Announcing the Winners of the 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund

Google’s Creator Labs and Aperture are thrilled to announce the recipients of the second season of The Creator Labs Photo Fund—an initiative providing financial support to encourage artists at formative moments in their careers. Started in 2021 and made possible by Google Devices and Services in partnership with Aperture, the second season of the Creator Labs Photo Fund supports thirty artists working in photography and lens-based practices with a one-time $6,000 grant.

The winning artists of this year’s Creator Labs Photo Fund are:

Ramie Ahmed, Wesaam Al-Badry, Devin Blaskovich, Kierra Branker, Luis Corzo, Daniel Diasgranados, Lisa Elmaleh, Ryan Frigillana, Golden, Jeremy Grier, Avijit Halder, Oji Haynes, Jenica Heintzelman, Ramona Jingru Wang, Natalie Keyssar, Ryan Patrick Krueger, Xi Li, Ira Lupu, Yael Malka, Ashley Markle, Ashley McLean, Arlene Mejorado, Shala Miller, Clara Mokri, Colton Rothwell, Keisha Scarville, Tam Stockton, Jennifer Teresa Villanueva, Isaiah Winters, and Zhidong Zhang.

Aperture serves as an essential platform for artists, fostering critical dialogue within the photographic community. “Partnering with Google on the second edition of the Creator Labs Photo Fund embodies Aperture’s longstanding mission to support new voices in photography,” states Brendan Embser, senior editor of Aperture magazine. “The thirty selected artists bring us projects with a dynamic and wide range of approaches, including commentaries on photography’s documentary and archival potential, and intimate explorations of identity and community. Aperture’s editorial team recognizes critical rigor animating the work by each of these artists, reaffirming the role that images play in creating a dialogue with the past and envisioning new possibilities for the future.”

Ramie Ahmed

How can portraiture illustrate the potential of protest without crossing into exploitation? With Beauty and Its Time Has Come, Ramie Ahmed seeks an answer. “I don’t think people realize how powerful a weapon a camera is,” he says. While protest is often seen from a documentary angle, Ahmed removes the activists from that setting, instead photographing them as individuals in their own spaces. This is his community, a group of Black, queer individuals grown over the past three years as protesters have forayed into the streets of cities across the US. Ahmed rarely makes just one portrait of his sitters. Rather, he shows the viewer multiple angles. One subject lies on top of bedsheets, looking inquisitively at the camera, then holds their hands in front of their face; another faces the camera directly, then looks away at her shadow on the wall. “The quiet moments mean so much to me,” says Ahmed. These are protest portraits, make no mistake—but protest as afterimage, reflection as opposed to reaction.

Wesaam Al-Badry

In his series From Which I Came, Wesaam Al-Badry seeks a correction to the narrative, created through decades of media coverage and cultural stereotyping, of the violent Arab Other. Born in Nasiriyah, Iraq, Al-Badry is a refugee of the first Gulf War. His life in the United States is a symbol of a cultural and political coalescence that pervades his work. “It’s impossible to say there is one type of Arab,” he says. “So the project came to be, ‘I’m just going to photograph people as they are.’” The resulting photographs depict what one might imagine to be a quintessentially American family with the familiar marks of Al-Badry’s Iraqi heritage. In one photograph, two women wearing abayas sit in plastic chairs on a lawn, the house creeping into the edge of the picture; in another, a young girl in a leotard stretches in the same spot. The Midwestern backdrop underscores a transgressive goal, the statement that Al-Badry’s community needs no introduction and no excuse. “These people don’t see themselves as the Other, they see themselves as them,” Al-Badry says.

