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Between pose and presence: on Farren van Wyk’s Mixedness is My Mythology
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Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:20:42 +0000
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Farren van Wyk’s first solo museum exhibition, at Fotomuseum Den Haag, turns the camera towards her own family while drawing on the visual histories of anthropological photography, portraiture and colonial representation. Born to a South African mother and Dutch father, Van Wyk was classified as ‘coloured’ before moving to the Netherlands at the age of […]
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Farren van Wyk’s first solo museum exhibition, at Fotomuseum Den Haag, turns the camera towards her own family while drawing on the visual histories of anthropological photography, portraiture and colonial representation. Born to a South African mother and Dutch father, Van Wyk was classified as ‘coloured’ before moving to the Netherlands at the age of six. In Mixedness is My Mythology, made with her parents and brothers on the family farm in Putten, her carefully staged analogue photographs explore how identity is shaped through pose, performance and the act of representation itself. Bas Blaasse writes about a body of work that examines how photography negotiates the terms of visibility, revealing how family, history and belonging are not only recorded but constructed through images.
Bas Blaasse | Exhibition review | 30 July 2026Join us on Patreon
In her first solo museum exhibition at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, photographer Farren van Wyk turns to the intimate terrain of her own family while tracing the broader histories that shape it. Mixedness is My Mythology, presented in the museum’s lower gallery, brings together a series of staged black-and-white photographs made in collaboration with her parents and her brothers – Alexander, Marck-Anthony and Benjamin – on the family’s farm in Putten. Rooted in a biography that moves between South Africa and the Netherlands, the series engages with questions of migration, racial classification, identity, and representation, in a documentary register that remains carefully orchestrated.
The exhibition is installed in a single, restrained space. The large photographs, evenly spaced, are hung at eye level. At first glance, they appear almost disarmingly direct, depicting a family in a rural environment, in a set of scenes that feel recognisable. For a moment, the work seems to lean toward the idea of a family archive. We see siblings together in shared moments, recurring settings and a sense of familiarity.
But that impression doesn’t quite hold. No one is caught off guard. Their poses are thoughtfully composed or reserved, their gazes neutral, attentive, solemn. These are not spontaneous images, and they do not pretend to be. Instead, they propose a persistent tension between appearing natural and being carefully arranged, between intimacy and its construction. The photographs make clear that those depicted are involved in shaping how they are seen, even as the limits of that control remain open.
This approach builds on Van Wyk’s broader practice, which engages with identities shaped by apartheid, migration and mixed heritage by reworking historical modes of representation. Here, Van Wyk brings that photographic questioning into the space of her own family.
In the series, titles play a crucial role. Some anchor the images in kinship, naming siblings or relationships. Yet just as many introduce a more loaded register, drawing on cultural, theoretical, historical, or mythological references. The photographs themselves often adopt familiar visual formats such as portraits, group portraits and frontal compositions, but never quite land comfortably in them. Instead, they hover somewhere in between. They’re recognisable, but slightly off. The tension between what is shown and what is named opens up a space in which different frameworks – scientific, political, mythic – briefly overlap without fully aligning.
In Our Anthropological Golden Era (2021), for instance, the family is arranged in a way that recalls ethnographic photography: frontal, ordered, almost typological. Yet the contemporary clothing and relaxed posture subtly undo that framing. The image is legible as ‘anthropological,’ but only just. What it exposes is the construction behind that legibility. Something similar happens in The Whole Picture (2021), where the siblings are gathered in a quasi-heroic formation, holding tools that evoke labour and land. The title promises completeness, but the scene feels too composed to deliver on that promise. The ‘whole picture’ materialises, but only as something staged.
Other works push this tension further. In The Black Panthers meet Nelson Mandela (2024), Van Wyk is seated centrally, flanked symmetrically by her brothers. The composition borders on being ceremonial. The title invokes political histories and imagined affiliations, while symbolic elements in the scene, such as animal imagery, posture and setting, echo visual traditions of display and authority. Elsewhere, rifles, animal skins and assertive stances recall the language of hunting photography. These references evidently carry weight: associations with power, ownership and historically charged relationships to land and animals deeply embedded in European and colonial traditions. The images seem to move within these traditions while also testing them, without fully determining where they stand.
