What Byström Leaves Behind

Arvida Byström’s photography has always been comfortable with what makes everyone else nervous—body hair, menstrual blood, skin that hasn’t been styled into submission. There Will Be Blood is exactly what the title says: work that looks at the body’s involuntary processes with a directness that reads as more radical than anything that announces itself as radical. She shoots on film, often pink-tinted and overexposed, so the blood ends up looking like something from a half-remembered dream rather than a clinical document. It stays with you longer than you’d expect, which is probably the whole point.