TRUTH OR DARE at Toxico Cultura

Juliana Beasley and I leave for Mexico City in just over a week to co-teach an intensive photography workshop at an interdisciplinary creative think-tank, Toxico Cultura. The course, Truth or Dare: Establishing Connections with Your Subject, takes place from August 25th - 29th, and more information can be found on Toxico's blog. Many thanks to Toxico's Founder and Director, Gabriella Gomez-mont, a documentary filmmaker, writer, and luminary who made this happen.

A description of the workshop:

Two American photographers, Juliana Beasley and Tema Stauffer, will share their experiences with and ideas about forming intimacy with subjects. Juliana Beasley’s monograph, Lapdancer, which explores stripper culture through the perspective of an insider was published by powerHouse Books. In 2009, Beasley’s project, Last Stop: Rockaway Park, was awarded fellowships from The Aaron Siskind Foundation and The New Jersey State Council of the Arts. Her most recent series of portraits shot at a residency in Sete, France, was published in a second monograph. Tema Stauffer’s series of portraits of adolescents on Main Street in Binghamton, New York, The Ballad of Sad Young Men, was exhibited at Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery in 2009, and selections from her American Stills series were shown in Whatever Was Splendid, an exhibition exploring the legacy of Walker Evans on contemporary American photographers at Fotofest Biennial 2010 in Houston.

These two artists with different approaches to developing relationships with their subjects will help students find their own methods for photographing people. The course will address how photographers can use the camera as a vehicle to make a deeper connection to people both within and beyond their own social circles. Both artists will give lectures about their own work and will also examine relevant historical and contemporary photography through slide presentations and readings, including work by Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham, Katy Grannan, Rineke Dijkstra, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Donna Ferrato, and Jim Goldberg.

Students will complete a shooting assignment photographing subjects in private and public environments. Students can begin a new project or further develop an existing project. The course will also include a writing component asking students to make journal entries about their experiences photographing subjects, and this written content will be discussed in class. The course will conclude with an exploration of the editing process and critiques of students’ work.

Juliana and I will also co-teach an extended 10-week Personal Vision course at the ICP on Friday evenings beginning Friday October 6th. Please find more information listed in the ICP's Fall Programs Guide: Truth or Dare: Establishing Connects with Your Subjects

culturehall feature 50: HOLDING PLACES

Thank you to writer and cultural critic Emily Carter for culturehall's current feature issue, HOLDING PLACES, describing work that captures a sense of place. Featured artists are Daniel Kukla, Adam Ekberg, Marie Koetje, and Jamie Maxtone-Graham.

A close friend from our overlapping years in Minneapolis, Emily and I got to spend a hot, sunny afternoon this summer exploring her new place in New Haven, CT.


Emily Carter
New Haven, CT
July 2010

August apartment sublet/share

I will be out of town more than half of August and I'm looking for someone who is interested in subletting my apartment for all or part of the month. I would be willing to rent it by the week to someone interested in spending time in New York in August, or rent it for the month to someone who would share it with me for part of the time. Please contact me to discuss possibilities and prices.

More info about the apartment:

It is located on Graham Avenue about five blocks from the Graham L-train (near Williamsburg/Greenpoint). It takes less than fifteen minutes to get to Union Square in Manhattan. It is a charming block with a laundromat, a bakery, a cafe, a nail salon, a hair salon, two delis, two vintage stores, a French restaurant, an Italian restaurant - everything you could possibly need.

The apartment is an older railroad on the third floor of a small building. There are three rooms - a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom/office. Plus a little bathroom with a shower and a tub. The apartment gets sunlight on both ends and the general aesthetic is very retro.

There is a double bed in my bedroom as well as a futon that folds out into a double bed in the living room, so it is practical for extra guests.

Other amenities include: wireless internet, air conditioning, old tv/dvd player, stereo/music collection, art books, and photos.

I would love to find a friend of a friend to stay here, or someone who can assure me they are entirely trustworthy and responsible. Artists, students, international visitors are all great.

WIP Grant

Two weeks left to apply for Women in Photography's 2010 WIP - LTI/Lightside Individual Project Grant with guest judge Karen Irvine, Curator and Manager of Publications at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. The $3,000 grant award will provide funding for one female photographer to support project costs. An additional $1,000 grant will be provided by Kodak for the selected artist's choice of Kodak materials. The new deadline is Thursday, July 22.

