Oscar, Tivoli, New York, March 11, 2017. © Stephen Shore.
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!
"Guide to Happiness" © Jessica Pettway
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.
© Robert Wade, California, 1969-1970, courtesy of the photographer, from "All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party," PCNW 2018
Seattle exhibition traces the visual descendants of the Black Panther party
All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party, organized by Michelle Dunn Marsh at Seattle's Photographic Center Northwest – as well as an abridged (expanded) version at AIPAD earlier this spring – is an exhibition drawn from a book of the same name and showcases a select group of contemporary black artists, whose work has been informed or influenced by The Black Panther Party. Timed to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Seattle chapter – the first outside of California – the exhibition looks to how the Panthers' visual codes and social platforms play out in contemporary African American photography. I spoke with curator Michelle Dunn Marsh to learn more about the book, exhibition and plans to take the Panther's legacy into the future. The exhibition is up at PCNW through June 10th, 2018.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Michelle Dunn Marsh
© Anthony Tafuro
Artist finds his voice and unexpected order in visual chaos.
Anthony Tafuro is hard to pin down. In one series called Barrier Kult, the Brooklyn-based artist makes dreamy, mysterious black and white photographs of skateboarders with references to satanic Norwegian Blackmetal. The statement for another project, his recent book, Where Ya' At, which includes digital glitches, discolored flowers, skulls, and abstractions of light sources describes the work as "Analog captures of living and dying throughout the real and digital world." And since the days of Occupy Wall Street, he's followed masked activists Anonymous, making images that hover between traditional photo-journalism and something sinister.
Across all of his work, Tafuro's eye weaves through black and white and color, through casual snapshots, near-documentary, pure abstraction and visual experiments with no beginning or end. On the surface, it's messy and discordant but somehow it hangs together swimmingly.
I contacted Tafuro to learn more.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Anthony Tafuro.
Photo © Kris Kozlowski Moore
Guns are one of the most contentious dialogues in the United States today. They have become wedges in elections, with the NRA defending their ‘rights' to semi-automatic weapons at all costs, and after a wave of shootings in the past year, the issue has mobilized mass student walkouts to demonstrate an increasing support for restrictions that will help keep them safe. Other countries, such as Australia in 1996, have demonstrated progressive overhauls of legislation in response to mass shootings, a move that is increasingly cited as something to consider adopting in the United States.
Being recognized as one of the world’s safest countries to live in, one would rarely expect Switzerland to sit alongside the United States with one of the highest rates of gun ownership per capita of any country. Switzerland’s legislation towards guns, while not totally unrestrictive, is relatively liberal yet there have been only three recorded mass shootings in recent history.
This premise is where English photographer Kris Kozlowski Moore's series and self-published photobook Forty Six Guns began, to engage in a varying and exceedingly broad discourse around the idiosyncrasies of Switzerland's gun culture. Black and white landscapes are juxtaposed against still life photographs of baseball mitts and sculptural gun range targets, while snowy mountaintops play off in situ portraits – it's not exactly what you might expect from a series called "Forty Six Guns." The work is airy and poetic, presenting an open-ended unraveling of Switzerland's little known, yet dominant gun culture.
While Humble stands firm in our support of gun control legislation, we're drawn to Kozlowski's meditative series on how guns can pervade a national identity. I had a conversation with Kris to learn more.
Jon Feinstein, in conversation with Kris Kozlowski Moore
