McCartney’s studio is testament to her varied and visually alert career. Tucked away on a quiet cobbled mews in West London, its three floors combine all of the practical needs of a working environment – office space, shoot backdrops, an extensive range of herbal teas – with the white-washed atmosphere of a gallery.

The space is festooned with McCartney’s images: some in a state of completion, printed at huge scale, others attached to a large silver board with magnets, covered in felt tip notes. A monobrowed Tracey Emin (as Frida Kahlo) stares down from one wall. Mark Rylance dressed as Olivia from Twelfth Night from another. Celebrities face off frogs and white horses, reigning over the neatly arranged piles of contact sheets and books. On the floor, a photo of neon lights has been turned into a rug.

“When I first came here, it was all offices,” McCartney explains. “I just stripped it out… It’s nice to have it quite clean.” We are sitting at a huge round, wooden table that used to belong to McCartney’s mother, Linda. To one side, a bank of windows reveals a bright-ish winter day – all that glass crucial for a photographer who prefers to work with natural light. In the background members of her team drift up and down the stairs.

McCartney has been here for more than two decades, using it as a hub for photographing, post-production, exhibition organisation, ideas generation, and more. For her most recent publication – a plant-based cookbook-cum-portrait project called Feeding Creativity in which she captured figures including the Haim sisters and David Hockney eating her meals – she had two large armchairs installed near the kitchen so that she had somewhere comfortable to sit and write. 

“It became my friend. What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera”

The table is not the only thing McCartney has inherited from her mother. Also a photographer, Linda McCartney was responsible for providing Mary with her very first camera, a Leica R7. After grappling with the challenges of shutter speeds and light meters, it quickly offered a new window onto the world, travelling everywhere with her. “It became my friend,” McCartney says. “What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera.”

In her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, Virginia Woolf dwelled on the pleasures of walking through London. She describes the process of becoming extra-observant, distilled to “a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” For McCartney, the camera crystallised a similar feeling – preserving and making concrete the fleeting details she had been noticing since childhood. “It can be this big scene, but you see one little flower or something within it and it then seems like a photograph.”

As an ambassador, McCartney works frequently with Leica cameras, whether an SL for “all singing, all dancing” projects that might end up on a billboard, or the Q “if you’re out and about, or at a party.” She also has “a little compact Leica” which fits in her bag – another portable eye.

This range of models speaks to the breadth of her work, spanning portraiture, fashion, landscape, and documentary (both static and film), as well as more commercial endeavours. A particular light comes into her eyes when discussing portraiture: the delicacy of creating a rapport, knowing when to speak and when to be silent, the skills both personal and technical that go into reaching something “deeper than surface level.”

“If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy”

Some of McCartney’s portraits are made here in the studio. “If I’m shooting here… it pares it all back,” she observes. “It’s really about the pose, the connection, how you’re feeling with the person. There’s less space to hide.” Really though, one suspects that she is happiest out and about where her gaze can rove.

“I love going into somebody’s environment,” she confirms, explaining her interest in what people’s possessions and personal clutter betray about them, “like how Pre-Raphaelite painters would have little symbols.” She references a 1996 photo of hers titled ‘Mum’s Side of the Bed’, a patch of sunlight falling across beautifully embroidered duvet and pillows. “If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy.”

This image is currently sitting as a sizable print on the ground floor, resting against the bookshelves. It is magnificent up close, the scale revealing every wrinkle and stitch. It was recently featured in her 2023 Sotheby’s show Can We Have a Moment?, part of a trilogy of solo exhibitions that began at the Château La Coste in France and ended at A Hug From the Art World in New York last November.

Each taking a different theme, this trilogy gave McCartney free reign to revisit her archives from the past three decades, drawing new threads between her intimate, playful images – family portraits, rubbing shoulders with snogging couples, muddy festival-goers, fleshy roses, and performers readying themselves backstage.

The pleasure of a photograph is not just in the taking, but in its continued afterlife. McCartney’s studio points to the ongoing physicality of a photograph, whether it is a question of tweaking colours and rebalancing shadows or drawing out fresh details in the chosen scale and opacity of a print. In an exhibition setting, too, new conversations can be created as disparate images speak to one another across time and genre.

Towards the end of our conversation, McCartney brings up a fortuitous encounter she had with Magnum photographer Eve Arnold in the 1990s while overseeing a show of Linda’s work in a museum in Bradford. Arnold was working on her own in an adjacent gallery. “She was incredible… She looked like the lady in the [Looney Toons] Tweety bird cartoons. But then when you observed her hanging the show, she knew exactly what she wanted. She was very direct, feisty in a really good way.”

“Take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

The two got to know one another and McCartney learned an important lesson from this woman who had coaxed extraordinary candour from the famous: that the subject should always come first. “She had so much trust with her sitters,” McCartney reflects. Sometimes the perfect image might arrange itself in front of the camera as if conjured – but if it ruptures that sense of trust, it is not worth it. This sort of mutuality seems to define McCartney’s work, which often has a grounded, contemplative edge, full of quiet warmth. Really, it is very simple, she says. When you lift a camera, you “take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

Images taken by Alice Zoo with Leica’s SL2-S, with 35mm, 50mm, and 90mm lenses

These conceptual musings have led to some of his best-known works. Theaters, for example, emerged out of a “near-hallucinatory vision” – an “internal question-and-answer” beginning with “What if I photographed an entire movie?” The result is a series of more than 100 large format photographs of empty theatres, their architectural details illuminated by gleaming white screens. These images, along with key works from all of the 75-year-old’s major photographic series, will be displayed in his largest retrospective to date, opening this week at London’s Hayward Gallery.

