In the summer of 2023, I was living in Qaanaaq, Greenland, one of the most northern cities in the world. It’s a tundra: there are no plants, it barely rains and, in the summer months, there are 24 hours of sun. During the night, the weather is calmer and more colourful – by day, it’s hardcore and very bright. This was taken just before midnight. I could hear kids playing tag outside, then they got tired and lay down. I went out and asked if I could take a photo. We have a lot of nostalgia in our culture in Greenland, and this photograph captures that feeling: it is the middle of summer, but it has the look of spring. Greenland in spring is unlike any other place. Since the sun is not visible in the winter, when spring comes it brings life back. That time of total darkness is very spiritual.

The whole town knew I was taking photographs, but the fact that they’re now going be on show at the Danish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale isn’t so interesting to them – it’s too far away. My work has always been about Greenland’s history, traditions and everyday life, such as hunting. I was given permission to take photos with the hunters, but it was difficult to shoot where they work because the ice was melting.

I’d been thinking about going to Qaanaaq for years as my name originates in the town. I wanted to take my name home, to understand its meaning and its spirit. That is how this series Soon Will Summer Be Over began.

Qaanaaq is one of the last places in Greenland to have been colonised by Denmark, in 1937. At that time, they were still living exactly as they had in the old days, a traditional life, with shamans and hunters. We Greenlandic people call ourselves Inuit, which really means human. We use a drum called “the one to take you to different skies”, and when we play it we connect to different worlds and meet other creatures. That is how we understand we are human. It is hard to explain, but this is how Greenlandic people work. Our language is very visual, too.

Photographs come naturally to me. I follow my instincts. To me, a good photo is an honest photo. I work with three different cameras. This was taken with a point and shoot. In the same series, I also worked with a camera from the 1940s, which requires more planning and preparation. When I present my photography, I try to show it in an Inuit way, in terms of how the works are hung and represented, what materials are used, all adapting to the environment. We are very good at adapting to places.

I lived for a time in New York and believed I was going to stay there for many years. But I quickly realised most of the photographs I wanted to take were in Greenland, so I went home and started capturing the Greenlandic lifestyle. When I moved back from New York, where it is so busy and everyone walks very fast, I understood the meaning of walking slowly.

Art culture is a western concept. When we make harpoons and decorate them with depictions of animals, it is not to make them look good – it is because we hope the harpoon will get that animal. A lot of our traditions are about hope. Living in Greenland is not easy – we need a lot of hope!

When people from home see my photographs and feel homesick, that’s a sign they like my work. They feel something familiar in what they see. That is what I want to achieve.

View image in fullscreen

Inuuteq Storch’s CV

Born: Sisimiut, Greenland, 1989
Trained: Self-taught.
Influences: “Everyday life. Qunerseeq Rosing, John Møller, Richard Billingham, Jacob Aue Sobol, my family.”
High point: “Being in east and north Greenland.”
Low point: “The first time I couldn’t take any photos due to being creatively exhausted – I thought I would never be good at taking photos for the rest of my life.”
Top tip: “Be honest and be excited.”

‘It was a revelation that it had stood the test of time’

One of the photos from Carla Williams ’86’s thesis.

Carla Williams

For her senior thesis, Carla Williams ’86 mounted an exhibition of 74 photographic self-portraits. Her adviser Emmet Gowin remembers the show as perhaps the best thesis he advised in his 36 years on the Princeton faculty. “There are images here which are painful, fearful, proud, strong, humorous, sensuous, tender and even faintly frightening,” Gowin wrote in 1986 of the body of work Williams produced in her dorm room — a 1901 Hall single her senior year — with a secondhand Speed Graphic 4×5 camera. 

Williams went on to craft a career as a scholar, teacher, and merchant of photography, but her college work didn’t gain a wider audience until it was published last year as a monograph with the title Tender, which later won the First PhotoBook award at the 2023 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Awards. Shortly after publication last fall, the images were exhibited once again — for the first time since her Princeton thesis show — at Higher Pictures Generation, a gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Williams didn’t take art classes in high school in Los Angeles, where she grew up, but she enjoyed a course in Italian Renaissance art and applied to take a photography course the next semester.

“I had an interview with Emmet,” Williams remembers, “and from the moment I stepped into the basement of 185 Nassau Street, I knew. It was the smell of it, the sound of it. By the time I got to the classroom and office area, I wanted in.”

