Forever Young and Always Late
Emile Rubino
“November cold.No raincoat.Spent all my money,my budget for personal expenses and photography and rent and telephone…” 1
– Alix Cléo Roubaud
This text is an attempt at pointing out shared features and distinct characteristics of photography in contemporary art today. I’ve been thinking about writing this piece for some time, but I always feared it might awkwardly cast me as the “village explainer.” My hesitations began to fade with encouragement from peers and after reading a recent Artforum roundtable on The Future of Photography2—a disappointing exchange on AI and print conservation whose crystal ball title felt like déjà vu from debates fifteen years ago. This curator-led roundtable, which quite literally went back to the future, mostly failed to include artists defining photography in the present. Here, I will be discussing the work of a number of artists—many more than my editor would prefer—born between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s.
These artists do not form a group or a movement in any tangible way. For the most part, they studied in different schools and live in different cities across Europe and North America. Some are friends, some have exhibited together, others are just strangers or online acquaintances. Many are likely aware of one another’s work through Instagram or Contemporary Art Library—platforms which, as Michael Sanchez observed in his 2011 essay Art and Transmission,3 play a key role in decentralizing interconnected forms of artistic discourse and production. The current state of decentralization is particularly noticeable when set against the short history of photography as contemporary art—from the 1970s onwards—which was often tied to specific schools or cities.
For instance, from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, the Pictures Generation of Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Sarah Charlesworth was a New York-centric phenomenon. Concurrently, the 1970s were also marked by the queer and intimate photographic work of Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, Nan Goldin, and David Armstrong, who met in art school and became known as the Boston School of Photography. Also in the 1970s, at UCSD, socially engaged artists Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier, and Phel Steinmetz informally coalesced as the San Diego group. Further up along the West Coast, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, the so-called Vancouver School of photo-conceptualism emerged from the ashes of 1960s and 1970s conceptual art with Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ian Wallace, as well as Stan Douglas, Ken Lum and Roy Arden. Around the same time, the Düsseldorf School of Photography formed around Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Andreas Gursky who furthered the objective approach of their illustrious teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Primed by the trailblazing work of highly idiosyncratic artists ranging across generations—from Robert Cumming and Jan Groover to Barbara Kasten, and from Liz Deschenes, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Thomas Demand to Roe Ethridge—the aughts saw a new generation of photographers grappling with the first waves of cultural anxiety brought on by the digital “ocean of images.”4 From the early 2000s to the mid 2010s, renewed ontological concerns notably manifested through process-based abstraction, a return to the studio, laser-cut sculptural experiments, and a focus on the low genre of still life. Artists like Lucas Blalock, Elad Lassry, Eileen Quinlan, Walead Beshty, Shannon Ebner, Annette Kelm, Michele Abeles, Leslie Hewitt, and Phil Chang, to name just a few, began to probe photography’s newly expanded and porous boundaries.
The possibilities of the medium had to be reconsidered in light of the rampant digitalization of everything. Long-repressed concerns over materiality and objecthood resurfaced—having previously been addressed only in passing in 1970 by MoMA’s associate photography curator Peter C. Bunnell, in a rather quirky exhibition titled Photography into Sculpture. Shortly after the turn of the century, the sense of urgency surrounding these questions, along with the vitality of the artistic and discursive production they prompted, brought photography to new prominence in the art world. The titles of key exhibitions from that period speak for themselves: The Anxiety of Photography at Aspen Art Museum (2011), What Is a Photograph? at ICP (2014), Photo-Poetics: An Anthology at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2016), or again, Under Construction at Foam in Amsterdam (2014). Photography had to be reappraised—had it lost or regained its magic? It certainly felt more ubiquitous, more undefined, and more malleable as art than ever before. Although this moment marked the beginning of decentralization through the blogosphere, it mostly took roots in and around New York City and Los Angeles as MFA programs at Bard, Yale, CalArts, and UCLA were run by influential artists like Stephen Shore, Catherine Opie, and James Welling.
To state the obvious, this concise history of “photography after art photography,”5 as critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau called it in her eponymous 1991 essay, is reductive and Western-centric; primarily revolving around North America and Germany. Looking at MoMA’s recent iterations of its New Photography exhibitions—a series that began in 1985—it becomes clear that the museum’s efforts to revise and decenter discourses mark a decisive break from the narratives the institution had been constructing since the early 2000s. Yet, these recent installments appear to have garnered little attention among artists. Overall, the works on view simply look far more traditional than in previous exhibitions. And while the need for institutions to confront their shortcomings and biases is evident, this sudden and concentrated curatorial shift feels, at best, contrived, as narratives are made to appear mutually exclusive.
Finally, as an important side note to conclude this preamble, it’s also worth mentioning how a country like France has—perhaps more than any other—effectively sidelined photography from contemporary art discourse. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s in France, radical positions included Philippe Thomas’ conceptual photographic tableaux, Suzanne Lafont’s cinematic sequences, Jean-Marc Bustamente’s large-scale documentary, Pierre Joseph’s photographs deriving from his Personnages à réactiver (1991-2000s), and Jean-Luc Moulène’s genre-bending Disjonctions (1983-1995). But in spite of such positions, the country of Nicéphore Niépce continued to ghettoize photography through a network of dedicated institutions, fairs, and festivals.
