PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf

For part 1 of this 2 part episode, returning guest, photographer Kristine Potter, and first time guest, writer Rebecca Bengal, talk to Sasha about how they each started down their career paths, the similarities in their upbringings and how their early interest in music influenced the way they think about visual art. Sasha and Kristine discuss the history of "murder ballads" used to reference the casual violence against women in Kristine's new book, Dark Waters, published by Aperture which includes a short story by Rebecca. In part 2 of this episode, Sasha and Rebecca will talk about her short story and her new book, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, also published by Aperture. http://www.kristinepotter.com https://aperture.org/books/coming-soon/kristine-potter-dark-waters/ https://www.rebeccabengal.net https://aperture.org/books/coming-soon/strange-hours-photography-memory-and-the-lives-of-artists/ Kristine Potter (1977) is an artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, whose work explores masculine archetypes, the American landscape, and cultural tendencies toward mythologizing the past. Her first monograph Manifest was published by TBW Books in 2018. Her second monograph Dark Waters is being published by Aperture in the summer of 2023. Potter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and was awarded the Grand Prix Image Vevey for 2019-2020. Potter’s work is in numerous public and private collections including that of The High Museum of Art, The Georgia Museum of Art, the Swiss Camera Museum, and Foundation Vevey. Potter is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Middle Tennessee State University. Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction, essays, and documentary journalism about art, literature, film, music, and the environment. A regular contributor to Aperture, her writing has been published by the Paris Review, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Oxford American, Southwest Review, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection, among many others. She has contributed stories and essays to books by Carolyn Drake, Justine Kurland, Kristine Potter, Paul Graham, Danny Lyon, and Charles Portis. A MacDowell fellow in fiction and a former editor at American Short Fiction, DoubleTake, and Vogue, she holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Originally from western North Carolina, Bengal lives in Brooklyn. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer and publisher Matt Eich discuss the intricate play between personal work and universality, the importance of varied artistic inspiration, and the deep understanding and responsibility needed when working with communities as an outsider. Matt also expresses the necessity of having trusted voices help in the editing process. https://www.matteichphoto.com https://www.littleoakpress.com Matt Eich is a photographic essayist working on long-form projects related to memory, family, community, and the American condition. Matt’s work has received numerous grants and recognitions, including PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch, the Joop Swart Masterclass, the F25 Award for Concerned Photography, POYi’s Community Awareness Award, an Aaron Siskind Fellowship, a VMFA Fellowship and two Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography. His work has been exhibited in 20 solo shows, in addition to numerous festivals and group exhibitions. Matt’s prints and books are held in the permanent collections of The Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The New York Public Library, Chrysler Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Art, and others. Matt was an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work in 2013, and at a Robert Rauschenberg Residency in 2019. Eich holds a BS in photojournalism from Ohio University and an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School’s International Limited-Residency Program. He is the author of four monographs, Carry Me Ohio (Sturm & Drang, 2016), I Love You, I'm Leaving (Ceiba Editions, 2017), Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town (Sturm & Drang, 2018) and The Seven Cities (Sturm & Drang, 2020). He has one forthcoming monograph scheduled for Fall 2023. Eich self-publishes under the imprint Little Oak Press and resides in Virginia. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

In preparation for our first live gathering that we are calling PhotoWork Mixtape, May 24 at 7:00pm ET, featuring Bryan Schutmaat, we rewind the show to our very first episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf where Bryan was the guest! Along with mention of the Mixtape, Sasha & Michael kick things off by discussing our exciting line up of upcoming guests. Sasha speaks with Bryan Schutmaat who, in 2020, received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. 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. REGISTER FOR PHOTOWORK MIXTAPE: https://photowork.foundation/photowork-mixtape/ https://www.bryanschutmaat.co Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer based in Austin, Texas whose work has been widely exhibited and published. He has won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Bryan’s prints are held in many collections, such as Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pier 24 Photography, Rijksmuseum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He co-founded the imprint, Trespasser. Read below for more. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

