PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf

The Missing Guest On this mini, no guest episode, Sasha and Michael joke around about their missing guest, try to confirm that Michael is indeed who he says he is, since Sasha has not actually seen him in a year, and share the photography books they are both currently reading. Sasha also advises listeners to preview the work of their next guest, Doug DuBois. Books mentioned in this episode: Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender - Sally Stein https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/migrant-mother-migrant-gender-sally-stein?_pos=1&_sid=62776877e&_ss=r On Photographs - David Campany https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/photographs Seeing Deeply - Dawoud Bey https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/dawoud-bey The Locusts - Jesse Lenz https://charcoalpress.com/shop/the-locusts A Parallel Road - Amani Willett https://www.overlapse.com/catalog/a-parallel-road/ Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer / filmmaker, Gillian Laub, talk about the patience needed to let a certain type of project take shape.  Gillian discusses her HBO Documentary, Southern Rites, and explains why still photography alone was not enough to tell that story, and she reveals the importance of trusting her editor in the book making process and making hard cuts to beloved images. This is an incredibly warm and cozy talk between two old friends who share lots of thoughts and feelings with one another and, of course,  the listeners.  http://www.gillianlaub.com http://www.southernritesproject.com Gillian Laub (b.1975, Chappaqua, New York) is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in comparative literature before studying photography at the International Center of Photography, where her love of visual storytelling and family narratives began. Laub spent over a decade working in Georgia exploring issues of lingering racism in the American South. This work became Laub’s first feature length, directed and produced, documentary film, Southern Rites that premiered on HBO.  Her monograph, Southern Rites (Damiani, 2015) and travelling exhibition by the same title came out in conjunction with the film and are being used for an educational outreach campaign, in schools and institutions across the country. Southern Rites was named one of the best photo books by TIME, Smithsonian, Vogue, LensCulture, and American Photo. It was also nominated for a Lucie award and Humanitas award. Laub recently recieved the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was honored as a NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow in 2019. Laub has been interviewed on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Good Morning America, Times Talks and numerous others.  Laub contributes to many publications including TIME , The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. Laub’s work has been widely collected and exhibited, and is included in the collects of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Terrana Collection, Boston; Jewish Museum. New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (now American University Museum Collection in Washington, DC), and a wide range of corporate and private collections.

Episode Notes For our 10th episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Michael plays host while Sasha answers some of the burning questions that our listeners have been sitting on for 9 episodes.  Below we have linked to some of the resources that we mention in this episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions and feel free to keep them coming through our DM on Instagram. DM your questions here: https://www.instagram.com/sashawolfprojects/ https://www.instagram.com/realphotoshow Here are some links to resources mentioned in the show: Kris Graves Projects https://www.krisgravesprojects.com TBW Books https://tbwbooks.com TIS Books https://www.tisbooks.pub Paris Photo https://www.parisphoto-newyork.com/en-gb.html Society for Photographic Education https://www.spenational.org Lenscratch http://lenscratch.com

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Alejandro Cartagena, talk about finding motivation from within and not counting on the art world at large to propel or inspire your creative output. Alejandro talks about how his early work as an archivist has come back around to be a key part of his current practice and how he juggles multiple bodies of work at once. Alejandro's incredible passion for his craft, his good humor and high spirits keep this conversation moving at warp speed. https://alejandrocartagena.com Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions in spaces including the the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Portland Museum of Art, The West Collection, the Coppel collection, the FEMSA collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the George Eastman House and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and among others. Alejandro is a self publisher and co-editor and has created several award wining titles including Santa Barbara Shame on US, Skinnerboox, 2017, A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption, The velvet Cell, 2017, Rivers of Power, Newwer, 2016, Santa Barbara return Jobs to US, Skinnerboox, 2016, Headshots, Self-published, 2015, Before the War, Self-published, 2015, Carpoolers, Self-published with support of FONCA Grant, 2014, Suburbia Mexicana, Daylight/ Photolucida 2010. Some of his books are in the Yale University Library, the Tate Britain, and the 10×10 Photobooks/MFH Houston book collections among others. Cartagena has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award in London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo Leon in Mexico among others. He has been named an International Discoveries of the FotoFest festival, a FOAM magazine TALENT and an Emerging photographer of PDN magazine. He has also been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Award and has been nominated for the Santa Fe Photography Prize, the Prix Pictet Prize, the Photoespaña Descubrimientos Award and the FOAM Paul Huff Award. His work has been published internationally in magazines and newspapers such as Newsweek, Nowness, Domus, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, Stern, PDN, The New Yorker, and Wallpaper among others.

