Betye Saar passed away on Sunday 27 July in Los Angeles, four days before her 100th birthday. Last September I wrote about her and her artist daughters Lezley and Alison for …

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My chapter is calle…

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I’m removing the paid tier from Shade Art Review.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. A subscription model asks me to produce on a schedule, and I’ve realised that’s quietly been working against my process and rhythms. So I’m letting the paid tier go and anything written from Jan 2026 onwards will be free to read. Articles written before this date can easily be read via a pledge.

Subscribers are increasing and so is revenue, there are nearly 1,000 of you here now. But a paid tier asks something of me that I want to give freely now, rather than on a schedule.

If you’re on an annual plan, Substack will refund the unused portion automatically. Monthly paid subscriptions will switch to free.

Thank you much for valuing my witterings! I’m glad you’re all here and I get so much from connecting with you. Nearly 1,000 readers monthly, plus however many shares I'll never know about, is quite wild for someone like me: a dyslexic, word-avoidant, independent non-writer.

I've also been thinking more broadly about where Shade lives. Like many of you, I have concerns about the direction some of these platforms are heading and I don't want to keep asking you to sign up to yet another app or service to follow work you already follow. At some point I may move Shade off Substack entirely and publish everything, including the podcast, directly from my own site. If that happens I'll let you know well in advance and your free subscription will come with me. Until then, I’ll see you in a while!

Lou x.

Then came the Venice Biennale's artist list. One hundred and eleven names for In Minor Keys, Koyo Kouoh's final exhibition, conceived before her death last May and now being realised by her appointed team. And I found myself reading it through the lens Rodney had given me, asking questions I might not have asked a week earlier. Not about the list itself, but about the broader machinery that decides what art reaches the public and how. About the systems we all participate in.

In his article, Rodney also champions artists in the AIM Biennial whose work does what art should. Work that takes the materials of lived experience and transmutes them into something that gestures beyond the present. As artists we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But we do want connection. And as a viewer I want a gut punch, whether that lands soft or hard. I want a direct line to the artist’s interiority, however that reaches me. Rodney calls it “artwork that looks toward a horizon that expands rather than stands still.” I call it work that has a pulse.

And there are artists with a pulse, where the depth of emotion and the quality of the craft are inseparable. Arthur Jafa. Simone Leigh. Tracey Emin. Theaster Gates. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Jenny Saville. Lorna Simpson. Joy Gregory (although it’s harder bringing to mind photographer’s). These are established names, but the pulse was there in their early work, the thing that makes you stop and not know why you’ve stopped. That’s what’s missing from so much emerging work being platformed today.

Take Camille Provost, an artist I’m currently in conversation with. I haven’t seen an artist at this stage of their career produce work with this level of certainty and weight in process and form. Just two years out of the RCA, making work informed by her Ivorian and French heritage, drawing on Glissant’s concepts of creolisation and rhizome, moving between wood, clay and fibre. Old soul comes to mind. Her first solo show Excessive Refinement at Project Loop, has the kind of quiet ambition that speaks to a longevity of practice.

Also this week, Jerry Saltz shared his characteristically unfiltered take on Kehinde Wiley's Obama portrait. He's rude about it, but I think his take is fair. And it made me think about how often we platform an artist’s visibility over their work. Why are we still championing art that flatlines?

Kobena Mercer warned us about this in 1990. His essay Black Art and the Burden of Representation argued that even visibility campaigns entail specific problems of form, that compensatory representation frequently produces what he called a slighting of visual concerns. Thirty-six years later, the slighting continues. In 2020, it came dressed as institutional urgency.

I am not saying that representation doesn’t matter. I argue the opposite in my Shade Art Review pieces, like in the Nan Goldin one, and in most conversations I engage in with collaborators. I have also written about the cynicism of institutional interest and the cycles of visibility and erasure, like in this piece: Black Fatigue? The Pivot to Identity-Free Black Art. But what I am saying is that across the ecosystem, the barometer is moving away from the work itself to the popularity of the artist. And most of the time, these artists aren’t ready for the platforming they receive. The cult of the individual artist has eclipsed the art itself. We celebrate personas before we interrogate practices.

Clip: from Testament (1988) John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective. Referenced in Kobena Mercer's 'Black Art and the Burden of Representation' (1990). A work Mercer defended against critics who questioned who it was for rather than the quality of the work and what it did.

