Editor’s note: Joel Shapiro died June 14, at age 83. In the final weeks of the sculptor’s life, Max Norman interviewed him for a career-spanning profile. What follows are some of Shapiro’s reflections on his storied legacy. This article will also appear in the annual “Icons” issue of Art in America, due out in late August.

Alongside the larger sculptures in what turned out to be Joel Shapiro’s last show in New York, at Pace Gallery this past fall, there were a few roughly painted, pin-studded models about the length of your forearm, perched on rectangular white plinths. They shared a room with small insectoid bronzes, so it wasn’t clear whether these wooden models were meant to be read as documents of Shapiro’s process or as its product. But the ambiguity was perhaps the point. “It’s when you’re doing the work that transformation happens,” Shapiro told me in April. “It’s actually physically working with wood, looking at it, cutting it, changing it, altering it, until it somehow satisfies some aspect of your unknown intent.” That’s what attracted him to sculpture in the first place, “It was a fact and a form,” he said.

To walk through Shapiro’s Long Island City studio—among the works in various states of undress beneath the lofty ceilings of the ground floor, up to the menagerie of smaller pieces on the third—was to be surrounded by facts and forms. In one sunny corner a branching cactus grew in a pot atop a dolly, held up with an armature of plywood and a green pole. At first glance, I thought it might be a work I’d never seen, or some caprice Shapiro threw together and then abandoned in another of his numerous experiments. It was, in fact, just a cactus.

But I wouldn’t have been too surprised, since Shapiro’s long career was sustained by constant inquiry into the most fundamental artistic questions, a kind of sculptural Manhattan Project that left no aspect of his medium unexamined. From gargantuan to Lilliputian and back again, from austerely abstract to cheekily representational, from the floor up onto the wall or onto stilts and then into the air, from senseless just across the threshold to meaning—with unashamed sincerity and unrelenting focus, Shapiro pushed sculpture to new places.

He is best known for his sculptures of the human figure, most often fashioned from long rectangles of painted wood or cast bronze, gracefully frozen in a gravitational in-between that tickles your brain and tightens your stomach. He developed not just an unmistakable style but also a signature sculptural language, a syntax of loose connections and obscurely intuitive forms, like the recognizable lines but unfamiliar harmonies of Schoenberg’s music.

Very few of his sculptures have titles, but the Pace show was something of an exception. At its heart were three large new works made of wooden volumes covered in fast-drying casein paint, which Shapiro has used on wood and paper since the 1970s. In one corner, the more than eight feet of Splay (2024) splayed back: Two narrow blue rectangles formed a kind of body, and at its base were red and black fins resembling short legs, with a yellow sprout on top joined so loosely as to seem impossibly tangential. It was mirrored, on the other side of the room, by Wave (2024), an eight-foot-tall sculpture whose broad horizontal forms gave it a winglike quality relatively rare in Shapiro’s oeuvre.

Between the two hovered the artist’s last masterpiece, which bears the weighty name ARK (2020/2023–24). At more than 18 feet long and nearly 12 feet high, the piece is Shapiro’s biggest wooden sculpture. Yet unlike Splay or Wave, ARK rests on just three tiny points of contact with the ground, as if en pointe. Two enormous rectangles the color of dried blood spelled out its core; nestled behind one was a long narrow turquoise wedge, while two longer, narrower ones extended upward, like masts or feelers. This big sculpture has lots of room for surprises—not least a shock of orange on the internal face of one rectangle, with blue on its narrowest edge.

“The work makes you more aware of your body as your body moves around it,” sculptor Rachel Harrison told me. For the young British artist Jesse Wine, Shapiro “keeps it soft in places and hard in others. It’s almost a type of pacing.”

An ark—whether Shapiro’s ARK or the Bible’s—is a vessel of preservation, a means less of conveyance than survival. It’s an uncanny note to end a career on, but a fitting one. Roberta Smith, in a 1982 essay, once suggested that Shapiro, a bit like a latter-day Noah, “helped bring sculpture back from the brink of extinction.” In the sublime but infertile desert of Minimalism, Shapiro saw a path forward for his medium: It would take repurposing sculpture’s past, and his own.

SHAPIRO’S STUDIO IS HOUSED in a surprisingly stately former ConEd substation in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The situation is apt, and not just because Shapiro, who was born in 1941, grew up just a couple of miles away, in the left-leaning working-class neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. For one, what he described to me as his “first really radical” piece was a diminutive 1973 sculpture of nothing other than a bridge. And Shapiro himself was something of a bridge artist, spanning the Minimalism of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith and the Postmodernism that followed. That’s why he is often classified as a Post-Minimalist, a term that describes artists like Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Morris, who brought the maker’s process and psychology back into sculpture.

It took time, though, for Shapiro to figure out that he could be an artist in the first place. His mother was a microbiologist, and his father a physician who once sewed up Robert G. Thompson, chairman of the New York State Communist Party, after he was stabbed. There was art around the house (African, Indian, Indigenous), and as a kid Shapiro took classes in ceramics, drawing, and painting from a local artist. But up until his graduation from NYU, where he arrived after an abortive year at the University of Colorado Boulder, and then night classes at Queen’s College, it was assumed that Shapiro would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. “The idea of being an artist didn’t seem possible,” he told art historian Lewis Kachur in 1988, in an oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Two years in India with the Peace Corps changed that. Following in the footsteps of his sister, who had married an Indian man and lived in Bombay, Shapiro spent 1965 to 1967 teaching gardening techniques in rural areas as part of an effort, begun by Gandhi, to encourage Indians to grow their own food. Stationed in Andhra Pradesh, he traveled widely and made friends with locals and like-minded expats. He was surrounded too by sacred Indian sculpture, whose dense designs and endless variations on the human form he photographed on tours across the country. The experience “heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time,” Shapiro reflected in 2007.

