In 2007, photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman began Geolocation, a nationwide project, tracking the locations of hundreds of tweets from around the United States, Canada and the UK and making photographs to mark their location in the real world. Working long distance, the photographers' collaborative process explores the massive, rapid collection of often incredibly personal data, grounding it in physical form. The images, ranging from roadside slices of America not unlike Sternfeld's America Prospects, to lonely, unspecific landscapes, give a heartbreaking window into contemporary isolation and the need to connect in a time in which everyone is at our fingertips. The culmination of their work was recently pared down to a wonderful publication of more than 70 photos published by Jennifer Schwartz and David Bram's Flash Powder Projects, and includes essays by Julia Dolan, Kate Palmer Albers, Jamie Allen, Chad Alligood, Mark Alice Durant, Paul Soulellis, Michael Wolf and Natalie Zelt. We spent some time (virtually, of course) with Marni and Nate over email to learn more about their work and its implications.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
Happy New Year! Like a few other sneaksters out there, we decided, after reading so many clickable best-of lists, to create a cheat sheet to find some consistency among our favorite listmakers and heartbreakers. Since early November, when the festivities started bounding about, we enlisted our new researcher Diana Guerra to help compile as many as could find, from mainstay publishers like Time, The Telegraph, and The New York Times photobook lists, to ear-to-the-street photoworld wizards like Tim Clark, and Pete Brook, and a number of publications we've never even heard of. We may have missed a few, and some promise to surface in the first weeks of 2016, but this should give you a good glance into it all. Without further rambling ado, below are the eleven most popular photobooks of 2015 -- "11" because of a tie! Read more about them at each link below, and support the photographers by spending some of that unlikely leftover holiday cash. BTW, there's a full list of all the lists we included at the end of this post, and a link to download an Excel sheet in case you want to dig into the data we collected.
And... and....ALSO! If you find this particularly engrossing, check out another take on the subject at And The Winners Are..., a wonderful breakdown compiled by Laurence Vecten and Marc Fuestel.
© Azikiwe Mohammed aka @misterace12
As much as brands have been using Instagram to sell their products (dear readers, we KNOW you've seen McDonalds come up in your feed sometime in the past two weeks to a barrage of comments like "Get the f*ck out of my feed, Ronald!") it continues to be an invaluable tool for photographers to get their work in front of larger audiences. Whether it's a straightforward means of promoting new projects, or using the app as a sketchpad for new ideas, we're constantly in awe of the new work IG helps connect us to everyday. For more than a year, we've enlisted some of our favorite photographers to participate in week-long Instagram "residencies' taking over our feed, occasionally in wild and unexpected ways. Below (and above!) are highlights from 10 Humble Instagram residencies over the past few months. We encourage you to keep up with their work, on IG and beyond.
Photo © Manolo Espaliú
Last year, the American Northeast experienced record snowfalls, and climate change seems to be on most of our minds. Winter can brutal, it can be beautiful, it can be a mysterious mix. For Humble Arts Foundation's first open call of 2016, we want to see your photographs representing winter - literally, abstractly, or somewhere in between. Show us your vision of a cold, cold world, and don't be afraid to get crazy. Inspired by Andy Adams' annual "Winter Pictures" calls in previous years, we're partnering with FlakPhoto, and invited Andy to co-curate this exhibition with Humble's co-founder Jon Feinstein. The group show will be featured on Humble's website and we'll feature select images on Instagram @HumbleArtsFoundation and @FlakPhoto in late February, 2016.
Also, if you didn't catch it already, the photo above is by Spanish photographer Manolo Espaliú. Visit his website, and follow him on Instagram.
Deadline:
Jan 25th, 2016
© Josh Poehlein
The first image Seattle-based photographer Josh Poehlein made for his series Hinterland is a vertical photograph of people walking up a barren sand dune. One of the few images in the series that contains a human presence, it suggests a journey into an unknown void, an infinite, open-ended reality, and in some ways serves as a linchpin for the entire project. The work, a mix of sculpture and studio-based photographs of stars, interstellar abstractions, and natural phenomena paired with images of the Pacific Northwest’s sweeping natural landscapes, raises questions about time, space, and photography’s ability to reconcile it all.