When the system responsible for bringing work to the table cannot distinguish between an image that happens to depict a Black figure and an image that fundamentally shifts the conditions of looking, it defaults to what it recognises, work that says look, this is us and stops there. And we are complicit. We celebrate every selection. We share every announcement. We resist publicly questioning these systems because we know the cost of visibility, and we know how quickly it can be withdrawn. This leads to a choice few representing all of us. Some are opportunists, representing us and the art world badly. We argue for more complex representation of Black life whilst policing the complexity of our own critical responses to Black art.

Rodney ends his Bronx Museum review by writing “We deserve a vision of something that’s beyond this time and place.” I agree. The question is whether the work on the most powerful platforms in the art world got there through rigour or through convenience. What’s on our plate is not the only meal available. It’s the one we were given.

In today’s essay, Eleanor traces a lineage of South Asian photographers who use technical strategies, from blur and opacity to degradation, to work against the colonial demand for clarity. From Umrao Singh Sher-Gil’s pioneering work from the 1890s through the mid-20th century to Sutapa Biswas and Al-An deSouza’s contemporary work, she shows us how unreadability becomes a site of autonomy.

Thank you, Eleanor. Enjoy everyone.

Please consider supporting Shade Art Review with a subscription. This is a reader-supported publication. Subscription income supports this work, the contributors, and Shade Podcast production. If you're unable to subscribe for the 83p weekly, please like and share this piece to help it reach a wider audience. Shade Art Review takes hours of work. I deeply appreciate your emails of support; however, financial contributions make it possible to continue publishing.

I have never made the jump to invest in a high performance digital camera. For the past ten years, the old Nikon F50 film camera I inherited as a hand-me-down from my late father is what I’ve stuck to using. Nothing fancy. I did have to replace the lens once because it started forming hairline cracks, until finally, it did crack beyond repair.

In that time between being cracked and fixed, I still could, and did, use it. It was a counter intuitive way of working. But these poor images I was producing, within the testing grounds of an ill-endowed practice, has grown to become a methodology for articulating my own mixed position. A position sitting in-between whiteness and brownness, Britain and India. In-between a complex set of conflicts and harmonies that have existed across time.

It was only after I began processing the images and filtering through the blurred, fuzzy ones to discard, that I realised I was engaging in a sort of photographic writing-of-the-self, using the erroring of my lens. These images were neither a document nor an abstraction, but caught somewhere in-between.

This is how I have been using the camera for a while now: bending the rules of photographic legibility, resolution, and completeness as gestures towards an otherwise future.

However, the lens is not innocent. It is important to recognise the roots of photographic practice as a Eurocentric tool implicated in the colonial project. In the 19th century, the camera birthed a new racialised form of looking. Colonised subjects were captured, rendered in-focus, disseminated, and consumed in Western scopic pleasure and control.

As a girl, I remember sitting in my Auntie’s living room in Birmingham, fixated on the pictorially perfect black and white photographs hung on the wall behind her sofa. Demurely seated men, women, and children. Hands resting on laps. Neatly folded legs. A wall filled with our Punjabi ancestors, situated against the backdrop of the British Raj. My Auntie could never really recall where she got these images from, or who exactly we were looking at. But she insisted on keeping them displayed as an antidote to homesickness for our visiting loved ones who had recently migrated from India to England. I loved these pictures because they gave me a tender urge to hold on tight to a place, that at that time, I had never actually been to.

It is only since returning to look again and again at my Auntie’s living room wall, that I have been able to unsettle, recode, and set these images free to be read in the present space. Meticulously staged and developed, these figures were facing the exposure of a camera for the very first time.

As forms of colonial trophy image-making, they are reminders of which voices become absent from photographic production.

Punjabi photographer Umrao Singh Sher-Gil always resurrects the nostalgic familiarity of my Auntie’s photographs for me, but recasts the beauty of these perfectly rendered bodies as unstable.

What can it mean to produce one’s own images?

As one of the earliest examples of Indian subjects depicted through an Indian photographer’s own lens, Sher-Gil’s work bridges the gap between colonial documentation and the textures of lived experience.

Free and slippery bodies.