Back in New York, Shapiro talked his way into the MFA program at NYU and started working in earnest. He also married Amy Snider, the founder of Pratt’s Art and Design Education department; the two had a daughter, Ivy, now an art adviser. To support the family, Shapiro worked polishing silver for a then-decent $3.25 per hour at the Jewish Museum, at the time, a radical force in New York, having mounted “Primary Structures,” the first real institutional show of Minimalism, in 1966. Brice Marden and Mel Bochner worked there as guards.

In his studio, then downtown, Shapiro went through “an idea a week.” These experiments first became public when Marcia Tucker selected a piece for the Whitney’s 1969 “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Material” show: a five-foot square of dyed nylon monofilament stapled to the wall. (After the show, Tucker wrote, the piece “becomes an art corpse set to rest in a plastic bag in a corner of the artist’s studio.”) The monofilaments, which he made for about a year and a half, “had an intensity and … a sensual aspect that was peculiar,” Shapiro told me.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he created a series of drawings (one now in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection), made only of messy grids of repeated impressions of the artist’s fingers. In 1970, for his first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Shapiro installed small wooden shelves in a straight line across two adjacent walls. (Shapiro moved to Pace in 1992.) On each shelf rested an identically proportioned rectangle of different materials—steel, plaster, gum rubber, Homasote wall board, and copper. With his fingerprint works, he had isolated the most basic gesture of drawing: mark-making. The shelf works similarly isolated the most basic gesture of sculpture: the presentation of material to be read by the viewer.

For his next show, in 1972, Shapiro produced process works like One Hand Forming (1971), a stack of sausage-shaped clay cylinders formed with one hand, and Two Hands Forming (1971), balls of clay formed with both hands arranged à la Hesse in round groups on the floor. 75 lbs. (1970), in a clear nod to Andre, juxtaposed 75 pounds of magnesium and 75 pounds of lead; the latter form was, true to its material, much smaller. Looking back, Shapiro reflected that he was “basically figuring out where something, at least for me, became more than a pile and had some real intent or purpose.”

These works shared the Minimalists’ ambition to isolate what Judd called the “specific object,” devoid of reference to anything beyond itself. Yet they bore what Judd sought to banish: the literal mark of their maker. Beneath the surface, they also reflected Shapiro’s exposure to craft in India, where he had taught locals to build ovens out of clay, and once recalled observing “cow dung patties on the wall, conic displays of pigment and spice… endless rolls of fabric. All raw material.” A 1970 photograph of Shapiro’s worktable—strewn with pieces of hammered copper, balls of clay, and stacks of river-rock-like lozenges—could easily be mistaken for a disorganized display in an anthropological museum. “His works of this period [the 1970s] exude emotions as vehement as a child’s fears combined with something akin to the austere discipline of a scientist,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1993.

It was these vehement emotions and a child’s fears that seem to have pushed Shapiro away from conceptual questions and toward an intensely personal figuration. The pieces in Shapiro’s 1973 show at Alanna Heiss’s Clocktower Gallery in New York are viscerally affecting, coming just after the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Snider the year before. The centerpiece was Bridge (1973), a simple milled cast-iron structure just 3½ inches tall. (It superseded a balsa wood version shown earlier that year in a group show at Paula Cooper.) The bridge was displayed by itself, marooned on the vast floor beneath a high ceiling. In the same show, an 11-inch-tall ladder leaned against the wall and two rough birdlike shapes, formed in clay by Shapiro’s right and left hands and then cast in bronze, rested on a shelf at waist height. The following year, again at the Clocktower, a mangled drawing mannequin splayed in one corner, right by the scuffed baseboard—a disturbing work critics immediately linked to Giacometti’s chilling bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). Around the same time, Shapiro produced a three-inch-tall chair in bronze (it “looks as if it were conceived by Gerrit Rietveld for a dollhouse designed by Plato,” Robert Pincus-Witten, who coined the term “Post-Minimalism,” once quipped) and, perhaps most iconic of all, a five-inch-tall cast-iron polygon that resembled a house.

“There were all these prohibitions about representation and anything that had reference,” Shapiro said of the art world’s attitude at the time. He didn’t care. These figures “were a record of my emotion, of my anxiety.” Indirectly, they may have reflected his sense of powerlessness; directly, of course, they represented home, and his role as creator of more than just art. “I was also building doll furniture for my daughter,” the artist remembered. “All of a sudden I’m looking at this three-inch chair on the floor and it does something spatially on the floor that I hadn’t seen. That really engaged me. It seemed like a real place to go.”

The simple fact of these sculptures’ smallness—the opposite of the maximalist scale favored by the likes of Morris, Serra, and Tony Smith—was profound. Had they been larger, they would have lost their power. “It was dragging you into this interior, almost ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stuff,” Shapiro observed. “I wanted them in your space.” These works were intimate but nonetheless impersonal, imbued with equal parts pathos and irony. “If these sculptures locate the contents of memory within a public space,” Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1976, “it is in order to show that the privacy of our memories is what is most trivial about them.”

Beginning in the mid-’70s, forms like chairs, stools, boxes, houses, birds, horses, and even coffins were rendered so elementally as to hover between figuration and abstraction. Teasing the plinth—considered, like cast iron, retrograde at the time—Shapiro mounted houses on small shelves or on tabletops. In one of the most famous iterations, from 1974, he mounted a small rectangular house, cast in bronze (and with a gently sloped roof whose angle he lifted from the helmet of Donatello’s David), on a narrow bronze shelf that protruded about two and a half feet and then dropped down at 90 degrees, a physical embodiment of the sightline—and the out-of-sightline. These pieces still exert a mysterious force, like Etruscan funerary objects or Cycladic figurines, evoking the near past of our own childhood and, somehow, childhood itself. Our desire to read these stubbornly suggestive shapes is as innate and reflexive as the desire to make sense of our inchoate feelings, to love the family that wounds us.

