Episode 59 | Olivian Cha

Recorded in: Los Angeles
Episode Length: 20:45
Air Date: November 19, 2023

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Aidan McMahon

In this episode, host Jordan Weitzman visits archivist Olivian Cha to talk about her work at the Corita Art Centre. Cha has been responsible for the organization, digitization and archiving of all of Corita’s (formerly Sister Corita) photographs.. In putting together the Ordinary Things Will be Signs For Us: Photographs by Corita (co-published this past fall by Magic Hour Press and and J and L Books; edited by Jason Fulford, Julie Ault and Jordan Weitzman), we worked closely with Cha, who also contributed an essay to the book.

If you’ve seen the book already, this is a little behind the scenes episode, and if you havent, a little background on Corita and her photography.

Episode 58 | Roxana Marcoci

Recorded in: New York City
Episode Length: 28:45
Air Date: November 17, 2023

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Aidan McMahon

Roxanna Marcoci is the David Dechman senior curator and acting chief curator of the department of photography at MoMA. She began working at the museum in 1999 in the painting and sculpture department, but moved to the photography department when Peter Galassi enlisted her to join. Since, she has curated numerous exhibitions including survey shows on Zoe Leonard, Taryn Simon and Wolfgang Tillmans. Most recently, she opened a major show of An-My Lê’s called Between Two Rivers In 2010, she co-founded Forum on Contemporary Photography at MoMA with Eva Respini conceived as an experimental platform for free-form critical discussions.

Episode 57 | S*an D. Henry-Smith

Recorded in: New York, New York
Episode Length: 37:32
Air Date: July 24, 2023

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Aidan McMahon

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and now living in Amsterdam, S*an D. Henry-Smith’s practice uses and blends a mix of photography, poetry, and performance engaging in black experimentalism and collaborative practices. They have received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project and Poets House, and have read, performed, and exhibited at Basilica Soundscape, the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and 47 Canal. In 2020, their first monograph, a collection of photos and poems called Wild Peach was published by Future Poem.

Their current two-person show with Reina Sugihara called relics is currently on view at 47 Canal in New York.

Watch their film, Lunar New Year here.

& the roots that rise by S*an D. Henry-Smith

engraved by S*an D. Henry-Smith

adama by S*an D. Henry-Smith

Episode 56 | Giulia Zorzi

Recorded in: Milan, Italy
Episode Length: 33:55
Air Date: June 29, 2023

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Aidan McMahon

On a recent trip passing through Milan, I stopped into MiCamera to talk to Giulia Zorzi about her legendary bookshop. She started it in 2003 with Flavio Franzoni, and has since become one of the best photo bookstores in the world. Just something very special about it - The way that the shop looks and feels - the front room with new titles, and the back room - more like a history of the phonebook museum. Giulia’s become a fixture in the photo book community and hers and Flavio’s efforts have supported and promoted many of the photographers who have been on this show. MiCamera became a gallery too and a venue for workshops with photographers from around the world who pass through.

We sat down In the grotto - the basement of the store, dimly lit, where we had this conversation.

An exhibition by Jason Fulford hangs in the front room of the shop, with new titles on the shelves and tables

The back room of the bookshop - more like a history of the phonebook museum.

Eugenio Tonoli cataloguing books in the front of the store

Episode 55 | Genesis Baez

Recorded in: New York City
Episode Length: 38.31
Air Date: December 28, 2022

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

It was so nice getting together with Genesis Baez to catch up and hear about what she’s been up to. We first met at Skowhegan a few summers ago, a time when she was just coming out of grad school at Yale.

Since then, she’s started teaching at Pratt and the New School, has a new book coming out next year with Capricious, and this past month, opened a show with Jenny Calivas in Justine Kurland’s studio space called Silt of Each Other. Genesis’ work often deals with her roots growing up between the US and Puerto Rico. It’s sometimes surreal, other times more steeped in reality, and always leaves the meaning of what you’re looking at open to interpretation. We recorded this conversation in New York in October.

All Photos by Genesis Baez

Episode 54 | Rahim Fortune

Rahim Fortune by Miranda Barnes

Recorded in: New York City as part of The Classroom at the NYABF
Episode Length: 53:22
Air Date: November 23, 2022

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Mixed by: Adam Ohr

Last month, as part of the Classroom at the New York Art Book Fair, Jordan Weitzman sat down with Rahim Fortune to talk about his book I Can’t Stand to See You Cry. It was published last spring by Loose Joints, and just recently went on to its second printing. The photos in the book were shot in Texas and surrounding states, and weave together a mix of pictures of people, interiors and the landscape, all made amidst the backdrop of his father’s battle with ALS.

The conversation is being aired on the podcast in it’s entirety. Special thank you Sarah Chaplin Espenon and Lewis Chaplin of Loose Joints for organizing this conversation and to the New York Art book fair for allowing it to be published here.

