April 29 - May 20, 2022
INTERESTING PHOTO NEWS & GREAT PHOTO LINKS
Great Photography Stories
Art News Interviews Carrie Mae Weems
I really loved this thoughtful and interesting Art News interview with Carrie Mae Weems. She has so many interesting and helpful things to share:
“There’s something about my own physicality, and the ability to carry a certain kind of weight. I could exploit myself in a way that I probably wouldn’t necessarily ask anybody else to. If I need to get down on my knees and crawl across the scene, that’s something that I could do without imposing myself on others. I’ve grown to understand that my body has the ability to carry a great deal of weight and a great deal of significance, and that I could use that, that I could bend that in these unique ways that will allow me to construct the image that I really needed to make without having to negotiate with others about how that was going to be done.”
The Guardian explores Justine Kurland’s new photo book: SCUMB Manifesto
Photographer Justine Kurland’s new photo book is a creative and provocative challenge to the patriarchy and male-dominated photography canon - the book consists of photo collages she created by cutting up and reassembling 150 photo books by white, male photographers. I enjoyed this introduction to Kurland’s work by The Guardian.
“I started out thinking it would be a purely punk act of destruction, but really it’s the most delicate, fussy medium,” says Kurland, “I spent hours and hours making these meticulous, lacy cuts and then carefully putting them together. It’s about the glue as well as the scissors. For me, it is a reparative act rather than a destructive one.”
Monica Hesse Reminds Us On Twitter (posing advice):
If a photographer ever suggests “let’s move this to the floor,” do not listen to them.
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
When I take pictures of strangers out in public.
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Gazelle Mba Writes About Roy DeCarava.
I appreciated this Gazelle Mba reflection on the work of Roy DeCarava for the London Review of Books.
“He was looking for a modernist visual language that would capture Black subjects and Black social life without making them simply objects of sociological inquiry. His photographs, all shadow and blur, bring a different Harlem into view, one where the light falling softly on a coat-hanger demands attention, and where the hooks that a swing should hang from tell a story about children in a city which, as DeCarava’s sometime collaborator Langston Hughes wrote, will give them nothing but dreams deferred.”
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
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Photo at the top of The Roundup: Dr. Lisa Levy in her office, Bushwick © James Prochnik