Elle Pérez: Devotions
Elle Pérez: Devotions is the first monograph devoted to the artist’s work, bringing together more than a decade of photography and related material produced from 2009 to the present. Across portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and images of physical transformation, Pérez explores love, desire, pain, pleasure, and vulnerability, using photography to examine how people form relationships with one another and with their own bodies.
Pérez began photographing underground spaces in New York as a teenager, documenting communities shaped by freedom, friendship, and self-expression. Over time, their practice expanded to include portraits of friends and lovers, photographs of wrestlers, landscapes, still lifes, and multimedia works influenced by art, literature, and personal archives.
Central to Pérez’s work is the relationship between photographer and subject. Many images develop through direct exchanges with the people portrayed, with trust functioning both as the aim of the encounter and as a formal element of the photograph. Rather than treating portraiture as simple observation, Pérez allows subjects a degree of control over how they appear, creating images that move between intimacy and performance, documentation and self-presentation. Devotions brings together some of Pérez’s most significant photographs from the past fifteen years alongside notes, writings, postcards, screenshots, reference articles, and research materials. These elements offer insight into the artist’s working process and reveal how personal experience, cultural references, and studio research contribute to the finished images.
The sequencing of the book moves between documentary records and more constructed or
imaginative photographs, reflecting Pérez’s interest in the unstable boundary between perception and performance. The result is a body of work in which tenderness and tension, vulnerability and strength, proximity and distance continually overlap.
At the centre of the monograph is a substantial selection of portraits, many of which are now held in major museum collections across the United States. Pérez’s photographs remain attentive to the physical and emotional conditions of each encounter, using the camera not simply to describe a subject but to record the complex exchange that takes place between people. Published by Aperture in September 2026, Elle Pérez: Devotions includes 216 pages and 192 images and marks the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Pérez’s photographic practice. The project was made possible in part through the generous support of Stuart B. Cooper and Becky Besson. Aperture also acknowledges Michael Hoeh for his contribution, with additional support for the printing of Elle Pérez: Devotions provided by Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
About the Author
Elle Pérez was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1989 and lives and works in New York. They received a BFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2015. Their work has been presented in solo exhibitions at institutions including MoMA PS1, the Public Art Fund, Carnegie Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Pérez also participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Their photographs are held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Pérez received the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has taught at institutions including Harvard University, Williams College, Cooper Union, and Yale School of Art, where they are Assistant Professor of Graduate Photography.
