Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank are the 2026 Denis Roussel Award winners for Work of Merit.
“I love the concept of this body of work especially in context with this sentence in your synopsis, “the physical act of making a photograph, and the substances that making involves, are inseparable from its meaning.” That’s wonderful and not only is it a perfect sentiment of the legacy of making photographs by hand, it also represents a novel marriage of material and message that rings close to the heart of this annual competition.
I’m curious about your thoughts relating to the work in exhibition and if it is affected by the formality of a gallery’s “white cube” that has defined worthy and finished “art” for the last century. The crux of your work is, for me, the evolutionary process of making the work, and that is the art, rather than the finished piece on the wall or commercial gallery exhibition. If that is the case, it leads me to the question of whether the work is ever finished since it is, after all, alive, morphing and changing form through continuous transition… until the lights are turned off. Is turning off the exposure the end or completion of the work?
None of my questions are a negative critique of what you are creating. For me, the meaning of the making in your work is more vital in conversation than the subjects represented — such as Binh Danh’s Vietnam anthotypes, the transformation of materials in the works of Anselm Kiefer or the Tending the Flame work of Brian David Griffith, where he expresses the relationships of nature and humanity via the medium of fire. As with cooking, the making is far more personal than the eating. In the spirit of the Denis Roussel competition, your work is a perfect reflection. ” Christopher James
Would you please tell us about yourself?
We’re Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank, and we work together as Kaya & Blank. Işık grew up in Turkey and Thomas in Germany. We both grew up near American military bases, so US military and the consumer culture were part of the background of our childhoods long before we started critically questioning their roles in our lives. We met in 2018 at UC San Diego. Işık was pursuing her MFA, and Thomas was a visiting graduate student on a DAAD scholarship at the Center for Human Imagination.
We started out just helping each other with our own projects, but it quickly felt so natural that we were making every creative decision together. In 2019 we made it official and became a duo. Today we live and work in Los Angeles. Our projects predominantly focus on infrastructures hiding in plain sight, such as cell towers disguised as trees, oil pumpjacks, or the machinery of global shipping. We research them, photograph and film them mostly at night, and then look for materials that can bring the subject into an installation, whether that’s tar from the La Brea Tar Pits, saltwater from the ports, or living algae.
Where did you get your photographic training?
Işık studied Photography & Videography at Istanbul Bilgi University, then earned her MFA in Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Thomas started with cultural and media education focused on photography, then studied art in Karlsruhe and Mexico City. Together we trained ourselves in the historic and alternative processes we employ in our joint artistic work.
Who has had an influence on your creative process?
Our influences come from different generations of artists and approaches to lens-based media. Looking at the work of the Bechers taught us how powerful a systematic approach can be. Their typologies of industrial structures show how patient, repeated looking can turn ordinary infrastructure into something entirely different from just the background of everyday life. Trevor Paglen has also been an important influence, particularly in the way he uses photography to make hidden systems of power and technology visible. His work on surveillance infrastructure, military sites, and the technologies that shape contemporary life has shown us how photography can reveal things that are deliberately obscured or simply difficult to perceive. His distant images of classified military sites, and photographs of surveillance and communications infrastructure demonstrate how a camera can become a tool for investigating systems that usually remain outside our field of vision.
Bruce Conner and Pipilotti Rist come from another side, through film, video, and installation. Conner’s collage sensibility and use of sound have been an important influence, while Rist reminds us that a work can be immersive, sensory, and playful rather than only analytical. Uta Barth’s work on light and the act of seeing itself made us more aware of how much a photograph depends on perception, not only on the subject. These are really just a few of the artistic voices that influence us. We love looking at work and going to exhibitions, and we are constantly discovering artists and ideas that change the way we think and work.
Please tell us about an image (not your own) that has stayed with you over time.
We’re going to bend the question a little, because the thing that has stayed with us isn’t a single image. It’s Pipilotti Rist’s retrospective at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary here in Los Angeles. It was one of the most complete sensory experiences either of us has had in an exhibition, and we still find ourselves going back to it in our heads. Her work is mostly based in videos, objects, and installations, so it isn’t photography at all. However, walking through it gave us the same feeling of magic we get in the darkroom, when an image slowly emerges after all the preparation and chemistry.
What image of yours would you say taught you an important lesson?