Williams started making self-portraits in her first photography class, and she initially focused on the genre for practical reasons. “I wanted to learn how to use the large-format viewfinder on the camera,” she says, “so I thought, ‘Let me use myself as a subject until I get up to speed.’”

But there was a deeper rationale for her project. “I was a young Black woman,” she says. “I was curious to see my likeness. I was taking Peter Bunnell’s History of Photography course, and I wasn’t represented in what I was seeing.” 

Williams did take some of the works she studied in the course as models, including Alfred Stieglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Weston’s portraits of female nudes. She says she was also influenced by images of naked women in the collection of Penthouse and Playboy magazines her father kept in their home. 

 “Once she began to take self-portraits, her personhood, her sensibility started to really come out,” Gowin says of Williams. “It was totally uncommon in that era for women to take themselves as the central subject of everything they did. She was able to sustain a level of invention and beauty that’s still astonishing.”   

And, he adds, her “willingness to accept chance and imperfection” in the photographs themselves, “to take what you get and make the most of it, is a really strong characteristic. It made her work more personal.”

Williams earned an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico after graduating from Princeton, but she never marketed her work aggressively. She was uncomfortable with the commercial aspects of the art world, and, she says, “In the early 1990s, Black photographers were only just starting to be shown.”  

Instead, Williams worked as a curator of photography, first at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and then at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. In 2002, she co-authored The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, a foundational work on the topic, with curator and scholar Deborah Willis. Williams taught photography for five years at the Rochester Institute of Technology, but in 2014 she moved to New Orleans to open a store featuring fine and decorative arts by Black artists and designers.

“There was no conscious moment of feeling done” as a photographer, Williams says. “It just wasn’t my focus. At that point I had no plans to pursue photography.”    

After Williams had to close her store at the start of the pandemic, she scanned all of the photographs in her house, created a website, and put some of the images on her store’s Instagram page. One of her customers, the photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya, noticed the self-portraits on Instagram and recommended them to publisher Paul Schiek, who suggested Williams put out a book of her work. 

Through Schiek, Williams was introduced to the gallery Higher Pictures, which proposed restaging Williams’ senior thesis exhibition. “It delighted me that someone else was thinking about the show besides me,” Williams says. “I had my trepidations about some of the images holding up, but I trusted the gallerists.”

Gowin came to the November opening of the show, which was composed mostly of original prints from the thesis exhibition with the same presentation and sequencing. “The first thing we said was that it was better than we had thought,” Williams says. “It was a revelation that it had stood the test of time. I was quite delighted.”

In Justine Kurland’s photographs, shot across the American West, trains silently pass through the picture plane: Burnt red and yellow railroad cars emerge from tree-lined curves, bisect flat plains and disappear into the mouths of tunnels; weathered freight cars yoked together both dot the terrain and demarcate it. The images are inherently steeped in history — the bloody, relentless westward expansion of a nascent country and, today, the vast but aging infrastructure of a world power.

But, from 2005-2011, the locomotives also represented a negotiation between Kurland and her young child, Casper, as he joined her on the road for up to eight months of the year from the time he was a baby. Living out of a van and a camping tent in parks and rural stopovers, Casper became fascinated by the rumbling approach of each train’s procession. He often led her to the scenes in her photos, Kurland told CNN. In her images, his hair is often windblown, his gaze fixed on the blurred passing cars.

“Casper loved trains, and if I was going to schlep him on these road trips, it made sense that I would then incorporate trains into the photographs that I was making,” she said in a video call with CNN.

For a long time, Kurland didn’t show the work she had made as they traveled together, except for a handful of images of Casper in “Highway Kind,” her 2016 book that pieced together multiple bodies of work she had shot on the road to better understand American mythologies.

Across her three-decade career, Kurland has frequently photographed people on the fringes of society, staging scenes of runaway girls and documenting communes, transient lifestyles and spiritual experiences. But she’d never shown portraits of herself, and for a long time the idea of presenting an entire monograph on her son seemed too “sentimental,” she explained.

Though even at the time, she knew there “something significant enough about our life on the road that I needed to document,” Kurland noted, “I just hid those photos away.”

A nomadic family portrait

In the years since, however, Kurland has gained perspective on the resonance of their images and journeys together. It is rare to think of a traditional family unit as a nomadic mother and child, and rarer, still, to make family images that don’t sit in nostalgia, or mark all the little triumphs of boyhood. Kurland and Casper are, instead, often solitary figures, even together, with their own inner lives. They set out West in a tradition mythologized by men, from explorers to photographers and writers.