Sugimoto thinks of himself as a conceptual artist, stating that “I use photography as a tool”. His work, which spans 50 years, meditates on existential themes such as mortality, truth and the passage of time. In Diorama, he photographs displays of stuffed animals in natural history museums, eerily blurring the border between reality and fiction. Seascapes raises metaphysical questions, presenting horizons from around the world. Another major series, Portraits, includes images of wax figures at Madame Tussauds, which invite us to consider our perception of truth, while Lighting Fields is a study of static electricity rooted in his fascination with the history of photography.

Sugimoto’s references are vast, spanning art history, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and physics. “The collection of historical objects is a very important source for me to study the passage of time, the history of human consciousness and how the human mind was born,” he says. Photography is Sugimoto’s “visual statement” – a means to express his ideas. But his preoccupation with ancient objects has also fed into his architectural work, a more recent arm of his practice. In 2008 he co-founded a firm, New Material Research Laboratory, with architect Tomoyuki Sakakida. The name is intentionally ironic; their ethos is reinterpreting forgotten materials and techniques from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.

This strand of Sugimoto’s work is interesting because in relation to time, photography and architecture feel inherently different. Photography relies on impermanence, capturing a fragment of time that will never be again. Architecture, on the other hand, does not stop or capture time – rather, time moves around it. How do these two practices align for Sugimoto? “The consciousness of space,” he says. “Designing a space is the same as composition in photography. You need to have a sophisticated sense of space.”

In fact, the passage of time is a key factor in Sugimoto’s conceptualisation of physical spaces too, especially the Odawara Art Foundation, which he describes as “the last piece of my art”. Established in 2009, Sugimoto’s foundation is located around an hour outside Tokyo, nestled in the mountains of Hakone and overlooking Sagami Bay. Parts of the grounds are still under construction (it is due to be finished in around three years) but at its core is the Enoura Observatory, completed in 2017. The complex includes a 100-metre-long gallery, an observation deck, a tea house, and a restored stone gate from the Muromachi period (1338–1573).

“Designing a space is the same as composition in photography. You need to have a sophisticated sense of space”

Sugimoto the photographer is a master of light, and as an architect, he is no different. The gallery is oriented to frame the sun on the summer solstice, while the deck is angled to capture the winter solstice. Sugimoto likes to imagine future alien civilisations stumbling upon these human ruins, and this played an integral role in his design. In the gallery, the optical glass windows will eventually smash, and its roof will crumble. If it all goes to plan, in around 5000 years the complex will be complete – “a beautiful ruin” like a pyramid or the Parthenon.

Sugimoto’s second studio space, a penthouse apartment, is where he keeps sculptures, makes architectural sketches, and develops images. As you would expect, it is spacious, minimalist and pristine. Sugimoto picks up a music box, handmade out of a rusting rice- cracker tin. Winding through an aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, he sings jovially, pacing the wooden floors and gazing toward the glittering Tokyo skyline. The scene is surreal, but it is in no way surprising. Sugimoto has spent most of his life cultivating atmospheres with unexpected but insightful references. If it all goes to plan, his insights will endure, passed on to future civilisations who will discover enigmas in the ruins of his art.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is at the Hayward Gallery, London, from 11 October until 7 January 2024

“I make work every single day,” Koenning says. “I make multiple projects at the same time, and I would describe what I do as a web of projects that are interconnected and overlapping.” From the stacks of boxes of negatives and prints – carefully stored, catalogued and organised – one can assume that Koenning is what might be called an ‘obsessive image-maker’. Hers is a healthy, daily practice of photography, just as running or yoga might be for others.

We pass the morning chatting over multiple cups of tea, then continue through lunch. The word that we keep returning to in our conversation is ‘community’. Not only are community and interconnectedness a key dynamic of Koenning’s work, defining how she approaches almost all her projects, they are also fundamental to the way she operates day to day. Moving to Melbourne from Brisbane well over a decade ago, and before that from the Ruhr region of Germany, Koenning has built and nurtured multiple networks for herself in different parts of the world. Over 10 years, Koenning has immersed herself in education, teaching at universities in Australia, and engaging with workshops and masterclasses supporting young photographers in the Asia-Pacific region. She has been a regular at Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia over many years, offering her time to lead workshops for emerging Asian photographers. She has done similar work and mentored young photographers for Photo Kathmandu (Nepal), Myanmar Deitta (Myanmar) and The Lighthouse (India). This October she is running her first workshop in Europe at Palm Tree Workshops Space (Greece), following Jason Fulford, Mark Power, David Campany and Max Pinckers.

“I often return to run workshops at the same places over and over again, I form strong bonds,” Koenning says. “Much like my image-making, I love returning to things and revisiting them. I very easily fall in love with places, things and people, and then have no choice but to return.” One of her newest projects, still in progress, is based in a small, regional town located six hours’ drive from Melbourne, which Koenning has been visiting regularly since December 2020. “Robinvale became a place of interest to me through research,” she explains. “I was reading a lot about what it means to live rurally or remotely, and I became interested in communities that live out of the spotlight.”

“I make work every single day. I make multiple projects at the same time, and I would describe what I do as a web of projects that are interconnected and overlapping”

Due to a seasonal farming industry, Robinvale’s population is one of the most diverse in Australia. Located on the Murray River (Australia’s longest), the town is at a confluence point of five different Indigenous language groups with a strong First Nations presence. This new work has seen Koenning build connections and unexpected bonds with the people she has met. She has even been accepted as an unofficial town chronicler, invited to all the town’s events, and to family parties and gatherings. This has, like her other projects, allowed her to delve deeper and to start to tap into the complexity of stories that exist in Robinvale. Its history is plagued by the legacy of colonisation and settler stories and traces of dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Today, contemporary narratives are formed by new international migrants, and other issues such as drought, the environment, and more broadly, how humans live together in and build community. “Robinvale came unexpectedly into my life, and has changed me,” Koenning says.

