Table of contents for Issue 72: Spring 2020 in Huck

In my childhood home, there was an old black-and-white photograph that used to hang in the hallway. It was a family portrait – of my grandparents, my great uncles and my mother as a three-year-old, all posing in a photographer’s studio. At the time, they were going through a lot of upheaval – they were recent economic migrants who’d moved from a small island in Greece to South Africa – but all you could see was their pride; their elegance. It’s an amazing, dignified image. Of all the photographs I have, it’s the one I treasure most. When I was a teenager, South Africa was going into democracy – the world was being explained to me in this incredible way through photography. I decided that was the kind of thing…

Two years ago I walked to the hospital for a routine check-up and was told that I had been having contractions all afternoon without knowing. They told me that the baby was on his way, over a month early, and immediately prepped me for an emergency caesarean. An hour later, a fragile 2.2kg mewling infant was cut out of my body. Life and breath issuing from the person that I instantly loved most in the world was the most exhilarating sound I had ever heard. With every week since, the twin newborn states – of new motherhood and new life – have gradually fallen away, revealing mother and child. It’s at once the most vulnerable and hardening thing I’ve ever done. You begin your life in expansion. From rolling to…

When I look at the images Cristina Garcia Rodero’s makes, I see a synergy in our work. I believe it’s because we both like to spend time with people. We enjoy the union one creates with others through the process of photography – there’s a similar energy there. She speaks a lot about religion and the body, which are themes I’ve explored in projects like Noises In the Blood, which is about dancehall culture in the UK, and Subida al Cielo, a series on death and mortality. In our work, we are trying to express universal themes – the strength and fragility of people, the human condition, collective behaviour, passion, pain – in ways that still remain revealing. Cristina began photographing the deep-rooted rites and traditions of small towns and…

I was born in Marysville, California, 1951. Back then, they would have said I was an over-active child… but I think we have more clinical names for that now! I didn’t particularly do well in school or tests, though I always excelled in art and visual things. It was fairly obvious that I wasn’t ever going to be Harvard material. So when it was time for college, I applied to CalArts. I didn’t actually have any art, so I sent them samples of psychedelic light shows that I used to put on for rock bands with my friends. CalArts accepted me, but they didn’t know where to place me in terms of the specific school. So they just stuck me in the design school, which, at the time, offered a…

My love for photography comes from my grandfather. He was captain of a ship in World War II and came back quite clearly traumatised. He used to shout at everyone in the family, but he’d also take pictures of us all, using a waist-level box camera. I see now that this was a way for him to mediate some kind of relationship with the world – because he could no longer do it by conventional means. Photography was a powerful tool for him, almost like therapy. That made a big impression on me. Seeing how important a camera was for my grandfather, I always knew that I needed photography to be more than just pictures on a wall. I felt it wasn’t enough to just have an image reproduced in…

People have questioned my validity in the photo industry. I guess that comes with the territory of getting an A1 feature for your first New York Times assignment, but also for being a young, black, female photographer. There is definitely some resistance towards the changing landscape of photography, with tools like Instagram allowing more inclusivity and accessibility – the photo world still has many gatekeepers who play by the old rules. Despite this, had I tried to have a career like this 20 years ago, it would have been 10 times more difficult. My first brush with photography came through my nana. Growing up, she always documented friends and family events, or passing moments just for fun. Her home in Cambria Heights, Queens, was always filled with boxes of family…

I got my first BMX when I was 10. Nowadays, BMXing and skateboarding is cool, but back then we were outcasts – you’d get beat up just for being different. When I was a kid, home was Newmains, a working-class, ex-mining town about 20 miles southeast of Glasgow. It was pretty rundown. I just wanted to be on my BMX all the time. There were a few of us who were into it, we had a wee gang and as we got older we would enter small competitions, get drunk, have a riot… I loved the freedom. But when I was about 19, I got in some trouble. Because we were the only BMXers in town – because we stuck out – these thugs came after us one night. One…

If I could pinpoint the moment photography became more significant in my life, it would be when my mother was diagnosed with an illness. I was in my last year of high school, and I had also just discovered that my parents had separated. I felt that my whole life had derailed. My father gave me a camera to cope with my mother’s illness and making photographs became a way for me to feel like I existed. I was born in a small town near Kolkata, India, called Chinsurah. I did my schooling at a boarding school in Dehradun. Growing up, my father was always the family photographer, and a really good one too. I am not sure if he knows how beautiful the photographs he took of my mum…

I don’t remember my first photographs. There were never really any signs I wanted to be a photographer – I didn’t even know what one was as a child. I was born in Tokyo and raised in Shizuoka and Kanagawa Prefecture, the eldest son alongside my two brothers and two sisters. For the most part, we all did whatever we wanted. To be honest, I mostly spent my days wishing I had been born into a wealthy family. But I started taking photography ‘seriously’ at around 19 years old – not long after I had begun photography school. By the end of my time studying, I decided that becoming a photographer would be my life’s work. I graduated in 2008, and within a year I presented my first solo exhibition…