Matt Olson interviews culturehall for ROLU

Minneapolis-based curator Matt Olson recently interviewed culturehall for his art and design blog ROLU - a favorite in our Resources. Matt curated Feature Issue 46 for culturehall, bringing four new artists to the site. Thank you, Matt, for a ton of support and enthusiasm. To see a better-looking version of the interview, please find us on his sexy blog: ROLU INTERVIEWS CULTUREHALL

There's such a huge number of art related blogs and sites now. It's almost mind- boggling. You call Culturehall “a curated online resource for contemporary art.” Could you talk a bit about what your initial thinking was for starting it? And where within the continuum of sites do you fit?

David:
My interest in the Internet started during the late nineties while finishing up grad school. It was a funny time where radically new technology was worming its way through society and there was nothing close to a consensus on how it would change the way we live. I was also intrigued by the media and marketing hype surrounding the promise of the Internet, especially since most of this future was unavailable due to slow connections, slow computers, bad search engines, and websites with poor information architecture.

The idea for Culturehall started in 2000 after completing my studies. I was looking for ways to promote my work and the Internet seemed like an interesting option but I couldn’t find the equivalent of a slide registry. The few sites I did find had no curatorial outlook and were for the most part random jumbles. I thought this was kind of odd since the Internet could be a very convenient way to show art. If someone were interested in seeing your work, you would just send a link instead of dealing with slides or other physical portfolio material.

Tema:
Part of what distinguishes Culturehall from other portfolio sites is that participating artists are chosen selectively. David and I work together along with guest curators to invite artists whose work reflects a strong vision and serious commitment to the arts. While artists included on the site are at various stages in their careers, we intend to keep the bar high in terms of the quality of the work.

Culturehall features work by four artists every two weeks on our homepage. These features are accompanied by curatorial statements written by one of us or by our guest curators. David and I are interested in reaching out to dynamic figures in the arts – artists, writers, curators – to get a range of perspectives. Some of our recent curators include Erin Sickler, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Shane Lavalette, and Zeina Assaf, among others. We were thrilled to invite you, Matt, to curate a feature issue, and we love the new artists whose work you brought to the site.

Culturehall has also created a resource for descriptive links to other blogs and websites. David and I have researched the Web for writing about the arts that we felt was relevant to our community of artists and to our audience. We’re invested in collaborating with an international network that shares some of our interests in contemporary art.

What are your long-term goals for Culturehall?

David:
I would like to see Culturehall become a place where artists can connect with their audience and build a wider following for their work.

What’s the reaction been so far?

Tema:
Culturehall has received enthusiastic responses from artists we’ve invited to the site. Other figures in the arts we contacted about adding their blogs and websites to our resources have also given us great feedback. The writing our guest curators have contributed to the site has generated interest from an increasingly wider audience.

David:
We’ve received very positive feedback from both our members and the public. It’s rewarding to see the opportunities that come about for our members as a direct result of their presenting work on Culturehall.

What do you think about the massive amount of art being consumed online rather than in person?

Tema:
Ideally, viewing and reading about art online will stimulate interest in experiencing art in person rather than replace it. Culturehall exists as a place to discover and research artists’ work through their portfolios, as well as a list of their current exhibitions and events.

David:
I see the online environment as a way for creating an increased interest in art for a broader public. The convenience of being able to easily sample a broad selection of work is a powerful aspect of the online experience. Viewing art online informs the public and invites participation.

What is the best “art moment” you’ve had recently … both in “the real world” and online?

Tema:
The best art moments in “the real world” for me consist of making my own work, which recently has involved making trips on the bus to Paterson, New Jersey to develop a new series of portraits. Other great art moments stem from communicating with artist friends and peers day-to-day, both in person and online, and being involved in a vibrant arts community in New York City. Selecting work and writing feature issues for Culturehall are also exceptionally rewarding experiences.

David:
Real World - wandering through the Whitney Biennial on a lazy Sunday afternoon at the same time as Yoko Ono. She was in the full Yoko. Her presence felt like an undocumented work in the show.

Online - http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it - After many years of anticipation the MAXXI in Rome has finally become a reality (and their website too.) I’ve visited Rome twice in the past few years and was disappointed each time to find that this long awaited Zaha Hadid project was only more chronically behind schedule.

