GREY
MAG
“Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”
— Allen Ginsberg (b. June 3, 1926)
“Today, at this very moment, language is losing its material basis — in other words, its reality — and floating in space.”
— Takuma Nakahira, PROVOKE No. 1, 1968
Black & Grey returns with The Simulation — an issue built around a question that has become impossible to avoid: what is the relationship between the real and the managed version of the real, and what does that management cost us?
The answer, across fiction, photography, translation, and archive, is everything.
The Framework
Context
2026 is the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth. It is a useful year to publish an issue called The Simulation.
Ginsberg’s core demand — “Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.” — was an argument about what gets lost between experience and its management. Spontaneous and fearless writing, as he described it, was a way of telling the truth from naked and authentic experience. The revision that serves comfort is the revision that kills the thing. The first thought is the contact with the real. Everything after it is administration.
Takuma Nakahira was making the same argument from Tokyo in 1968, in a different medium. He opened his afterword to Provoke No. 1 — an edition of approximately 300 copies — with a question that has not been answered: “How to fill the gap between politics and art? This is both an old and a new problem.” The collective preface went further: language, the PROVOKE group argued, was losing its material basis — floating free of the real — and the obligation fell to photographers to capture fragments of reality “that can no longer be grasped through existing language.” The photograph as the thing language had failed to say.
Both positions converge on the same problem The Simulation is built around: what happens when the managed version of reality becomes the only version on offer? What breaks through? What refuses to be administered?
The fiction in this issue addresses it from the genre-bending sci-fi and horror of its luminous contributors. The photography authorship delves into the shimmering irreality of non-verbal hyperreality and framing the what-if of both analog and digital capture, fearlessly erotic from femme gaze and masculine inquiry. The archive surfacing for the first time after a decade of being held — that refuses to be just archive. This issue holds no advertising, as the advertising is in our very pockets in infinite scroll.
Guest Editors
Yi Izzy Yu &
John Yu Branscum
Yi Izzy Yu & John Yu Branscum conceived and edited the literary selection. Their Shadow Book of Ji Yun (Empress Wu Books) — compared by Fortean Times to Kwaidan and One Thousand and One Nights — and Stars That Pause: 2,000 Years of Asian UFO Encounters & Lore (2025) established them as the essential voices working at the intersection of Asian folkloric archive and speculative consciousness. Their governing premise: the encounter with the inexplicable has always been documented. That documentation is the act of resistance against the systems that require its suppression.
Fiction & Writing
The Writers
Ai Jiang
Nebula, Hugo, Locus & World Fantasy Award winner — I AM AI / Linghun
Contributes a second-person psychological disintegration narrative set inside a corporate extraction camp in the oil sands. The camp controls light, sleep, sound, and communication. The protagonist’s perception begins to merge with the environmental damage they are complicit in. Oil becomes tears becomes blood becomes self. This is simulation as somatic event — something that happens in the body before it reaches the mind. It is the piece in this issue that most closely enacts what Brown’s camera is doing: showing what the managed environment does to the self it contains.
Geneve Flynn
Two-time Bram Stoker Award winner — Shirley Jackson Award winner — co-editor, Black Cranes
Contributes “The Fallen Man,” set across two dates: June 5, 1989 and June 5, 2022. A state-sponsored assassin hunts beings with inexplicable courage who appear at moments of historical rupture. The Tank Man. An old woman eating a mandarin in front of riot police. The assassin opens an ordinary man’s chest at the end and finds nothing. The simulation he depended on — the one that made his life’s work coherent — was the fabrication. Flynn makes that argument in prose that reads like a document because it is one.
L.E. Daniels
Bram Stoker Award nominee — Australasian Shadows Award finalist — co-chair, HWA Mental Health Initiative
Contributes “The Howling Places,” set on the night of November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall falls on a muted black-and-white television in a nursing home while a night nurse named Sofia navigates something erupting through the institutional reality of managed dying. A Slavic entity. Something from the deep pre-Soviet past that knows her family name. The simulation here is the care facility — the administration of the body at its most vulnerable — and what it howls over is the past that refuses to stay sedated. The image of the Wall falling on a muted TV while someone is being strapped down in an adjacent room is compression that belongs in a photograph.
