Since Ryan McGinley and Tim Barber shaped VICE Magazine's photographic vision in the early 2000's, the magazine has had a consistent reputation for showing exciting new photography. Its relentlessly defiant content, ranging from controversial editorial stories to the often coveted annual Photo Issue, has carved out a recognizable, heavily copied aesthetic, trickling into mainstream fashion, lifestyle and advertising campaigns. Aside from their proclaimed hard-edged journalism, it's likely that this vision helped make VICE the media giant it is today. In 2013, before things could get stale, Matthew Lefheit took the reins for a brief but impactful stint. Under his tenure, Leifheit opened VICE's scope to photographers like Michael Bühler Rose, Erin O' Keefe, Lucas Blalock, and Rachel Stern, who are as equally engaged with photography's academic history as they are in keeping it current.

As Leifheit recently headed to Yale to pursue his MFA, Elizabeth Renstrom has taken over, promising to keep VICE's photographic spirit courageous. Renstrom, a former Parsons' student of George Pitts is an accomplished photographer and photo producer, and regularly shoots for clients like Refinery 29, TIME, Nylon, and Bloomberg Business Week while still somehow managing to find the time to make her own work, including a hilariously poignant ongoing series about her early adolescence in the 1990's. Just as her first issue came out of production, we caught up with Renstrom to hear more about her plans for VICE, her own work, and what's changing in photography today.

PostedSeptember 16, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications

TagsVICE Magazine, Interviews, Elizabeth Renstrom, Matthew Leifheit, New Photography, Tim Barber, Ryan McGinley, Vice Photo, VICE

In the summer of 2013, after completing her MFA in photography from Yale, Sadie Wechsler rode her bike around Iceland, eventually making her way to back to Seattle, Washington where she’d grown up. During this time, which she spent almost entirely alone in various states of wilderness, Wechsler began making Baby This One’s For You, a series of pictures that reflect a perspective of the natural landscape driven as much by wonder and nostalgia as they are by sadness and fatalism.

PostedSeptember 8, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists

TagsSadie Wechsler, New Landscape Photography, Ansel Adams, Yale Photographers, Seattle Photographers, Manifest Destiny, Humble Arts Foundation, Jon Feinstein, Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award Finalists

For the past 4 years, Brandon Tauszik has been making portraits of historically Black barber shops in Oakland California, using GIFs made from looped video footage. Resting somewhere between narrative and documentary, Tauszik's series "Tapered Throne" paints a quiet snapshot of businesses that have served as pivotal community hubs for over a century, and continue to thrive in spite of rapid urban gentrification. Despite being white, and on some level an outsider, Tauszik's thoughtful approach has earned the trust of the men he photographs, and presents an intimate view of barbershop culture that, as historian Quincy T. Mills writes, "are constantly in motion and in tune with the comings and goings of the people in their city." We spent some time with Tauszik to learn more about his creative process and motivations.

PostedAugust 26, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

TagsBlack Barbershops, animated gifs, GIFs, black and white, documentary photography, Brandon Tauszik, Oakland

Alexander Binder is a wizard creator of imaginary worlds. Growing up in Germany’s Black Forest in the 1980’s, his pre-internet (and pre-Kanye West) childhood and limited athletic abilities sparked a love for old fairytales, comic books and fantasy literature, as well as science fiction and horror movies. Over the years, these obsessions accumulated into a mental archive of psychedelic stories and imagery, which have had a major influence on his photographic practice for more than a decade. Binder’s upcoming book with Tangerine Press, Kristall ohne Liebe, meaning "The Crystal without Love,” uses various mystical symbols to draw an ongoing tension between competing forces of darkness and light. From a distance, this might sound like the perfect recipe for a late 1990’s mall-goth picture book, but it’s executed with a sensitivity that is smart, thoughtful and aesthetically riveting. And it's even stranger when viewed while listening to Black Sabbath’s N.I.B.

PostedAugust 7, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio, Publications

TagsAlexander Binder, German Photographers, Occult Photography, psychedelic photography, spiritual photography, toy camera photography, spirit photography, Jon Feinstein, Humble Arts Foundation, Tangerine Press, photobooks of 2015, photobook

Shanghai Falling (Fuxing Lu Demolition) ©2002 Greg Girard — Shanghai Falling (Fuxing Lu Demolition) ©2002 Greg Girard

Time Magazine associate photo editor Myles Little has organized an internationally touring exhibition 1%: Privilege in a Time of Inequality, that attempts to raise awareness of the growing disparity of wealth around the world. Using Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibition and book The Family of Man as a launch point, Little aims to use the work of some of today's most acclaimed photographers to create a contemporary conversation about inequality. Little positions his exhibition in contrast to Steichen's, which presented an optimism towards the human spirit. For Little, the vast disproportion of today's wealth has harmed humanity with grave consequence. While these words and the exhibition title might suggest a collection of weighted, potentially propagandistic images, Little's selection contains a thoughtful mix of work that is as soft-spoken as it is hard-hitting, which will hopefully help it to speak to a broad and diverse audience. We spoke with Myles to learn more about the exhibition, and the book he'll publish with Hatje Cantz if successfully funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

PostedJuly 29, 2015

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesPublications, Exhibitions, Artists

TagsMyles Little, Time Magazine, Privilege in a Time of Inequality, Nina Berman, Christopher Anderson, Paolo Woods, Gabriele Galimberti, Daniel Shea, Jesse Chehak, David Leventi, Traveling Exhibition, David Chancellor, Zed Nelson, Greg Girard, Juliana Sohn

Keeping Photography Weird: 10 Questions with VICE's New Photo Editor Elizabeth Renstrom

Sadie Wechsler's Photographs Rethink the 'Breathtaking' Landscape

Picturing Oakland's Historically Black Barbershops Using Animated GIFs

Alexander Binder's Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Privilege in a Time of Inequality: A Conversation With Myles Little