The photographer’s work is currently on show in the massive Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), which features over 200 artists and runs until 20 August 2023. The featured series, titled while the mountains had feet and curated by NGV’s Maggie Finch, is partly extracted from a large body of work titled between the river and the sea, which she began at the end of 2019 as a response to a number of traumatic experiences, including the devastating bushfires and the death of a loved one. As she made the work, it evolved and became about processing melancholy and lightness, intimacy and grief, and exploring community, geography, walking, similarity and difference, and witnessing over time. The photographs exhibited at NGV are taken from four different projects. “I call them ‘migrant pieces’,” Koenning explains. “I was interested in exploring a constellation on the wall, creating a dialogic space that enables a fellowship of images.”

The result is a fluid presentation echoing Koenning’s artistic process. It is about accessing and delving into different stories, and working simultaneously across fragments and multiplicities that ultimately find connection. “I’ve always been really interested in clustering, layering and reassembling,” she reflects. “As Teju Cole says: ‘Artists have a duty to be weavers and repairers of stories’.”

katrinkoenning.com

Over the course of a year, Paglen – known for creating works that interrogate the often-invisible networks and infrastructures that govern our lives – estimates that he is in Berlin for about one and a half weeks a month. He divides the rest of his time between New York City, where he officially lives, and producing projects in the field – often in the deserts of California, Nevada and New Mexico. As such, he collaborates with people around the world and maintains a small studio in Brooklyn, as well as what he calls a “depot” in California: a van loaded with equipment that he stores on his father’s ranch. “I usually fly in there and can drive wherever [I need to go to shoot],” he says.

When he is in Berlin, “we’re usually pretty hardcore [at work] on a project or multiple projects,” Paglen explains. He sleeps in the private room on the top floor of the studio, and works seven days a week. “I’ll get up, get a cup of coffee, and get right to it,” he says. “I try to get out for an hour or two to go to the gym, but I’m usually working pretty late.” Indeed, his days in Berlin start at around 10am and finish 12 or 13 hours later, “because California [where some collaborators live] doesn’t really wake up until it’s 6 or 7pm [here]”. He works on the weekends, “because I can do more focused work, more of the intellectual work then”. When speaking, Paglen shows no signs of self-pity for the heavy workload; his energy and affability make it clear that he loves what he does, and he is totally committed to the process, no matter how intense it might be.

“I like to live with something before I put it out [into the world]. I want to see if it continues to hold my interest. Especially for an artwork that somebody might buy and live with, I want to make sure that I want to live with it before suggesting that someone else might want to.” 

Testing, testing

Paglen’s photographs and films are primarily shot elsewhere in the world, but Berlin is where his ideas germinate and artworks take their early shapes. “The crux of [what we do here] is pre- and post-production,” he says. “Figuring out what we want to make, and then figuring out the plan for the project.” It is in Berlin, in collaboration with his team – Daniel, his studio director and cinematographer; Eilis, a photo editor; and Leif, a programmer and software engineer – that Paglen tests his ideas to see if they can be realised and turned into fully fledged artworks.

Previously, such ideas have included launching an ultra-archival disk containing 100 photographs into space. Titled The Last Pictures (2012), the project is memorialised via a miniature replica of the rocket that took the artefact into space, sitting atop a bookshelf in the common area upstairs. On the opposite end of the shelf – which is dedicated entirely to a smattering of objects related to projects past and present, each of which Paglen patiently explains with a healthy mixture of excitement and earnestness – is a small turquoise glass cube, a proof of concept for his installation Trinity Cube (2015) in Japan. “It was a commission to make a public artwork for the exclusion zone around Fukushima,” he explains. Paglen wanted to create a giant glass cube made from broken and irradiated glass. This was collected from the exclusion zone and fused together with Trinitite, a glassy mineral formed out of sand in New Mexico when the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. He tested the idea back in Berlin: “It was, like, ‘What happens when you fuse a bunch of glass together that is broken and that we just kind of found?’,” he recalls. When the test succeeded – resulting in the cube now on the bookshelf – the project could go into full-scale production.

“Projects are always ongoing.”

There are four desks in the production room on the ground floor. Three hold computers while the other is cluttered with various materials, such as a lightbox, cutting mats, scissors and glue, along with a partially deconstructed Autonomy Cube in need of repair. Metal shelving units are stacked high with transparent plastic boxes holding everything from external hard drives, power strips and cables to 35mm lenses, GoPros, webcams, and LED tools. One wall is covered in a webbed network of research and reference images, while another hosts a large-scale print of a work-in-progress, part of a new project that will be unveiled in May at Pace gallery in New York.

Among the wall of references are small images of undersea cables, phrenology diagrams, and portraits commonly used in AI training sets. Each of these clusters allude to photographic series that were previously exhibited. Although he is not actively producing anything in relation to these at the moment, their continued presence is indicative of Paglen’s overarching workflow: “I’m never like, ‘Here’s the series, these are the dates, and now it’s done’,” he says. “Projects are always ongoing.”

paglen.studio

The family moved to Todmorden four years ago, but Preston has been living in north England for nearly two decades. She was born in Henan Province to a family of doctors. Following in their footsteps, she gained a BA in clinical medicine at Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1999 and qualified as an anaesthetist soon after. It was in 2005 that she packed it all in to pursue photography, and moved to the UK. Since then, Preston has developed a research-led practice through which she explores nature and landscape to investigate cultural and national identity, migration and societal relations. Her first major project, Mother River (2010–2014) traced the Yangtze River to its source, photographing the surrounding environment at 100-metre intervals on a large format camera to gain an intimate understanding of contemporary China. For Forest (2010–2017), Preston investigated the journeys of ancient trees as they were uprooted and transplanted into urban environments, and the complexities behind that industry. In 2020, her focus turned to the UK. For one year, she walked to the same rhododendron bush in the south Pennines every other day. Preston became fascinated by the idea that the plant is a non-native, invasive species. She uses it as a metaphor to discuss post-colonialism and identity, giving it the title With Love. From an Invader (2020–2021).