All photos by Rahim Fortune from I can’t stand to see you cry

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Episode 53 | Baldwin Lee

Recorded in: New York City
Episode Length: 1:03:28
Air Date: October 26, 2022

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith


It was a privilege to get to speak with Baldwin Lee recently in New York. With his new self-titled monograph published by Barney Kulok’s Hunter’s Point Press, Lee’s work has really been getting a newfound attention that it deserves. The 80 photos in the book, edited from over 10,000 by Kulok, were made over 35 years ago on a series of cross-country trips through the southern US. At one point, Lee felt like he honed in on the subject matter that would become his raison d’etre. He worked tirelessly for the next 4 year, then, he stopped. He decided that he had done what he needed to do, and that was it.

Baldwin and I got together at an Airbnb which he was staying at for some events around the book, and a show of his which was opening at the Howard Greenberg gallery.

Episode 52 | Gary Schneider

Recorded in: Long Island, NY
Episode Length: 48:02
Air Date: March 8, 2022

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

On a cold winter day last month, I took an early morning train from Penn Station out to Long Island to meet Gary Schneider. Originally from East London, South Africa, Schneider moved to New York in the late '70s to work for Richard Foreman's Ontological Hysterical Theatre. It was there that he met his partner, the performer John Erdman. In 1981, with the encouragement of their friend Peter Hujar, Schneider and Erdman opened up a photo lab in New York's East Village which would become legendary. Schneider went on to print for Richard Avedon, Lisette Model, Irving Penn, Nan Goldin, Robert Gober, and of course, Peter Hujar. In Hujar's dying wishes, he specified that Schneider was the only person who would be allowed to make posthumous prints of his work.

Funny enough, Schneider's photos look nothing like his old friends. They are tough, microscopically detailed portraits of friends and artists' faces and bodies. They have been exhibited internationally, and are the subjects of his dozen monographs.

We sat in the living room of their cottage surrounded by snow-covered birch trees to record this conversation. Quaint, and understated, with photos from their great collection hanging on their walls, it felt like a pretty magical place to be in.

John Double, 1989 by Gary Schneider

Vince Aletti, 2001 by Gary Schneider

Lynne Tillman, 1990 by Gary Schneider

Episode 51 | Matthew Leifheit

Recorded in: Brooklyn, NY
Episode Length: 37:07
Air Date: January 12, 2022

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

When I went to visit Matt Leifheit last month at his MATTE HQ storefront in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, I found him  with a paint bucket in hand, touching up a few spots on the walls from an exhibition that was just taken down. The space is on the ground floor of the building in which resides. He opened last year to do exhibitions, book launches and special events. It became a new extension MATTE Editions, the publishing initiative which he founded over a decade ago. With it, he's published MATTE magazine, books, and has put on shows, all at the same time of making his own photographs, teaching, writing, and working as an editor. I think that's the thing that's always impressed me about Matt - his involvement in many different capacities within the medium, each activity informing another.

As a photographer, his work often takes the form of projects, in which he adopts a format and style for each one, much like a director would on a film. 

This spring, his first monograph, To Die Alive, is being published by Damiani, made up of a photos taken on Fire Island over the past five years.

From To Die Alive, forthcoming by Damiani

from Yale Daily News series

The Whitman's Sampler, 2021

Episode 50 | Linda Rosenkrantz

Recorded in: Los Angeles, California
Episode Length: 27:40
Air Date: November 30, 2021

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

In the summer of 1965, the author Linda Rosenkrantz, then in her early 30’s had an idea - to record her friends over the course of a summer. She made hundreds of hours of recorded conversations then spent a year transcribing it all, and then worked to an edit in order to make her book TALK. It was radical then and since has a cult classic.

In one of her next projects, she had the idea to ask some of her friends to write down everything they did one day - from the time they woke up to the time they went to bed, in all it’s detail and minutiae. One of her friends was Peter Hujar, and he agreed to take Linda up on her assignment - he could have picked any day, but the on the one he chose, he ended up going to photograph Allen Ginsberg, had an editor from french Elle on her way back to Paris who came over.  In their conversation, at one point, Peter says something like “you know, I never think I really do anything in a day, but I’m realizing how much I actually do.” To which Linda responds - well, that’s why I’m doing this!” You can read their conversation in a new book we published with Magic Hour Press called Peter Hujar’s Day.

We recorded this interview in the Valley in L.A., where she’s been living for the past 35 years.

Cover of the first edition of Rosenkrantz’ 1968 novel Talk

Cover of Rosenkrantz’ 2021 book Peter Hujar’s Day

Episode 49 | Terri Weifenbach

Recorded in: Paris, France
Episode Length: 36:33
Air Date: October 13, 2021

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

I got together with Terri Weifenbach on a beautiful early autumn afternoon in Paris. She invited be to Jardin des Plantes, a park she's explored a lot since moving to Paris two years ago.

