Some five or six years ago, Lauren Oliver taught me how to darkroom print. We immediately bonded over our love of Super 8, which she used to document performances, and I to shoot anything and everything around me. At some point, Lauren showed me a treasure that feels too precious to share: a 16 mm negative holder with an opening the size of a fingernail.

We decided to put this unusual negative holder to the test by making a C-print from Super 8. The footage, which showed votive candles flickering on an altar, was nearly uniform from one frame to the next. Rather than cut the Super 8 into smaller strips, we left it intact so that dozens of feet of film dangled from both ends of the enlarger head like paper streamers. 

It was a spellbinding experiment. The final image revealed more than a picture of candles. What appeared were three consecutive Super 8 frames that simulated movement. On the one hand, I was struck by our photograph’s novel sense of illusionism: I imagined a tiny, fleeting moment playing on repeat on the page. On the other, the photo felt completely foreign to everyday perception. As if with a photographic butter knife, Lauren and I took a split-second moment and spread it out flatly into three distinct pictures. Somehow, incongruously to logic, we took a moment in time and translated it into space. 

In the act of translation, plenty of ambiguities emerge. When we think on very simple terms about language, words mean different things depending on context and place. The word bomb, for example, might be translated into Spanish as bomba, but depending on who you talk to and where, it might lead one person to duck for cover, someone else to point you to the nearest gas station, and someone else to sing folk ballads. Because of that ambiguity, the act of translation often exposes what words really express and where they come from. Sometimes, the most unexpected insights arise from that movement from one language to another.

In this spirit, the interview took a stab at translation between three related, but quite distinct mediums: cinema, photography, and photobooks. What they share is perhaps the indexical image recorded mechanically on light-sensitive material. But the means of deploying these frozen pictures lends to very different kinds of stories that warp time, memory, and history. In some way, these three artists are all at work creating their own languages for conveying the complexity of their experiences. It was exciting to discuss the beautiful exchange between these three mediums and learn what photography has to gain when it steps outside itself and understands its own limitations.

Keisha Scarville. lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound. MACK, 2024

Sofia Granados Dyer: I want to start this conversation by talking about the singular image, which feels like such an important distinction between cinema and photography. Why does the singular image feel insufficient in your own work? What doesn’t quite fit in that frame?

Lauren Oliver: I begin making an image with a score or a question for myself. Then I carry that question in front of the camera and start to answer it within my body. At a certain point, I leave the seed of the question behind to be in dialogue with my body. How does it feel to be in one position or transition to the next? What parts of the body work in harmony and which work against each other? The contact sheet becomes a record of this becoming.

Traditionally with photography, you get the contact sheet and then choose the one image that represents a particular idea. For me, the whole contact sheet is important for seeing that record of movement. I typically extend from one image to two to three, to four to five. In a three-channel film I made a few years ago, I wanted people to see the space before I enter, what happens when I enter, how I move through it, and then how I exit it.

SGD: Why does it feel important to you to show what comes before and what comes after?

LO: There is so much labor involved in crafting an image and sometimes I feel like that gets lost once the photo goes up on the wall. Feminist artists in the 1970s worked with their bodies and showed the labor behind it, and they didn't feel constrained to just showing one image. I feel like we've lost that somehow photographically and maybe I’m trying to bridge that rift.

SGD: Do you think about these as poses or more as snapshots?

LO: I think about it as a dance, actually. Looking at these frames on a contact sheet breaks the dance down image by image. When you squint and go in order from top to bottom or left to right, you create a record of the foot moving from the ground up to the knee.

Lauren Oliver. Motion Study. 

SGD: Does the dance come first or does the photo come first for you? In other words, do you care more about the performance or about documenting it?

LO: A year ago, I started rewiring my brain to not think about my work as photos or films, but as records of performances. I would say I prioritize the performance and the dance over the photo.

SGD: Do you ever perform live without photographing it?

LO: I have not yet.

SGD: Why do you think that is?

LO: I've been trying to work through that. I feel like when you use the word performance, people think irl. They forget that you can perform for the camera. We only engage with those performances from the 1960 and 1970s through what's left over. We weren't in the room when Carolee Schneemann was removing paper from her vagina, or when Yoko Ono had people cut pieces of her wardrobe on a stage. I think it's important to make that distinction and put those records on the same level as performing live.

SGD: Martha, I want to extend this question of singularity to your book design. Your pictures completely bleed over the page and over the frame. Why doesn’t the page feel sufficient for holding the photographs?

Martha Naranjo Sandoval:  I don't know if the page is not enough. I just think that the image is comprised of more than what’s there. At some point, I decided to design the book as if you were looking at contact sheets. When that happened, I was like, how much am I going to respect the images? Or will it be more pictorial than that?

Martha Naranjo Sandoval. Small Death. Mack, 2025

SGD: We were discussing earlier that Rosalind Krauss essay on grids. She talks about Mondrian and how in some of his paintings, the structure of the grid seems to go on forever beyond the canvas. In other cases, the grid is circumscribed by the canvas.

MNS: When I teach photobooks, I find that a lot of my students don't want to do full bleed images. They’re thinking about the frame, and when you go full bleed, you have to do away with the frame. But there is something nice about an image that doesn't end. It ends by the arbitrary thing that is the edge of the book. It feels like it goes on forever.

