Love, heartache, pleasure, pain – Devotions, the first monograph from Elle Pérez, speaks to it all. The book, published by Aperture, begins with their early days making photographs at The Bronx Underground, an all-ages music project where young Black and Latino punk bands could play their first show in the basement of the First Lutheran Church of Throgs Neck. From there, it traces their unwavering pursuit of visceral moments and unflinching emotional exchanges with family, friends and lovers, both in Puerto Rico and the Bronx. Together, this genre-defying patchwork of images grounds us in the complexity of being human.

For Pérez, artistic success is measured not just by innovation, but by how these gestures go on to offer possibilities of development to other artists. With Devotions, they break the traditional photo book form by translating the often private and unseen gestures of the studio into something tangible. Photographs sit alongside a constellation of ephemera: Xerox prints, personal notes, and text and image research across art and literature, inviting the viewer into the artist’s psyche and contemplating how the act of collecting material shapes their work. And yet, as with all Pérez’s work, they remind us that photography’s potency is born of the medium’s illusionistic nature: nothing is what it seems, and everything matters. 

Here, Pérez speaks about thresholds of vulnerability, the power of breaking form, and why musicians offer artists a radical blueprint for success. 

At its heart, Devotions really brings the volatility of process to life. It feels like you bring the heat of the studio into the book. What is the studio for you and why was it important to connect those dots?

Elle Pérez: The studio is so alive. It’s so special. My own little island. In it, I have a sense of freedom, and that’s so important. When I was studying at MICA, I was one of the few seniors who had a studio in a building full of painters. I was finding that I had been shooting entirely in my apartment, and it was creating such an intimate experience that it was starting to feel uncomfortable. I needed a separate place, a professional yet artistic space to shoot that was not a home, and not outside, and not the subject’s home, and was instead a space of consideration. The walls were full of images I was working on, and research and ephemera. 

Every single opportunity that has allowed me to be a photographer with a studio has been absolutely transformational. Photographers deserve so much more as artists than they get. That’s why it was important to me that the studio be represented in the book because it really is that important. 

Part of your process is transferring the research from the studio walls into binders when a project comes to a close. In Devotions, we get to explore some of this material alongside the work that it informed. It feels like we get a glimpse of the inner workings of your mind. 

Elle Pérez: These binders function as sketchbooks or referable archives and I collate them when I move on to new ideas and thoughts. The book contains excerpts from four of them, and I spent a lot of time thinking about which pages to put out there. Many didn’t make it, and honestly, sometimes that was because they didn’t look cool enough. It was important that this ephemera gave visual information to the viewer too. The book became a form where I could present this material on a one-on-one basis at scale to the viewer. It's like I’m handing you individual pages from the collages from the studio, and you can go through them at your own pace.

Is there a sense of vulnerability in showing the process? The material is deeply personal and the part of an artist’s world we don’t usually get to see. 

Elle Pérez: I have gotten more comfortable with being vulnerable as I’ve continued to make work, but there’s always a new threshold of vulnerability and making the book crosses a new threshold. Although I had already got used to sharing them privately with curators, students, and bringing them to artist talks. People often flip through them, then land on something and say it out loud. That also prepared me for this moment.

In making the book, you went back through almost two decades of work. I’m curious about that experience; what did it reflect about where we stand in photography today?

Elle Pérez: I think about the body as a camera and how that is both the tool, the impetus, the impression, the feeling, the gesture of seeing and loving. All of that collapses into that moment of making the image. Over time, I became increasingly interested in how we make photographs speak. How do you infuse it with an energy and send that energy back out into the world? 

One of the qualities I see in your work is a potent combination of critical thinking and critical feeling. How do you navigate that space?

Elle Pérez: There are different moments. The critical feeling is like the moment of making the photograph, the moment of choosing the photograph, the moment of being honest about whether it’s doing what it needs to do. That may be when the transition to critical thinking starts. I often think about the audience and how the image functions for them, depending on them spending one moment, five minutes or a lifetime looking at the work – what else unfolds for them and for me.

Part of your practice, and this book, is about thinking of people and communities as vectors for sharing or preserving cultural histories. There is a sense of creating lines of undeniability in a time when erasure continues to be weaponised. Does that feel true to you?

Elle Pérez: What makes photographs so essential is the possibility that, whether it’s a good day, a bad day, or a very bad day, presence is preserved for continuity of understanding. Photographs can offer a counterposition to what would otherwise be unchallenged history. It’s about the urgency of having images that exist outside official narratives, or images that are taken into official archives and then become a glitch or presence in what would otherwise be a simpler archive.

What does that participation look like to you?

Elle Pérez: When I was 15, I started working at this club downtown called the Knitting Factory because I wanted to get into music. Music is an industry where you can have a lot of different types of success – but an ideal example of success is to break a new form, innovate, and then release a lot of music over your career. That really set a trajectory in my mind, in terms of what artistic success could look like. In music, you are expected to change. Your albums have to be different; they have to do specific things and all have different purposes. There should be growth or change, or maybe, if there isn’t, different trajectories shoot off of that. I had that in the back of my mind as I started thinking about what kind of life I wanted. 

Devotions by Elle Pérez is published by Aperture and is available here now.