One of the most remarkable, if not revealing, photos is Home (2021). The four siblings gather around a mirror, in which Van Wyk herself appears in the centre, holding the camera. The act of photographing is folded, as it were, into the image. It’s a simple gesture, but it slightly contrasts with the otherwise measured tone of the series. For a moment, the composition loosens. Benjamin’s broad smile introduces something more open, almost casual. At first glance, the title seems to frame ‘home’ as a constructed scene, aligned more with family ties than with place. Yet the mirror complicates that reading somewhat. It also hints at identity as something mediated, as formed in relation to others, appearing before a gaze that frames and potentially judges. The photograph embodies how the entire series holds together both the pose and the possibility of slipping out of it.
Seen from this angle, the exhibition is less about presenting a fixed identity than about following how identity takes shape in images. And repetition plays a central role in doing so: similar poses, recurring gestures, repeated encounters with the camera. Identity, if it emerges at all, does so gradually, through these iterations, rather than as something stable or given. The use of black and white reinforces the ambiguity. In a body of work concerned with ‘mixedness’, the absence of colour does not neutralise difference, but shifts attention to form, contrast and the cultural weight of the image itself.
This also raises a more basic question: what does it mean to produce an image of a family together, rather than to document one? The collaborative setup suggests a shared investment in how the family appears, while the precision of the staging also introduces a certain – critical – distance. These are intimate scenes, but they are also clearly arranged, held in place for a viewer. They don’t so much define a life between South Africa and the Netherlands as explore how such a life can be made visible at all.
The unremarkable setting in Putten helps sharpen the project’s tensions. The landscape of fields, barn and stretches of grass carries the familiar tone of a Dutch rural calm. But that calm feels provisional. The landscape is less a backdrop than a surface against which the family positions itself, bringing together, if only temporarily, different histories, references and ways of seeing.
All images courtesy Fotomuseum Den Haag and the artist.
Mixedness is my Mythology runs at Fotomuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, until 23 August 2026.
—Bas Blaasse is a Brussels-based writer, editor and researcher focusing on photography, contemporary art and visual culture. His work examines how images and artistic practices engage with questions of nature, landscape, and collective experience. Trained in philosophy and in photography, he received the 2023 C/O Berlin Talent Award in Theory.
Images:
1-Farren van Wyk, Craniometry Study, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.
2-Farren van Wyk, Home, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.
3-Farren van Wyk, Benjamin, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.
4-Farren van Wyk, The Rebirth of Venus, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.
5-Farren van Wyk, Alexander’s Braids, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.
6-Farren van Wyk, Our Anthropological Golden Era, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.
7-Farren van Wyk, Marck-Anthony & Benjamin, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2022.
8-Farren van Wyk, Alexander, Mixedness is my Mythology, 2021.
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The ethics of looking at a mother
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Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:05:48 +0000
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Katherine Hubbard’s The Great Room has the makings of a modern classic, and its presentation at Vienna’s Secession marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition outside the U.S. Joining Hubbard and her circle on the opening night, Peter Watkins finds something stranger and less settled than a documentary about dementia, caregiving or the ethics of […]
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Katherine Hubbard’s The Great Room has the makings of a modern classic, and its presentation at Vienna’s Secession marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition outside the U.S. Joining Hubbard and her circle on the opening night, Peter Watkins finds something stranger and less settled than a documentary about dementia, caregiving or the ethics of consent. Staged photographs, mirrors, bodily contact prints, and reconstructed rooms show a mother and daughter continually remaking their roles, testing who looks, who holds power, and what it costs to make grief public.
Peter Watkins | Exhibition Review | 23 July 2026Join us on Patreon
En route to Vienna’s Secession, I thought I understood the terms and conditions Katherine Hubbard was working in. My own project, The Unforgetting, grew from losing my mother as a child and watching my grandmother’s slow slide into dementia during the years the project was reaching its apex, until those two losses became, for me, almost indistinguishable. I assumed this thematic and familial overlap would make Hubbard’s photographs familiar territory. I was mistaken. I spoke with Hubbard for over an hour before her public talk, working through ideas I recognised as my own without either of us quite naming that recognition. But our conversation changed how I saw the show. It wasn’t that I was necessarily wrong about her approach or the subject; rather, I had assumed the project reached a certain clarity that the exhibition, to its credit, deftly refused.
The Great Room documents five years Hubbard spent photographing her mother, Antonette Berger, in Berger’s Philadelphia home – a project that began in 2020 and continued through Berger’s diagnosis with LATE, a relatively recently characterised brain disease whose symptoms can resemble those of Alzheimer’s. Two kinds of images make up the exhibition. The first are large-format, black-and-white photographs taken in the house itself: mother and daughter staged in doorways, the mother’s bed, surrounded by an accumulation that can only be described as “things”, boxes and clutter, in various states of order/disorder. As we move through the exhibition, the apartment seemingly begins to shed the weight of its contents, and the photographs increasingly lean on the use of mirrors as props. These photographs work to dissect the space, tear it apart, and transform our visual register.