Do you think art is good for you?

David:
Personally, yes, art is good … for me … but I’m very hesitant to impose that assumption on an audience broader than myself. However, I do think the critical thought and creativity that go into making and viewing art would be beneficial to many people.

Tema:
What could possibly be better than something that expands imaginations, heightens sensitivity, challenges conventions, creates community, and encourages critical dialogue? Fortunately, the definition of what is good for you, like art itself, is vastly subjective and open to interpretation.

culturehall feature 47: AMERICA

As the Fourth of July approaches, culturehall features artists whose provocative work challenges us to consider, or reconsider, the American experience. These four artists draw from a variety of sources - personal relationships, historical representations, cross-country tours - to examine our national identity through their images. When viewed together, their work collectively asks us to look at America’s religious groups, its vast working class, its legacies of sexism and homophobia, and the impact of its foreign wars. Their pictures of America, real and invented, recognize diversity, complexity, inequality, and humanity.

Clayon Cotterell’s All in the Family series contributes to a broader dialogue about the effects of United States military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan on American soldiers, their families, and their communities. Included in this dialogue is Nina Berman’s startling photographic series of returned soldiers wounded in Iraq, Purple Hearts, as well as Oren Moverman’s 2009 film, The Messenger, dramatizing the experiences of two officers assigned to the Army’s Casualty Notification service. Cotterell’s ongoing, and more directly personal, photography project focuses on his younger brother, Ian, at various stages in his career as a U.S. soldier deployed to Afghanistan. Cotterell made portraits of his brother before he left for war and continued to photograph him when he returned on leave. These haunting images describe a boy engaged in the rites of passage into manhood – still baby-faced, with a profound sense of apprehension cast in his expressions – bearing tattoos and trying on his Body Armor. Cotterell’s intention to complete the series upon the end of his brother’s tour underscores an implicit sadness about the uncertainty of the future for Ian and indeed for a generation of young Americans in a time of war.

A recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts graduate program in photography, Debbie Grossman’s thesis work consists of a series of historical photographs altered by the artist to present a version of the American West populated exclusively by women. Grossman borrowed images from the Library of Congress of a settlement called Pie Town in west-central New Mexico shot by American photographer Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration in 1940. Using Photoshop as a drawing tool and changing text to re-imagine the gender of and relationships between Lee’s subjects, Grossman created My Pie Town, a fictitious parallel reality where women perform both traditional male and female roles, exist within lesbian partnerships, and demonstrate positions of leadership, strength, and authority. Her homesteaders don boots with spurs, rope calf, grow crops, raise families, and manage town politics. Grossman transformed an iconic American scene by subtly changing the gender of one of Lee’s original subjects from a man to a masculine woman to portray a lesbian couple strolling harmoniously with their young children on her Pie Town’s Main Street.

Greg Reynold’s Jesus Days is a pictorial memoir of his experiences as a closeted gay man working for an American evangelical movement in the late 1970’s and early 80’s. Prior to coming out and moving to New York City, Greg Reynolds spent eight years as a youth evangelist counseling Christian students, leading prayer meetings, and participating in missions and evangelical projects in Central America and Florida, where Christian students proselytized to beach vacationers. While homosexuality was regarded as a sin within his organization, Reynold’s collection of personal snapshots from this era of his life conveys the affection and attraction he experienced and suppressed towards his adult male friends and colleagues. The eroticism in his gaze at male bodies and personalities, so clearly expressed in his pictures, suggests that photography was an outlet and perhaps a source of revelation for deeply repressed and forbidden desires.

In the tradition of photographers like Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld who explored America through road trips, Brooklyn-based photographer Marc McAndrews has developed an extensive survey of working-class people and environments through a series of cross-country journeys in his van. Combining a sense of reality and fantasy, McAndrews produced large-format images of bikers, mechanics, motel clerks, waitresses, bowling teams, and prostitutes in legal brothels in Nevada. His subjects and the spaces they occupy appear uncannily vivid and almost three-dimensional, such as Sheree Tucker at her desk with a burning cigarette in hand, an assortment of coffee mugs on her large wooden desk, and family photos and taped notes decorating the wood-paneled walls of her office. The heavy dose of Americana in McAndrew’s work is imbued with warmth and remarkable detail.