While some of these institutions, whether in France or elsewhere, are instrumental in the presentation of historic works, or as sites of reflection on reportage, photobooks and vernacular images, many tend to perpetuate the old-fashioned ethos of artful, and authorial photography. Already in 1965, in Pierre Bourdieu’s study Photography: A Middle-Brow Art,6 sociologist Jean-Claude Chamboredon noted that the real mandate of photography museums was to assuage art photographers’ anxiety regarding the ambivalent cultural status of their medium. In doing so, these medium-specific institutions inevitably perpetuate a status that justifies their existence and constitutes their main raison d’être. As I am about to gather artists through the prism of photography for the purpose of this text, it’s important to note that the ones discussed below largely seem to operate outside the narrow confines of this “photo-ghetto.”7 Instead, their work maintains a fluid dialogue with a broader artistic and cultural landscape, building upon what critic George Baker—repurposing the formulation of his mentor Rosalind Krauss—called photography’s “expanded field.”8
Niklas Taleb, Metropole, 2024, Archival pigment print, artist frame; glass, tape. Courtesy Lucas Hirsch, Dusseldorf
Megan Plunkett, The Hammer 05, 2021. Digtal print on glossy paper under 2 ply white mat in aluminium artist frame. Courtesy the artist and Emalin, London
Megan Plunkett, The Hammer (Left), 2020-21. Digtal print on glossy paper artist's frame. Courtesy the artist and Emalin, London
Julien Goniche, morve profil drop transparent vertical, 2019, Courtesy the artist and Photography Exhibit, Zurich
Paul Levack, Dog, 2023. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle baryta paper, artist's frame. Courtesy Bodenrader, Chicago
Paul Levack at The Gaylord Apartments June 3 - July 2, 2023, Installation Image, Courtesy The Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles
Christopher Acque, Civic (Ohio Street), 2022, detail. Courtesy the artist and Regards, Chicago. Photo: Useful Art Services
Christopher Acque, Civic (Ohio Street), 2022. Courtesy the artist and Regards, Chicago. Photo: Useful Art Services
Christopher Acque, Civic (Ohio Street), 2022, detail. Courtesy the artist and Regards, Chicago. Photo: Useful Art Services
Mariia Andreeva, Short- mid- and long- light waves subtracted by colour lens filters from a photograph of painted potatoes (red), 2025, Silver gelatin print on baryta paper. Courtesy the artist and Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main
Mariia Andreeva, Short- mid- and long- light waves subtracted by colour lens filters from a photograph of painted potatoes (green), 2025, Silver gelatin print on baryta paper. Courtesy the artist and Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main
Mariia Andreeva, Short- mid- and long- light waves subtracted by colour lens filters from a photograph of painted potatoes (blue), 2025, Silver gelatin print on baryta paper. Courtesy the artist and Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main
Felix Rapp, Darkroom in Use (Violet and Deon at UBC), 2025, Inkjet print in handpainted frame. Courtesty the artist
To identify commonalities in the work of artists operating in such varied contexts, I will occasionally take the liberty to embrace our contemporary condition, and write about works I know only through documentation. Comparing the current photographic production to that of the early 2000s, or more strikingly to that of the late 1990s, the first obvious differences lie in the scale and materiality of the works. Fueled by the critical relevance and demand for the medium, artists and galleries in the aughts could still justify the high production costs involved in large and sleekly framed photographs. Coming up at a time when photography wasn’t popular on the art market, millennials have had to contend with different prospects and adjust their production budgets accordingly. Over the past decade, following an important turn towards identity politics and crucial questions of representation, photography was very much subsumed under the regime of figurative painting. As a cultural and financial asset, painting reaffirmed its unparalleled ability to embed value in muddy brushstrokes and signal desirably mediated forms of authenticity. Only a handful of photographers managed to contend with painting by critically reinvesting the field of portraiture. In recent years, aside from the tender and incisive work of artists like Paul Mpagi Sepuya, D'Angelo Lovell Williams, Elle Pérez, Talia Chetrit or Deana Lawson, photography was largely kept in the basement.
In the meantime, most artists working with photography have had to find ways to claim a place on the wall—often in smaller galleries or artist-run venues—and create specific objects, without resorting to large-scale printing or expensive framing. At the moment, apart from Heji Shin’s sardonically big prints of big cocks or big American rockets, the stable worldview implied by grand heroic pictures feels like a bygone era. Today, the more modest scale of the work and the widespread use of inexpensive framing methods are perceivable. From Em Rooney’s pewter frames or Yair Oelbaum’s elegant clip frames, to Megan Plunkett’s use of affordable aluminum profiles—not to mention the proliferation of prints pressed under glass à la Zoe Leonard—a newly provisional material sensibility emerges. Stemming in part from an economic context marked by high rents, unpayable student loans, wage stagnation, and increasingly prohibitive shipping costs, this understated yet highly considered approach to photographic objecthood could also be described as a “broke-alumni aesthetic,” or a tongue-in-cheek “photo-club materiality.” Under these conditions, the light-handed and unpretentious work of Moyra Davey, Zoe Leonard, or Jochen Lempert has come to exert a formative influence on younger generations.
Artists are having to subtly redefine the rules of photographic objecthood by acknowledging the medium’s penchant for smoothness while confronting its edges with the imperfections of the material world—a fancy way of saying that framing is a serious problem. In his 2024 solo exhibitions at Édouard Montassut in Paris, and at Lucas Hirsch in Düsseldorf, German artist Niklas Taleb sandwiched his inkjet prints between panes of glass held together solely with transparent tape. His screen-like photographic objects, which hover a few centimeters away from the wall, strike an unusual balance between sleekness and DIY improvisation. Taleb’s low-key gesture—the careful haphazardness with which he applies the tape—echoes the beautifully thin line that distinguishes his domestic photographs from ordinary family snapshots. In Paris, visitors were greeted by a picture of the artist’s daughter’s face, clownishly pressed against the glass of the camera lens, thus conflating the mediation of the apparatus with the transparency of the object in the gallery.
With photography’s general downscaling, the classic inkjet print mounted on Alu-Dibond is no longer a go-to. As a matter of fact, it’s been a while since I walked into an exhibition that smelled of glue, adhesive, and plexiglass the same way painting exhibitions reek of turpentine. As trivial as it may seem, the return of the passe-partout is too conspicuous to ignore.9 Once considered old-fashioned, the elegant border of the passe-partout has paradoxically become a restrained but non-negligible terrain of experimentation, and an effective way to signal a degree of critical distance toward the medium. Deeply indebted to the work of Christopher Williams and his clever subversions of photographic conventions, the current use of the archival border shows how a conservative hallmark can be productively turned around.