Some of the forms were themselves wounded: Shapiro made a series of small, hollow rectangular volumes with apertures of various sizes; most were orthogonal, but some were organic, more abrasions than openings. It was one of these that Antony Gormley saw in 1980, on a formative visit to the Panza collection in Varese, Italy. “Here was something that immediately by inference engaged your body,” he recalled to me. “They referred to shelter, the human need for habitat, but without overplaying it.” Gormley—who also spent time in India, and who made his debut at London’s Whitechapel Gallery a year after Shapiro made his in 1980—views this early work of Shapiro’s as “playing with Minimalism while making one very aware of what Minimalism has declined to engage with.” It was a “really useful irritant.”

SHAPIRO HAD FLIRTED with the human form from the beginning, with the mannequins strewn in corners. But his now instantly recognizable manner of representing bodies took root in the second half of the 1970s. In 1976 Shapiro cast in bronze what looks like a fallen bough, with a pair of limbs stemming from a slightly thicker rectangular trunk; one was bent into a kind of knee, the other extended straight. Both divide, like wishbones, into two smaller branches. That was the same year his sister died by suicide. “I was looking at trees, trying to find some image that might convey that,” he told me. The bronze tree “was very much about her.”

Around the same time, he cast in bronze a nine-inch-tall running man and, defying another Minimalist taboo, painted it in stripes of black and red—a color here reminiscent of Rodchenko’s Constructivism, which the body’s rectangular figure evokes. Experiments ensued, with mannequins posed like caryatids and with sitting, lying, and crouching figures. But he found his stride—or his balance—in 1980, with a figure made of four-by-fours straight from the lumber yard leaning forward on one “leg,” as if frozen on its way to a yoga pose, or halted mid-trip. On one “arm,” a sawmill’s stamp is still visible, like a tattoo.

In the decade that followed, Shapiro’s work was “figurative with a vengeance,” as Schjeldahl put it. Crucially, almost all of it stood vertically in space instead of lying on the floor. “Somehow the ground, the wall, the table, they became a frame,” he remembered.After working beneath the weight of so much grief in the ’70s, Shapiro’s work was literally elevated by “a kind of enthusiasm,” tending increasingly vertical. Even the floor works from the decade, which include fragmentary figures (a rectangular “torso” sometimes with just a “head”) cast in iron, or made from wood or plaster, reach up into space, or lift themselves up as far as they can. Around 1980, he began mounting small, brightly colored reliefs on the wall. By the end of the decade, he was elevating volumes on long dowels, like spider crabs, and hoisting forms on poles.

These sculptures, whatever their form, are decidedly off-kilter, “sidestepping all of the hubris that has marked all of sculpture in the Western canon,” as Gormley observed. Shapiro tapped back into sculpture’s tradition of figuration, but slantwise, making light of what might otherwise have been monumental. He drew inspiration from Degas, whose sculpture, he once said, “is so refined and elegant in his projection of form into space, whereas Rodin builds from the ground up.” And while he employed materials—beams in bronze or wood or aluminum—evocative of industrial modernity, he made all the heaviness seem light. His bronze and iron casts often preserve the grain of their wooden molds, even the traces of the saw. Metal makes for permanence, but not always perfection.

By the 1990s, Shapiro was experimenting regularly with doubling bodies, seeing how, in combination, they come even closer to abstraction. And his work scaled up with time, as he received ever more public commissions. Among the most important was Loss and Regeneration (1993), a monumental installation on the steps of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., comprising a 25-foot-tall figure that seems to plunge earthward, its head down and a long arm extended into the air, and, some 40 feet away, a nine-foot-tall house poised, like a dreidel, on one corner of its roof.

Catastrophe worked strange magic on Shapiro. Divorce, grief, a world-historical tragedy that haunted his secular Jewish upbringing—all stimulated his art. And so it was one morning as he was in a cab on his way to the Newark airport, when his second wife, painter Ellen Phelan, called to tell him that a plane had collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In the years following 9/11, Shapiro’s geometric compositions became increasingly complex and contingently joined. He began breaking up models and recombining them into dynamic and unstable forms, strung together and suspended with metal wire that had all the jumbled eloquence of rubble. (It figures that a sculptor would see the collapse of the Twin Towers a bit differently from the average New Yorker.) In the wake of that event, Shapiro “recognized—it’s a harsh thing to say—the limitation of what I was doing previously,” he said. The trauma worked to “push my work beyond a kind of representation,” to study “collapse and joining.”

His fragile, mobile-like assemblages begun in the 2000s look back to two of Shapiro’s long-standing influences, Calder and Miró, whose lightness is often subtended by darkness. But they also point to where Shapiro would go in the coming decades.

IF SHAPIRO’S FIGURES linger in the rich limbo of balance, in the 2000s, he burrowed into the density of contraction and collapse. A high point came in 20 Elements (2004–05), an 11-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide, 10-foot-long cluster of 20 brightly painted wooden rectangles, commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, that responds to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Dance (1865–69), a virtuosic academic relief originally intended to adorn the facade of the Paris Opera. (A study for the piece was on one of the models on display at Pace.) Mirroring the central, leaping figure in Dance, the heart of Shapiro’s composition is a large yellow rectangle, which he characteristically lofted at a diagonal. Responding to the dynamism of Carpeaux’s sculpture, none of the 20 elements is joined along an edge but instead seem to be magnetized to some core. This refusal to let the shape of the volume dictate its mode of connection to other shapes—a hallmark of Shapiro’s later style—is of a piece with his desire to resist the ways architecture could wind up framing, even constituting, so much of Minimalist sculpture.

