Magic Hour

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Just last weekend, a piece of Carmen’s - a portrait in multiple images of Toni Morrisson was featured on the last cover of the New York Times Magazine of the decade. The culmination of an eventful past couple of years for Carmen, she released two new books - Notes on Fundamental Joy with Printed Matter and My Birth with SPBH Editions. That book accompanied her show of the same name in MoMa’s New Photography in 2018. In that powerful installation, she used two facing walls to tape up over 2000 found photographs of women giving birth.

Winant was born in San Fransisco, studied at UCLA and the California College of the Arts and now lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, artist Luke Stettner and their two sons, Carlo and Rafa. She is the Roy Lichtenstein chair of studio art at Ohio State University where she teaches as well.

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I remember the first time I met Patrice Aphrodite Helmar. It was around this time in 2017, and a friend asked if I wanted to go and check out the Backyard Biennial that she was putting on at her place in Ridgewood. A self-initiated curatorial effort, she showcased the work of emerging and established photographers alike. There was food and drinks, a slideshow going, and prints untraditionally arranged within the orange walls of her backyard. As we walked in to her ground floor apartment, she greeted and hugged us as if we were old friends. I remember we talked about Friedlander’s Nudes and EJ Belloq’s Storyville portraits at some point that night, but what stuck with me most was a kind of energy that she filled the room with.

Patrice makes heartbreaking photos - lots of pictures of people, often in intimate settings. She’s made lots of her work in bars, where she’s also worked quite a bit, and she’s spent a lot of time shooting in New Orleans. She’s exhibited work across the country, but, she also gives so much back and makes such an important contribution to the photo community in New York. Aside from the Backyard Biennial, she teaches at Pratt and Fordham, and she's the founder Marble Hill Camera Club.

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Matt Grubb is sitting in his car in the parking lot outside his favourite movie theatre in Queens, sipping a Diet Coke. As we're coordinating a time to meet for this interview, he tells me that he’s about to go see the new Avengers movie for the third time. It had just come out two weeks ago….I’m amazed and laughing to myself just thinking how much i love that compulsion. I think that same kind of curiosity and passion goes into his work and is one of the reason’s he’s such a brilliant image maker. His pictures, often varied genre’s, are unified somehow in this mysterious, very original combination of eloquence and strangeness.

Matt grew up in San Francisco, earned his MFA at Yale and has done editorial work for the New York Times, Vice and most recently, Gayletter. This past summer, he published his first, now sold out book, Brian Singer 2001, which was launched at 56 Henry in New York alongside a selection of new photographs made this year.

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In 2010, with a feeling that the traditional publishing industry was not going to last, Bruno Ceschel founded Self Publish Be Happy, an initiative to support and promote the work of emerging photographers. Originally, it functioned as a platform for artists making DIY Books and Zines, but eventually would become more expansive, getting involved in educational activities, the curation of exhibitions and events, and with their own publishing initiative. Through its imprint SPBH editions, Ceschel has published books by Carmen Winant, Lorenzo Vitturi, Nicholas Muelner, Peter Puklus and Chritina de Middel to name a few.

In addition to his work with Self Publish Be Happy, Ceschel is also a lecturer and a curator and has organized events at numerous international institutions such as C/O Berlin, The Photographers Gallery in London, MiCamera Mian and Printerd Matter in New York. He also writes regularly for publications such as Aperture, the British Journal of Photography and FOAM.

Ceschel began his career in photography working at Colors Magazine as a journalist, then edited by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.

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I went to go visit Paul Mpagi Sepuya on a cool day this past winter at his studio in the Boyle Heights area of LA. In one room, test prints, book mockups His desk and a big printer filled the space. In the other, a Russian plywood bench, a big mirror on the wall, a velvet curtain hanging and a camera on a tripod. He suggested we do the interview in that room, the set where many of his photos have been made, and maybe somehow, maybe the setting would provoke more interesting conversation. The items in that room are the elements in his photographs, and they all have significance in relation to his interests in portraiture, but what I found equally as interesting was the economy he used with those props in order to produce varieties of different, complex images. Nothing about his picture making process is really fancy, but that simplicity allows him to roam around in, and complicate the frame.

In the past few years, Sepuya has really been on a roll - he’s had work in Moma’s most recent New Photography exhibition, is currently in the Whitney Biennial. He’s had had numerous solo shows, most recently at Team Gallery in New York and his photo Darkroom Mirrors was featured on the cover of Artforum’s March 2019 issue.