A good example of this is the American artist Juliana Halpert’s exhibition Bountiful Years (2024) at Sebastian Gladstone. For this exhibition, the Los Angeles-based artist and editor used the press release self-reflexively. She constructed her text around recommendations from her mentors and friends on how she should show and contextualize her series of still lifes—medium-format color photographs—surreptitiously taken a decade earlier, in the office of soon-to-be disgraced Artforum co-publisher Knight Landesman, while she worked as lowly production associate. Following the advice of “Bruce H” who “urged [her] to be totally anal [and], to go full fucking Christopher Williams on this shit,”10 Halpert simply framed her pictures in off-white wooden frames with thick white passe-partouts. In turn, the passe-partout, just like the exhibition text, emphasizes the meta-status of her photographs in the context of the art world. Just like her exhibition text, Halpert’s consideration for the borders that contain her images is precisely what helps to draw out an understanding of the stakes outside her pictures.
In a more ironic manner, Timothy Kelly, an American artist who studied in Düsseldorf, played with extreme conventionalism in his series titled American Artist and The Discipline of Photography (2019). His still lifes of dust on a tiled floor, shot from a Rugrats-eye view, are displayed in black frames with white passe-partouts, tastefully cut with additional space on the lower half. Exhibited at Can in Vienna and at Bonner Kunstverein in 2023, Kelly’s stern black-and-white pictures recall Moyra Davey’s Floor and Paw (both 2003)—warm color photographs of dust on a parquet floor. Kelly’s work brings the nostalgia of Davey’s domestic imagery close to an analytical coldness redolent of Christopher Williams. Hence, the mat boards around his pictures, just like the word discipline in his title, function as double entendres. In his series, as in Halpert’s, the passe-partout operates as a quasi-literary device working alongside the exhibition’s textual components—embedded spaces of convention that can be overturned and reframed.
Other artists use the passe-partout to more sculptural ends. In 2019, for his deadpan exhibition of moody Dick Picks and Snot Shots at Photography Exhibit! in Zurich, French artist Julien Goniche used black mat boards held in place with colorful push-pins. For Canadian artist Marisa Kriangwiwat, DIY passe-partouts with multiple shaped openings offer another way of approaching collage through concealment and negative space. Hinting at teenage aesthetic with a distinctly 1990s feel, Moroccan-Canadian photographer Fatine-Violette Sabiri often incorporates bright colored mat boards in her ornamental approach to framing. In her layered self-portraits, American artist B. Ingrid Olson UV-prints a second image onto the passe-partout, wrapping the object’s foreground and background within the depictive space. In a similar way, the German artist Damien Kern frames his cartoonish still lifes of mass-produced collectible figurines in reflective plexiglass passe-partouts, which mirror the exhibition space like screens that draw the viewer in.
At a time when outmoded or supposedly conservative forms are being mined for artistic possibilities, and when artists seek meaning in places once overlooked—the edges of a frame or the surface of a print—the resurgent interest in late 19th-century Pictorialism is compelling to observe. Following art photography’s late-modernist ethos, which aimed to assert the medium’s purity and legitimacy by reducing it to its distinctive properties (i.e. optical sharpness and documentary clarity), Pictorialism was dismissed as kitschy and remained a “no-go zone” for conceptual photography. Throughout his work, the artist Paul Levack—an American based in Mannheim, Germany—consciously makes use of a wide range of photographic substrates, mounting techniques, and printing methods. His nuanced understanding of photographic materiality often involves hand manipulations and pictorial effects such as soft focus, distortions, and blurs. Levack disturbs the seamless industrial surfaces of photography when he employs thermally fused carbon pigment on laid cotton paper, creates mural-sized prints with packing tape, or—as he did for his 2023 exhibition at The Gaylord Apartments in Los Angeles—applies varnish to his inkjet prints.
As written in the press release for Levack’s 2024 exhibition at Bodenrader in Chicago, the artist operates a “shift away from the strict confines of hardline conceptual photography—but not entirely without its teachings…”11 The result is an equivocal kind of Neo-Pictorialism whose seductive distortions channel the 1980s avant-garde punk vibe of Barbara Ess’s pinhole photographs. Whether he is photographing his dog or The Circumcision of Christ, 1470–1475 (2024), Levack’s images appear at once too earnest and suspiciously self-aware of their transgression. His work exudes a mischievous pleasure in toppling the divide between photography’s polite analytical side (dry) and the repressed stickiness of its materiality (wet).
This queering of pictorialism is also visible in the quieter work of American artist Christopher Acque who regularly makes use of gum-bichromate printing—an anachronistic technique inextricably associated with the era of Pictorialism. In his exhibition at Regards, in Chicago in 2022, the artist applied the technique to a series of photographs presented like a motion study of shirtless men jogging alongside the city’s waterfront. Pressed under linen passe-partout and placed inside gleaming acrylic boxes, Acque’s photographs focused on torsos, running shorts and the occasional outline of a smartphone pushed against a statuesque butt.
A more mediated instance of this conceptual interest in the material origins of photography is Mariia Andreeva’s exhibition Potato Quality (2025) at Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt. The Russian-born artist covered the floor of the gallery with red, green, and blue (RGB) confetti, alluding to the colored particles of potato starch found on Autochrome plates. On the wall, she displayed three framed black-and-white prints of a single tabletop still life—potatoes cut in half and painted in red, green, and blue. She printed this formal arrangement using three different color filters for each of the three monochromatic silver gelatin prints, thereby drastically modulating their tonal range. Without a doubt, Andreeva’s focus on potatoes’ historic ties to photography is also reminiscent of Christopher Williams’ 2003 picture of plastic corn piled under a Kodak three point reflection guide—a photograph that supposedly alludes to the presence of corn derivatives in everything we touch, including photographic technologies.
