matt black

Matt Black's work has been popping up all over the place lately. Deservedly so. This is some of the strongest documentary photography I've seen in a long time. I have used the word slay, as in this work slays me. I had a hard time selecting images to share here, as I basically like all of the pictures he's made. He just recently won the W. Eugene Smith Award.

Here's the bio from his website:

Matt Black is a photographer from California’s Central Valley. His work has explored themes of migration, farming, poverty and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico. Recent photo essays have been published in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and Vice Magazines.

He was named Time Magazine's Instagram photographer of the year in 2014 and is a contributor to the @everydayusa photographers’ collective. He has produced short films and multimedia pieces for msnbc.com, Orion Magazine, and The New Yorker, and has taught photography with the Foundry Photojournalism Workshops and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Anastasia Photo gallery in New York represents his fine prints. He is a nominee to Magnum Photos.

His work has been profiled by National Geographic, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Time and Slate, and has been honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, World Press Photo, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Pictures of the Year International, the Alexia Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. He lives in Exeter, a small town in California’s Central Valley.

aline smithson

Many years ago while attending a Santa Fe portfolio review, a lovely fellow participant noticed my name tag and said hello. She had seen my work in Shots Magazine and really liked it. We shared our portfolios with one another, had drinks and dinner and quickly became friends.

My friendship with Aline Smithson has deepened over time. She, practically unknown as a photographer that year in Santa Fe, has blossomed into quite the photo super star! You may know her blog, Lenscratch (if you don't, you should) and you've probably seen work from one or more of her series in various photo publications. Maybe you've shown her your work at a portfolio review (she sits on both sides of the review table these days), heard her lecture or taken a class from her. Recently, perhaps you've seen her book. Aline is a busy and talented woman. She's also incredibly supportive, generous and kind.

We traded prints early on in our friendship. I selected one from her series called "Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer's Mother," her ode to Whistler's famous painting. I love this body of work, and it was the one that really defined Aline's arrival as a photographer (in her past life she was both painter and fashion editor.) Her mother, well into her 80's when she agreed to pose for this series, was in poor health but maintained a great sense of humor about it. Sadly, she didn't live long enough to see the completed set of images, but Aline has always said she's "up there enjoying her success."

Aline's "Spring Fever" series is another of my favorites. In it she photographed seven-year-old girls wearing hats from the 1950's (she loves a good garage sale). In Aline's own words:

"Juxtaposing hats traditionally worn by women half a century older with the visual of a child on the threshold of knowledge and sophistication allows us a glimpse into the future, and possibly a reflection of a face that wore a head full of flowers long ago.

Some believe that articles of clothing hold the essence of the original owner. It is my hope that we are not only looking at a contemporary face, but an echo of a person that once wore a hat covered in flowers and worn during a church service or a garden luncheon, when once upon a time, we celebrated Spring with fanfare and a hat."

In spite of the fact that Aline has so much on her plate these days, she continues to be a prolific art-maker. And now, 20 years worth of her work as a photographer has been compiled in a gorgeous book called "For Self & Others: Portraits as Autobiography." With a thoughtful introduction by Karen Sinsheimer (of blessed memory), essays by Aline and just over 100 beautifully reproduced images, the book is a welcome tribute to a smart, engaged, curious, witty, sensitive and poetic photographer. Among the 18 bodies of work represented, I still love her older black and white work (Aline remains a film devotee) that includes, among other things, images of her family and her environs.

Aline considers all her portraits a reflection of who she is and has created a visual narrative that defines exactly that. I think it's ultimately what most of us are trying to achieve in one way or another; she has succeeded with style and grace, and I congratulate her heartily. I'm glad she came up and said hello in Santa Fe; I truly value our friendship that has spanned these many years.

wild and precious

How can you not love this guy? He named his daughters Clover Lee, Poppy Dee and Honey Bee! Jesse Burke received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, where he is a faculty member, and his BFA from the University or Arizona. His work deals with "themes related to vulnerability and identity, as well as human's complicated relationship with nature." Jesse was recently named one Time Magazine's top 50 US photographers to follow on Instagram. His book, Wild and Precious, from which these images are culled, was published this month by Daylight Books. It features images made over five year's worth of road trips made with daughter Clover, and it looks pretty wonderful. 

"Wild & Precious brings together treasures from a series of road trips traveled with my daughter to explore the natural world. I use these adventures to encourage a connection between my child and nature and to give her an education that I consider essential—one that develops appreciation, respect, conservation, and self-confidence. On the road we talk about the vastness of nature and try to get more in touch with the earth. Together we document the routes we drive, the landscapes we discover, the creatures we encounter, even the roadside motels where we sleep. Wild & Precious reveals the fragile, complicated relationship that humans share with nature and attempts to strengthen those bonds." - Jesse Burke

they say it's about the journey...

not the destination.