Body Armor, Clayton Cotterell


Main Street, Debbie Grossman


Christian Staff Taking a Break, Greg Reynolds


Sheree Tucker, Marc McAndrews

SELF EXPOSURE

Francesca Romeo and Shen Wei debut new color photographs from their self-portrait series along with work by Nils Ericson and Zachari Logan in a sexy summer show opening this Thursday at Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

SELF EXPOSURE
Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY

June 24 - July 30
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 24, 6-8pm

culturehall feature 46: YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW - curated by Matt Olson

Inspired by an exceptional blog about architecture, art, design and culture called ROLU BLOG, David Andrew Frey and I invited its Minneapolis-based author, Matt Olson, to curate our current Feature Issue 46. Matt examines the role of the Internet in his experience of contemporary art and highlights the work of culturehall artists Emilie Halpern, Maryanne Casasanta, David Horvitz and Sam Falls.

Matt's design studio, ROLU, recently commissioned art/design duo ASDF to create a call and answer photography project, Scattered Light, which proposed a series of assignments asking artists to attempt to reacquaint the viewer to his/her surrounding environment and introduce another way of seeing and interpreting the things around them.

culturehall birthday picnic

May in Paterson

Glen
Main Street
Paterson, NJ
May 2010


Kassandra
Main Street
Paterson, NJ
May 2010


Stacey
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Paterson, NJ
May 2010

Paterson, New Jersey

Tommy
Main Street
Paterson, NJ
April 2010


Dorothy
Bus Station
Paterson, NJ
March 2010


Jose
Main Street
Paterson, NJ
April 2010

culturehall feature 43: FACT, FICTION, FILM AND FANTASY

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.
- Susan Sontag, On Photography

In the decades since Susan Sontag wrote a collection of critical essays about the impact of images on modern reality, our environment has grown considerably thicker - and stranger - and our notion of what is real even more complicated and confounding. Facebook, YouTube, photo blogs, reality TV and cheap digital cameras have accelerated the rate at which the image-world can expand, invent and devour reality. culturehall presents four contemporary artists whose work, in one sense or another, testifies to these subjective and slippery ways we interpret moving and still images, and the influence of images on our fantasies, myths, fictions and identities.

German artist Stefan Heyne’s images investigate the perceptual psychology of how we read photographs. Heyne deliberately captures blurred images of everyday objects and spaces – a wardrobe, a shelf, a corridor, a playground. The original subjects become vaguely recognizable or virtually abstract, transformed into hazy and sensual color fields. Each of these things or places translates simultaneously as familiar and elusive. Rather than providing us with a description or a set of facts, Heyne’s photographs delve into subconscious territory and evoke memories, emotions and associations.

Louise M. Noguchi shoots the Wild West – at least the legendary place we know from movies and tourist attractions with good lookin’ bad guys and lots of guns, blood and dust. Her document series explores Western lore and its romance with violence and aggression. These documentary photographs made in theme parks seduce us with cowboy fantasies while poking fun at their absurdity. By showing us the stage, the props, the actors, Noguchi reveals the smoke and mirrors of a cultural myth.

Noguchi collaborated with artist June Pak to produce somewhere, an installation of five vertically stacked TV monitors appropriating a short clip of footage from The Wizard of Oz. The dramatic clip of Dorothy’s house falling from the sky appears on the five monitors, giving the impression that the house is falling from one monitor into another, while the sound increases until the house reaches the bottom screen. Noguchi and Pak call attention to the transfiguration of reality through the use of Hollywood effects.

Millee Tibbs’ series, This is a picture of me, uses self-portraiture to examine the influence of mediated images of women in vernacular photography and cultural views of sexuality. Tibbs pairs snapshots of her childhood self with staged photographs of her adult self in identical outfits and poses. Her reenactment of these girlish expressions and gestures, like talking to Daddy on the telephone or lying on her back naked in a bathtub, are provocative and unsettling, raising uncomfortable questions about childhood sexuality and the representation of femininity. The actual snapshot of Millee emulating a female pop star crooning into a microphone in a wood-paneled family room becomes creepier still in conjunction with the adult version of the same scenario.


