In his ongoing series The Aristocrats, photo-based artist Jayson Bimber combines crude digital retouching with references to art-historical tableaus as a means to critique systems of wealth in the United States and abroad. He scans found images from fashion magazines and advertisements, creating montages that are as equally unsettling as they are seductive. Bimber's techniques highlight an umbrella of contemporary concerns ranging from political corruption to sinister puppeteering in the upper echelons of the commercial fine art market. Like the famous joke "The Aristocrats" from which this series' title is derived, it intentionally lacks a punchline or true narrative structure, bringing to light the absurdity of its content, in essence, a "joke about jokes."
I spoke with Bimber to learn more about his process and ideas.
Interview by Jon Feinstein
He may not tell you this directly, but Nathaniel Ward's photographs are about the subtlety of defeat. They are brimming with quiet, often painful metaphors, buried as footnotes in photos of people and the land. From the ghostly large format color photographs of hallways, classrooms and bathrooms in American schools Ward made a decade ago, to To Turn the Mountains into Glass, politically agnostic black and white pictures made while traversing Israel's charged landscape, his work is riddled with introspective pause. And it's consistently quite beautiful. Ward's latest exhibition, A Nationless Place, on view through March, 2018 at the Ford Foundation Gallery at New York Live Arts adds a new layer to his methodologies by integrating sweeping swatches of text beside his photos of sometimes-confusing slices of landscape and human experience. Unlike explanatory "exhibition text" you might expect in a themed group-show retrospective, it functions as a piece of the art unto itself. I spoke with Ward to learn more.
Interview by Jon Feinstein
As much as we'd like to say we're sick of best-of lists, and as much as we might like to claim listicles and punchy headlines are as expired as pineapple still-lifes, we can't help ourselves. It's been a while since we've compiled a roundup, but we're excited about these 29 photographers who we've featured on our Instagram feed over the past few months, some as week-long takeovers, and others who have momentarily graced our feed. Like Catherine Losing, whose work treads a fine line between smart advertising and art photography, or Erin Elyse Burns and Ana Samoylova, who made some of the most innovative and off-the-cuff photographs of the 2017 solar eclipse. It's all good and we encourage you to follow them all.
Naomi Harris and I go way back. Her series of Floridian Jewish grandmothers, which appeared as the cover story for the second issue of HEEB magazine during my senior year at Bard College in 2003, was single-handedly responsible for me approaching the magazine to shoot for them, and later serve as their photo editor and Creative Director.
Harris' sharp observational hilarity, documentary chops, and an informed "art photography" sensibility is rare and unforgettable. Her most recent project EUSA, which documents American-themed places in Europe and European-themed places in The United States has been keeping my attention since she began, both for its strange sense of humor and for its rich cultural commentary. So when FlakPhoto's Andy Adams messaged me on Facebook a couple weeks ago saying. "Do you know Naomi Harris' work? Have you seen her Kickstarter? You should write something about it for Humble," I jumped to attention. It's a project that demands to be a book, and there are only a few days left to support it. WHICH YOU CAN DO HERE
If this isn't enough of a hard sell, spend some time hearing from Naomi:
Interview by Jon Feinstein
San Diego-based photographer Alanna Airitam describes her urge to produce The Golden Age, a series of monumental photographic portraits that celebrate African American and African Diasporan identity and counters their omission from visual narratives in much of western art history, as unrelenting. Friends and acquaintances agreed to sit for Airitam, who situates her subjects in lush sartorial and environmental settings that recall the personal and material abundance portrayed in Dutch Renaissance portraits. Working photographically, rather than with oil paint, the artist creates a forum in which we’re invited to consider matters including identity, consumption, and who is celebrated.
Humble Arts Foundation senior editor Roula Seikaly spoke with Airitam about the project’s origin, relatable vulnerability between photographer and sitter, and challenging both stereotypes and the impermanence of popular culture through familiar media forms such as portraiture.
Interview by Roula Seikaly