Yet Andreeva’s specific use of photography’s analog properties to spatially split and halt perception halfway towards a fuller resolution is more symptomatic of what George Baker calls photography’s “lateness” in his recent book Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (2023). Inspired by Theodor Adorno’s writing on Beethoven’s late style, Baker’s concepts of “lateness”12 and “afterlife” are also based on Hal Foster’s idea that we live in the cultural aftermath of modernism and postmodernism—a moment when aspects of both are seamlessly intertwined. Taking into consideration photography’s technological determinism and its hegemonic role in postmodernist deconstruction, Baker frames photography’s lateness not as a period, but as an approach to form and as an artistic strategy for survival.
For Baker, photography’s anachronistic turn exemplified in the work of Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard is representative of our moment, when temporalities coexist beyond the linear possibilities of “the neo- or the post-.”13 But while Leonard and Davey began to work at a time when analog photography still prevailed, millennials are the generation of the transition to digital technologies. The intentionality with which younger artists are exploring photography’s lateness is therefore even more striking. From Lotus L. Kang’s sprawling abstract C-prints, Maria Toumazou and Nina Porter’s sculptural pinhole cameras, Nat Faulkner’s chemical experiments, to Peter Tomka, Rachel Handlin, and Felix Rapp’s respective explorations of analog photography as a social space or a way to build community—there is a second wave of artists who revel in the potential of lateness. Their practices also show that while contemporary art’s quest for newness is frequently decried, the forever-young medium of photography seems uniquely able to bypass that predicament. Of course, on a more practical level, as labs shut down and the price of photographic film and paper increases, the question remains: how long can lateness last?
Marysia Paruzel, Nadja carrying miu miu, balenciaga, dior and loewe boxes, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Radio Athènes
Marysia Paruzel, Nadja carrying miu miu, balenciaga, dior and loewe boxes 2, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Radio Athènes
In the introduction to his book, George Baker tentatively suggests that the work of the four women he is about to discuss also advances with what he calls “a feminist and queer politics of time,” through themes of care, activism or sisterhood. Two recent transgenerational group exhibitions offer an updated take on his idea as current photographic practices are intricately linked to queer and feminist discourses and art histories. At Radio Athèns in 2025, HER curated by Helena Papadopoulos, brought together photographic works by different artists,14 including Josephine Pryde, and the Polish artist Marysia Paruzel. The exhibition’s focus on photographic iterations and variations is exemplified in Paruzel’s novella-like sequences—groupings of C-prints pressed under glass, and featuring the edges of the negatives.
In Paruzel’s main sequence, we follow a young woman named Nadja. The artist shows her vacuuming the floor of a nice apartment, waiting for the metro with grocery bags, carrying Miu Miu or Balenciaga boxes, and taking out the trash. Paruzel’s analog pictures enact a constant dialogue between medium and subject. Her photographs’ raw editorial look exert a nineties vibe, which along with the materiality of the C-prints, contrasts with some of the photographs’ contemporary markers, such as Labubus. But the furry doll’s own 1990s nostalgic appearance slyly attenuates this obvious anachronism—introducing a compound form of ambiguity that recurs throughout Paruzel’s work. In one picture Nadja showcases her precious Labubu, while in another, she holds a handful of cheap counterfeit Lafufus. Combined with her stylish but maid-like attire and her inscrutable attitude toward the camera, it becomes unclear whether she is the maid of a rich girl or a rich girl without a maid.
A set of pictures by Josephine Pryde—different from the ones included in the group exhibition in Athens—comes to mind as a significant precedent to Paruzel’s maid sequence. In her 2006 suite of portraits Just What is Aura Anyway?, Pryde insistently photographed a young woman dressed in a Victorian maid outfit standing with her hands clasped in the dark corner of a room. These beautifully awkward pictures are accompanied by a two-part text piece. The first half consists of a short statement attributed to the maid. The second half, written in the voice of the artist, evokes the making of photographs of dust we don’t get to see:
I have a maid, she keeps me soft.
We do interviews together, and print the words next to our names.
In the evenings, I photograph the dust she missed.15
Thinking back to the dust balls in Moyra Davey and Timothy Kelly’s photographs, Pryde and Paruzel’s stylized and class-conscious depictions of gendered maintenance work complicates the duality between photographic practices that either foreground intimacy (socially perceived as feminine), or rationality (socially perceived as masculine). Their work does not reproduce this duality. Instead, they leverage the inherent “bourgeois coldness”16 of conceptual photography to cunningly collapse the reductive divide between emotionality and rationality. By ventriloquizing photography’s muteness, their self-reflexive attitude toward the medium’s affective registers and connoted modes of artistic production, can serve as a locus to expand Baker’s feminist and queer politics of time, which relied on the gendered attributions of existing categories.
The persistence of dust as an element linking unacknowledged housework and photography’s overlooked physicality brings us to a second group exhibition relevant to this discussion. 8 erweiterte portraits (Eight Extended Portraits) (2025-2026), was a dialogical exhibition curated by Hendrike Nagel at Kunstverein für Mecklenburg und Vorpommern in Schwerin, Germany. For this exhibition, several artists were successively invited to respond to a series of photographs made in 1974 by the Austrian photographer Cora Pongracz (1943-2003). The recent “rediscovery” of Pongracz’s photographic work, like that of other strong feminine and queer figures—such as George Tourkovasilis (1944–2021), but also Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952–1983), Bettina Grossman (1927–2020), and Sheila Pinkel (1941–)—has been generating significant enthusiasm among younger artists. Arguably, the reason for this excitement lies in the need for new historical models embodying a combination of formal experimentation and political intersectionality—figures whose work doesn’t nearly fit in the pivotal divide between art photography and postmodernism.