In this non-episode episode, Sasha, Michael and Taylor talk about the upcoming Mixtape gathering featuring Bryan Schutmaat. Sasha and Michael also talk about our first upcoming multi-guest episode. Register for PhotoWork MIXTAPE at: https://photowork.foundation/photowork-mixtape/

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Carolyn Drake discuss her celebrated book Knit Club, published by TBW Books, as well as her other bodies of work. Carolyn talks about her complex reasons for leaving and then returning to the United States, after many years, and the importance of being connected to the place you are photographing. https://carolyndrake.com/ Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and creatively reimagine them. Her practice embraces collaboration and has in recent years melded photography with sewing, collage, and sculpture. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, and challenging entrenched binaries. Drake was born in California and studied Media/Culture and History in the early 1990s at Brown University. Following her graduation from Brown, in 1994, Drake moved to New York and worked as an interactive designer for many years before departing to engage with the physical world through photography. Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two long term projects. Two Rivers (self-published ,2013) explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers and earned a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. Wild Pigeon (self-published, 2014) is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Uyghurs in western China. This work was presented in a six month solo exhibition at SFMOMA in 2018 and earned the Anamorphosis Book prize. Following this, in Internat (self-published, 2017), Drake worked with young women in an ex Soviet orphanage to create photographs and paintings that point beyond the walls of the institution and its gender expectations. This work was awarded the 2018 HCP fellowship curated by Charlotte Cotton and later exhibited in several festivals in Europe. This project was followed by Knit Club (TBW Books, 2020), which emerged from her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi. Knit Club was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Book of the Year and Lucie Photo Book Awards and exhibited at McEvoy Foundation in San Francisco and at Yancey Richardson Gallery and ICP in New York. Drake now lives in California and is currently developing self-reflective projects close to home. Her latest work, Isolation Therapy, was exhibited at SFMOMA’s show Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis in 2021 and at Yancey Richardson Gallery in 2022. Her work has also been supported by Peter S Reed Foundation, Lightwork, the Do Good Fund, the Lange Taylor prize, Magnum Foundation, the Pulitzer Center, and a Fulbright fellowship. She is a member of Magnum Photos and represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Tommy Kha discuss his latest book, Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter published by Aperture. Tommy shares his thoughts about how photography is a language and a way to get to know people. Tommy and Sasha also talk about his life and work in Memphis and the obstacles he had to overcome to figure out his place as an artist there. http://tommykha.com https://aperture.org/prints/reassemblies/ Tommy Kha was born in 1988 in Memphis, Tennessee, and lives and works between Brooklyn, New York and Memphis. The artist received a BFA from the Memphis College of Art in 2011, and an MFA from Yale University in 2013. With a humorous and poignant touch, Kha examines how we construct belonging and otherness through photography, inventing new models for self-portraiture with a critical eye toward the medium’s long history of absences and erasure. Growing up as a Chinese-American boy in Memphis, Kha had often been made to feel he was different. Now as an adult the artist locates a place for himself, both within the American South and the tradition of photography. Critical of the ways in which photography has been used to assert truths and historical narratives that exclude or misrepresent, Kha has found a model of picture-making through which he maintains agency as a subject of photography and questions the construction of the “self.” In his ongoing project I’m Only Here to Leave (2015 – Present) the artist creates cardboard cut-outs and prosthetic masks of his own face and photographs them, complicating and fracturing his representation. Kha has also reproduced his image as a puzzle and layered his photographs atop one another in exhibitions, furthering feelings of dislocation evoked by his work. Kha’s work often returns to his family’s history; Soft Murders (2014 – Present) is a collection of ongoing and related projects partially inspired by his mother’s own snapshot photography from a photoalbum she gifted him. Soft Murders maps the connections between the artist’s family, their history, and his hometown through staged photographs featuring himself (as well as cardboard cut-outs of himself), his mother, and signifiers of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Community. Kha has included his mother’s personal photography – self-portraits of a young woman confidently posed, smiling at the camera – within the project. These stand in contrast to Kha’s intentionally theatrical photographs, which balance precariously between comedy and tragedy, being and performing, and the mundane and the absurd. Representing experiences of Asian Diaspora and images of iconic Americana, the artist asks how photography, a tool which has been used to other people who look like him, might become a means by which he can be truly seen. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, writer and educator, Tim Carpenter discuss his book, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die, published by The Ice Plant. Tim also talks about the importance of seeing a place over time as a way of seeing how you, yourself, have changed over time and how he let go of the idea of subject matter. https://www.timcarpenterphotography.com https://theiceplant.cc/product/to-photograph-is-to-learn-how-to-die/ Tim Carpenter (Illinois, 1968) is a photographer, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is the author of several photo books, among them A month of Sundays (TIS books); Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road (The Ice Plant); Local objects (The Ice Plant); township (collaboration with Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Brad Zellar; TIS/dumbsaint); Bement grain (TIS/dumbsaint); Still feel gone (collaboration with Nathan Pearce; Deadbeat Club Press); Illinois central (Kris Graves Projects); The king of the birds (TIS books); and A house and a tree (TIS books). Local objects was included in the 2018 exhibition “American Surfaces and the Photobook” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was listed for the Kassel Photobook Award 2018. Carpenter received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012, and in 2015 co-founded TIS books, an independent photobook publisher. He is a faculty member of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program, serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Mentorship Program, and is a co-proprietor of Distant Zine. Carpenter’s book-length essay “To photograph is to learn how to die” was published by The Ice Plant in Fall of 2022.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and artist, Meghann Riepenhoff discuss her book Ice, published by Radius Books. Meghann talks about how she makes work collaboratively with the environment and how she uses moments of failure as a signal that she is moving in a new direction. http://meghannriepenhoff.com https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/meghann-riepenhoff-ice Meghann Riepenhoff’s work has been exhibited and is held in the collections at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), and the Worcester Art Museum. Additional collections include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which holds Riepenhoff’s 12’x18’ unique cyanotype. Additional exhibitions include Yossi Milo Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, Galerie du Monde, Euqinom Projects, the Aperture Foundation, San Francisco Camerawork, the Denver Art Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). Her work has been featured in ArtForum, Aperture PhotoBook Review, The New York Times, Time Magazine Lightbox, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Oprah Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Wired Magazine, and Photograph Magazine. Her first monograph Littoral Drift + Ecotone was co-published by Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Shirin Neshat discuss her latest multimedia project, Land of Dreams which combines photographs, video installation, and a feature length film. Shirin and Sasha talk about what brought Shirin back to making art after an 11 year hiatus and how Shirin thinks about her identity as an Iranian artist. https://www.gladstonegallery.com/artist/shirin-neshat/ https://www.instagram.com/shirin__neshat https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/shirin-neshat-land-of-dreams Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy, Hirshhorn Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017), and most recently Land of Dreams, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021). Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), and the Praemium Imperiale award for Painting in (2017). She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Andrea Modica discuss Andrea's latest book, Theatrum Equorum, published by TIS. Andrea and Sasha talk about the great women artists in her life that helped open doors for her and how not knowing if anyone would ever be interested in her work allowed Andrea to make the photographs she wanted to make. http://www.andreamodica.com https://www.tisbooks.pub/products/theatrum-equorum Andrea Modica was born in New York City and lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches at Drexel University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of a Knight Award. Her books include Treadwell (Chronicle), Minor League (Smithsonian Press), Barbara (Nazraeli), Human Being (Nazraeli), Fountain (Stinehour Editions) and most recently As We Wait (L’Artiere), now in its second edition. Her most recent monograph is a collection of portraits of Mummer Wenches, titled January 1 (L’Artiere). Upcoming is a book of photographs made at a horse clinic in Italy, titled Clinica Equina Bagnarola (Tis Books). Her photographs have been featured in many magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Newsweek and American Photo. Modica has exhibited extensively and has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts. Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.