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What You Need to Know: On view through March 9, 2023 at Lehmann Maupin in New York, “Walls, Windows, and Blood” features the premiere of pivotal artist Catherine Opie’s most recent body of work. Taken across Vatican City, the photographs mine its inherent power structures—both literally, through the locale’s architecture, and subliminally, engaging with the Catholic Church’s history and legacy. Contending with the politics of place and how it intersects with ideas around identity, the images tap into the vast, multilayered elements that compose the current moment in human history and explores how physical and social hierarchies are affected. The collection of photographs was taken in the summer of 2021 over a period of six weeks while Opie was working as the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome. Working in the shadow of the pandemic, the Vatican and surrounding areas were emptier than normal, offering Opie unparalleled access and opportunity to shoot.

About the Artist: American photographer Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is most widely recognized for her unflinching, often poignant color portraits that investigate facets of contemporary society through series that focus on specific groups of people—such as LGBTQ+ communities or high school sports players.

Her practice frequently references autobiography, queer culture, and collective experiences, touching on simultaneously personal yet universal themes. Known for pursuing distinct lines of inquiry across multiple series, within “Walls, Windows, and Blood” similar ideas can be traced to other recent bodies of work, such as “Rhetorical Landscapes” from 2019 and “The Modernist” from 2017. While the latter wrestled with concepts around political and global turmoil, and the former incongruities between America as an idealized model and America on the brink, the present series on view also uses a palette of power and identity and their myriad complexities to create new perspectives.

Why We Like It: The intricate, historical architecture that fills the walls of Vatican City operates within Opie’s images almost as a collaborator—working as framing device, compositional structure, and physical metaphor. Aligned with Opie’s longstanding affinity for surveying and investigating power structures and systems, coupled with the comparable emptiness of spaces of life, each image offers observers a contemplative moment to reflect on the specific view or vantage point of the composition, and consider the ways that the built environment and the activity it contains supports and promulgates the power of the Catholic Church and Catholicism. Adding the magnitude of these conceptual endeavors is the ability of Opie to capture the mass and scale of the architecture; many of the images are conveyed through a monumental reproduction process, resulting in photographs that reach upwards of seven feet, taller than most viewers. Incorporating scale internally and in the context of the space in which the image is viewed calls forth another recurring theme in Opie’s practice, that of complexities that can be found not only on the individual level, but societal, cultural, and political as well.

See featured works below.

Catherine Opie, No Apology (June 5, 2021) (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Blood Grid #1 (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #11 (Windows) (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #13 (Walls) (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #10 (Walls) (2023). Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

“Catherine Opie: Walls, Windows, and Blood” is on view At Lehmann Maupin, New York, through March 9, 2024.

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The Natural History Museum UK has announced the winners of the 2023 Wildlife Photographer of The Year awards.

This year’s People’s Choice award is “Ice Bed” by Nima Sarikhani. The stunning image, taken off Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, features a polar bear curled up peacefully, sleeping on a small ice floe drifting in the Arctic Ocean.

Other stunning images include one by Audun Rikarsen, taken in a fjord just outside Tromso, Norway. The image has moon jellyfish in the background below a stunning night sky lit with the aurora borealis.

You can find all the winning images and more here, or check out a video about some of the stunning images below.

(Featured Image credit: Nima Sarikhani, Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

My friend John Nesbitt, who has died aged 77, was one of a small group who designed and built large-format cameras. These cameras slowed down the photographic process and enabled photographers to reconsider and deepen their own practice – in John’s case, his enduring engagement with and understanding of the Welsh landscape, evident in Mutatis Mutandis at the Ffotogallery, Cardiff in 1987. In this exhibition John used multiple exposures on 10 x 8in negatives to explore the ways natural landscape changes with the effects of light, atmosphere and different weathers. The resulting images retain a profoundly haunting quality.

John was born in Carlisle, to Margaret (nee Shadwick) and Emmanuel, known as “Manny”. A couple of years later the family moved to Sunderland, where Manny worked as a buyer for a building firm. John attended Southmoor technical school, Sunderland, where he developed his interest in art, as well as useful skills in metalwork and woodwork. At 16 he left school and went to Sunderland Art School, then in 1964 to Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, which is where I first met him.