Selected prints from these past works decorate Preston’s studio walls. In the corner, two boxfuls of dusty pink stones, polished by the Yangtze River in Chongqing, remind her of her journey so far. The studio also houses Preston’s newest “collections”. Just as she did when she was a little girl, Preston fervently gathers anything that might inspire a future project. My eye darts around the space. There is a box of dried rhododendron petals; another filled with sheep’s wool gathered from surrounding fields. There is also a crate of fluffy white cotton. She plucks a tuft from each box and rolls the fibres in her hands. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these yet,” she remarks. Sculptural tree branches rest on the table at the back, next to a shelf stacked with grasses and dried plants. Some of these are arranged on another table under two studio lights, where Preston has been experimenting with still life. “Working with organic materials is exciting because you have to go with them or they just go off,” she says. “There’s only so much planning you can do, and I like the intuitive side of things.” Outside is a pile of tree trunks and a tangle of witch hazel cut from the garden. There is even an empty bird’s nest on the counter by the sink and a crumpled pile of metallic blue and pink balloons. “I drag things in…” she says.

“I started by cutting the world open, I ended up cutting myself open… Cutting myself open really means to become self-aware.”

Preston’s process has evolved from strict, self-imposed parameters to a much deeper intention to connect with nature, where she lets the subject lead. “Nature has always been there, but what I’m doing now is closer to botanical studies, with art and nature together,” she says.

The compulsive habit of collecting materials from the environment, and working with them in her studio, is key for her ongoing project, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. For Autumn, Preston gathered the fallen leaves of a rhododendron bush, arranged them in neat formation and photographed them in sections. They are layered and printed in Shanghai on a six-metre-long silk scroll. Preston wears white gloves as she unpacks it from a fine, embroidered, green silk box with traditional Chinese clasps. As we unroll it, handling it slowly and delicately, like the wing of a butterfly, we move through a medley of browns, maroons, burnt oranges and lime greens. The fine silk is almost translucent.

There is also a book, a hefty tome. The cover brandishes a tiny glass capsule housing a single rhododendron flower bud. “They are aborted flower buds,” Preston explains. She found 75 in total, and photographed each one as she opened them. I leaf through the life-sized prints. At the end, a sentence reads: “I started by cutting the world open, I ended up cutting myself open.” After dedicating so much time to the pieces, picking, ruminating, picturing and printing, alone with her thoughts, the work became somewhat cathartic. ”Cutting myself open really means to become self-aware,” says Preston. “[I gained an understanding of] the reality that we live in; that yes, I can be a strong woman, but I’m still in a system.”

“I’m trained here [in the UK] as an artist, but my medical training is coming through too. It’s the first time I’ve embraced myself. It’s taken so long.”

This time last year, Preston worked on Winter. She gathered the rhododendron seedlings from a smaller bush and arranged them in a circle on the wintry ground. She set them on fire then photographed them in large format. The images capture a near-spiritual moment as the flames danced around the snow. It was ultimately an experiment – “the snow came again and half buried the seeds. It finished [the piece] for me,” says Preston, gazing at the series of 12 images taped to a section of the studio wall. “I learned so much from this. Opening up, working with nature rather than on it. The performative side of my work has always been there, but it was suppressed. Now it’s completely out, that’s the way I like to work.”

One particular work dominates the room. A human-sized image of a pile of crinkled petals collected over three months from a smaller rhododendron bush. They are arranged in a slim oval shape, in colours that oscillate between amber, maroon and pink. The paper is cut down the middle and sutured together, like surgical stitching, with black thread. “It scares me because it’s so violent,” Preston says. “This is the piece that is most challenging for me. I’ve done so many tests on different materials.” Speaking of Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, to which this last piece also belongs, Preston muses that this is her first “mature” body of work. “It’s the first piece where I am really bringing back my Chinese heritage,” she says. “It started with the long scroll. Then the shape of the fire – the circle within a square – is a very traditional Chinese composition. Then I started working with the suture stitch. I’m trained here [in the UK] as an artist, but my medical training is coming through too. It’s the first time I’ve embraced myself. It’s taken so long.”

Preston offers us scones and we drink builder’s tea under a picture of the late Queen. Opposite, postcard-sized traditional Chinese drawings and yellow Post-it notes adorned with English and Chinese scribbles are stuck to the pillar. Preston is also working on a project with the working title of English Garden, exploring the concept of a garden that is full of non-English flowers; more “non-native invasive species,” she says. Her face is animated as she describes her plans; she is brimming with ideas for future projects that will take her back to China for the first time since before the pandemic. Embracing her heritage, her identity and her past, Preston is heading into the year open and aware. 

yanwangpreston.com

Mixing it up

Hailing from South Africa, Matloga initially came to Amsterdam strictly to paint. But during a two-year stint at De Ateliers, an intensive postgraduate residency programme, he decided to switch mediums. “I felt like oil painting was something I needed to understand scientifically; it seemed too sophisticated,” he recalls. “I needed to resurrect a sense of rawness.” Experiments with charcoal line drawings followed, as did trials with ink, which offered his works a visceral fluidity. Both are combined with cut-out, collaged photographs – sourced primarily from magazines or newspapers, and printed with varying degrees of sharpness, contrast and opacity. “With painting, it wouldn’t make sense to render everything in the same way, so mixing it up gives some vibrations to the work. It makes these paintings beautiful ugly things!”