Shapiro then “overwhelmed the architecture” altogether in his 2010 show at Pace, which included works like Was Blue (2010), composed of six painted rectangles of various dimensions, suspended with taut fishing wire as if in antigravity. “Of course they were dependent on the wall and floor,” Shapiro said, “but they weren’t organized around it.” In a 2016 show at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Shapiro suspended irregular polygons, including two in crimson that resembled houses, echoing a volume in a dark-blue sculpture that sat on the floor below. This work represented a “real sense of abandon,” he said. If his sculptures had always insisted on being viewed in the round, these new installations compelled the to move through them, within them—what Andre called “sculpture as place.”

“I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO DRAW,” Shapiro told me. But that’s not exactly true: He often sketched forms that eventually turned into sculptures, and even scribbled a series of unsettling etchings in the mid-’70s of couples dancing, or fighting, or both. Shapiro produced numerous drawings in charcoal and pastels, plus gouaches and woodblock prints, many of which reflect his sculptural preoccupations.

In the ’80s, he drew geometric forms in smudgy black charcoal on white paper—like blueprints for his houses, or X-rays of his stick men. (These bracing monochromatic pieces clearly left a mark on Christopher Wool, who served as Shapiro’s assistant for several years in the early ’80s. “His work is something I still think about all the time,” Wool told me.) Shapiro made blobby gouaches in bright colors around the time he started putting small, bright sculptures on the walls. He also started making collages, and collage-like geometric patterns, just as his sculptures themselves began to work more through juxtaposition than straightforward joining.

In his final years, Shapiro rapidly assembled pieces of wood using epoxy resin and one-inch pins shot out of a chunky, green-enameled pneumatic gun, made by the Italian company Omer. It was a kind of drawing in three dimensions, not so far removed from playing with blocks. “Even if it’s miserable, it’s playful,” Shapiro told me. To make ARK, for example, “I remember jamming pieces of wood into the vice, and compressing them,” he said. “I wanted layers of compression.” At some point, Shapiro’s longtime collaborator and woodworker, Ichiro Kato—who got his start crafting Donald Judd’s furniture—might translate a model into a finer maquette, which would then be translated once again when Shapiro chose to produce a piece at scale. In this iterative process, which sometimes unfolded over years, composition and contingency blended together. A sculpture might be transformed when a model got knocked over or fell apart; scrap snatched up from the floor might look like an invitation.

At the end of our meandering conversation, Shapiro and I spoke about two of his most towering predecessors, the totemic David Smith and the somewhat more puckish Anthony Caro. “I think David Smith really had to prove he was an artist in some way,” Shapiro said. “Caro not quite as much.”

I asked him if he still felt that he had something to prove. “I still think I do,” he replied. “But I think at this point I can be light-handed,” he added. “I think that’s a privilege of years.”

Caravaggio (b. 1571) is among the newest of the Old Masters. Though in one contemporary’s estimation he was egregius in urbe pictor, the outstanding painter in Rome, he fell out of fashion a few decades after his death; by 1660, Poussin would say that Caravaggio “had come into the world to destroy painting.” It wasn’t until a sustained rehabilitation effort by the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi after the Second World War that Caravaggio really came back into the public eye. But since then we’ve never stopped looking away.

“Caravaggio 2025,” at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, draws on Italian and international collections to assemble two dozen of the painter’s sixty or so known works. The paintings date from around the artist’s arrival in Rome in 1595 (a few years later than once thought) until his death, in 1610, aged just 38. Like his posthumous reputation, Caravaggio’s catalogue keeps growing as paintings are rediscovered; one canvas here (Ecce Homo, c. 1606–1607) only came to light in 2021, at a Spanish auction, and another (the lesser of two portraits of Maffeo Barberini, c. 1595), remains merely attributed. If you factor in the fourteen other works in other churches and museums, and the ceiling now accessible in the Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi, you can now see nearly two-thirds of the painter’s production in a single trip to Rome, now through July 6.

Caravaggio’s scandalous biography is certainly part of his continued appeal: Michelangelo Merisi, as he was known before taking on the name of the Lombard village where his father worked for a nobleman, became as well known in Rome for his misbehavior as for his astonishing paintings. He carried a sword without a permit, and was once arrested for casting a plate of artichokes (and probably aspersions) at a waiter. The artist eventually fled the city after killing a small-time gangster in a duel that broke out over a tennis match, of all things, for which the artist was sentenced to death. He shuttled from Naples (and the protection of the Colonna family), to Malta (where his membership of the Knights of Malta ended with imprisonment and escape by rappelling down a cliff to a waiting boat), to Sicily, and back to Naples (where a surprise attack in an inn left his face disfigured “beyond recognition”). He would die of malaria, alone, on his way back to Rome.

Caravaggio clearly had a lot going on, and his work—though rarely autobiographical—shows it. Few oeuvres are seeded with as many subtle self-portraits. Around the time he was seeking pardon for the après tennis murder, he would use his own face for the ghastly severed head in David with the Head of Goliath (c.1606)—an image of the artist offering himself, and his painting, to the viewer, as if a premonition of his own mutilation.

But more than biography, it’s Caravaggio’s style that gets somehow fresher with age. He evokes intense and particular human presences, but at the same time a mirror world that is pure image, pure representation: a rapt Narcissus (1597–1598) fittingly opens the show. His paintings are so technically fine as to be both compelling and suspicious, raising more questions than they answer. In the context of mannerist Rome, where imagined Beauty was the ideal, Caravaggio insisted, polemically, on painting from life.

