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Episode 32 | Paul Mpagi Sepuya Jul 11, 2019

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I went to go visit Paul Mpagi Sepuya on a cool day this past winter at his studio in the Boyle Heights area of LA. In one room, test prints, book mockups His desk and a big printer filled the space. In the other, a Russian plywood bench, a big mirror on the wall, a velvet curtain hanging and a camera on a tripod. He suggested we do the interview in that room, the set where many of his photos have been made, and maybe somehow, maybe the setting would provoke more interesting conversation. The items in that room are the elements in his photographs, and they all have significance in relation to his interests in portraiture, but what I found equally as interesting was the economy he used with those props in order to produce varieties of different, complex images. Nothing about his picture making process is really fancy, but that simplicity allows him to roam around in, and complicate the frame.

In the past few years, Sepuya has really been on a roll - he’s had work in Moma’s most recent New Photography exhibition, is currently in the Whitney Biennial. He’s had had numerous solo shows, most recently at Team Gallery in New York and his photo Darkroom Mirrors was featured on the cover of Artforum’s March 2019 issue.

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Jeff Burton Jun 14, 2019

Show notes

It seems to me like the more dramatic the subject matter a photographer takes on, the more difficult their job becomes. When what is in front of the camera has so much visual appeal already, how do you make pictures that are more interesting than the event?

Jeff Burton’s pictures are such a great example of how brilliantly someone has dealt with that problem. His work, much of which was made on gay adult film sets in LA, rarely just documents what is in front of him, but rather uses that material to construct his own personal and mysterious world that's more suggestive than explicit.

Burton was born in Anaheim, California and grew up in Texas where he studied at the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. He then pursued his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts as a painter before moving back to LA where he got a job at Catalina Films shooting stills on on gay porn sets.

We had this conversation in the garden outside his home in Silver Lake in Los Angeles.

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Jo Ann Callis May 21, 2019

Show notes

Jo Ann Callis’ photographs have such an uncanny strangeness to them. They often feel like they could be stills out of a David Lynch film, but she was making them long before Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive came to be.

She was born in Cincinnati and pursued her interest in art at Ohio State University, though her eduction was interrupted by marriage, moving our to LA and having kids. These challenges, though, would end up becoming a big part of her subject matter. She’s always been interested in the domestic, the body , femininity and sexuality but her pictures always complicate something that might seem so familiar to us all.

She enrolled at UCLA and it was there that she studied under the highly inventive Robert Heinecken in the early 70’s, who made a big impact on her. He turned her onto the the work of Paul Outerbridge and encouraged her to pursue what was going on in her life and inside her head as fodder for work.

We conducted this interview at her home in Culver City, Los Angeles where she’s been living for the past 38 years where we talked about her life and work.

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Mark McKnight Apr 30, 2019

Show notes

There is so much soul in Mark McKnight's dark, complex, psychological photographs, whether he's photographing the bodies of men he’s attracted to, still lives or landscapes, all which have a distinct relationship to one another.

Just last week, Mark was awarded the very prestigious Aperture Portfolio Prize. I encourage you to go and read Brendan Embser’s write-up on Aperture’s site because he really hits the nail on the head with Marks work and introduces it so beautifully. Embser says:

“ Mark McKnight is a modern-day modernist. His black-and-white photographs of skin and sand, brick and tar, with their rich tones and sparkling light, are redolent of twentieth-century masterworks, those pictures by men like Edward Weston who cast the world in silver-gelatin. Weston once said the camera should be used for recording the “quintessence of the thing itself, whether polished steel or palpitating flesh.” But for McKnight, who was born in Los Angeles to a New Mexican, Hispana-identified mother, something was missing from Weston’s vision. Something that would ignite a flame of recognition in a young queer man with ideas about male beauty more expansive than the Eurocentric standard. Something that would make “straight” photography a little less straight.”

Mark and I got together at his studio in the Boyle Heights area of LA, where he showed me some recent stunning prints that he’d been labouring over in darkroom. We got to talking about another big part of his life - teaching - which he spoke about with the same enthusiasm and energy that comes through in his work.

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Marcelo Gabriel Yanez Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

I first heard of Marcelo Yanez through a mutual friend, Bryson Rand, when he took out this tabloid format publication called Newspaper to show me. In Bryson’s usual humility, he didn’t even mention the photo of his that graced the cover, but Instead, wanted to show me other work inside that he was excited about, and especially about who put this all together.

At 19 years old, Marcelo Yanez took on a project. He had discovered a publication from the early 70’s called Newspaper that featured the work of photographers in the downtown New York scene. He fell in love wit it, and began to work on a revival of it with contemporary artists. In a looseleaf insert that came with the first issue of his revival, Marcelo wrote about treating Newspaper as an alternative exhibition space, and letting other queer artists know that if they’re in a particular geographical area where queer spaces don’t exist, to get in touch, so we can form a community. I remember reading that and feeling such a generosity and initiative in that offering. It both impressed and charmed me, and I knew this person was doing something special.

While he was working on Newspaper, he was studying art history ar NYU, with minors in German and Medieval studies, was working at the Fales library doing archival work, and he was also making his own photographs. Currently, Marcelo is a PhD student in the department of art and art history at Stanford University studying American art.

