Amy Stein @ Harvard Museum

© Amy Stein

Amy Stein
Domesticated (Solo Show)
Harvard Museum of Natural History
Cambridge, MA
Jan 22 - Apr 18, 2010

Amy is also speaking at the museum tomorrow at 2 PM. More info to be found at: www.network.nature.com

Re-visit our conversation with Amy by clicking here.

A Conversation with Michelle Kloehn

Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn

Michelle Kloehn (who participated in the very first Nymphoto exhibit) has a wonderful sensitivity to light, composition and the finicky nature of collodion tintypes. The mirror-like surface holds a surreal dimensionality that fiber prints or c-prints do not contain. These nuances are incredible in person (I've been a lucky admirer). Run, don't walk, if you get a chance to see these in person!


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn

NP: Tell us a little about yourself.

MK: I grew up in the Midwest in a town just outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and am the youngest of seven kids. When I was little our house was in a constant state of chaos, with multiple things going on at once- there was never a dull moment. It was within this free-for-all known as my childhood- that I think I unconsciously began my investigation into the world of observation. As the youngest of the clan I was always watching what everyone one else was doing- trying to learn what to and not to do-how to get away with this or that- the basic ropes of growing up. This coupled with being a slightly shy kid was the perfect combination for my keen interest in watching. And the watching- seeing- looking- grew into making images.


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn

NP: How did you discover photography?

MK: I discovered photography really through my dad who was, and still is always taking photos. Growing up we would have slide show nights where he would go through slides he had taken from family trips- the culmination leading up to the shots from when my mom, dad and the four oldest kids lived in Africa for two years. I loved looking at these slides. I would imagine what it would be like to travel to Africa and how different this world looked from my Midwestern one. So I think my dad planted the seed, then as I got older the real hook came after taking a photography class in high school with Mr. Hep. I will never forget the feeling of watching my first image come to surface in the darkroom.


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn

Np: Where do you find inspiration?

MK: This is constantly changing for me- but one thing that I always come back to is light. The way it gets distorted through a window- or runs along the side of a building- or fades just before dark and you can barely make out what’s in front of you. Light is a very physical thing for me and something that I am in constant awe of.


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn

NP: How did this project come about?

MK: I started using the wet plate technique eight years ago, when I went off to a residency and holed myself up in the darkroom until I figured out how the process worked. From there I have created several bodies of work- each one generating more questions for myself. Lately I have been thinking about light and shadow, about abstraction and representation, about the difference between what we think we see and what we want to see.

This series “ Unseen” was made using a very primitive 16 x 20 inch camera that a friend of mine and I put together. The images are all made in my studio where I alternate between making small sculptures and working with light itself. As this work builds and has been getting more and more abstract, and I find myself trying to find a place where the wet plate process adds to and informs the work… a place where chance and intent meet.


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn


Untitled from the series Unseen © Michelle Kloehn

NP: What's next?

MK: Using this large camera has opened up several avenues within the work-so I think I will continue down this path for a while.

Thank you Michelle! For more images, visit michellekloehn.com.

Culturehall Intern Wanted

Click to enlarge courtesy Culturehall

Culturehall is looking for an intern. This is a great opportunity for someone for someone looking to gain experience In art administration. From experience we can tell you that Tema and David are wonderful people to work with.
Please head over to Tema Stauffer's blog to find out more: www.palmaire.blogspot.com.
And see the current issue of Culturehall titled Framed curated by Candace and myself.

If You Are in Durham, NC

Mary Ellen Mark
Extraordinary Child
organized by The National Museum of Iceland
Duke University Center for Documentary Studies
Durham, North Carolina
- through January 27, 2010

Picture of the Week: Heidi Romano

© Heidi Roman

This week's image is by Heidi Romano. Heidi is the founder and curator of the online photo journal UYW. You can currently see Issue 3 at www.unlessyouwill.com.
You can see more of Heidi's work also at: www.talesoflight.com.au.

MLK Day

Medgar Evans' Backyard, Jackson Mississppi, 2005 © Jess Ingram

Today is Martin Luther Kin, Jr. Day in the US and we thought it would be a good occasion to re-visit our conversation with Jessica Ingram. You can do so by clicking here.

Emma Wilcox on WIPNYC

from WIPNYC:



For more images go to emmawilcox.org.

Go-Go Gadget: Instant Gratification

They're baaacck! Polaroid's getting back to their retro roots in 2010 with the release of their Pic 1000, their Polaroid OneStep film camera. Developed in part at the urging of The Impossible Project (who've been manufacturing classic film for Polaroid cameras), you can get all nostalgic while popping in some Polaroid 600 instant film and snapping away.

via Engadget

Tomorrow: Katrina D'Autremont

Sofia y Rosa, 2006 © Katrina M. d'Autremont

Si Dios Quiere (If God Wants)
2009 Fellowship Award Exhibition
Photographs by Katrina M. d’AutremontSilver Eye Center for Photography
1015 East Carson Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
Telephone: 412.431.1810

January 12 – March 20, 2010

Opening Reception:Saturday, January 16, 2010 7 – 9 p.m.
Artist’ remarks at 7:30 p.m., Members free; Non-members $6

Congrats Katrina!!

