Time to Kill

Photography operates through the transmission of agreed-upon codes that convey their underlying ideology. “Agreed-upon” here does not necessarily mean what a surface read might lead to. We do not enter the world in a fashion that at some stage involves us facing some bureaucrat who will present us with a list of codes that we have to agree to. There are no bureaucrats, or rather in some fashion we all act as that bureaucrat (whether we want to or not — it takes conscious effort to depart from that role).

The agreement is tacit, and it’s produced in such a fashion that voicing one’s disapproval is widely seen as a violation of what is presented as the natural order of things. We see this mechanism in place everywhere, especially now. Feminists, for example, are routinely attacked by public figures and the media for their attempts to create a more just society — often in societies that at least on paper are committed to providing exactly that: a just society.

We acquire photography’s codes and by extension the ideology sustained by them through exposure. And since we only see what exists in photographs but not what might exist in photographs, it’s difficult to understand how the codes are in fact not part of the truly natural order of things. And yet, they feel natural, especially, of course, if, like me, you’re one of the people towards whom these codes are geared: I am a man, living in a society that’s largely structured around the needs of men.

Curiously, there now is a crisis of masculinity. These days, that’s one of the talking points that gets bandied about a lot. I would agree, albeit absolutely not following the logic of the claim as it is usually made. The crisis of masculinity is not that men cannot be men any longer, which usually means being, you know, in charge, regardless of the consequences.

Instead, the crisis of masculinity is that the men in crisis are unable to understand and deal with the fact that masculinity itself is a lot more complex than the reductive version they believe in. In addition, if women and people outside of the binary system of human sexuality insist on having the same rights as men, then that does not mean that men’s rights somehow are being diminished.

After all, life in a society does not follow the logic of a zero-sum game. Someone else gaining more rights does not mean that someone else’s rights somehow are being diminished. In reality, a society moving towards more justness can only result in an enrichment of everyone’s well being (it’s telling, though, that some of the people who will tell us that a rising tide will lift all boats when it comes to money don’t believe in that when it comes to human rights).

In the world of photography, the codes with which gender relations are communicated are typically summarized under the term the male gaze. “Men act and women appear,” the late John Berger explained in Ways of Seeing, “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

It’s easy to understand how this is a problem. The male gaze establishes a hierarchy in society, and a society cannot be truly free if it contains hierarchies of any kind. The camera, in other words, becomes a tool of injustice if its use is not being questioned by those behind it and if the photographs made with it are not understood for what they are.

One might wonder what the (or maybe rather a — it’s possible to imagine a multitude) female gaze might look like, or maybe a gaze that exists outside of the male one. Outside but not necessarily opposed to, because thinking about this in terms of a competition brings us right back into zero-sum-game territory. An alternative gaze might help us see the world in a different fashion, a fashion that can increase the need we might feel towards helping build a more just society.

The problem with codes is that almost inevitably they’re reductive. The male gaze is relatively simple, and it’s reductive. The idea can’t really be to replace one reductive system with another. Instead, if you think about photography, the idea might be to instead arrive at photographs that are fully open, photographs that see people for who they are — and not as pawns in some larger prearranged game that only benefits some but not all.

What this might look like has now been demonstrated by Ahndraya Parlato in her new book Time to Kill. The book presents a series of portraits of women as women. By that I don’t mean women as they have to operate following the codes established by the male gaze; I mean women that have not been subjected to the male gaze, that operate outside of the confines of the male gaze.

(There are additional photographs in the book, mostly studio still lifes, and there is some text in the form of short letters written by the photographer to an unnamed person who would appear to be operating outside of the limits of mortality. For me, the emotional core of the book are the photographs of the women, which is why I will be focusing on them here.)

One of my concerns about the way the female gaze is being treated in the world of photography is that it is centered on its makers. It’s true, we have to think about photographers. We certainly have to think about who makes the photographs and how.

But photographs that are being released into the world are not complete. By that I mean that a photograph reveals itself only when it is viewed by another person. That person will also have to do some form of labour to understand what they are seeing, and how they are seeing what they’re seeing.

In other words, we will not arrive at a female gaze (or any other gaze outside of the male one) if we do not include viewers in our consideration. Of course, as makers of photographs it is impossible to perform that consideration. You can put any kind of verbiage around your photographs and/or books, but that’s not going to do the job. As a photographer, you essentially release visual messages in a bottle, not knowing who will encounter them — and how.

Thus, the viewer will have to do their own work. That work will (I’m tempted to write: must) entail looking at photographs without judgement. After all, male-gaze codes are geared towards a specific form of judgment, the judgment that hovers around John Berger’s words.