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Susan Meiselas Feb 28, 2019

Show notes

I got to Susan Meiselas’ Mott street studio a few minutes early and one of her assistants let me in to set up my gear. As I was waiting for her to arrive, I was leafing through a worn out first edition of Carnival Strippers, thinking to myself nervously, in that bout of anxiety before an interview - what are we going to even talk about that she’s gonna find interesting? The door clicked open she flew into the basement studio apologizing for a Magnum Foundation meeting running a few minutes late. She asked one of her assistants to prepare two cameras for some portraits of an old acquaintance she was going to do that evening an at the theatre, and rummaged through a couple manilla files looking for a note that she didn’t want to forget, and excused herself to shoot of a quick email. As soon as we sat down at the table and put the headphones on, though, her attention, in a split second, became so focused and engaged, as if none of the other million things she was working on or thinking about mattered. And that focus grabbed and threw me into this zone - my insecurities and preoccupations of what we were going to talk about dissipated in favour of an attention and curiosity in her.

Susan Meiselas has spent her life going into situations and making such varied acquaintances with who she has photographed over time, from young teenage girls outside her home on Mott Street to women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She’s documented human rights issues in Nicaragua to the goings on of exclusive S and M club in New York called Panora’s box. Meeting people and making quick acquaintances is one thing, but then making good pictures in those situations is another. It requires a kind of focus - getting into a zone - that I saw so palpably when we got together.

Meiselas was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948, studied at Harvard earning her MA in visual eduction, taught in the New York public school system and has worked as one of our most esteemed documentary photographers for close to 50 years. In 1976, she joined Magnum Photos and became a full member in 1980.

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Mary Frey Jan 25, 2019

Show notes

In the past two years, Mary Frey put out two new books - Reading Raymond Carver and Real Life Dramas. The first is made up of black and white work and the other, all color. Both bodies of work are in and around 35 years old and these were Frey’s first major publications of them. It wasn’t exactly as if she was unknown until now though. In fact, almost the inverse. She’s been a cult hero in photography circles for years and a beloved teacher at Hartford’s graduate program, where she taught until 2015.

Frey earned her MFA at Yale and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her work had been show at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and at MoMA to name a few. It was actually in the catalogue for a seminal show at MoMA called The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort where I first discovered her work. I remember her pictures had everything that I was interested in photography in them - they were banal, yet mysterious moments out of the everyday, they were graphically compelling, such great color and they had a strange open ended quality to them, especially in their unusual pairings with curious texts that accompanied them.

We got together at her studio in Longmeadow, MA to have this conversation.

- Jordan Weitzman

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Rory Mulligan Dec 22, 2018

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Jack Woody Nov 13, 2018

Show notes

I think I first came across Jack Woody’s name after buying a Duane Michals called Album years ago. I remember thinking that it was so elegant, so beautifully printed and layed out, that I was curious who was behind it. I remember mentioning that book the first time I met Duane, and he told me that there was this hotel in San Francisco who bought the book and cut out and framed the prints they were so gorgeous.

That gravure process that Jack Woody tracked down and began to use became one of the signatures of his imprints, Twelvetree and Twin Palms. The name of his first press comes from his grandmother, Helen Twelvetrees, a Hollywood movie star in the 1930’s.

After graduating high school, he wanted to go see his grandmother’s star on Hollywood boulevard, so he hitchhiked to LA. He ended up getting a job at a used bookstore called Pickwick. After a year there, he moved to Antiquarian Books, which was where he met David Hockney and his galerist Nicholas Wilder. It was that meeting that eventually led him to meeting Duane Michals, whose portfolio, Homage to Cavafy, he showed while working at the Nicolas Wilder gallery.

He’s published over 150 art books by the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Herbert List, George Platt Lynes, Diane Keaton, Allen Ginsberg, Lise Sarfati, Malerie Marder, Mark Morrisroe, Eggleston, Clemente, Michals, Mapplethorpe, Davidson...the list just goes on and on.

When he started publishing art and more specifically photo books in the 198O’s, no zone else was doing it, other than a couple other presses. He essentially invented a form that his imprint would become known for.

I was so excited to go and meet him. The Rolodex of people that he’s known and worked with is like an encyclopedia of both gay and photo history. And yet, when I went over to the house that he designed and built in the hills of Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met the most humble and charming man - soft spoken, unpretentious, but also willing to talk about his life and work if you expressed interest.

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Farah Al Qasimi Oct 09, 2018

Show notes

Last month, I went to visit Farah Al Qasimi at her home and studio in Williamsburg. After talking with her, I thought about her space and how both her studio and her living area represented different parts of her in a way. Both very smart, both refined, but in different ways - the living space had an elegance and a lightness to it, while the studio had a sense of humour and playfulness. I took it a step further and then thought about how those rooms also reflect the different ways she photographs men and women, which we'll get into in this episode

Farah’s work explores issues of identity, beauty and surface in the United Arab Emerates. Her work puts into question the way people are represented and speaks to and plays with traditional genres of the medium such as portraiture. She grew up between the United States and Abu Dabi, and finally moved to the US when she enrolled at Yale. She enrolled in the music program at Yale, and only switched into the photography program in her third year after a couple inspiring classes.

Her photos have been exhibited internationally, and last year, she had a solo show in NY last year called More Good New and published the book Body Shop. In addition to her practise as a photographer and a filmmaker, she teaches as well in the photography departments at RISD and NYU.

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