Who Has the Right to Make an Image?

Deana Lawson, Edge Control_edvc, 2023–. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

DOKUNST Redaktion

The people in Deana Lawson’s new body of work Edge Control did not choose to be photographed. They appear in surveillance-camera images from American beauty-supply stores—images of people observed and suspected of shoplifting, sometimes displayed in windows or near entrances in order to identify them and deter others. Lawson has been working with such images since 2023, bringing them into the context of her Edge Control series while leaving their peculiar visual language largely intact and intervening primarily where the identities of those depicted need to be protected. These images now hang in her first solo exhibition at Gagosian in New York, set within luminous black mirrored frames and accompanied by new holograms and the large-scale portraits for which Lawson has become known. The title itself is exactingly chosen: edge control is a widely used hair product designed to shape and hold the fine hairs along the hairline. At the same time, the term almost casually names the principle running through these images—the idea that bodies can be apprehended, ordered, and controlled through their visible surfaces. Beauty and surveillance do not meet here by accident. Both begin with looking at a body and with the assumption that something can be read from its surface.

For years Lawson has pursued a form of photography in which Black bodies do not appear incidentally but occupy the pictorial field with an almost sovereign presence. Her staged portraits draw on family photography, studio portraiture, documentary photography, and art-historical traditions; in them, the camera is not an invisible instrument but part of a negotiated encounter. Edge Control reverses that relationship. The surveillance camera knows no encounter. It observes from above, registers behaviour, waits for deviation, and produces an image whose function has already been determined before the person being watched even knows that they appear within it. Yet it is precisely the transfer into the gallery that creates another problem. What was originally intended to monitor, suspect, or deter is now enlarged, framed, contemplated, and presented as art. A change of location does not automatically undo the violence of the original gaze. It may expose that violence—but it may equally aestheticise it. The real tension of these works lies between those two possibilities: Lawson does not release the surveillance images from their original power. She subjects them to a second regime of looking.

The new holograms sharpen this contradiction. Lawson refers here to Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly and its so-called “scramble suits,” in which the visual identity of a body becomes unstable. Where the surveillance camera attempts to fix a person, identify them, and convert them into a usable image, the hologram allows identity to flicker. One medium asserts legibility; the other frustrates it. Lawson thereby extends the exhibition beyond a critique of surveillance toward an inquiry into the ways images produce identity in the first place: through recognisability, surface, attribution—and through the institutional authority that determines what an image is supposed to prove.

And then the viewer finds themselves standing before a black mirror. Lawson’s frames reflect those who approach the images, quietly altering the distribution of roles: suddenly, the person who believed they were exclusively looking at others is also inside the image. This is more than a formal device. At a moment when cameras in shops, on streets, at front doors, and within our own devices have become an almost unremarkable infrastructure, Edge Control poses an old question under new conditions: Who has the right to turn a human being into an image—and who subsequently has the right to determine what happens to that image?

That Lawson asks this question at Gagosian only makes it more acute. Between the surveillance camera and the art market, the same image passes through two systems that assign it radically different forms of value. In one, it possesses the operational value of suspicion; in the other, it acquires cultural, authorial, and ultimately economic value. Between them remains a person whose body, in either case, has become the surface upon which an interpretation is imposed. The gallery does not redeem the surveillance image from its origins; rather, it adds another layer of authority and value. Perhaps the most unsettling proposition of Edge Control is therefore that the exhibition leaves no innocent position from which to look. The camera watches, the shopkeeper watches, Lawson watches, the gallery exhibits, the art market assigns value, we look—and in the black mirror, the entire circuit suddenly looks back.

DEANA LAWSON
Edge Control
September 10 – October 24, 2026

Gagosian
541 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
USA

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