PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf

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.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha speaks with her friend Kris Graves who is a photographer and the founder of Kris Graves Projects, a collaborative publishing house for photography that addresses contemporary social concerns. Kris talks about being a Black photographer in the contemporary art world and makes a surprise announcement about a new platform for artists. Sasha and producer Michael Chovan-Dalton start this show with a somewhat longer introduction to provide some more background about Sasha and her connection to this first series of guests for the show.

For the first episode of Photo Work with Sasha Wolf, Sasha speaks with Bryan Schutmaat who, in 2020, received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. As Sasha likes to describe the show, it's a talky and touchy-feely version of her book, Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, and she and Bryan talk about his process and practice as well as his thoughts about the art world in general and what it means to call yourself an artist.