Matloga describes what his works depict as “socially confirmed scenes”: of everyday domestic life, Black joy, of people sharing a coffee, families listening to music, gossiping, dancing, of couples kissing or courting. Each work draws inspiration from a vast range of sources – be it the artist’s childhood memories, his dreams and travels, or perhaps another artwork, a newspaper article, a story or a recent conversation. The universality of these scenes is enhanced by Matloga’s application of photo collage. Gathering and reworking people from print publications, family albums, video stills and newspapers, the social status of his human subjects dissolves on canvas; hierarchies are flattened as the faces of friends, celebrities, family members and politicians merge.

“ With painting, it wouldn’t make sense to render everything in the same way, so mixing it up gives some vibrations to the work. It makes these paintings beautiful ugly things”

When discussing his practice, Matloga foregrounds the significance of formal elements – materiality, composition, structure. These same concerns shape his interests in the work of other artists, from the ‘painterly layers’ of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to Lubaina Himid’s festive, theatre-inspired scenes: “I guess I tend to appreciate the work before going into the whys,” he muses. Like Himid, Matloga describes his working process as akin to staging a theatre piece: “You need some lighting, some props, a stage, a cast… it’s like putting all those theatrical elements together in a box.” Where many artists choose to work in splendid isolation, free from the weight of external references, Matloga exhibits an openness for creative exchange. Incidentally, the very pieces we see hanging in his studio – their protagonists’ eyes gazing back at us – are destined for a show in Antwerp, to be set in dialogue with works by the late Paula Rego.

The notion of home is another central aspect of Matloga’s work. The treasured objects that surround his characters are the kind of keepsakes “that make a house a home”. The artist lights up visibly at the mention of Limpopo, the South African province where his former family home has become a second studio – offering an escape from miserable Dutch winters. “I have goosebumps just talking about it,” he says, “because that’s where the spark is for my work.” In the time he spends there, a gentler rhythm takes over, while the dual obligations of family and village life become a direct source of inspiration; tight-knit communities are always a “good place for thinking about human behaviour”, a far cry from the lonely individualism of northern Europe.

During our exchanges, Matloga is notably hesitant to dissect his work’s politics – and it is easy to understand why. Portrayals of Blackness, however universal, are interpreted far too readily through this lens; in some way, Matloga’s work proffers a refreshing counter-image to many such charged narratives. But in his fixation on home, quiet political undertones do surface, without ever being floodlit. In the years of apartheid, and after its dissolution, any house was an invaluable safe space; a place of retreat from the turbulent world outside, where private dramas displaced broader social crises. “The home was where people could let loose and speak about literally everything,” he explains. “Whether it was the new political announcement on the radio or the latest gossip from down the street, home became the pulse of everything that was happening. To this day, it still is.”

The longer I spend at Matloga’s studio, the more I observe the finer details – distinguishing rigid brushstrokes from softer charcoal finger-markings. I ponder the inner worlds of his collaged characters, and realise that his palette, though restrained, is far from monochromatic. Shades of brown, stone and deep purple linger next to black and white. With photographs taken and artworks discussed, the visit concludes with a gossip of our own. We talk over tea and macarons, exchanging stories of art, work and life in the city. Later, Matloga’s record player whirs into life. It is a humble yet communal scene, befitting of the canvases looming over us.

neomatloga.com

The idea for Broken Spectre began during a much-needed break. It followed the frenetic filming and release of his works The Enclave (2013) – an examination of wartorn Democratic Republic of the Congo that premiered at the Irish Pavilion in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 – and Incoming (2014–2017), which investigated the refugee crisis in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. It was an “intense and long period of making demanding works that required travel and witnessing disturbing or distressing things,” he says. 

While travelling through the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador and Peru, Mosse began conceptualising a personal photographic series of nocturnal flowers, an “eccentric” but serene subject. When he eventually released the work, Ultra, “people were confused about it,” he says. “Fair enough, because it’s so off-kilter with the rest of my practice… But during that time in the rainforest I couldn’t help but absorb the fact that there was this exponential burning of the Amazon.” 

In the new film – which premiers at 180 The Strand in London next week, with an accompanying photobook published by Loose Joints – Mosse explores the impact of resource extraction and deforestation in the Amazon. He captures the ravaged landscape and those on the “frontlines” of the ecocide – from ranchers and politicians perpetuating the issue to Indigenous tribes suffering from the encroachment on their lands. “Extractive violence against the non-human, climate change and human displacement are all interlocking conflicts,” he says. “Climate change is one of the hardest topics to represent because it’s so vast and beyond human perception. The project could have focused on the melting polar caps in Greenland, or the shifting of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic, but the Amazon rainforest is distinct in that the destruction is being very wilfully carried out in the present moment.”

Mosse closes two skylights, and screens the 72-minute multi-channel film on the walls of the studio. The work envelopes the space and all the specialised tools used to create it. Like his previous projects, the film employs infrared technology to infuse its landscapes and subjects with psychedelic purple and pink hues, although some of the starker scenes are presented uncharacteristically in black-and-white. The custom camera he designed for the project brightly captures the scar tissue of the ecological war in the Amazon. It was attached to a helicopter and uses nuanced multispectrum technology, which has the ability to capture light from frequencies beyond the light ranges visible to the human eye. Scientists use it to gather data in space, but usually with 10 or 18 bands of sensors.