Devin Blaskovich

In 2021, in his hometown of San Diego, editorial and fashion photographer Devin Blaskovich worked occasionally as a day laborer on construction projects. In time, he began to bring his camera along, photographing the physical objects surrounding him. As he continued the physical work, class consciousness drove creatively to complicate further depictions of building and landscape. “How do you separate it from those symbols that are very mixed with American photographic culture,” he asks, “and still make something that is about human infrastructure?” Though at first glance, the photographs in Blaskovich’s Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying appear as a collection of stark black-and-white sculptural still lifes divorced from their material reality, upon closer examination, a second, vastly different visual vocabulary emerges. While a formal reading of the photographs provides enough for an art historian to latch onto, these images are intended for a different audience: working-class viewers, many of whom may recognize Blaskovich’s scenes and the unique labor behind his constructions.

Kierra Branker

In Get It and Come Back, Kierra Branker’s colorful photographs give off a sense of discovery, as if the artist had simply happened upon her subjects. Shades of pink, blue, and brown find common ground across the images, as the scenes of community in south Florida cohere into a narrative of Black Caribbean diaspora (Branker herself is Trinidadian American). In one still life, the thesis is clear: a globe, rotated to show the Americas, with two dark figurines next to it, a set of dominoes in front. The project “has been building more into looking into these objects,” says Branker, “things like carnival headdresses and feathers, music, and dominoes, all of those little details that tell the bigger picture of how we’re moving and passing on legacy from our family members.” Mirrors too recur in the portraits; paired with the domestic settings of other photographs, these works serve to confirm an identity, creating a new home in an unfamiliar place and continuing the memory making of diaspora.

Luis Corzo

Mixing portraiture, still life, and an indexical sort of architectural photography, Luis Corzo, in his project Money Transfer, follows the homeward path of foreign workers’ remittances to their families abroad. The photographs are clear-sighted and often unsentimental, but Corzo’s diligence brings an emotional touch to an extensive international monetary network. The network itself sometimes plays a role—Corzo describes seeing the storefronts that facilitate remittances in all kinds of settings, first in New York with the delivery workers. “On another occasion, I’m in this little village in the Andes Mountains and Western Union is there,” he says. “I’d like to have an abnormal amount of documentation of these storefronts.” While the individual characters in Money Transfer could get lost in the expanse, Corzo keeps their lives and stories at center stage. By not only focusing on the workers he meets in the United States, Corzo pulls back the curtain on the entire global system, photographing the objects they carry and, eventually, their homes abroad at the other end of the cycle.

Daniel Diasgranados

For Daniel Diasgranados, suburbia becomes fiction and landscape becomes the universe. Diasgranados spent most of his life in the DMV, the area comprising Washington, DC, and parts of Maryland and Virginia, which he takes as a starting point for his series, Voyager II. “I wanted to make fictional stories through photobooks,” he says, “and really inform them from my life experiences.” The other origin point for the work is the titular NASA spacecraft, launched in 1977 carrying what was known as the “Golden Record,” containing a sampling of sounds from Earth (a greeting from the UN, wind and rain, Mozart and Chuck Berry) as a guide for extraterrestrial life. The settings in Diasgranados’s photographs are hyperlocal—a long stretch of road used for drag racing, a parking lot connected to a space station nearby that first led him to make the Voyager connection—and his collaborators are close friends and siblings. This is his Golden Record: the DMV and its inhabitants take on a universal role, “not necessarily canonizing images, but leaving remnants,” as he puts it.

Lisa Elmaleh

Around three years ago, Lisa Elmaleh began volunteering with humanitarian aid groups at the US-Mexico border, returning over time to make photographs of the landscape, aid workers, and migrants along the border. Unlike much of the photojournalism documenting the border—often characterized by quick snapshots of action or dramatic newspaper front pages—Elmaleh’s photographs, made with her 8×10 camera, operate with a different approach. “The whole process is slow,” she says. “I get to know each person that I’m photographing. I get to know the landscape in which I’m traveling.” Collectively, the photographs entangle the vast, harsh landscape—where Elmaleh has joined aid groups in search parties for migrants who have gone missing—with the soft portraits of those affected by a history of US policies. The result complicates a narrative often told in short, distinctly presented stories; in lengthening everything from the time spent on a single picture to the long-term goals of her work and activism, Elmaleh tells a story, years in the making, of empathy in a time of migratory crisis.

