In honor of the forthcoming holiday season, Humble Arts Foundation is now accepting submissions for group show #43: It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.
In his series, Getting Lost, currently on view at Nationale gallery in Portland, Oregon, Delaney Allen's still lifes, studio portraiture, and landscapes communicate his experience of profound grief. While diaristic work of this nature can often risk being overly inward, Allen effectively employs untraditional editing methods to build a narrative of his personal struggles that is both aesthetically mysterious and heartbreakingly real.
Allen began making this work in response to a brief yet massive wave of personal loss. Over the course of four months both of his grandparents passed away, a romantic relationship dissolved and his cat died in his arms. Searching for a means of coping, he looked to Rebecca Solnit's book A Field Guide to Getting Lost which helped inspire him to make photographs as one of the most effective forms of therapy. "In exploring those thoughts, as well as needing to reset myself mentally, I found going on long drives exploring new areas I’d never visited and also opening up my mind to see where it could go to be therapeutic."
On the surface the work might appear to be a pastiche of various popular movements in photography: wind swept photographs of national parks paired with jarring,sculptural, harshly lit studio shots. With a closer look, however, it's apparent that each of these seemingly disparate images are actually intense personal cues to Allen's methods of coping. In his studio still lifes, fabric, flowers, and other ephemeral details serve as what he describes as memorials, or "chaotic alters to bygone loves." In his photos of the atmosphere and American landscape, there is a sense of longing that is strangely both distant and nostalgic.
For Allen, this style of combining outwardly unrelated imagery on the same plane is essential to communicating his story. "With this method," says Allen, "the important aspect is to build the series from a sense of story or mood I want to portray. In doing so, it gives me the ability to expand to use all these different ways in which I shoot."
Born in Fort Worth, TX, Delaney Allen received his MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2010. His photographs have been shown nationally and internationally. He was listed in Magenta’s Flash Forward emerging photographers list of 2013 and attended photographer Alec Soth’s Camp For Socially Awkward Storytellers that same year. His first publication, Between Here And There, was listed on PhotoEye Magazine’s “Best Of” list for 2010. Allen currently lives and works in Portland, OR, where he is represented by Nationale. Follow him on Instagram @delaney_allen
An early pioneer of the online photo community, Andy Adams, founder of FlakPhoto, holds fast that the internet is not only an ideal venue for experiencing contemporary photography, but also one of the best tools for photographers to gain exposure and advance their careers. A serial optimist, from his tweets to Facebook posts, to talks about the future of photography, it would appear that Adams' every breath moves to support new image makers. This past month, Andy curated The FlakPhoto Midwest Print Show, his first brick and mortar exhibitions at the Madison Public Library in Madison Wisconsin, with a focus on photographers of the American Midwest. We "sat down" (virtually of course) with Andy to get his insights on photography on and offline, and have interspersed some of our favorite images from the show, which despite closing tomorrow, will live on, online.
How did the Midwest photography exhibition come about?
A while ago I learned that the Society for Photographic Education Midwest Conference was going to be hosted in Madison, Wisconsin — where I live. The Wisconsin Book Festival landed on the same weekend in October 2014 — this annual event is very popular and it brings lots of people downtown every year. Last fall, the Madison Public Library unveiled a $30 million architectural renovation that included a sparkling new gallery space — and an invitation to organize a FlakPhoto show there. The Wisconsin Book Festival’s headquarters are inside the Central Library adjacent to the Diane Endres Ballweg Gallery and just a few blocks from the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus where the SPE conference would be held. There’s never been a huge photography scene here and I knew that the conference/festival weekend would be an occasion for lots of Midwest creatives to gather in that space and look at pictures together. I’ve often lamented that there aren’t more independently produced photo/arts exhibitions here — so needed to do this.
What sparked your interest in specifically showing Midwest photographers?
For the past few years my projects have emphasized digital exhibitions designed for global, web-based audiences but I’ve never produced anything locally and I’m interested in growing the photo community where I live. Like a lot of people, I’ve been inspired by the way social media connects the international photography community — digital technologies make it easy to know about what everyone is doing, everywhere, all the time. At some point I realized that I knew more about what was happening photographically in London and New York and Paris than I did in Iowa or Kansas City or Milwaukee. That motivated me to use the Web to learn more about the creative people making pictures in this part of the world. The SPE Conference is a regional event — one designed to connect image makers from around the American Midwest — so a show that highlighted talent from this place made a lot of sense.
You're largely recognized as an online curator but you've actually curated several brick and mortar exhibitions in the past. How is this exhibition unique?
Well, it’s a very personal project. I’ve juried a number of print exhibitions in partnership with traditional photography organizations but this is my first independently produced show and the first time I’ve staged a photography event in Wisconsin. From the beginning my goal has been to highlight the diversity of work being produced in this part of the world and I’ve done my best to highlight a cross-section of photographers from around the region. This isn’t a definitive survey — it’s a personal selection of photographers I admire.
