© Serrah Russell, 2009
"I made this piece in 2009 and a friend of mine told me to hang onto it, that it would mean something in the future. I guess he was right as it sure means something to me right now."
- Serrah Russell
Found photo courtesy of the collection of Ben Alper/ The Archival Impulse
Regardless of your political leanings, the world, in all its beauty, can be a complex and terrifying place. Especially in light of the 2016 US Presidential election, we approach an uncertain future. For Humble Arts Foundation's final open call of 2016, we'd like to see photo-based work that represents the world to come. Is it a dystopia overrun by robots and holograms? An egalitarian paradise? The death of photography as we know it? A self-conscious riff on Fritz Lang's Metropolis? Something more abstract?
Show us your vision or interpretation of the future. And while you're at it, listen to this Milemarker record from which we borrowed the name.
Submission Details:
DEADLINE:
December 1, 2016
King Cheeto. The Giant Orange Crayon. F-kface Von Clownstick. Angry Creamsicle. A racist clementine. The list of absurdly accurate nicknames for Donald Trump goes on, as the 2016 election has become more of a circus than ever before. A man who many thought would have no chance of making it beyond the initial republican debates has somehow garnered support from masses of Americans.
Responding to Trump's frightening buffoonery, New York City-based photographer William Miller made a series of photographs that appear to be disintegrating before our eyes. "Making fun of Donald Trump," says Miller, "is like trying to put clown makeup on the face of a clown already in full clown makeup."
To make these pictures, Miller prints a found photograph of Trump onto a sheet of clear plastic or acetate. Since the plastic can't fully absorb the ink, the colored liquid gathers and drips, distorting image, which Miller then scans with a flatbed scanner for the final print. "He's almost impossible to parody or imitate because he's an atrocity against the norms of civil behavior," adds Miller. "He lives inside the joke so his reflection could never be more absurd than its referent." To see more of Miller's work, visit his website, follow him on Instagram, or check out our recent group show: 'Roid Rage.
© Michael Marcelle
"When I was a child," writes Michael Marcelle in the forward to his upcoming monograph Kokomo, I thought there were monsters on the beach, waiting beneath the dunes, between the reeds. I would walk along the shore with my family, looking over my shoulder for a sign..." In 2012, Hurricane Sandy swept these dunes away, destroying Marcelle's memories of his hometown on the Jersey Shore. Already into his career as an art and editorial photographer, the devastation the storm caused to his childhood memories floated into his work, a series of photographs that lie somewhere between memoir and science fiction.
While many photographers at the time covered the storm's destroyed landscape with an opportunistic or documentary lens, Marcelle folded its consequence inward. "The subjects are my immediate family," writes Marcelle, "caught in states of transformation and mutation in a ruptured, alien landscape." He recently teamed up with photography wunderkind Matthew Leifheit to publish the work under Leifheit's new imprint: Matte Publications, and they've launched a Kickstarter to help fund it. In advance of the campaign, I spoke with Marcelle about his obsession with horror and its metaphor in his work. Make sure to watch the video at the end of the interview to learn more.
© Jenia Fridlyand
In 2010, the Hartford Art School launched a unique MFA program in photography, distinguished from the traditions of Yale, Columbia, SVA and Cal Arts and other photography MFA canons. It stands apart through its limited-residency structure: summer-long intensive on-campus sessions, combined with travel components in the spring and fall in cities like Berlin and New York City. Students have access to a wide range of critics and lecturers throughout the year, including Alec Soth and Lisa Kereszi.
I emailed with founder Robert Lyons, and faculty members Jörg Colberg and Michael Vahrenwald to learn more about their philosophies on photography education, and what's moving them right now. We've also included some of our favorite photographs from the 2016 graduating class.
