Category: Interviews

by Luca Fiore

When, in 1982—forty-three years ago—the fifth expanded edition of The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall was published, Stephen Shore was thirty-five. It’s a super-classic, still studied today in universities all over the world—or almost. His name and one of his photographs appear on the very last page of the volume, alongside those of William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, cited as pioneers of the new color photography. After all, his first solo exhibition had been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971, when he was just twenty-three. A lot of time has passed since then. What must it be like to live for four decades knowing you’ve already made history?

In truth, photography is neither football nor pop music, and fame is a relative concept. And it took quite some time before he was actually considered “famous.” Shore tells Il Foglio that for the first twenty-five years of his teaching at the photography program at Bard College—which he still directs—he never showed his own work, not wanting to produce imitators: “I only started showing it when it had become so well known that it no longer made sense not to.” He’s referring mainly to the images in his most famous book, Uncommon Places, published in 1982. Urban and everyday landscapes, portraits made with the precision of a large-format camera—and in color. Before him, no one had done it quite that way. His other cornerstone contribution to the tough soil of photographic history is American Surfaces, the record of a journey from New York to Arizona, where the black-and-white Americas of Walker Evans and Robert Frank blend into a cocktail of vernacular visions: motel rooms, diner tables, armchairs, and carpets in quintessentially American hues.

Shore was the favorite photographer of Peter Schjeldahl, the erudite and exquisitely refined art critic of The New Yorker, who passed away in 2022. Schjeldahl wrote of him: “The closest to Shore, in a cohort that includes Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, and Richard Misrach, is his friend William Eggleston, the raffish Southern aristocrat who has made pictures unbeatably intense and iconic: epiphanies triggered by the hues and textures of a stranded tricycle, say, or of a faded billboard in a scrubby field. While similarly alert to offbeat sublimities, Shore is a New Yorker more receptive than marauding in attitude. I fancy that Eggleston is the cavalier Mephistopheles of American color photography, and Shore the discreet angel Gabriel.”

Until recently, the only colorful detail in his biography was that, at just seventeen, in 1965, he found himself photographing at Andy Warhol’s court—an experience that lasted five years and was later gathered in Factory: Andy Warhol (Phaidon, 2016). That seemed like plenty. And yet, this year he has come out with a brand-new book, Early Work 1960–1965 (MACK, 2025). Here again, the dates matter: these are photographs made between the ages of twelve and seventeen. They are the shots of a teenager, yet they look like the work of a fully formed artist. The volume is accompanied by a text in which Shore recounts how those images came to be and tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of New York in those years—even though he admits, “It’s like looking at someone else’s work. I actually have no memories; I can’t recall what I was thinking or what drove me then.”

He tells of a child who, for his sixth birthday, received a Kodak ABC Darkroom Outfit, a kit for black-and-white developing and printing. At eight he had his first camera, a Ricoh 35. At ten, his first copy of American Photographs by Walker Evans—the first encounter with art photography. At twelve, he was already active: “I used to go to a small playground on 57th Street and the East River, just outside Sutton Place, a well-to-do neighborhood. I photographed kids who were there with their nannies. I’d ask for their addresses, make a 20×15 cm print, and show up at their parents’ apartment with the photo. I asked for five dollars—which would be fifty today. No one ever refused.”

In 1962 he met a photojournalist, Lee Lockwood, who took him under his wing and introduced him to the New York photography world. Lockwood was editor of a quarterly magazine, Contemporary Photographer. Leafing through it, Shore saw for the first time the work of Lee Friedlander, Don Donaghy, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Dave Heath. He became friends with Heath, who introduced him to W. Eugene Smith, the legendary Life photojournalist. One day the young Shore asked Smith how much one of his prints cost. Smith replied, “Thirty-five dollars.” The boy said, “Thirty-five for a photograph?!” And the legend answered, “Okay, twenty-five.” A few months later Smith handed Shore the print—it was Guardia Civil, from his photo-essay Spanish Village, published in Life in 1951.

In the spring of 1962, at fifteen, Shore picked up the phone and called the Museum of Modern Art, asking for an appointment with Edward Steichen, then head of the photography department. Steichen not only agreed to meet him but bought three prints for the museum’s collection. Shore recalls: “Looking back on that period, I see that occasionally, when I wanted to meet someone I admired, I would just call them or show up at their door—as I did with the musician Noah Greenberg, and later with the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas.” The latter ran the Film-Maker’s Cinematheque, where Shore had the chance to screen one of his short films, titled Elevator. It was 1965, and that same night the premiere of Warhol’s The Life of Juanita Castro was scheduled. It was there that Stephen met Andy—the Pope of Pop—who invited him the next day to take some pictures at the Factory. Early Work ends with seven photographs taken on that occasion. Andy is there, of course, along with Ed Hood, Ann Reynolds, Donald Lyons, and Edie Sedgwick at her radiant best. Shore was seventeen but already a fully fledged photographer—he just had to apply what he had learned on the streets of New York. He kept returning to 231 East 47th Street almost every day for the next three years. Then, at some point, he left: “I didn’t want to spend my whole life in Warhol’s shadow.”

