Photo credit: Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropología. INAH-CANON.

Twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson have spent three decades photographing sites that shaped twentieth-century European history. Sea Eagle is part of a series of large-scale photographs depicting Nazi bunkers built along the coastline from Spain to Norway during World War II. The Brutalist structures survive, though they are now crumbling into the sea. Looming over the viewer and thus assuming some of the bunker’s original hateful power, this black-and-white photographic document asks whether the ideology the building represents should be fetishized, conserved, or destroyed.

“My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality,” says Sarah Pickering. In her series Explosion, Pickering shows the English countryside violently disrupted by mines, artillery, and other weapons. On closer inspection, we see that these are small-scale simulated explosions, of the type used in military and police training exercises and special effects.

While living in London, Elisa Sighicelli made a number of lightbox works inspired by the Renaissance art on display at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena. Looking past the paintings’ dense content, Sighicelli examined the background scenery and extracted passages of charming natural detail and painterly freedom; here we see a horizontal slice of the lower portion of Benvenuto di Giovanni’s Ascension. She then mounted the photographic print on translucent acrylic, the reverse side of which she selectively painted black, so the fluorescent light illuminates only the sky.

Staged deep in a forest in eastern Poland, this photograph depicts a member of a fictional utopian cult in the process of “devolving” into a tree—rejecting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in favor of plant life. In the series Modern Life of the Soul, Melanie Bonajo and Kinga Kiełczyńska capture nature’s beauty and mystery at the same time as they satirize our tendency to romanticize it, particularly in relation to gender and nationalism.

Aida Silvestri’s poetic approach to documentary photography allows her to explore diaspora, culture, mental health, and politics in her work. In this series, she embroiders portraits of Eritrean refugees with colored thread that maps the perilous journeys they took toward safety and personal freedom. The black-and-white images recall passport photographs, yet Silvestri uses blurred focus to maintain her subjects’ anonymity and enlarges the prints to elevate the refugees’ newfound exile identities.

Iris Hutegger has described her stitched photographs as “real images of fiction.” While hiking in the mountainous region of Switzerland where she lives, Hutegger takes color photographs that she prints in black and white. She then assigns the images numbers, removing their geographical specificity, and uses her sewing machine to insert foliage that could never appear in reality. The emotional dimension of the stitching is twofold: it adds imagined color and life and shifts our sense of scale from a vast mountainous expanse to a minutely patterned surface.