The Secret Lifetime of Pictures

We reside in an odd, shape-shifting time, the place the contours of an agreed-upon actuality are in flux. On social-media feeds churned by data-driven AI, the plot thickens till it shatters right into a thousand items. Conspiracy, as soon as the precinct of grocery store tabloids, is changing into frequent sense. Against a backdrop of fractured politics, the intrigue across the Epstein recordsdata gives a lingua franca, an unsavory level of consensus that an illuminati have circled their Gulfstreams to guard their very own.

Power, because the artist Taryn Simon has proven, is much less a spectacle than a system. Simon has spent her profession documenting the unseen constructions that form establishments, from flower preparations to nuclear storage websites. “I’ve never been looking to expose, I’ve been looking carefully to understand,” she tells us in these pages. It’s a line that speaks to how pictures have all the time existed in a sort of hole between revelation and concealment.

Not all secrets and techniques are pernicious, in fact. In an age of oversharing and eroded privateness, a well-guarded secret takes on a brand new forex, a method of opting out of a system that desires to know every thing about you. The photographers featured on this problem present how a secret could be a highly effective bond, a shared symbology amongst staff, a type of play, the premise of a riveting whodunit, or one thing that may’t simply be put into phrases. Sarah Charlesworth and Alix Cléo Roubaud each left behind enigmatic our bodies of photographs shrouded in open-ended questions. Charlesworth set her beguiling footage up like magic methods, solely with out a large “reveal.” Roubaud delighted within the sorcery of the darkroom. “I want to make everything come up to the surface,” she mentioned. Like that of all of the artists gathered right here, her work asks not solely what’s hidden, however how and why we select to look.

This article initially appeared in Aperture No. 263, “Secrets.”