Assembly (Ashlyn Davis Burns & Shane Lavalette)

Alec Soth is so beautifully human and also a brilliant photographer, and one so obviously begets the other. But if you don't take a listen for the insight into his art practice, new body of work, and upcoming photobook , come for the ping pong stories. Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (2019), and A Pound of Pictures (2022). Soth has had over fifty solo exhibitions including survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume in Paris (2008), the Walker Art Center in Minnesota (2010) and Media Space in London (2015). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Loock Galerie in Berlin, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

This is a really special episode. Andres Gonzalez talks about American Origami, which not only happens to be an extraordinarily impactful and important project, but also the most dynamically designed photobook. . . maybe ever. Andres is thoughtful, passionate, and extremely talented. Prepare to be inspired and more than a little in awe. Andres Gonzalez is an educator and visual artist whose current work engages with in-depth research to investigate relationships between ritual, memory, and place within the American social landscape. He has published two books, Some(W)Here in 2012 made over decade while living in Istanbul, and American Origami in 2019 which won the Light Work Photo Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture Book Awards.    He has received recognition from the Pulitzer Center, the Alexia Foundation, and is a Fulbright Fellow. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Stedelijk Museum in the Amsterdam, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, where he also collaborated with the Columbia College theater department and members from Tectonic Theater Project on a theatrical adaption of American Origami.

To continue our short streak of publisher/designers, I interviewed David Chickey for the podcast. I have often said that I want to be Dave Chickey when I grow up. While we are similar in age, I'd need decades to even come close to his talent and accomplishments. And of course, he couldn't be more lovely or more sincere. (Sidenote: How cool is it that I get to talk to all of these amazing and creative humans? What a life!)David Chickey is the publisher, designer, and editorial director of Radius Books, a nonprofit publishing company based in Santa Fe. He co-founded Radius Books in 2007 with a mission to encourage, promote, and publish books of artistic and cultural value. Radius titles have received national recognition, including multiple awards from AIGA, American Association of Museums Publishing, and best book nominations from The New Yorker, TIME, PDN, Smithsonian, Independent Publisher, and The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation. Chickey is the former board chair of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, and a graduate of Sussex University, England, and UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Jason Koxvold is the kind of person you would hate if he wasn't so smart and talented and thoughtful and kind. Oh, and charming. Did I mention charming? Yeah, he's the worst. Jason Koxvold (b. 1977, Liege, Belgium) received his BSc in Social Science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2000. His fine art practice focuses on the shared spaces between neoliberal economic policy and military strategy; he has made work in diverse locations, from Afghanistan to Nigeria, Arctic Russia to South Africa. His first monograph, Knives, was published in 2017, followed by You Were Right All Along (2018) and Calle Tredic iMartiri (2019). He is the founder of Gnomic Book, an imprint focused on challenging subjects by emerging artists, and Virtual—Assembly, an online book fair to support publishers and artists in our present moment of social distancing. Koxvold has exhibited in solo and group shows in the UnitedStates, Britain, France, and Japan. His work has been featured in publications including The British Journal of Photography, Aperture, the Financial Times Magazine, Der Greif, Wired, Le Litteraire, Newsweek, Gestalten, Thisispaper, The Great Leap Sideways, Mother Jones, and Slate. He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.

This is a super special podcast - mostly because Alan Rapp is an incredible fount of knowledge about the photobook publishing business, but also because we go deep talking shop, and he somehow pulled a switcheroo midway through and started asking me about my process for selecting projects.  If you're interested in photobook publishing, and if you're listening to this podcast I think you may be, there's a lot to learn from this episode.Alan Rapp is editorial director at Monacelli, a division of Phaidon. He is an editor, book developer, and writer specializing in photography, architecture, and design. He started his visual book publishing career at Chronicle Books, where he developed the photography list and published books by Elinor Carucci, David Maisel, Jona Frank, Jim Marshall, Linda Connor, and Henry Horenstein. Under the Monacelli umbrella, he has collaborated on new works by Elinor Carucci (Midlife) and Jona Frank (Cherry Hill), as well as Cig Harvey's fourth book, Blue Violet. He has contributed to several books and his writing has appeared in numerous print and web publications, including The Photobook Review, Modern Painters, and Urban Omnibus.

I have been a fan of Gail Albert Halaban's Out My Window series for years, so it was a delight to get to speak with her about this long-term project that began in her city, New York, and has since gone global. Tune in to hear about building community through photography and the interesting connections to be made when you look into your neighbors' windows.Gail Albert Halaban is an American artist born in Washington, DC. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and received her MFA in photography from Yale University. Her work has been widely published including three monographs of her Out My Window work which explores what people see through their neighbors’ windows in the cities of the world. Her work has been exhibited extensively, and she is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City, Jackson Fine Arts in Atlanta, and Weinstein Hammons in Minneapolis. 