For the eighth installment of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and artist, Dannielle Bowman, talk about Dannielle’s amazing trajectory, from almost giving up on making photographs, to being invited to work on the New York Times 1619 Project. Dannielle, who was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize this year, speaks at length about her work, and explains why and how she looks to create real ambiguity in her pictures. Dannielle discusses how shooting for the 1619 Project has had a lasting impact on her personally and on her work. The episode ends with a brief discussion of Dannielle’s experience at Yale in the MFA program and the strong bonds she formed there with her fellow students and professors. https://danniellebowman.com Dannielle Bowman received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where she was awarded the 2018 Richard Benson Prize. In 2019, she was a contributor to the New York Times Magazine’s The 1619 Project, and in 2020 she was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Bowman has been an artist in residence at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York; the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; and PICTURE BERLIN. Bowman has exhibited in the US and internationally. She lives and works in New York.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha talks with the Creative Director of Aperture, Lesley Martin. Sasha and Lesley take a deep dive into the world of photo book publishing, discuss the long process of getting a book made, from start to finish, and how up-and-coming photographers might approach publishers. Lesley talks about how she wound up at Aperture, the highs and lows of working collaboratively and about her extensive work on the publication, Stephen Shore's Selected Works, among other. They also talk about the joys of book details such as vertical gatefolds and what’s better to show editor—a PDF or a maquette. They end with some deep talk about legacy and express their mutual admiration. Lesley A. Martin is creative director and publisher of The PhotoBook Review, a newsprint journal dedicated to the evolving conversation surrounding the photobook. Her writing on photography has been published in Aperture, American Photo, FOAM, and Lay Flat, among other publications, and she has edited over seventy-five books of photography, including Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer; On the Beach by Richard Misrach; Paris • New York • Shanghai by Hans Eijkelboom; Tokyo by Takashi Homma; Paul Strand in Mexico; Illuminance and Ametsuchi by Rinko Kawauchi; and Enclave by Richard Mosse. She has curated several exhibitions of photography, including The Ubiquitous Image, part of the inaugural New York Photo Festival in 2008; the New York Times Magazine Photographs, cocurated with Kathy Ryan (2011); and in 2012, Aperture Remix, a commission-based exhibition celebrating Aperture’s sixtieth anniversary. In 2015, she was named a visiting critic to the Yale MFA Photography program. https://aperture.org

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Todd Hido, have a wide-ranging conversation about Todd's roles as an artist and an educator. Todd shares his ideas about how students should follow the John Cage rule and “ Find a place you trust and try trusting it for a while”, and how, as a student himself, he had to push back against a critique to make his work less subjective! Todd and Sasha find common ground through cinematic influences and the desire for hope as a motivator to keep working. There is much to love and learn from in this episode as Hido is extremely generous with his hard won wisdom. Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Wired, Elephant, FOAM, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. Most notably, Pier 24 Photography holds the archive of all his published works. He has over a dozen published books; his most recent monograph titled Excerpts from Silver Meadows was released in 2013, along with an innovative B-Sides Box Set designed to function as a companion piece to his award-winning monograph. Aperture has published his mid-career survey entitled Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs, a Chronological Album in October of 2016. His next book titled Bright Black World will be released by Nazraeli Press in the fall of 2018. In addition to Hido being an artist, he is also a collector and over the last 25 years has created one of the most notable photobook collections. His library will be featured in Bibliomania: The World’s Most Interesting Private Libraries forthcoming in 2018 by Random House.   http://www.toddhido.com

For the 5th installment of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Jess T. Dugan, speak with one another from their respective recording booths, better known as closets. Jess and Sasha discuss why Jess went to Columbia College Chicago specifically to study with Dawoud Bey, how working at a museum when she was younger has been beneficial to her subsequent career as a fine artist, and just how much people can really know you through your art work. Jess and Sasha also have a candid conversation about the strengths and differences between Jess’s two most well known bodies of work. Jess T. Dugan (American, b. 1986 Biloxi, MS) is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photographic portraiture. They received their MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (2014), their Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University (2010), and their BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2007).   Dugan’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Library of Congress, and many others throughout the United States.   Dugan’s monographs include To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015). They are the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and were selected by the Obama White House as a 2015 Champion of Change.   Dugan teaches workshops at venues including the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and Filter Photo in Chicago, IL. In 2015, they founded the Strange Fire Artist Collective to highlight work made by women, people of color, and LGBTQ artists. They are represented by the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, IL. http://www.jessdugan.com

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and guest, photographer, Adam Katseff, have a conversation about influence, the tricky part of trying to identify oneself as an artist, and the importance of acknowledging your own successes. Sasha and Adam talk about the process of creating his exquisite landscape series’, The Dark Landscapes and Rivers and Falls, and its connection to both early western landscape photography in the U.S, and abstract expressionist painting. In our introduction, Sasha and Michael talk about why Sasha is in her closet and how New Jersey is one step from the great beyond.   Visit https://www.adamkatseff.com to see Adam's work.   Adam Katseff was born in North Andover, Massachusetts and currently lives in Brookline, MA. He received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art before going on to receive his MFA from Stanford University. He has been the recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award as well as the Anita Squires Fowler Award, and his work has been shown around the country, including at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Hearst Galleries, and the Michael and Noemi Neidorff Gallery at Trinity University. In May 2015, Katseff won the INFOCUS Sidney Zuber Photography Award; as part of the win, his work was displayed at the Phoenix Art Museum for two months. In 2015 Katseff was also included in a major survey exhibition of photography, architecture and contemporary art dedicated to the Sierra Nevada region, mounted by the Nevada Museum of Art. The featured work was from his ‘Dark Landscape’ series and was acquired by the museum following the exhibition. Katseff’s work has received press from a number of notable publications, including The New Yorker and Collector Daily. Katseff had his inaugural show with Sasha Wolf Gallery, In The Course of Time, in October 2014, enjoyed a number of successful art fairs with the gallery, including AIPAD and a solo booth at Art on Paper in March 2015 and had his second solo exhibition, Rivers and Falls, in April 2015. He’s also represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and had a solo show at Koch in September 2017.   Please subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

For the third installment of PhotoWork, Sasha talks with photographer Elinor Carucci. Sasha and Elinor have a very personal and candid discussion about art, family, regrets, getting older in the public eye and navigating life during the pandemic. Elinor even shares her current favorite food. Hint: it’s a fruit. There’s a lot of love and warmth in this episode so, definitely, a very touchy-feely version of Sasha’s Book, PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on process and Practice. Please subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.