The Photographer and Aint-Bad Editor In Chief's personal work and editorial leadership balances representations of joy, struggle, beauty and resilience.

Drawing on the warmth she experienced growing up in Louisiana beauty salons, Emerald Arguelles uses photography to reflect the past and envision a bright present and future for Black Americans. This comes across in a range of approaches and subject matter, from straightforward yet emotive black and white photographs of beauty salons to portraits that highlight the poetry of human gesture. And in her role as Aint- Bad’s Editor In Chief, Arguelles sees an ongoing opportunity to close the cultural gaps that still loom in contemporary photography.

I spoke with the photographer and editor to learn more about her personal work and gaze forward.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Emerald Arguelles

PostedAugust 24, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

Categoriesinterviews, Artists, Portfolio

TagsEmerald Arguelles, Aint-Bad Magazine, New Photography, contemporary photography, photographer conversations, photographer interviews, contemporary portraiture, empathy in photography

Dana Stirling’s 2017 series and handmade photobook Property of The New York Public Library Picture Collection is a snapshot of a peculiar trove and vital resource.

In early August, we learned through artist Jason Fulford and this New York Times article that the New York Public Library administration made plans to remove its Picture Collection from circulation. The collection, often organized into folders or binders of images, has been an invaluable resource to artists, educators and the general public for years. It’s a trove of historical imagery - at times anonymous, often peculiar and magnetic to those obsessed with archival image culture, from Joseph Cornell to Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, and Taryn Simon.

In 2017, after touring the collection with Fulford, artist, curator and co-founder of Float Magazine Dana Stirling began zeroing in on a binder of UFOs. The collection contains 300 images, from stark “portraits” of aliens you might recall from issues of the Weekly World News, to flying saucers and almost psychedelic-looking orbs implied to be “space-related.” What fascinated Stirling more than just the alien phenomena were 121 images within the collection methodically stamped with “Property of The New York Public Library Collection” on the face of the image.

“It became clear to me,” says Stirling, “that this stamp was more than just an odd archivist’s decision, and now an integral part of the image and its composition.” More than just a watermark or security note, the stamp became part of the image, an intervention that, for Stirling, altered the images’ meaning by imposing an “alien element.”

Amidst the uncertainty of the collection’s future (details on how you can help preserve its public-ness here), we caught up with Stirling to learn more about her project and importance of this vital and peculiar resource.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Dana Stirling

PostedAugust 11, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

Categoriesinterviews, Photobooks, Publications, Vernacular Photography

TagsDana Stirling, New York Public Library Image Archive, UFO photography, found photography, historical image archives, appropriation, pictures generation, Float magazine

Fresh Meadows Cranberry Farm © Gene Dominique

Gene Dominique’s Still Here - African American Farmers in the 21st Century shows Black farmers of all ages and experience levels contributing to a backbone of American industry, despite numerous hurdles.

In March 2021, it was announced that roughly half of the $10.4 billion dollar portion of the American Rescue Plan earmarked for agriculture relief will go to Black farmers. Aid in the form of debt relief, grants, training, education and other assistance will help historically disadvantaged farmers acquire land and build or supplement existing farms. The news is welcome, and tainted by a lawsuit filed by disgruntled white farmers who insist that the Biden administration’s strides toward equity are biased.

While the case winds its way through this country’s labyrinthine legal system, the farmers portrayed in Gene Dominique’s long form documentary project Still Here - African American Farmers in the 21st Century will continue working. Inspired by his family’s south Louisiana agricultural legacy, Dominique captures the love and labor of working the land in images that easily rival the storied work of Farm Security Administration photographers.

I’ve known and admired Gene’s work for a few years now. It was a pleasure to learn about the series’ origin, how it started and who participates, and how he plans to pursue it as Covid-related restrictions are slowly lifted.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Gene Dominique

PostedAugust 5, 2021

AuthorRoula Seikaly

TagsBlack farmers, African American farmers, american agriculture, agricultural photos, Gene Domininque, Roula Seikaly, photographer interviews, documentary photography, photojournalism

Sarah-Lourdes Abrahamsen’s Drug Dreams uses photographs and text to visualize the artist’s fraught and ongoing journey from addiction to sobriety.

2020 exacted a profound psychological toll. Managing the tightly-wound anxieties fueled by a global health crisis, quarantine, and concerns for our families’ health and our own stretched our emotional fiber to its limit. For those grappling with addiction and substance abuse disorder, the challenges were all the more acute. A July 17th CNN report indicates that 93,000 Americans succumbed to drug overdoses in 2020, a 29.4% increase over 2019, the highest number ever reported.

Sarah-Lourdes Abrahamsen is one of millions of Americans who battled addiction last year, leaning into her photographic practice to make sense of the struggle and to honor sobriety’s hard-fought milestones. Named for the vivid dreams that may occur as addiction’s morbid grip loosens, the series Drug Dreams recounts her experience. Hastily composed text and images - some sharply focused and others blurry - uncannily mirror a mind free of, or marinating in intoxicants.

I met Abrahamesen in a recent portfolio review for Parsons School of Design. Over email and Zoom, our conversation delved further into the relationship between image and text, the human cost of the war on drugs, and how a creative practice supports sobriety.

Roula Seikay in conversation with Sarah-Lourdes Abrahamsen

PostedJuly 29, 2021

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArtists, Galleries, interviews

TagsSarah Lourdes Abrahamsen, Roula Seikaly, photography and addiction, photography during quarantine

Grandfather In Chacra, 23 days © Diana Guerra

Diana Guerra uses a 19th century photographic process as a meditation on the impermanence of cultural memory.

“When it comes to crossing borders,” writes Diana Guerra, “there is a transformation process that goes beyond one’s identity, and rather involves new understandings of family and our homelands.” For Guerra, a NYC-based photographer whose family lives in Peru, identity dissolves into traces of family, the people who presently surround us, and the landscapes we leave behind.

Fleeting Under Light, her ongoing series of photographic anthrotypes memorializes her cultural identity as it shifts and fades. Within the process, – invented in 1842 by Mary Sommerville using photosensitive materials created from plants – Guerra uses Peruvian purple corn as traces of her heritage and cultural ephemera.

Beyond this technical process, Guerra’s photographs were taken in New York City where she now lives, and two regions of Peru: La Arena and Lima. These include a range of subjects, from pictures of family members, a self-portrait, and an unintentional homage to The Last Supper. Guerra's images are a visual memoir to diasporic impermanence, which she describes as “vapor that leaves the ground, or that never settles.”

We speak about her process, her history, and how it all weaves together.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Diana Guerra

PostedJuly 23, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

Categoriesinterviews, Artists

TagsDiana Guerra, Peruvian-American photographers, Alternative Process, anthrotype photography, latinx diaspora, photography and diaspora, diaspora studies

Emerald Arguelles Celebrates Beauty, Community, and a Bright, Sparkling Future

Mining The New York Public Library’s Alien Archive

Still Here - Gene Dominique Photographs African American Farmers in the 21st Century

Getting Clean During a Pandemic

Photographing Family, Union, and the Unsettled Ghosts of Culture