The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa's Photographs

The world is saturated with images, and people often rely on selfies and travel or anniversary photos to track where they have been and who they want to be. Smiling, idealized pictures usually omit pain and other troubling aspects, and their orderly happiness can still make viewers feel sad. Twentieth-century photographers such as Lisette Model and Alvin Baltrop desentimentalized self-images by photographing people as they were, including social life on streets like Nice in the 1930s and New York’s West Side piers in the 1980s. Mao Ishikawa’s black-and-white series, with more than thirty works on view in “Rogue” at Alison Bradley Projects through June 13, emphasizes intimacy and how politics shape identity and actions. Her approach treats photography as more than a tool for examining her own subjectivity, instead producing expansive joy in which the medium contributes but politics and social context drive much of the effect.

Read at The New Yorker