Naturalism is one thing when you’re making secular images, presumably designed as tours de force to be displayed on easels, like, say, The Cardsharps (1596-97),where we observe dapper young men locked into their card game. Or in the three remarkable portraits in the show, including the second, firmly attributed likeness of Maffeo Barberini, one of Caravaggio’s keen aristocratic patrons later known as Pope Urban VII, whose sumptuous greens are being shown to the public for the first time since it was painted in 1598–99.  Along with several other paintings in the show, it now returns home to the palazzo that belonged to Barberini’s family.

But commitment to the worldly body is quite another matter when it comes to the sacred, which increasingly occupied Caravaggio as his life became more violent. Whereas the earlier paintings in the show’s first room are lit like studio photographs, the bodies of later paintings are like shots from a detective noir, cast more in shadow than light, giving you the sense that a moral struggle (good versus evil, the divine versus the all too human) is at work beneath their refined surfaces.

Caravaggio almost baits you with the beauty of his holy subjects, as in the three, increasingly sexy evocations of Saint John the Baptist (the last, from 1610, is basically a Venus), or in the paintings modeled by a beguiling Sienese prostitute named Fillide Melandroni, hung together in the show’s second room. She shines as the stately Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1598-99), considered the transition point to Caravaggio’s dusky mature style; as Magdalene standing by a symbolically loaded convex mirror in  Martha and Mary Magdalene (1598-99); and as Judith in the iconic Judith and Holofernes (1599-1600), a drama of furrowed brows in which the Babylonian general pays the price for being duped by appearances.

At times, we might fear being fooled ourselves: looking at these absorbing paintings, just like looking in them, is always a fraught affair. Yet it is the very realism of Caravaggio’s bodies—their complicated expressions, their palpable flesh—that renders the sacred paintings truly sacred. In art but also in life, his plunge ever deeper into worldliness seems to have led Caravaggio into otherworldly realms.  

Caravaggio reaches a high point with Taking of Christ (1603, from the National Gallery of Ireland). Christ is frozen in the precise second of the betrayal, his fingers still knitted in prayer as Judas plants his kiss; in a near cinematic narrative compression, Roman soldiers are already charging into the scene from the right, wearing their mirrorlike armor; behind Christ, at the far left of the canvas, a disciple, in yet another moment, screams into the black. Caravaggio himself stands in the jumbled crowd, holding up a lantern, straining to get a glimpse. It’s an ambiguous instant we would normally pass over on the way to the story’s inevitable conclusion. But Caravaggio keeps us suspended not in prolonged suffering, but in instantaneous sin.

The painter also lingers in the show’s final, haunting picture, the last one Caravaggio ever made: the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). He stands directly behind the ghostly white Ursula, just pierced by the arrow of the king of the Huns, whose offer of marriage she refuses; his mouth is open, face slack less with awe than what must be confusion—he’s looking at the king, and perhaps hasn’t even seen Ursula. He is staring out from the darkness. Where does the light come from?

This piece originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Photographs are made with light, but also with darkness. An extraordinary array of shows in New York mark the medium’s return to focus on the gallery scene after years dominated by figurative painting. In lieu of representation, they offer scenes of the unseen.

Marian Goodman presents Boris Mikhailov’s a largely archival show, “Refracted Times,” showing the undersides of his native Ukraine, alongside new work by An-My Lê. In “Dark Star,” Lê presents large-format views of the night sky over Mesa Verde, New Mexico. Long exposures yield Hubble-like definition, with galaxies visible over a ghostly landscape that recalls 19th-century albumen prints by Timothy O’Sullivan. Grey Wolf, a 2024 installation shown in a cyclorama brightly illuminated within the otherwise dim gallery, was by contrast shot in daylight, with pictures taken not of the sky, but from it. These curved photos—which echo Emmet Gowin’s “Nevada Test Site” series—look down on the Montana fields where nuclear missiles are siloed. The silhouette of the helicopter in which Lê must have ridden, visible in one picture, makes clear that her perspective here is less a bird’s than a bomber’s.

In “Stony the Road” at Sean Kelly, Dawoud Bey also reads what’s inscribed in the ground in 14 oversized exposures of dense foliage in a shadowy wood, and a slow-motion film moving through the same environment. The pictures, which evoke Atget’s and Adams’s documents of trees and roots, were made in 2023 along the Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, part of the Underground Railroad; the film is titled 350,000 for the number of people sold at Richmond’s slave markets from 1830 to 1860. Bey first turned toward landscape in “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” a 2017 series depicting real and imagined locations along the Railroad in Ohio. This newer photographic inquiry continues to point to meaning hidden in plain sight, underground.

A different kind of invisible connection is pictured by Larry Clark, whose portraits of New York City skaters, made just before his film Kids (1995), are on view at Ruttowski;68. Clark has a gift for portraying the delicate warp and weft of social fabrics, particularly in communities where they are simultaneously strongest and hardest to perceive. Here, teenaged skaters, in their baggy jeans and ratty T-shirts, give Clark permission to capture those contrary urges to blend in and stick out that rule a young person’s life.

In “TRANCE,” at Bortolami, Paul Mpagi Sepuya de- and reconstructs the optics of the social. Known for his intimate semi-self-portraits, with the artist often entangled with friends and lovers, here Sepuya attends to the studio. The mirror is a recurring motif here as elsewhere in his work; his reflective repertoire now expands to include the gazing ball, tripod-mounted, as a kind of anti-camera, or cradled in the artist’s hands, like a globe or a skull. These studies make explicit the baroque preoccupations that give Sepuya’s work its depth and its sometimes mind-bending complexity—his early modern, and just plain modern, attention to the mechanics of representation in all senses of the word.