Wardrobe, by Stefan Heyne


Bang, by Louise M. Noguchi


somewhere, June Pak in collaboration with Louise M. Noguchi


"3-2-83, 2007", Millie Tibbs

CONTEMPORARY U.S. PHOTOGRAPHY Catalogue

The FotoFest 2010 Biennial closes this weekend in Houston and what remains is a catalogue including five curatorial essays on the work in the exhibitions with an introduction by Charlotte Cotton.

The catalogue is available for purchase thru the FOTOFEST STORE and PHOTO-EYE BOOKSTORE.

Thank you to curator Aaron Schuman for his beautiful essay about the work in Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs. Four of my images (Bedroom, Teenage Boy, Couple Embraces, Winter Gas Station) were reproduced in the catalogue, and Aaron's insight into my own work was moving to say the very least.

Excerpt from Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs, page 38:

Finally, Tema Stauffer, who focused American masculinity and male adolescence in her portraiture series The Ballad Of Sad Young Men (2008), includes several such portraits within her broader and more extensive body of work: American Stills (1997-2009). Returning to the eclecticism of the first chapter of American Photographs, and under a similarly sweeping heading, Stauffer presents an assortment of sharply poetic observations of a country that at times can be angry, melancholy, brutal, and cold, but can also be enchantingly majestic and profoundly moving. Throughout the series there is a critical yet immensely forgiving sense of real compassion at work - a profound love for the subject, with all of its flaws - which strikes straight at the soul of the matter, in the most ordinary places and everyday moments. Rather than simply testifying to waste, selfishness, imminent collapse, and so on, Stauffer's Stills represent a truly committed and heartfelt attempt at unearthing the "splendid" from the "whatever" of contemporary America.

- Aaron Schuman

inMotion's 2010 Photography Auction and Benefit

I donated a large print of my White Horse photograph to inMotion's 2010 Photography Auction and Benefit taking place tonight at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers.

InMotion's annual Benefit raises vital, life-changing resources for thousands of New York City's most needy women and their families - a majority of whom are abused and many are immigrants. InMotion provides free legal services to women, primarily in the areas of matrimonial, family and immigration law.

Please see inMotion's website for more information about the organization: inMotion Justice for All Women

Douglas Britt reviews WHATEVER WAS SPLENDID for Houston Chronicle

Fotofest exhibit traces Walker Evans' legacy

One of the FotoFest 2010 Biennial's official exhibitions, Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs, explores parallels between Walker Evans' Depression-era photos and current lens-based U.S. work.

The unavoidable conclusion is that Evans casts a long, wide shadow over much of today's photography, luckily for us. It's not just that the nation has endured the worst recession since the period depicted in Evans' seminal 1938 book, American Photographs. It's that many of today's photographers — whose styles and subjects differ wildly from one another — are up to the same things Evans was, which isn't to say there's anything nostalgic about their work.

Aaron Schuman, founder of the online SeeSaw Magazine and the exhibition's curator, sets up the show by citing Lincoln Kirstein's introductory essay to Evans' monograph.

“(Evans) can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers,” Kirstein wrote. “Here are the records of the age before imminent collapse. His pictures exist to testify to the symptoms of waste and selfishness that caused the ruin and to salvage whatever was splendid for the future reference of the survivors.”

Photographers' eyes burrow through plenty of ruin today. For his Down These Mean Streets series, Will Steacy walks with a large-format-view camera from various cities' airports to their central business districts — always at night, with an emphasis on “neighborhoods you wouldn't want to be in at night; the parts of town you drive through — not to,” he says.

Steacy captures the signs of blight and neglect — a Philadelphia power plant looming over a crumbling neighborhood, a desolate Detroit housing project, the charred remains of a burned-out car in Los Angeles — with unwavering candor and, often, eerie beauty.
We see more thoroughly burned-out — and bombed and bullet-riddled — remains of cars in Richard Mosse's photographs following American soldiers in Iraq. And his photos and video of American soldiers lounging in the ruins of one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces — “whatever was splendid,” indeed — brilliantly straddle the line between wry humor and tragic grandeur.

Closer to home, Todd Hido burrows through ruin in the interiors of foreclosed suburban homes and, more dreamily, along rural roads, and Tema Stauffer's American Stills echo Evans' poetic portraits of everyday people and places.

More counterintuitive at first glance is Schuman's inclusion of work by Hank Willis Thomas and Jason Lazarus, both of whom work with other people's photographs to explore aspects of popular culture. But Schuman notes that American Photographs is “as much an interrogation of photography as it is of America, if not more so,” and Thomas and Lazarus update that exploration in fascinating ways.

