Reading Shortlist 12.18.13

© Georgina Berkeley, untitled page from the Berkeley Album (1867/71), from the exhibition "Playing with Pictures:
The Art of the Victorian Photocollage"

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended sites, readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

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AGMA Magazine, Playing With Pictures: The Art of the Victorian Photocollage." Some impressive works in this post of early mixed media work from high society women in the 1860s and 1870s. (Click on the words "Playing With Pictures" to get the gallery of images to open up.)

Laurie Anderson, Rolling Stone, Laurie Anderson's Farewell to Lou Reed. Nothing at all to do with photography, but a lot to do with life.

Capa at 100, International Center of Photography. A half-hour radio interview which is the only recording known of Robert Capa's voice. He discusses a trip to Russia, how a couple of his most famous images were made and how he came up with his name. Also includes one of the most awkward, non sequitur product placements I've ever heard.

© Jane Cooper, Original Caption: "This Area Is Known as Gay Hill near Stockbridge, Vermont. The Farm Was
Originally Built in the 1800's by Ephraim Twitchell, the Famous Vermont Bridge Builder 03/1974"

DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency. This Flickr page of the U.S. National Archives houses over 15,000 images from the EPA funded Documerica project. The project, ongoing between 1971-1977, entailed contracting freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities and everyday life in the 1970s. Photographers included David Alan Harvey and Danny Lyon.

© Barcroft Media via Getty Images

The Guardian, Liu Bolin, invisible man - in pictures. Not really photography either (beyond documenting his performances via the camera), but man, this guy is impressive.

Andrew Reid, EOSHD, Consumer DSLRs "dead in five years" I'm generally not very interested in talking about gear or gear articles and the points here may be a little extreme, but the coming changes to the camera market and camera development are going to affect all of us.

Sightsmap. Fascinating map of the density of photographs taken around the world.

Alec Soth, Little Brown Mushroom Blog, Popsicle #46: The letters of Sergio Larrain. Soth explores the idea of photographers giving up on photography through Aperture's Sergio Lorrain.

Susan Worsham, Fresh Air on Tumblr, Conversations with Margaret Daniel. I've been putting this hour-long audio compilation on while scanning or doing post-production the last month, just listening to Daniel talk. She could talk about anything and I'd listen.

Michael Zhang, PetaPixel, Video: Photographer Has Camera Lens Stolen From Around His Neck. Welp, that...that sucks.

Reading Shortlist 1.29.13

© Christopher Makos, Andy with SX-70 and Konica, undated

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

Heavy on videos this time. On the shortlist:

Gianpaolo Arena, Landscape Stories, Steve Bisson. Bisson, founder and editor of Urbanautica, shares his thoughts on the state of and future of landscape photography in this short interview from 2010.

Coburn Dukehart, NPR Picture Show, What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief. The article provides a good moment for photographers to make some decisions - before finding themselves in the situation - about their stance on making images in moments of grief and also on making street portraits without permission more generally.

Bryan Formhals, LPV Magazine, Lick Creek Line by Ron Jude. Formhals explores the evolution of his strong reaction to Lick Creek Line.

David Hockney, Louisiana Channel, Photoshop is boring. Hockney raises an interesting question: is Photoshop creating a "stale" look in photography? Includes an awkward bondage conversation at the end.

© David Hockney, Composite Polaroid 31 1/2" x 24 1/2"

Monte Peckham, American Suburb X, INTERVIEW: "A Conversation Between Lewiz Baltz and John Gossage" A free-flowing conversation about cinema as the pre-eminent art form of the 20th century, The Pond, the relationship between photography and linguistics, and how - for both photographers - the subject of the work is the person looking at it.

Polaroid SX-70 promotional video. The SX-70, introduced in 1972, is fully explored and explained in this video. The SX-70 was used, among others, by David Hockney, Ansel Adams, and Walker Evans. Not going to buy the soundtrack to this video, however.

Viviane Sassen, Quality Matters. Sassen talks about her process in this short video, from editing to photobooks. "You can easily make or break a book with design."

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, The Great Leap Sideways, Beauty as Bitter Fruit: Susan Worsham’s By The Grace of God. Wolukau-Wanambwa deciphers what it is about the images of Worsham that pull us in so far.

Exchange Edit: Kevin Thrasher by Susan Worsham

fototazo is starting a new, periodic series in which two photographers will selected images from various  bodies of work of the other photographer and sequence them to form a new body of work. This idea comes from the photographers Kevin Thrasher and Susan Worsham.

Kevin writes:

The idea to edit one another's work came from a conversation I had with Susan after a photography lecture. Susan said that she had made different edits of my work - opening various windows of images from my website and creating her own groupings - essentially coming up with her own narrative using different bodies of work. I think its a unique opportunity for me to see how others see my work. I welcomed this chance to see what Susan could come up with, see new connections in my work that I might not have considered on my own.

Photographers have to have projects these days, I don't know if its always been that way. I doubt, although I could be wrong, that Josef Koudelka set out on day one to make a book of Gypsies. I would like to think that he made photos, and then eventually he realized he had a cohesive idea in place. Maybe via Susan's edit, I will realize that I don't need to think of working in these rigid projects and I will be taking more photographs out in the world.

