Magic Hour

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Michael Marcelle Sep 28, 2020

Show notes

I have an interesting relationship to Mike Marcelle’s work. On the one hand, I totally get it, but on the other, i so don’t relate to where it comes from. I get the seeing, I feel the strength of the pictures, but his reference points feel so different than mine in a way. Like, for example, the new Suspiria would probably NOT come up in every conversation of mine, and with him, welll…..

Process though - that’s another story. Hearing Mike speak about his way of making pictures, often involving ideas as starting points for photos i totally get. In his case, he jots them down in a several year long email to himself that he replies to over and over. Those ideas, though, are just to get off the couch, to try something out, to roam around and find things. The photos that he makes are always completely different and unexpected.

Mike grew up in New Jersey where he recently made photos of his family which ended up in his book Kokomo, published with Matte in 2018. In Gregory Crewdson’s essay in the book, he says that Marcelle's photographs employ various conventions of the beloved horror and B-movies of his youth - self-consciously low-end special effects and garish, technicolor lighting - the materials of the domestic and familial are reconfigured into an uncanny, alien world.

We conducted this interview remotely, i in Montreal, and Mike at his home in upstate New York that he shares with his husband Danny.

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Mary Manning May 21, 2020

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On an unusually mild winter evening this past February, I got together with Mary Manning at her apartment in NYC. She is the author of Blueprint and First Impressions of Greece, and has contributed to numerous publications, most recently, a wonderful image text exchange with the author Olivia Laing in the Spirituality issue of Aperture. In 2006, she started the blog Unchanging Window, which became an important creative outlet for her and a way of finding community. She has shown with Canada (gallery) in NYC, has shot for Ekhaus Latta, and recently contributed photos to the Dimes Cookbook.

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Drew Sawyer Apr 21, 2020

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Just before the world went into Covid-19 lockdown, I got together with Drew Sawyer at his apartment in the Bedstuy. He’s the photo Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, and among the numerous exhibitions he’s worked on in his current and previous posts at MoMa and the Columbus Museum of Art, he recently gave the Russian Ghanian photographer Liz Johnson Artur her first solo museum exhibition, resurrected the color work of Gary Winogrand and put together an incredible survey of queer work in the past 50 years in Art After Stonewall. Drew earned his Ph.D in art history and archeology at Columbia University, where his dissertation was a critical re-examination of Walker Evans.

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Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. Mar 11, 2020

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On the chair next to me sat a worn out copy of Toni Morrisson’s Beloved, a favorite which Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. told me he’s read at least three times. We were sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment which he’s been living at in Flushing, Queens, on the upstairs floor of a yellow and burgundy house museum dedicated to the work of Louis Ladimer. Ladimer was the inventor of the carbon-filament light bulb, an addendum and improvement to Thomas Edison’s original lightbulb. So the photographer is living in the house of someone who helped a great deal with the way we see, and in Elliott’s case, it seemed particularly apt. At his recent solo show in New York at Nicelle Beauchane, his photographs radiated with grace and elegance, a heightened sensitivity to form, rendering unexpected, complicated and beautiful images out of his everyday life.

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Vince Aletti Feb 03, 2020

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Vince Aletti has been writing and reporting on culture for over 50 years. He was the first person to write about disco for Rolling Stone in the early 70’s, he worked as a senior-editor for the Village Voice for over twenty years and was the photo critic for the New Yorker until 2016. In this episode, Jordan Weitzman sits down with Aletti at his storied, book and art filled east village apartment to talk about it all.

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Carmen Winant Jan 08, 2020

Show notes

Just last weekend, a piece of Carmen’s - a portrait in multiple images of Toni Morrisson was featured on the last cover of the New York Times Magazine of the decade. The culmination of an eventful past couple of years for Carmen, she released two new books - Notes on Fundamental Joy with Printed Matter and My Birth with SPBH Editions. That book accompanied her show of the same name in MoMa’s New Photography in 2018. In that powerful installation, she used two facing walls to tape up over 2000 found photographs of women giving birth.

Winant was born in San Fransisco, studied at UCLA and the California College of the Arts and now lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, artist Luke Stettner and their two sons, Carlo and Rafa. She is the Roy Lichtenstein chair of studio art at Ohio State University where she teaches as well.

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Allen Frame Nov 26, 2019

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Jordan Weitzman sits down with photographer Allen Frame at his home and talk about everything from his early days in Boston with Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, to where his sense of space in his photographs comes from.

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Patrice Aphrodite Helmar Oct 16, 2019

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I remember the first time I met Patrice Aphrodite Helmar. It was around this time in 2017, and a friend asked if I wanted to go and check out the Backyard Biennial that she was putting on at her place in Ridgewood. A self-initiated curatorial effort, she showcased the work of emerging and established photographers alike. There was food and drinks, a slideshow going, and prints untraditionally arranged within the orange walls of her backyard. As we walked in to her ground floor apartment, she greeted and hugged us as if we were old friends. I remember we talked about Friedlander’s Nudes and EJ Belloq’s Storyville portraits at some point that night, but what stuck with me most was a kind of energy that she filled the room with.

Patrice makes heartbreaking photos - lots of pictures of people, often in intimate settings. She’s made lots of her work in bars, where she’s also worked quite a bit, and she’s spent a lot of time shooting in New Orleans. She’s exhibited work across the country, but, she also gives so much back and makes such an important contribution to the photo community in New York. Aside from the Backyard Biennial, she teaches at Pratt and Fordham, and she's the founder Marble Hill Camera Club.

This episode was brought to you by:

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Matt Grubb Sep 17, 2019

Show notes

Matt Grubb is sitting in his car in the parking lot outside his favourite movie theatre in Queens, sipping a Diet Coke. As we're coordinating a time to meet for this interview, he tells me that he’s about to go see the new Avengers movie for the third time. It had just come out two weeks ago….I’m amazed and laughing to myself just thinking how much i love that compulsion. I think that same kind of curiosity and passion goes into his work and is one of the reason’s he’s such a brilliant image maker. His pictures, often varied genre’s, are unified somehow in this mysterious, very original combination of eloquence and strangeness.

Matt grew up in San Francisco, earned his MFA at Yale and has done editorial work for the New York Times, Vice and most recently, Gayletter. This past summer, he published his first, now sold out book, Brian Singer 2001, which was launched at 56 Henry in New York alongside a selection of new photographs made this year.

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Bruno Ceschel Aug 28, 2019

Show notes

In 2010, with a feeling that the traditional publishing industry was not going to last, Bruno Ceschel founded Self Publish Be Happy, an initiative to support and promote the work of emerging photographers. Originally, it functioned as a platform for artists making DIY Books and Zines, but eventually would become more expansive, getting involved in educational activities, the curation of exhibitions and events, and with their own publishing initiative. Through its imprint SPBH editions, Ceschel has published books by Carmen Winant, Lorenzo Vitturi, Nicholas Muelner, Peter Puklus and Chritina de Middel to name a few.

In addition to his work with Self Publish Be Happy, Ceschel is also a lecturer and a curator and has organized events at numerous international institutions such as C/O Berlin, The Photographers Gallery in London, MiCamera Mian and Printerd Matter in New York. He also writes regularly for publications such as Aperture, the British Journal of Photography and FOAM.

Ceschel began his career in photography working at Colors Magazine as a journalist, then edited by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.

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