Three years ago, while on a redeye flight, '90s news reporter-turned photographer Tabitha Soren was reading a PDF on her iPad to pass the time. By the fourth chapter, the lamp above her seat was her only source of light, and at a certain angle she noticed it illuminating strange lines across the screen. As she continued reading, these lines grew into convoluted, gestural smudges – her fingerprints abstracted from continuous scrolling as she repeated the same motions over and over again. “At the end of the fourth chapter,” says Soren, “they had accumulated enough that I almost wiped the screen clean of them so I could read more easily, but before I did that I noticed how beautiful the marks were.” And thus began Surface Tension, a series of photographs that pulls apart the many layered ways people consume and engage with images online.
Melinda Hurst Frye makes pictures in the dirt. In her latest series, Underneath, worms, caterpillars, beetles, snails and anonymous animal skeletons intermingle with stringy roots and soil that are simultaneously mysterious and hyper real. They at once resemble homages to narrative painting and large scale Natural History museum dioramas, giving a private view into the world beneath our feet. The Seattle-based photographer creates these images in her yard - not with a camera, but with a flatbed scanner, rigging it to a power supply inside her house, and letting its slow, ultra-high resolution scan a landscape rarely explored with such intimacy. In her own words, “The surface is not a border, but an entrance to homes, nurseries, highways and graveyards.” In time for her solo exhibition, up through August at Seattle’s CORE Gallery, we spoke with Hurst Frye about the ideas and process behind this new work.
In the introductory essay to Charlotte Cotton’s 2015 anthology Photography is Magic, she argues that photography’s current “moment” has broken free from analog nostalgia in a move to use photographic tools – digital or otherwise – with a newfound sense of freedom. This “freedom,” embraced by photographers who came up under the spectre of digital-ness often rests on open and continuous experimentation. San Antonio-based photographer Charlie Kitchen’s – Standard View (2015) and Recent Work (2016) builds on this idea through a series of in-camera collages that weigh trial, errors, and tactility over highfalutin conceptualism. “After shooting my thesis with a 4x5 camera,” says Kitchen, “photography began to unravel itself and I began to dig deeper into the medium, rather than contemplating what I could shoot to convey any sort of feeling or concept.” While skeptics might see this as avoiding conceptual responsibility, it’s a practice that has allowed Kitchen, like many photographers today, to unearth photography’s many tools for expanding visual possibility.
As long as she can remember, Isabel Dietz Hartmann has been drawn to the rift between external appearance and what lies beneath. For the Seattle and NYC-based photographer, these various forms of self-portrayal and awareness, whether it’s something as externally loaded as an item of clothing or tattoo, or the subtle way one might hold their hands when they are aware that people are looking at them, can act as barriers to understanding ones self and connecting with others. For the past few years, she’s been making A Prison and A Nook, a series of elegant, yet self-aware black and white photographs that attempt to understand this tension in its archetypes.
2016 marks the twenty third anniversary of the pioneering photography mentoring program First Exposures, and the third year since the organization separated from San Francisco Camerawork. Roula Seikaly spoke with First Exposures Director Erik Auerbach and Program Associate C.A. Greenlee about the origin of the program, the profound nature of mentor/mentee relationships, and how a non-profit continues to grow without diluting the powerful programming it offers. We've interspersed some of our favorite images from select students in the program since 2015.