Caleb Stein - Down by the Hudson

In Caleb Stein’s imagery, community triumphs over the individual. In this interview, he speaks with us about his photographic approach, his fascination with small-town America, and the soothing power of water.

White Noise

Photographer Jesse Diamond was coming off a divorce, and struggling with loneliness and uncertainty when he began making the black-and-white photographs that comprise his forthcoming book, White Noise (minor matters). Without realizing why, he was drawn to compositions that set lone figures in empty spaces, and to crowded scenes. Looking back, Diamond writes, his attraction to the scenes he captured relates to his childhood on the road with his musician father. “To this day, I find comfort in being alone within a vast space, and I also feel very much at home in large, crowded surroundings.”

Hustlers

Philip-Lorca diCorcia - David Holstein, 30 years old, Elnora, Indiana, $25, 1990-1992

Victor Cobo

Much of my photography stems from early emotionally strained years involving difficult relationships. In many ways the private world that reveals itself in my work is my own mechanism of escape. The process of my life organizes all these chaotic abstractions of existence, molding them into often surreal and theatrical forms. The results can be explosive, threatening and also sweet and sentimental. It is a universe of fragmentation and irrational disorder that is beyond my zone of safety. Yet it is my world. One in which I can always retreat to because I can manage it. I am the star of my own show.  

When I was four years old my parents went through a torturous divorce. My father had been using all manner of drugs and was an acute alcoholic. The relationship had been abusive, often to the point of serious violence, and finally my mother had no choice but to flee with me and go back to Spain. 

Eventually my father sobered up, and we’ve remained in contact through the years. As a child I was sent to visit him during summer breaks from school. Each day he would insist that we go out so he could take photographs of me. Years later I realized that the pictures he was making were illustrations of an imaginary relationship. One that he had created in his mind. This delusion had become his secret universe, hidden away from the rest of the world. In most of the pictures of us he had scattered around his house, I was not smiling: proof that even at an early age I did not trust that this ‘relationship’ he was attempting to depict was in any way real. The pictures were fiction. 

As much as it is difficult to admit to myself, I know that I am like my father. There is a sense of ever growing isolation and peculiar delusions, thus photography has become my therapy and my best friend. I am intrigued by life’s obscure curiosities. Transfixed, they are what I have; what has me.  

- Victor Cobo

Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation (again)

From The New Yorker: In “Pleasures and Terrors,” figures are suspended against a blank background, devoid of context; it’s unclear whether they are falling or floating.

Alec Soth - I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating

Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer.

Um Realismo Necessário

José Pedro Cortes - 2005-2018

For Your Eyes Only

Pixy Liao - For Your Eyes Only (2012 - now) 

For Your Eyes Only is a visual love letter to an intimate lover. I am interested in the mundane life, in finding things and making fun of it, liberating it from what it is. This project is a combination of daily life and performance with a naughty attitude. It’s an extension to my “Experimental Relationship” project, which portrays a female dominant relationship.

This project was initialed with the support of EnFoco's New Works Award

Shin Noguchi

Shin Noguchi, born 1976, is an award winning street photographer based in Kamakura and Tokyo, Japan. He describes his street photography as an attempt to capture extraordinary moments of excitement, humanism and beauty among the flow of everyday life. With his discreet, poetic and enigmatic approach to his art, Shin is able to capture the subtleties and complexities of Japanese culture without relying on staged, no-finder or hip shot photography.

"Street photography always projects the "truth". The "truth" that I talk about isn't necessarily that I can see, but they also exist in society, in street, in people's life. and I always try to capture this reality beyond my own values and viewpoint/perspective."

Shin was the 2014 Winner of the MAP Talent Prize at the Festival de photo Toulouse. He has been featured on The Leica Camera Blog six times, in Courrier Inte'l, Internazionale, Libération, Tages-Anzeiger, The Independent, etc, and some assignment work has been also published in Die Zeit, Libération, etc.

Sam Contis

Sam Contis (b. 1982) lives and works in California. She received her MFA from Yale University’s School of Art in 2008. Her work has been shown internationally with exhibitions in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, and San Francisco. She has had recent solo shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. She is a recipient of the 2017 Nancy Graves Foundation Artist Grant and the 2016 Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship. Contis’s work is represented in collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Deep Springs, her first book, was published by MACK in 2017. In 2018, her work was included in Being: New Photography at MoMA, New York.