The bodies on view — women’s — are judged in any number of ways around very specific ideas of attractiveness (that are culturally coded). And there are so many rules that actively diminish attractiveness, all of them playing a person’s biology against them.

As long as the male gaze is so dominant, the key is thus to try to look without judging, to look without coming to any sort of initial conclusion. As a viewer, you will want to see the person in the photographs for who they are in that photograph (remember, a photograph will never show you the person, only a mediated image).

This is how you want to look at Time to Kill. This is how you can begin to de-program the male gaze from your mind.

I’m a little bit hesitant to give Buddhist practice as an example, given that neoliberal capitalism has co-opted mindfulness as a life-style tool. But the actual Buddhist idea of approaching the world in a non-judgmental way provides a great way to re-learn looking at photographs.

Look at a photograph, and every time a thought pops up in your head, catch it and interrogate it: what is it that makes me think that? What form of judgement am I arriving at? Tell yourself: no judgement. Just look.

You will not be able to shed all judgment. Instead, you will become more aware of your thinking and of how you look at photographs. In other words, you will become more aware of what determines what you see in a photograph.

In the end, photography is a social practice that connects a photographer with possibly a multitude of other people. For that social practice to get better, the work has to be done at both ends.

There is a shared responsibility to look at photographs with the same attention and care that went into their making.

Time to Kill is an absolutely marvelous book that will only reveal itself fully if as a viewer you are willing and able to match Ahndraya Partato’s attention and care.

Recommended.

Time to Kill; photographs and text by Ahndraya Parlato; 144 pages; MACK; 2026

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Keizo Kitajima

My first exposure to Keijo Kitajima’s work came in the form of Photo Express Tokyo, published in 2012 by Steidl/Le Bal. Billed as “a facsimile of the legendary series of twelve booklets” originally published by the photographer himself while staging a year-long exhibition at CAMP gallery in 1979, the publication consists of a slipcase with those facsimiles, with one more booklet added. The later contains installation photographs from the time and a very short text that did not help me very much understanding what I was looking at.

There were various aspects to the work that fascinated me. First, Kitajima staged twelve different exhibitions in one year (one per month). Second, he produced a little booklet that he sold during the individual shows (you can see them in some of the installation photographs, lying on a table in the gallery). Third, the exhibition was produced in situ, discarding any photography-exhibition convention that until then I had taken for granted: no frames, and the prints had been made right there, using the photographic materials available at the time.

Up until the financial crash of 2008, I had lived under the rather naive assumption that commercial photography galleries exhibited work based on artistic merit and on what their owners responded to. This is incredibly naive, of course, as I would learn the hard way. Regularly, I trekked down to New York City from Western Massachusetts to be exposed to what I thought was at the forefront of contemporary photography.

Then it all came down: first, there was the financial meltdown. And the galleries started showing the most bland, decorative photography. It was as if suddenly, the idea of artistic merit had changed. But of course, that was not the case. It was just that commercial galleries are not overly concerned with artistic merit. Much like luxury-car dealerships, they’re showrooms in which the wealthy shop for additions to their possessions.

Kitajima did not have to worry about any of that. Even though there were some galleries in Japan, they were not geared towards selling photographs. Instead, their idea was to show photographs. And CAMP was not one of those other galleries anyway. It had been co-founded by Daido Moriyama, Seiji Kurata, and Kitajima (Kurata and Kitajima had both been students of Moriyama’s). It was, in other words, an artist run gallery. With commercial considerations being absent, the photographers were able to do what they thought they needed to do to showcase no only their work but also what photography itself was capable of.

Even though in 2012 I was deeply embedded in the Western system of photography — at the time, I taught in an MFA program where students were required to produce serious books (not cheap booklets) and had to stage their final exhibition as if they were art stars (large prints in very expensive frames), the CAMP model struck a chord in me. It appealed to my more rebellious side. I was (and still am) quite naive, but I also had (and still have) a very strong interest in getting around systems that do not work for me. Especially after 2008, I realized that commercial galleries (or museums for that matter) do not actually work for photographers (it’s really the other way around).

Increasingly, I was also beginning to wonder about photography itself and the way it was treated in the world of art. Why do prints have to be editioned if in fact you can make any number of them? Why does everything have to be precious? Why or how does one edit? Why does one show the “best” (or “most successful”) photographs? Or rather is there a way to do something different, and what might that look like? Kitajima’s Photo Express Tokyo showed one possible way.