One of the artists invited to show alongside Pongracz was the Cypriot photographer Marietta Mavrokordatou, who also took part in the exhibition at Radio Athèns. In Schwerin, Mavrokordatou presented two works (both 2025), reframing photography as a phenomenological event. 6/1 consisted of a series of pulsating spotlights installed all around the exhibition space at baseboard height. This proto-photographic intervention—akin in that regard to Mariia Andreeva’s confetti or Zoe Leonard’s celebrated camera obscuras—altered the mood and visibility throughout the maze-like arrangement of walls showcasing Pongracz’s work. The warm glow and rhythmicity of 6/1 prefigured Untitled (The way back), an analog slideshow with 81 macro photographs of breadcrumbs scattered across everyday surfaces and photographic lenses. Through the lens of the projector, these gently forensic photographs, clearly influenced by Josephine Pryde’s haptic approach to vision, revealed the ethereal physicality of optics. Like suspended dust particles made visible by the beam of the projector, Mavrokordatou’s breadcrumb trail seems to follow the last remnants of indexicality, as if searching for a tenuous way back.
Paul Niedermayer, It‘s Always Off (4), 2022. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of Photography Exhibit, Zurich. Photos by Björn Allemann
Tiphanie Kim Mall, Treppe, 2024, Courtesy of the artist and Fächer, Berlin
Tiphanie Kim Mall, Spiegel, 2024, Courtesy of the artist and Fächer, Berlin
Yair Oelbaum, Untitled, 2022 [printed 2024] digital c-print from Polaroid scan in artist’s frame. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York
Yair Oelbaum, Untitled (afterimage), 2024 c-print from trimmed sheet film in artist’s frame. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York
In the Artforum roundtable mentioned at the beginning of this text, the Georgian artist Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili makes an interesting observation pertaining to indexicality in regards to the success of two recent blockbuster photography exhibitions with equally foreboding titles. Talking about Nan Goldin’s This Will Not End Well (2024-25) at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, and Wolfgang Tillmans’ Nothing could have prepared us—Everything could have prepared us (2025), at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Alexi-Meskhishvili judiciously points out how both exhibitions put forth a very “analog worldview.”17 According to her, the popularity tied to this analog worldview is indicative of “a kind of longing for a simpler photographic language that young people connect to.”18
With Goldin publicly denouncing the genocide in Palestine, and Tillmans embodying European liberalism amidst Russia’s ideological weaponization of homophobia, this remark could have been contextualized in the highly politicized nature of both events. Although that did not happen in the pages of Artforum, it’s worth expanding on Alexi-Meskhishvili’s idea. For many, this longing for indexicality associated with a simpler photographic language is also a longing for simpler times. Especially in the West, many reminisce on the good old days, when Tillmans could photograph the Concorde, when progress seemed like a questionable but believable horizon, when countercultures hadn’t yet been fully institutionalized by museums and mainstream media, and when digital imagery held more promises than existential dread.
Nevertheless, the return of simpler and apparently more straightforward photographic languages is noticeable in the work of many artists operating in our post-truth, and post-reality moment. If we think back to the complex cinematographic stagings of the 1990s, or the focus on Photoshop and post-production in the aughts, photographic work made today appears significantly more direct. Yet these appearances are often misleading, as many artists are consciously playing with the expectations set by photographic languages that only appear less mediated or more indexical. There is a kind of performative de-skilling at play in the use of seemingly more straightforward photographic languages, which results in newly contrived “marks of indifference”19—akin to but different from the actual lack of technical photography skills embraced by conceptual artists in the 1970s. In the age of AI assisted phone pics, this approach to de-skilling lends photography a document-like appeal we long for: a made-up authenticity that could be compared to the equivocal quality of amateur porn shot by professionals.
The starting point of Paul Niedermayer’s photographs is often something banal that she returns to with intentionality, and with her camera. While this might almost bring to mind the modus operandi of Jeff Wall, the difference lies not only in the nature of Niedermayer’s subjects, the modest scale of her work, and the deceptive casualness of her photographs, but also in her self-reflexive and critical approach to repetition. Through seriality, the German photographer conjures a spatial and temporal context. In Relaxation Drops In The Service Sink (2022), a mesmerizing series of macro photographs capturing ominous splashes and water drops in a metallic sink, she is purportedly photographing from the perspective of a worker in a bar. With Harold Edgerton’s singular and iconic Milk Drop Coronet (1957) photograph in mind, one could momentarily entertain the idea that Niedermayer took her comparatively casual pictures between serving two Berliner pils. It’s easy, and even tempting, to imagine her reclaiming time and agency through micro diversions in her workday—a way of doing one’s own work on the job that Michel de Certeau called travail en perruque20 (the wig). But, given the cumbersome setup necessary to make such refined macro photographs, it’s evident that she had to go back to her workplace on her own time, solely for the purpose of realizing these pictures. Niedermayer’s relaxation drops inhabit a productively ambiguous territory between Ruscha-esque seriality and the forensic exactitude of Edgerton.
In another one of her series titled It’s Always Off, first shown at Photography Exhibit in 2022, Niedermayer repeatedly photographed the knobs of a stove, emulating the habitual cellphone snapshots one might take before leaving home, as visual proofs meant to alleviate the fiery anxieties of daily life. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that her photographs are not actually the mnemonic aids they evoke. Instead, they are carefully crafted and cunningly aestheticized pastiches of such utilitarian note-taking images. Imbued with just the right degree of enigma, these photographs soon make you wonder if you, too, might have left the stove on before coming to the opening.
Comparably, after taking casual cellphone pictures of her surroundings while waiting for a session with her psychoanalyst, Swiss artist Tiphanie Kim Mall eventually brought her camera into the waiting room. The more intentional photographs she produced retain an incidental quality akin to film stills. In the small exhibition room at Fächer in Berlin in 2024, her analog color pictures depicting closed doors, dimly lit hallways, carpeted stairways, and gilded mirrors, materialized murky psychological thresholds. Again, not unlike Niedermayer, and slightly differing from Jeff Wall’s renowned dictum, “I begin by not photographing,”21 Kim Mall engages in an act of re-mediation—expanding time while forensically doubling down on the minutiae of the everyday, treating it like it holds a secret code.
