ChrisSoFly’s self-portraits celebrate his love for fashion, music, and awakening from rigid gender roles.

Growing up, the Sanford, Florida-based multidisciplinary artist never imagined he’d feel comfortable wearing dresses, wigs, and makeup, and sharing photos of himself with the world. “Once I finally put my own fear of judgment aside and became comfortable in my own skin and started dressing how I wanted and expressing myself freely,” Chris writes, “ I realized that this may be my purpose….showing that boys can be princesses too.”

In his self-portraits, which he shares predominantly on Instagram – often with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments – Chris unapologetically and joyfully confronts the camera with bedazzled glory.
The series started earlier this year when Chris began designing fashion pieces while teaching himself to sew through Youtube videos. His creations manifest themselves as pastel dresses, flowers in his hair, posing before floral backdrops that highlight his exuberance and power. I spoke with Chris to learn more about his experience and work.

I spoke with Chris to learn more about his experience and work.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with ChrisSoFly

PostedDecember 3, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsChrisSoFly, self-portraiture, collaborative portraiture, fashion photography, multi-disciplinary artists, toxic masculinity, queer identity and photography, new photography, contemporary portraiture

Daniel Temkin uses code and other devices to manipulate how we understand photography and visual perception.

I first came across Daniel Temkin's Straightened Trees series in late 2016 when I was curating "Future isms," Humble's exhibition that used utopian/dystopian images as a metaphor for the dark times and uncertainty surrounding the United States presidential election. Buildings and power lines twist and contort around artificially "corrected" trees, calling into question what is real, what's human-made, and how we conjure a landscape-ideal. Temkin's trees, which he makes by using an algorithm and code injection to alter the digital structure of a straight, large-format photograph respond to a need to control a messy world. A critique of perfectionism. A landscaping rhinoplasty with disastrous consequences.

Like Straightened Trees, Temkin's larger practice is all about the conflict between human thought and logic. It reflects the two worlds he straddles: photography and computer programming. In a recent exhibition at New York City's Higher Pictures Gallery, he paired his trees against his new series Dither Studies.

For those, like myself, who are likely unaware of what "dithering" is, it's one of the most fundamental algorithms of contemporary photography, dating back to the 1970s when it was used to translate color or grayscale images to black and white pixels. The process allows a limited color palette to take on the look of a gradient image. Kind of like a highly pixelated ombre sky. Temkin hand renders these images in acrylic on panel, turning each pixel into a square of color, with highly psychedelic results. While visually dissimilar, Dither Studies relates to Straightened Trees in its push to pull apart the image-making process, confronting the strange and illogical structures of human and machine-based perfectionism.

A presidential term (and a much more frightening world) deep into my admiration for his work, Temkin and I spoke to bring it together.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Daniel Temkin

PostedNovember 19, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists

TagsDaniel Temkin, art and technology, straightened trees, dither studies, photography and code

Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America © iO Tillet Wright — *Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America* © iO Tillet Wright

Roula Seikaly speaks with iO Tillet Wright about Self Evident Truths, his ten-year project (and now photography book) of 10,000+ humanizing portraits documenting people in the USA that identify as ANYTHING OTHER than 100% straight.

I was champagne-drunk while listening to United States President-elect Joseph R. Biden formally address the nation on November 7th. It was also my birthday, and there was much to celebrate. When I heard him include trans and queer Americans in a long list of people to whom he owes this victory, as though he was naming family members, I cried. I thought of my transgender wife and all of our friends in queer and other marginalized communities for whom the previous four years particularly have been terrifyingly fraught, and how it may be slightly easier to breathe now.

With that in mind, it’s a pleasure to introduce this interview with photographer iO Tillet-Wright. In 2010, Tillet-Wright embarked on a nationwide project to photograph people who are generally lumped into the category “LGBTQIA++,” which the photographer/activist rightly calls out for how it generalizes the otherwise glorious variations within queer communities.

