Photo Courtesy of Shutterstock

Click-bait continues to be one of the emptiest forms of online pseudo-journalism. Easy headlines full of hollow adjectives goad readers to spend their attention on an endless cycle of content. While these words often lead to thoughtful material, they can pull us down a rabbit hole of a story that has little to do with its syrupy headline. This "and you'll never guess what happened next" form of new literature extends to art and photography journalism, and its motives are pretty transparent, but somehow we keep clicking, and here at Humble, are often guilty of using them ourselves. So we asked some of our favorite photography writers, curators, editors, historians and educators to dish out their most beloved click-bait pet peeves, which we illustrated with some of our favorite stock images of cats.

PostedApril 23, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

Tagsbuzzwords, cat photography, Matthew Leifheit, Emily Shornick, Shane Lavalette, Alison Zavos, Amy Wolff, Pete Brook, David Rosenberg, John Edwin Mason, Lindsay Comstock, Gabriel H. Sanchez, Aline Smithson, Blake Andrews

29°59'57.01"N, 90°23'45.77"W (Norco) © AnnieLaurie Erickson

Afterimages commonly appear when the human eye comes in contact with something it’s not supposed to, like bright light, a pinprick, or another repelling force. In her series Slow Light, photographer AnnieLaurie Erickson uses long exposures of oil refineries in Louisiana captured with handmade cameras to address this phenomenon as a parallel to unapproachable obstacles in contemporary society and industry.

PostedApril 15, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

TagsAnnieLaurie Erickson, Annie Laurie Erickson, after images, retina, radical color, new color photography, experimental photography, handmade cameras, handmade lenses, Jon Feinstein

Carson Davis Brown’s “Mass” is an ongoing series of visual disruptions to big box department stores and supermarkets across the United States. Combining elements of sculpture, performance art, and “straight” photography, Brown builds guerrilla structures out of un-purchased materials, quickly assembles them without permission into meticulous, colorful, totem-like sculptures, and photographs them before abandoning them for the public to perplexingly discover.

PostedApril 9, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

TagsCarson Davis Brown, Sculptural Photography, Performance Art, Chain Stores, Big Box Stores, Sculptural Interventions, Intervention Photography, Jon Feinstein, Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Smithson, Radical Color

Ben Alper has been collecting vernacular photographs for nearly a decade, trolling eBay auctions, thrift stores, and junk sales to decontextualize strangers’ forgotten photographic gems, occasionally posting them in phantasmic sequence on his ongoing blog The Archival Impulse. Unlike many of today’s most widely known collectors whose practices focus largely on curating, editing and archiving, Alper often threads his collecting into his work by manipulating the images to give them unexpected meaning. His most recent collection “Adrift” takes this into new territory with its alteration and publication of a fully intact cruise-ship vacation photo album that Ben discovered in a junk store in 2011.

PostedMarch 31, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

TagsBen Alper, Jon Feinstein, archival photography, snapshot photography, uncanny photography, vernacular photography, Found Photography, fine art photography

Artist Erin O’Keefe uses elements of painting, sculpture and architecture to create studio-based photographs that confuse the senses, and reconfigure how we see photography as truth. Using multiple means of visual trickery, she leverages the digital manipulation we often take for granted by creating images that appear altered, but are shot straight on, without any form of retouching or “post processing.” In less than a decade, O’Keefe has created more than five distinct projects of studio based work that address these ideas in wavering forms. With a background in sculpture and architecture, she brings new and unexpected energy to the medium, encouraging viewers to rethink how they view photographs and interpret vision itself. We asked Erin about her practice and thoughts on photography's continuously shifting moment.

PostedMarch 26, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

Tagsphotography, Erin O'Keefe, new formalism, digital manipulation

12 Magical Buzzwords Photography Blog Writers Need to Stop Using

Eerie Oil Refinery Afterimages by AnnieLaurie Erickson

Carson Davis Brown's Impromptu Sculptures Disrupt Big Box Monotony

Ben Alper Turns a Cruise Ship Vacation into a Cryptic Narrative with his New Book ‘Adrift.’

Erin O'Keefe's Multidimensional Photographs Might Melt Your Brain