When asked why he decided to publish his teenage images, Shore explains that his assistant, Laura Steele—who manages his archive—had started working on those early negatives a few years ago. “You need to look at your old photos,” she kept telling him. One day, returning home from some errands with his wife Ginger in Rhinebeck, a small town on the Hudson near where he now lives, he decided to look through the stack of prints Laura had made. “On top was an image taken in ’63 or ’64 at a street intersection I had just driven through. I didn’t remember ever being there. And yet, the two people in the photo were my parents.” The coincidence struck him—but not only that. “It was as if, in that image, there were already the photographic concerns I would develop a decade later in Uncommon Places: the attention to the vantage point, the way shadows enter the frame from below, the relationship between poles and street signs. Everything was already there—and yet I had no memory of taking that picture.” That very image now appears on the back cover of Early Work. It feels like a prefiguration of the Shore to come. The rest of the book consists mainly of street portraits—men, women, old people, and children populating the urban landscape of New York. It’s a genre that flourished in the 1960s and made great names of Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, and Diane Arbus. It’s as if, in those same years, you could hear a kid playing trumpet with the cadence and atmosphere of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

But like Davis, Shore didn’t stop there; he has always sought to evolve his language. In his memoir Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography (MACK, 2022), he recalls the time, in 1976, when he met Ansel Adams—one of the fathers of American photography—at a mutual friend’s house. “During dinner I saw him drink six tall glasses of straight vodka. Toward the end of the evening he said to me: ‘I had a period of great creativity in the 1940s, and since then I’ve done nothing but mediocre work.’ I don’t remember the context of the remark, but I remember clearly that he said it in a dry tone, like a photographer observing something.” That sentence, Shore says, stuck in him like an arrow. He vowed never to end up saying the same of himself. Of course, there are great artists who have always remained faithful to their language without losing their edge—he thinks of Eugène Atget, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Lee Friedlander. “Others renewed themselves by changing their aesthetic approach or subject matter—sometimes simply by changing cameras. During that dinner with Adams, I realized that, temperamentally, I belonged to the second group, the ones who refresh their vision.”

Over the years, the different cameras Shore has used have indeed changed his language. At the beginning there was the large-format view camera with color sheet film (20×25 cm), but later came the cellphone, drones, and digital medium format (for the gear-obsessed: a Hasselblad X1D). Each technology imposes limits and opens new possibilities—the photographer’s body and mind assume a different posture depending on the tool being used.

That lesson from Ansel Adams is one of many that Shore tries to pass on to his students—who arrive at Bard College at the same age he was when he entered the Factory. And even if his images seem, visually, to have little to do with the Warholian world, the link between Shore and Andy runs deep. “From him I learned first and foremost how an artist works. I saw him at work and saw how he experimented—trying and trying again—to understand what worked and what didn’t.” But there’s more: “In him there was what I call a distanced delight in contemporary culture. A kind of detached pleasure, in the sense that he would see something and say, ‘Wow, look at that.’ And he didn’t just mean he liked how it looked—he was amazed that it existed, and that it existed that way. Yet he maintained a distance, which wasn’t necessarily critical detachment. He liked everything, but always with a measure of distance. And that’s perhaps an attitude that, in some way, belongs to me too—especially in my American Surfaces images.” A title, incidentally, that Andy would have loved.

And what about his nineteen-year-old students? What should they be taught? “My task is to help them find their own voice,” Shore explains. “That’s why, along with technical instruction, we give a lot of space to class discussions of their work. Technique must always serve expression and aesthetics.” But there’s also something else, perhaps even more interesting: “Bard is a liberal-arts college, so students majoring in photography are required to take courses in the humanities or sciences—but the opposite also happens: in my classes I sometimes have students who have no intention of becoming artists, but study sociology or history. And I think that’s very interesting, because then my job is to teach them to look attentively. They walk every day from their dorm to the classroom, usually with headphones on or eyes on their phone. But if they take that same route with a camera around their neck, they begin to notice things they’d never seen before. Paying attention is a very useful skill for anyone. And it’s perhaps the most important contribution photography can make.”

Il Foglio, September 3, 2025

by Luca Fiore

When her first book, Sequester, was released in 2014, The Guardian’s photography critic, Sean O’Hagan, wrote that the volume was “laden with an inordinate sense of silence. Her monochrome landscapes, made using long exposures at dusk or early morning, alert us in their meditative way not just to the thereness, but also to what James Joyce called the ‘whatness’ of things.” He continued: “One senses that, for Awoiska van der Molen, photography is like a metaphysical quest, a journey to the essence of things. Her images take me back to Nan Shepherd’s classic book, The Living Mountain, which recounts, in luminous prose, the Scottish writer’s lifelong fascination with the Cairngorms as a physical and spiritual landscape. In it, she writes of her solitary walking and looking: ‘It is a journey into Being: for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire… I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, that is the final grace accorded from the mountain.’ That grace exists, too, in these quiet photographs of a world both desolate and beautiful.”