Ryan Frigillana

In Manong, Ryan Frigillana expertly agitates and bends the archive to navigate a personal and collective history of Filipino migrants in the United States, centered on his family. “Combing through visual history is my attempt to exhume those hidden parts of myself, the parts that live in my body but can’t be seen,” he says. The photographs are presented in physical entanglement, with archival images placed within and on top of Frigillana’s own photographs, or vice versa. Past and present are one and the same, acknowledging history, as he explains, “not as an inert relic, but as a living, breathing, and speaking presence.” Frigillana primarily focuses on his parents, and his closeness to this collective history is apparent in his portraits of his mother and the material details of their life in America. In total, Manong provides a formally distinct addition to photography’s ability to tell an asynchronous history of oneself and one’s community.

Golden

“My photographs center Black queer autonomy,” says Golden, whose series On Learning How to Live navigates the lives of the photographer and their close community in strongly lit environmental self-portraits. Almost painterly in construction, Golden’s photographs are painstakingly detailed, often planned out days or weeks ahead of the camera’s entrance. Golden often takes center stage themself—occasionally surrounded or embraced by others—in domestic scenes with varied living standards. In one tableau, Golden stands perched on a chair in front of a wooden fence; in another, between red armchairs in a lavishly decorated room. Even so, the subjects are presented with dignity. “I remember studying European paintings in art history during undergrad, and usually, only white figures were staged confidently and propped up within and surrounding the home,” they say. “In my images, the kitchen chairs, broken backyard fence, bedroom ottomans, and mattresses become the thrones, the pulpit, the homes, and the nation.”

Jeremy Grier

“The lack of documentation of Black life up north in New England is something that is very real,” says Jeremy Grier. During the pandemic, Grier moved back to his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, and over time he began to reexamine the once familiar city, making environmental portraits of its residents in the places he knew. The lineage of Black portraiture—from James Van Der Zee to Roy DeCarava to Dawoud Bey—has a metropolitan history, and while that history resonates with Grier’s photographs, these images are also informed by the photographer’s own relationship to Hartford. In backgrounds, familiar viewers will recognize Albany Avenue, or Sigourney Square Park, where a young group poses playfully, engaged with Grier and his 4×5 camera. Beyond the photographs’ reference to the history of the medium, Hartford North End, as Grier titles this project, is an ode to a Black community full of life in the Northeast.

Avijit Halder

After their mother’s death, Avijit Halder inherited a collection of saris. For more than a decade, they kept them, migrating in that time from Kolkata to the United States. In a way, the saris existed more as a material archive than a wardrobe. After years of storing them away, Halder began to use the saris in photographs, wearing and waving them, activating the objects to create colorful scenes full of motion. “I was interested in this symbol of ultimate femininity in our culture,” they say, “and how that plays with this idea of gender and body that I was exploring.” Their collaborators in the photographs were members of their queer community in Brooklyn, where Halder lived while completing their MFA at ICP-Bard, and a level of intimacy emerges from each image. Stable, somber self-portraits of Halder contrast the ecstatic photographs of others modeling the saris, hinting further at Halder’s close personal connections to the people and objects across the series. The resulting project, नेति नेति (Not This, Not That), takes the saris as a starting point to look at the expansive fluidity of gender, culture, and material inheritance.

Oji Haynes

Oji Haynes thinks about his photographs as poems, giving himself space to reflect before making the work, referring to an image as an artifact and a fable. “The medium itself runs deep just like the history of Black life,” he says. “They honestly go side by side.” Likewise, the photographs join together like lines of verse. A scene of young men wearing black hoodies seated in a restaurant is followed by a collage of gray sweatsuits: incarcerated men in found photographs purchased on eBay. Later, new men in gray appear, glancing back as if the camera were an unexpected visitor. The portraits are intimate—a woman sitting on a bed, her red dress contrasting with the white sheets; a woman embracing a man from behind in a dimly lit bedroom—and add depth to the documentation of Black life as a shared history. Haynes describes his process as instinctual: “It really comes from just sitting still and listening most of the time.”

