Time Magazine associate photo editor Myles Little has organized an internationally touring exhibition 1%: Privilege in a Time of Inequality, that attempts to raise awareness of the growing disparity of wealth around the world. Using Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibition and book The Family of Man as a launch point, Little aims to use the work of some of today's most acclaimed photographers to create a contemporary conversation about inequality. Little positions his exhibition in contrast to Steichen's, which presented an optimism towards the human spirit. For Little, the vast disproportion of today's wealth has harmed humanity with grave consequence. While these words and the exhibition title might suggest a collection of weighted, potentially propagandistic images, Little's selection contains a thoughtful mix of work that is as soft-spoken as it is hard-hitting, which will hopefully help it to speak to a broad and diverse audience. We spoke with Myles to learn more about the exhibition, and the book he'll publish with Hatje Cantz if successfully funded through a Kickstarter campaign.
There is a tendency among naysayers to refute Instagram's legitimacy, condemning it as nothing but a visualized Twitter. These wizards say it's not much more than a tool for self-promotion, navel gazing, or disguised brand building. That, despite Vik Muniz and Alex Praeger's Instagram prints garnering thousands of dollars in Aperture's 2013 benefit auction, there's no value in its incredibly low resolution. Despite this ongoing discourse, Instagram continues to be an impactful source of photographic discovery and influence, for some it's become its own distinct lens, and for others, it's become a sketchpad for larger ideas. For the past year, Humble has invited some of our favorite photographers to participate in weekly Instagram residencies - each with a unique bend. To celebrate this pseudo-anniversary, here are 52 of our favorite images from participating photographers in all their low-res glory. We encourage you to explore their feeds, and follow their ever-evolving work.
Joe Rudko’s Object Drawings are a series of collages that manipulate, obscure, and otherwise distort photographs. They confront viewers to rethink how we experience the act of seeing and understanding the world around us and its increasingly malleable visual representations. While the Seattle-based artist’s final pieces are far from straight photography, they are often rooted in his ideas about its continuously evolving history.
Tristan Cai highlights the intersection of science and religion in an attempt to understand how people have intellectualized the supernatural throughout history. His recent series Tales of Moving Mountains: Why Won't God Go Away is an unsettling collection of multimedia works that focuses on the evolution of human-god relationships in Christianity, with a focus on developments in Asia.
This body of work uses the sky as a subject in explorations of light, space and time. In the images, space is simplified and flattened at times, and emphasized and expanded at others. Much like the sky itself, the viewer's understanding of the work is constantly in flux.