Playing with Photographs

Two recent exhibitions in New York City invite thoughts about the meanings and possibilities of photography in art. Featuring the works of the artists Gauri Gill and Farideh Sakhaeifar, the exhibitions explore unconventional methods of photo-taking and making. Long known for her collaborative practice, Gill's work features multiple authors and subjects who play with photographic conventions and subject-object relations. Her subjects devise their presentation and mask their faces. Pointedly rejecting the ethnographic perspective, Gill's subjects exercise a level of freedom from the fixity of the camera. Sakhaeifar, from a markedly critical vantage point, draws attention to the ways that photography can obscure its subjects. Deeply sensitive to the histories of photography, both artists visualize the things that photography cannot contour—horror, pain, joy, and the unreal.