going on, making the sense of transparency as symbolic as it is literal. CRP/ also tries to bridge the gap by having artists take part in activities rather than simply hang their work on the walls. The cliché of the artist as individualist is reframed here.

“In the current French cultural and political landscape, we ask a lot of artists,” Hoareau notes. “There’s a sense that artists can’t just create, they owe things to society too. We are pushing them in that direction and it’s a political choice, including via grants they receive. I sincerely believe in these projects but not everyone’s work or disposition is cut out for that. For some artists, exchange is part of what they do. We have to figure out who can, and who cannot. I would never force anyone to do it. We are a support system and we respect the artistic project.”

This summer, the museum remained open in August, a month in which much of France effectively shuts down every year. It was a test run to give people somewhere to go and workshops to try, since some in the area do not necessarily have the means to travel for summer vacations. “We are conscious of the societal challenges of the region, and the centre d’art has a responsibility at several levels: what we say through our exhibitions, and making what we propose accessible in our immediate environment,” says Hoareau. “We must continue to raise the centre d’art to the next level, to have a referential position within the sphere of photography and contemporary art. Our programming has to achieve both aspects.”

This commitment to the community includes maintaining a high artistic standard, with each initiative carefully weighed up before getting the green light. “Not just exhibitions, but our cultural and educational programming, everything adjacent to the exhibitions themselves, to greet the public,” says Hoareau. During August, CRP/ hosted movie screenings as well as workshops with the artists whose work was being exhibited, notably silkscreen printing and cyanotype ateliers. “Our decision to stay open this summer when most institutions close – us included previously – I don’t know what it will yield,” mused Hoareau, prior to the opening. “But we’re going to try, and not cling to the statement ‘We’re closed because no one is around’. We posit: ‘No one is around because we’re closed’.”

The work recently on show also confirms how closely CRP/ respects the region, and how much it wishes to champion it. The institution launched a competition to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the mining basin’s Unesco listing as a World Heritage Site (as well as its own 40th anniversary), asking artists to propose how they would work in the area. The competition attracted nearly 150 applicants and the four winning photographers, selected by a jury, all won commissions to present a new take on the physical and social landscape, by using experimental techniques. The exhibition is titled En creux / Commande photographique sur le Bassin minier (In Hollow, Photographic Commission on the Mining Basin), and features work by Clément Brugger, Isabella Hin, Hideyuki Ishibashi, and Apolline Lamoril.

Brugger’s laser engravings of images adorn a species of local wood, all cut from a single tree trunk and leaving the bark visible. Hin focuses on the miners’ ‘shower room’ and the blue uniform which is sidelined as the miners wash but is here seen wet, torn and distorted in large format ultra-glossy prints. Japanborn, France-based Ishibashi spotlights 12 slag heaps in gum bichromate prints and produces pigments collected from their individually biodiverse settings, displayed alongside his scientific measurements and catalogued empirical approach. Lamoril examines the rabid fan culture around the football club RC Lens, using 1990s archival material of the working-class supporters and their spirit of solidarity, alongside images of sports gear conserved at the National Sports Museum.

“You don’t always have to speak about the region to speak about the region”

In autumn, the programming pivots with an exhibition by Robin Lopvet. Lopvet, who also works as a photo retoucher, will show a variety of his tongue-in-cheek works, which remix tableaux by Hieronymus Bosch, still lifes made from scraps of food waste, and much-memed images of dog faces emerging from clouds produced by natural and socio-political catastrophes. The exhibition will examine what Hoareau calls the “image mensonge”, or the ‘lying image’, which has been deformed enough to leave little or no representative veracity. “There’s a ‘LOL’ quality, and the images appear very light-hearted, but in fact they’re dire,” Hoareau says. This will be the first CRP/ exhibition to explore the absurdity of the digital image and the photograph’s capacity to manipulate the viewer – a take which, in the age of AI and ChatGPT, is highly topical.

Hoareau oversees a wide range of exhibition themes, and describes her approach as one of “symbiosis: an appetite to reread the classical collections and, at the same time, interest in the contemporary image and its challenges”. For her, “there’s no conflict” in reaching for disparate things, and so far she has programmed (in succession) French photographer Camille Lévêque’s visual relationship to Armenia, a group show of four emerging Chinese photographers, an exhibition featuring part of CRP/’s own collection, and vernacular images from the collection of Jean-Marie Donat.