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It seems to me like the more dramatic the subject matter a photographer takes on, the more difficult their job becomes. When what is in front of the camera has so much visual appeal already, how do you make pictures that are more interesting than the event?

Jeff Burton’s pictures are such a great example of how brilliantly someone has dealt with that problem. His work, much of which was made on gay adult film sets in LA, rarely just documents what is in front of him, but rather uses that material to construct his own personal and mysterious world that's more suggestive than explicit.

Burton was born in Anaheim, California and grew up in Texas where he studied at the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. He then pursued his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts as a painter before moving back to LA where he got a job at Catalina Films shooting stills on on gay porn sets.

We had this conversation in the garden outside his home in Silver Lake in Los Angeles.

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Jo Ann Callis’ photographs have such an uncanny strangeness to them. They often feel like they could be stills out of a David Lynch film, but she was making them long before Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive came to be.

She was born in Cincinnati and pursued her interest in art at Ohio State University, though her eduction was interrupted by marriage, moving our to LA and having kids. These challenges, though, would end up becoming a big part of her subject matter. She’s always been interested in the domestic, the body , femininity and sexuality but her pictures always complicate something that might seem so familiar to us all.

She enrolled at UCLA and it was there that she studied under the highly inventive Robert Heinecken in the early 70’s, who made a big impact on her. He turned her onto the the work of Paul Outerbridge and encouraged her to pursue what was going on in her life and inside her head as fodder for work.

We conducted this interview at her home in Culver City, Los Angeles where she’s been living for the past 38 years where we talked about her life and work.

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There is so much soul in Mark McKnight's dark, complex, psychological photographs, whether he's photographing the bodies of men he’s attracted to, still lives or landscapes, all which have a distinct relationship to one another.

Just last week, Mark was awarded the very prestigious Aperture Portfolio Prize. I encourage you to go and read Brendan Embser’s write-up on Aperture’s site because he really hits the nail on the head with Marks work and introduces it so beautifully. Embser says:

“ Mark McKnight is a modern-day modernist. His black-and-white photographs of skin and sand, brick and tar, with their rich tones and sparkling light, are redolent of twentieth-century masterworks, those pictures by men like Edward Weston who cast the world in silver-gelatin. Weston once said the camera should be used for recording the “quintessence of the thing itself, whether polished steel or palpitating flesh.” But for McKnight, who was born in Los Angeles to a New Mexican, Hispana-identified mother, something was missing from Weston’s vision. Something that would ignite a flame of recognition in a young queer man with ideas about male beauty more expansive than the Eurocentric standard. Something that would make “straight” photography a little less straight.”

Mark and I got together at his studio in the Boyle Heights area of LA, where he showed me some recent stunning prints that he’d been labouring over in darkroom. We got to talking about another big part of his life - teaching - which he spoke about with the same enthusiasm and energy that comes through in his work.

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I first heard of Marcelo Yanez through a mutual friend, Bryson Rand, when he took out this tabloid format publication called Newspaper to show me. In Bryson’s usual humility, he didn’t even mention the photo of his that graced the cover, but Instead, wanted to show me other work inside that he was excited about, and especially about who put this all together.

At 19 years old, Marcelo Yanez took on a project. He had discovered a publication from the early 70’s called Newspaper that featured the work of photographers in the downtown New York scene. He fell in love wit it, and began to work on a revival of it with contemporary artists. In a looseleaf insert that came with the first issue of his revival, Marcelo wrote about treating Newspaper as an alternative exhibition space, and letting other queer artists know that if they’re in a particular geographical area where queer spaces don’t exist, to get in touch, so we can form a community. I remember reading that and feeling such a generosity and initiative in that offering. It both impressed and charmed me, and I knew this person was doing something special.

While he was working on Newspaper, he was studying art history ar NYU, with minors in German and Medieval studies, was working at the Fales library doing archival work, and he was also making his own photographs. Currently, Marcelo is a PhD student in the department of art and art history at Stanford University studying American art.