“What’s important in thinking about these pictures… is to (consider) what a family album could look like, that doesn’t look like the way we think of motherhood,” she said.

The photos that make up “This Train,” newly-published by Mack Books, are presented as a duality. In the book, accordion-style pages pull out, following the pair’s life on the road: On one side, Kurland prepares a meal at a fold-out table while Casper looks out over the firepit; Casper holds a hollowed lost tooth in palm of his hand. On the reverse, the series of trains weave in and out of the American landscape. Some were taken by Casper, in fact, clicking the shutter for his mom, as he and Kurland discussed in a conversation published in Aperture in 2016.

“Sometimes we would wait so long,” Kurland told him of their patience for trains to appear. “Sometimes we would wait all day.”

Embedded histories

Kurland calls the book “a love letter to Casper,” who is now 19 years old, but also “an acknowledgement that his life wasn’t so easy.” Though for years he thought his life was normal — that other mothers at highway rest stops were photographers with their kids, too — he had a hard time adjusting to school when she enrolled him as a six-year-old, she said.

“There’s certain kinds of ideas of normalcy (in) family life that, when you divert… it makes things significantly more complicated,” Kurland said.

Living off irregular paychecks, Kurland and Casper would sometimes have to “hunker down” at campsites until a deposit came through.

“There were really harrowing times on the road… we’d have to sleep in a garage, and I was making macaroni and cheese on a Bunsen burner for Casper because we had to wait until the mechanic had fixed my 10-year-old van with like 250,000 miles on it,” she said.

In 2008, when the recession hit, Kurland took a teaching job that provided a steadier income, and reduced her road trips to summer and winter breaks. Casper’s father had become more involved in his life by that point, she noted — and after he turned 11, Casper asked to stop traveling entirely.

As “This Train” details, as much as the book is about their relationship, there’s other darker narratives implicit in Kurland’s images. The rail system symbolizes the markings of colonial settlers on the land — the forced migration and demise of Indigenous populations, as well as the deaths of some 1,200 Chinese immigrants who laid the tracks, the latter of which the scholar Lily Cho addresses in an essay for the book. In that way, Kurland’s reverse images of lone trains have a spectral presence, tracing and retracing the same pathways of the dead who built them.

“If I’m pointing my camera at the trains because Casper loves them, I’m still also pointing at the history embedded in the landscape of those trains,” Kurland said. Fifteen years later, she explained, she looks at the images from a more “critical distance,” she explained, one that deeply considers the landscapes’ significance in US history.

Her interpretations — and those of viewers — will likely keep shifting, she acknowledges, just like any other photograph seen by different people over a period of time. “The thing that’s beautiful about every photograph is that they get to change,” she said. “They don’t have fixed meaning; no photograph does.”

Actress Hannah Waddingham helped set the world right on the red carpet when she told off a photographer for asking her to show a bit more leg. Waddingham, known for her roles in Ted Lasso and Game of Thrones, was attending the Olivier Awards when the incident happened.

Waddingham was hosting the award ceremony in London and stopped to pose for photographs on the way into the Royal Albert Hall. Fans captured the moment on video, and it quickly went viral, sparking a debate about what’s appropriate behaviour.

“Oh my god, you’d never say that to a man, my friend,” she said. She told the photographer she would move away if they insisted on such requests, adding: “Don’t say ‘show me your leg.’”

Waddingham walked on, turning back to mutter, “Have some manners”.

The incident has sparked a conversation about whether the media is still sexist. Certainly, many people have applauded Waddingham for asserting her boundaries.

Critics have viewed the request from the photographer as symptomatic of the industry as a whole, with it still being very male-dominated. It is indisputable that the male gaze (albeit cis-het) is generally different to that of a female or LGBTG+.

But is that necessarily wrong? I believe that Hannah is correct when she said that the photographer would never ask that question to a man. But, at the same time, are the men on the red carpet wearing fabulous ball gowns with thigh-high slits and copious amounts of cleavage on display?

I think what it boils down to are two things. If Waddingham felt uncomfortable by the comment, she was correct to assert her boundaries and refuse. However, she should also understand that this sort of peacocking behaviour does go with the job to a degree.

Secondly, it is evident that we need a wider range of people working in the media—actually, working in all industries, if I’m being honest. That is the only way that any meaningful change will happen, and general sexist attitudes will move further out of fashion.

What do you think? Was she making a valid point?