There is no single thread; rather, everything is multifaceted and complementary, which, for Hoareau “reflects the diversity of the production today”. In fact, the mix can yield surprising parallels. Hoareau points out that one of the emerging Chinese photographers, Zheng Andong, investigated the American West and the Chinese workers who went there to look for gold – a theme which resonated well in a French town with a mining past. Andong’s work included an image with a poppy, flora that workers brought to the US from China. This echoes something similar in the CRP/ region, in which Moroccan miners brought strains of mint from home that did not previously exist locally. As Hoareau points out: “You don’t always have to speak about the region to speak about the region.”

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I’ve had a deep interest in photobooks since 2006, when I made my first one at university. I was very aware that this was a big part of how I could disseminate my work. I couldn’t – and still can’t – afford to make a traditional commercial photobook. That monetary side of things has influenced my path to evolve the format. I started to question why there is this limited definition of what the photobook can be. Things have to evolve; all art evolves. I had to find some way to make them mine – to imbue them with unique authorship.

I started making my ‘book installations’ in 2013. They were very limited, primitive and unrefined. Since then I’ve been trying to use a more sculptural form. I come from a construction background, and I physicalise the work at a very early stage. Even after the first shoot I might make an initial dummy to bring the images off the screen. My book installations are, in effect, maquettes. As I complete each one, I view them in the same way I would dummies. These dummies – that from traditional interpretation would be deemed the ‘back end’ of a photo project – are the heart and soul of it.

The Abysm is a book of pictures of my father connected to his cancer diagnosis. It depicts a complete mental collapse and breakdown. Those are honourable and truthful depictions. I felt that the single-form photobook couldn’t adequately represent that. I needed to add other dimensions. The idea with the project is to show the images in a complete snowscape – to show the book installation in a cold, algid environment. That is how the experience felt and how it was. I hope that feeding that exterior environment into the narrative of the book will add an element of connection for the viewer. I’m trying to bring the imagery off the page while still keeping the page.

Caligo started as a vertical installation – playing with the dummies and thinking, ‘How could this work?’ It first came from a cardboard form, then there was the idea of a concertina book. I thought, ‘What if the concertina book somehow came off a wall?’ I tested it in Paris – the first proper maquette – and when I submitted it to the Aesthetica Art Prize, they asked whether it could be made horizontal. I didn’t know how to take being asked to change the artwork to fit the space, but I thought it was a good challenge so I made the horizontal version. Another form of Caligo is the fourmetre installation, which challenges the very definition of what a photobook can be.

“I couldn’t – and still can’t – afford to make a traditional commercial photobook. I started to question why there is this limited definition of what the photobook can be.”

For Interstates of Becoming, I spent four years working in the Indian Himalayas. I travelled along NH5, a road along the border with Tibet, which is one of the most dangerous roads in India. It was terrifying. It was originally a trunk road built by the British to syphon trade away from Kashmir. Today it’s a very important route for the hydroelectric industry and for the Indian military, because it services the border region with China. The mountain is continually eroding, with landslides every other day. There is also the creation of man-made concrete structures to try to counter this. It’s a continuing cycle of construction and destruction. I am currently creating a photobook installation that depicts the direct and indirect effects humans and mountains have on each other. When the series was shown as NH5, I included a wall that was leaning against the viewer like a landslide – a billboard you would walk under. I wanted to bring across all the elements I experienced on this road to the installation.

As global temperatures rise, glaciers melt and water flows increase. Excess water creates more precipitation that, in turn, falls heavily within the Himalayas. Concrete, metal and tarmac act as the facade of human preservation. The peril is amplified by the ‘developed world’’s ignorance to the effects of imperial and capitalist industrialisation, but human endeavour doesn’t stop. It’s an ongoing contest for survival that binds humans with the mountains. I like to think there’s a harmony within this tussle for dominance; that’s what I’m trying to depict in these photographs.

It’s liberating to remove the ‘documentary photography’ title. I always felt that was too limiting. The fallacy of truth that is connected to it restricted me. Being so immersed in documentary photography as my starting form, I later considered whether I could use different materials to show the truth I’m trying to convey. To show the strength of what I’m trying to convey. The narrative is honest.

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.