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I got to Susan Meiselas’ Mott street studio a few minutes early and one of her assistants let me in to set up my gear. As I was waiting for her to arrive, I was leafing through a worn out first edition of Carnival Strippers, thinking to myself nervously, in that bout of anxiety before an interview - what are we going to even talk about that she’s gonna find interesting? The door clicked open she flew into the basement studio apologizing for a Magnum Foundation meeting running a few minutes late. She asked one of her assistants to prepare two cameras for some portraits of an old acquaintance she was going to do that evening an at the theatre, and rummaged through a couple manilla files looking for a note that she didn’t want to forget, and excused herself to shoot of a quick email. As soon as we sat down at the table and put the headphones on, though, her attention, in a split second, became so focused and engaged, as if none of the other million things she was working on or thinking about mattered. And that focus grabbed and threw me into this zone - my insecurities and preoccupations of what we were going to talk about dissipated in favour of an attention and curiosity in her.

Susan Meiselas has spent her life going into situations and making such varied acquaintances with who she has photographed over time, from young teenage girls outside her home on Mott Street to women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She’s documented human rights issues in Nicaragua to the goings on of exclusive S and M club in New York called Panora’s box. Meeting people and making quick acquaintances is one thing, but then making good pictures in those situations is another. It requires a kind of focus - getting into a zone - that I saw so palpably when we got together.

Meiselas was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948, studied at Harvard earning her MA in visual eduction, taught in the New York public school system and has worked as one of our most esteemed documentary photographers for close to 50 years. In 1976, she joined Magnum Photos and became a full member in 1980.

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In the past two years, Mary Frey put out two new books - Reading Raymond Carver and Real Life Dramas. The first is made up of black and white work and the other, all color. Both bodies of work are in and around 35 years old and these were Frey’s first major publications of them. It wasn’t exactly as if she was unknown until now though. In fact, almost the inverse. She’s been a cult hero in photography circles for years and a beloved teacher at Hartford’s graduate program, where she taught until 2015.

Frey earned her MFA at Yale and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her work had been show at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and at MoMA to name a few. It was actually in the catalogue for a seminal show at MoMA called The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort where I first discovered her work. I remember her pictures had everything that I was interested in photography in them - they were banal, yet mysterious moments out of the everyday, they were graphically compelling, such great color and they had a strange open ended quality to them, especially in their unusual pairings with curious texts that accompanied them.

We got together at her studio in Longmeadow, MA to have this conversation.

- Jordan Weitzman

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Not gunna lie, i had a pretty big art crush on Rory Mulligan long before i met him to talk about his work for this show. I remember first discovering his work on the J&L Books website in the special edition section. They had published a small book of his work in an edition of 10 called Freddie. You couldn’t find it anywhere, but there were enough pictures on the site to get a feel for what he was up to. But I remember thinking to myself - what exactly was he up to?

There was a strange, dark, melancholic but humorous tone to his photos. There was a quality in them that i felt reflected a certain tradition of documentary style art photography, but his voice was lyrical was uncanny in all of them. As I’ve gone to speak with photographers for this show, Rory’s name has often come up as someone who’s work has had a big influence on them - especially some of the younger ones.

Rory got his MFA at Yale, has had solo shows in the US and Japan, and his work has been featured in Blind Spot, Newspaper and MATTE Magazines to name a few. Rory is a master printer too - the go to for Latoya Ruby Frazier, Tod Papageorge, Justine Kurland and Mark Steinmetz - if those four names don’t give you any sense of a level of quality demanded in their work, I really don’t know who does. All traditional black and white hand printing, so delicate and subtle and nuanced - a fine art unto itself...

We got together at his studio in in an abandoned aerosol spray can factory in Yonkers, New York, the same town which he grew up in. That landscape of his childhood is the same one that he continues to explore in his work today….

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I think I first came across Jack Woody’s name after buying a Duane Michals called Album years ago. I remember thinking that it was so elegant, so beautifully printed and layed out, that I was curious who was behind it. I remember mentioning that book the first time I met Duane, and he told me that there was this hotel in San Francisco who bought the book and cut out and framed the prints they were so gorgeous.

That gravure process that Jack Woody tracked down and began to use became one of the signatures of his imprints, Twelvetree and Twin Palms. The name of his first press comes from his grandmother, Helen Twelvetrees, a Hollywood movie star in the 1930’s.

After graduating high school, he wanted to go see his grandmother’s star on Hollywood boulevard, so he hitchhiked to LA. He ended up getting a job at a used bookstore called Pickwick. After a year there, he moved to Antiquarian Books, which was where he met David Hockney and his galerist Nicholas Wilder. It was that meeting that eventually led him to meeting Duane Michals, whose portfolio, Homage to Cavafy, he showed while working at the Nicolas Wilder gallery.

