Sooo psyched about the cover of the new issue of the Oxford American magazine! Spring 2020 has sprung, It features the gorgeous work of Savannah, Georgia-based photographer, Emerald Arguelles, which I first saw in the Atlanta Celebrates Photography 2019 catalog.
Thank god—or, rather, thanks to an invitation from curator//force of nature/friend Mary Stanley—I was in Atlanta that month, or I may have missed it. And thanks to SlowExposures 2019, in Zebulon, Georgia, for reintroducing me and Mary, leading to her inviting me to visit for photo fun. I love when photo-world connections result in beautiful things. <3
Order your advance copy HERE!
Or, better yet, SUBSCRIBE!
SPE South Central portfolio throwdown in TX! →
Hey y’all! I’ll be reviewing photography student portfolios with a fine list of photo-world colleagues. Saturday, February 29, 2020, as part of SPE’s South Central portfolio throwdown, at Texas Woman’s University, in Denton, Texas.
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2020!
$5 for SPE members
$35 for non-members
https://www.spenational.org/conferences/spesc-portfolio-throwdown-2020
Guest blogging in February on Hatje Cantz fotoblog!
From ‘I Can Help,’ (1984) © Paul Reas
A belated first post as guest blogger for Hatje Cantz’s awesome fotoblog for the month of February.
Check out Paul Reas’s work, in his new book Fables of Faubus, published by GOST Books in December 2018. All images © Paul Reas. BUY IT. It’s freaking spectacular.
© Alyssa Taylor Wendt
Celebrating Damage Through Artistic Collaboration
In Austin right now, Alyssa Taylor Wendt and Erin Cunningham are blowing the art world up with their collaborative exhibition these, our precious scars, a well-integrated show including photography, sculpture, and installation. On view at ICOSA through the closing party on May 19, I implore you: do not miss this one.
Evaluated solely as aesthetic objects, each of the works in this show is visually appealing. Striking photographs of burnt landscapes and decaying buildings have intriguing gold striations running through them. Cast aluminum sculptures of a policeman, a spaceship, and other meaningful objects exist in states of suspended melt.
Read More
© Walker Pickering
Walker Pickering's Nearly West
With his series Nearly West, Austin-based photographer Walker Pickering portrays Texas and the Southern United States in a way that evokes a time long past. Pickering, who is based in Austin, was “raised in the oil fields of West Texas and the swamps of far East Texas.” As a child, he and his family took summertime trips to Mississippi and Alabama for family reunions. Says Pickering, “When you get down to it, I’m really just trying to evoke memories from my own childhood.”
W. Eugene Smith and The Big Book
”Steelworker with Goggles,” 1955, by W. Eugene Smith ©The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith
Last year, the University of Texas Press published a facsimile of photographer W. Eugene Smith’s The Big Book. The original was a two-book maquette handmade by Smith, which he singlehandedly edited, sequenced, and constructed. The Big Book, which was modeled after Edward Steichen’s successful The Family of Man, was Smith’s attempt to anthologize the many projects he had worked on during the span of his varied career. Unfortunately, Smith was unable to complete The Big Book before he died in 1978 at the age of 60 years old, and it remained unpublished until last year.
© Melissa Catanese, from Dive Dark Dream Slow
The Ice Plant: Adventures in Art Book Publishing
The Ice Plant is a small art book publishing company in Los Angeles, California, that has a wonderful penchant for imagery in which there’s an aspect of the peculiar in the mundane. Mike Slack and Tricia Gabriel, the duo that runs The Ice Plant, leapt into publishing after many combined years of experience in the book business. And while they are both photographers, they estimate that this experience working in the business has more to do with how they publish books than their own creative practices in photography.
Learning to Love You More
Twelve years ago, artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher created Learning to Love You More, an online, participant-driven project that generated contributions from more than 10,000 people worldwide by its finish in 2009. The idea was that July and Fletcher would post creative assignments to the website, and anyone who wanted could complete any or all of the assignments, as many times as they liked. Participants, both artists and not, photographed or otherwise recorded their submissions, which are still posted publicly online. Both the website and the accompanying book, published by Prestel, generate the same sense of wonder that will be familiar to fans of July’s films and writing.
Four Carny Workers, Detroit, Sept. 4, 1973 © Dave Jordano
Revisiting 1970s Detroit with Portraits from Today
Last year, Dave Jordano decided to unearth some work he created as a student in the early 1970s in his hometown of Detroit. Both Jordano and Detroit had changed a lot over the years: Jordano had moved away from the city and from his dream of being a documentary photographer to pursue a career as a commercial photographer in Chicago. And once-prosperous Detroit had fallen on much tougher—and well-documented—times…