Experimenting with stereoscopic lenses and unusual selenium toning techniques, Sher-Gil ruptures the flow of imagery that was being produced at the time. He creates counter-images to the British idea of what constituted beautiful portraiture and the types of representation the camera was built for.

Destabilised, multiply positioned, obscured forms of self-capture. These images are not a coming out of visibility, or a writing of himself out of the frame, but open up a new space of refusing capture. A technical complexity that troubles the unwanted gaze. That unsprings the trap.

The very act of picking up the camera becomes an act of liberation. A disobedient act so something new, something different can emerge.

Roland Barthes famously described the photograph’s ability to issue a “certificate of presence”. But a presence that we are so used to equating its’ value with its’ legibility. Departing from this view of photography to one that foregrounds how precious the slips, leakiness, and gestures of unreadability are in an image, allows us to query what is really meant by making visible, and who this visibility is actually for.

Obfuscations in an image are a “creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise,” Tina Campt says. It is this stretching of veils over images, deciding what and what not to make easily accessible to the viewer, that I recently re-encountered in the work of Sutapa Biswas and Al-An deSouza, two South Asian lens-based artists who I saw shown side by side for the first time last year in Tate Britain’s exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain. I immediately viewed their work as contemporary continuations of what Sher-Gil was trying to achieve in 19th century India; South Asian photography mobilising negation as “disorderly power”.

South Asian photography in general, I feel, is still rarely afforded dedicated space within exhibition making, and for me, Sutapa Biswas’ Synapse Series lifts this neglected genre out of its habitual curatorial framing as simply just documenting diasporic life. Biswas is investigating photographic form, function and apparatus as it meets, reacts with and relates to her brown body. Her visually complex images — stone surfaces of erotic Indian art projected across her naked form — complicate the focal capabilities of the lens. Half in light, half in shadow, she self-disrupts with these ‘synapse blocks’ or blind spots to resist being readable. I struggled to linger on her body, bound to her only briefly, before rerouting my gaze elsewhere within the photographs. She decides what is shadowed, exposed, overexposed and concealed. She denies being positioned clearly, withholding from us these photographic default codes of visual comfort.

Al-An deSouza struck me to be similarly conjuring a restless photographic terrain. I became compelled to relook at The Lost Pictures, a series of deSouza’s childhood photographs from the 1960s that he left out in his home to collect everyday grease, dust, water spots and his own bodily debris. The mottled figures are ungraspable. Elusive. Guileful. The original images of himself and his family have been reproduced, in real time, putting their transforming bodies in negotiation with the inevitable opacities of image-production.

Biswas’, deSouza’s and Sher-Gil’s work prompts me to reach for Erica Scourti’s concept of Dark Archives; information that evades classification, which cannot be located, retrieved or seen. These shadowy spaces of negation and invisibility in photographs demand a greater critical, intentional, but tender viewership. They make us work really hard. They make us recognise more deeply the ways we can and should be seeing. They make us see that photographs aren’t the incontestable documents of our past, but are complex artefacts, holding onto unseen stories and encrypted, expansive lives.

Eleanor Sanghara Güstard is a Punjabi-British cultural producer, artist, writer, and curator. She is currently the Engagement Producer at Arnolfini, having previously worked at Hauser & Wirth, Tate, and Central Saint Martins.

Welcome back. I’m thinking about curating an exhibition around something I feel is missing from what we see in photography exhibitions. I can’t say what yet, but I want to talk with photography curators about first steps. Anyone want to get in touch?

Meanwhile, I spent time at Whitechapel Gallery with Joy Gregory’s Catching Flies with Honey —here’s what I thought.

Women and Space (1987-1999) shows Joy in domestic interiors and hotel rooms. She shot this series on holiday when working three jobs, the only time she had to make work. It resonates with my own experience of finding time to think about my photography. There’s an urge to escape domestic space, to have a studio, but that’s economically inaccessible for most of us. A residency perhaps? However, these pose new challenges, some of which I wrote about here. I understand Joy’s achievement in making these images, and I’m grateful she shot them, proving we can perhaps work anywhere. But, as I wrote in my review of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation, the material conditions of making work matter profoundly.

