Talia Chetrit’s presence on the contemporary map of photography is not defined solely by the dismantling of her own intimacy. Born in 1982, trained in the analog tradition and in a visual thinking acutely aware of its own mechanisms, she has turned the domestic sphere into a territory of suspicion, especially in the series where she grazes—without fully yielding—the experience of motherhood.

The fall edition of The Paris Review features the work of two artists. Martha Bonnie Diamond is one of them. Born in New York in 1944, she died just two years ago, in 2023. She was among the most singular pictorial voices of her generation. For more than six decades she explored the city as a perceptual register. Rendering it recognizable never interested her.

I have a rough idea of where New Zealand is on the map. And I’m quite pleased not to know it with any greater precision; in that vagueness, the place remains slightly mysterious, a little enigmatic. Even there —so far from what we consider the heart of the planet, which is our apartment— events unfold that feel uncannily familiar. My grandmother Jacinta used to say: En tolos sitios cuecen fabes… y dalgunes, hasta les quemen. (Everywhere, the same dramas simmer)

I have always been drawn to the biblical passage in which God asks Moses to stretch out his hand over the sea. He summons a powerful wind from the east, cleaving the waters and opening the path through which the people of Israel will advance.
I look at this image and, after a moment in which I enjoy the analogy, a distant sense of dread overtakes me. Very distant, to be clear; I want to be honest.

By the late nineteenth century, a group of Japanese statesmen had decided they’d had all the shogunate they could reasonably endure. However beautiful the swords and scabbards, it was time to catch up and tune themselves to the rest of the world. Japan had to modernize and find other uses for the wheel. Those visionaries from the domains of Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen...

Many of us love stories about extraterrestrials. Enjoyable, measured, tinged with mystery. For some, though, they become a feverish fixation. They comb the internet the way people once prowled libraries, hunting for hidden messages, for the codes and arcana exchanged in some shadowy dimension—guardians of the secrets.

What could I possibly say today about Wifredo Lam and the exhibition the MoMA has devoted to him? Little that hasn’t already been uttered—successfully or not—by the hundreds of critics and journalists who have read, interpreted, or merely circled around the curatorship of Christophe Cherix (David Rockefeller Director) and Beverly Adams (Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art).

Evelyn Sosa—the Cuban photographer so many of us admire—has been selected as one of the twelve artists participating in No Vacancy Miami Beach 2025, the juried contemporary art program sponsored by the City of Miami Beach during Art Week. Her inclusion in this competition constitutes a significant institutional endorsement...

A few weeks ago, I visited Snakes and Ladders, the endearing exhibition by Sheida Soleimani at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. What struck me most was the meticulous care with which she constructed the settings that would provide a specific frame for the subjects of her photographs. I had the impression that she did not want to leave anything to chance...

It’s not going to happen, of course, but let us imagine that, suddenly, the Egyptian people —not in an Arab spring but in an Arab autumn— decide that their past is shameful, that all its physical evidence, its traces and monuments, must be erased. They rush with torches along the western bank of the Nile —the shore of the dead: Giza, Saqqara, Luxor, Thebes, Abu Simbel— in a near-telluric frenzy of destruction...

In 1992 I was very hungry. Not appetite—hunger. Cuba was enduring what was possibly the darkest year of what the government called the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” That was how President Fidel Castro named it in his televised addresses. For the weight of his words, for the absolute finality of every decision, he could be considered a pharaoh—and in some way, he was...

Day after day, I browse through a handful of publications that, either in their entirety or in their cultural sections, comment on the most significant events within the visual arts. They form the main source of my modest archives. At times I come across striking images that merely illustrate an article; fortunately, when the magazine is a serious one, the caption provides all the essential data. Yet beyond the excellence of the work itself, it’s worth asking, every so often, whether—as illustration—it’s truly a fitting choice.

No one told me. As, in the distance, we begin to make out the white summits of sixty, and while we hurriedly weigh what still lies ahead, we also start to calibrate what we’ve left behind. We turn hypersensitive, and the weight of transience settles comfortably on our shoulders. No one will lift it off. Imagine we have passed ninety and are left only with memory—if it hasn’t been lost along the way—and the counterweight of our legacy. We watch how the most conspicuous thing, the mark we might call our trace...

I ended the previous piece speaking about what has happened to my country after dismantling practically every vestige of its republican past. The revolutionaries abolished even the privately owned shoe-repair shops. They changed names as charming as “La Cenicienta” to Unit 256 for General Shoe Repair. They stripped them of every sign of identity, every trace of belonging. Where there had once been a prudent owner and two, three, or four cobblers, the space was taken over by a director and a deputy director...

I keep in my files an article The New York Times published on June 11, 2020. You’ll recall those were particularly unsettled months. The paper updated it on the 24th, while the protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis—on May 25, 2020, at the hands of a white police officer—were still echoing. The crime—captured on video and broadcast everywhere—unleashed a global wave of outrage against systemic racism and police violence in the United States.