Since then, for Awoiska, born in Groningen, the Netherlands, in 1972, her career has been on a constant rise. Sequester (Fw:Books, 2014) was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo award, followed by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2017 and the Prix Pictet in 2019. In the meantime, she published three other books: Blanco (Fw:Books, 2017), The Living Mountain (Fw:Books, 2019), and The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves (Fw:Books, 2024), the latter again selected for Aperture/Paris Photo. Today, her photographs are part of the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and the Museum of Photography in Seoul.

“I didn’t want to become an artist. I grew up in what I would call a disharmonious and chaotic family, with my mother a painter and my grandfather a sculptor. I wanted a normal life, a normal job,” she tells Il Foglio. “I started a Tourism school because I wanted to travel, but I quit after two years. I enrolled in art school, studying architecture, thinking I would find a job in an office. But even that didn’t work out.” At twenty-five, she found herself without a clear direction. While working as a waitress, she took a course in photography and darkroom printing. There, she finally realized she had found “the right thing for her” and decided to return to art school to study photography. “I had the chance to work in solitude, having control over the entire process. It was just me, the camera, the chemicals, and the things in front of me.”

During her studies, she stumbled upon a book by Wim Wenders, Written In The West, in which the German director recounted his location scouting in the United States for Paris, Texas. “I wasn’t so much struck by the American landscapes, but by an interview where Wenders explained that what he was looking for was ‘the end of the world, where everything is finally silent.’ I wondered what it would mean for me, in the Netherlands, such an urbanized place, to go in search of the same thing.” She began a series of portraits of young Dutch people living in the North, near the dikes, far from the rest of the world. Awoiska asked herself, “What are they doing there? Why aren’t they looking for anything else?” This became her graduation project. But what next? What else was there to photograph?

“There are many artists who move from one project to another with great ease. They have an idea, they realize it, and then they move on to another. But for me, it doesn’t work that way. I don’t love the term ‘project,’ which is so overused. I’ve always been more interested in understanding the inner drive, the intrinsic motivation that leads me to create images. I tend to go where things take me.” So, during her Master’s in photography in Breda, she found herself traveling by train along the northern coast of Germany, which, in her thoughts, was again a kind of “end of the world.” There, she found a group of artisans engaged in rebuilding a medieval shipwreck. “Unlike my previous subjects,” she recalls, “these men and women didn’t worry about their appearance or how they would look in photos. I noted in my journal that they seemed ‘without vanity’ and ‘uninfluenced by the outside world.’ It was a kind of epiphany that strengthened the common thread present in all my subsequent works.” So, it wasn’t about portraying people in particular situations, but about something that had that characteristic of purity or, perhaps, imperturbability. Or maybe the right term is “sprezzatura.” In fact, after that trip, she started focusing on urban landscapes, photographing them from the outside and the inside. “I was looking for the same experience I had with the German artisans: places that seemed untouched by the outside world. I realized that those buildings, especially at night, offered me support. I felt them, in some way, rooted. Something I could lean on. In the daytime tumult of the city, photographing them helped me find peace and feel more rooted myself.”

For six years, she photographed nothing else: industrial buildings, suburban street corners, anonymous interiors, old armchairs, radiators. All nocturnal images, where the absence of people suggested a sense of quiet. Then, one day, while looking back at some of these images, she noticed a patch of black earth on which one of these houses stood. It was a photograph taken a year earlier, but in that moment she thought, “That’s where I need to be.” This marked the beginning of her great landscape period, which would occupy Awoiska van der Molen for the next decade and take its first stable form in 2014 with Sequester, as we mentioned.

Of that book, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, one of the sharpest and most elegant pens in contemporary photography criticism, wrote: “The photographs describe surfaces, fissures, and rolling expanses of an unspecified landscape, taken with long exposures on nights of profound shadow, when each scene is illuminated by the light of a distant moon. What we see in each image is therefore the accumulated compression of many minutes or hours of light traveling across a dark scene, so that ravines, trees, rock faces, leaves, and slopes are lit by a light that casts no shadows in the darkness surrounding them.” He continues: “Amidst all this darkness, these images are animated by life, and by a sense of its spread into the imperceptible depths of shadow, where the silhouettes of leaves transform into spores with rough and blurred edges. Trees seem to reach for the light, while the jagged pattern of shadow and light animates the surfaces of the grass, and in the diaphanous shimmer of this nocturnal light, we feel like explorers of a deep and pristine ocean.”

Van der Molen has traveled across Europe in her Fiat Marea, stopping in safe places and sleeping in the back seat. She has been everywhere, she says, “from Spain to Crete, passing through Norway.” In her book, no location is specified, because it is not a work about places. Instead, she explains: “I only take the camera out of my bag when, in a place, I feel a connection between my ephemeral and transient self and what is eternal and solid. In these places I photograph, what I feel is a deep sense of rootedness. Photography is the result of this connection, of this experience. I’m not documenting the landscape: I’m photographing what I perceive by being in nature. The place we come from.” It’s one thing to say it, another is to create convincing images that can convey the same experience to the viewer. The artist says that after an entire year of work, there were only five or six “good” photographs. And, working with analog, you only find out if a shot was successful weeks later. It’s so easy to fall into the temptation of the rhetoric of the sublime that comes from romantic painting, she explains: “It’s like photographing a person smiling. Everyone likes a beautiful smile. But is it really the expression that says the most about us? In landscape photography, something analogous is the sky, where the eye can get lost in the depths. My attempt, however, is not to let the gaze escape.” It’s almost the search for a centripetal rather than centrifugal force. An invitation to an immersion.

