What do a cat shopping for Christmas presents, a snow buried car and some shivering NYC pigeons have in common? Not much aside from their obvious "winter" theme, but they are all part of the fascinating digital archive put online earlier this year by the New York Public Library. While curating our latest group show, Winter Pictures over the past few weeks, one favorite distraction was rabbit-holing it down this maze of historical photographic tangents, so we thought it would be fitting to cull a collection of our favorite cold, discordant gems - a series "b-sides" to the exhibition. Enjoy.
Coorain by Brian Christopher Glaser
Coorain Devin, host of the new video art talk-show web-series, Coloring Coorain, is a renaissance-hatted conceptual artist, TV star and cultural wonder producer who uses campy humor to address complex themes ranging from feminism and queer identity, to poetry, vernacular photography, and even personal health issues. Their playful, and often heartwarming approach, which credits influences spanning Candy Darling, Oscar Wilde, Dave Eggers, and John Waters, help to make these issues more accessible to a range of audiences without dilution or sacrifice of content. Corain recently collaborated with 15 photographers to produce a calendar picturing the artist as a means to to explore some of these same issues "at a time when queerness is frequently appropriated, repackaged and deployed as entertainment." Coorain's work gives agency and visibility to them, and their influence on contemporary pop culture. We interviewed Coorain to learn more.
Like pretty much every content marketer..er..photography organization, we've been hosting some of our favorite photographers for weekly Instagram residencies, and it's been lots of inspiring fun. But with only one "resident" per week, we've limited the number of photographers we can share with our world.
So starting this coming weekend we bring you: #HUMBLEWEEKENDZ. In addition to our weekly Instagram residencies, we'll be sharing some of our favorite photographer submissions throughout each weekend, and the process is damn easy. To submit, simply add "#humbleweekendz @humbleartsfoundation" on Instagram in the comments of any of your favorite photos, and if we absolutely love them, we'll share it from Humble's Instagram feed with proper attribution and a link back to your feed when the time is right. We've helped grow the followings of many photographers already so you've got nothing to lose.
XOXO in advance,
Jon and Amani
In 2007, photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman began Geolocation, a nationwide project, tracking the locations of hundreds of tweets from around the United States, Canada and the UK and making photographs to mark their location in the real world. Working long distance, the photographers' collaborative process explores the massive, rapid collection of often incredibly personal data, grounding it in physical form. The images, ranging from roadside slices of America not unlike Sternfeld's America Prospects, to lonely, unspecific landscapes, give a heartbreaking window into contemporary isolation and the need to connect in a time in which everyone is at our fingertips. The culmination of their work was recently pared down to a wonderful publication of more than 70 photos published by Jennifer Schwartz and David Bram's Flash Powder Projects, and includes essays by Julia Dolan, Kate Palmer Albers, Jamie Allen, Chad Alligood, Mark Alice Durant, Paul Soulellis, Michael Wolf and Natalie Zelt. We spent some time (virtually, of course) with Marni and Nate over email to learn more about their work and its implications.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
Happy New Year! Like a few other sneaksters out there, we decided, after reading so many clickable best-of lists, to create a cheat sheet to find some consistency among our favorite listmakers and heartbreakers. Since early November, when the festivities started bounding about, we enlisted our new researcher Diana Guerra to help compile as many as could find, from mainstay publishers like Time, The Telegraph, and The New York Times photobook lists, to ear-to-the-street photoworld wizards like Tim Clark, and Pete Brook, and a number of publications we've never even heard of. We may have missed a few, and some promise to surface in the first weeks of 2016, but this should give you a good glance into it all. Without further rambling ado, below are the eleven most popular photobooks of 2015 -- "11" because of a tie! Read more about them at each link below, and support the photographers by spending some of that unlikely leftover holiday cash. BTW, there's a full list of all the lists we included at the end of this post, and a link to download an Excel sheet in case you want to dig into the data we collected.
And... and....ALSO! If you find this particularly engrossing, check out another take on the subject at And The Winners Are..., a wonderful breakdown compiled by Laurence Vecten and Marc Fuestel.