But nowhere is this forensic insistence on the mundane more visible than in the work of Megan Plunkett. The artist—who lives in Los Angeles and used to work as a private investigator—regularly deploys a photographic language inspired by her previous job. Plunkett summons narratives that draw on popular imaginaries by extracting a deadpan surrealism from the everyday objects she photographs. For example, in her series of photographs of hammers, the artist riffs on the repetitive logic of criminological event analysis by implementing the principle of the “matching image”22—staged photographs aimed at factually reproducing situations in order to create document-like depictions that can be used as evidence in court.
The indexical language of forensics is also used to experimental ends by American artist Yair Oelbaum. Zooming in onto the everyday, dust appears once again in his abstract color photographs and takes on uncanny biomorphic shapes through the lens of his Macro Polaroid SLR—a camera originally conceived for crime-scene investigation and medical photography. When asked if he sees any connection between his photographs and his work as a therapist, Oelbaum replies: “Maybe I’m trying to help my little specks and dirt achieve self actualization through my photographs.”23 As pointed out by David Campany in his influential 2015 book and exhibition a Handful of Dust: “in many theories of photography, of the essence or ontology of photography, it is the incidental detail that is thought to be crucial. The lens captures what exceeds the eye. For photography the incidental detail par excellence is dust.”24 Campany’s book revisited the history of modernism through Man Ray’s famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s dust breeding—an accumulation of dust on a glass plate in the artist’s studio, which eventually became part of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Le Grand Verre) (1915-1923). With its unstable relationship to authorship, and its ambiguous role as an artwork documenting another process-based artwork, Man Ray’s forensic image prefigured aspects of both conceptual art and postmodernism. However, Campany’s book, published ten years ago, included very few references to contemporary artists. Writing about the work of Moyra Davey in a 2010 article for Frieze, George Baker already made a parallel between Davey’s and Duchamp’s dust. He extended the comparison through their work’s respective emphasis on anti-productivity, laziness, and languish.25
This emphasis on anti-productivity, just as the direct influence of current or past day jobs in the practices of Plunkett, Niedermayer, or Halpert, shows how the economic conditions mentioned earlier in this text are shaping more than just the scale and materiality of the photographic work produced today. As artists resort to strategies related to travail en perruque, the expanded conditions under which their work is produced frequently become a subject or serve as underlying methodologies. But whether we consider Juliana Halpert photographing on the job in the offices at Artforum, Niklas Taleb photographing while fulfilling his duties as a young father, or Tiphanie Kim Mall making pictures before a routine appointment, none of these artists work in a biographical or first-person register. While their work relies on contextual markers referring to personal life, it nonetheless maintains a mediated attitude—a distanced third-person approach, often implicit in the use of the term “conceptual” when applied to photography outside a strictly art-historical context.26
What seems relatively new is the way intimacy and mediatedness come together in this “minor” conceptual photography—to borrow the term of Deleuze and Guattari.27 To some extent, this minor photography shares affinities with the contemporary literary trend of autofiction, in that both offer ways for individual experiences to acquire collective political value. We could even consider that by contriving and performing contingency—the optical unconscious that’s so often been used to define photography as the medium of realism—these artists are bringing realism back into photography not as an inherent quality, but in a literary fashion, as a “rhetorical style […] crafted to conjure a believable world...”28
This attention to the everyday conditions of artistic production—how both labor and realism are deployed, concealed, fictionalized or highlighted—resonates with Sianne Ngai’s brilliant analysis in her book Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020).29 Ngai examines how misaligned perceptions of too much or too little labor shape both value and aesthetic judgment. Writing about the work of Norwegian photographer Torbjørn Rødland, she shows how a photograph can work too much—by relying on “cheap tricks”—and thus come across as “not working enough,” lacking what we would regard as “real labor.” In her reading of Rødland’s work, Ngai reveals how his photographs provoke an ambivalent response—appearing both technically slick and strangely under-labored. She reminds her readers that photography’s habitual oppositions between instantaneousness and duration—schematized by historian and philosopher Thierry de Duve as “snapshot” vs. “time-exposure”30—also translate in terms of value and aesthetic judgment. To illustrate this, she refers to Nan Goldin’s “trashy” snapshots, which seemingly work too little, and Jeff Wall’s labored tableaux, which seemingly work too hard.
Seen through the fantastically useful lens of Ngai’s theory, the works mentioned above reveal a distinctly paradoxical relationship to labor. While directly addressing labor-related themes, many of these photographs, by resisting any kind of monumentality, also appear to require less work than they actually do. As suggested by my analogy to amateur porn, these works play it cool and pretend not to be trying too hard. They do so by employing a direct photographic language that appears simple—when, in fact, more consideration, skill, and care have gone into their making than initially meets the eye. Is this tasteful downplaying of labor in any way related to the fear of coming across as cringe—“trying too hard”—or is it symptomatic of a generation that, after being labeled as lazy teenagers absorbed by computer screens, bitterly disguises its efforts as professionalized leisure?
Together with the aforementioned downscaling of photography, the contrived amateurism of these works could be interpreted as the sign of a growing confidence in the legitimacy of the medium—no need to make photography too big, sleek, or overtly complex for it to be taken seriously. However, the persistent use of analog means of production implicitly seems to express something contradictory, as it indicates an equally persistent anxiety about the perception of labor in photography. Indeed, the elusive locatability of labor in photography has always been the Rubik’s cube issue that has kept photographers trying hard throughout ages. Taking into account the sterile but seamless ease of digital printing, the experimental potential of analogue photography cannot be considered apart from the labor-intensive implications of its cumbersome physicality. Surely, the craft entailed by analog processes can be seen as a reassuring shelter for visible forms of photographic labor. Artists using these techniques effectively imbue their work with a materiality steeped in the flawy language of “liquid intelligence”31—chemical stains, dust-specks, and light-leaks—that make labor locatable, forcing viewers to look at photographs instead of merely looking through them.
