A new magazine spotlighting Black photographers recently launched its first brick and mortar exhibition.

Last month a new exhibition opened at The Maryland Institute College of Art: Representation in Relation to Race. Curated by Lia Latty, founder of BlackIs Magazine, the show is the first in-real-life extension of the online platform, expanding upon Latty’s mission to champion photographers from the African diaspora.

It’s an exciting and challenging group of photographers, organized into three exhibition of three photographer each week. In celebration of the show and BlackIs’ one year anniversary from launching, I spoke with founder Lia Latty to learn more about the platform, the exhibition and her goals going forward.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Lia Latty

PostedApril 7, 2022

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesExhibitions, Art News, interviews

TagsBlack Is Magazine, Lia Latty, new photography, contemporary photography, photography and the African diaspora

The artist’s new exhibition Synchronicities, Traditions, and Remembrance at The Prelude Pointe Gallery in Marietta, Georgia attempts to materialize the memory of her father’s death.

When De' De’ Ajavon was just six years old, she lost her father. His passing left a gaping, unrecoverable hole that she's only recently been able to process. Using cyanotypes for their rich, murky blues, Ajavon digs through the emotional and physical reminders that continue to haunt her to this day. “Grief is a life-long, ever-evolving experience,” she writes, “and, because I was so young when he passed, I’ve had to spend my whole adult life trying to heal myself.”

Ajavon's images depict literal and metaphorical haziness, serendipity, and a perpetual void – she describes her work as a response to decades of “deep contemplation regarding time’s ability to distort our memories and how we perceive them.” It's a means to support her perpetual grieving process, act as tangible evidence of loss, and, she writes, “as a subconscious lead to the things we might have already known deep down inside.”
The exhibition is currently on view in Marietta, Georgia at The Prelude Pointe Gallery space through March 2, 2022.

I spoke with Ajavon to wade through it.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with De’ De’ Ajavon

PostedFebruary 4, 2022

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Art News, Exhibitions, Galleries, interviews

TagsDe' De' Ajavon, new photography, alt-process photography, photography and memory, photography and healing, art as therapy

Humble’s latest open call looks to the landscape as a source of conflict, beauty and contradiction

As an extension of our exhibition at Seattle’s Photographic Center Northwest, Humble's next online exhibition, will include photography that engages landscapes framed by conflict, trauma, and beauty. From the legacy of systemic racism in the United States to the Holocaust in Europe and the entrenched conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, to the worldwide reckoning on climate change and many others, Pained Vistas looks to the potential for picturesque views to be fraught with catastrophe and contradiction.

We're interested in seeing your landscape photography that addresses these concerns.

Guidelines:

PostedDecember 10, 2021

AuthorEditors

CategoriesExhibitions, Open Call

Tagsopen call, landscape photography, photo opportunities, humble arts foundation, Jon Feinstein, ROula Seikaly

“I Hear America Singing,” curated by Ashley Lumb at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, Jordan presents a wide and inclusive picture of contemporary American photography.

For 19th Century poet Walt Whitman, America was the sum of its people – an ambitious symbol of collective participation and responsibility. His 1860 poem “I Hear America Singing” celebrated democracy in its most ideal form - something the country has, for many, continuously fallen short. Taking its title from Whitman's poem, Ashley Lumb’s exhibition – the first exhibition of American photography to take place in Amman, Jordan – features the work of 16 contemporary American photographers showing the many experiences of America and American identity.

Lumb uses three themes: Landscape, Portraiture and American History to frame the exhibition. This ranges from Lucas Foglia's poetic images of rural America to Millee Tibbs folded abstractions that distort and push against the hyper-masculinity of early American Landscape photography. Highlights (but really, every image in the show eloquently articulates the puzzle of American identity) also include Wendell White's series "Schools for the Colored," which presents locations in Northeastern states that once functioned as segregated schools, digitally edited to "screen out" surrounding area, isolating them from white society.

I spoke with Lumb to learn more about this exciting and ambitious exhibition.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Ashley Lumb

Alae (In the Mirror), Beirut, Lebanon, 2020 © Rania Matar

Mark Alice Durant speaks with renowned photographer Rania Matar about her new photography book published by Radius Books.

Rania Matar is a Lebanese-born photographer whose portraits, primarily of girls and women, in the Middle East and the U.S., have gained critical and popular attention internationally. Her fourth book, She, is being published by Radius Books this fall, for which I was honored to contribute an essay. I first saw Matar’s photographs in a solo exhibition in 2016, titled Invisible Children, that presented portraits of refugee children on the streets of Beirut. I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of her imagery, yet also moved by the complex political subtext.

The history of photography is shaped by portraiture. It is the most rudimentary of photographic relationships––one person points a camera at another. From that simple arrangement has grown an enormous archive of formal and informal images, providing a sense of who we are, individually and collectively. What distinguishes a complex portrait from a photo made for a passport? What elevates mere likeness into an image that resonates?

Like many great portraitists before her, from August Sander to Seydou Keita, Matar, first and foremost, respects and honors her subjects. And in doing so, Matar has expanded the spectrum of human representation. She describes her portrait sessions as collaborations; that collaborative spirit, combined with her intuitive sense of light and sensitivity to the architectural and cultural space that surrounds us, has produced an extraordinary body of work. Matar’s solo exhibition, which shares its title with the book opens October 23rd at Robert Klein Gallery.

Mark Alice Durant in conversation with Rania Matar

PostedOctober 18, 2021

AuthorMark Alice Durant

Categoriesinterviews, Artists, Exhibitions, Photobooks

TagsRania Matar, Mark Alice Durant, Lebanese photographers, women photograph, portraits of women, photography and the middle east, photography and adolescence, Radius Books, 2021 photobooks, new photography, documentary photography, contemporary photographic portraiture

What Is, Black Is?

De’De' Ajavon’s Cyanotypes Ponder The Hazy Reminder of Loss and Grief

Open Call: Group Show #71 - Pained Vistas (redux)

A New Photography Exhibition in Jordan Shares a "Kaleidoscope" of American Identity

She: Rania Matar's Portraits of American and Middle Eastern Young Women Entering Adulthood