This weekend marks Printed Matter's annual New York Art Book Fair: a glorious, highly curated, jam packed, sweaty gathering of some of best mainstream and independent art book publishers. Hosted at New York City's MoMa PS1 in Long Island City, it's filled with frequent book signings, people watching and an opportunity to spend a downpayment on way too many photobooks (which you should.) We hope the renegade book appropriating bootleggers Flat Fix are back for an attack. Oh, and there's also the Independent Art Book Fair happening close by in Greenpoint, which is worth a walk over the Pulaski Bridge. Below are some of our anticipated favorites, in no particular order.
We know. This headline might imply an association between these photographers and the many ills a certain small-handed circus leader denies knowing when called to task, and we apologize. This has nothing to do with Mr. Trump, though we suspect he (maybe) collects the "great" work of Peter Lik, right? Why are we even rambling about this? Moving on, here are some of our favorite photographers working right now, all who've hung out with us over the past few months for weekly Humble Arts Foundation Instagram residencies. Some are making Instagram their visual diary or sketchpad, while others are using it as a wider domain for sharing long term photo projects. Have a look, give them your follows, and be moved to keep up with their ever-inspired work.
Beautiful Mystery © Bubi Canal.
In June 2016, the International Center of Photography (ICP) reopened after a two-year hiatus. Now situated in a custom-designed site at 250 Bowery in Lower Manhattan, the Center announced its intentions as a 21st-century institution with the controversial exhibition Public, Private, Secret and a rotating curatorial program. Curator Charlotte Cotton fulfilled the first Curator-in-Residency position, collaborating with ICP staff and guest contributors to present a timely exhibition that considers the implications of self-representation and visibility in a visually saturated world. Cotton spoke with Roula Seikaly about the exhibition, the Aperture Summer Open as an extension of the Photography is Magic project, and the pros and cons of independent curatorial work.
Emailed Kiss Goodnight © Tabitha Soren
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.
Inchworms © Melinda Hurst Frye
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.