These seemingly heterogeneous and at times contradictory practices share a similar disposition. They accept photography’s paradoxical condition: that of a comparatively young medium that has spent much of its life attempting to prove its artistic worth, while also being inextricably late—anticipating the possibility of its own demise earlier than expected. For much of its history, photography has behaved like a defensive adolescent, insecure, self-conscious, and always questioning its identity—insisting “I am art” or borrowing legitimacy from other established art forms, and panicking every time a new technology appeared. What’s changed is not the insecurity itself, but how it’s handled. Today, instead of looking for an arbitrary essence by focusing on one personality trait, photography is more capable of accepting its multiplicity, its codependency, its lack of purity, and its uncertainties about the future. Photography is, in this sense, laying on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, talking openly, even as it remains restless. If, as George Baker proposes, lateness is also a survival strategy, which attests “to the fact that autonomy is best described as the revelation of insufficiency,”32 then photography’s teenage insecurities can be seen not as a weakness to be overcome, but as the source of an endless fountain of youth. By turning the awareness of its age-old anxieties into self-acceptance, photography is slowly transforming its limiting beliefs into adaptive behaviors.
Marina Sula, Untitled, 2024 pigment print on archival paper Courtesy the artist and Diana, Milan Photo: Andrea Rossetti
One evening, confused by the laughable ambition of this piece of writing, I called a close friend in a state of despair typical of the month of November in Brussels when I spend too much time alone at home with my own thoughts. He made a keen observation and said that “these works share a strong desire for photographs to hold a lot more meaning than they actually can—a poetic and hopeless desire that’s doomed to fail in the most beautiful ways.” He also said that what is most obvious to him is the search for new subjects to photograph. It’s clear that artists are busy looking in the cracks and crevices of daily life, desperately trying to excavate the last remnants of boredom amidst doomscrolling ADHD and freelance bed rotting. This dramatization of nothingness is epitomized in the constant return to dust and incidental detritus as subject matters of choice. Sooner or later—as in Marina Sula’s eerie Untitled (2024) photograph of a Maxi Pack of 65 dishwasher tabs—we all find ourselves staring blankly at the stuff cramped in the back of the cabinet below our sink, looking for answers. It is as if the current instability of the world entailed us to take refuge in the dusty nooks and crannies of daily life. Yet it remains unclear how much these mundane fragments can really contain before they too turn back into dust, thereby revealing our illusory ability to grasp and inhabit the everyday.
When talking about the small pieces of trash and discarded materials she arranges into ephemeral still lifes, the American artist Diane Severin Nguyen cites the example of sweeping her apartment, collecting the dust, and bringing it to the studio in a small bag. For Oelbaum, Nguyen, Mavrokordatou, and others, getting close to these small pieces of dirt and dust specks becomes an act of intimacy that foregrounds the inherently mediated nature of picture-making. Like ragpickers, their attention to such debris also reflects a longstanding fascination with photography’s capacity for transfiguration—the ease with which it can hold and transform the disparate elements of an increasingly fragmented world, filled with what Nguyen calls “psychic garbage.”33 For millennials, this fixation on dust could also be read as a semi-conscious response to the regime of picture-perfect Airbnb interiors described by Vincenzo Latronico in PERFECTION34—a novel satirically portraying young creatives obsessed with immaculate surfaces but forced to confront the grimy realities of freelancing from a home office.
Nguyen’s puzzling photographs bridge the abject surrealism of Wols’ still lifes and the enthralling goriness of pimple popping or ear wax removal videos. As such, her close-up photographs prefigure the kind of synthesis operated by AI generated images. Funnily enough, on a few occasions, I have overheard people wonder if the amorphous fluidity of her photographs had anything to do with AI. Today, the idea that the apparatus of photography can be used to process the world and its garbage is inextricably linked to the fact that in turn, the images it produces will themselves be processed by AI systems that will generate more images—more garbage. That’s precisely why dust and other stand-ins for the idea of indexicality seem so meaningful to artists at the moment. While dust had come to symbolize the unwanted leftovers of modernism’s hygienist mindset, it now comes as a comforting marker of real entropy. When unhinged technofascism is sustained by mega servers kept in low-dust environments that far exceeds the wildest dust-free fantasies of modernism, the anachronistic practice of photography retrieves its cherished position as a harbinger of death—do you really want to live forever?
In her 2023 exhibition, Autofocus, at Kunstmuseum Basel, Swiss artist Gina Folly presented a series of documentary color photographs that she made while following the members of Quasi Tutto—an association of retired individuals who provide small services such as gardening, decluttering, or repairs. In Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto! Maintenance Art – Proposal for an Exhibition “Care,” 1969, a well-known paragraph ends by linking daily tasks with the problematic impetus to stay young: “go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.”35 But for the retired citizens photographed by Folly, staying young means being in use, and being useful means fulfilling maintenance tasks for others. Arranged on the wall like a photo-essay in the pages of a magazine, Folly’s photographs adopt a straightforward language akin to the casual social photography found in community brochures or schoolbooks. Her photographs riff on a minor genre of social photography to look at equally minor occurrences, as though photography partook in an act of maintenance—honoring the everyday by keeping it visible.
Folly’s exhibition also included six metallic benches for visitors to sit on, rest, and observe the wide range of tasks carried out by the people she followed. Branded with the logos of analog photography companies like Ilford, Agfa, or Kodak, these benches replicated a Fujifilm bench photographed in Japan by one of Folly’s friends. With their obsolescent branding, the benches allegorically hinted at analog photography’s own condition—a retired medium that wants to remain useful just as the retired people photographed want to remain “in use” in spite of old age. Extending this metaphor, the artist installed a wall-mounted light with a flickering bulb, tethered to a transmitter, programmed in Morse code to spell the lyrics of Alphaville’s 1984 Cold War anthem, Forever Young.