And Susan adds:

Unlike a moving picture where your eye has no choice but to follow the lead of the directors, a still image lets you pause and wonder what has happened in the moment before and what will happen next. If a film's sequence is out of order the story might not make sense. In photography one picture placed beside a second can change or enhance the meaning of both.

Like Kevin mentioned, I think we all come up with our own narratives when looking at photographs. I was drawn to certain pictures on Kevin's website that I wanted to see together even though they were not from the same body of work. The images below are intuitively chosen and they become a sort of small poem perhaps of my friends work.

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This is Susan's edit of Kevin's work. All images belong to Kevin's projects Brown's Island, Common Ground, Auditing Life, and Gap Creek RD. Yesterday we presented Kevin's edit of Susan's work here.

Exchange Edit: Susan Worsham by Kevin Thrasher

fototazo is starting a new series of posts in which two photographers will select images from the various bodies of work of the other photographer and then sequence them to form a new edit. This idea comes from the photographers Kevin Thrasher and Susan Worsham.

Kevin writes:
The idea to edit one another's work came from a conversation I had with Susan after a photography lecture. Susan said that she had made different edits of my work - opening various windows of images from my website and creating her own groupings - essentially coming up with her own narrative using different bodies of work. I think its a unique opportunity for me to see how others see my work. I welcomed this chance to see what Susan could come up with, see new connections in my work that I might not have considered on my own.

Photographers have to have projects these days, I don't know if its always been that way. I doubt, although I could be wrong, that Josef Koudelka set out on day one to make a book of Gypsies. I would like to think that he made photos, and then eventually he realized he had a cohesive idea in place. Maybe via Susan's edit, I will realize that I don't need to think of working in these rigid projects and I will be taking more photographs out in the world.

And Susan adds:
Unlike a moving picture where your eye has no choice but to follow the lead of the directors, a still image lets you pause and wonder what has happened in the moment before and what will happen next. If a film's sequence is out of order the story might not make sense. In photography one picture placed beside a second can change or enhance the meaning of both.

Like Kevin mentioned, I think we all come up with our own narratives when looking at photographs. I was drawn to certain pictures on Kevin's website that I wanted to see together even though they were not from the same body of work. The images are intuitively chosen and they become a sort of small poem perhaps of my friends work.

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This is Kevin's edit of Susan's work. All images belong to Susan's projects Some Fox Trails in Virginia and By the Grace of God. Tomorrow we will present Susan's edit of Kevin's work.

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Kevin Thrasher lives in Richmond, VA. He received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work has exhibited in the Northeastern and Southern U.S.

Susan Worsham (b.1969 Virginia, USA) took her first photography class while studying graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2009 she was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography and her book "Some Fox Trails In Virginia" won first runner up in the fine art category of the Blurb Photography Book Now International Competition. In 2010 Susan was awarded the first TMC / Kodak Film Grant and was also an artist in residence at Light Work in Syracuse, New York. Susan was named one of Photo District News top 30 Emerging photographers to watch in 2011, and was included in Photolucida’s Critical Mass top 50. Recently her work travelled to China to represent America in the Lishui Photography Festival.

The Image: Susan Worsham, "FROGS BLOOD AND SPINAL CORD"

© Susan Worsham, FROGS BLOOD AND SPINAL CORD, 2012

Susan Worsham: When I was 18 my brother took his own life on his first visit home after severing his spinal cord in a motorcycle accident. I had already lost my father to a heart attack when I was in the third grade, and finally in 2004 I lost my mother as well.

Shortly after my mother passed I came across a set of antique veterinary slides. They were some of the most interesting things that I had ever seen. They seemed to hold beauty and death at the same time. I framed 90 of them in a long wooden frame resembling the shape of the slide itself. It was the first piece of art that I made after my mother died.

I called the piece a watercolor because of the collection of pastel colors, but it was also a sort of poem when you got close and read the titles...Rabbit's Lung, Fowl's spleen, and even Human Umbilical Cord. I began to collect the slides with the intention to photograph as well as frame them. I then went on to photograph my old childhood home as well as my oldest neighbor, Margaret Daniel. She was the last person to see my brother alive, and has become a large part of my work.

The story came full circle last year when Margaret brought out her dissection kit and microscope slides to show me. I had forgotten that she had been a biology teacher, and here she was holding the same sort of slides that I was so fascinated by. Margaret's microscope and slides have since become a metaphor for my own desire to look deeper into the landscape of my childhood. From the flora and fauna to the feelings, Margaret calls it "blood work."

f100: Cole Caswell, CJ Heyliger, Caleb Cole, Susan Worsham

© CJ Heyliger, Wreckage, Edison, NJ, 2010, from the series "Dream of Pines"

fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition - the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. A little more information on the project is available in the first post in the series here.

We began the series with responses from Nicholas Nixon, Matt Johnston, Blake Andrews, John Edwin Mason, Aline Smithson, Colin Pantall, Michael Werner, Liza Fetissova, Laurence Salzmann, Bryan Formhals, Richard Mosse, Shane Lavalette, Amy Stein, Amani Willett, Wayne Ford and S. Billie Mandle.

Today we continue with responses from Leslie K. Brown and Gordon Stettinius

Respondent: Leslie K. Brown is an independent curator and educator pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at Boston University. A former curator at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, she holds an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. Besides working at and guest curating for several museums, Brown has also taught at the Art Institute of Boston, BU and the Rhode Island School of Design and regularly serves as an invited guest critic, juror, reviewer and lecturer. Her recent projects include a solo exhibition of Daniel Ranalli’s work and an essay for photographer Sandi Haber Fifield’s book, Between Planting and Picking. Currently living in Cambridge, MA, she is the product of a Kodak family.

Selections: Cole Caswell and CJ Heyliger. Exploring the boundaries of landscape—literally, geographically, and metaphorically—both photographers are graduates of the Art Institute of Boston. Caswell (Peaks Island, ME) earned an interdisciplinary MFA from Maine College of Art and is an adjunct instructor and active collaborator with the Geographic Observatory and WE ARE X [wax]; Heyliger (Somerville, MA) teaches at AIB and currently works as an assistant for Abelardo Morell and Nicholas Nixon.

In addition to their personal work seen here, together with Bryan Graf, Caswell and Heyliger maintain the blog Swamp Recordings as an archive of their collective ramblings in the wetlands of the east coast and in preparation for their upcoming multi-media installation and interactive/inhabited studio at Bodega in Philadelphia next spring. Jointly, they have also recently launched the publishing venture Sun System.

© Cole Caswell, reservoir, 2011, from the series "Fallen Volume #2"

Respondent: Gordon Stettinius has been exhibited nationally and internationally, his photography can be found in both private and public collections, and he is a winner of the 2009 Theresa Pollak award for Excellence in the Arts. Stettinius taught at Virginia Commonwealth University until 2009 when he decided to take some time away for teaching to start an independent publishing company, Candela Books.

Selections: Caleb Cole and Susan Worsham

© Caleb Cole, Woman Looking In, 2008, from the series "Other People's Clothes"

Caleb Cole: The first work of his that I was drawn to was "Other People's Clothes," a body of work that involves Caleb finding or borrowing an outfit or a piece of clothing. He then will construct a scenario with himself as subject. It sounds simple, and maybe it is, but he does a brilliant job avoiding campy self-portraiture by adding vulnerability with trace amounts of melodrama. It is hysterical and the more I find myself considering photographers and their very meaningful projects from all over the globe, the more I need work like this to pick myself up again.

Susan Worsham: There is a resonance in Susan's work that I take in on a level just beneath comprehension. Her work is autobiographical in a way. She writes of family and loss but then photographs the vibrations of these experiences and somehow manages to bring together constructed scenes and familiar people, intimate scenes, but suggests those people and those times that she misses the most. As if the soup will always remember the garden. To see it unfold is subtle and persuasive.

© Susan Worsham, Untitled, from the series "Some Fox Trails in Virginia"

Susan Worsham on Portraiture

Alessandra Sanguinetti, The Necklace, 1999

fototazo has asked twelve photographers what makes a good portrait. This is the 4th in the series of their responses. The first three came from Steve Davis, Elinor Carucci and Mark Powell.

Susan Worsham (b.1969 Virginia, USA) took her first photography class while studying graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a member of the Appalachian Photographer's Project and her work has been featured online at Flak Photo, The Exposure Project, Lenscratch, Ahorn Magazine and Fraction Magazine. In 2009 Susan was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography and her book Some Fox Trails In Virginia won first runner up in the fine art category of the Blurb Photography Book Now International Competition. In 2010 Susan was awarded the first TMC / Kodak Film Grant and was also an artist in residence at Light Work in Syracuse, New York. Her work is held in private collections and has been exhibited at Dean Jensen Gallery, The Photographic Center Northwest, Silver Eye Center for Photography and the Corcoran Museum of Art during FotoWeek D.C.

She was recently named one of PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2011.

Susan Worsham: As children, we are taught not to stare. A portrait however gives us permission to spend time gazing at another human being, to discover their nuances, and wonder about their life. When taking, or looking at a portrait I am drawn to a quiet intimacy, a vulnerability that connects me to the subject. The photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti's portraits of two young cousins Guille and Belinda are images that I never grow tired of revisiting. When I was an artist in residence at Light Work her portrait "The Necklace" hung above my bed. The gaze of the young girl greeted me every morning, like she knew a secret that she wanted to share. Like the best images, this portrait holds layers of meaning. Is it one girl coveting another's beauty, like a queen's attendant, or two girls playing at the women that they will become?

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Untitled, 2004

In a similar image taken years later the girls revisit their younger selves, taking up a familiar pose. This image is what I think of when I think of a good portrait, even though neither girl is in a direct exchange with the camera. There is a change in their appearance, but we also feel  a change in their relationship. This portrait captures the distance that is forming between childhood and adulthood, as well as between the two girls.

A good portrait is magic, and has something that words can not express.