Then, at a certain point, after ten years of work, Awoiska realized she was repeating herself. “I learned a lot about myself during that period, and perhaps that’s why I no longer felt the need to continue that search.” So, while in Japan looking for new landscape images, she happened to photograph, at night, the grid of orthogonal lines drawn by the windows of a traditional Japanese house. The opaque panes prevented a view of the interior but returned a soft light, discreetly illuminating the darkness of the street. Back in Amsterdam, she looked at the image and said to herself, “No, too pretty.” But the following year, she returned to Kyoto to photograph nature and made a few more images with the same kind of subject. “But in the third year, I went again knowing that I would only photograph the windows. I didn’t know yet why or what I would do with them. I just knew that was what interested me. But there are those situations where you have no idea why you’re doing something, you just do it in response to what’s happening. It’s horrible to hear, but these are moments when you feel happy.” As in one of her photographs, Awoiska’s story is made of lights emerging from the deepest blacks. If I think back to the first time I photographed a window, in 2015, I realize it was a period when I felt lonely. Over time that personal experience passed, but it made me aware of an epidemic of loneliness that was afflicting a country like Japan and, ultimately, our entire society. Thus, as had happened with the nocturnal landscape, the photographs of the windows became a kind of psychological space for the artist to explore. Those luminescent panes become a kind of separating membrane, a defensive barrier, but also a breach in a closed world. “The more time passes, the more I think that this kind of loneliness is at the root of many difficulties, not just personal ones. I think that certain political behaviors, cultural choices based on fear, ultimately grow from this feeling of isolation and lack of connection.”

It would be wrong to create a cause-and-effect connection, because it’s never like that in van der Molen’s work. But perhaps it’s no coincidence that from the mysterious images of the grid of squares/windows captured from a medium distance, the artist began to get closer to the glass, framing the objects leaning against the opaque panes. They resemble bodies pushing outwards. “I was surprised by these new images. They had a new intimate, even sensual, quality. And I asked myself what they were saying about me. Was there perhaps a desire for greater intimacy?” The book that resulted from this is titled The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves and is a unique object, bound as a leporello with the photographs of the windows and a 16-page insert with the images of the glass. A design object in itself, it sold out in just two months.

Awoiska only understands herself and her work in retrospect. Today, she thinks back to the cover of Sequester, a photo she initially discarded because it was “too pretty.” A year later, she recounts, upon re-examining the negative, she changed her mind: “It seemed like a Japanese drawing to me, with flowers at the edges and the center empty—a space that in Japan would be called ‘Ma.’ I had never used it before; I considered it ‘their’ concept, not mine. But I realized that in that image there was also the meaning of darkness in my work: a black hole on the border between heaven and hell, life and death, beginning and end.” She shares this because, with the window series, things seem to have reversed: “In the center, there is a bright white, surrounded by darkness. I don’t want to cross that white space; I prefer to stay in that darkness which for me is like a warm blanket. Even if the windows can be born from a feeling of loneliness, I don’t try to interpret too much. Yet, comparing the covers of these two books, I see an interesting, almost ironic, inversion. An unexpected reversal.”

Il Foglio, August 27, 2025

by Luca Fiore

One day in the mid-2000s, Batia Suter received an email from someone asking about the relationship between her work and Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The sender had seen a draft of what would later become Parallel Encyclopedia, her first book, published in 2007 and now considered legendary. In her Amsterdam studio, the Swiss artist had to Google the name of the great German scholar—she had no idea who he was. It took only a few seconds for her to realise the near-overlap between their projects. Today, she tells Il Foglio it was a shock that took her two weeks to recover from. “What was the point of continuing such an immense effort if someone had done the same thing a century earlier?” She ordered books, read, studied. What unfolded before her was the fascinating and mysterious world of the German art historian and critic—“Hamburg at heart, Jewish by blood, Florentine in soul”—who, during his lifetime, amassed a collection of 65,000 books and 8,000 photographs of artworks. In the last years of his life, he began working on an unfinished project: panels grouping images of artworks from all eras to show how certain iconographic themes in Western culture repeat over time. A utopian and marvellous undertaking. A new way of studying art history through photographic reproductions. An adventure abruptly cut short in 1929 by a heart attack.

Instead of being paralysed by the comparison, Batia found in Warburg a companion along the way. “I had found someone who was familiar with my way of thinking. I began to feel him as a brother, in who he was and in the way he researched. Back then, he had to order images from all over the world, spending a lot of money. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of simply scanning them from the books I collected. Of course, he was interested in Greek culture, the Renaissance, the workings of the human body. I’m not very good at building theories. Mine is more an attempt to make high culture and low culture collide.” Indeed, Parallel Encyclopedia—a 600-page volume created over five years of intense, obsessive work—is less a tool for study and analysis than an epic of the gaze. Monumental in its encyclopaedic scope, it seems to play with, if not poke fun at, the rationalism of Diderot and company. Yet it contains an immense love for the power of images: their ability to speak their own language and to converse with one another, generating unexpected new meanings.