Some of the more straightforward photographs show the ordinary tasks of care, and mother-daughter exchange, moving between what felt like genuine moments of recognition between the two women, to something more staged, theatrical and ethereal. The power of the portrait of Berger in the bath – her concentrated, intelligent gaze directed at the camera – has stayed with me ever since. The second are darkroom body prints, made without a camera at all: Hubbard’s mother, covered in Vaseline, pressed directly onto photographic paper, a cameraless contact print. Where the other photographs are sustained by an umbilical tether that links the body to the gaze, these prints collapse that distance entirely; the cord becomes literal, skin against paper.
At Secession, the domestic architecture of Antonette Berger’s house is structurally imported, at least in gesture. A dividing wall that once harshly split her mother’s “great room” between the bedroom and living room is reconstituted in the gallery, its bare studwork exposed and doing double duty as an armature for the photographs themselves. The room that once served a grander, representative function is represented as a place of abundant accumulation, improvised storage, objects in transition from purpose to obsolescence, waiting for their inevitable removal from the home. The skeletal structure, in the context of the exhibition, becomes a kind of Frankenstein version of the curious addition to the Victorian room that Hubbard herself confessed to hating: unfinished and practical rather than sensitive to its architectural surroundings.
The photographs register a circling, almost ritualistic movement through the interior. Hubbard and Berger loop repeatedly through the apartment with two 4×5 cameras, tripods, mirrors and props, staging images alongside the mundane routines of bathing, dressing, sorting possessions. Hubbard has called the camera, in this context, a “structuring presence”: it inserts pauses into the grind of care work, carving out time outside the realm of medical necessity. As the circuits through the house tighten – drawing, in Hubbard’s words, “smaller and smaller concentric circles” around the false wall – the work tracks the gradual constriction of Berger’s cognitive world without ever settling into a documentary account of decline.
Mirrors recur throughout, notably capturing Hubbard herself, tripod and all, in the act of looking – a refusal of the invisible, omniscient viewpoint that photography usually assumes. In a diptych of photographs, the roles invert outright, and Hubbard photographs her mother while her mother photographs her back. It would be tempting to call this collaboration, but Hubbard resists the word. Hubbard has said she wanted to give her mother “all the power” assumed by the person behind the camera – which means the inversion is something she designed, a fiction built for her mother to inhabit, not a symmetry that simply existed between them. This somehow makes the work more precise, more real, and more reflective of what this period of their relationship perhaps looked like.
Hubbard has also spoken of not wanting the viewer to mistake themselves for standing where she once stood with her camera; by keeping herself visible in the frame, she resists the fantasy that her mother is a passive object of scrutiny. The fiction of “Antonette the photographer” runs through the whole project as a playful counter-current, insisting on respect for a woman whose social image could otherwise easily flatten into that of patient, elderly, demented.
I had expected, before Vienna, that the ethics of this project would rest on consent – on whether a mother with declining cognition could meaningfully agree to being photographed nude, at her most exposed. That question doesn’t disappear. But meeting Hubbard reframed it. Her method, she says, is “homeopathic”: rather than smoothing over what is uncomfortable in her mother’s house, she uses the image to amplify it. When she felt her mother was no longer cognitively able to maintain the photographic rituals they had instilled in their relationship, they immediately stopped the work.
Hubbard has said she has come to loathe the framework in which she is “mothering her own mother,” and wonders instead whether something closer to a theory of queer mothering is at stake: a relation that doesn’t run one direction, that keeps swapping who holds the camera and who is held by it. At the end of her talk before the exhibition opening, when the conversation circled back, inevitably, to the word “collaboration,” her interviewer offered something more apt: perhaps the role Antonette took on was simply that of mother – the unbounded, non-judgmental love that overlooks everything for the sake of a daughter. They left it there, and it felt right to leave it there too.
Carol Mavor, writing through her own mother’s Alzheimer’s in Black and Blue, opens with a sentence I have carried with me since long before I met Hubbard: “My mother has lost herself. My mother has forgotten herself.” I recognise the flatness of that sentence, its bruising straightforwardness. It is close to how I once described my grandmother, in her last years, to people who asked about her wellbeing. Elsewhere, writing on Barthes and the photographic image, Mavor calls the maternal “a cord (unsevered)” – and that, I think, is the truer description of what Hubbard’s photographs insist on.
