Conversations

I first encountered Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s work when I walked into his 2017 solo exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City.  I didn’t so much view his pictures as I did stare at them, trying to reconcile the spatial constructions, to untangle the delicate knots of reference and self-reference, seeking to decode anonymous flesh of male forms, and trying to figure out where any given picture starts or ends;

How can we modernize the way we think about photography? Not just in the conversations surrounding digital vs. analog––old vs. new––but creating an improved taxonomy around processes and ideas that are universal to the medium and art making at large? A more holistic approach to an ever-changing landscape?

Drawing on his background in painting and reprographic photography, Eric Shows makes pictures with a variety of approaches, including using broken cameras, improvised models, and an additive color process that often approaches or exceeds the limits of his camera’s sensor. His practice is often a performative meditation on the relationship between the captured image and the embodied experience of the objects or events captured. Our shared interest in the history of images programming…

For the past few years, Russian-born and U.S. based artist Anastasia Samoylova has been creating imagery that breaks boundries of conventional photographic genres. Her project, Landscape Sublime, presents hybridized scenes of tabletop collages, and forms a distinct and multi-layered interrogation of photographic aesthetics, online media, and our image saturated culture…

German artist Lotte Reimann’s project Jaunt is a series of web-appropriated imagery that has been edited to function as erotica that blurs the lines of documentary and fantasy . The bulk of the images she uses for this work were sourced froma single group of pictures uploaded online by an annonymous couple who created and shared portraits and self-portraits of themselves engaging in nude poses and sexual behaviors. Combining this imagery with pictures of cars crashing, racing and…

Swedish artist Martin Brink has spent the past several years exploring methods of creating photographic work for web-based distribution. His output is seen in a range of ebooks, gifs, and pdfs, most of which are offered as free downloads, and the image-works he presents are often minimally styled expressions of time, space and movement. His latest completed work, 2014 Walks, is a PDF book that excersizes an exchange between physical and cyber experience…

Many people seem to imagine that when they look at a photograph it transmits some rather objective information to them and then that is the end of the exchange. What has always really interested me is the way that exchange shapes our encounters…

Daniel Gordon is a photographer who creates highly illusionistic images of objects that he constructs from paper prints. His photographs, which, resemble Dada collages and Matisse’s paintings, appear contemporary, possibly because of the medium itself that serves both as the…

Lucas Blalock’s current studio is located in a spacious former warehouse building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Neatly organized, Blalock’s space appeared cozy and light-filled, with prints of his new work pinned to the walls, a plastic table in the center, Deardorff 4×5 view camera, stack of older prints laying on another table, a big old printer, computer, and lots of books. I stumbled on a few small metal wheels on the floor, and realized later I was looking at…

A.D. Coleman has been writing about the field of photography for over 45 years. As the first photo critic for the New York Times, he saw firsthand the rise of the medium’s stature in the art field during the late ’60s, and has continued to track its long and ever-expanding evolution since that time. Throughout his career, he has taken close interest in the rise of electronic and digital media, following its developments…