Photographer unknown (image: via creative commons.)
Bonus submission points if you can name the folks in this photograph.
Humble's latest photography open call asks for work in tripped-out forms.
We could position Humble's next open call as a mile marker in the trajectory of American Landscape Photography. The "manifestly destined" photographers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century segueing into The New Topographics of the 1960s, typologists, and generations following them all.
© Drew Nikonowicz. From the series Notes From Anywhere
Just one year since receiving his BFA in photography from the University of Missouri, Drew Nikonowicz has produced a prolific body of work that many would consider an accomplishment for photographers ten years his senior. In 2015, still an undergrad, the photographer snagged the coveted Aperture Prize for his series This World and Others Like It, and recently completed a one-year residency at Fabrica Research Centre in Italy.
Nikonowicz' mysterious, yet clearly defined practice explores aspects of fiction, reality and the history of photography. He shoots mostly large format black and white film, something unheard of for many photographers born after the creation of Photoshop. He imbues them with a current twist, often combining them with computer generated photographs to unite a historic technology with a contemporary one. At first glance, his pictures evoke early photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Curtis in their monochromatic attention to the vastness of the American landscape. But while Adams and Curtis presented an optimistic, often idealized picture of promise and opportunity, Nikonowicz paints something a bit darker, layered with science fiction. I spoke with the photographer about his recent series This World and Others Like It, and its subchapter Notes From Anywhere.
Interview by Jon Feinstein
© Sadie Weschler
In the summer of 2013, after completing her MFA in photography from Yale, Sadie Wechsler rode her bike around Iceland, eventually making her way to back to Seattle, Washington where she’d grown up. During this time, which she spent almost entirely alone in various states of wilderness, Wechsler began making Baby This One’s For You, a series of pictures that reflect a perspective of the natural landscape driven as much by wonder and nostalgia as they are by sadness and fatalism.
Since photography’s early days, photographers have explored human relationships to the natural world at countless angles, from Ansel Adams’ glorifications of the national parks to The New Topographics’ flat, and often typological views of industrial and suburban development. While at times, it might appear that this terrain has been done to death, Christopher Rodríguez’ series Between Artifice and the Sublime offers a sad, yet refreshing meditation on our constantly evolving place in the American landscape.