Jenica Heintzelman

In Down a Stream, Jenica Heintzelman engages medical and therapeutic skepticism with a critical, yet open mind. After a doctor suggested that unresolved trauma could impact her health, she began to research mind-body therapy and similar alternative healing practices. “I grew up with this idea that if you have faith, you will be healed,” says Heintzelman, who was raised Mormon and has since left the church. Rather than using a documentary photographic approach, Heintzelman works with actors and dancers to recreate and improvise scenes referencing the group therapy sessions. “A lot of what I was trying to portray,” she says, “was the subconscious part of healing, the darker side.” The photographs are almost claustrophobic; harshly lit, they closely focus on faces or hands, a “catalog of gestures,” as Heintzelman calls it. A few do not feature people, instead exploring the spaces around them, similarly uninviting—closed doors, the backs of picture frames, furniture pushed close together.

Natalie Keyssar

Natalie Keyssar began to cover the war in Ukraine as a photojournalist soon after Russia’s invasion in February 2022. Since then, she has photographed on assignment for Time magazine, the New York Times, NPR, and other outlets. In Ukrainian Love Letter, Keyssar reorganizes her commissioned documentary work alongside unpublished images from her ongoing time in Ukraine, producing a heartfelt narrative of a nation in crisis. Keyssar presents many of her photographs as diptychs, taking the opportunity to collapse time and “rearrange the emotional and sequential landscape” as she says. The title of the series refers first to the relationships between Ukrainians of all backgrounds, but also to the photographer’s own love letter to the country and those she’s met. “I feel like weaving these things together is how I’ve always done my work,” Keyssar says. “It’s how I’ve figured out how to be an artist and a journalist at the same time, and reconcile that in a way that feels true and honoring to the people in the photographs.”

Ryan Patrick Krueger

Ryan Patrick Krueger has been collecting photographs since he was a teenager living in Portland, Oregon. Initially combing through antique stores in the city, he eventually moved online, to sites like eBay, simply searching “gay interest” to uncover archives from the pre–Gay Liberation era of the 1960s. On Longing, first exhibited in 2022 at Monaco Gallery in St. Louis, presents a wide-ranging collection of these photographs in a scientifically detailed, curatorially organized, and ambitiously displayed set of collages. “I use the exhibition space to create a temporary memorial with these materials,” Krueger says. Layers of found photographs find new meaning among pictures photocopied from pre-Stonewall yearbooks and excerpts of Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics. Krueger does not shy away from the painstaking work involved in uncovering these images, often including mailing envelopes from eBay sellers and, as byproduct, every address he has held for the last decade. “​​I long to understand that history of invisibility,” he says, “where I can situate myself in a history and culture that I am proud of.”

Xi Li

In Xi Li’s photographs, scenes staged in a studio become abstracted beyond easy recognition. Li constructs objects, projects, and images; repurposes materials; and, eventually, photographs her creations. She refers often to the role of memory, both personal and collective, in shaping her work, Surface Memory. “I believe that memory is a choice,” Li says. Whether the choice is in our own perception of memory, or in the act of remembering at all, the questions Surface Memory raises come with no simple answers. The work also navigates the fallibility of her own memory. Li left her home in China ten years ago, and she uses the photographic process to rebuild a concept of home. “I consider the unstable harmony between actual and fictive recollections,” she says, “and want to blur the lines in between.” In one diptych, Li photographs a still life of real plants—migrant plants from Asia, she says—potted alongside photographs of plants printed from public domain images. This is perhaps her most straightforward image: the signified and signifier in union.