Nearly twenty years after the publication of Parallel Encyclopedia, Batia Suter is a prominent name in the world of photography. Few, like her, have worked so convincingly and radically with archival research—a field that has become one of the most beloved and developed strands in contemporary photography. Alongside her publications, Suter has translated her research into monumental installations using her image collections. She was a finalist for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2018; that same year, she exhibited at Le Bal in Paris, one of the most important photography venues. This year, she won the Swiss Design Award and is present with a solo exhibition at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, titled Octahydra. In the current display of the Stedelijk Museum’s permanent collection in Amsterdam, her installation drawn from Parallel Encyclopedia is on view—80 books, open and overlapping, so that their photographs engage in visual dialogue.

Suter’s passion for images began early, at the age of 14. That’s when she started carrying a camera with her everywhere. She would spend hours developing and printing film rolls in the darkroom. She enrolled at the School of Design in Zurich, then transferred to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands. “I began painting and drawing by enlarging my photographs. I would project the images and trace them—a very physical and intense process. But it was also stressful—I had to work at night to have the darkness needed for projection, and I needed large spaces. I realised I couldn’t go on like that until I was eighty. Even then, I wasn’t interested so much in the technique—whether painting or photography—as in understanding images and their effect on me.” After the academy, she enrolled in a master’s program in typography. It was the late 1990s, and Batia had no experience with computers, but in that course she discovered two programs that would irreversibly shape her career: Photoshop and QuarkXPress. The first for working on scanned images, the second for laying them out on the pages of a potential book. “That’s when I started collecting second-hand books. I began scanning all the images that interested me. I would print them on A4 sheets and lay them out on the floor. I worked in an open space, and lots of people would pass by. At a certain point, they started stopping and asking for copies of the images that had caught their attention.”

That’s when Batia realised something fundamental: her thinking moved through images. Not only that—everyone has their own favourites depending on their past and interests. Yet there are some images that appeal to everyone. “There are photographs that relate to something we have in common. There’s something in them with a particular power, able to captivate us.” This became the starting point for her research. What are these images? Why are some timeless? She wanted to understand. Her passion for images became like a drug—a kind of addiction. And when she began working with page-layout software, she felt a new sense of freedom. The ability to experiment—more easily than ever before—by juxtaposing, swapping, and inverting her collected material opened a frontier of exploration that seemed endless. She had finally found her tool.

The first spread of Parallel Encyclopedia presents works by Julian Stanczak, Marina Apollonio, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Marcello Morandini, Tadasky, and Mosuho Ohno—all artists linked to the Op Art movement. These are striking geometries designed to enchant or deceive the eye. Turning the page, we find images of plankton, their microscopic marine forms arranged in geometries recalling those just seen. In the same spread, however, there is also a test chart used to calibrate a camera’s greyscale, made of circles, lines, and triangles. Forms echo one another. Later, there are photographs of planets, seashells, everyday utensils. A few pages on, enlargements of snowflakes and ancient cameos inlaid with human figures. The further you go, the more you are drawn into a narrative of visual analogies and shared meanings. Without any sense of rupture, on page 50 we are confronted with atomic explosions, American aircraft carriers, road accidents. On page 300 we see an eighteenth-century stool whose legs, in the next spread, rhyme with those of oxen pulling a plough. This opens an entire section devoted to horses: engravings, paintings by Velázquez and Simone Martini. There’s even a photograph of a tiger, with its trainer, resting calmly on the back of an elephant. Buster Keaton next to a medieval miniature. Dürer and an Assyrian sculpture. African art, X-rays, commercial catalogues. Centripetal and centrifugal force. Tintoretto and Yves Klein, Giotto and Walker Evans. A fascinating journey, a flow with no narration, yet one that holds attention like the plot of a thriller. Where will the next page lead?

After her encounter with Aby Warburg, another unexpected meeting shaped Batia Suter’s path. “My mother is a psychologist. Once, while I was talking to her in her studio, my eye fell on Man and His Symbols by Carl Gustav Jung. I picked it up and started reading.” For the artist, it was another shock: “Again, his way of thinking about images was very close to mine. He talks about ‘Urbilder’—primordial images developed by the unconscious and common to all humanity.” Jung studied dreams, fantasies, and religious symbols to show the recurrence of certain universal imaginative forms. “It’s a very powerful idea—that human beings all react the same way to certain visual information. It’s something natural. And for me, that’s very clear. I’m convinced that such a thing exists: at a primitive level, we are stimulated by certain subjects and images and by their qualities.” And yet Suter felt something was off: “I knew I didn’t want to go in a psychological or spiritual direction. I had to step back, stop, to understand better what I was looking for.” Again, the crisis became an opportunity for a fresh start, and Suter returned to immersing herself in her world of photographs, working to refine her language so that the invisible thread binding her compositions would become ever more transparent to the viewer. But in the end, what kind of language is it? “It’s similar to the language of dreams. It’s fast, associative, non-rational. I create unexpected connections between images to generate new meanings. I’m not trying to explain everything verbally, but to provoke a visual experience. A language that operates beyond words, touching something more fundamental in human experience.”

