Marcy Palmer’s photographs remind us to pause and look for moments of beauty amid turmoil, heartache, and uncertainty.

Since 2018, Marcy Palmer has made lush gilded photographic prints of ferns, flowers and other botanicals – personal and delicate images that you want to hold them in your hands. These glimmering, gold-leafed prints are steeped in photo-historical references - an homage to Anna Atkins and surrealist photographic pioneer Florence Henri - yet feel contemporary and fresh.

Palmer's book You Are Eternity, You Are The Mirror, which will publish in September with Yoffy Press, continues this close and quiet encounter. While in no way a salve or encouragement to look away from a world in crisis, it’s a moment to draw breath and recharge.

We caught up to discuss the shimmer and the light.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Marcy Palmer

PostedAugust 27, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Photobooks, Publications, Portfolio, writing on photography

Tags2020 photobooks, Anna Atkins, Gilded photographs, photographs of flowers, botanical photography, Marcy Palmer, Yoffy Press, Khalil Gibran

Kiliii Yuyan on living off-road and photographing Arctic communities with an indigenous lens

Few photographers spend more time on the road than Kiliii Yuyan, who travels up to 300 days a year. A Maryland-born descendent of both Nanai (Siberian Native) and Chinese immigrants, he roams the Arctic to live alongside and document Indigenous populations whose customs and cultures often remind him of his own ancestors.

Aside from the intrepid feat of Yuyan’s images—they require long flights and rocky boat rides into sub-zero climates, and living in remote villages— his work accomplishes something rarely found in “extreme travel photography.” His pictures do not strain to be “epic” in subject-matter. Instead, the scenes are often quiet and isolated. But his graphically assembled compositions, with strong lines and interwoven positive and negative shapes, bring forth an image that demands to be looked at with a tender and curious eye. This flips the awestruck, aloof, and often predatory Western gaze that traces back to the earliest days of travel photography.

Yuyan, who now lives in Seattle, is a member of Natives Photograph and a 2020 Nia Tero Storytelling Fellow, a yearlong program for Indigenous creatives. Quarantine has grounded much of his travels, but it hasn’t stopped him from shooting new work and publishing a book, “Chukotka,” out this year through Kris Graves Projects.

We talked to Yuyan about living on the road, photographing people who live off of the land, and approaching every project with an Indigenous lens.

Quinn Russell Brown in conversation with Kiliii Yuyan

PostedAugust 20, 2020

AuthorQuinn Russell Brown

CategoriesArtists, Photobooks, Portfolio

TagsKiliii Yuyan, Quinn Russell Brown, arctic photography, indigenous photography, Natives Photograph, Chukotka, Kris Graves Projects, photobooks, 2020 photobooks, photographing indigenous communities, National Geographic Photographers, travel photography, ethical documentary photography

© Kadiya Qasem. From the series New Wave Order ii

Photographer Kadiya Qasem finds tension and hidden meaning in crashing waves and other symbols of aesthetic beauty.

Waves , sunsets, flowers, and clouds are among the most over-photographed subjects. It's easy to scroll past them on Instagram without a second thought. Yet, something about Kadiya Qasem’s work commands an uncomfortable pause.

Qasem's warm-toned waves are alluring but disconcerting. In looking at them, our gaze becomes the conduit through which uninvited visual fantasies are projected. Qasem turns these perennial visual clichés into poetic universal symbols, inviting viewers to reconsider what they see as desirable. The Allure of Otherness pairs photos of pastel clouds against beach landscapes and fog-soaked trees, positioning them as romanticized or exotic emblems.

For Qasem, a British Yemeni Greek photographer, they are stand-ins for how it feels to be a cultural other, and how that can impact an individual's identity. Her two-part Waves series adds a layer to this conversation, casting the ocean as a sign of resistance amidst global turmoil and the climate crisis. "If the sea could speak up," Qasem writes, "what would she say?"

In Horse Scapes, Qasem photographs horses at arm's length, often with her hand gently resting on their backs, abstracting their bodies into landscapes. A power dynamic is implied but, like all of her work, the relationship remains mysterious.