For his Unbranded series, Thomas takes images from magazine advertisements featuring black Americans, often targeting them as consumers, and strips them of their copy and logos. His tactic highlights the stereotypes and assumptions behind the imagery. Because the same image can be disturbing, cheesy, poignant and hilarious all at once, the results are riveting.

Lazarus reversed Thomas' process, adding text instead of removing it while using amateur photos, not commercial ones. He asked various people, “Do you remember who introduced you to the band Nirvana?” and got them to write the answer with an anecdote on the back of a snapshot of that person. He then scanned, enlarged and framed the images and handwrote their responses on the prints' margins.

You might not think such a simple technique would pack much of a punch, but Lazarus' selection is unbelievably sweet — and often devastating. It shows how ordinary people, recording their memories, transform Nirvana's “well, whatever, never mind” mantra into something heartfelt, even splendid.

-Douglass Britt

More good stuff in the mail

culturehall as resource in arts education

Besides culturehall providing artists with a online space to display and promote their work, and the arts community a place to discover this work, David Andrew Frey and I envision the site increasingly utilized as a resource in arts education. We hope it will make a useful tool for educators to present contemporary artwork to students and to inspire written or visual assignments.

I experimented with the Digital Photo I class that I am currently teaching at William Paterson University by demonstrating how the site functions, as well as giving students a writing assignment based on work on the site. Since the class is examining portraiture and shooting portraits in a series of assignments this month, I asked them to write a paper based on a culturehall portfolio that contains photographic images of human subjects.

The photographers whose portfolios my students wrote about include: Dina Kantor, Mara Bodis-Wollner, Paolo Morales, Millee Tibbs, Heather Musto, Tiana Markova-Gold and Ayala Gazit.

Culturehall Assignment: Photographing the Human Subject

Please visit culturehall, an online resource for contemporary art. Use the browse link at the top of the homepage to locate the browse page. You can browse all works or be more specific in your search by browsing by genre or medium.

Locate a portfolio of photographic work including images of human subjects that are of interest to you. You might choose any of these genres of work: street photography, documentary photography of a single subject or a group of subjects, studio portraits, staged portraits, etc.

Please write a one-page paper addressing these questions:

Who is the subject, or who are the subjects, of the photograph or series of photographs?
What is the photographer’s relationship to the subject(s) as you perceive it?
How is the photographer using light? (Natural? Available? Flash? Studio?)
How is the photographer framing the subject(s)?
What mood does the photographer capture?
Does the work have any political content such as issues of race, class or gender?

Prepare to present your paper to the class along with a link to the selected portfolio that we will view as a group.

Interview on GRAYPIGEON

Maria and Yasmine
Austin, Texas
December 2009

A short set of interview questions I answered over the course of a few winter nights in January 2010 for GRAYPIGEON was recently published on their site. GRAYPIGEON describes itself as a social networking site whose sole purpose is to bring together a collective of artists. The site is under transition and will be relaunched with a new name at some point in the near future.

Q&A

Why do you do what you do?

I write and take photographs in order to search for a meaningful understanding and expression of life experiences and to participate in a dialogue with a community of peers who share similar passions and values. Being wired for a creative path often feels like a condition or affliction – it is inescapable. I can’t imagine a life for myself outside of the arts.

What are the works you are most happy with? Why?

If I were to choose one image that best represents my photographs of American spaces, it would be the White Horse. I spent a week in the winter of 2007 driving around Florida swamplands chasing an elusive dream and felt like I actually captured it in that image. I think some of the qualities that exist in much of my work – the quiet tension, melancholy, mystery and beauty – come through vividly in this photograph.

More recently, I have primarily been shooting portraits – the young men in Binghamton in the fall of 2008 and other subjects I have found since in Texas, Michigan and New Jersey. I’m specifically interested in searching for people whose lives exist on an edge and exploring their expressions, emotions and stories.

What themes are hot on your mind right now?

Love, loneliness, vulnerability, uncertainty, sexuality, dreams, broken dreams, internal and external struggles.

You seem to have your hands in just about everything. Highlight some of the things you are up to besides making photographs.

