We're excited to announce two open calls with August deadlines:
Humble Cats at Photoville in NYC in September, and Humble's next online exhibition: Group Show #58: On Death. Details below!
Lack of cultural and gender-based diversity has been a problem in the art and photography world for years. Despite many positive, forward-thinking exhibitions, programs, and platforms dedicated to changing this, many of the major photo competitions, "photographers-to-watch" lists, and photographer mastheads in major publications are overwhelmingly white and male. Sure, there are exceptions – and a number of ongoing efforts to change this – but the scales, especially in magazine publishing and major commercial shoots, are still tipped.
Frustrated with the slow pace to progress, photographer, writer, and curator Oriana Koren, alongside her collective The Authority Collective, developed "The Lit List," a merit-based, 30-strong selection of female, trans, non-binary, people of color, and otherwise marginalized photographers who they believe are not getting the attention they deserve. To be announced in August 2018 and exhibited at Photoville in Brooklyn, NY, the final list of 30 will be pared down from a 50-photographer shortlist based on 200 initial nominations made over the past few months. The jury is comprised of industry decision-makers of color and allies including Zora J Murff of Strange Fire Collective, Paloma Shutes of California Sunday magazine, Siobhán Bohnacker of The New Yorker, and Noelle Flores-Theard of Magnum Foundation.
Excited, hopeful, and equally frustrated with Humble's own tortoise-crawl towards equal representation, I spoke with Oriana Koren to learn more about the inspiring project. Throughout this interview, we've included some of our favorite images from the photographers being considered.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Oriana Koren.
In her latest exhibition, Midst, Megumi Shauna Arai uses soft, subtle metaphors to address the many, often ambiguous layers of her Jewish and Japanese heritage.
While trained as a photographer, Megumi Shauna Arai often combines sculpture, fibers, and exercises with culturally significant materials to emphasize this splintering complexity. Her latest exhibition, Midst at Seattle's Jacob Lawrence Gallery is a series of photographs of bodies suspended in water exhibited amidst three installations referencing Japanese folk practices for honoring sacred space. In a piece in one room titled "did you not know, I was waiting for you?" a hobo bag with elements of Japanese stitching stands propped up in cinder blocks like flowers in a makeshift vase. In another piece titled "Interior Frontiers," sets of rice straw rope resembling a crown of thorns hang from the ceiling and entryway and wrap around the entire space. In another piece, " simultaneously (the border of a great belonging)," a similar rope connects two small boulders like a tin can telephone, but hangs loosely without the tension one might expect.
While each piece in the show has a very specific origin, there is an open-ended-ness that allows viewers to float through the gallery and gather their own meaning. I spoke with the artist to learn more about her process of making the work, and how her own sense of identity fits into it all.
Daniel W. Coburn's photographs confront the tension between the artist's inner narrative what's projected to the outside world.
Daniel W. Coburn’s Becoming a Specter, on view at Philadelphia’s Print Center through August 4th, is purposefully restrictive and subtle. The artist demonstrates how the elimination of color in a photograph can make the deepest blacks and brightest whites – and everything in between – so vivid and tactile that you don’t miss color at all. And that's exactly what Becoming a Specter does.
The exhibition consists of twelve untitled photographs, four to a wall, in an alcove gallery space on the second floor. Predominantly images of people, they all seem to deliberately capture the split-second moment where nothing looks particularly real as if the subject and photographer have come together on an inhalation.
Exhibition review by Deborah Krieger
We're no fans of McDonald's, but we can't escape the impact of their golden arches on our landscape, culture and emotional psyche. And unsurprisingly, they're incredibly photographic. Their shimmering presence can be strange, funny, and ominous - at times a topographical eyesore, at others, an unfortunate landmark or "Where's Waldo" beacon of Americanism wherever we go.
Seeing these pop up repeatedly in our Instagram feed, and in larger bodies of work from some of our favorite photographers like Tim Davis and Susana Raab, we put out a call for various interpretations of the logo in context. Without further ado, here are 30+ photographs of the McDonalds logo in its unsettling glory. Make sure to check out more work from each photographer by clicking the link in their image-credit.