on simultaneity and continuity in the photographs of genesis báez
Published February 8, 2026 ┃ Photographs by Hannah Cash
The first image I saw by photographer Genesis Báez was a risograph print entitled Threshold (2021). I could not tell exactly what I was looking at. There were multiple reflections of and into rushing brown-gray water. Two shapes bisected the water, extending and distorting the ripples. They seemed like portals or gaps or holes or cut-outs. What was the reflection? What was the reality? Something was breaking the logic of this image.
I like when a photograph confuses me. I enjoy the momentary uncertainty, the gentle disruption. Reality becomes unstable. I am asked to question what I am seeing. I must slow down. I must untangle.
Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs have done this to me, too. When I first saw Lacanau (Self) (1986), I thought I was looking at the outline of a sandy mountain against a pale pink sky and an Adidas clothing item draped messily in the dip of that hill. I now know from seeing this photograph many times and my continued looking that that is not at all what I am seeing. If I stop seeing the pink as the sky and I look closer at that reddish-tan form, everything reconfigures. The reddish-tan becomes the body, the knee specifically. The Adidas fabric becomes the bottom of a pair of shorts. The pink becomes a t-shirt. The sandy color becomes sand. Tillmans did not point his camera at a landscape, he pointed it down toward his own body. It is a photograph of himself, even a self-portrait as his title suggests.
A photograph, often assumed to be static and immediate, can reveal a process. The act of seeing can be an unfolding. In a well-known optical illusion known as the Rubin vase, some people see a vase and other people see a profile of two faces. Usually, we see one first and then the other.
Threshold features two mirrored shards stuck into flowing water. The brownish-gray water fills the frame. The optical illusion, or confusion, occurs with the reflections of sky onto the water’s surface, the reflection of the water into the mirrors, and the mirrors’ reflections back onto the water. No matter which element is real and which is a reflection, the water is continuous. In a talk she gave at the International Center for Photography in October, Báez said, “I am interested in the ways that photographs can be like water: unfixed, describing our permeability, and suggesting how we are all interconnected—how people, environments, and histories flow through one another across time.” In her photographs, the water, unconfined by the frame, exists infinitely.
Báez has another photograph with mirrored shards, Earth to Sky (2021). This time, the mirrors are inserted into snow. The snow looks like clouds, as if those soft edges and gray pockets are holding rain. The icy surface in the bottom left corner twinkles like the surface of water. The snow is clouds is sky is water.
Genesis Báez has been considering and offering ideas of connection and continuity in her ongoing multi-strand photographic series, recently published in the monograph Blue Sun (Capricious, 2025) and shown at Dashwood Projects, New York. The photographs shift between images like these—of water, sky, snow, earth, flora, fauna—and ones featuring herself and several other woman, often her mother. They take place mainly in New York, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico, where she lives, her mother lives, and her grandmother lives, respectively. Báez visibilizes nature as a continuum, unconfined by categories, borders, or barriers. That natural continuum extends to herself, a child of the Puerto Rican diaspora, seeking to fortify her connections to her maternal lineage and homeland. In that same talk, she said, “Lately I have been considering my relationship to the landscape here in the Northeast more directly, attempting to locate myself within it.”
In her photographs, she proves distance to be a mirage. It is manufactured. I remember standing on a Manhattan street in June 2023 and looking up at an orange sky above me. Wildfires raged across Northern Canada. They were thousands of miles away but their air was our air. The here and there collapsed. That surreal and sickly sky looks like the smoky yellow water of Making Weather (2023). The cloudiness might be sand being kicked up below its surface or something more sinister and toxic moving through it. There are no mirrors in this photograph; it is not reflecting the sky. But the water contains clouds as if it is the sky. In her photographs, the above is often below. The ground is in the sky. The sky is in the water.
In Montaña Santa Elena (As an Ocean) (2012–13) and The Side of the House and Almond Tree (As Sky) (2013–14), Báez was dissatisfied with two photographs she took and their inability to capture her relationship to the photographed landscapes. She buried the negatives at the site where she took the original images. The transformed negatives are what became the work one year later. I look at those two photographs and I see the deep, darkness of the night sky streaked with stars. It is not galactic, it is dirt. I should feel as if I am looking down, but instead I feel that I am looking up. It is not conflation; it is not transference; it is simultaneity. What is above is also what is below. The awe that can be experienced from looking up at stars can also be experienced, in Báez’s hands, by looking down at the ground beneath our feet.
Báez’s images offer a sense of expansiveness that is not hindered by the frame, even in a domestic, interior scene like Crossing Time (2022). She finds ways, like mirrors or shadows, to go beyond the frame. In this image, she photographs her mother on a couch holding up a string and looking at the wall. Someone outside of the frame is also holding that string, perhaps Báez, and then also being cast as a shadow onto the wall which is bathed in a sumptuous yellow glow of light. The shadowed figure holds the other end of the string. There are more layers within this frame than it seems. It is a tunnel box, layer upon layer, shadows upon shadow. The string goes on forever, real and shadow. So too does the link between these two female figures. The two women, actual and shadow, are just as continuous as the uninterrupted string, actual and shadow. Light, time, and space are being bridged. Crossing Time allows for perpetual continuity. The perpetual and continuous bond between a mother and daughter.
In the artist’s own words, “I love what photographs make possible.”