I’m reading Sally Mann’s new book Art Work: On the Creative Life, which makes me want to return to the country in some kind of artist fantasy. Mann lives and works on her farm in Lexington, Virginia, where she’s photographed within a limited radius for decades. She says: “Dig where you stand", her belief that the familiar world contains more mystery than any fantasy. I lived in rural Ireland when my daughter was born and found that I couldn’t photograph, but that was due to mothering demands and sleep deprivation, although the scenes were set, visually. Now I have more time, I imagine a creative life in the countryside again.

The Honeymoon Project (1990-92) are tiny kallitype prints that drew me through Joy’s process. She says “This series began life in 1991 as a single image inspired by Miralda’s project marking the 500-year connection between Europe and America. It later developed as an exploration of personal ambitions and desires. A series of self–portraits more concerned with internal concerns than the physical exterior.” What I enjoyed was the small scale and the storytelling. The kallitype process is an iron-silver Victorian technique where paper is hand-coated with ferric oxalate and silver nitrate, exposed to UV light, then developed in chemical baths, creating prints with rich brown to sepia tones and extraordinary texture. I wanted to get inside the photos as a character. Taking time over process creates more inviting imagery for the viewer, and sometimes we need that welcome hand when entering someone else’s world.

Recently, a photographer was helping me with my camera search and he challenged me on why I was choosing analogue, “Why be stuck in nostalgia?” That question seemed odd, as I never considered buying a digital. I knew that I wanted the work to be about process, about what feels good in my hands at the end of that process. I also want to take as few images as possible and savour each one, like I do meals and glances from loved ones. I want to hold onto just a small handful of things as I’m getting older, images included, in pockets and within books on shelves. As I move forward, I want to be still and considerate, at each step along the way.

Joy and I chatted about the richness of colour in her Sri Lanka series, and I enjoyed seeing these up close. I could feel the humidity and weight of the environment, almost feel the presence of people who walked the estate over centuries, I could feel their breath as I leaned into in the prints of empty spaces. These colour prints, made in 2004 during an artist residency at the Lunuganga Estate and taken in the aftermath of her father’s death, felt quite Lynchian, where the architecture and low light speak as characters. They reflect a meditative mood shaped by solitude, grief and the denseness of history in the tropical landscape.

The transparencies from the Magenta and Green series (1985), Dancing with Tulips, In Conversation, Leaving the Space, held that same filmic quality. There's flux, flow, defiance and tenderness in these works. Is she thrashing those tulips or dancing with them as the title suggests? It’s unclear, but we're not being confronted, which is what I like about Joy's work. We are welcome and won’t be shouted at. Sometimes we don't want to be challenged into image combat, interrogated for opinions: "What do you see? YOU, viewer?! Oi. Rarrrr.“ All the works in the show reflect Joy's nature. Here, we step in willingly. Catching flies with honey. As we process so many images centered on identity, this show is different in the way that it encourages our curiosity and willing participation. Straight portraits can't quite achieve this, which is partly why I felt the need for more range in Zanele Muholi's Tate Modern show (in 2024 – 2025). Not a criticism of Zanele specifically, just that a show of that scale needs breadth.

This exhibition came about through the eighth Freelands Foundation Award, which supports mid-career artists who haven’t had a major UK solo show. Joy got this award because her work is extraordinary. And the timelines are important. She was working through questions about beauty, place, and self-definition decades before these conversations became our norm.

The Blonde film and photo series (1997-2010) stayed with me too, maybe because of where we are now in relation to it. Joy says “The platinum blonde is a metaphor for eternal childhood, a subject of global fascination and western society’s object of desire.” Other contemporary artists like Claudia Rankine and Maxine Walker have explored blondeness as subject alongside Joy, who was asking these questions nearly three decades ago. Why are we so fascinated with blond messaging in our photographic practices? Shall we explore that next time?

Catching Flies with Honey is at Whitechapel Gallery until 1 March 2026.

Images are just unedited snapshots from the gallery visit © Lou Mensah.

As 2025 closes, I’m thinking about bodies that shed, transform, and refuse fixed identification.

Earlier this year, I co-curated Read My World Literary Festival with Maboula Soumahoro. For the festival Pelumi Adejumo curated A Body Sheds, a program exploring physical discomfort, transformation, and illness. The lineup brought together writers examining pregnancy, menopause, chronic illness, gender transition— all are states where language struggles to keep up with what our bodies actually do.