Vanessa Fogg
Lightspeed / Best Science Fiction of the Year Vol. 4 — The House of Illusionists and Other Stories
Contributes “Remembering Day.” Ten thousand years forward: beings who have uploaded their consciousness into solar-system-spanning networks return once a year to their original bodies. The story’s question is simple and devastating: does love survive the simulation? Can the man who looks like your husband be your husband when he exists simultaneously in a thousand places at processing speeds your body cannot reach? Fogg is a former molecular cell biologist. Her elegy for the physical world is written with a scientist’s precision and a mourner’s grief. The line that names the issue: The simulation isn’t perfect for unmodified, flesh-and-blood minds.
Photography
The Images
Brown’s photographic lineage runs through Robert Frank and the PROVOKE photographers — but the operative reference is not the early Nakahira of grain and blur. It is the second Nakahira: the one who disavowed are-bure-boke by 1971, who argued in his 1973 essay Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? that the lyrical black-and-white photographs of the PROVOKE era had failed because they imposed the photographer’s personal vision onto the world rather than letting the world reveal itself. Photography, Nakahira concluded, was “essentially a result of an interplay of things, thoughts and the self” — and the photographer’s task was to strip away the subjective distortions, not amplify them. What he called for was camera-centric, ultra-literal photography: the image as direct witness rather than expressive gesture.
No retouch. The conviction that the cleaned image is the lie and the uncleaned image is the argument. Not a technical constraint — a philosophical one. The camera as instrument of direct encounter, not instrument of style.
The participation / depiction / illumination framework that structures this issue’s photographic section distinguishes three modes of presence: the photographer inside the event, the photographer recording from outside, and the rare third thing — when the image produces knowledge that neither photographer nor subject could have anticipated. The Simulation is built on that third thing. Everything in it reaches past what was intended.
The Mylar Series — Bil Brown
Leica Gallery Vienna / Rangefinder Gallery Chicago / Lyles & King, New York
Shot entirely in-camera on Leica digital and film, no post-processing, no retouch — turns the photograph itself into a simulation problem. The subject is the reflective surface. The document is made of distortion. What the camera captures is not the world but the world’s image of itself, bent, broken at the edges, recognizable and wrong simultaneously. The series has been exhibited at Leica Gallery Vienna, Rangefinder Gallery Chicago, and in collaboration with Penny Slinger and Polly Borland for their exhibition Playpen at Lyles & King, New York — a collaboration that CULTURED magazine covered in depth, describing the work as inventing a cacophonous and raw visual vocabulary that refuses to locate the body as stable, coherent, or containable.
Nadya Tolokonnikova / Pussy Riot
ARTnews — #6, The Defining Artworks of 2025 — POLICE STATE
Portrait work made during the No Kings activation and in the original POLICE STATE show — belonging to a body of work that ARTnews ranked #6 in their list of The Defining Artworks of 2025. POLICE STATE, Tolokonnikova’s ten-day durational performance installation at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in June 2025, recreated a Russian prison cell inside an American museum. On the third day, the National Guard arrived in the streets outside. Anti-ICE protests erupted. The museum closed. Tolokonnikova stayed. She began live-streaming the protest audio into the installation, layering the sounds of Los Angeles in 2025 over recordings from Russian penal colonies. The simulation collapsed into the real, in real time, in front of a peephole.
The Russian government has designated Pussy Riot an extremist organization. Tolokonnikova is wanted in absentia. Her 2023 installation Putin’s Ashes placed her on Russia’s most wanted criminal list. She continues to make work.
Brown’s photographs of Tolokonnikova are not documentation of a celebrity or a symbol. They are images made inside an ongoing action — a resistance that has already survived imprisonment, exile, and state-sponsored erasure. The no-retouch discipline here is not an aesthetic position. It is a refusal to manage what the frame found. Whatever the frame contains is what happened. The photographs exist as counter-evidence to the Russian state’s requirement that this woman not be seen.
Mat Mercuri — Daniela Pineda
Scientist / Philosopher / Photographer
Mat Mercuri is a scientist, philosopher, and photographer — a combination this issue treats not as a paradox but as a clarification. His portraits of actor-filmmaker Daniela Pineda appear in these pages as one of the issue’s most charged images: a subject who carries her own public visibility into the frame and lets the photographer find what that visibility conceals. Mercuri’s scientific training produces the same quality of sustained, non-reactive attention the camera requires at its most honest. The image does not editorialize. It stays with what it finds.