Louie and I met in 2011. He was just back from Afghanistan with the most gorgeous silver portraits of soldiers he was embedded with. Six years later, we would publish those portraits as part of the deconstructed photobook, Front Towards Enemy. We had many adventures in between and even more since, including sitting 10 feet from Andrew McCarthy during a screening of Pretty in Pink.  To know Louie is to adore him.  He is one of the most sincere, loyal, stand-up people I know, and I'm thrilled you'll get to know him a little (by listening) too. Louie Palu is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on social political issues such as war, human rights, and poverty. His work has appeared in festivals, publications, exhibitions and collections internationally. He's a 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the recipient of numerous awards, and he is well known for his work which examines social political issues such as human rights, conflict, and poverty. He's currently working on a long term project in the Arctic partnered with the National Geographic magazine, National Geographic Society, and is a National GeographicExplorer. In 2019, his work was selected for the Arnold Newman prize for new directions in photographic portraiture. He also has published two books with Yoffy Press, Front Towards Enemy and A Field Guide to Asbestos.

Matthew Brandt is a mad scientist/brilliant image-maker/pure delight. Oddly, we talk about poo a lot on this episode, but it kind of works. We also talk a lot about the creative process and parsing out the good ideas from the not-good-yet ideas. It's human and inspiring. Take a listen. Calling his approach "a little bit messy and experimental," Matthew Brandt produces large-scale photographs through labor-intensive processes recalling the 19th-century origins of photography, often incorporating the physical matter of the subject itself. Attuned to the history of his medium — and its resolute physicality — and inspired by classical American landscape photographs, Brandt traverses the West, photographing and collecting material samples from nature and cities. The reciprocal relationships that Brandt creates between his subjects and the materials used to represent them are always conceptually grounded, often in response to social and environmental issues. He is deeply inquisitive, even fearless, in his exploration of subjects, materials, and processes, reinvigorating the medium of photography with a sense of wonder. Through his work, Brandt poses a fundamental question about his magical-seeming medium: what is a photograph? Matthew Brandt received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2004 and MFA from UCLA in 2008. Brandt has been the subject of several institutional solo and group shows and is in the permanent collections of many important museums and private collections.  Matthew Brandt lives and works in Los Angeles. 

I cannot get enough of Carolyn Drake - her talent, her intentionality, her grounded and inspiring words. But alas, I gush. We talk about collaboration and books (surprised?), and she has a lot of brilliance to share on both topics. Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and creatively reimagine them. Her practice embraces collaboration and has in recent years melded photography with sewing, collage, and sculpture. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries. Drake has turned several long-term projects into highly-acclaimed book projects. Two Rivers (2013) explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Wild Pigeon (2014) is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Weegurs in western China. In Internat (2014-17), Drake worked with young women in an ex-Soviet orphanage to create photographs and paintings that point beyond the walls of the institution and its gender expectations. This work was followed by Knit Club (TBW Books, 2020), which emerged from her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi loosely calling themselves "Knit Club” and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Book of the Year and Lucie Photo Book Awards. Drake now lives in California and is currently developing self-reflective projects close to home. Her latest work, Isolation Therapy, is on view at SFMOMA’s show Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, the Anamorphosis Prize book prize, Peter S Reed Foundation, Lightwork, the Do Good Fund, the Lange Taylor prize, Magnum Foundation, Pulitzer Center, and a Fulbright fellowship. She is a member of Magnum Photos.  

These two! A powerhouse duo of talent, passion and all-around art do-goodness. They are pooling their wide ranging skills to deliver a new model to help artists become creatively and financially successful. Learn all about Assembly in this episode!Ashlyn Davis Burns has worked to support lens-based artists for the past decade through curatorial, editorial, and fundraising initiatives, including most recently as the Executive Director & Curator of Houston Center for Photography (2015-2020). She has written for numerous publications, consulted with artists and publishers on photobooks, and curated exhibitions internationally for a variety of institutions including libraries, universities, and galleries.Shane Lavalette has worked as the Director of Light Work (2011-2021), a non-profit dedicated to supporting emerging and under-represented artists working in photography, as well as a publisher, editor, writer, and consultant to collectors, institutions, photo editors, and artists. Lavalette has a broad range of professional experience in curating, publishing, design, creative direction, art buying, fundraising, and advocating to make the field more equitable for artists.