Photography’s limits, both physical and conceptual, animate Roe Ethridge’s “Shore Front Parkway,” at Andrew Kreps, which takes its title from a landscape of a man-made berm at Rockaway Beach, behind which soulless apartment blocks loom as a rainbow reaches down to dispel the doldrums. A few such chance encounters are interspersed among staged studio shots, but even those vacillate between the real and the ideal, the constructed and the found: if you look closely at an entrancing still-life of red rubber gloves resting on a grid of checkered tiles, you notice the surface is ungrouted and flecked with grime.

Like Ethridge, Shannon Ebner, in “The Seaweed Synthesizer,” at Kaufmann Repetto, looks to the sea, specifically the sound at (and of) the Long Island Sound. Ebner’s practice has long lingered on the boundary between text and image, poetry and picture; here she explores the relationship between the visual and the aural, with photographs of LPs resting on sand (one inscribed, in black wax, “noise is noise”), two concrete forms that resemble ears, an underwater hyrdrophone distorted by the undulating water, and a found measuring stick, comically long, presumably used to track tides. A picture of letters spelling out SEA, / WEED / SYN, / THE, / SIZE / EAR anchors the exhibition, which resonates with a work, Sound Image—aquatic whispers playing in the space. With her characteristic conceptual sharpness, Ebner collapses sound into photo, confounding the senses.

John Divola transgresses literal boundaries in “The Ghost in the Machine” at Yancey Richardson. Divola has long made pictures from inside abandoned buildings, whose crumbing walls delimit a space beyond social, and visual, norms. In Blue with Exceptions (2019–2024), made at the derelict George Airforce Base in California, prints of AI-generated birds hang on the wall, their gauzy hyperrealism jarring against the gritty surfaces of the abandoned buildings, often spray-painted or lit by Divola. Yet the AI angle feels vogueish in comparison to the taut rigor of the “Vandalism” series (1973–75), also on display. The juxtaposition probes the fundamental contradiction, even discomfort, that defines the medium: photographers don’t just make pictures—they take them.

Correction, 2/11/2025: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Shannon Ebner inscribed the words “noise is noise” in paint rather than wax. It also stated that the sounds in her show were gathered from Black Point, Connecticut, though they are more broadly from the Long Island Sound.

“THEY FUCK YOU UP, your mum and dad. / They don’t mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” That’s Philip Larkin’s 1971 “This Be The Verse,” a lament that leaves little room for ambiguity. “Get out as early as you can,” the poet concludes, “and don’t have any kids yourself.” Have art instead, Larkin might have added, in this acrid ars poetica.

Perhaps no medium is in closer dialogue with parenthood than photography, which is, after all, a reproductive technique. (The nucleus of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, 1980, the founding text of modern criticism of photography, was a snapshot of Barthes’s mother—a picture, however, that remains unseen.) From Imogen Cunningham’s soulful 1930s portraits of her work-worn parents to Richard Billingham’s disturbingly charming pictures of his alcoholic father from the 1990s and Latoya Ruby Frazier’s 2001–14 photos of her familial matriarchs defiantly enduring the repercussions of environmental contamination, photographers have often sought to picture the intimacy or estrangement they feel toward their parents—and inevitably, to preserve their presence before it’s too late.

But there is a difference between merely photographing your parents and actively collaborating with them. Leigh Ledare was back at home from the Rhode Island School of Design, sleeping on the floor of his grandparents’ apartment, when he got a call from his mom, Tina, who lived down the hall. Then in her early 50s, Tina had been a ballerina with the Joffrey Ballet, and had even danced for George Balanchine; she had also worked as a model. She quit dancing when she married Ledare’s father in 1973, and then had two kids. Ledare’s brother had tipped him off that, after her divorce, Tina, was now practicing a different kind of dance: She started stripping at the club next door to the apartment building, and meeting men through classified ads.

When Ledare went down the hall to visit her at the agreed-upon time, Tina opened the door buck naked. There was a stranger in the apartment, a young man. The encounter felt like both a declaration and a challenge. Ledare had his camera with him and, at his mother’s invitation, started taking pictures of her that day.

Those images became his first book, Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008). The book intersperses photographs of Tina—many of them out-and-out pornography, showing her imitating salacious poses that she saw in porno magazines, or having sex with younger lovers—with those of Ledare’s grandparents and precocious but troubled brother and, toward the end of the book, the artist’s young wife. (They later divorced, but have collaborated since.) Mixed in are old lists and classified ads Ledare dug out of boxes in his mom’s apartment, and recollections or conversations he typed up for the book, plus stills from a soft-core fetish video shot by Tina and a few friends.

Pretend feels like a cross between a nudie mag and the scrapbook of a particularly fucked-up family. Its candor is at once revelatory and disturbing, in the vein of Larry Clark’s 1971 photobook Tulsa (Ledare lived with Clark before he went to RISD, and cites him as a mentor; a nude self-portrait in Pretend of Ledare holding a revolver is a nod to the cover of Tulsa). A portrait of Tina posing in silky lingerie on a blue bedspread precedes a faded picture of young Tina modeling in Seventeen magazine. A collage of some of her classified ads (“Beautiful, sexy, intelligent, & talented former ballerina & serious artist…”) is followed by a funny picture of Tina, posing nude like an old pinup, in front of a wall of boxes labeled “vintage shoes.” Ledare’s own recollections are seeded throughout, alongside lists, scrawled in a childish hand, of “gifts mom has been showered with” and “other presents Mom has bought me,” “childhood heroes,” “Girls I wanted to do,” “Jobs mom has quit for the following reasons.”