Ira Lupu

“Back then it still felt terribly dangerous,” says Ira Lupu, from her family’s home in Odesa, about her first return to Ukraine in April 2022, a few months after Russia’s invasion. “It still is, but you learn to navigate that.” This line of thinking seems to characterize the familiar clichés of war photography from Ukraine, in newspapers and online, with the dominant early coverage tapering off into only occasional snapshots. Since that initial visit, Lupu has gone back and forth between New York and Odesa, making a collection of photographs titled Time of the Phoenix that embraces an empathetic view of her home country and its people. Though traces of the war remain in the photographs, a human focus pervades. “I’ve been focusing on the things that are not as visual and do not fall into this photographic vocabulary of the war,” Lupu says. Some of the scenes require context if seen individually—the young people on a mountain in one image, for example, are refugees, soldiers, and combat medics—but the conflicted reality of life amid war reveals itself as a method of survival in Lupu’s photographs.

Yael Malka

Yael Malka’s The People’s Beach began as a commission from the New York Times, a three-month-long assignment to cover the last summer before the People’s Beach at Riis Park—a haven since the 1940s for New York’s queer community—would be closed for the demolition of a nearby building. A New Yorker and a queer photographer, Malka was a fit for the project, and the resulting photos show a deep care for the community that frequents the beach. Malka made the work entirely on film, including additional Super 8 video footage. The resulting warm, sunbaked photographs feature portraits of beach regulars, landscapes showing a divine sunset over the beach, and details such as flowers lining a fence, or a hand blocking the waning sun’s glare against the water. The personal project extends beyond the work published in the Times, adopting a more nuanced and historical perspective. “My point of view is in the photos,” says Malka. “Things that point to a tension or some sort of violence.” The work continues; Malka has returned to document the demolition, and further, the revival of the People’s Beach.

Ashley Markle

“A big part of my work is looking at the individual,” says Ashley Markle, “and seeing how the individual forms the collective.” This balance is at the center of the photographer’s series The Lion and the Lamb, in which she embeds herself with the Columbia University wrestling team. She chose wrestling for its structure as a distinctly individual sport—endless hours of preparation for a single seven-minute match, one competitor versus another—but one that’s nonetheless played as a team. Markle focuses on the movement of the wrestlers’ bodies, recalling her interest in dance and positing wrestling as its hypermasculine surrogate. Her photographs engage the athletes closely, following the ritual of practices and matches with an anthropological sensitivity. In many of the photographs, the young men grasp and grapple intimately in the frame of Markle’s camera. She also makes space for collaboration, photographing a set of portraits of wrestlers standing in front of a red backdrop held up by their peers. The collaboration between teammates is part of the process, Markle explains. “Their moment will come too.”

Ashley McLean

In her tender portraits of young Black fathers, Ashley McLean opens a conversation about the dominant representations of masculinity, fatherhood, race, and domesticity. As a response to negative media portrayals of Black men, McLean began making photographs she describes as calm, less abrasive than traditional protest art. “I want the men in my community to see themselves as pure and tender through these images,” she says, reflecting on how the men she knows have been raised alongside those portrayals. “I see myself as this mediator between the world and how these men present themselves.” In one photograph, a father holds his child next to a Romanesque statue of a man, a distilled vision of the project’s thesis of expectation and reality. Going beyond an approach that holds the work in the polemic realm, McLean makes these photographs for the people in them. “I’m leaving behind these images for these young kids and their parents,” she says, “creating a beautiful memory that they can have in their albums.”

Arlene Mejorado

A Landscape Holds You Still, Arlene Mejorado’s series of photographs rooted in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, brings together portraits of the artist’s family and scenes deconstructing an outside perspective of the region. Beyond the community living there, the valley is home to major film studios and cultural depictions—in many ways, the landscape operates as a stand-in for anywhere. By acknowledging the way this place has been seen both by her and by others, Mejorado breaks down the way one can create a construct of home. “I was thinking about how communities can write ourselves into a landscape that we are living in, through memories and archives,” she says. Mejorado photographs family members in street medians, using a banal but liminal space for environmental portraits that force viewers to take in the surrounding landscape. Another image recalls Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80); the low-angle portrait recontextualizes the film industry’s cityscape for Mejorado’s community story, as if to say, “We belong here.”