During the opening, as crowds gathered below, a handful of us – Hubbard, her partner, the artist A.K. Burns, a few of her friends, the curator Bettina Spörr, and I – were let up onto the Secession’s roof to visit the cupola. The setting sun reflected off Olbrich’s 3000 gilded wrought-iron laurel leaves, long ago nicknamed the golden cabbage. Hubbard stood apart, and for a moment the composure she had held all evening seemed to loosen. A friend embraced her. Brief as it was, I recognised in that moment the sincerity and difficulty of undertaking such a project, the toll exacted in its making, and the personal cost of rendering this kind of grief so public.
All images courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery, New York.
Katherine Hubbard: The Great Room runs at Secession, Vienna until 30 August 2026.
—Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently teaching at FAMU, Prague.
Images:
1-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one, 2021.
2-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (hand to face), 2021.
3-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (after all), 2025.
4-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (s), 2025.
5-Katherine Hubbard, body print, hawk, mother, 2023.
6-Katherine Hubbard, body print, rear pressure point, 2023.
7-Katherine Hubbard, body print, my chin on your shoulder from behind, 2023.
8-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (pendulum left), 2025.
9-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (untitled), 2025.
10-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (Antonette), 2022.
11-Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (snap), 2025.
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Mark Sealy’s vision of photography beyond critique
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Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:50:43 +0000
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Guided by Mark Sealy’s artistic direction, the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg brings together 279 international artists across 11 exhibitions throughout the city, centred on the theme Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other. Drawing on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, bell hooks and others, the festival reimagines photography as an ethical […]
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Guided by Mark Sealy’s artistic direction, the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg brings together 279 international artists across 11 exhibitions throughout the city, centred on the theme Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other. Drawing on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, bell hooks and others, the festival reimagines photography as an ethical encounter, inviting viewers to consider alterity, difference and the possibility of a shared future. Visiting the Deichtorhallen, Tim Clark notes the boldness of this approach, observing how love in art and exhibition-making risks smoothing over structural inequalities, yet done right, might prompt us to consider what photography can help us become, rather than simply what it can depict.
Tim Clark | Exhibition Review | 16 July 2026Join us on Patreon
There is a moment, midway through Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other, when the scale and sheer force of Mark Sealy’s ambition become fully apparent. Moving between photographic bodies of work by Dawoud Bey, Sandra Brewster, Mónica de Miranda, and Tyler Mitchell, one is vividly aware that this is not simply a powerful group exhibition. Nor is it merely another attempt to redress historical exclusions within the medium. Rather, Sealy asks a more difficult question: what if photography could serve as a site for ethical encounter? What if, in a moment characterised by disquiet, violence and ideological hardening, photographs might help us imagine relationships founded on mutual recognition rather than domination?
As the headline exhibition of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Alliance, Infinity, Love, carries the weight of the festival’s intellectual programme. Drawing upon the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the writings of bell hooks and the enduring refrain of Nat King Cole’s 1948 recording of Nature Boy – ‘the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return’ – Sealy constructs a curatorial framework that is by turns poetic, political and perhaps even unfashionable. When irony is so often the condom of culture and social and environmental justice remain familiar features on the international art circuit, Sealy avoids loading up on critique by placing love at the centre of his thesis.
It’s a risky move. Walking around the exhibition together, Sealy, as the festival’s artistic director, is aware of this danger. I, for one, cannot help but think that ‘love’ has become one of the most overused and underexamined terms in contemporary curatorial discourse. Too often love in art and exhibition-making appear as a form of rhetorical softening, a means of smoothing over structural inequalities without adequately confronting them. Here, Sealy underscores love not as sentiment or consolation but as an ethical demand – a commitment to recognising the humanity of others despite the historical and contemporary systems designed to deny it. After all, bell hooks’ insists: ‘love is an action, not a feeling.’
This distinction matters because Sealy’s exhibition emerges from a decades-long, career engagement with photography’s complicity in the production of racialised, colonial and exclusionary forms of knowledge. As director of Autograph in London, and author of several books including: Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time and A Lens on Liberation: Photography as Resistance, he has spent years interrogating the medium’s role in shaping perceptions of race, identity and power. Although those concerns remain present of course, they have evolved, much to the exhibition’s benefit. The emphasis is no longer solely on exposing photography’s failures; instead, Sealy pursues what possibilities might emerge once those failures have been acknowledged.