I teach photography courses at William Paterson University in New Jersey and The School of the International Center of Photography in New York. In addition to teaching, I work as a curator for an arts website called culturehall founded by artist and curator, David Andrew Frey. culturehall is a curated online resource for contemporary art where selected artists can share their work with curators, gallerists, collectors and other artists. My role has been to invite artists, feature and write about their work, and build our list of resources that includes international blogs, websites and organizations devoted to the arts. The goal of the site is to build a sense of community amongst artists, promote their exhibitions and events, and provide greater exposure for their work. It’s a great job for me because I thrive on developing relationships with other artists and supporting work that I think merits attention. I also participate in online discussion of the arts and share personal work-in-progress through my own blog, PalmAire.

Why do you teach? Does it help you as an artist?

Teaching is one of the most rewarding ways I can make a living in the arts. I love teaching. Teaching is about communicating ideas and forming relationships with students. It gives my life more structure and purpose. It motivates me to be more informed, organized and articulate. I like the kind of conversations that transpire in critiques, and it is satisfying to watch students develop an enthusiasm for photography and grow in their work.

How would you describe the process through which a talented young artist achieves professional and financial success? Is that even the goal?

Professional success, understood as visibility and accomplishment in the art world, doesn’t necessarily lead to financial success. Most of my peers, even those who have achieved some substantial recognition for their work, are still struggling to make a living as artists. As far as I can tell, professional success comes from a combination of talent, hard work, commitment, perseverance and a supportive community. Financial success is exceptional. Artists who recognize and utilize the power of the Internet as a forum for networking, promotion and creative expression are probably more likely to receive exposure and succeed in their careers.

I recently finished reading the biography and journals of John Cheever which describe the financial challenges of one of America’s great writers even while his stories were regularly being published by The New Yorker. Making art tends to cost more than writing, and many visual artists whose work is shown in respected galleries often spend more on the expenses of producing work than they receive from sales of the work, especially during the current economic climate.

Developing a career in the arts is a tough path and one that requires a great deal of sacrifice and endurance. The majority of artists I know support themselves through teaching or other jobs related to the arts – and those jobs are competitive as well.

Any gallery shows or events you’d like to talk about?

I will be exhibiting thirteen photographs – made from 1997 thru 2008 – in a group show called Whatever was Splendid at the Houston Fotofest Biennial opening in March 2010. The show, curated by Aaron Schuman, explores the influence of Walker Evans on contemporary American photographers. Walker Evans has been a significant figure in shaping my understanding of who and what is worth photographing, and it will be interesting to have my work viewed in that context. Other participating photographers include Will Steacy, Michael Schmelling, Greg Stimac, Jason Lazarus, Jane Tam, Richard Mosse, Craig Mammano, Todd Hido, Hank Willis Thomas and RJ Shaughnessy.

I love good things in the mail

I Met a Unicorn

Unicorn
Austin, Texas
copyright Barry Stone

Since I couldn't make it to Texas (and I'm just about over that now), I'm happy to report that Texas is coming to me. Well, not just me. Good friend and photographer Barry Stone is exhibiting seven photographs in his third solo exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery opening Friday March 26th. Originally from Texas, Barry spent some years in New York teaching at the ICP. He currently lives in Austin near my favorite place to swim, Barton Springs, and teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos. Barry is also the author of a beautiful photo blog, YES YES YES, as well as a new blog specifically devoted to images of Texas, O EMPIRE WIDE AND GLORIOUS.

According to the press release for this upcoming exhibition of his recent work:

Barry Stone employs a wide variety of practices as a means of generating singular images. His approach includes "straight" photography, rephotographing, computer-rendering, and manually reworking, and does not value one method above another. Instead, Stone takes an egalitarian view of image-making. At a time when an explosion of photographic imagery can seem to dilute the medium to an infinite stream of information, Stone displays a considered selection which exemplifies his varied approaches. Through the seven photographs, he has slowed the eye to focus on points within his photographic practice.

In two photographs—one of a "unicorn" at a children's party, the other of a woman pointing her digital camera at a sunset—the conceptual focus of the image is enclosed in the framing of a scene observed by Stone through the lens of his camera. Another work in the show is a rephotographed image of an oil painting, an image within an image. In a third piece, Stone employs the conceit of the self-referential image again by spray-painting an arc on a photograph of a corner space and rephotographing, collapsing the pictorial space back into abstract elements.

