Five Photographers on Photographing Art
Interviews that formed part of piece published on Artsy, April 2026.
ALMA FEIGIS: Can you recall a recent exhibition that’s stayed with you? I’m curious whether you felt compelled to photograph anything or whether the work resisted translation into an image.
ALEXANDRA GORDIENKO: What comes to mind is Christoph Büchel at Fondazione Prada, in Venice. I’d seen online a lot of pictures of parts of his installation. His work is about debt, and how society finds itself in debt, and how capitalism takes us there. Certain parts of this gigantic exhibition went quite viral on social media, but when I came to Venice, my experience of it was so intense – it was just amazing, and what I saw online in no way illustrated what I was going into. But I don't see it as a negative thing, because those bright images only enticed me to experience the whole process for myself.
ED TEMPLETON: Last year, I travelled to Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz just to look at the paintings of Otto Dix and, in the process, discovered how much I enjoy German art from the Weimar era. I took plenty of photographs of the art for inspiration. As a painter, I might be working on something and can use the images. I shot to dissect how a certain painter achieved something, how they used their materials and brushwork and how it might inform me if I’m doing something similar. It’s rare and a privilege to see paintings in person; the vast majority of people only see art through reproductions.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Tillmans’ Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us has stayed with me. The entire space operated as an image in itself; the former library was transformed into an environment with prints pinned, taped, framed, scaled up or left fragile. You were left to wander rather than being guided. I liked that sense of freedom, of thinking through space rather than through a single framed work. But I didn’t feel compelled to photograph much – the meaning of many of the works depended on scale, proximity, and the physical relationship between images.
ZORA SICHER: I’m not sure, but not long ago, someone asked me about who my influences were in a photographic context. Right now, I'm going back to photography that I encountered early, to things like Lee Friedlander nudes that I haven't looked at since I was in college and never paid attention to. But I’m also being influenced by media that are so beyond photography. I'm amazed by painting for the first time, like I understand something about it differently, even though I'm not ever going to make a painting like that. I'm feeling something about someone else's brain, and maybe the way I'm digesting it is photographing the little piece of it that makes sense to me. I guess that’s my way of processing it.
ALMA: When you encounter an artwork in a gallery and decide to take a picture of it, what are you responding to? What feels important to retain or interrogate?
ZORA: I’m trying to understand what my day-to-day practice of taking photographs on my phone is, and what I qualify as part of my art practice, versus the throwaway images. Having this little digital tool all the time and observing what I'm drawn to photographing, and what I want to share, has informed how photography feels different now; the way that I want to set up an image is changing. I'm not going to psychoanalyse the whole process behind what we’re trying to capture with these images of art or exhibitions. I'm an Instagram addict like everyone else. I post my nice stories of the week – a song, maybe an image of a poetry book and something from an exhibition. I think all I’m doing in those instances is making connections between these things for myself. At the most innocent core of things, I want to share something that excites me. It’s quite a human motive, and it’s also a big reason for my art practice and what I want to share with the world.
MARTHA NARANJO SANDOVAL: A show is finite – it happens and then ends. I want to keep it for longer to have a remembrance of what it was. I think about it in the same way I think about seeing pictures of my grandmother when she was young. I can approximate some things, but she might get something else out of it, because the picture is not really preserving something; it’s activating the memory in her head and returning her to the context of the moment. You see a picture from an exhibition and think, “That’s right, the piece was hung this way; I felt this way.” But seeing it on a screen is not the same experience at all, and that’s fine – you have to be in front of something to really see it. Maybe the picture is just there to trigger memories, or to help you explain to other people what it felt like to be there.
ED: It could be that the way a work was framed was interesting, or, like I said above, the way an artist painted something was fascinating or informative, so that means I’m getting as close as the museum guards will let me with an iPhone. But I also take an overview of the whole work in case the gift shop doesn’t have a postcard. I suppose my approach to photographing the art is practical, whereas I’ve seen people photographing art almost like a trophy or a celebrity, to prove that they were in the presence of a famous work – a token that can be shared on social media. I’ve done that too.
