GABE BECKHURST

Follow my Lead

As if gently tweaking television antennae to receive a signal transmission, in Karimah Ashadu’s films, sound will often—for just a split second—precede the image. In Machine Boys (2024), the drip feed of an idling motorbike engine comes in before we meet the un­-

­­wavering gaze of its rider. Or in Power Man (2018), we hear the moist exhalations of a shadow boxer’s exertion before we see him training in the near pitch black of predawn. The arrival of the image in Ashadu’s films is sometimes slow, like the rising sun itself. Sometimes it snaps into view with the intensity of the midday glare. Ashadu’s images often seem to lack stability. She attaches her camera to moving parts—a motorbike, a horse, a wheel arch—sending us through dizzying rotations or else churning us up in the dirt. I read this gesture as a conceptual riposte to the claim of photographic objectivity: an anti-tripod in which the camera jitters, shakes, and keels as much as any organic body integrated within its field of vision. Karimah Ashadu’s films consistently jostle us with competing acts of listening and reading, ensuring that sound and image conspire against a notional sense of what non-diegetic sound or speech does to images in the cinematic field, and how scores elicit an emotive register and interpretatively steer us. And because Ashadu’s films speak in multiple languages, sometimes it is text that we read as an image—an inscription holding the space that we anticipate an image to fill.

In Cowboy (2022), it is the achingly declarative statement that beats us there: “I have been acquainted with horses for so long, I deserve to make something of it.” This tells us all we need to know about the protagonist in shorthand—a principled, gentle man whose yearning for professional recognition does not compromise enjoyment of his work.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 170/2025, pp. 7–18.

ANNE FAUCHERET

“You see? That which intended to enlighten the world, in practice darkened it.”

The postindustrial age of digital and disembodied capitalism is characterized by abstraction, dematerialization, and invisibilization. These developments intensify processes of rationalization and domination initiated long before. The tension between the apparent volatility of neo-capitalism, its firm grasp on bodies, territories, imaginaries, and knowledge, and the material and symbolic devastation it causes is at the heart of Olena Newkryta’s work. The Vienna-based artist investigates this tension in a material, situated, and embodied way. Departing from concrete situations and specific sites, she weaves around them multilayered and polyphonic narratives, which unravel complex entanglements between technology, labor, science, and economy, and which trace unpleasant genealogies and open new future paths. At the same time, the artist pays careful attention to her protagonists, human or nonhuman.

These protagonists are working bodies, often invisible female work­­ing bodies. In Patterns Against Workers (2023), the motif of the “pattern”—technical, spatial, social, aesthetic, and psychologi­cal—enables the artist to connect the beginnings of automation in textile production with the rationalization of space, the standardi­za­tion of gestures, the alienation of psyches, the internalization of con­trol, and the fragmentation of the social body.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 170/2025, pp. 19–30.

JAN PHILIPP NÜHLEN

Photography with Tainted Grain

The title of Heiko Schäfer’s project Fotografie mit verdorbenem Korn (Photography with Tainted Grain, 2024–ongoing) takes inspiration from an old Chasidic tale that Yuval Kremnitzer positioned at the beginning of his study about the return of authoritarianism in the present, published in 2024. It’s about an astrologer who warns his king that the grain harvest is tainted and that everyone who eats of it will become insane. But what the king fears more than madness is devi­ating from the norm. Therefore, he and his astrologer are supposed to eat of the tainted grain as well and simply remind each other that they are “crazy.”¹ (. . .)

Schäfer situates his work at this crossroads. He photographs “total­­ly normal” work life as if to ask whether we would recog­nize it if we and the people around us had gone crazy. Foto­grafie mit verdorbenem Korn is inspired by the well-known collection of essays Photography against the Grain (1984) by the American photographer and critic Allan Sekula. What the two have in common is the “search for a certain ‘realism,’ . . . in and against the grip of advanced capitalism.”²

1 Yuval Kremnitzer, The Emperor’s New Nudity: The Return of Authoritarianism and the Digital Obscene (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2024), p. xiii.
2 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), pp. ix–x, esp. p. x.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 170/2025, pp. 31–42.

ALEXANDER RISCHER & NORA SDUN

At the Bottom of the Trays

A while ago he was moved to a different job. Though it was not the profession he’d learned, he did enjoy it. He was a pool attendant at a public outdoor bathing area. The swimming pool was designed as an analogue photo lab: the individual pools were arranged like trays for the developer, fixing bath, and soaking bath, with the latter represented by the large pool for mature swimmers (the stop bath was not factored into the design). The diving tower, with its massive head, was the enlarger. Jumping directly into the pool where, in a photo lab, the developer is located, well, this was a concession to the physique of those frequenting the swimming pool. They encounter a light-­sensitive surface not as a wave or corpuscle, but as quite solid yet highly vulnerable bodies breaching the surface by plunging into chlorinated water.

He himself enjoyed taking pictures and sometimes made photographs while at work. Documentary photography, as it were, about photographic processes in the respective baths, something his coworkers accepted. This was another reason he liked the swimming pool. He imagined the process of designing the swimming pool as an ersatz for a psychoanalytical treatment of persons who had suffered from the work craze of their parents. For instance, the father photographs, the mother retouches. The children were always told that photography is a highly artificial, mysterious process and, most especial­­ly, a highly sensitive process. It is presumably for these reasons that the architectural firm had built this swimming pool in the form of a laboratory: as a decimation of pathos turned architecture and a glorification at the very same time—facetious tributes are tributes all the same. Parody and the disdained tend to be too close for com­fort. The question of whether it was really such a good idea to build a swimming pool like a lab need not be resolved here. The idea was apparently to shine glaring sunlight on the miracle of the darkroom.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 170/2025, pp. 43–46.

ROSE-ANNE GUSH

Hidden Messages

Disavowal is not ignorance—it is knowing and refusing to act on that knowledge. You feel the heat rise in waves that remain fixated in ever-longer spells. You watch storms rewrite coastlines, floods swallow houses and cars, erasing towns; wildfires turn forests and cities to ash. And yet, you seek out air-conditioning, scroll past headlines, and book another flight. This is not denial; denial rejects evidence. Disavowal is more perverse—it acknowledges this reality but carries on as if it weren’t happening. The crisis is accepted, even expected—yet daily life remains unchanged, because to change would mean dismantling the structures that define comfort, convenience, capital accumulation—structures that define modernity. In more specific terms, we inhabit what Wim Carton and Andreas Malm term the overshoot conjuncture: “the period when officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded . . . and the dominant classes responsible for the excess throw up their hands in resignation and accept that intolerable heat is coming.”¹ The desire to remain held transfixed in this intolerable heat, even when it burns through the flesh, reflects the dynamics articulated by Maryam Jaf­ri’s latest body of work that takes lithium as its object through which to examine these material and psychopathological conditions.

Lithium—a soft, silvery-white alkali metal, the lightest of all ele­ments, is designated a “critical mineral.” Lithium is charged with solving the problem of planetary heating largely resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. It is essential to rechargeable batteries that power devices, electric vehicles, solar panels—the “green transition” to renewable, rechargeable energy and digital labor, as well as automated weapons, surveillance systems and drones, fueling the current context of interminable war.

1 Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (New York: Verso, 2024), e-book.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 170/2025, pp. 47–58.