She was born in New York and raised in Washington, DC, where she lived for much of her life. In 1997, over 20 years after she started making photographs, she published her first book, In Your Dreams, with Nazrelli Press. Since then, she's gone on to publish 19 other books including Lana, Hunter Green, Snake Eyes and Des Oiseaux. Her latest book, out this fall, is called Cloud Physics, published by the Ice Plant in North America and Atelier EXB in Europe

From Lana and Snake Eyes by Terri Weifenbach

From Cloud Physics by Terri Weifenbach

From Hunter Green by Terri Weifenbach

Episode 48 | Billy Sullivan

Recorded in: New York City
Episode Length:
Air Date: July 29, 2021

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

It was a book of photos and paintings of his called Still Looking (Editions Patrick Frey) that my friend Anthony showed me that really piqued my interest in Billy Sullivan. As I flipped through it, made up of work spanning 50 years, I couldn't believe how good he was at both - as a painter and as a photographer. While he always considered his photos to be raw material for painting, they truly exhibit superior qualities of pure seeing. And all the people in them! Everyone from his late husband, the curator Klaus Kertes to Hilton Als, Cookie Mueller to his muses Christian and Ed. His work is both a portrait of his life and of downtown New York over the past  five decades. 

We got together at his loft on the bowery where he's been living for over 40 years. I saw photos of his tacked onto the wall Pastels and paintings of flowers for a show which is up now at the Madoo Conservancy. It was a rainy afternoon and it was coming down pretty hard on the skylights, so do forgive the ambients sounds. We started talking about how he first started making photos.

Amy and Sam, Summer 1976 by Billy Sullivan

Cookie’s Kitchen, 1980 by Billy Sullivan

Hilton, 1996 by Billy Sullivan

Episode 47 | Dayanita Singh

Recorded in: Montreal /Delhi
Episode Length: 44:41
Air Date: May 10, 2021

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

I could speak about two parts of Dayanita Singh that interest me a lot, but it's really the combination of the two that make her so compelling. The first - and this is the pre-requisite of course - is the work. The way in which she's carved out a niche in photography which has a focus on bookmaking, but then also plays with exhibiting. She's always teetering on the edge of both, blurring the lines between the two. Whether it's books on the wall, or photos housed in the handcrafted wooden boxes she makes, form is always being played around with.  Photos are just raw material, she says, which she uses in service of something she's making. 

The other part is her personality - her being and energy which drives all the work. An artist, a photographer, a bookmaker, an ambassador for her work, a promoter, Dayanita Singh, though celebrated, collected internationally by the worlds finest museums, published by Steidl, and shown at top galleries, still has a kind of DIY attitude to her practice. If she doesn't do it and make it happen, who will?

We had this conversation remotely, I in Montreal and she from her apartment  in Delhi.

Installation view of Sent a Letter by Dayanita Singh at Callicoon Fine Arts, 2019

Zakir Hussain, Dayanita Sing’s first book

Installation view of Museum of Chance by Dayanita Singh at MoMA, 2013

Episode 46 | Stephen Koch

Recorded in: New York, NY
Episode Length: 36:35
Air Date: March 25, 2021

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

In 1987, at the height of the AIDS crisis, Peter Hujar, at the age of 53, passed away. His work, which was largely unknown at the time except to friends and small cult following, is now considered to be one of the richest bodies of work amongst 20th century photography. After a long debate over who he was gonna leave his archive to, he decided on his close friend, Stephen Koch. The decision was controversial amongst friends of Hujar’s, and in a famous exchange, Koch recounts Hujar telling him “You’re no good, but you’re the best I’ve got.” In this conversation, I talk with Koch about his career as a celebrated author, teacher and executor of the Peter Hujar’s estate, which has managed for almost 35 years.

Stephen Koch, 1969 by Peter Hujar

Self-Portrait and Paul Thek by Peter Hujar, two portraits which hang in Stephen Koch’s office

Links
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/05/the-pictures/

Episode 45 | Shala Miller

Recorded in: New York, NY
Episode Length: 56:30
Air Date: February 19, 2020

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Cristal Duhaime

It was a little strange getting together with Shala Miller in the same space we’d met in less than a year ago. It was Farah Al Qasimi’s opening at Helena Anrather’s gallery, and the room was packed. This time, we were in the same space, but it was filled with Shala’s things instead - stuff for her to work on and during residency she was doing at the gallery. The room had different workstations that were set up, which made sense to me given Shala’s practice. She is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography, film and music, which she makes under the name Freddie June. As I’ve gotten more and more into her work, I’ve discovered that It’s the tapestry of it all that makes it so compelling and rich. Shala is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, studied at SAIC in Chicago and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris before pursuing her MFA at Bard. She currently lives and works in New York.