Shala Miller

Shala Miller embodies every role in Obsidian, an expansive multimedia project combining fiction, autoethnography, and self-portraiture with superhero comic books and a distinctly Black femme perspective. The concept came to Miller as a healing response to several instances of abuse, a way to reclaim power and harness some of the rage she was feeling. In Obsidian, Miller is not only the titular character—hero or villain—but also the historian researching the character and the original author. “It started from a very specific personal experience of being abused by these people in my life,” she says, “and then it’s as if the rage has a reverberation to it … you can see it beginning from me and then growing to reach the collective masses.” The individual images each contain layers of narrative context, whether from Miller’s iconic poses (as Obsidian) or the handwritten text and photo-objects placed around the portraits. Viewed as a complete set, the project leans into its contradictions and questions the nature of photography and storytelling.

Clara Shuku Mokri

Bright reds and blues leap from the images in پلو آلبالو (Cherry Rice), a family narrative from Clara Mokri focusing on her Iranian cultural heritage from her father’s side of the family. “It’s all a way to connect,” she says. “My parents don’t share a culture, so it was really about getting to experience both cultures intimately from my perspective.” Mokri’s work as an editorial photographer has established the pop of color as a familiar trait, but here it is imbued with a renewed significance in sharing her family’s story. Details such as a Coca-Cola can, brilliantly red over a tray of food, or a man’s denim, a light blue set against a field of wheat, become central points of cultural awareness as Mokri emphasizes the objects and icons that characterized assimilation for her father and his sister, who came to the United States in the late 1970s, during the Iranian Revolution.

Colton Rothwell

The American Mountain West finds itself under critical inspection in the photographs of Colton Rothwell. Elegy, a roaming collection of black-and-white images made across Idaho, where Rothwell was raised, and Montana, where he now lives, evokes the history of photography’s manifest destiny and New Topographics—particularly the photographs of Robert Adams—reinvigorated with a haunted and distanced unfamiliarity. Taking his queer identity as a starting point, Rothwell faces the mythology of the West and its imposed masculinity head-on, often through depictions of charged memories: a standalone cross in a field, the interior of a car, two shirtless men, a shared cigarette. “It’s often not what you’d expect to see,” he says, “queer people in the Western landscape and thriving.” The topography becomes animated as a character, its harshness acknowledged and summarily disarmed. As the viewer sits with the photographs, Rothwell’s vision of an imaginative West takes hold: an expansive landscape full of possibility.

Keisha Scarville

Keisha Scarville started photographing her family while visiting her home in Guyana during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I started to think about what it means to move between two different spaces, the struggle to find connection in those different spaces,” she says. Scarville’s interest in family units, traveling back and forth between Brooklyn and Guyana, eventually turned into an interest in the traditional Caribbean limbo dance, and the way Black bodies maneuver through space. “There’s this level of absurdity but also amazingness about the limbo,” she says. “This idea of success being predicated on how you can move through constraints.” In her series Li/mb, Scarville reconstructs the limbo in expertly staged self-portraits (though a few feature her cousin as a stand-in). The photographer poses on textiles, adding further layers to the complexity of cultural identity and spatial reality. Body and background merge together, offering an introspective look into the threshold between self and community.