MOHAMED: What feels important to retain is not just the image of the work, but the experience of encountering it. I’m less interested in a neutral reproduction and more interested in holding onto why it stopped me.When the artwork is small, I often feel an even stronger desire to photograph it. Small works feel more precious and intimate, and almost fragile. They require you to move closer, to slow down, to adjust your breathing. That closeness creates a private moment between you and the object. There’s also something about scale that shifts power. Large works dominate a room while small works invite you in, and when I photograph them, I’m responding to the sense that something subtle and easily missed deserves attention.
ALMA: When it comes to photographing artworks, is faithful documentation a useful concept, or does every image become a portrait of the work?
ED: That’s funny, I never thought of it quite that way. When I hire a photographer to shoot my paintings, it’s for posterity or for a book, so I want the lighting and colours to be correct and for it to be a faithful reproduction. It’s something to put into my archive once a painting leaves the studio. I once did a series of black-and-white film photographs called Deanna and other people looking at paintings, which was very much like the trophy pictures I mentioned before. When we came across a famous or well-known painting, I would get a photo of my wife, Deanna, considering the painting. But when I’m shooting an iPhone picture of an artwork, I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of it as a portrait of the work, although it totally is.
ALEXANDRA: We do a lot of collaborative projects with artists at MARFA, including narrative-driven shoots within the space of an exhibition – we've done shoots within exhibitions of Cindy Sherman and Maria Lassnig, Isa Genzken, Michael Dean, Nicole Wermers. I love art, I love fashion, and I love the intersection of the two – how they talk to each other. You probably can’t do a shoot next to the work of some dry German photographer, but it’s different in the work of certain sculptors and artists who share the same references as the photographer doing our shoot, who ask similar questions, who draw inspiration from fashion, or people-watching on the street. It's very sad when art is used as a backdrop for a fashion image; that’s flat and unproductive. But if both parties engage with the meaning of what they're trying to achieve, that can help both conversations become deeper.
MARTHA: I once saw something at the Whitney where they had acquired a performance, but what they actually held were photographs of it. We walked down a corridor viewing the pictures while a curator described what had taken place during the performance. I kept thinking how it's a very human, but also a very imprudent thing to want to preserve something as elusive as a performance, to show it in a way that all you can think of what you're seeing is that you weren’t there. What you get is almost the anecdote of it.
ALMA: How do you see a work shift when it is translated into a photograph?
ED: Texture is something that is hard to translate, and scale is sometimes hard to understand. I had only seen The War, the big triptych by Otto Dix, via reproduction until I went to Dresden, and in some ways, it was less impressive than I imagined from reproductions. There was a demystification of the way it was painted when you see it in person. I don’t think it changed my reverence for the work, but some of the mystery was gone, and in close detail, some of the brushwork and the way the paint sat on the canvas was surprisingly simple. It was very eye-opening.
ALEXANDRA: I vividly remember Lisa Bryce’s exhibition at Sadie Cole HQ’s Bury Street space, which included just two paintings. If you took a photograph and cropped it around the work, it would have just looked like any other white space and the artwork. But it has a really different message if you take a wide shot, maybe even from outside, and you see how small that gallery is and how large and sparse the works are, and how they sit in this historical building. I think that's what I'm always mindful of, the context.
MARTHA: I remember someone showed me a Graciela Iturbide photograph called La niña del peine, which depicts a girl in a doorway with a comb in her hair. Despite all the times I've seen this picture, in books or on the internet, I never noticed that there was information in the doorway. The first time that I could see that was when someone showed me an actual print at an archive – I could see that something was happening behind the girl. That's something that, if I had tried to photograph on my phone, it wouldn't have shown because it's just something so delicate and subtle. I have friends who are such nerds about printing that, if the pictures were living digitally, would rather send you the file from their camera than a picture of a photograph. You can't do that with work that isn't photography. What are you going to do – send paint in the mail?
ALMA: Once an artwork is photographed and shared, it begins to take on a life of its own. How do you think about that loss, or redistribution, of control?
MARTHA: I believe that, once you make art and show it, it's no longer yours. People take pictures with their phone and forget where they took it, and live with that image without even having their name around, and that's fine. You just have to let your images do their own thing and have their own lives separate from yours.
ALEXANDRA: I think it's a question for the artist: how come the artist allowed for that to be the prime image that is seen? Then, a critique of the artist not having enough concept around it or power around it to shift this outcome. Why does the artist give the power to somebody else? Why can't artists claim the power back? I think that that is the beauty of an artist as an occupation: you decide what you do, and you decide how you position yourself.