The image Alan Greenspan as a Rainbow in Washington D.C. on October 23, 2009, 12.20.2009 was created by sampling the colors of a Washington Post press photograph of Greenspan testifying in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and creating a gradient rainbow from those colors, a nod to the connection between photography and currency, neither of which is tied to a gold standard that delineates a definitive value.

Stone's photographs deal with the problems of description in photography, and can reflect our perceptions of reality as we acknowledge the factors which inform their production and interpretation.His aesthetic in this regard is as indebted to the language of painting as it is to the language of advertising as it is to capitalist production.

I Met a Unicorn
Barry Stone

Klaus Von Nitchtssagend Gallery
438 Union Avenue
Brooklyn, NY

March 26 - April 25
opening reception Friday, March 26, 7 - 9pm

Telegraph features WHATEVER WAS SPLENDID

Telegraph (UK) features WHATEVER WAS SPLENDID: NEW AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, curated by Aaron Schuman. The feature closes with this powerful commentary:

As much as Evans’s precedent has provided both the inspiration and reinforcing framework for this exhibition, WHATEVER WAS SPLENDID is first and foremost the manifestation of the intelligence, ingenuity, and multiplicity of voices and visions that can be found within current US photographic practice. Yet consciously or not, all the photographers represented here have, in their own distinct ways, expanded upon many of the themes, strategies, clues, symbols, ‘certain sights, [and] certain relics of American civilization past or present’ first glimpsed in American Photographs. They all inherently possess a somewhat familiar ‘burrowing eye’, and share a determination to record, testify, and salvage what they can of their own precarious age for its survivors. And just like Evans, they have both reinvigorated American photography and redefined their country—conceptually, aesthetically, culturally, politically, historically, photographically, and so on—within very contemporary terms, celebrating both the United States and its photography, as Kirstein put it, ‘with all [its] clear, hideous and beautiful detail, [its] open insanity and pitiful grandeur.’

Please see the full feature: Whatever was splendid: New American Photographs

And a slide show of selected works from participating photographers: Whatever was splendid: slideshow

Aaron Schuman has kindly sent me shots of the installation of some of the work that I contributed to the exhibition.

Arriving from Texas ...

While I was home emailing my pen pals and trying not to feel too terrible about the fact that I couldn't make the trip to Houston for the opening of Fotofest last night on account of my often terrifying state of being financially stuck, I received this very sweet and pretty hilarious snapshot of the installation from photographer Carolyn Monastra. In between the women on the bench and the gang at the Minnesota State Fair on the wall, that is photographer Dana Miller on the left, who I met and exhibited work with along with Mara Bodis-Wollner in the inaugural opening of Jen Bekman Gallery in 2003. Keep your fingers crossed for me that my life can become less virtual one of these days.

Houston Fotofest 2010 Biennial

Thirteen photographs I made between 1998 - 2008 are included in an exhibition at Vine Street Studios, one of five exhibitions in the Fotofest 2010 Biennial in Houston, Texas opening tonight. Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs explores the legacy and continued influence of Walker Evans on contemporary American photography. The exhibition was curated by Aaron Schuman - a photographer, writer, lecturer, curator and founder/editor of SeeSaw Magazine. Other participating artists are Will Steacy, Michael Schmelling, Greg Stimac, Jason Lazarus, Jane Tam, Richard Mosse, Craig Mammano, Todd Hido, Hank Willis Thomas and RJ Shaughnessy.

Also at Fotofest is an exhibition, Road to Nowhere?, including work by one of the contemporary photographers whose spirit I admire the most, Victoria Sambunaris. I had the opportunity to meet Vicky earlier this fall before she left on a long journey to make new photographs in the southwestern region of the United States which finally winds down in a couple of weeks. Her beautiful and politically-charged images of the American landscape will be shown along with work by an exceptional group of American photographers: Sheila Pree Bright, Jeff Brouws, Tim Davis, Myra Greene, Eirik Johnson, Jason Lazarus, An-My Le, Nic Nicosia, David Oresick, Trevor Paglen, Greta Pratt, Michael Robinson, Jason Salavon, Christina Seely, Paul Shambroom, Greg Stimac and Brian Ulrich. Road to Nowhere? was curated by Natasha Egan, Associate Director and Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

For a complete list of Fotofest exhibitions, please see: Fotofest 2010 Biennial