The exhibition brings together approximately 30 artists whose practices span generations, continents and photographic traditions. Importantly, the selection resists any straightforward geographical and demographic categorisation. Within Sealy’s constellation of works, it’s the emphasis on imagination that gives the exhibition much of its emotional force. Particularly striking is the extent to which joy, intimacy and tenderness are permitted to occupy space alongside grief and historical trauma. This may sound like a modest achievement, but within contemporary exhibition-making it remains surprisingly rare. So embedded in visual culture are representations of marginalised communities within narratives of suffering that it can become a trap for curators, artists, cultural workers, and publics alike. By contrast, beauty functions gloriously here not as escape but as a form of resistance, the possibility of pleasure itself becoming politically significant.
This strategy proves effective. In Alliance, Infinity, Love, unfolding an argument takes second place to generating a series of conversations. Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s explorations of Black queer spirituality resonate across the galleries with Hélène Amouzou’s meditations on migration, displacement and visibility. Mário Cravo Neto’s refined portraiture finds unexpected echoes in the work of younger artists such as Tyler Mitchell, whose images continue to expand the visual vocabulary of Black representation. Elsewhere, Inuuteq Storch’s photographs challenge inherited colonial narratives surrounding Greenlandic identity, while Mónica de Miranda’s work navigates the complex terrain between memory, geography and postcolonial belonging.
Decidedly body-centric, the exhibition’s most haunting works are those marked by absence, none more so than Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black. Reimagining sites along the Underground Railroad – a covert network of secret routes, safe houses and abolitionists that enabled more than 100,000 enslaved people to escape the American South for free states and Canada during the mid-19th century – the black-and-white photographs depict landscapes in northeast Ohio. Evoking the perspective of an African American fugitive, Bey’s images of marshes, woodlands and white picket fences at night are suffused with the enveloping atmosphere of twilight. Far from documenting history, they conjure a psychological landscape that invites viewers to reflect on the uncertainty, fear and resolve of enslaved people navigating unfamiliar terrain in search of safety. Printed in velvety blacks that teeter on the threshold of visibility, the photographs are presented at a monumental scale and hung unusually low against grey walls, drawing the viewer into their darkness. Arranged as a sequence, the gallery culminates in a view across Lake Erie, its waters stretching towards an indistinct horizon. To where, we do not know.
Elegantly installed at the Deichtorhallen, the exhibition is carefully paced, allowing individual works the room they require while maintaining a coherent rhythm across the galleries. Moments of visual intensity are balanced by quieter intervals of contemplation. What emerges is an exhibition structured around relation as opposed to resolution, because Sealy does not impose a singular interpretative framework upon the works. Conversely, viewers are encouraged to inhabit a space of uncertainty, where the “other” of the title is not presented as a fixed subject to be known but as a continual challenge to the viewer’s assumptions.
For all the current enthusiasm surrounding participatory and socially engaged practices, contemporary photography exhibitions often remain surprisingly didactic. Images are expected to communicate clear political messages, while audiences are positioned primarily as recipients of information. Thankfully Alliance, Infinity, Love operates differently. It slows the viewer down and insists upon attention. It asks us ‘to look at and look into things.’
Yet the exhibition is not without its tensions. The philosophical framework derived from Levinas provides a compelling ethical foundation, but it occasionally risks abstraction. Levinas’ notion of infinite responsibility to the other has inspired generations of thinkers; however, it has also been criticised for its limited engagement with political structures and material conditions. A similar challenge occasionally surfaces here. While individual works grapple directly with histories of colonialism, migration, racial violence, and social exclusion, the exhibition’s overarching rhetoric sometimes appears more comfortable addressing interpersonal ethics than systemic power.
This is not a fatal flaw, but it does create moments of friction. One occasionally wonders whether the language of alliance and love can adequately account for the entrenched economic and political forces that continue to shape contemporary inequalities. The exhibition asks how we might relate differently to one another; it is somewhat less clear about how those relationships intersect with institutions, states and systems.
And yet perhaps that criticism risks missing the point. What distinguishes Sealy’s project is precisely its refusal to reduce photography to a tool of diagnosis. Much contemporary photographic discourse remains oriented towards revelation: exposing injustice, uncovering hidden histories, documenting harm. These remain essential tasks. But Sealy suggests they are not sufficient. If photography is capable of revealing what is wrong with the world, it must also help us imagine what could be otherwise. ‘The photographic works’, he writes, ‘are not passive reflections. They are calls that invite us to embrace a cosmology of difference, and seek to function as sutures against attempts at division.’