SGD: Which is something I feel happens a lot in your book, Keisha. I see it in lick of tongue's chapter breaks. The first chapter starts with the line “this is not the beginning,” which is quite provocative. On the next page, you have this full bleed photo that's very cosmic and what looks like a family snapshot that's folded in on itself and pushed to the edge of the page.

Keisha Scarville. lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound

Keisha Scarville: With the layout of lick of tongue, I wanted there to be a moment where the structural pattern breaks. I was thinking about Tarkovsky and how he spoke about a desire to fill the frame with time. It became this thing: how can the page be filled with time?

The project is so much about letting go of narrative structures. That occasionally meant purposefully filling the page with image. It also meant the threading of language. I wanted there to be moments where, by way of rhythm, I could bring attention to the edge of the page and activate it as a space for something to happen. It also leans into a question of anticipation. What can you anticipate about what’s on the other side of that page?

SGD: The way you push things to the very edge of the margin reminds me of that Eisenstein essay Martha has mentioned being important for her, “Word and Image.” At some point, Eisenstein talks about enjambment as this really beautiful cinematic technique. It’s a sense that the syntax and the cadence aren't quite aligned. It's like something isn't quite fitting on that line and then has to push to the next one.

KS: But it does fit. The work just doesn't follow a conventional way of thinking about how it fits. I think a lot about how collage makes time more tactile and eruptive, particularly in a photo book. I'm interested in rethinking this idea of what fits and what doesn't fit.

SGD: But I think that's why your book and the work of everyone here is so interesting. It’s rethinking the way that something like narrative can fit or not, even within its own logic and rhythm and structure.

KS: I don't think that's anything new. There have always been individuals who have wanted to rethink structure. I don't know if anyone has seen Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS, but he talks a lot about the way in which he's rethinking narrative structure within a filmic space.

SGD: The question of structure is one I want to open to Martha and Lauren. What happens when you make the structure between photographs so visible, and what does that reveal for you? When you have to decide the structure that's going to work for your own story, you inevitably have to decide what stays in and what you leave out. What did that process reveal about your own lives?

Martha Naranjo Sandoval. Small Death

MNS: I’ve been making pictures for a decade at this point. It's like 500 rolls. They have to be organized in some way and I keep bumping against the question of how. It’s as if they don’t want to be organized. You could organize it chronologically, but that’s so boring. Who cares about how things actually happen? Instead, I wanted to be playful. I’ll let connections become apparent by how pictures sit next to each other.

In some ways, because there is no text and no dates in my book, I’m not helping you get closer to the truth. I do think that reveals something more about the viewer than about myself. Putting a book out means letting go. Once the pictures are out there, they're no longer you, really. They can't be.

Martha Naranjo Sandoval. Small Death

SGD: Lauren, I want to ask you the same question of what structures foreground and what they leave out. Your composites strike me as mathematical at times. They are these beautiful grids that evoke an almost hyper-controlled visibility of your body by showing it from 10 different angles. It’s as if you reveal every part of the pose. Are there pictures or documented performances that no longer feel like you? Where does structure come into that?

LO: I feel like I tend to structure my composites through gesture. In the process, I think about what that reveals to me and what I hope that it conveys to the viewer about the body’s possibilities and limitations. My aim is to then throw it back to the audience to look at what's happening in the photo or in the video, and think about enacting it within themselves.

Lauren Noelle Oliver. Balloon

There is an image on the screen. When I presented it during critique, the main discussion was essentially, “You don’t need all of this. I get what you're doing in one image. Why do you need the accumulation?”

Hearing that was hard. You’re torn between listening to them and listening to yourself. Why is it important for me to have all five frames? In that image, I’m blowing up a balloon. I don’t think one picture can capture the amount of tension that goes into that. Showing it in stages really emphasizes how the particular action feels: the jaw tightening, the cheek swelling. It can’t just be one image for me. It was a fight. I was like, it's five. Sorry.

SGD: That does take us to a question I have about movement. Film or cinema is also obviously called moving image or motion picture. Tarkovsky talks about sculpting in time. André Bazin, who founded the famous magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, called film objectivity in time. Movement can mean all sorts of different things in terms of photography and your own work. It's very much not obvious. How do you understand it?

KS: I have failed many times to do video. Every time I try to do video, it's very difficult for me to move the camera. I cannot move the camera. It's just impossible for me. Maybe I've just watched way too much Chantal Akerman. Then, I was locked into this question: what if the frame doesn't move and we just have to linger? I think that I try to do the opposite when I'm taking photographs.

Keisha Scarville. lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound

I was also thinking about the question: What would it look like if all these things I want to say had to be sung or shouted, or if it were a performative poem? That was guiding me in creating movement for the book and also for thinking about an image that just lingers. It ties to the title and the ways of using language. The lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound was about thinking about what comes next. Even language can produce movement.

Keisha Scarville. lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound

SGD: Language as producing movement. Can you say more to that?

KS:  I knew that I wanted to include writing with the book and I purposefully used language to think about time and movement. All of the years I included were either the year of birth or the year of passing for individuals in my family. I also knew I wanted to push against this idea of a beginning to say that it’s impossible. That’s why I talk about the ways time is kept in a different way. How long does it take to clap roti? How long does it take to walk to the white church and back, which is something that is familiar to my family in Guyana. Those were ways of talking about movement and time without having to say: “This is about time.”

Keisha Scarville. lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound