Art dealer, curator and lifelong photographer-advocate Sasha Wolf speaks with Humble Arts Foundation about Photowork: her new book of informative, career-changing interviews.

Regardless of how you define “success," being a successful artist is hard. From making a truly cohesive body of work or writing a statement that resonates and cuts through the clutter of art speak, to marketing your work and getting buyers, curators and publishers to care about your work, it’s daunting. And with the onslaught of digital and visual noise, the challenges are ever-evolving.

In response to so many of these challenges, Sasha Wolf recently published Photo-Work: 40 Photographers on Process and Practice with Aperture, a collection of short, sweet, direct interviews with forty photographers crystalizing their key challenges, how they overcame them, and how they continue to iterate and pivot to help enrich and advance their process, practice, and careers. While the book doesn’t offer a simple salve – it shouldn’t – it’s a refreshing and much-needed conversation.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Sasha Wolf.

PostedOctober 24, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications, Photobooks

TagsAperture Books, Sasha Wolf, Advice for Photographers, photobooks, Alejandro Cartagena, Sasha Rudensky, Doug Dubois, Alec Soth, Catherine Opie, Matthew Connors, Dawoud Bey, Rinko Kawauchi, Kelli Connell

I can’t think of a parent who doesn’t obsessively photograph their kids. Sure, the photos often are out of focus, include the blur of a finger half-covering an iPhone lens or feel so manufactured-ly happy that we just can’t believe the moments are real, but they’re something we can’t quit.

Even more than whatever meal we feel compelled to immortalize.

For many parents, like photographer Ashly Leonard Stohl, it's a form of self-portraiture - a “portrait of parents” that reflect on how we see ourselves, our fears and reflections of our childhood projected on our children. Stohl’s latest book The Days Are Long & The Years Are Short, published by Peanut Press is the culmination of years of Stohl photographing her kids as a mirror to herself. It's also a response to how the challenges of motherhood are often omitted from public conversation. Stohl’s photos balance the cherished moments with the ones not outwardly discussed. Hunting for a Halloween costume while wearing a disdainful frown. How time can move painfully slow, yet evaporates before our eyes. The moments you don’t see in Parents Magazine.

As a photo-obsessed parent of a one-year-old, I’m drawn to Stohl’s eloquent and honest approach. We spoke to talk parenting and the unfortunate stigma of “Mom Photography".

PostedOctober 18, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications, Portfolio, Photobooks

TagsAshly Leonard Stohl, Mom Photography, Documentary Photography, Peanut Press, Days and Years Book, photobooks

Photographic typologies can be boring. Serialized to death. A bit too literal or on the nose. (I say this as someone who still loves them, in spite of agreeing with Joerg Colberg’s New Year’s plea to photographers a decade or so ago to "stop making typologies," at least for a while, still can’t get enough of them.) So, when a photographer adds some warmth, digs deeper into the soul of a structure, I want to learn more.

Enter Eirik Johnson, who, since 2010, has been making typologies of seasonal hunting cabins built by the Iñupiat inhabitants of Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska through the extremes of the Arctic summer and winter, which culminate in his new book Barrow Cabins, recently published by Ice Fog Press. The cabins rest on the shores of the Chukchi Sea, part of the larger Arctic Ocean, and are built from a variety of makeshift materials – weathered plywood to old shipping pallets collected from the nearby-decommissioned U.S. Navy Base – whatever is on hand.

Rather than comparing structures purely for their architecture or photographing them under a monotonous, non-descript sky, Johnson’s point of comparison is the light and temperature itself. He describes it as a “meditation on the passage of time.” While on the surface, these photographs might appear to focus on the structures, they feel more like explorations of the emotional capacity of weather, seasons, and the metaphoric hunt for light and calm.

I spoke with Johnson earlier this month as he was preparing for the book’s release. BTW, you should get a copy.

PostedSeptember 26, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesPortfolio, Publications, Artists, Photobooks

TagsEirik Johnson, Barrow Cabins, Ice Fog Press, Alaska Photography, Photographic Typologies, Jon Feinstein

Flat Pictures You Can Feel manipulates and repackages how we see (and feel!) images on screens, on walls, and in our hands.

Some of my favorite photographic series are ones that seep ambiguity. While I love typologies and projects with a clear beginning, middle, and end, pictures and sequences that at first bewilder me or make me think “What is this photographer actually thinking?" "What's going on in this image?" or ” Why are these photos organized like this?" often have the most staying power. Will Douglas’ latest book Flat Pictures You Can Feel, published earlier this year by Ain’t Bad, does just that.

Images of bullfights volley against religious iconography, photos of smashed surfaces, gravesites and others balancing soft and hard, peaceful and violent, immediate and metaphoric. Some are Douglas' own photographs, others are appropriated images from advertisements, rephotographed on walls or digital monitors. It's often unclear which are his own, and which are borrowed, but it doesn't really matter. The notion of "feeling," them, pulled from the book's title, is central to them all. Douglas collects and collates these haphazard moments into a strange meditation on how the process of viewing an image – whether it’s on a screen or in physical form – can change or even numb how we understand their place in the world.

After meeting Douglas at Portland, Oregon’s 2019 Photolucida portfolio reviews, I followed up to dig deeper into his ideas, process, and clarify the confusion that first drew me in.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Will Douglas

PostedJuly 3, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications, Portfolio, Photobooks

TagsWill Douglas, appropriation, masculinity, Flat Pictures You Can Feel, Ain't Bad Books, Photobooks

A Harvest of Death. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania July 1863 © Timothy O’ Sullivan (public domain) — *A Harvest of Death. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania July 1863* © Timothy O’ Sullivan (public domain)

Humble announces two (radically unrelated) summer open calls: one book and our next online group show.

1) On Death: the book. In partnership with Kris Graves Projects

Following last year's online group show On Death and our latest online group show Loss, Kris Graves invited Humble to team up for a sequel: On Death, the book – set to publish later this year.

What’s it about?
Death has a rich place in the photo history. For critics and philosophers including the late Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, the medium itself was “a kind of death," or as Sontag put it in On Photography, a "memento-mori that enables participation in another's mortality, vulnerability, mutability." Sure, Sontag and Barthes' wisdom is decades old, but we continue to see it transcending time and shifting attitudes towards the medium.

The book will present contemporary photographic takes on the end of life, not only as it passes, but in the sometimes abstract metaphors entangled in the practice – how time and life arrest within a frame. Submissions are open to anyone, including those who were featured in either prior exhibition.

PostedMay 16, 2019

AuthorEditors

CategoriesOpen Call, Publications, Exhibitions

Tagsopen call, photobook opportunity, don't call it a contest, Kris Graves Projects, Roula Seikaly, Jon Feinstein, photo opportunities

A New Book Highlights How 40 of Today's Most Prolific Photographers Build and Sustain a Successful Body of Work

Ending the Stigma of "Mom Photography"

Eirik Johnson's New Book Captures Arctic Hunting Cabins Through Seasonal Extremes

Will Douglas' New Photobook Flattens and Complicates Our Relationship to a Screen-Based World

Two Open Calls: On Death (the book!) and Group Show #62: 100% Fun

1) On Death: the book. In partnership with Kris Graves Projects