Photographically, Photo Express Tokyo appears to follow the Provoke model: high-contrast black and white with at times wonky compositions. But photography is more than what its pictures look like. If you look more closely at what Kitajima’s photographs actually show, it’s almost the complete opposite of Provoke. Provoke is infused with a deep sense of nihilism: it’s very straightforward to realize that its photographers did not appreciate the world they were living in. With Kitajima, it’s not so clear. You could see Photo Express Tokyo that way — the excess of a consumerist culture that amuses itself to death (to use the phrase that Neil Postman a few short years later would come up with). But you could also see the photographs as the complete opposite, as a celebration of the joy and energy that is created by the excesses of consumerism.

Over the years, I came across other work by Kitajima. Some interested me, some not. The publications appeared to be released in random order, or rather some arrived way after the fact, years after their photographs were taken. I was interested in this artist, but I found it difficult to understand what was going on, probably in large part because I was unable to read any articles published in Japan.

In late 2019, I met the artist (as part of a visit with a group of students) in what turned out to be yet another one of his own galleries. The photographs on the walls had nothing to do with the work I had been familiar with. They intrigued me deeply, in part because for once with this artist, I felt an affinity in terms of the visual language he had used. I was and will never be able to make work that looks like Photo Express Tokyo (not that I wanted to), but his Untitled Records — land- and cityscapes photographed in what can only be described as bleak settings — strongly resonated with me (I’ve long had a particular fondness of what in one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is being jokingly described as “despair vision”).

I did not find the artist talk and conversation that ensued in Kitajima’s gallery particularly enlightening. This might have been a translation issue. I don’t want to blame the translator, though. It’s more that Kitajima’s thinking probably best unfolds on the printed page when words are being used. In addition, much like many Japanese artists I have met, there is an obliqueness that probably arises from the very different cultural background and from how things are expressed. In any case, I remember one detail that excited me: Kitajima said that he now eschewed editing the work. There was an answer to my much earlier question whether you can do that: yes, you can. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the photographs on the walls very much, and I did not think for one second that they were edited poorly.

But how do the bleak landscapes relate to the earlier high-contrast black-and-white photographs, many of whom had been taken with a flash? And how did the street photographs fit in that he made at some stage, not to mention the very colourful documentary-style portraits taken in what was the Soviet Union in its death throes? The catalogue of a recent exhibtion at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum entitled Borrowed place, borrowed time would finally provide me with an answer (or so I hoped). The book combines all of Kijatima’s work, with a number of in-detail essays added (all available in English translation, which is not a given for such a catalogue from Japan — kudos to its makers!).

As it turned out, the curators in Nagano and the authors of the various essays were facing the same challenge I had been facing: how does this all add up? What are the connections between these very different bodies of work? In part, the answer is provided by the artist’s photographic biography that ties together the early photographs, taken in Okinawa, with Photo Express Tokyo and the later street and documentary photographs. Throughout the book, these are all summarized a snapshots, which is not how they would be described in the West. I don’t mean this as a criticism; to a Western reader this might cause some minor confusion, though.

But there still is that big jump to the later landscapes and the puzzling portraits that show people in white outfits facing the camera with rather blank expressions. These portraits give off Thomas Ruff vibes, except that there appear to be variations of the same people. Without any added context or information given, this is rather confusing (adding an interesting element to Ruff’s approach). As it turned out, Kitajima photographed the same people once a year over a period of a decade (or so). And at least some of the landscapes originated at scenes of natural disasters, which Japan, a country frequently hit by earthquakes and their after-effects (fires and/or tsunamis), is very familiar with.

So what’s the connection? The various authors make valiant efforts to tie it all up. I don’t think that I believe any of these. Instead, I am happy with something else, the photographer’s own words from 1982: “Right now, I want to draw a line under the work I’ve done so far […] and redefine the rules — or grammar, if you will — of my photographic language.” (p. 281) Redefining the rules here meant finding the right camera and approach for what he wanted to do.

Sometimes, the answers can be so simple.

This would make the comparison with Thomas Ruff all the more relevant: after all, the German artist is focused on the conventions of photography. Whatever approach needs to be taken for any given project, however connected or disconnected it visually is from what came before, is the approach to be pursued. It’s not an approach followed by many photographers, possibly given the inherent challenges. But both Ruff and Kitajima demonstrate what can be gained by doing it.

Lewis Bush once told me something to the effect of “photography is too interesting to be art” (or maybe he meant “Art”). My own interpretation of Lewis’ words lead me to think that photography is too interesting to be confined into the art world’s Procustean bed, with its editions, framed photographs sold by used-car salesp… sorry, I meant gallerists, strict and simplistic editing rules, and more. Yes, you can follow that route, and yes, you can get interesting results that way. But there is more.