Nine years after Parallel Encyclopedia, in 2016, Suter released Parallel Encyclopedia #2. Same format, same method, same number of pages. But unlike so many film sequels, this second volume stands on its own. The artist introduces colour—sparingly. The layout is slightly more elaborate. There is perhaps more humour. But again, the flow of thousands of images manages to embrace all human knowledge, from the micro to the macro, from the ancient to the contemporary. From this volume—as from the others that followed, particularly Radial Grammar (2018)—came installations in which Suter allowed images to interact with space. They could take the form of large-scale prints, slideshows, projections. “Installations allow me to explore physical space, to walk among the images. Here, the images become almost like a ‘skin’ of the wall, interacting with the architecture.” She conceives these operations as “extractions” of one or more chapters from her books—extensions of her editorial projects. If the experience of a book is intimate and repeatable, its “spatial staging” becomes something physical, where the viewer confronts images larger than their own body, able to be examined up close or from afar. The same is happening these weeks in the dark spaces of the Roman cryptoporticus in the historic centre of Arles, where Suter has been invited to present Octahydra for the Rencontres de la Photographie. It is a projection-based work reflecting, on one side, on architectural forms, and on the other, on images of food containers whose rhythmic, architectural patterns evoke structures of defence and protection.

Suter’s is a language that eludes immediate rationality, yet is universally understandable. Like music, in a way. The images she gathers, through a kind of ancestral pull, are not mere representations but words in a discourse grasped almost unconsciously. As she herself admits, we live in a moment when—overwhelmed by a constant flow of visual stimuli—“reflection is almost impossible.” And these images she uses, drawn from the past—a past arriving to us through the printed page—appear perhaps as the last handholds to keep us from drifting away, in a context where it is ever harder to distinguish what is true from what is not.

Il Foglio, August 12, 2025

by Luca Fiore

The welcome republication of her debut book, On The Sixth Day, offers an opportunity to retrace, in perspective, the work of one of the great names in contemporary photography: Alessandra Sanguinetti. The volume, which first appeared in 2005 and soon went out of print, greatly contributed to the success of the Argentine photographer, born in New York and raised in Buenos Aires, who is now a prominent member of the Magnum Photos agency. From this first and important work stem the two subsequent projects that earned her true notoriety: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams and The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer. All three books, published by the British publisher MACK, were made in the Argentine countryside, on a farm near the one where the photographer spent her summer holidays for twenty-five years. Guille and Belinda are two cousins, granddaughters of Juana, the keeper of the animals to whom On The Sixth Day is dedicated.

The book, square in format like the images it contains, has on the cover a photo of two white lambs tied together by a thin rope around their necks. The one on the left has its head covered by a hood and veers toward the edge of the photo. The other is being tugged by its companion and seems to be trying to break free. The two pale figures emerge from a completely out-of-focus background. Their heads and limbs are in motion; only the woolen fleece is clearly visible in detail. The horizon divides the yellow-green plain from the gray-purple sky. The lens frames the two animals tightly. The point of view is at the animals’ eye level. This is the key stylistic choice that supports the entire book, which is, in Sanguinetti’s intention, a tribute to the domestic and wild creatures that enliven rural life on the vast Argentine plain. The dedication, at the end of the long sequence of images, reads: “This book is dedicated to the extraordinary lives of farm animals everywhere. For all they go through, all they give us and all we take from them.”

“I wanted to show a reality that is rarely told,” Sanguinetti explains to Domani: “And it is never told by looking at the true protagonists, which are the animals themselves. Mine is a tribute, but I wanted to make it without concessions, without sentimentality or idealization. No matter how well you know an animal, you will never be able to truly understand it. It’s already hard enough with a human being. My partner, the person I know best, remains a mystery. Let alone an animal.”

It is a book without compromise. The colors are as vibrant as those saturated by the exuberant light of the Argentine sun. The green-green of the grass, the brown-brown of the earth, the blue-blue of the sky. And above all, the red-red of blood. There is a lot of it throughout the sequence. The blood of animals killed, skinned, even aborted. “It is the normal life of farms, where every day the farmer kills an animal to feed his family. There is no intention to condemn, no finger-pointing. If I had wanted to denounce violence against animals, I would have gone to photograph somewhere else: in factory farms.”

As mentioned, the framing is almost always at the animal’s eye level. There are portraits of the horse and the hen. Of the cow and the chick. The duck and the rabbit. A group of dogs barks, who knows why, at a disoriented pig. It is a choice that forces the viewer into an incredibly close gaze, dramatically reducing the distance from the subject. But this closeness, due to technical reasons, also produces a notable reduction in depth of field, leaving only the subject—or even just part of it—in focus, enhancing the sense of intimacy. Many of these shots have all the characteristics of classical portraiture, with the sole difference that the subjects are not human beings. “I don’t believe that showing an animal’s character means humanizing it. Even because, even in portraits of people, you end up projecting onto the subject something that might have nothing to do with that person. My animals are neither metaphors nor symbols. They are what they are.”

