Reaching the twentieth printed edition is quite a feat, even when there’s little to celebrate. In this ZUM#20 we bring together contributors who defy the status quo of the image and make us see what we have not seen – be it by transforming the personal universe through the mirror of collective tragedies, by tackling with irony the situation of those at the edges of capitalism, or by facing the archives on which history is based, but which can also be used to rewrite history. Like many Brazilians, the young photographer Allan Weber lost his job during the pandemic. To support his family, he put down a deposit on a motorcycle and started to work delivering orders made via cellphone apps, from his home in the north of Rio de Janeiro. The scenes of his everyday life are on the cover of this edition, revealing the beauty of an urgent and often invisible routine. It is like opening an intimate diary that Carrie Mae Weems invites us to her kitchen table, to share her anxieties. Published in full here, in times of isolation, the series of photographs completes thirty years and is ever-more current. With a touch of irresistible prose, Lita Cerqueira clicks open the shutter of the memories and loves that have marked her life. In a stroll through the night, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk ventures into photography to scrutinize the urban landscape of Istanbul, a city in transformation.

Photography and literature still fuse in a new tale by the writer Ana Paula Maia, inspired by the images taken for ToiletPaper, a magazine edited by the artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. Visual transgression and delirium are also the pillars sustaining the work of the trans collectives Limitrofe Television, Analcancer2009 and Bouquet International. Their pop calendar, which opens this edition (transformed into a poster for subscribers) helps us to count the time we have lost. Faced with so many images, what is the role of archives? In rescuing the stories behind old snaps, the Paiter Suru. people prepare the arrows of the future. Denilson Baniwa confronts the classic iconography of Theodor Koch-Grünberg with the icons of the movies, and so rocks the frontier which divides our photographic science and pure science fiction. Facing tradition itself, the architect Paulo Tavares contests the notion of progress which permeates modern Brazilian photography and shows how it can help combat the erasure of the indigenous peoples it helped to celebrate. We carry on vigilant in difficult times.