You're launching an exhibition website as the physical show comes down. Why is this important?
My previous museum exhibitions have been web-based projects that emphasize the image as the primary photographic experience. The Midwest Print Show website complements a physical exhibition that stands on its own by expanding on the experience — gallery spectators were able to access the site on their mobile devices to read photographer biographies and learn more about the artists by linking to their websites while in the presence of the prints. Now that the show is closing the website functions as a record of the past and a resource for the future. This project is/was a true hybrid exhibition — it lives simultaneously on and offline.
You have a background in online marketing. Does this impact your work with FlakPhoto and the photography community?
I suppose so. I’m as fascinated with digital communications as I am with photographic culture — understanding how those forms come together is at the heart of my creative work.
Tell us more about the BUBBLER — who are they and how did the collaboration come about?
The BUBBLER is a wonderful community arts & maker space that’s powered by the Madison Public Library. Trent Miller, who runs the program, directs the library’s Diane Endres Ballweg Gallery exhibition program. He and I became friends and he invited me to collaborate on a FlakPhoto show. The BUBBLER’s mission is focused on producing art out of anything and we worked together to stage a show that aligned with that vision. The Midwest Print Show is very much an extension of the BUBBLER’s DIY philosophy: we kept things simple by showing unframed prints. I decided early on that I wanted our photographers to produce their own prints — that the show should feature the uniqueness of each of their particular printing styles and paper preferences. In the end, that added an exciting element that emphasized the magical thingness of photography — which is more vital today than ever before.
Flak used to be one of a few online venues for showing photography. Now there are hundreds. Does this impact the work you do?
Probably. It’s taken traditional photography institutions a decade to understand how to use the Internet to do their work. I saw the Web’s potential early on but it’s taken me 10 years to stage a FlakPhoto print show. I’m always going to be interested in building a better website but I’ve got the bug for producing IRL exhibitions now. The hybrid territory between analog/digital is still uncharted territory I plan to explore.
What is most exciting about photography for you right now?
Hands down, it’s Instagram! Mobile photography is fascinating and fun — it’s gotten me excited about making my own pictures again and there’s something wonderful about looking at all of these little illuminated images in the palm of my hand. I’d like to do a mobile photography show at some point — or a small print exhibition. Or both. Someday...
Bio: Andy Adams (b. 1978) is an independent producer + publisher whose work blends aspects of digital communication, online audience engagement, and web-based creative collaboration to explore current ideas in photography and visual media. He is the editor of FlakPhoto, a website that promotes the discovery of photographic image-makers from around the world. In his spare time he hosts the FlakPhotoNetwork, an online community focused on conversations about photo/arts culture.
Just kidding, but did we reverse-psychology-click-bait you just a bit? Maybe? But, seriously. We could not be more hyperbolic with excitement for what some of our favorite photographers are doing on Instagram right now. Below is a roundup of October's glorious Humble Instagram residencies from our friends Joshua Dudley Greer, Joy Drury Cox, Katharine Shields, S_U_N_, and Alexandra Forsyth. They are all making inspiring work on and off of Instagram, and are definitely worth a few minutes to familiarize yourself with them, and follow them on IG. Click forth and enjoy.
If you got this far, and haven't yet stumbled upon our #Latergram exhibition from earlier this year, please check it out.
In her recent body of work, Equivalents, Seattle-based Serrah Russell rephotographs details from advertisements and editorials within fashion, lifestyle and nature magazines, giving them new meaning by encouraging viewers to rethink how we "see." She focuses on the native photographs' dead space and superficially less important details in body parts, foliage and domestic interiors, and uses them to produce new images that serve as textural landscapes and emotional narratives.
"The source image often is intended to sell a product or a brand," says Russell, "so if even the fragment continues to do that, then that is not an image I want to rephotograph. I seek image fragments that can create some type of narrative, perhaps about beauty, sadness, experience, memory, individual, landscape, environment. "
Russell uses a Polaroid DayLab Copy Systems Pro camera -- which is essentially a scanner that uses Polaroid film -- to maintain the original scale of the image, allowing her to zero in on specific details without alteration. "I like the physicality that the Polaroid image provides as an art object. The images are transitioning from one printed image to another printed image and maintains the feeling of fragmentation."
Although the resulting pictures are clearly abstractions, they retain enough original details - the bridge of a nose, the space where hairline meets forehead, a closeup of a hand leaning on an old rug - to ground them, ever so slightly, to their original material. Russell's use of the Polaroid to carefully crop, isolate, enlarge and soften these secondary details, ultimately turns images that at once may have existed to sell products, sexuality, or constructed experiences of the natural world into thoughtful meditations on intimacy.
Serrah Russell received her BFA in photography at the University of Washington. She works and lives in Seattle where she is also co-founder of Violet Strays, an online curatorial project with an emphasis on temporality and experimentation.
