At some point, Katrin Koenning’s ongoing series Glow will come to a natural end. She’ll stop making her black and white photographs of ghostly light peering through faces, bodies and everyday ephemera, and will fold them into a natural conclusion. But for now, this work, which has been evolving for several years, will continue to meander in non-linear bliss, wrapped in various metaphors about impermanence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