Ultimately, Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other succeeds because it embraces risk and boldly articulates an expansive moral vision. Sealy has produced an exhibition of generosity and intellectual coherence; one that is also emotionally profound and galvanising. Where it trumps other similar projects is in the questions it prompts about what photography can help us become, less what photography can show us. In doing so, Sealy offers one of the most thoughtful and ambitious photographic exhibitions of recent years – an exhibition that understands the encounter with the “other” as the beginning of a shared future, as long as we are willing to look for it.
The 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg runs until 22 September 2026.
–Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words. Also working as an independent curator, he was Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Arianna Catania, Walter Guadagnini and Luce Lebart between 2020-26. He teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.
Images:
1-Mario Cravo Neto, Odé, 1989 © Mario Cravo Neto
2-Inuuteq Storch, Keepers of the Ocean, 2016-2022 © Courtesy the artist and Wilson Saplana Gallery
3-Tyler Mitchell, Self Decoration (#1), 2022 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery
4-Dawoud Bey, Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky), from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) Rennie Collection, Vancouver. © Dawoud Bey
5-Sandra Brewster, Take a Little Trip (Frantz Fanon), 2021. © Courtesy the artist
6-Hélène Amouzou, Self portrait Molenbeek, 2009 © Hélène Amouzou
7-Mónica de Miranda, Earthworks, 2024. © Mónica de Miranda
8-Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Nothing to Lose XII (Bodies of Experience), 1989. © Courtesy Autograph, London
9-Tyler Mitchell, Ghost Image, 2024 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery
10-Lee Shulman und Omar Victor Diop, The Anonymous Project presents Being There, 2023. © Courtesy the artists
11-Works by Mário Cravo Neto, Installation view of Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other June 5 – September 22, 2026 © Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Photo: Henning Rogge
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The feminist possibilities of the cut image
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Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:40:25 +0000
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Co-published by Thames & Hudson and V&A, Fiona Rogers’ Cut Out is a 240-page dive into photo collage, photomontage and assemblage, framing the cut as both a technique and a way of thinking. From Lorna Simpson’s cosmic reworking of the pin-up and Helen Chadwick’s visceral blue photocopies to the Surrealist experiments of Claude Cahun and […]
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Co-published by Thames & Hudson and V&A, Fiona Rogers’ Cut Out is a 240-page dive into photo collage, photomontage and assemblage, framing the cut as both a technique and a way of thinking. From Lorna Simpson’s cosmic reworking of the pin-up and Helen Chadwick’s visceral blue photocopies to the Surrealist experiments of Claude Cahun and Dora Maar, Rogers traces how artists have pulled photography apart to make it speak in new ways. Anneka French reads Cut Out as a wide-ranging account of feminist image-making, arguing that Rogers connects practices shaped by race, colonialism, climate, and digital technology to a broader challenge to photography’s claims of authority, visibility and possession.
Anneka French | Book review | 2 July 2026Join us on Patreon
A woman sits on a bed, legs folded beneath her, a soft purple fabric wrapped around her waist. The woman’s dark eyes, defined brows and glossy hair are accentuated because the rest of her body is cut away. Rendered as a map of the night sky, her body is filled with tiny bursts of starlight shining against a black expanse. This is Brooklyn-born Lorna Simpson’s Everrrything (2021), one of a ten-part work Sky Pin Ups (2021–present), a series of photo collages that reclaim the Black female body by partially removing the original context of a sexualised image and reworking it within the expansive and radical possibilities of the cosmos. The word ‘VISIBLE’ appears, and the central subject, framed by a deep indigo surround that mimics the sky, emphasising the infinite scale of the series’ ambition.
Everrrything is one of the images in Cut Out, Fiona Rogers’ 240-page book that examines photo collage, photomontage and assemblage through a feminist lens. While it is not the first work that appears, Simpson’s piece is indicative of Rogers’ intentions. Indeed, Alona Pardo’s text on Simpson, part of the chapter ‘Feminisms,’ argues that the women in these collages ‘give form to speculative realms…’ and ‘are the creators of their own universe,’ sentiments that feel apt throughout Rogers’ book.
