Kinship and the Natural World: Genesis Báez and Martha Naranjo Sandoval in Conversation
Please join Aperture and Printed Matter for a conversation between artists Genesis Báez and Martha Naranjo Sandoval, discussing their recent publications: Blue Sun/Sol Azul (Capricious Publishing, 2025) and Small Death (MACK, 2025). Báez and Naranjo Sandoval will speak individually about their respective works, then discuss overlapping themes including deeply personal and often beautiful notions of home and family.
In Blue Sun/Sol Azul, Genesis Báez, who was raised in two worlds—the US island territory of Puerto Rico and the cold environs of New England—photographs the elemental bonds of family. Martha Naranjo Sandoval’s Small Death is a diaristic portrayal of the loss and disruption of emigration, told through strips and isolated frames of Fujifilm 200 35mm color slide film, filled with dreamlike self-portraits, surrealistic cityscapes, and revealing images of Naranjo Sandoval’s parents, husband, and siblings.
The two publications were both shortlisted titles from the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, currently on view at Printed Matter. Now in its thirteenth year, the awards recognize excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year.
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Images: Genesis Báez, Crossing Time/Cruzando el tiempo, 2022, from Blue Sun/Sol Azul, 2025; Martha Naranjo Sandoval, from Small Death, 2025
Genesis Báez is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Centering photography, Báez merges fiction, personal narratives, and social histories of modern de/colonization in a conversation around placemaking. Her works foreground the material qualities of photography, such as relative stasis, edges, and light, and how they come to reveal the interconnections that underpin our lives.
Martha Naranjo Sandoval (born in Mexico City, 1989) is a Brooklyn-based visual artist, photographer, publisher, and cataloger. Her work focuses on the family album as a means of creating community around photography. She holds a degree in film from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography and Bard College. In 2023, she presented the solo exhibition The Stench of Orange Blossoms at Miriam Gallery in New York, and in 2024, Flowering Wound at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, as part of its artist-in-residency program. Her monograph Small Death, published by MACK, was shortlisted for the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook First PhotoBook Award. One of her pieces was included in the landmark exhibition The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the founder and director of the editorial project Matarile Ediciones, which publishes work by artists who are immigrants or part of a recent diaspora.
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