After years of following her work, I finally reached out to Qasem to learn more.

Jon Fenstein in conversation with Kadiya Qasem

PostedAugust 13, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsKadiya Qasem, photography of waves, conceptual photography, photography and identity, photography on beauty, photography and beauty, The Allure of Otherness, horse photography

Dese’Rae & Felicidad with their children Theo and Gus, 2020. © Helen Maurene Cooper

Philadelphia based photographer Helen Maurene Cooper uses the 19th-century wet plate collodion process to make socially distant Ambrotype street portraits of her neighbors during quarantine.

Helen Maurene Cooper’s photography is driven by personal connection and relationship building. In long-form documentary projects, she has photographed drag queen culture, Floridian mermaid performers, and has collaborated on portraits with Black and Latinx-owned specialty nail businesses on Chicago’s West Side. Feminism, entrepreneurship, and the power of adornment are central to her work.

Cooper moved from Chicago to Philadelphia’s East Kensington in 2019. Months later, as Covid 19 swept the nation, the challenge of engaging a new creative community and balancing parenthood (Cooper has an 11-month old daughter) and professional demands intensified. How does a photographer who relies on the intimacy of portraiture navigate these limitations? How does one get to know their neighbors when all interactions must take place at a mandatory six-foot distance, our faces obscured by masks?

Cooper takes this challenge in stride. Setting up her 8x10 camera just beyond her front door, she commits her neighbors’ images to history on wet collodion plates. People of the Pandemic, River Wards - Philadelphia is a project for the Covid age, calling to mind the visual traces of historical crises including the Civil War and the 1918 influenza epidemic that tested American resolve.

We spoke about producing a mature body of work that reflects seven years of working with the collodion process, social distance portrait photography, how connections are made amidst pandemic, and how the white gaze might shape this moment of social reckoning.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Helen Maurene Cooper

PostedJuly 29, 2020

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsCollodion Process, Helen Maurene Cooper, Pandemic Portraits, 8x10 portrait photography, Contemporary Portraiture, photography and social distance

I first came across Durham, NC-based photographer Faith Couch's work a few years ago when one of her images stopped me in a near-endless Instagram scroll. Two arms, one slightly darker than the other, jut into the frame. One rests slightly above the other, both bend at peculiar yet relaxed angles, struck with warm, even sunlight. Framed before a desert horizon, the sun casts them as if they were placed before a studio backdrop. They flatten and deepen the perspective and relationship to space, and create a new way of looking at form as symbolism. As viewers, we have no idea whose bodies or souls they belong to, yet there's a suggestion of love, humility, and tenderness. They are fantastical yet intimate. They feel like science fiction braced with empathy and optimism.

These feelings resonate throughout Couch's work, which she describes as focusing on "the Blackness that exists in the peripheral and informs all things." Her entire practice pushes against degrading historical narratives about Blackness and instead celebrates the significance and influence of Black culture across the globe. It's about self-love, centering, and creating a vast and positive spectrum of Black representation, often with the body as a central form.

In the past year, Couch's work has recently garnered the attention of curators like Antuan Sargent, who included her in his widely acclaimed book and exhibition The New Black Vanguard, is now part of the SeeInBlack collective, and was included in the 2019 exhibition In Conversation: Visual Meditations on Black Masculinity at the African American Museum in Philadelphia for her uniquely powerful vision.

I recently spoke with Couch about her practice, inspirations, and the complexity of representation.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Faith Couch

PostedJuly 16, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsFaith Couch, Black joy, new photography, photography and optimism, New Black Vanguard, Photography and masculinity, photography and representation, contemporary photography, emerging photographers

Gilded Photos of Flowers – an Antidote to Crisis

Finding Homeland Through Ice and Snow

Have You Ever Seen a Subversive Seascape?

Faith Couch Creates a New Future of Black Love

Gilded Photos of Flowers – an Antidote to Crisis

Finding Homeland Through Ice and Snow

Have You Ever Seen a Subversive Seascape?

People of the Pandemic: Wet Plate Portraits from a Social Distance

Faith Couch Creates a New Future of Black Love