And yet, even though it is first and foremost a documentary work, it is impossible not to perceive in the succession of these photographs a poetic impulse that touches on ultimate things: life, death, joy, suffering, the sense of fate. In itself, the style in which they are made would suffice to render them verses of a poem about the intertwining of tenderness and violence that takes place on an Argentine farm. But to this is added the biblical connotation given by the title of the work, which refers to the sixth day of creation, when God created animals and man, and gave the latter dominion over all other creatures. A choice that seems to lift the images out of a historical and specific dimension and elevate them to a mythical and universal one.

At the same time as On The Sixth Day, Sanguinetti explains, the work with Guille and Belinda began—two cousins roaming around the farm while the artist was focused on animal portraits. From time to time, the two girls—nine years old at the beginning—enter the frames, appearing in the background of the animals’ life. Then, gradually, the photographer begins to observe and interact with them, in a dialogue that becomes first complicity, then friendship. The first book dedicated to them has a rather descriptive title: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. The girls are first photographed in everyday rural gestures, then in dress-up games that become a series of mise-en-scènes of nativity scenes, angelic images, jealousy dramas, jokes about future motherhood. In one shot, Guille and Belinda appear emerging from the waters of a stream like a pair of Ophelias in brightly colored clothes. At times these are dream-dreams or sacred representations, while at others they appear as prophetic visions.

“As the two girls grew up, I had to change my approach to them,” Sanguinetti explains today: “At the beginning it was easy to play together, but then they experienced a sudden transition from childhood to adulthood, since Belinda married at sixteen and became a mother at seventeen.” This phase of transition is the theme of the next book, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer. The two young women are no longer innocent souls dancing in open fields, but appear inside a modest room, cooking, cleaning, and studying. Carefreeness and play are replaced by a more everyday poetry, where mischief gives way to hidden kisses, and the fake baby bumps made with pillows become real. Heartbreaking sunsets appear, dusks of a day that is the season of a life. “It’s been twenty-five years now that I’ve been seeing them, and every time I go back I just want to visit and spend time with them, like with friends, without the camera somehow coming between us again,” she recounts. “And yet, every time, I can’t help it—I always end up bringing home a few shots.”

In her latest work, Some Say Ice (MACK, 2022), Alessandra Sanguinetti returns to the same themes—animals and children—but in a completely different context and with a style almost opposite to what we had come to expect from her. It is a collection of images in refined black and white, taken since 2014 in the small town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin. This is the same place featured in Wisconsin Death Trip, a book of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick at the end of the nineteenth century, documenting the life and death of its inhabitants. Sanguinetti found a copy of that volume on the shelves of her home in Buenos Aires when she was still a child. Contemplating that series of faces—often photographed post-mortem—was the moment, the artist explains, when she first recognized the reality of her own mortality. In Some Say Ice, animals are depicted like sculptures. The faces of children, young people, and the elderly are austere. Icy. Winter dominates the landscape. The title of the book is a line borrowed from a Robert Frost poem: “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.” “While I was working in Black River Falls, it felt like I was trying to solve a mystery or find the culprit of a crime,” Sanguinetti explains. “I was looking for clues to find a valid answer to something for which there can be no valid answers.” It was, the artist continues, a kind of exorcism to ward off the fear of death. It is likely here that the threads first woven in the Argentine countryside are tied together again—where the white fleece of the lambs was stained with red blood, and the dream of childhood faded into the arid truth of everyday life: “The reason I photograph—and perhaps the reason all of us do, whether we admit it or not—is that we don’t want to disappear. Every image, even the most banal selfie, is a kind of denial of death.”

Domani, 25 January 2024

by Luca Fiore

Kristine Potter is one of the new voices in American photography. Her dense and elegant black and white images, while respecting the formal canons of tradition, are windows that open up glimpses into certain stereotypes on which, until today, US society has perched.

Born in Dallas in 1977 into a military family (her father and grandfather were both army officers), she grew up in Warner Robins, a small town in central Georgia.

His mentor was Mark Steinmetz, a silent and highly refined photographer, a great heir to the American black and white tradition, author of South Trilogy, three volumes considered a milestone in photography publishing of the last twenty years.

Potter’s first major work is entitled The Gray Line, dedicated to the cadets of West Point, America’s most prestigious military academy. It is a reflection on the construction of masculinity and its connection to an idea of institutionalised management of violence.

His cadets, whether in full uniform or in battle dress, are ordinary young men, with pensive gazes, over whose fate lies the shadow of death, suffered and procured.

“After that project,” explains the artist, “I found myself helping to order the family archive, which contained some photos inherited from my great-grandparents. They called themselves ‘sharpshooters’, they were actually Wild West artists. They toured with Buffalo Bill: it was the first form of entertainment related to that imagery. There I thought that the cowboy was another archetype of American masculinity that I could work on’.

Thus was born the idea for the project that was to become Manifest, the book published by the Californian publisher TBW Books, which owes its title to the expression ‘Manifest Destiny’, summarising the 19th century colonists’ belief that the conquest of all North American territory was God’s will.