One typescript—tattooed with scribbled-out words and handwritten additions—recounts how, in the summer before seventh grade, “Mom’s started calling me into her room in the afternoon, ‘to talk.’” She’d even hand her son a dollar or two to fold origami for her, but “mostly she’s just lonely and pays me to keep her company.” She talks about her own youth. She compliments his listening, and adds that “dad is awful at that.” One afternoon, Ledare is sitting in a chair in his mother’s bedroom when she gets up and takes a shower. “When the water stops I pretend to be asleep” and he watches her as she comes back into the room and lies down naked on the bed. “I can tell she knows I’m watching her,” he remembers.

The whole series could be considered “an après-coup of that moment,” Ledare said in a phone interview. Pretend could be (and has been) read as a simple variation on the Oedipus complex. But it is much more complicated, and interesting, than that. This is obviously a memory of a boy’s sexual awakening, something that inevitably happens in relation to a mother. But it is also a story of a mother’s performance for her son, a version of what would unfold as Ledare photographed a “crisis my mother is acting out.” (One picture of Tina shows her giving a blowjob while wearing an upside-down tiara.) It is a personal crisis—around this time, Tina was struggling to figure out how to support herself—but also a familial one. “There’s a family feud being enacted,” Ledare said, between his mother and his grandfather, who lives just down the hall. Ledare himself was recruited into the fight, helping his mother sexualize herself in a way that, he knew, disturbed his grandfather, who once had to step down from a job as a minister because of a sexual transgression that Ledare alludes to in the book.

“It’s a coauthored project, in a sense she’s the director of the situation,” Ledare says. “I’m figuring out a way to almost parasite that situation.” The art consists in “that act of non-judgment,” a withholding that Ledare says “nominates the viewer to hold that judgment.” The relationship between Ledare and his mother is queasily ambivalent: a woman’s cracked fantasies of herself are lovingly produced by her son, a professional image-maker, and the ethics of it all are left to us.

Pretend launched a career in which Ledare has probed the permission a photographer gets from a subject—even formalized in a written contract, for one project—and that a subject sometimes wrests back. His feature-length documentary, The Task (2017), records him literally encroaching on a group relations conference, interrupting the work of therapy.Ledare is currently in training to become a psychoanalyst himself, a technique, he says, that prioritizes “allowing us to understand ourselves better as opposed to [being] cured.”

WHAT LEDARE DOES WITH PORNOGRAPHY—short-circuiting it by helping his mother star in her own fantasies—Charlie Engman does with fashion photography. Engman’s book MOM (2020) represents a 12-year collaboration between the photographer and his mother, Kathleen McCain Engman. Like Ledare, Engman had just moved back home after school (he studied Japanese), and his mother was there and available, willing to be photographed. Engman began working professionally in fashion, and “there were these categories of meaning and value that were being imposed on me and imposed on all of us that I was supposed to illustrate,” he says. “As a measure of self-defense almost … I started to try to bring her into editorial projects for fashion,” a way of bringing out, and sending up, the norms of the genre by applying them to an atypical elderly body.

There are not many women in fashion who look like Kathleen—a stern-faced, 74-year-old redhead recognizable to any fan of Collina Strada, where Engman is art director. To photograph her as a model, in the bold outfits and provocative poses that advertising and editorial employ, renders that photographic language distinctly visible, and critiquable.

Collaborating with his mother was safe for Engman. “I could ask things of her that I wasn’t yet comfortable asking of other people,” he said in a video call. The project blends personal and commercial work: all the photographs published in MOM were taken on commission, beginning in 2012 with a Hungarian magazine, when Engman was just 21.

Engman’s pictures, like Ledare’s, are sometimes sexy. In many, Kathleen is in various states of deshabille, perched or splayed on beds and couches, or simply staring at the camera, as nude as Eve. “As her son and as a gay man, she is the most de-sexed thing possible to me,” Engman says. Plus, he adds, the family is used to seeing each other naked. (“I guess we’re kind of Germanic in that way.”) Sexy often blends toward something more matter-of-fact, when her body is contorted or seen from an unflatteringly vulnerable angle, and we see her not as an object of desire, but as a mere fleshy object. In one unforgettable image, Mom with Plum, 2014, a plum rests on the back of Kathleen’s arm, where it meets her naked back, as she bends forward at 90 degrees; the freckles on the plum almost match the freckles on her skin.

Sometimes it seems as if Engman has done up his mother in drag as a kind of woman she is not, clothed in all the fantasies of desire of one of Engman’s celebrity models (Chloë Sevigny, Mariah Carey’s dogs) or in outfits that read recognizably as skater, twink, or John Waters-y caricature. Kathleen has a model’s cool confidence, pulling off pictures in which she should be out of place.But unlike Ledare’s series, which is driven by Tina’s own fantasies, MOM was directed by Engman. “There was a very interesting dom-sub dynamic at play there,” he says. He found his mother submissive to an almost troubling extent, inverting the usual parent-child hierarchy. Kathleen is presented in an aesthetic that clearly belongs to Engman, a decidedly millennial mix of the dense collages and iPhone screenshots of Instagram extravaganza, as well as the lux language of art photography that evokes Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston, Juergen Teller, and of course, Ledare.

A series of disturbing images late in the book makes Engman’s power, as shaper and mis-shaper of his mother’s form, most explicit. One superimposes a shot of Kathleen getting her hair done for a shoot over her body sitting in the studio; at the very bottom of the image, almost hidden, is a rope that ties her hands. The next page shows an iMessage conversation in which Kathleen sends (Today 15:47) a selfie from the dentist’s office, a single gold crown shining next to a white-gloved hand. Turn the page and there’s Kathleen’s made-up face, staring out from a plastic bag filled with water, as if she were a goldfish; her red hair is suspended, and air bubbles stream out of her nose. The white dress shirt she wears is sopping wet, the bag suspended by something outside the frame. Kathleen is at the mercy of the photographer—she can hold her breath for only so long.