The social documentary turn in Folly’s work is the last notable trait of current photographic practices that I will discuss here. When photography became busy with itself in the aughts, it wasn’t always disposed to fulfill a social agenda, entrenched in the malleable interior space of the studio, it marked another one of the medium’s “agoraphobic moments,”36 to borrow the expression used by David Campany to describe the tendencies of surrealist photography. Similarly, but for different reasons, when introducing the work of Moyra Davey in his book, George Baker states that Davey’s photographs of dust first seem to “emerge as ‘last’ photographs, pictures that turn inward, in melancholic self-absorption, away from the urban spaces of street photography; documents that relinquish all purchase on the social field in which photography once thrived.”37
Gina Folly, Auto Focus, 2023. Photo series in artist's frame. Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Basel
Gina Folly, Kodak Bench for Auto Focus, 2023. Artist's bench. Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Basel
In contrast, some recent practices demonstrate attempts to have photography look inward and outward simultaneously, devising a self-reflexive realism where the medium’s material and social histories become a prime lens.38 Indeed, Folly’s social photography finds an echo in the work of Nilo Goldfarb who also reinvests the field of documentary photography while reflecting on the medium’s lateness. The very short text accompanying Electrolatina (2025), his recent exhibition at Can, includes a clear statement: “Goldfarb insists on the persistent contemporaneity of analog opticality.”39 Goldfarb’s silver gelatin prints, which show art students photographed at a train station, simultaneously seem to formalize and emulate the documentary style of Fred Lonidier who photographed life on campus at UCSD throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Lonidier is also the subject of Goldfarb’s forthcoming book, Fred Lonidier’s Casual Photography (2026).
Finally, in her recent duo show with Chris Kraus at Bel Ami in Los Angeles, Juliana Halpert used photography to look back lovingly on her mother’s career as a public defender advocating for criminal justice reform in Vermont. On the eve of her mother’s retirement, Halpert turned her investigative lens toward her mom’s run-down work environment—its whiteboards, Post-its, filing boxes and meeting tables—highlighting the Sisyphean nature of this unglamorous job. Taken together, Goldfarb, Halpert and Folly’s work seems to signal photography’s timid but noticeable return to the outside world—a reminder that even for a medium turning 200 years old in 2026, it’s hard to get old without a cause.
2. Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Thomas Demand, Florian Ebner, Roxana Marcoci, Christian Scheidemann, Jeff Wall, and Pablo Larios, "The Future of Photography: A Roundtable," Artforum 64, no. 3 (November 2025), https://www.artforum.com/features/photography-roundtable-1234736996/.
3. Michael Sanchez, “2011: Art and Transmission,” Artforum 51, no. 10 (Summer 2013): 294–301.
4. Ocean of Images is the title of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2015 exhibition, curated by Quentin Bajac, Roxana Marcoci, and Lucy Gallun.
5. Abigail Solomon‑Godeau, “Photography after Art Photography,” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 103–123.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
7. The term “photo ghetto” has previously been attributed to Jeff Wall, as noted in Michael Prodger, “Photography: Is It Art?,” The Guardian, October 19, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/19/photography-is-it-art.
8. George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 120–140.
9. Carter Seddon’s 2015 exhibition Interface at Jenny’s, Los Angeles, can be seen as a precursor to this return to more subdued forms of presentation.
10. Juliana Halpert, Bountiful Years, exhibition text, Sebastian Gladstone Gallery, New York, October 5–31, 2024, https://sebastiangladstone.com/exhibitions/63-juliana-halpert-bountiful-years-new-york/.
11. Ramsey Alderson, Paul Levack, exhibition text for Paul Levack, Bodenrader, Chicago, December 2, 2023 – January 27, 2024, https://www.bodenrader.com/paul-levack/.
12. George Baker, Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1.
13. Ibid., 9.
14. The other artists included in HER were George Tourkovasilis, Marietta Mavrokordatou and Esther Theaker.
15. Josephine Pryde, The Enjoyment of Photography (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 2015), 31.
16. I am borrowing the term bourgeois coldness from Henrike Kohpeiß’s Bourgeois Coldness (Brussels and London: Divided Publishing, 2025).
17. Alexi-Meskhishvili et al., “The Future of Photography.”
18. Ibid.
19. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art/MIT Press, 1995), 246–267.
20. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
21. Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall: "I Begin by Not Photographing" (video), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 7, 2010, YouTube, 0:03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yG2k4C4zrU.
22. Megan Plunkett, “Los Angeles: Impossible Thinking. A Conversation with Gracie Hadland,” Flash Art, August 26, 2024, https://flash---art.com/article/focuson-graciehadland/.
23. Yair Oelbaum, interview by Max Levin, “Yair Oelbaum,” BOMB Magazine, February 24, 2025, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2025/02/24/yair-oelbaum-by-max-levin/.
24. David Campany, a Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic (London and Paris: MACK and Le Bal, 2015), 22–23.
25. George Baker, “Some Things Moyra Taught Me,” Frieze, April 1, 2010, https://www.frieze.com/article/some-things-moyra-taught-me.
26. The terms “first-person photography” and “third-person photography” come from Lucas Blalock. The many discussions I’ve had with him over the years have greatly contributed to this text..
27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
28. Campany, a Handful of Dust, 24.
29. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
30. Ibid., 209.
31. Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall, ed. Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, and Boris Groys (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 90–93.
32. Baker, Lateness and Longing, 385.
33. Diane Severin Nguyen’s Transfigurations, directed by Jessica Kingdon and Nathan Truesdell, New York Close Up (Art21, September 21, 2022), YouTube video, 8:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyz1ttUebBI.
34. Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection, trans. Sophie Hughes (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025).
35. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition ‘CARE,’” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969): 54–55.
36. Campany, a Handful of Dust, 14.
37. Baker, Lateness and Longing, 321.
38. This self-reflexive realism bears affinities with Ian Wallace’s work of the 1990s, notably The Idea of the University (sixteen color photographs laminated on canvas with painted monochromatic strips). Wallace’s approach to photographic realism was influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s cinéma vérité.
39. Nilo Goldfarb, “Electrolatina,” exhibition text, July 23–August 22, 2025, Contemporary Art Library, https://cdn.contemporaryartlibrary.org/store/doc/71562/docfile/3bec62e466d8582fd31fb82e447b78af.pdf.