Tam Stockton

“I tend to be attracted to pictures that sit on the edge of being a joke,” says Tam Stockton, whose series Sometimes I Think of What’s Forgotten finds itself on the edge of several lines—between photography and sculpture, digital and analog, reality and fiction. Stockton constructs his images in various ways that go beyond traditional photographic means; in several instances, he prints, cuts, rearranges, and rephotographs existing images into new constructions. The results are uncanny, surreal imprints of recognizable features of life that Stockton describes as almost nostalgic. Reconstructed collages of nature and domestic life—the cloudy blue sky above a field, a man sitting on a rooftop—lead to recollections of something almost there but just out of reach, the familiar feeling of a memory rather than the fact itself. Stockton is hesitant to define any firm meaning in the work. “I try to separate out the images that I feel hold this confusion, or that have the potential to,” he says. The photographs highlight the malleability and playfulness of memory, letting the viewer in on the joke.

Jennifer Teresa Villanueva

Jennifer Villanueva, in ¿Quieres Salvar Al Mundo? Empieza por tu Familia (Do You Want to Save the World? Start with Your Family), explores the complex dynamic of an immigrant family through the objects and routines of their daily life. As a student, Villanueva began documenting her mother and grandmother, who immigrated from Mexico, but the project took a turn during the process of helping her parents attempt to obtain legal resident paperwork. The photographs do not shy away from the struggles and sacrifices across generations, but they retain a sense of resilience. One image, a sort of categorical still life taking stock of Villanueva’s grandmother’s items, appears to be constructed by the photographer; in fact, the objects were laid out already. “I’m not just trying to reveal her identity and submit that to the public,” says Villanueva. “I want this relationship between the domestic and the public, this idea of being legal and illegal.” As a whole, the series is both organizational and aspirational, a project of legibility in the face of overwhelming political obstacles.

Ramona Jingru Wang

Don’t let the playfulness of the title of Ramona Wang’s series—My friends are cyborgs, but that’s okay—belie the sophistication of its goals. Discussing her practice, Wang references academic theorists from Edward Said to Donna Haraway, combining their work to form a concept of “Techno-Orientalism,” a fusion of fluid, outsider identities seen as the Other. Wang, who was born in Guangzhou, China, and now resides in New York, primarily focuses the project on Asian identity, emphasizing the expectations and marginalization faced by her collaborators for simply existing in a world that dehumanizes their bodies. “I would tell them this is a mockumentary,” she says. “You have to imagine that you are a cyborg, and it’s a documentary of you.” The careful poses in the portraits are often at odds with their domestic environments, as Wang’s mockumentary subjects continue to play a role even within the privacy their own homes. But her photography is also an act of care and solidarity. “I think I am part of them in this imaginary cyborg community,” she says.

Isaiah Winters

After his military service as a linguist and analyst in the US Air Force, Isaiah Winters took some time off to visit the national parks of the American West. The discomfort he experienced as a Black man encountering the idealized symbolism of manifest destiny led Winters to investigate the visual culture that surrounds the park system. His series This Land Is Your Land brings together mixed media collages of collected visual objects from advertising to found archives, as well as photographs made by Winters of the people he has encountered in the parks over the past couple of years, primarily in Glacier National Park and Yellowstone. Winters says he has a storage unit full of “everything Western memorabilia,” and his collection spans well beyond what has been used so far. “As I started to dig more and more, I had a much more critical approach to it,” he says. “It’s impossible for me to see these parks the same way anymore.”

Zhidong Zhang

Zhidong Zhang’s photographs are works of collaboration. Their series No Place Like Home confronts the diaspora experience (Zhang was born in Hunan, China) in portraits of their close friends and family members mixed with still lifes of the objects they have carried for years. When discussing the project, Zhang recalls a concept from the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about,” a way to leave open space for representation. “I’m trying to move my way of making images,” says Zhang, “speaking nearby my queerness, my diasporic experiences, and the condition of in-betweenness that has inhabited my body over the years.” Zhang finds space for themself and their collaborators to exist between the reality of diaspora and the expectations placed upon them, “Metabolizing bodies that are often politicized and eroticized in very exploitative ways,” as they say. Through their quiet constructions, the photographs look back on Zhang’s personal history and invite an alternative future.

Artist statements by Eli Cohen.