The Photographer's forthcoming book, published by Yoffy Press and FW books contrasts the romanticization of the American West with present-day personal, cultural and political realities.

In 2013, Jon Horvath stumbled upon "Bliss" the population-of 300, rural Idaho town and metaphors were born. During a period of introspection, Horvath embarked on a series of photographs that reflect what he describes as "how entrenched mythologies of place and traditional mythologies of happiness collide." Breaking from voyeuristic explorations of small town America, This is Bliss is a search for marks of success, perfection, idealism and hope.

Horvath expresses this through an eclectic mix of color and black+white portraiture, sweeping landscapes and found imagery, ending in what feels like an existential ellipses without resolve. A few days shy of Horvath's Kickstarter fundraiser ending (have we said yet that you should get this book?) we caught up to learn more about his journey.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Jon Horvath

PostedNovember 15, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Art News, interviews, Photobooks, Portfolio, Publications

Tags2021 photobooks, Yoffy Press, FW: Books, Jon Horvath, Contemporary Landscape Photography, small town photography, new photography, photobooks, travel photography, roadtrip photography, Bliss, Bliss Idaho

“I Hear America Singing,” curated by Ashley Lumb at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, Jordan presents a wide and inclusive picture of contemporary American photography.

For 19th Century poet Walt Whitman, America was the sum of its people – an ambitious symbol of collective participation and responsibility. His 1860 poem “I Hear America Singing” celebrated democracy in its most ideal form - something the country has, for many, continuously fallen short. Taking its title from Whitman's poem, Ashley Lumb’s exhibition – the first exhibition of American photography to take place in Amman, Jordan – features the work of 16 contemporary American photographers showing the many experiences of America and American identity.

Lumb uses three themes: Landscape, Portraiture and American History to frame the exhibition. This ranges from Lucas Foglia's poetic images of rural America to Millee Tibbs folded abstractions that distort and push against the hyper-masculinity of early American Landscape photography. Highlights (but really, every image in the show eloquently articulates the puzzle of American identity) also include Wendell White's series "Schools for the Colored," which presents locations in Northeastern states that once functioned as segregated schools, digitally edited to "screen out" surrounding area, isolating them from white society.

I spoke with Lumb to learn more about this exciting and ambitious exhibition.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Ashley Lumb

Weshyar, His Family, Open Wounds © Younes Mohammad

Kurdish photographer Younes Mohammad’s photographs of PeShmerga fighters and refugees convey the barbarity of war while honoring refugee experiences from an insider’s perspective.

Images of refugees are common in worldwide media. Scenes of displaced and traumatized people often serve as sanitized substitutes for footage of the natural or man-made catastrophes that violently interrupt life’s familiar rhythms.

Younes Mohammed knows the precariousness of refugee life first hand. From 1974 to 1998, the Kurdish Iraqi sheltered across the border in Iran. While he was relatively protected from Saddam Hussein’s genocidal purge of ethnic Kurds, Mohammad was estranged from deep cultural and familial roots in his home country. In 2011, he left his job to pursue photography full time.

Open Wounds recounts Mohammed’s work with Peshmerga fighters - those who face death - in the months and years after ISIL rampaged across Iraq and Syria. Comprising harrowing portraits of wounded warriors and scenes of life scratched out from devastation, the series also conveys the photographer’s all too keen understanding of uncertainty amidst conflict.

Mohammed describes working with Peshmerga warriors and their families, why it is crucial for refugees to be seen and their humanity sustained, and what kept him busy during quarantine.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Younes Mohammed

PostedOctober 28, 2021

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArtists, Galleries, interviews

TagsPhotography and War, Younes Mohammad, War Photography, contemporary photographic portraiture, Kurdish photographers, photos of Perhmerga fighters

Alae (In the Mirror), Beirut, Lebanon, 2020 © Rania Matar

Mark Alice Durant speaks with renowned photographer Rania Matar about her new photography book published by Radius Books.

Rania Matar is a Lebanese-born photographer whose portraits, primarily of girls and women, in the Middle East and the U.S., have gained critical and popular attention internationally. Her fourth book, She, is being published by Radius Books this fall, for which I was honored to contribute an essay. I first saw Matar’s photographs in a solo exhibition in 2016, titled Invisible Children, that presented portraits of refugee children on the streets of Beirut. I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of her imagery, yet also moved by the complex political subtext.

The history of photography is shaped by portraiture. It is the most rudimentary of photographic relationships––one person points a camera at another. From that simple arrangement has grown an enormous archive of formal and informal images, providing a sense of who we are, individually and collectively. What distinguishes a complex portrait from a photo made for a passport? What elevates mere likeness into an image that resonates?

Like many great portraitists before her, from August Sander to Seydou Keita, Matar, first and foremost, respects and honors her subjects. And in doing so, Matar has expanded the spectrum of human representation. She describes her portrait sessions as collaborations; that collaborative spirit, combined with her intuitive sense of light and sensitivity to the architectural and cultural space that surrounds us, has produced an extraordinary body of work. Matar’s solo exhibition, which shares its title with the book opens October 23rd at Robert Klein Gallery.

Mark Alice Durant in conversation with Rania Matar

PostedOctober 18, 2021

AuthorMark Alice Durant

Categoriesinterviews, Artists, Exhibitions, Photobooks

TagsRania Matar, Mark Alice Durant, Lebanese photographers, women photograph, portraits of women, photography and the middle east, photography and adolescence, Radius Books, 2021 photobooks, new photography, documentary photography, contemporary photographic portraiture

Queer Moments at Lightwork Gallery in Syracuse, NY highlights the diversity of queer experience and the power of photography to affirm and sustain difference.

For nearly five decades, Light Work Gallery has amassed a photography collection donated by the artists who participated in the organization’s varied programs, including artist residencies and exhibitions. It’s a unique collecting model, one driven by the artist’s sense of their best work and not external factors or input such as art market viability or donor eccentricities. Moreover, the 4,000-piece collection sustains a counter narrative to other institutional photography collections that do not reflect the diverse identity markers of contemporary makers.

Curator Ryan Krueger elaborates on those themes in Queer Moments: Selections from the Light Work Collection. On view at the Syracuse, NY gallery through October 14th, the installation highlights 14 artists whose photographs convey quiet yet remarkable moments in queer history from the 1990s to now.

Krueger, who works at Light Work Gallery as the Digital Services Coordinator, wrote at length about the project in our email exchange, noting how the Light Work collection charts photography’s material and aesthetic evolution over 48 years and why the perennial quest for representation is so important..

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Ryan Krueger

PostedOctober 7, 2021

AuthorRoula Seikaly

Categoriesinterviews, Galleries, Exhibitions, Artists, Art News

TagsLGBTQIA+ artists, Lightwork, Queer Moments, Lightwork Gallery, Ryan Krueger, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Laura Aguilar, John Edmonds, Albert J. Winn, Jess T. Dugan, Ajamu (Ikwe-Tyehimba), Rory Mulligan, Clifford Prince King, Clarissa Sligh, Mark McKnight

Get This Photobook: Jon Horvath's This Is Bliss Looks at a Small Town as a Symbol of Personal and Political Idealism

A New Photography Exhibition in Jordan Shares a "Kaleidoscope" of American Identity

A Photographer Visualizes Refugee Life after Fighting ISIL

She: Rania Matar's Portraits of American and Middle Eastern Young Women Entering Adulthood

An Exhibition Honors The Many Experiences of Queer Photographic History