Art dealer, curator and lifelong photographer-advocate Sasha Wolf speaks with Humble Arts Foundation about Photowork: her new book of informative, career-changing interviews.

Regardless of how you define “success," being a successful artist is hard. From making a truly cohesive body of work or writing a statement that resonates and cuts through the clutter of art speak, to marketing your work and getting buyers, curators and publishers to care about your work, it’s daunting. And with the onslaught of digital and visual noise, the challenges are ever-evolving.

In response to so many of these challenges, Sasha Wolf recently published Photo-Work: 40 Photographers on Process and Practice with Aperture, a collection of short, sweet, direct interviews with forty photographers crystalizing their key challenges, how they overcame them, and how they continue to iterate and pivot to help enrich and advance their process, practice, and careers. While the book doesn’t offer a simple salve – it shouldn’t – it’s a refreshing and much-needed conversation.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Sasha Wolf.

PostedOctober 24, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications, Photobooks

TagsAperture Books, Sasha Wolf, Advice for Photographers, photobooks, Alejandro Cartagena, Sasha Rudensky, Doug Dubois, Alec Soth, Catherine Opie, Matthew Connors, Dawoud Bey, Rinko Kawauchi, Kelli Connell

I can’t think of a parent who doesn’t obsessively photograph their kids. Sure, the photos often are out of focus, include the blur of a finger half-covering an iPhone lens or feel so manufactured-ly happy that we just can’t believe the moments are real, but they’re something we can’t quit.

Even more than whatever meal we feel compelled to immortalize.

For many parents, like photographer Ashly Leonard Stohl, it's a form of self-portraiture - a “portrait of parents” that reflect on how we see ourselves, our fears and reflections of our childhood projected on our children. Stohl’s latest book The Days Are Long & The Years Are Short, published by Peanut Press is the culmination of years of Stohl photographing her kids as a mirror to herself. It's also a response to how the challenges of motherhood are often omitted from public conversation. Stohl’s photos balance the cherished moments with the ones not outwardly discussed. Hunting for a Halloween costume while wearing a disdainful frown. How time can move painfully slow, yet evaporates before our eyes. The moments you don’t see in Parents Magazine.

As a photo-obsessed parent of a one-year-old, I’m drawn to Stohl’s eloquent and honest approach. We spoke to talk parenting and the unfortunate stigma of “Mom Photography".

PostedOctober 18, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications, Portfolio, Photobooks

TagsAshly Leonard Stohl, Mom Photography, Documentary Photography, Peanut Press, Days and Years Book, photobooks

© Jane Deschner. From the series Remember Me. — © Jane Deschner. From the series *Remember Me*.

For nearly twenty years, Jane Waggoner Deschner has been accumulating found vernacular photographic snapshots and studio portraits – her archive now exceeds 65,000 – and manipulating them to change how we understand their meaning and imagined histories.

Deschner’s techniques range from digital manipulation to painstaking hand embroidery, often stitching famous, dry or ironic quotes to create what she describes as a “satisfying, meditative intimacy with mechanically captured moments of unknown people’s lives.” Her collages and embroidery range from personal explorations and existential ruminations on death to political commentary and discussions of gender.

Her latest series, Remember me: a Collective Narrative in Found Words and Photographs, includes 700 found photographs embroidered with anecdotes culled from family and friend-written obituaries. For Deschner, this process illustrates a collective narrative that reminds us of how we are all connected.

Longtime fans of her work, we invited snapshot-collector-extraordinaire Robert E. Jackson to speak with Deschner about her process and ideas.

Robert E. Jackson in conversation with Jane Waggoner Deschner

PostedOctober 10, 2019

AuthorRobert E. Jackson

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsJane Deschner, Jane Waggoner Deschner, Robert E. Jackson, Vernacular Photography, Found Photography, Snapshot Photography, Photography and death, artist interviews, photographer interviews

Playing Dress-up in Billy's Room. March 2019. From the series Puberty. © Laurence Philomene — Playing Dress-up in Billy's Room. March 2019. From the series *Puberty*. © Laurence Philomene

Photographer Laurence Philomene’s bright, pastel photographic self-portraiture challenges notions of gender and trans-representation in popular media.

I first encountered Laurence Philomene’s work around 2012, at the height of Tumblr. Looking back, it was one of the first visuals that felt like a reflection of the life, body, or gender I could someday have. I remember being inspired to make photos of myself and my friends, converting closets into makeshift studios with found fabric and wearing outfits and makeup we were not yet ready to reveal to the public eye.

Since then, Philomene has not slowed down — and has gone on to create an incredible archive of images that continue to challenge our notions of gender with joyful, confident, and pastel photos of their community and visions of the world.

Laurence Philomene’s most recent series ‘Puberty’ is an ongoing documentation of their transition on Hormone replacement therapy. Made in Philomene’s signature style and color, these photos not only serve as a beautiful and vibrant document — but ask that we, as trans & queer & non-binary people — be seen as whole and complicated creatures. They are rooted in the vernacular and mundane and allow for a trans narrative and representation outside of the spotlight and the heightened spectacle of visibility that comes with it.

Philomene’s photos are messy, honest, comforting, and vulnerable: an important visualization of daily life to trans folks who have yet to envision or see it reflected back to them. Dishes. Texting. Lounging. Breakfast. Watching TV in bed, awash in a purple haze. The moments before and after a testosterone shot. Crying, with the camera pointed squarely at our face.

June T. Sanders in conversation with Laurence Philomene

PostedOctober 3, 2019

AuthorJune T. Sanders

Tagstrans portraiture, Laurence Philomene, June T. Sanders, New Photography, Staged photography, gender in photography

Photographic typologies can be boring. Serialized to death. A bit too literal or on the nose. (I say this as someone who still loves them, in spite of agreeing with Joerg Colberg’s New Year’s plea to photographers a decade or so ago to "stop making typologies," at least for a while, still can’t get enough of them.) So, when a photographer adds some warmth, digs deeper into the soul of a structure, I want to learn more.

Enter Eirik Johnson, who, since 2010, has been making typologies of seasonal hunting cabins built by the Iñupiat inhabitants of Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska through the extremes of the Arctic summer and winter, which culminate in his new book Barrow Cabins, recently published by Ice Fog Press. The cabins rest on the shores of the Chukchi Sea, part of the larger Arctic Ocean, and are built from a variety of makeshift materials – weathered plywood to old shipping pallets collected from the nearby-decommissioned U.S. Navy Base – whatever is on hand.

Rather than comparing structures purely for their architecture or photographing them under a monotonous, non-descript sky, Johnson’s point of comparison is the light and temperature itself. He describes it as a “meditation on the passage of time.” While on the surface, these photographs might appear to focus on the structures, they feel more like explorations of the emotional capacity of weather, seasons, and the metaphoric hunt for light and calm.

I spoke with Johnson earlier this month as he was preparing for the book’s release. BTW, you should get a copy.

PostedSeptember 26, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesPortfolio, Publications, Artists, Photobooks

TagsEirik Johnson, Barrow Cabins, Ice Fog Press, Alaska Photography, Photographic Typologies, Jon Feinstein

A New Book Highlights How 40 of Today's Most Prolific Photographers Build and Sustain a Successful Body of Work

Ending the Stigma of "Mom Photography"

Jane Waggoner Deschner Stitches New Narratives Into Found Vernacular Photographs

Laurence Philomene and the Trans Gaze

Eirik Johnson's New Book Captures Arctic Hunting Cabins Through Seasonal Extremes