He’s published over 150 art books by the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Herbert List, George Platt Lynes, Diane Keaton, Allen Ginsberg, Lise Sarfati, Malerie Marder, Mark Morrisroe, Eggleston, Clemente, Michals, Mapplethorpe, Davidson...the list just goes on and on.

When he started publishing art and more specifically photo books in the 198O’s, no zone else was doing it, other than a couple other presses. He essentially invented a form that his imprint would become known for.

I was so excited to go and meet him. The Rolodex of people that he’s known and worked with is like an encyclopedia of both gay and photo history. And yet, when I went over to the house that he designed and built in the hills of Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met the most humble and charming man - soft spoken, unpretentious, but also willing to talk about his life and work if you expressed interest.

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Last month, I went to visit Farah Al Qasimi at her home and studio in Williamsburg. After talking with her, I thought about her space and how both her studio and her living area represented different parts of her in a way. Both very smart, both refined, but in different ways - the living space had an elegance and a lightness to it, while the studio had a sense of humour and playfulness. I took it a step further and then thought about how those rooms also reflect the different ways she photographs men and women, which we'll get into in this episode

Farah’s work explores issues of identity, beauty and surface in the United Arab Emerates. Her work puts into question the way people are represented and speaks to and plays with traditional genres of the medium such as portraiture. She grew up between the United States and Abu Dabi, and finally moved to the US when she enrolled at Yale. She enrolled in the music program at Yale, and only switched into the photography program in her third year after a couple inspiring classes.

Her photos have been exhibited internationally, and last year, she had a solo show in NY last year called More Good New and published the book Body Shop. In addition to her practise as a photographer and a filmmaker, she teaches as well in the photography departments at RISD and NYU.

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In 1972, more than a decade after I had taken up photography in earnest, I returned to Hyde Park to visit with Hugh Edwards. By then Edwards had retired from his position as Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago and was teaching a night course in the history of photography at the School of the Art Institute. Because Hugh Edwards did not like to be photographed, there aren't many photograps of him. He also didn't want to be filmed or tape-recorded—claiming, in his words, that he did not want to be "etched in concrete." He also hated to write, and did so reluctantly and infrequently. I had come to Chicago intent on making tape recordings of him, in order to try and preserve the astounding ability he had with language. Almost everything he said was laced with irony and wit. His reading and his contrary thinking about almost everything in society made him the most intellectual American I had ever known.

Well aware of Hugh's reluctance to be documented for posterity, I told him only that I wanted to record something about his parents and his background; I knew that Hugh had lots of vivid stories about his childhood. Born in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1903, Hugh had been stricken with a terrible and painful bone disease in his infancy. He had to be wheeled around in a cart by his parents until the age of six. (He would be lame for the rest of his life; in the Print and Drawing Room at the museum, there was always a pair of wooden crutches leaning against the wall next to his desk.) One of his ancestors had come to America from Ireland and built a hotel deep in the Tennessee woods after marrying a Cherokee Indian. His mother had worked in a post office near the Ohio River where his father, an engineer on a steamboat, first met her. During the Battle of Shiloh, which was fought just below the border of western Tennessee—a battle General Grant later described as being so ferocious that you could walk across the field by stepping from one dead body to the next—Hugh's great-uncle was shot in the head with a minie ball.

Hugh's grandfather and his grandfather's younger brother, accompanied by a slave named Toby Arnold, then walked to the battle site to find him and bring him back to Paducah. As a child, Hugh was able to lay his finger in the dent that the ball had left in his great-uncle's skull.

When Hugh was a grade-school student, there was a lynching in Paducah. Because Hugh's father was a socialist, some of his classmates left a piece of the victim's skull inside Hugh's desk, to torment him; when the boy opened the top and reached inside, he touched it.

The truth was that I had come to Chicago to try to record Hugh's ideas on photography. Hugh had discovered me when, as a boy of nineteen, I had put a bow photograph of a construction worker in a University of Chicago Arts Festival contest—and, the following year, a photograph of a truck in the desert. I still remember that spring afternoon when Hugh came into Ida Noyes Hall to see the pictures that were hanging there. The rain was coming down in sheets as he swept into the hall, and I watched as the little man in the Kangol hat propelled himself up the short flight of stairs on his two wooden crutches.

He awarded my picture first prize. The other judge was the former documentary (and later abstract) photographer Aaron Siskind, who challenged Hugh's choice and said he "didn't like trucks." Hugh countered with, "What do you like, pregnant women?' Perhaps there was a picture of a pregnant woman in the show.