Ashley Nkechi Igwe opened the program reading ‘Body Horror’ her text that centered on the messiness of our bodies: “the pregnant body that dreams and vomits and stretches; the body in transition, forming itself through fire; the chronically ill body.” Bodies “in a state of becoming” that rarely appear in art canons except as identity anomalies rather than the everyday.I loved her provocation that “The horror was never the body. The horror was the demand to be coherent. To be legible. To be contained.” This connects directly to my final Shade Podcast episode of the year, which looks at which bodies get to move through art world spaces.

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While Lanre’s focus is on cities beyond London, those of us in the South weren’t operating separately - we were part of interconnected networks with communities north of the M25. The Tottenham uprisings in 1985, for instance, didn’t happen in isolation. Information, people, and strategies move between cities in preparation and in the aftermaths of events of this kind. We were part of a national network of resistance and community building.

I’m not writing a book review today, critiquing what’s inside We Were There. I’m sharing some of my memories that surfaced whilst reading it, during my summer 6:30am sessions - flashbacks to family, to community and the gaps between documented history and lived experience.

However, I will say that Lanre’s book is essential reading, dense with information that fills in blanks for those of us whose family histories were lived precariously on the ground and for those new to our stories. Reading it brought a particular kind of pain at times, because of what it stirred up. Whilst reading We Were There I felt that however rigorous the journalistic work, different storytelling mediums hold different textures of experience. I went on a tangent of feeling, that was like an itch I couldn’t scratch —experiencing how facts on the page ignites what the body carries. I wanted to immerse myself further, to hear the rich stories come to life sonically and pictorially too. There are images in the book, but I found myself googling photos and videos relating to the events covered. I love engaging with history holistically - those different layers of connection.

As part of my history is intertwined with rasta life during the 1980s, Chapter 3 Jah Warriors, drew me in quickly. Through the book I re-engaged with the anti-racism organising of the time. Some of the events mentioned echoed what was happening in my hometown of Watford, with Stuart Hall’s academic activism as part of that landscape. “We recognised that he was on side,” one of Lanre’s interviewees says about Hall, as they acknowledged that activism comes in many forms. We may have been on the same side as the big thinkers, but we experienced injustices differently to those with a more curated understanding of things. And I always feel this disparity of experience when reading books about our history.

This gap between lived experience and activism also seems to have grown, with many of today’s social justice advocates adopting causes for personal advancement. I’ll leave unsaid what I think of some of the more prominent commentators working in the arts today, including one photographer in particular.

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‘A Spike Lee Joint’ appears on my laptop screen and ooh, I felt a buzz of nostalgia. Rosie Perez returns in the opening sequence, after her iconic Do the Right Thing dance, which I try to watch at least once a year, as a pick me up. The camera immediately moves with that Lee swagger, drawing us into the rhythm…

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Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper reimagines Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper with the artist herself as a nude Black female Christ, surrounded by eleven Black disciples and one white Judas. When exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001 as part of ‘Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers’, the work sparked immediate controversy.

New York …

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Absorbed in Jessica Dallow and Barbara C. Matilsky’s Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar during my 6:30am reading se…

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Welcome to The Message, the new section of Shade Art Review examining the institutional framing and seemingly neutral art criticism of Black artists' work. Each week we take one artwork that was misunderstood, mis-categorised or dismissed in ways that obscured its impact on contemporary art.

For readers who enjoy deep dives, I'll include further reading and listening recommendations in some of The Message posts. Enjoy!

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Jennie Baptiste's first major solo exhibition opens at Somerset House this autumn, three decades after she began documenting Black British identity through music, fashion, and community.

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After months of preparation, Read My World Literary Festival 2025 opens at Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam, and I'm writing this from afar with a heart full of anticipation and gratitude.

This festival's roots stretch back to 2010 in Ramallah, where a conversation with Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh first sparked the vision for Read My World. Her words planted …

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Readi…

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Hello readers, friends,

I'm pressing pause on regular programming while on summer break, but wanted to get this down from last night at Everyman in the Garden, an event with Yinka Ilori in Watford. Holidays being challenging during these limited travel periods of my life, I've been maximising accessible cultural opportunities…

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I'm pressing pause on the regular Shade Art Review newsletter for August and September while I take a summer break and work on some new things behind the scenes. But I'm not disappearing entirely.

Instead, I'm doing something I rarely allow myself, slowing down with books. Real, physical books. As part of my mission to get back to …

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