digressions: a blog

1. Alec Soth

Do you want me to pretend that I don’t feel like a little child on the way to an amusement park when I hear Alec Soth has a new body of work? Someone pick me up from Chicago and take me to Atlanta to view Black Line of Woods, his new body of work. Oddly enough, the internet is revealing very little about what the actual work looks like, even beyond a cursory Google effort. We’re all used to seeing and digesting new work quickly and efficiently, so I’m enjoying the anticipation. It appears to be a concerted effort on the part of Alec and the High Museum to suppress details, perhaps as an extension of the nature of the work, which is about the lonely characters beyond the fringes of society, who have consciously dropped out, or have been effectively “dropped out” for some time. Hermits, survivalists, and the like, a group of people no longer foreign to contemporary photography. Maybe the “secretive nature of the work” meets “secretive nature of the PR” is a little too obvious, but at least it offers a departure.

You can see an interview with the Museum’s photography Julian Cox below. And if you’ve had a chance to read the interview I did with Alec for Too Much Chocolate, take a look.

2. Pieter Hugo

Chika Onyejekwe, Junior Ofokansi, Thomas Okafor. Enugu, Nigeria, © Pieter Hugo 2009

When images from Pieter Hugo’s new body of work, Nollywood, causally strolled up from the bottom of my screen in my Reader, I briefly exchanged an internal dialogue with myself regarding not making work that hits this hard. Federica Angelucci says that Nollywood’s movies, West Africa’s Hollywood, “…are a rare instance of self-representation in the mass media. The continent has a rich tradition of story-telling that has been expressed abundantly through oral and written fiction, but has never been conveyed through the mass media before.” In usual Hugo fashion, we find a series of images that dangle a continent’s over fictionalized representation by a string in front of its audience, all the while baffling viewers with it’s seemingly casual photographer/subject interaction. I can’t wait to see the show at Yossi next year.

3. Tim Barber

© Tim Barber

Tim Barber has a new website. There is nothing to say about it, while simultaneously a lot to say about it. I’ll stick with the former. Indulge. Speaking of indulging…

4. Moonmilk Book

Cover of Moonmilk

Morel Books has published Ryan McGinley‘s new body of work, Moonmilk. The first edition sold out right away, which doesn’t surprise me considering the edition was 1000. However, a new edition is on the way. It’s good to see very successful artists collaborating with smaller presses.

5. New Sam Falls Books

© Sam Falls

I also want to highlight Hassla Books, a great independent publisher of small-run artist books. Color Dying Light is the new publication Hassla is releasing by artist Sam Falls, who creates photographs that are self-referential, primitive, and routed in contemporary photography’s interest in walking the medium’s baseline.

Forthcoming from the press is an Anne Collier publication, so keep them under your radar (they have a non-obnoxious mailing list).

Have you noticed that this post consists only of white male photographers? I have, and it bothers me.

6. Jon Feinstein

© Jon Feinstein

Jon Feinstein, all around good dude and advocator of artists, mammothly updated his website. I fully understand a more schizophrenic artistic disposition. Personally, I need to be simultaneously working on projects that consist of taking “straight” photographs while making work that more abstractly approaches photography. Jon clearly does this as well. His practice extends not only to a figure and landscape focus (see Portraits and Small Signs) and pictures about pictures (the image above is from the series Pure Aesthetics), but also to examining image culture on the internet (From Russia With Love), collecting objects in a cataloging context (Fast Food), and recontextualizing dated technology (The Serpent and the Rainbow). Jon, perhaps you should call your website, “Concerns in Contemporary Photography, an Ongoing Guide.” Take a look.