“Through fortuitous circumstances I ended up on the western slope of Colorado, a remote and sparsely populated area. I stayed, at first, a whole summer. I wanted to photograph people, but there were so few people around that at first I spent entire days without meeting anyone. So I also started to take landscape images, which I had never done before”.

Potter knows that, in the United States, the history of landscape photography was made in the West. And, in the early days, the images of authors such as Carleton Watkins had fed the rhetoric of ‘Manifest Destiny’, which had led to the conquest of those regions at the expense of the natives. During the five years she returned west, Potter continued to make portraits, particularly of people who had moved there for an idea, as if to revisit the ancient dream of the settlers.

“I started to ask myself what meaning that rhetoric can have today and whether all the violence it produced really realised that dream. And the answer is no. They are such inhospitable places that you can barely live there’.

The image of the men photographed does not correspond to the stereotype of the cowboy in John Wayne’s films: ‘Some were really ranchers, others were farmers, others wandered around looking for odd jobs. But what is certain is that none of them felt like heroes’. From the point of view of rendering nature, the photographer distances herself from the tradition that had celebrated the miraculous glory of the vast spaces of the West. The horizon is almost never there: rocks dominate, the land is barren and the vegetation is all a tangle of shrubs.

The strange sequence of landscapes and portraits, some spontaneous others posed, was noticed by the great British photographer Paul Graham, who decided to include Kristine Potter’s work in the 2021 exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, entitled ‘But Still, It Turns’. The exhibition brings together a number of authors representing so-called ‘post-documentary photography’. That practice, that is to say, which uses documentary tools and style (the one that descends from Walker Evans) without the concern of returning a faithful or objective image of what they record, but with the ambition of saying more than what is seen in their images. A mix of poetry and document. Invention and facts. A genre that could perhaps be compared to non-fiction in literature: that which is done by writing about reality, but whose result goes beyond mere reportage.

Potter’s latest project, Dark Waters, also belongs to this genre of photography. First presented at the Swiss Image Vevey festival, where it won the jury prize, then at Micamera in Milan, it has now taken the final form of a book, published by Aperture, the most authoritative photography publisher in the United States.

“I grew up in the south, in Georgia. Not far from the town where I lived, there is a creek called Murder Creek. I must have walked past it hundreds of times without paying attention. But once I asked myself: what the hell kind of name is that? Why is it called that? Then I wondered if there were other places with the same name. And, with map in hand, I realised that not only were there others, but the US is littered with terrifying names: Dead Man River, Spring Rape, Bloody Fork, Blood Creek…”.

This observation is intertwined with the observation of the existence of the all-American tradition of murder ballads: songs that recount bloody episodes, in which, almost always, it is a man who kills a woman and abandons her in a river or lake. These songs are so deeply rooted in American folk that some of them have become true standards: Pretty Polly was recorded by Bob Dylan, Knoxville Girl by Nick Cave, Down in the Willow Garden by The Chieftains and Bon Iver.

Potter, for instance, went to the historical sites of the death and burial of Naomi Wise, the young orphan girl protagonist of the song Omie Wise, who was killed in the waters of a North Carolina creek in 1808. In this work, too, the artist alternates between landscapes and portraits. The men are shot outdoors, while the women are immortalised in the studio, against a black background, almost impersonating the heroines of murder ballads. Reality and fiction interact with the lyrics of the songs to create a deliberately disturbing tale. Violence and death are only evoked, yet they form the searing core of the work.

“I have wondered if the history of violence, with which the southern United States in particular is steeped, also lives in the landscape. Or at least it affects us when we move. I am interested in the fact that all the stories we tell about ourselves, I am also thinking of the southern gothic tradition – William Faulkner, Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor – are often based on violence. And, for women in particular, this lives in our psyche: if I cross a car park at night to get my car, I clutch my keys in my hand like a weapon, because I know something could happen to me’.

If for the landscape of the west, the artist had tried to render the sense of disorientation of the ‘modern cowboys’, the challenge in the south is very different. “In Colorado, there is so much light that even the shadows are bright. In Georgia, however, it is the exact opposite. Everything is dark, vital, full of energy. The vegetation is thick. And the darkness is what interested me. I wanted to render the echo I perceived. Which is perhaps the echo of the much violence our land has witnessed’.

The technical choices are also dictated by this research: whereas for Manifest, Potter had used a film view camera, for Dark Waters she chose the digital medium format, which allows, thanks to the greater sensitivity of the digital sensor, to capture the depth of field with shorter exposures, in order to better fix the details of the dimly lit scene.

But the search for detail is functional to the psychological rendering of the scene. The objective is not so much the documentation of real places or situations – the artist says that 80 per cent of the portraits are staged – nor even the literal representation of the stories of the murder ballads.

“For me, those songs are examples of much of our contemporary cultural storytelling – meaning entertainment that revolves around the diminishment of women. My work often employs specific examples but my hope is that they are understood to represent circumstances more generally. The more ambiguous imagery in the work is my way of asking questions about what is reality and what is in my mind – and by extension – what is informed by this long history of storytelling.”

Domani, 3 August 2023