If you truly want to keep your work alive, you might want to follow someone like Keizo Kitajima instead who embraces his tools like any other “serious” photographer but who will then expose and develop photo paper handing on the walls of his own gallery, who will simply not edit his work any longer, or who will re-conceptualize past work into the present. Unlike paintings or sculpture, photographs allow you do to that.

The making of photographs allows for almost limitless flexibility, and the showing does so, too.

It’s the kind of lesson that especially MFA students would need to hear. But given that many MFA programs are now especially eager to set up a straight pipeline to car dealersh… I’m sorry, for some reason this keeps happening… commercial galleries and museums, I’m afraid that MFA programs might have become the places where photography goes to die, to re-emerge as some form of zombified version of its former self, bereft of the richness of what the medium actually has to offer.

Borrowed place, borrowed time; photographs by Keizo Kitajima; essays by Tadashi Matsui, Shigemi Takahashi, and Shino Kuraishi; 360 pages; PCT; 2025

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La Cuarta Pared

If you take photographs out of the context of ordinary life — out of the lives lived by people who do not think of themselves as photographers or artists — to insert them into an art context, you will have to charge them up (unless for some reason the photographs somehow possess the artistic pretense that is so desperately sought after by those who can’t enjoy photography for what it does and thus is).

There are many different ways of charging up such photographs. You can create juxtapositions and/or groupings that would not appear in their original contexts. Or you can intervene after the fact, by which I mean that you alter the original photographs in some fashion.

When this work is done by competent hands – the physicality of materials appears to play an important role here, the outcome can be outright exhilarating. Think of, for example, Ruth van Beek‘s incessantly inventive interventions, all of which seemingly so simple — but you still have to come up with them (and most other people simply don’t).

Whereas Van Beek mostly works with commercial imagery — there are a lot of photographs that appear to have emerged from instructional contexts, for his La Cuarta Pared Diego Ballestrasse used family albums (his own and another family’s). The Argentinian artist who now lives in Spain selected small fragments from photographs, fragments that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

Photography is a way of making someone pay attention to something. Art photography often deals with confounding its audience’s expectations: you expect one thing but are presented with another.

The core of La Cuarta Pared centers on presenting photographic fragments that must mean something — when looking at art, there is that clear expectation that meaning might arise. But some art refuses to offer up simple and convenient ways to get to it.

What, after all, does the white tip of a woman’s shoe that just barely peeks out from underneath its wearer’s white dress tell us? The expectation is that there must be a meaning, and when none is clearly presented, the viewer will inevitably construct one. Was someone getting married? And if yes (or even no) what would the tip of that shoe tell us?

On his website, the artist presents a longish text that dives into all kinds of aspects of photography that we are asked to believe are involved in the making of the work. It’s not that I would want to argue with this — at times, I do find discussions about photography interesting.

Were I to encounter the photographs alongside such an elaboration in real life, though, I would probably be inclined to ask the following: you take your own family’s photographs, cut out small segments many of which seem particularly charged up, and then you expect us to believe that it’s all just about photography?

I don’t necessarily intend for the above to be seen as a criticism. Or rather, it’s a criticism of the verbiage that comes with La Cuarta Pared — but not at all a criticism of the photographs themselves.

After all, this is a hugely enjoyable body of work, in part because larger parts of it are so unsettling. Something appears to have gone horribly wrong, but it’s impossible to tell what exactly that is. Again, there’s that game of expectations around photography, and if you play it the way Ballestrasse plays it, people will have questions.

As an artist, you don’t want to give any answers. As an artist, you don’t want to explain anything. You only want to make people feel something (and if they feel something for the love of god don’t go into a spiel around what photography does).

After it arrived in the mail, La Cuarta Pared (the book) ended up in the pile of books I intended to write about. Somehow, time went by, and now it’s a year and a half later. I remember looking at the book many times and thinking I’d wait until the right moment to write about it.

Given its imagery, I always felt I wasn’t quite ready to write the piece — until the other day, when I was rearranging books on my shelves, and I encountered the book again. I am just as intrigued by the book as I was when I first looked at it. And I realized that with this book, I will never be able to identify the right moment. After all, that’s what its images center on: the impossibility to clearly see what is on view.

Recommended.

La Cuarta Pared; images by Diego Ballestrasse; essay by Marta Dahó; unpaginated (with insert); University of Cádiz; 2024

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

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Thank you for your support!