A Conversation with Yola Monakhov

Young Men from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov

Yola Monakhov's solo show Photography After Dante opens tonight at Sasha Wolf Gallery. Yola was kind enough to take the time out in her busy schedule to share the thoughts and the ideas behind Photography After Dante with us.


Alfredo at Home from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov


Police from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov

NP: Tell us a little about yourself.

YM: I was born in Moscow, USSR, and immigrated to the States with my parents at the age of seven. I grew up in Jersey City and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My parents lived in Jersey City, but since the schools in New York City were better, I officially resided with my grandmother in a government building on Madison Street (not Avenue), and then on Cherry Street, by the Manhattan bridge, and attended what is now called the Chelsea School for Writers and Artists, and then the Bronx High School of Science.


Bartender from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov


Girl with Plane from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov

NP: How did you discover photography?

YM: I discovered photography at Bronx Science. At that time I was a lackluster student, but when I took photography my junior year, the comment "student especially gifted in this field" appeared for the first and only time on my report card from a drop-down menu of comments. I used my father's partly manual Nikon with a zoom lens and no aperture control, the kind of camera I now discourage students from using. Later on, my good friend's boyfriend, a young man sometimes on the wrong side of the law, sold me an F3 with a satchel of accoutrements. I knew it to be stolen, but this did not bother me until later. In college, at Madison, WI, I worked for the student paper as a photographer and reporter, but had no notion of photography as a life. I studied literature, and proceeded to a PhD program in Italian at Columbia.


Man with children from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov


Paola from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov

NP: Where do you find inspiration?

YM: I don't think about inspiration as a practical part of my work, although there are certainly times when I seem to have better results and productivity. I think my work became stronger when I started to work from internal motivation and all the time, regardless of how I felt. A friend of mine who is an actor and writer in Hollywood once told me that the difficulty in acting was that you couldn't just act on your own, outside of a production. You needed a vehicle. In photography, one invents vehicles for oneself, or counts on assignments, but I find it important to make work regardless of whether the vehicle is there. It's small enough a medium that I can go out on my own even if I have only a vague notion of what I am looking for. Or I can have a very specific project. And when not making pictures, there is plenty to do with printing, developing, researching, teaching, organizing, and planning. That said, I find my education and my interest in the world, literature, politics, and culture to provide both a starting point, and a framework for what I do. And let's not discount the importance of love, and a spiritual and emotional life.


Cows from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov


Ragazzi di Siena from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov

NP: How did this project come about?

YM: I think of this project as something like the closing of a circle. Seven years after leaving my PhD program, I came back to Columbia for my MFA, and then had the opportunity to teach there. In early 2008, I attended a university lecture about Dante by my former professor, Teo Barolini, in which she drew attention to the poet's eye for detail, what she called his "non-stereotyping imagination," and how, as a result of seeing the particular, he was able to acknowledge and create of "Multiplicities of History, Identity, and Belief," as her lecture was called. This made a bell go off in my head, as teaching photography had launched me into thinking about the structure of the medium. Certainly, the fact that meaning stemmed from the particular thing before the camera was big. And I was interested in the truism that photographs are like poems. It occurred to me that I could have a very interesting conversation with Dante's poem in my work, and that it could be a fruitful collaboration. (Choosing collaborators, why not go for the top!?) I applied for and received a small fellowship from La Macina di San Cresci in Greve in Chianti, Tuscany, and travelled there last summer to initiate the project. I consider this show to be the first part. Ultimately, I intend to spend more time with this project and complete a book that brings the two subjects together.


Pantheon from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov


Piazza from Photography After Dante © Yola Monakhov

NP: What's next?

YM: I have a full semester of teaching ahead of me. Once this show is up, I will get back to my New York project, "Empire Pictures." Now that I have done something in which I brought a set of constraints into my work, and, I think, activated the subject in a new way for me, I wish to continue on this path. Something that came out of the Dante work was that everyone I photographed, when I told them what I was doing, had their own understanding of my project, got it, so to speak, and, commented on it in some way, whether verbally, or in how they expressed themselves before the camera, or both. This dimension, akin to oral history, but perhaps something different, seems worthy of exploration. I think that the documentary genre in photography has long had a troubled, or perhaps undefined, relationship to its subject. Witness the reception of two new Dorothea Lange biographies, in The New York Review of Books recently, where Jonathan Raban labels her work an "American Pastoral." Or the sort of revisionism or violence that Walker Evans' work has undergone, with Sherrie Levine, now on view at the Met, or Allie Mae Burroughs resurfacing as an older woman. Or even something like National Geographic sending Steve McCurry to find the woman who, as a girl, posed for its most famous picture of all time, only to have her voice discomfort with what had happened, and to demonstrate that, as a grown woman with a hard life, it is only with the face of a little girl that she could have had the appeal that readers found so mesmerizing. That relationship between a photographer's mastery (when the photographer does indeed possess it), and the lives of its subjects (when not before the camera), and questions of the picturesque, of how the camera shapes the subject, is an ongoing concern. And of course, there is the question of how culture, that ubiquitous thing, filters through, and then assimilates the products of that encounter. This is a concern I intend for my work to continue to address.

Thank you Yola! For more images in the Photography After Dante series and other projects please visit yolamonakhov.deepvisionmedia.com.

Photography After Dante
Sasha Wolf Gallery
10 Leonard St.
New York, NY 10013
January 14 though March 6