The first heliograph we successfully developed, following Nicéphore Niépce’s original recipe. We had collected tar at the La Brea Tar Pits and refined it ourselves for the exposure, so we had invested a lot of work in it without knowing whether it would work. When the image finally emerged, it was the most intense version of darkroom magic we’ve ever felt. Starting from such a simple recipe and watching a picture appear made us feel closer to the earliest moments of the medium, and to how its inventors must have felt when it finally worked. The simple lesson we learned from it was that photography is undeniably a material practice. That’s easy to forget in a world saturated with digital images. It’s also a practice that has always been part of a long history of extraction. Holding a picture made from tar makes both of those things impossible to ignore.
Please tell us about the work you submitted to Denis Roussel Award
We submitted Bloom, a project that has been with us for several years. It began in 2022 during a studio residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, where we had the chance to research and test ways of growing photographs from living algae. Our first attempts worked, but they were a far cry from what the project became. One of the biggest problems was that we didn’t know how to preserve the grown images, even for a short time. It took us several years and many attempts to arrive at the current version, which uses alternative photo paper mounted on a specific type of aluminum as the base for the images.
Bloom is rooted in the Maumee River Watershed, one of the largest in the Great Lakes region. Its runoff carries agricultural nutrients into Lake Erie, where they feed the toxic algal blooms that have become a regular summer event. The images show grain silos, the storage architecture of the industrial agriculture behind that runoff, and the algae that grows the pictures is a product of the same system. We see the Maumee River Watershed as a local manifestation of global conditions, since industrial agriculture now leaves its mark on bodies of water worldwide. In exhibitions we show the dry plates alongside a grow station and a video, so viewers can see both the finished images and the living process that creates them.
What part of image-making do you find the most rewarding?
For us it’s less a single part than a cycle. Being out in the field with the camera is amazing, especially when it takes us to places where we’d never normally stay for long. But when we return to the same sites again and again, that feeling eventually fades. That’s when the studio becomes exciting again. Working with materials in the darkroom and watching prints emerge is incredibly rewarding, until, after weeks of refining the same prints, that excitement fades too. And that’s what we love about photography and about how we work: we need both. Each side renews the other, so we keep moving between the studio and the field.
How do you work through times when nothing seems to work?
A lot of our projects have gone through stretches where nothing worked. It helps that there are two of us, so we can talk a problem through and look at it from different angles. It also helps that we can change gears. When the field stops feeling productive, we go back to the studio and the materials, and when the studio stalls, we go back out with the camera. We usually have several projects developing simultaneously, so we can also switch between projects and return to a stalled one with fresh eyes. And if all of that fails, the last resort is a deadline. Finding one that pushes us to finalize something has rescued us more often than we’d like to admit.
What tools have you found essential in the making of your work?
Publicly accessible data is high on the list. Our projects often involve large numbers of locations, whether that’s hundreds of cell towers, oil derricks, grain silos, or data centers. Map data helps us structure our fieldwork, and without it this would not be possible or at least much, much slower. The other essential tool isn’t a piece of equipment at all. It’s the active community of alternative photography practitioners, both online and offline, who share their knowledge and experience in forums and in books. Access to that community has hugely impacted our printing practice, and we’re grateful to the people who take the time to write down what they’ve learned.
Is there something in photography that you would like to try in the future?
There are many alternative processes we’d like to try. Some aren’t photographic at all but use similar chemicals, like soil chromatography. Others are about the camera itself, like 3D printing our own cameras. We love experimentation, and photography offers so many different routes for it.
How does your art affect the way you see the world?
We had our first big solo exhibition in Germany earlier this year, and the curator Lukas Picard wrote in his essay that our work shows an approach that is less sovereign appropriation than relational approximation. That was one of those light-bulb moments, because it named something we had felt without having words for it. Making photographic work that focuses on material realities forces you to engage with a subject much more directly. You can’t just take a picture and move on. You collect the tar, grow the algae, and spend time in places you’d normally pass through. That way of approaching things has shaped how we relate to the world around us, and it gives us the chance to really take our time. These slow processes might also be a useful counterweight in a world that relies on ever faster creation of content.
What’s on the horizon?
It has been an incredibly busy year, and right now we’re trying to catch our breath and plan the next steps. We’re slowly working on a few new strands, but nothing is specific yet. The solo exhibition in Germany was a bottleneck we had worked toward for several years. Now that it’s behind us and we’ve had a chance to look at everything we’ve made so far, we can use that view to decide where and how to focus next. One possibility is a publication, which would extend that moment of reflection and help us understand the work better. But nothing is settled yet.
To learn more about the work of Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank please click on their names.