It was Hugh who passed on to me his enormous admiration for certain photographers, and inspired me with the feeling that there was so much that could still be done. In 1965, he loaned me his Rolleiflex, which I took into Uptown; in 1967, and again in 1969, he gave me one-man shows at the Art Institute.

At the time, I think I printed and edited my pictures so that I could bring them to Hugh for him to look at. After he died, I thought...

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Danny Lyon is a living legend in photography. Born in 1942 to a Russian-Jewish mother and German-Jewish father, he grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens and went on to study history and philosophy at the University of Chicago. Beginning in the early 1960’s while in his early twenties, he was drawn to the civil rights movement in the south which he immersed himself in and documented. He became lifelong friends with Julian Bond and congressman John Lewis, whom he lived with in an apartment in Atlanta. He was in jail with Martin Luther King, jr. During that decade, he also became a member of the Chicago Outlaw biker gang which he photographed over a period of a few years and he made work in a Texas prison that would eventually become the books, The Bikeriders (1968) and Conversations with the Dead (1971), respectively.

Lyon is a Guggenheim fellow twice over (1969 & 1978) and his work is held in countless museum collections around the world including in The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney.

While he devoted himself to photography throughout the 60’s, he turned to film in the early 70’s. His first film, Social Sciences 127 is about a wild tattoo artist named Bill Sanders, which he shot and then edited at Robert Frank’s apartment. It was at his apartment that Frank introduced Lyon to Danny Seymour, who would give him a cheque for $7,000 to finish his next film, Llanito. As a result of Seymour financing his film, Lyon was able to use his own savings to buy a piece of irrigated land in Bernalillo, New Mexico. He built a house on the land with an undocumented Mexican worker named Eddie, which he and his wife Nancy still live in today. We conducted this interview in the living room of their house.

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A friend recently told me that John Edmonds pictures of african American men in Do-Rags were the first photo's that had the power to completely change his perception. It reminded me of something which Dorothea Lange said, which was, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

One can speak of Edmonds depictions of queer black masculinity in terms of their content and politics, but none of that would be transmittable if the photos themselves were’t so sensual, strikingly beautiful and full of mystery.

John earned his MFA from Yale in 2016, and since, he has been commissioned by the New Yorker, has had work featured in Aperture and has shown with ltd. Los Angeles. He had a solo show in 2017 called Higher and another which is one right now called Tribe: Act One at their Lower East Side space which runs till May 31.

When I went to meet John at his studio, there was just one print hanging on the white walls called Marcus with the Sacred Heart - a . I really loved that, especially just after learning that the late Peter Hujar would do the same at his house. Only one picture of his on the wall at a time. It obliges one to pay singular attention, to look hard, even for a brief moment.

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It was a true honour to meet with Rosalind Fox Solomon, just a few days shy of her 88th birthday. It’s often noted how she came to photography later than most when she was close to 40, but i couldn’t help think more about how long she’s kept it up for. How long she’s stuck with it. In her 80’s, she has has continued to make photographs, and strong ones at that. 

When we met, she served black coffee and showed me her old darkroom. The way in which she printed was always of great importance, she told me. An exhibition poster hung from a solo show at Moma in 1986, but that’s just tip of the iceberg. The breadth of her work is enormous. It’s held in over 50 museums around the world, has been the subject of 30 solo shows, and appears in 11 monographs, most recently, Got to Go with Mack. She has always photographed both at home and abroad making pictures of people suffering from AIDS during the crisis in New York to Israeli’s and Palestine’s in the West Bank just a few years ago. Vince Aletti said that he’s thought of her as an intrepid explorer, who brings back these pictures that are not necessarily easy to look, but has a lot to do with what makes them so powerful. She’s happy to disturb us.

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For the past little while, Atlanta based artist Erin Jane Nelson has been travelling to barrier islands, monuments and sites relating to climate change to make photographs. Her pictures, though, serve as her starting points to what become elements in her mixed media work. Its most recent incarnation is in both ceramic and tapestry, which is being shown at the Whitney this month in a group show called Between the Waters. 

Aside from her own artistic practice, Nelson is a curatorial assistant at the High Museum in Atlanta in both the Photography and Folk art departments. She recently curated an exhibition called A Fire That No Water Could Put Out, a survey of civil rights photography from the museum's collection. She’s also the co-founder of an artist-run gallery called Species that she and her husband, artist Jason Benson, ran out of their studio in Atlanta.

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