Making MOM left Engmanwith a newfound consciousness of the morality of his work. “I think it radicalized me on a political level,” he says. “I was really like, ‘fuck, other people have feelings too.’” Engman continues to work widely as a commercial photographer, recently shooting Charli XCX for British GQ and the viral New York magazine cover of a person with the head of a cat for a series on pets. But his mother remains at the reflective center of his practice—even as he pivots to incorporating AI. He is currently training a model on images of Kathleen, which will present another moral test. A viewer immediately grasps the ethical tension of a photographer shooting a parent, which is a slightly clearer version of the fraught relationship a photographer has with every subject. But what happens when it’s no longer the child who is in control of the parent, but another kind of intelligence entirely?

IF THE PEROSNAL BECOMES POLITICAL in Ledare’s and Engman’s work, the political becomes personal in“Ghostwriter,” an ongoing series Sheida Soleimani began in 2020. The 34-year-old’s parents immigrated from Iran to rural Ohio in 1984, fleeing political persecution. Soleimani’s father is a physician and pro-democracy activist, her mother, a nurse and fellow traveler. Both fled their homeland in dramatic journeys that Soleimani grew up hearing about on the other side of the world. “JD Vance grew up 20 minutes from where we were,” she says, underscoring the contrast. Her parents didn’t speak English well, so she was the only audience for the stories of their lives back home, and the traumas they carried: solitary confinement, perilous escapes over snowy mountains, friends put to death. “They don’t believe in therapy, of course, even though they’re medical professionals,” she says. “I was exposed to some pretty insane shit at a young age.”

Soleimani first resisted telling her family’s story in her work, though she was unafraid of politics: she originally drew attention for her dense collages, which she creates in her studio and stages for the camera, as well as her effigies of women wrongfully executed by the Iranian government. Her visually exuberant “Medium of Exchange” (2016–18) series has a burlesque quality, combining dense archival materials with live models, sometimes nude and often wearing the masks of political figures like Kissinger, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, sometimes slicked with black oil.

The pandemic, however, pushed her to think more about the stories she grew up hearing. She was convinced that her mother would get Covid from her father, who works in a hospital, and that they, and their stories, might be lost. So she called up her parents and proposed a series, and they agreed, on certain conditions. Their faces must be covered, since her father is still politically active under a pseudonym. And the project must be collaborative. Soleimani became their “ghostwriter,” telling stories that belong to her parents, but in her own language. The title of the series has another valence too: Soleimani is making visible ghosts from her parents’ past, specters that have haunted her life as much as theirs.

She introduces her parents in two portraits, Noon-o-namak (bread and salt), 2021,and Khooroos (rooster) named Manoocher, 2021. They sit in three-quarter profile, before a busy backdrop of photographs, tiled likea checkerboard, that showthe ruins of their home in Shiraz, Iran, where many of their stories take place. In both, they wear masks and clutch a bird in one arm. Her mother holds a guinea hen, a species that she had rehabilitated in Shiraz; her father holds a rooster, an allusion to a bird that used to live on their property, where he killed many snakes.

Many of Soleimani’s pictures show birds, which constitute a language of symbols her parents gifted her. As a nurse, Soleimani’s mother focused on rehabilitating birds when she moved to America and could not practice because of her ropy English. The artist herself is a licensed bird rehabilitator; her interview for this piecetook place in the aviary for her crows. Her brood sometimes interrupted her speech. (“The Ravens speak Farsi and they imitate my voice,” she said. “They’re saying Salaam.”)

In Khoy (2021), named for the prison where her mother was held in solitary confinement for more than a year, her mother’s hand sticks out from paper bars, holding an Eastern bluebird that Soleimani rehabilitated and then released with her mother. Soleimani constructs her images as sets, with costumed characters posed among printed-out images and sculptures: in a trompe l’oeil that evokes the forced juxtapositions both of historical processes and artistic practice, Soleimani re-creates realities as complicated, and chaotic, as collage. Here, the bars are made from a cut-up printed image of the actual entrance to the Khoy prison, where her mother was sent for her activism; screen printed in the upper left corner is a Farsi poem in which Soleimani’s mother compares herself to a bird in a cage that no one listens to.

So much in these images is private. The Farsi text is illegible to most viewers, and even those who can read the language would not know the real meaning of the poems. Many images feature Soleimani’s mother’s eerie drawings from her past (a face drawn on a quince, a glyphic fetus on a board). And of course, Soleimani’s parents keep their faces covered.

Working with her parents required the artist to “build a consensual practice.” Photography is always an act of domination. “The lens is a dick that penetrates the world nonconsensually,” the artist likes to tell her students. Dada collage, whose cutting, splicing, gluing, and superimposing fascinates Soleimani, is similarly haunted by violence.

Photography, like family, is stalked by questions of power, of ownership, of autonomy. Photographing one’s parents brings out these familiar, yet still fundamental, ethical quandaries. That is in part because every viewer intuitively understands what is at stake when you see your mom naked. But it is also because, here, we can clearly grasp how photography works in two directions at once. The artists here have taken their parents’ pictures, yes, but given them something in return too. Ledare gave his mother, Tina, access to the airy realms of high art that she briefly inhabited as a young dancer, but from which motherhood took her away. Engman has rendered Kathleen something of a viral icon; as standards of beauty and inclusivity change, she is in demand as a model. And Soleimani has externalized and shared stories that her parents have carried within themselves, “ghostwriting” narratives that they did not have the language, or the freedom, to tell.