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After graduating in 1967, John initially focused on still life and landscape painting, supported by occasional teaching and work in forestry. He married Jan Allen in 1968 and, following the birth of their two sons, Piers and Tom, the family moved in 1971 to mid-Wales, where John turned to photography using a range of camera formats. John and Jan separated in the mid-70s.

Dissatisfied with the limitations of the second-hand 5×4 MPP camera, in 1983 he decided to design and make his own camera, based on the classic cameras made by Gandolfi and Deardorff. Working in a disused blacksmith’s workshop attached to his home in Llanidloes, he built his prototype, initially using an old mahogany table-top from a skip for its body. Subsequently, John ran large-format camera workshops that proved so popular that he teamed up with a fellow photographer, Pete Davis, to run them on a regular basis; they also resulted in orders for around 150 handmade cameras.

In 1985 John’s work featured in a survey of British photography, Image and Exploration: Some Directions in British Photography, 1980-85, at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. A complete portfolio titled The Old Metal Mines of Mid-Wales was purchased by the National Library of Wales in 1995, and in that year John exhibited another landscape portfolio, Whispers, at the Recontres Photographiques en Bretagne, at Galerie Le Lieu in Lorient, on the southern coast of Brittany. In 1996 John held a retrospective of his work at Studio 13, Llanidloes, and began funded work on a series of photographs about the Highland Clearances, under the title The Year of the Burnings.

John married his second wife, Michelle Audurea, in 1991, and six years later they moved to an old farmhouse in the Vendée, western France, which John refurbished. Although he continued to take photographs and exhibit his work, he no longer made cameras. He returned to an earlier passion for Celtic music and began playing the bagpipes he had bought in an antiques shop in Bath in 1966.

He is survived by Michelle, his sons, Piers and Tom, two grandchildren, and his elder brother, George, and two sisters, June (his twin) and Kathleen.

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The Gulags were a repressive system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union that cost the lives of millions of people.

Photographer Barry Lewis arrived in Siberia in 1991 during the glasnost era when the USSR embraced a more open attitude.

Lewis was allowed a rare look at the Gulags in northwest Siberia and captured people who had been broken but ultimately had been lucky to survive. His haunting photos have been collated into a new book.

He captured structures built by the hands of the prisoners who were sometimes incarcerated over something petty like owning a book of forbidden poems.

A simple misdemeanor would result in receiving a life of hard labor which many did not survive.

Lewis was commissioned by Geo Magazine to visit the Gulags during the dying days of the Soviet era. The Gulag system was championed by Joseph Stalin who used it as an instrument of political repression — often sending people there without a trial.

An estimated 18 million people are reported to have been sent to a Gulag from 1930 to 1953 with some two million dying as a direct result of their detention.

After Stalin died in 1953, steps were taken to dismantle the Gulag system with a definitive ending in 1960.

“In 1991, traveling to a Siberian Gulag would have been impossible had it not been for the reforms in the mid-1980s of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Leader of the Soviet Union, with his drive for political and economic restructuring (perestroika) and his call for a new era of transparency and openness (glasnost),” writes Lewis in his new book.

“These five years were full of a heady hope for a new future for the old empire, as the reforms revealed some of the horrors and inefficiencies of its Soviet past”

Lewis says he was lucky to benefit from the short period of openness before the Soviet Union completely collapsed and his new book was brought on by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine when he “felt compelled” to reexamine his old archive of photos from the 1991 Siberia trip.

“Since the invasion of Ukraine, Stalin has undergone a total rebrand by the Russian Government; this was closely linked to a rise in nationalism. Any dissenting voices are ruthlessly suppressed and the return to political imprisonment brings uncomfortable echoes of the old Gulag,” he says.

Gulag: A Journey into the Darkness of Stalin’s Siberian Prison Camps by Barry Lewis is available for pre-order now from Fistful of Books and will begin shipping in March.

Image credits: Photographs by Barry Lewis