“They’re each capturing a narrow bandwidth of spectral reflective data, of reflected light,” Mosse explains. His team wanted to shoot at 20 times dilution to capture more detail, which meant they needed to process it 20 times slower. “It is quite hard to find a black-and-white motion picture film processor professionally, since there are very few labs offering the service and none of them would do it at 20 times slower,” he says, “so we decided to develop our own device.”

Mosse considers this new work his first outwardly “activist” project, having previously rejected the categorisation. He envisions Broken Spectre as a trilogy examining war zones and the violence of resource extraction. The film includes an unscripted monologue from a Yanomami woman named Adnea calling for the reinforcement of protection of demarcated lands. The team gained access to her after extensive searching that often seemed to lead nowhere. “It’s evident from the platform that we give Adnea in the film; she’s very much the author and confronts us, the photographers and the viewers, in a very direct way, giving us the feeling of complicity in the situation, and asking who will help solve the problem,” he says.

“The only way to change the world is through activism, but I was cagey about this categorisation of my work in the past because I thought about Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on art and autonomy – the autonomous artwork versus the work of agitprop or propaganda – and how an autonomous artwork can be instrumentalised,” he says. “I was coming from that school of thinking and I don’t see artwork in the same instrumentalised way. Ultimately it’s not about conscience, it’s about consciousness. It’s about shifting perception rather than telling people what to think. And I think a lot of people would agree with me there.” 

The work draws its inspiration from a 1955 memoir by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Based on travels that took place beginning in the mid 1930s, the travelogue primarily focuses on his reflections on the rapid destruction of the Brazilian Amazon and the impact of deforestation on its Indigenous inhabitants, and poignantly forewarns of the state of the rainforest today. “His travels around Brazil at that time were very specific and it just so happened that those were exactly the routes that I took – bizarrely, unwittingly, from Cuiabá to the route of General Rondon’s telegraph line, which was a slightly absurd or surreal symbol of modernity

leading into the heart of the rainforest when Lévi-Strauss was there,” Mosse says. “I suppose the reason I wanted to allude to this work is not only because it’s such an extraordinary book but because I had this fantasy in my mind: what if Lévi-Strauss were able to follow me and essentially retrace his path from years before? He would be even sadder if he was able to see the march of development today.”

Broken Spectre by Richard Mosse will be on show at 180 the Strand from 12 October until 04 December 2022.

The accompanying photobook is published by Loose Joints.

His current cavernous space isn’t Geeting’s first studio. The 33-year-old moved from his hometown in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 2007 to study at the School of Visual Arts, New York – “The Big Apple!” he says, impersonating a thick New York accent. After graduating, he rented a smaller space in Bushwick (a neighbourhood south of Greenpoint). “I remember shooting a lookbook in there, and I literally had to be out the door and across the hall to get the model’s full body in the frame,” he recalls. 

Although it was small, this initial space was instrumental in his development as an artist because it allowed for experimentation that was not possible at home. It wasn’t just the delineation of space either, but what surrounded it. They had a good selection of objects at Bushwick’s dollar stores. With minimal financial investment, he could source bits of junk and paraphernalia, make some fun shapes, and post it to Tumblr – a platform through which he nurtured a burgeoning following. 

“I felt like if I had a studio, I could make work that was more challenging. Messier, in every sense of the word”

David Brandon Geeting

His work caught the eye of photo editors, and Geeting quickly grew out of the space. He realised he could make increased income somewhere larger: more room allowed for more chaos. “It’s the same thing that happens when I go to a restaurant and the menu is too big,” he says. “I end up ordering the worst combinations of food.” 

Unlike most people, Geeting does not feel paralysed by choice. Instead, he throws all the spices into the pot. “I’m not someone that likes to make a huge mess, especially at home, which is funny because my work is very messy,” he says. “I felt like if I had a studio, I could make work that was more challenging. Messier, in every sense of the word.” 

In his new windowless studio, Geeting needed to mimic the sun. He began adapting skills learned in his commercial career to his art practice. “It was a series of experimental bursts. I was trying out different magic tricks,” he says. The images, published in Amusement Park, are bright and poppy, as though they were taken near a pool at high noon. “If somebody asks me how I took a photo, I’ll normally tell them because I know they’ll never be able to make it the same way,” he says. “They could have the same idea, but it would hit different.” 

Geeting wants to feel like he has captured something forbidden. Something only he has access to. Indeed, Geeting’s vibrant and surreal compositions have set a trend in the realms of still life and product photography. But the artist does not think of himself as a leader – or a follower. “I want to be doing my own weird thing that no one wants to do,” he says. For example, he will use a $40 speedlight taped in bubble wrap, and be excited by the idea that no one will know how he did it. Each body of work he creates rebels against the former. The studio, the real world, the studio, and so on. 

“There is something of a back-and-forth going on, which feels like something of a necessity for me to maintain some kind of balance in my practice,” he says. He conceptualises all of his projects as books initially. And often gets ahead of himself. He’ll think, ‘This is going to be the second spread in the book,’ even though he has only made 10 per cent of the work. Thinking of how it will live in the real world is what propels him forward. “With most of my work, I’m concerned first and foremost with aesthetics, and the concept is always born out of the process of me making the work.” 

Geeting’s latest project, The Marble, is more meditative and slower than anything he has made before. There is a maturity in the way he speaks about it. He researches the props beforehand and does not go to the studio unless he already has an idea. He lays out the images in Photoshop before he even begins to photograph them. “The experimentation goes on in my brain beforehand,” he confirms. 

Only about one-third of the images in The Marble were taken in the studio. “The outside [photographs] feel how the studio used to feel. I don’t know what I’m going to get. Most of the photographs in The Marble are about keeping an open mind. Not getting lucky, but getting blessed.” The objects are sourced from Etsy, vintage stores, and upstate NY thrift shops. He is looking for props that represent some kind of human connection to nature. “Things that [people] put in their front lawn that express their love for the world, so much so that they make cartoon versions of them.” These objects line his studio shelves, as though he is hosting his own garage sale. 

There is something sentimental about the way he speaks about them. Geeting remembers how as a kid, laying on his bed, listening to the sounds beyond his bedroom – parents arguing, birds singing, the television buzzing – he felt a psychic connection with the objects in his room. He would stare at them, believing that they were staring back. A divine understanding between glances. At this moment, he appears to get embarrassed and says he was probably just spacing out. 

Geeting and I have been close friends for seven years (in the real world, I call him Dave). He can be evangelical; our friendship group jokes that he was a pastor in a former life. He loves astrology. In college, a girl told him he was a Pisces: “I Googled what that meant, and never felt as understood as I did in that moment in my entire life.” Suddenly, he was able to embrace everything he thought was bad about himself. It is how he organises his community, friendships and enemies. One day, Dave showed me a prop and said that I would like it because I am a Gemini. If he asks for your star sign, it means he likes you. If he remembers it, you can call him Dave too. 

dbg.nyc

The Marble by David Brandon Geeting is open by appointment at 10 14 Gallery in Dalston until 09 September 2022. Contact info@1014.gallery to book. 

Goudal’s studio is located away from the bustle of the main boulevard in a quiet alleyway. It is early April, the sky is blue but the wind is chilly, so it is a delight to be enveloped by the heat of a fire stove upon entering the studio. Goudal’s practice is predominantly rooted in the outdoors, but the artist welcomes me into a space resembling a country house living room, where we sit at a large wooden table for coffee. Next door, a second luminous room opens up. With a glass roof and bright white walls it has the appearance of a laboratory and it is this workroom that houses the evidence of Goudal’s creative practice. She describes her studio as fluid and ever-changing, always adapting to her latest projects. Currently, Goudal is preparing for two significant shows opening in July: a solo exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles (04 July to 28 August 2022) and an installation/performance at the Avignon Festival (07 to 27 July 2022).

Born in Paris in 1984, Goudal moved to London to study graphic design at Central Saint Martins. Following a master’s in photography at Royal College of Art, she set up her first studio in the English capital. Her practice mixes photography, film and installation to explore the politics of landscape at the intersection of ecology and anthropology. Her work has been exhibited worldwide in a number of renowned institutions and events, including The Photographers’ Gallery, Foam and Venice Biennale. Ultimately it was love that brought her back to Paris in 2016, and today she works between the two cities.

“What I’m most fascinated by is the construction of images and what one can make-believe inside an image.”

Earlier this year, the artist exhibited her paleoclimatology-led project, Post Atlantica, at Edel Assanti gallery in London. The multimedia work will form part of her show in Arles and mobilises her archival imagery of tropical forests, engages at length with the history of scientific discoveries, and uses innovative photographic and filmic devices. As Goudal states: “Photography is a tool for me, a simple instrument, in the same way as video, installation or performance. But what I’m most fascinated by is the construction of images and what one can make-believe inside an image.” Traces of Post Atlantica’s process and samples of the distinctive jungle collage are dotted around the studio.

Goudal’s art begins inside and works its way out. The Belleville studio functions as a base, and is filled with illustrations and scientific articles. She displays her inspirations on the wall and pairs them with tests and prints; assemblages that mark essential milestones in the progress of the work. A typical day in the studio is punctuated by visits from journalists, gallerists and collaborators, as well as team meetings. As such Goudal uses nearby libraries and the cafe next door to carry out her research. Books and other reference points feed her passionate investigations into paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) and instruct her many trips to natural environments, where the landscape has been crafted by geological and climatic history. Like the scientists who inspire her, Goudal’s creative process also requires image-making “expeditions”.

Goudal’s work sits at a juncture between fiction and reality. Imagined scenes and scientific evidence attach and detach to coincide with the photographer’s intent and artistic gesture. The studio is at the centre of the unexplored landscapes, and it is here that images of tropical forests are reproduced, manipulated, deconstructed and multiplied. Goudal questions assumptions about the world, and highlights what we do not know about its dizzying movements and rhythm. The work offers an interpreted visualisation of these phenomena and little-known scientific events. The artist tells me about the scientific discoveries behind Post Atlantica: the coal found under the Antarctic ice, and the ice strata that hide tropical forests. The work functions as a translation of complex ideas into sensory experiences; perfectly incarnated by her video installation Inhale, Exhale (2021) or the triptych and film Untitled (Waves) (2022). The challenge is in conveying the unusual encounter between art and paleoclimatology.

Gazing at the artist’s work, we are placed in a position of confusion: what exactly are we looking at? It is a necessary destabilisation to provoke our ethnocentric vision of nature. By disrupting our perception, Goudal advances her reflection on the multiple links between humans and their environment. Can we consider Earth without any human presence and disturbance? Our planet existed before us, what will it be like without us? To see Goudal’s work is to experience the anticipation we all share: waiting for new discoveries about the past of the planet to explain what’s coming next. She educates us about Earth’s history and forces us to think about disasters to come. From her bright Belleville studio, Goudal’s work triggers viewers’ ecological agentivity. 

Phoenix by Noémie Goudal will be on show at Les Rencontres d’Arles from 04 July until 28 August 2022. 

Correction: In our Ones to Watch May/June 2022 print issue, it was written that Noémie Goudal’s Belleville studio is one of two workspaces occupied by the artists. This is incorrect; Goudal has just one studio, in Paris. 

Photography by Emily Monforte
Assisted by Joy Newell

A couple since they were teenagers, the Templetons have lived in Huntington Beach, California, their whole life. We visit their home studio to learn about how they use the space together, and about their ‘claustrophobic’ relationship

Vegan, monogamous, and a couple since they were teenagers, Deanna and Ed Templeton live in an immaculate suburban neighbourhood in Huntington Beach, California. Located about 35 miles outside Los Angeles, HB – as the locals call it – is famous for its surf and skate culture. Visit the local mall, and you can pose on a stationary surfboard set against a massive oceanic mural. It’s also notorious for its preponderance of Trump supporters and mask-mandate protesters. A liberal artistic enclave it is not.  

Nevertheless, this is the city where the Templetons – two artists who are collectively known for their gritty photography, portraits, and paintings – grew up and have spent all their lives. However, although HB is a formative place for Deanna and Ed, it doesn’t define them. The pair met when he was 15 years old and she 18, and married four years later. Ed was a teenage skateboard star, and the couple travelled the world for his competitions. In 1994, he started to document skateboard life, establishing an immersive, dynamic aesthetic inspired in part by his love of Larry Clark’s work.

Deanna, who had experimented with photography as a teenager, soon joined him in making photos. Armed first with a point-and-shoot, a gift from her mother, and then a Canon AE-1 that Ed gave her, Deanna began to develop her own practice – although she is at pains to call it that. “I just started shooting,” she says, nearly whispering. Whereas Ed says he’s “more cynical”, an omnivorous street photographer who is “humanist/absurdist”, Deanna tends to direct her images. Like Ed, she’ll shoot two guys brawling on the street, “but then I’ll run up and ask the guy with the swastika on his chest, ‘Can I make your portrait?’”

On this sunny day, we pull up to their modest two-storey home on a street so quiet that it feels abandoned. A tall man with kind eyes comes out to greet us. This is Ed: painter, photographer, and 2016 inductee into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. He’s wearing Vans, a plaid shirt, and perhaps a few days’ worth of stubble – he has a quiet but probing presence. He invites us in.

Upon entering the home where the couple have lived since 2001, we encounter all the elements of classic American suburbia: comfortable furniture, tasteful decor, an abiding sense of order. It takes a moment to realise that it’s not all soothing aesthetic predictability. Hundreds of art books are arranged in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the walls are filled with artwork (their own and that of others), and there’s a project in the works at nearly every turn. 

Deanna – small, slender, smiling and softly spoken – joins us at the dining room table, where there’s a maquette for a potential group show at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco that will include her work. She has arranged carefully cut-to-size printouts of photographs, many of them from her book What She Said (Mack, 2021), on the scaled-down museum walls.

In the living room, a small table holds paints and paper for the graphics Ed creates for his skateboard company, Toy Machine. He can work comfortably while he watches TV, or he can gaze out at the pool, where the couple have placed large inflatables – a razor-toothed shark and a dinosaur – to deter the ducks that occasionally fly overhead from hanging out.

Ed, 49, and Deanna, 52, have separate offices and share a darkroom. “I have spent countless hours in there blasting early Metallica while printing photos,” says Deanna. The garage, entered through the living room, has been converted into a painting studio for Ed. Spending an increasing amount of time in front of an easel, he has recently published a book of “multilayered pen and ink scribbles” titled 87 Drawings, with Nazraeli Press. Artworks from his recent show at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles are being temporarily stored in a guest room downstairs. Both artists unnecessarily apologise for their presence.

The couple are warm, generous, and attentive, to others and each other. When one of them speaks, the other watches and listens intently. They finish each other’s sentences, not out of impatience but because they are deeply supportive of each other – each wants the other to feel and be understood. At one point, Deanna gently interrupts Ed to make a point, and she places her hand on his shoulder. He clasps his hand over hers, and they remain in this gesture of affection long after the topic has changed. 

“We’re creatures of habit,” says Ed, who runs through a typical day Chez Templeton. They wake up around 10am, and he checks social media on his phone – a “slight doom scroll” – while she makes the smoothies they drink every morning. Then they go to their respective work spaces in the house until 2pm, when it’s time for tea. Deanna will make a soy chai or matcha, and the couple will sit out by the pool and tell the other about their day. Then it’s back to work till 6pm. Deanna makes them both a juice, and they cook dinner together. This is followed by a walk around the neighbourhood, maybe 40 minutes to an hour, “every single day,” says Ed.

Evenings are for watching a movie. The Templetons have recently been working their way through films from Hollywood’s pre-Code era, although they also enjoy watching hockey. “Some people use the word ‘claustrophobic’ to describe the way we are,” observes Deanna, “but it’s just kind of how it is.” Ed adds: “Compared to a lot of people, our relationship would be considered very claustrophobic.”

For as long as they’ve been together, Ed has been documenting their relationship – including, in the early years, moments of sexual intimacy. They’d eventually like to publish the images in a book that Ed, whose initial influences include Nan Goldin, playfully calls Suburban Domestic Monogamy. “I look forward to it,” says Deanna, “because I think it’s going to be beautiful, just to look at our love. No one else might care to see it, but I’m happy he documented it.”

Change is on the horizon, and the Templetons will soon have a new setting to explore. They’re taking steps to spend roughly half the year in Amsterdam, where they have friends. They still love HB, and it will always be their home, but there’s something about seeing themselves described as lifelong Huntington Beach residents that feels lacking, says Deanna. “I just want to have on our record that we had this other experience,” she says. “It would just be so sad if this was it.” 

@ed.templeton | @deannatempleton