The Oval Court (1986) by British artist Helen Chadwick is another expansive example. A vast installation composed of life-sized Prussian blue photocopies, collaged on to a low plinth, it shows Chadwick’s naked body amid a collection of dead mammals, birds and insects, accompanied by plant life and other assorted objects. In the section of The Oval Court illustrated, a small axe appears, wound with rope and laid up Chadwick’s stomach and crotch, a gesture that references the violence, precision and creative potential of a sharp blade.
Rogers, the V&A Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography, here presents artists and photographers on a global scale, each one making a significant contribution to subject or process, with insight provided via thematic introductions and by texts from a range of critical contributors. The vast majority of these works are owned by the V&A, a collection that holds almost a million photographs. The first chapter ‘Early Pioneers’ features Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron and Edith Mary Paget, experimenters with cyanotype, photogram, multiple and cut negatives, watercolour, and mixed media collage. Later chapters centralise more bodily feminist concerns. Joy Gregory’s cyanotypes explore the Western world’s obsession with the female blonde; Joanne Leonard’s prints from Journal of a Miscarriage (1973) portray the personal, visceral sweep of emotions experienced through the loss of a pregnancy; Linder’s photomontages recontextualise pornographic and consumerist depictions of the female body; Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is represented through a photogravure in which eyes are ‘tattooed’ across her back, collaging both voyeurism and ritual within one provocation.
‘Experimental Forms’ includes some of the most well-known but nonetheless extraordinary photographers selected for this anthology, many of whom have been the subject of major solo exhibitions in recent years. Claude Cahun’s practice, for instance, is illustrated through eight symbolically loaded pieces, reprinted from half-plate negatives: Surrealist compositions of faces, eyes, hands, cacti, scissors, and a game of chess. Dora Maar is here shown through silver gelatin Surrealist photomontages from the 1930s including Untitled (Hand Shell) (1934) and The Pretender (or The Simulator) (1935). Meticulously rephotographing different motifs, cropping, reorienting, and retouching these, Maar’s work taps into the emotionally atmospheric and enigmatic possibilities of the technique to reinvent. Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue, meanwhile, via Fantasy (1953) and Modern History (1956), uses photocollage via platinum prints, imaginative experimentations developed by building upon the technique of chigiri-e, where softly textured collages are formed from torn paper components.
The power of photography in combination with interdisciplinary gestures such as printing, stitching, projecting, and piercing, are most evident in the ‘Reclaiming Histories’ chapter. Reclamation, reparation, collaboration, and appropriation offer approaches to examine the archival, canonical, traditional, traumatic, and inherited. Works by Swiss-Haitian, Helsinki-based, Sasha Huber, employ a supremely-impactful layer of staples that disrupt the photographic surface to give a kind of armoured exterior to Black female subjects; Joana Choumali’s embroidered prints are means to personally and psychologically connect to a landscape devastated by terrorism in Côte d’Ivoire; cyanotype self-portraits by Tarrah Krajnak address a dislocation from her birth city of Lima via projections of political violence on to her Indigenous body. The recovery of female subjectivity and autonomy is apparent across the whole book but in works such as Mickalene Thomas’ Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires (2010), this gesture is made in direct reference to art historical representation, to Édouard Manet’s 1863 oil on canvas. Other of Thomas’ photographic prints and collages are overlaid with rhinestones, tape and fibreglass mesh, all part of the ‘incandescent magic’ of her practice, as curator Renée Mussai’s longer text describes it.
‘Speculative Futures’ presents work that engages with the digital, the climate crisis and interrelations between these subjects. Echoing Pardo’s words on Simpson’s practice, ‘I have a world to build… and I’m not waiting around for this world to end before I begin to build the next – we, travas, have already begun that’, says Ventura Profana. Profana, a Brazilian artist who uses photomontage as a tool for divination, queering and climate justice is here included by way of the hyperreal digital montage Balm of Gilead (2020). This chapter also includes Barbados-born, Glasgow-based Alberta Whittle, French artist Noémie Goudal and an extended text by curator Pelumi Odubanjo on the abstract mixed-media collages of Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu. In Uruguayan artist Liliana Farber’s large-scale series, Isolarii (2022), also within this section, historical cartography is layered with contemporary digital mapping processes to create ‘data collages’ shaped by politically controlled borders, colonialised territories and technologised perspectives.
The final text within the book is an artist’s, that of Justine Kurland, the American who, following Valerie Solanas, developed SCUMB (The Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books), a body of work in which photobooks by canonical white, male photographers have been cut up and reconfigured into something new, something shape-shifting, bold and radical. In an extract from her manifesto, Kurland writes, ‘I thrive in the stagnant waste of your boring photography… I’m coming for you with a blade.’
Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage by Fiona Rogers is co-published by Thames & Hudson and V&A.
—Anneka French is a writer, editor and curator based in Birmingham. She is Project Editor at publishing house Anomie and contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor among other titles.
Images:
1-Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), Kate Dore with Photogram Frame of Ferns, photograph by Oscar Gustav Rejlander in collaboration with Julia Margaret Cameron. © The Victoria and Albert Museum
2-Mabel Annie Burnip (1893–1984), from photographic album with albumen prints and hand illustrations, c. 1870s. © The Victoria and Albert Museum
3-Claude Cahun (1894–1954), Aveux non Avenus [Disavowed Confessions], 1930. © The Victoria and Albert Museum
4-Muza Vladimirovna Luppian (1912–42) Military collage album, c. 1935. © The Victoria and Albert Museum
5-Elemérné Marsovszky (1895–1944), Untitled (women holding ball with skull emblem), c. 1930. © The Victoria and Albert Museum
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10 Must-See Exhibitions: Summer 2026
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Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:49:00 +0000
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With summer truly upon us, our quarterly art guide returns to shine a light on some of the season’s most captivating exhibitions and events. From highly anticipated retrospectives to ambitious surveys, the primer includes standout offerings from Les Rencontres d’Arles, as well as other major festivals including PHotoESPAÑA in Madrid and the Triennial of Photography […]
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With summer truly upon us, our quarterly art guide returns to shine a light on some of the season’s most captivating exhibitions and events. From highly anticipated retrospectives to ambitious surveys, the primer includes standout offerings from Les Rencontres d’Arles, as well as other major festivals including PHotoESPAÑA in Madrid and the Triennial of Photography in Hamburg, alongside two exhibitions in Scotland, and more.
1000 Words | Resource | 25 June 2026Join us on Patreon
Laia Abril, Endometriosis – Museum of Romanticism, Madrid2 June – 13 September
Housed in the Museum of Romanticism, an ornate Madrid institution better known for its Spanish Romantic paintings, a new photographic and research-led installation by Laia Abril figures people living with endometriosis in moments associated with pain, exhaustion, physical self-protection and attempts to obtain relief. Presented in the Official Section of the 29th PHotoESPAÑA, the images echo the suffering and reclining women of 19th century art and follows directly from Abril’s On Mass Hysteria and extends the concerns of her long-term project, A History of Misogyny. It’s timeline begins in 1860, when the condition was first described medically, but its focus is firmly contemporary. Namely, the lasting consequences of a healthcare system that has treated the male body as the universal standard. That bias, Abril tells us, has fuelled inadequate research, delayed diagnoses and the routine dismissal of symptoms as normal, exaggerated or psychological – a form of violence that has shaped the project’s focus on invisibility, disbelief and the gulf between the makeshift strategies patients use to survive and the scientific answers they are still denied.
Joanna Piotrowska, A Moment of Darkness at Noon – The Common Guild, Glasgow23 May – 18 July
Joanna Piotrowska’s A Moment of Darkness at Noon turns The Common Guild in Glasgow into a charged, dreamlike chamber of bodies, fragments and uneasy intimacies. Working across large-scale black-and-white photography, collage, sculpture, textiles, and specially made frames, this highly anticipated exhibition extends the artist’s interest in Jungian psychoanalysis; particularly intuitive, associative and pre-verbal forms of expression. Within it Piotrowska splices together faces, limbs, animals, landscapes, and family images into strange new constellations that feel theatrical and faintly threatening. Long preoccupied with the push and pull between care and control, safety and confinement, she brings those tensions into sharper, more surreal focus here. Installed in the former school building’s upper galleries, it is Piotrowska’s first exhibition in Scotland. Devoted entirely to collage, A Moment of Darkness at Noon marks an exciting shift in a practice already celebrated for making the familiar feel deeply, deliciously strange.
Daido Moriyama, Love Letters to Photography – Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation, Paris20 May – 4 October
Sidestepping the dutiful career retrospective, a new exhibition on the legendary Daido Moriyama goes straight for the live wire running through more than six decades of his work and takes up his restless, ecstatic and often combative obsession with the photographic image. 60 prints mingle with books, magazines, texts, and archival documents, creating a portrait not only of Moriyama but of photography looking back at itself. Moriyama has always treated the magazine page and photobook as active photographic spaces rather than secondary containers for his images, and a new 256-page publication accompanying the exhibition honours that while bringing 22 of his essays and fragments into t