Also included in this issue: Grammy Award-winning photographer and art director Mathieu Bitton, director and photographer Mark DePaola, and others shooting primarily within the hundred-year tradition of Leica cameras.
Emerging Photographers
Ukraine / Los Angeles / Tokyo / and further
The Simulation also features curated work by emerging photographers from Ukraine, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and further. Elina Eventova’s images made inside an ongoing war that is also, simultaneously, an information war are of love, not death — a war in which the managed version of events and the photographic evidence have been in direct conflict since the first day. MAROE’s underground images of an LA kink and underground fashion scene that is at once run by and owned by the women and femme queer voices that enact it. These photographers are not documenting history. They are inside it. The distinction is what Black Grey Mag’s participation / depiction / illumination framework was built to describe, and these images are why the framework exists.
Archive — First Publication Anywhere
The Vitriol Issue, 2015
The Simulation marks the first publication anywhere of work from the original VITRIOL issue — Black & Grey’s 2015 issue that was completed, finished, and never released. Not lost. Held for when the world could see it. Updated for 2026.
Olivier Zahm — Asger Carlsen — Penny Slinger — Lydia Lunch — Love Bailey
Olivier Zahm — co-founder of Purple magazine and one of the essential architects of transgressive fashion and art photography across the last three decades — whose position has always been that desire is a form of knowledge, and that the camera held without institutional permission produces the only images worth keeping. Asger Carlsen — the Danish artist who began as a crime-scene photographer and arrived at images of the human body so precisely distorted they occupy what one critic called the hazy cloud-cuckoo land between analog and digital photography, between the real and the fabricated. His series Wrong and Hester are benchmarks in the history of photography’s confrontation with the body as impossible object. Penny Slinger — British surrealist, feminist, occultist, whose 1977 work An Exorcism used erotic collage and tantric imagery to map the female body as a site of power rather than availability. Slinger’s work disappeared for decades before its recovery as the foundational feminist surrealist document it always was. Lydia Lunch — No Wave pioneer, musician, writer, performance artist; a foundational voice in New York’s late-1970s underground whose refusal to separate the political from the physical, the sexual from the confrontational, defined an entire strain of transgressive culture that runs directly through what Black & Grey has always been. Love Bailey — photographer, filmmaker, trans activist — whose work insists on the body in transformation as the primary archive, the thing no managed image can fully contain.
This work was made in 2015. It arrives here updated, in 2026, showing very little has changed — while everything has changed. A photograph does not age the way a text ages. It holds its original light. What these images captured then is what they contain now — unretouched, unmediated by the decade between their making and this page. That a decade passed is not incidental to this issue. It is the condition the issue is examining: what the archive holds, what finally gets released, and what the image has been waiting to say.
On the Issue
What This Is
The Simulation is not a science fiction magazine. It is not a horror magazine. It is not a photography magazine. It imagines culture in a way that addresses all of these and none of these.
It is an art document about what the managed version of reality requires us to forget, and what refuses to be forgotten.
Ai Jiang’s camp. Flynn’s Tank Man. Daniels’ nursing home. Fogg’s uploaded dead.
Brown’s Mylar surfaces. Tolokonnikova’s body. Mercuri’s portrait of Pineda.
Images from inside a war that is also an argument about images.
Zahm, Carlsen, Slinger, Lunch, Bailey and more — a decade held, now released.
Everything in this issue refused to stay shadowbanned inside the simulation.
The cultural camera has no image stabilization. No automatic exposure management. No algorithmic cleanup of what the sensor found. The fiction in this issue operates the same way — mind slogans embodied for a new age. Yu and Branscum’s archive translations of two thousand years of encounters operates the same way. The Ukrainian photographer operating the same way under conditions that make the philosophical stakes material.
THIS IS THE ARGUMENT · THIS IS THE EVIDENCE · THIS IS THE POINT
Black & Grey is published from Los Angeles.
The Simulation is available in limited edition print with three covers.
Guest edited by Yi Izzy Yu & John Yu Branscum.
Editor-in-Chief Bil Brown. Associate Publisher Mat Mercuri.
@blackgreymag
COVER IMAGES | SELECT PAGES