Carla Williams began making the photographs in Tender at eighteen, while studying photography at Princeton. Working with instant Polaroid 35mm and 4×5 Type 55 film between 1984 and 1999, she used the near-immediate result to keep adjusting her own expression and form, building a self-portrait in black and white and color that remained largely private for more than thirty years. The book, her first monograph, was published by TBW Books in 2023 across 160 pages and 80 plates, in softcover with a dust jacket.
The poses in Tender answer a specific inheritance. Williams has described growing up between two authoritative bodies of pictures: the male-dominated canon of the medium she was being taught, and the women posed in her father’s pornography collection. With her own body she made the photographs she had not seen before, images that move through provocation, play, sensuality, gentleness, power, glamour, sorrow and humor. What holds them together is not a single style but a willingness to keep testing what a self-image can hold. The sequence was assembled years after the fact, and the accumulated variation is the book’s argument.
A book of this kind is often valued chiefly for the presumed importance of its subject. Here the more durable claim is formal: the constraint of instant film, put to the service of a young woman’s continuous experimentation with self-representation, produces a body of work whose range and internal coherence would be difficult to fabricate later. It won the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, a distinction awarded to a debut publication, and it includes essays by the artist and the scholar Mireille Miller-Young, which frame the photographs without substituting for them.
For a collector, Tender is interesting less as a scarcity than as a coherent record of a sustained private practice. The work was made on instant and large-format film, over fifteen years, largely outside public view, and it treats the artist’s own body as its only subject. That combination — duration, privacy, and a deliberately narrow frame — is what gives the book its weight.