10 years and 10,000 portraits later, the project Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America celebrates individuality that is barely contained within the photographic frame and holds immeasurable possibilities beyond a clumsy acronym. Published by Prestel this October, the 544-page book is monumental for its size, scope, and content - “10,000 faces of survival, charisma, and charm” - alike.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with iO Tillet-Wright

PostedNovember 12, 2020

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArt News, Artists, Galleries, Photobooks

TagsiO Tillet-Wright, Roula Seikaly, New Photography, Self Evident Truths, photobooks, queer identity and photography, empathetic portraiture, Contemporary Portraiture

Photo Editor Gabriel Sanchez and Photographer Steven Eichner at their Long Beach, NY studio, 2019

Humble speaks with Gabriel Sanchez about his inspiring career and the story behind editing legendary 1990s NYC nightlife photographer Steve Eichner's new book In The Limelight

Gabriel Sanchez is one of today’s most inspiring photo editors. After writing for Aperture and Artforum ( that’s is EARLY work!) he carved a following and niche developing thousands of stories as Buzzfeed’s Features photo editor. Sanchez recently took a job at the New York Times assigning a range of photo essays and stories, working closely with photographers he'd previously admired from afar.

Amidst a career change and the pandemic, Sanchez edited In the Limelight: The Visual Ecstasy of NYC Nightlife in the 90s, a new photobook published by Prestel that celebrates the work of Steve Eichner, one of few photographers with insider access to photograph the wild and crazy 90s club scene in NYC. Oh, and he also became a dad.

I spoke with Sanchez to learn more about the project, his advice for up and coming photographers, and what it’s like having hands in so many reaches of photography.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Gabriel Sanchez

PostedOctober 22, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Photobooks, Publications

TagsGabriel Sanchez, Steve Eichner, Into The Limelight book, 1990s party photography, NYC nightlife photography, Prestel Publishers, photo editors, advice for emerging photographers

Untitled #33, Jersey City, NJ © Jon Henry

Jon Henry’s ongoing series, Stranger Fruit, uses the classical pietà – Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary cradling Jesus – to illustrate the enduring pain of Black mothers who have lost their sons to police brutality.

New York City-based photographer Jon Henry stages portraits with various women around the United States cradling their sons on street corners, in parking lots, in front of government buildings; everyday spaces that symbolize the horrific commonplace-ness of racist, systemic murder. While Michelangelo’s Pieta casts Mary looking down at Jesus, many of the women in Henry’s portraits lock eyes with the lens, and us as viewers, returning our gaze with sadness, strength, and, depending on who’s looking, condemnation.

Henry paces these portraits with images of the women in bedrooms and other quiet, empty spaces, a signal of contemplating loss and endurance. “Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits, and protests,” Henry writes, “is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child.”

While the women in Henry’s photos have not actually lost their sons, these slow, reflective portrait sessions, made with a 4x5 camera represent living with a constant fear of police violence.

Henry occasionally intersperses text from a few of the mothers he photographs, often organized into poetic stanzas. For Henry, these passages speak to the experience of mothers across the country:

I feel sad,

sad that mothers actually
have to go through this…

My son was able to get up
and put back on his clothes
Others not so much.

They are still mentally frozen
in that position, that sadness,
that brokenness. I feel guilty

to be relieved that it’s just a
picture because for others
it’s a reality.

I feel scared, I feel next. I feel like Tyler could be the
next hashtag.”

Henry started the series in 2014 in response to the police murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, and continues as they never seem to end. He recently won the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture for this series which will be on display at The Griffin Museum through October 23rd and has several images in Photographic Center Northwest’s latest exhibition Examining The American Dream in Seattle, Washington, up through December 10, 2020.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Jon Henry

PostedOctober 15, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsJon Henry, contemporary portrait photography, Arnold Newman Prize, large format portraiture, pieta, concerned photography

These Self-Portraits Show That Boys Can Be Princesses Too

Straightening Trees in a Glitched Out World

10 Years and 10,000 Portraits of Queer America

In The Limelight: BuzzFeed's Former Photo Editor on How to Make it as an Emerging Photographer, His New Role at The New York Times and a New Book on '90s Club Kids

These Portraits Process Black Mothers' Greatest Fear