precisa aprender ingles is a substack newsletter where I share musings on my images along with unpublished unedited pictures from my contact sheets.
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30. A peeing self-portrait
Martha, Germantown, December 2025.
ROLL 609 | FRAME 20
Last week, I showed this self-portrait at NADA with Miriam Gallery. I have been trying to take this picture for a long time and I was excited when the roll came back from the lab and it surpassed my expectations.
A photograph of a peeing woman is nothing new. Sophy Rickett took a series of women (herself included) in business casual clothing peeing standing up at night in London’s financial district. Emmet Gowin took a picture of Edith Morris, his wife, peeing inside a hut, pee puddle glistening and all. Jia Chang took a series of black and white self-portraits peeing standing up in multiple positions against a black background. I still have wanted to take this picture for a long time.
And there it is. Me, as a fountain, with a trail of bright pee coming directly from me onto the ground. Taken on a cold winter day, in front of a river.
One of the joys of taking film pictures is uncovering pictures when you look back at your contact sheets. Graciela Iturbide described it as there being two decisive moments: “One, when you take the photo; and two, when you discover it in the contact sheet”. Just the other day I did it, starting from the last picture I used in the book. I not only found pictures I had not considered, but I also realized that I took more worthwhile pictures last year than I had initially assumed...
Martha and Dylan, Brooklyn / Paris, November 2025.
ROLL 593 | FRAME 34
Last year in November I went to Paris. Every time I travel I rewind the roll that is in my camera and then load it back into the camera after I go through security and wind it to the frame where I left off. I forgot to wind it and I accidentally double-exposed four pictures from this roll, blending my room in Brooklyn with the streets of Paris. Of course, I now have the narrative of “I ruined the only three pictures I was excited about this year”. Which might or might not be true.
What is true is that I am so unsure about any of the pictures I took this year. They are not particularly different from the pictures that came before, but that is exactly the problem. When I made Small Death I looked at every picture I have ever made. I organized it and thought about them very hard. All the pictures I made afterwards did not surprise me. I also spent long stretches of time without photographing.
There are some pictures that I have been sitting on for over a year.
On September 20th last year I found out MACK was going to publish a book of my work. From September to March I worked really hard to select, sequence, and lay out the book. I scanned so many new pictures and I also stopped sharing any pictures I was excited about, knowing that unveiling them for the book made the most sense.
Many pictures, like the one in this newsletter, have been patiently waiting for their day in the sun. I am so excited to finally share them with you...
It is funny how things happen. Mid March, I finalized the edit for a book I will publish this fall with Dashwood Books. This book contains a handful of pigeon photographs, including the one above. I have been taking pictures of these animals, maligned in New York, as they carry less ugly connotations in Mexico. Parallel to this, I published with Matarile Ediciones the work of Carlos Jaramillo, centered around a group of men in Cuba that train and race pigeons. (By happenstance, I am publishing yet another bird book by Sheida Soleimani this summer)...
There are a couple of books that I often come back to but the one that I perhaps pick up the most is Bluets by Maggie Nelson. There are so many reasons I like that book, which is perhaps a topic for another day, but one of the most important is that it’s a horny book. I think there is still an imbalance of how much horny work is made by women.
One of the first times I showed this work, a male photographer friend told me that he appreciated how much my work was about the female gaze. Before him saying that I had not given that aspect of my work a lot of thought. Before I was simply picturing the desire I felt for my husband, I am now well aware of what I am doing and what it means to do it...
I have been thinking about photographing my parents. In a talk I had with Kelly Long she asked me when was the first time I collaborated with them in my work. I do not remember. I have even been thinking about that after the fact. I can’t for the life of me recall. I do know they were in very early film school shorts. My dad, always making the most unnatural choices of what to do with his body. My mom, always giving me something so much better than any ideas I have.
In the talk I quoted Justine Kurland from a portfolio she published in the guardian. She says that Casper, he son, gave her the pictures she took of him. I agree. My parents have given me so many pictures and pieces...
When Jaclyn Dooner approached me to be part of Interwoven: Unveiling the Poetics of Observation, we both knew it was going to be up at the same time as my solo show at Baxter Street. I said yes because I love working with Miriam gallery and I was moved by my inclusion on such a special show. The show focuses on the quieter images, which I usually place around heavier ones. It was an interesting exercise to sequence only these images, to show work that I myself don’t much think about. It gave me an opportunity to examine my work in a different way, right after a whole year of focusing on such an involved exhibition. Both shows are 20 minutes away from each other (via the J train). You could catch both in the same day and see for yourself such different sides of the same body of work...
This week I wrapped up both my photobook class at Parsons and my work-study program at ICP. I felt so connected to my students that it was so hard to let go. This was a challenging time to be an educator and I felt so grateful for how wonderful my students were.
Earlier this year my friend Anna at ICP asked me to talk about a piece in the anniversary show and I chose Justine Kurland’s. It is hard to hear any recording of myself because it does not entirely match how eloquent I think I am, but I did touch upon something important. Now that I am en educator I think about my education in a different way and it was nice to have an opportunity to talk about how formative it was to have Justine as a teacher...