“Often his subjects are depicted in the complex throes of an effort to make sense of their togetherness, and appear at odds to some degree with the environment that surrounds them – disconnected, albeit momentarily, from the ground on which they stand. This disjuncture is counterpointed by alarming and deeply compelling moments of sincerity and intimacy that serve not only to reassert the insufficiency of a model of victimhood as a means by which to make sense of hardship, but that also evince an unbending faith in the essentially humane basis of hope.

All of this is expressed in a vivid palette of striking contrast, and colour imbued with deep-running fertility. So often in these images colour is the analogue of a pivotal emotional tone, but what is perhaps most compelling about its use is the way in which it so often subverts the conventional expectation of the moment or environment in which it is employed. A certain warmth and gratitude underpin the tears of a middle-aged woman stood on a street corner, her gaze welcoming the touch of a man who whose face we cannot see, but whose finger gently brushes a tear from her face; another young woman with a black eye is crowned by the deep gold shimmer of small lights in the distance, her pallid complexion seeming at odds with the warmth that surrounds her. Life as seen in these images is both vivid and monochromatic – as complex as the contradictory circumstances that each photograph seeks so sympathetically to depict. In the end, the images deliver a truth more felt than known.”

— from the introduction to Something more felt than known: a conversation with Curran Hatleberg.

“Depending on how I’m feeling on a particular day or week, I’m constantly changing my mind about what they mean.  I’m wrestling with my own ambivalence while trying to rule out whether I love or hate this place. I seem to not want to commit to either. The landscape continues to be full of messages that complicate my feelings about the past and present.”

— from a conversation with Sean Stewart just uploaded at thegreatleapsideways.com

(Source: thegreatleapsideways.com)

I’m delighted to have one of my photographs featured in Stuart Pilkington’s latest online photographic collaboration, Someone I Know - a collection of portraits made by photographers including my excellent classmate Cynthia Henebry, my teachers Brian Ulrich and Justin James Reed, fellow Richmonder Susan Worsham, as well as the inimitable Irina Rozovsky and many other talented photographers.

Go see.

“As do all wars, the Civil War produced a generation of people tired of trying, of paying for ideals, and the condition of the West is to be explained in part by that generation’s cynicism and the pattern it set. Many immigrants saw their separation from others as a welcome freedom from responsibility. Liberty meant leaving people, whatever their needs, behind. We became a nation of boomers, everlastingly after a new start out in the open, by ourselves.

This morally indefensible equation of space, understood as distance from others, and freedom, understood as license to pursue one’s own interests without regard for those of others (no one else being in view), has ended of course in the reduction of everyone’s freedom. While the apparently infinite number of opportunities to start again stretched away westward, the mythology of capitalism appeared plausible. Anyone could, if the compulsion of his greed were left alone by government, go into the space, which was luckily well stocked with natural resources, and by work become rich.”

— Robert Adams “In the Nineteenth-Century West” in Why People Photograph

Photograph: Bryan Schutmaat, Grays The Mountain Sends

“While it’s certainly true that photographing unknown subjects is a privilege, I don’t claim deep intimacy or insight into the lives of those I photograph. That being said, I am committed to treating my subjects seriously. My interest is in understanding people as individuals, not the fallout of a social problem. I approach people because I’m simply curious about them. I hope the pictures of people convey some semblance of dignity, because they are precisely the type of individuals who are often wrongly perceived of as disadvantaged or outsiders. For me the picture making process has always served to prompt contact, and remove some of the indifference we have for each other — it supplies a reason for human exchange when I wouldn’t have one otherwise.”

— from Something more felt than known: a conversation with Curran Hatleberg, up at thegreatleapsideways.com

(Source: thegreatleapsideways.com)

“These images are curated, and I hope it’s very apparent that that is the case. I really did treat the press negatives like my own, which is to say that while they depict a real moment and real histories, they are very much part of my agenda and my fiction. There are facts in the photographs, but they must be teased out of the greater fiction. In the Copia work and this archive work, I use the fact that we have a difficult time in separating those two from each other to give the pictures more veracity. One of the great strengths of the photographic image is that people want to believe it, so therein lies the refashioning and co-opting. (…)

What started as such a little curiosity has taken me on a long journey of investigation. There are always times when I step back and reconsider whether I’m done with this subject, or I should say done with using consumer culture as indicative of larger political, economic and social issues. Yet I simply continue to find so much more to explore, and the topic is so overarching that it continues to demand attention. What’s invigorating is when it pulls me far outside of what I would normally define as my artistic practice. I wasn’t much of a collector until the ideas in the work pointed me down that road. As a result, now the Copia project has a prequel per se, and this also is big and vast and should be comprehensive.”

— from Close Out: a conversation with Brian Ulrich, just published at thegreatleapsideways.com

“One of the reasons often given to explain why the American film industry settled in Hollywood is Southern California’s ability to simulate almost any part of the world: it has lush agricultural areas, deserts, mountains, forests, oceans and open space in which to build Babylon or Atlanta, all drenched in ceaseless light. That is to say, to be in California is to be everywhere and nowhere and usually somewhere else (in the posher parts of LA every house seems to be dreaming of elsewhere: this half-timbered job is in the Black Forest and that one next door is the Alhambra). And as the Los Angeles writer Jenny Price recently remarked, to say ‘I ate a doughnut in Los Angeles’ is a different thing altogether from saying ‘I ate a doughnut.’ The invocation of LA throws that doughnut on a stage where it casts a long shadow of depravity or opportunity (which, here, might be the same thing). She added that just as Lévi-Strauss once remarked that animals are how we think, so Los Angeles, and by extension California, are also how we think – about society, about urbanism, about the future, about morality and its opposite. It’s as though, in the golden light, everything is thrown into dramatic relief, everything is on stage acting out some drama or other.”

— from “Checking out the Parking Lot” by Rebecca Solnit, July 2004, London Review of Books. Photographs from Boulevard © Katy Grannan (2011). See my essay on Boulevard, “Street Theatre and Broken Dreams”, at thegreatleapsideways.com

From “Before Tomorrow”, featured at thegreatleapsideways.com along with an interview with photographer Yannik Willing.