Recently I spent a week at a place in paradise where I got to do some of my favorite things: hiking, swimming, circuit training, eating of fresh organic vegetarian food, and spending time with my sister. I wasn't planning to hang out in the art studio and play with clay, but I did.

It had been a while since I squished cold earth through my fingers, and I forgotten what a supremely relaxing and meditative act it is for me. I was, once again, smitten by this quiet, solitary activity.

The clay I used, as it turns out, is one that doesn't dry. Ever. Or at least, not soon enough to make it easy to transport. So, anything I made in the shaded, breezy studio was something I knew I would leave behind.

Rather than worry about how it might look fired or how it might look glazed or how it might look on my mantel, it was simply about how it felt to be doing it at that moment. And, guess what? There were no worries! What a novel idea! The process was what counted, not the finished product.

I did have my iPhone handy, though, so I took snaps of the stuff I made. Then I said "goodbye!" It was actually very liberating.

Now I just need to figure out how to let this notion spill over into other areas of my life.

haiku

I bet I hadn't written a haiku poem since middle school, but that was our first assignment for the Midwest Jewish Artists Lab (which started this week). We were asked to bring a piece of recent work and write three lines to introduce the work we make. It was a nice way for us all get to know each other a bit as we begin this journey together. Among us are dancers, poets and visual artists. A very interesting mix!

My haiku:

In the early Spring

The wind curls around your face.
Eyelashes flutter.

Have a great weekend, all!

jordi pizarro: twins

“A few months ago New Delhi-based photographer Jordi Pizarro came across a magazine story about the small town of Kodinhi in the southwestern state of Kerala, India. Home to about 2,000 families, Kodhini is reported to have a whopping 250 pairs of twins (give or take a few). Pizarro says it’s a phenomenon that no one in the village has been able to explain.

(To put that number in perspective, according to the Telegraph that’s more than six times the global average, and one of the highest twinning rates in the world.)

Wanting to see pictures of all these twins, Pizarro did what most people do—he searched online. Surprisingly, he found very few professional images, so he set off for Kodhini straight away to make photos of his own.

That journey, made along with a friend and translator, took him first to the capital of Kerala, where he learned that there would be a mass for 400 sets of twins at a Christian church in the south of the district a few days later.

‘My friend and I started to laugh,’ says Pizarro. ‘After having lived in India for two years, you learn never to be sure about anything in this country, and you can’t make plans too far in advance, since sometimes things happen and sometimes they don’t.

‘So we arrived very early at this church. I was totally nervous and anxious thinking about the twins—and whether or not this mass would be real.’

But real it was. Prior to the mass, Pizarro found the director of the church and got full access to photograph the ceremony.

‘After a breakfast of tea and cookies, we started to see sets of twins dressed exactly alike coming up the road,’ says Pizarro. ‘I jumped out of the car and I started to speak with the people, asking them, Why are you coming here? Where are you from?’

The lighting inside the church was dim, so Pizarro made portraits of many of the twins outside, in a more natural setting. The next day, he continued on to his original destination, Kodhini.

After his positive experience in the church, Pizarro expected it would be easy to find twins to photograph in Kodhini, but to his surprise, no twin would let him take their picture without permission from the director of the local ‘twin association.’ And it turned out that that guy wanted thousands of dollars to grant permission. Citing his ethics as a photojournalist, Pizarro refused to pay.

Frustrated and disheartened, Pizarro was smoking a cigarette outside when a well-dressed man approached him. He spoke a little English and asked Pizarro what he was doing in Kodhini. Pizarro explained his project, and the man, a teacher at a local school, said he knew most families in town and offered to introduce him to twins. The only thing he wanted in exchange was the opportunity to practice his English.

‘It was perfect,’ says Pizarro. ‘We spent three days with the teacher going to visit different houses in the village, and the scene was very different—all the people received us well and were super happy to have a professional photographer taking portraits of them.’

Continuing with the style he had started outside the church, Pizarro decided to use the tropical vegetation as his backdrop and to have the twins wear the same clothes.

To create the final images, he used a Photoshop filter that emulates the look of Kodachrome film and added borders from scanned vintage photos.

‘What I like from this series is that looking at it gives a sensation of something magical,’ says Pizarro. ‘The images feel familiar, like a family album.’"

[Jordi Pizarro is from Barcelona and is currently based in Delhi. This article was published on the National Geographic blog.]