Fact/Fiction: Stories Behind the Prints
Photographers reveal the stories behind their images in Fact/Fiction, the October Square Print Sale, running from Monday, October 26 to Sunday, November 1
Bruno Barbey, Lagos, Nigeria, 1977
“In 1977, Bruno was in Lagos on a story about the famous singer Fela Kuti. Before he could meet him, he was told that he wouldn’t be allowed to photograph him at home unless he agreed to smoke a large joint. He agreed to the idea, thinking he could just pretend, but the drug was so potent that he found himself stuck on a sofa, unable to move, and could do nothing more than press the shutter button.
“Personally, I find that this incredibly realistic photo transports us into a completely imaginary world: a woman entering the room by jumping through the window while a young man calmly answers the phone.”
— Caroline Thienot Barbey
Michael Subotzky, Cape Town, South Africa, 2023
View through the windows of the old ‘Non-White’ section of Cape Town Station.
“I have long been fascinated by this stained glass window located in the old ‘Non-White’ section of the main train station in Cape Town. After visiting the site many times, I decided the best way to ‘express’ rather than ‘document’ the experience of being in that building looking out was to combine often opposing views in one composite image.
“Shot on 5×7 large format film, the main frame was exposed for the interior windows and concrete, and the rest for the exterior. The exterior frames are deliberately varying in scale or ‘zoom’ to reflect the actual experience of looking through the windows at slightly varying distances from the apertures, and with attention to different aspects of the landscape.”
Moises Saman, La Havana, Cuba. April 7, 2026
“Young performers from the Compañía Cirabana Circus train inside a deteriorating former theater in central Havana. The group, made up of children and teenagers from at-risk families, rehearse acrobatics and juggling routines, with limited equipment, relying in part on donations to sustain their activities.
“As Cuba faces a prolonged economic crisis marked by shortages of food, fuel and basic services, frequent blackouts and limited access to electricity have made training conditions more difficult, with little ventilation inside the space.”
Eli Reed, New York City, 2001
“The place was so surrealistic… You’re trying to document it, to get the best evidence you can get and the feeling of what’s happening, what he’s trying to do — it’s like what anybody else would.
“You’re trying to recover, trying to do the best you can to correct things on the level that you can, because you’re not like a Superman.”
Rafał Milach, Września, Poland, 2016
“The First March of Gentlemen is a fictional narrative composed of authentic stories. Historical events from the town of Września serve as a starting point for a reflection on protest and mechanisms of discipline.
“In a series of collages, the reality of communist Poland in the 1950s merges with the memory of the Września children’s strike of the early 20th century. This temporal shift is intentional: the issues explored in the project are universal and resonate as a metaphor for contemporary social tensions.”
Danny Lyon, New York City, 1968
“My 1967 series on the demolition of sixty acres of mostly 19th-century buildings in Lower Manhattan has been reissued four times, most recently by Aperture. At the time, I used photography to show the pathos and beauty of destruction which I understood was embedded in the greatness of architecture.
“The present fascist regime is not only destroying our liberties, it is permanently entombing itself in our lives and our children’s lives through architecture. The despicable ballroom and the proposed arch will desecrate the beauty of our capital. Nothing is permanent, and we can look forward, in the hopefully near future, to these atrocities being demolished. Their ruins will be a monument to the beauty and resilience of our democracy.”
Elliott Landy, New York City, 2002
“I took this in 2002, in Times Square. I used color slide film and a unique handmade ‘camerascope’ filter tube attachment mounted onto a zoom lens. There was no Photoshop, AI, or any type of alteration done to the photo after it was shot. It represents one moment in time in many places at once due to the kaleidoscopic lens’s ability to reframe reality. I call this series Kaleidoscapes, because they are in the same visual family as Landscapes — an image which shows a very broad view.
“For years I had wanted a device like this, to take a kaleidoscopic view of reality. Nothing that I found was satisfactory until one day, I met a young man selling his camerascope invention at a crafts fair in Lincoln Center. Interestingly, I had dreamed about a kaleidoscopic lens for my camera a day or two earlier. I stopped and chatted with him, introducing my previous well known music works and told him I would love to buy one another time as I did not have the money for it then. He handed me the lens and said, ‘Here, take good pictures with it and send me a few that I can use to promote it.’ It took several years to figure out how to use the lens to get beautiful images, and by the time I had anything good to send, he had ceased making the camerascopes.
“This is certainly a dreamlike documentary image, which is what I have always tried to create with my camera — a way to show people the dreamlike mind space I am feeling which causes me to take a picture.”
Eve Arnold, London, UK, 1961
“Eve Arnold made this photograph for a Sunday Times story titled, ‘Women Without Men,’ which brought together very different female lives — from young women sharing a London flat, to nuns and a lesbian wedding.
“The photograph is documentary, yet the title creates its own narrative. Who were “women without men,” and what did that description actually tell us about their lives? Arnold’s intimate photograph seems to resist the simplicity of the label. The facts are visible, but the story imposed upon them is more ambiguous.
“In that gap between lived reality and the narratives constructed around it lies photography’s uneasy relationship with fact and fiction.”
Sohrab Hura, Kovalam, India, 2015
“This photograph is from my work The Coast, where I was looking at how the space of doubt between fact and fiction gets manipulated by those in power, by constantly tweaking the context and meaning of images. The book that I finally published was structured as a game in which each image would appear twice, and in each repetition it would be juxtaposed with a different image, thereby creating a different set of meanings. I was not looking at anything new.
“This tampering of fact with fiction has been ongoing from the time the first image was made for the sake of power. However, the book was published in 2019, in an entirely different pre-Covid19 world, where there was still some semblance of a tension between fact and fiction. Today I hope we don’t lose that tension entirely.”
Alex Majoli, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2020
“In 2020, on the eve of COVID spreading across Italy, I began traveling and photographing the epidemic. A few months later, during an artist residency with a theater company, I asked five actors to re-enact a photograph I had taken the previous month. I didn’t show them the ‘original’ image at first, only at the end of the experiment. The actors had never been inside a COVID hospital, nor had COVID themselves; they had never heard the words doctors were using at the time, nor felt the fear of its consequences. At most, they may have had an imagined picture drawn from the news.
“I gave them no direction, letting them rely only on their own perceptions and acting skills. I chose to stage this photograph in a real hospital, next to the rooms where actual COVID patients were being treated. In many tests I later conducted with viewers, the ‘real’ image, taken in a Sicilian hospital months earlier, was perceived as less truthful than the staged one.”
