In May 2025, Tamara Lanier’s court cases against Harvard University for the possession of daguerreotypes featuring her ancestors finally resulted in a settlement. These high-profile cases, which hinged on her familial claims to two photographs in Harvard’s collections, have inspired conversations around archival practices, ownership, and consent in photography. In the mid-nineteenth century, Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz had photographs taken of enslaved African Americans, including two named...

Avant-garde art and transgender identification begin from a common crisis of representation: a sense that, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “[t]here is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself material form.” In diverse instances of modernist cultural production and trans gender alike, such a recognition spurs attempts to reconfigure the contours of the sensible in ways that affirm the salience and shareability of this “something.” Yet avant-garde practitioners’ experiments attest to a structuring ambivalence about whether and how the “unpresentable” might be made visible on the surface, whether of a body or a body of work. In the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917, this ambivalence assumes heightened political stakes, and art objects appear correspondingly riven with dialectical tensions; much as they celebrate the destructive potential of their own novelty, they cannot quite relinquish the dream of the artwork as seamless totality. How answerable must the made body be, they ask, to a public? To history? Thus, I suggest that we might understand the art of the early Soviet avant-garde—both in its motivating questions and in the answers its new forms encode—as surprisingly trans. From a phenomenological standpoint, such a reading is not far-fetched. Compared with the spectrality of the as-yet-unrealized trans body, or—in the case of achieved gender transition, its no-longer-visible past—even the most conceptual art works feel far from abstract. To be trans (in the broadest sense of that term) is to perceive, with immediacy, the always-already-mediated nature of one’s flesh. It is to live with a constant awareness of the body’s historicity, as it seeks to disentangle itself from both the lived praxis and the conceptual nexus of being/having been “the other” gender. But to be trans is also to be possessed of a different, mental image: a vision of a truly-gendered (or genderless) self whose hold on one is no less powerful for lacking the body’s—or words’, or pictures’—material support. Trans gender, then, is a paradox: an identity founded on a metamorphosis. It is, as Judith Butler and others have described, an accretion of actions, a habitus or performance, and yet not reducible to how a body looks or moves. “Trans” plays at the boundaries where determinism borders on agency; it seeks what the Soviet avant-garde sought: not merely a shift in the visible world, but to be material differently.

For someone who thinks a lot about photography, I have decidedly mixed feelings about being seen. In Canada, where I grew up and once again live, the state’s term for non-Indigenous racialized people like me is “visible minority.” The hypervisibility of racialization often confers a kind of invisibility, however. As a cis scholar of mixed Chinese descent, I am persistently misrecognized by other members of the institutions through which I move, mistaken for a student, staff member, a different...

I first encountered Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) at a conference on modernism and comedy. While her performance style is not exactly comical, the Baroness is most notable for her eccentric writing and elaborate costumes, despite the fact that her title brought her no monetary stability. Born in Germany, she immigrated to the US with a husband who soon abandoned her, she married the Baron (her third husband) who soon died, and she made her way to the Greenwich Village art...

In the urgency of what sounds initially like an auteur’s command, the fictional “Director” of Adrienne Kennedy’s 1973 play-within-a-play, An Evening with Dead Essex, discloses the unnegotiable terms of his own captivity before the phantasmal image. It is in the frequent repetition of a one-word imperative from the Director—to “flash”—that its operational binding (as the instruction by which to advance photographic images in a slide projector) can be perceived to shred. The demand is at once a managerial spur for his actors to make headway in grasping their subject matter, and an abyssal first step in the momentum of the collective going-under necessitated by its deepest realization .

A creature luminous and vexed, the firefly flits in melancholic briefness, brilliant yet burning out, its light’s little lifespan mocked by the starry fixtures of the sky. The firefly’s illumination is a chemical process, like the flash of a camera but without the photograph’s sense of permanence and history. Instead, summer by summer, children chase down these natural lanterns and collect them in mason jars, glass enclosures for viewing their darkening demise. Aquariums of lost energy.

1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter. But The Atlantic upstages this narrative by suspending a dark ovoid shape with curling horns above the title and author information, its square eye sockets emptying out onto a yellow block of color on the page behind it. It is a photograph of an Ogoni mask, and it is credited to Eliot Elisofon’s 1958 book The Sculpture of Africa. In fact, photographs from Elisofon’s book hang above all the fiction and poetry published in this issue of The Atlantic. This photograph does not, it almost goes without saying, illustrate Achebe’s story, in which no mask explicitly appears, or the ethnic background of the author, which is Igbo. The connection appears to be purely visual: the mask is egg-shaped. Elisofon’s photographs of African art appeared on the pages of American magazines throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and as these photographs circulated in the mass media they illustrated two different histories. First, they were intended to enhance American understanding of the African continent, its history, and its peoples during the era of decolonization. But because Elisofon also reanimated early-twentieth-century ideas of modernist primitivism, his photographs simultaneously illustrated modernism’s midcentury institutionalization in the United States. Understanding Elisofon’s photographs in this period thus requires historicizing them on the news-driven pages of LIFE, The Atlantic, and THINK (IBM’s in-house magazine). As Serge Guilbaut has memorably put it, New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris in this period, and Eliosofon’s photographs of African art were part of this appropriation: against the backdrop of African decolonization, they reenacted modernist primitivism for American consumption in the mass media. As a result, though they appear to be very much of their midcentury time period, Elisofon’s photographs in fact counteract the progressive temporality underlying American reporting on the emergence of new, independent nations in Africa and their relation to the ascendant global power of the United States. On the whole, then, this article is about tangled temporalities: there are multiple pasts in the midcentury present of Elisofon’s photographs; there is an inexorable sense of progress alongside clear evidence of stasis; there is repetition to the point of anachronism; yet there is very little of that form of temporality we call the future.

In 1888, the George Eastman Company put the first film-roll camera on the market. The new “Kodak” put photographic practice into the hands of many amateurs and hobbyists for the first time. This camera had immediate cultural effect, shaping how people saw and recorded things—even when they didn’t have a Kodak with them. In 1890, for example, the American journalist Nellie Bly had few regrets about her record-breaking trip around the world, except that in her “hasty departure [she] forgot to take a Kodak.”

When I first saw this image on the National Gallery of Australia’s website, I wasn’t quite sure who, or what, I was seeing (fig. 1). What is the shadowy form lurking in the bottom-left-hand-corner of the image? Is it a person emerging out of the basement, a playful photographic superimposition, or something more banal: just another painting propped in the corner?

In 1927, Ansel Adams, Albert Bender, and Bertha Damon drove through the US-Mexico borderlands. While Bender was already a prominent patron of the arts, and while Damon was already an established environmental writer, Adams was at a creative crossroads.