Jose in between Chey and Elliott, Cherry Valley, 2020 by Shala Miller

Elliott just after his shower, Fire Island, 2020

Dad sometime in May, Cleveland, 2019

Episode 44 | Anne Turyn

Recorded in: New York, NY
Episode Length: 36:56
Air Date: January 6, 2020

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Cristal Duhaime

In 1978, while living with her then boyfriend Tony Conrad in Buffalo, Anne Turyn founded Top Stories, a small, independent press. Over the course of 13 years, she would go on to publish 29 periodicals of experimental image and text work. She got avant garde artists like Laurie Anderson, Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller on board and basically gave them free reign to do what they wanted in between the covers and on them, as long as the Top Stories logo was on the front and an index of previous issues was on the back. They’re all so beautiful and somehow, when you look at them all together, there’s a total through line in terms of how they all look and feel.

Top Stories book covers

Links:
http://topstoriesperiodical.com
http://topstoriesperiodical.com

Episode 43 | Moyra Davey

Recorded in: New York, NY
Episode Length: 47:15
Air Date: November 16, 2020

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Cristal Duhaime

While preparing to interview Moyra Davey, I started to really try and figure out what it is that I love so much about her work.

Is it that she is able to deal with the most mundane, everyday subject matter in such a personal, unpretentious, electrifying, simple and complex way?

Is it her subject matter that’s so appealing? Artists that she’s interested in, diaries, ephemera, hang-ups, let downs, preocupations, inspirations, quotes, books? Is it that she speaks of those things in the first place?

Is it her form? The simple elegance of it which is a through line in all her work from the writing to the films to the mailers.

“I’m trying to write in the forms of the work I want to read” she writes in her title essay of her recent book Index Cards published by New Directions. That seems like such a simple and easy thing to do, but it’s really the most challenging place to get to.

Moyra was born in Toronto in 1958, grew up in Montreal and lives in New York now, where she’s been for some 30 years.

She is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and just last month, she opened a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

I visited her in her apartment in New York where we conducted this interview.

All images by Moyra Davey

Episode 42 | Michael Marcelle

Recorded in: Montreal / New York
Episode Length: 22:30
Air Date: September 28, 2020

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Ellen Payne Smith

I have an interesting relationship to Mike Marcelle’s work. On the one hand, I totally get it, but on the other, i so don’t relate to where it comes from. I get the seeing, I feel the strength of the pictures, but his reference points feel so different than mine in a way. Like, for example, the new Suspiria would probably NOT come up in every conversation of mine, and with him, welll….. 

Process though - that’s another story. Hearing Mike speak about his way of making pictures, often involving ideas as starting points for photos i totally get. In his case, he jots them down in a several year long email to himself that he replies to over and over. Those ideas, though, are just to get off the couch, to try something out, to roam around and find things. The photos that he makes are always completely different and unexpected. 

Mike grew up in New Jersey where he recently made photos of his family which ended up in his book Kokomo, published with Matte in 2018. In Gregory Crewdson’s essay in the book, he says that Marcelle's photographs employ various conventions of the beloved horror and B-movies of his youth - self-consciously low-end special effects and garish, technicolor lighting - the materials of the domestic and familial are reconfigured into an uncanny, alien world. 

We conducted this interview remotely, i in Montreal, and Mike at his home in upstate New York that he shares with his husband Danny.

All photos by Michael Marcelle

Links
http://michaelmarcelle.com

Episode 41 | Mary Manning

Recorded in: New York City
Episode Length: 36:54
Air Date: May 21, 2020

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Cristal Duhaime

On an unusually mild winter evening this past February, I got together with Mary Manning at her apartment in NYC. She is the author of Blueprint and First Impressions of Greece, and has contributed to numerous publications, most recently, a wonderful image text exchange with the author Olivia Laing in the Spirituality issue of Aperture. In 2006, she started the blog Unchanging Window, which became an important creative outlet for her and an a way of finding community. She has shown with Canada (gallery) in NYC, has shot for Ekhaus Latta, and recently contributed photos to the Dimes Cookbook.

Mulberry (for Moyra) by Mary Manning

60/40 (Ben, Diamond, Maia, Sean, Elisabeth, Annabeth, Violet, Carl, Anh, Ian, Marc, Carl)

Untitled - outtake from Eckhaus Latta Fall Winter 2020 show by Mary Manning

Episode 40 | Drew Sawyer

Recorded in: Brooklyn, NY
Episode Length: 39:23
Air Date: April 21, 2020

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Cristal Duhaime

Just before the world went into Covid-19 lockdown, I got together with Drew Sawyer at his apartment in Bedstuy. He’s the photo Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, and among the numerous exhibitions he’s worked on in his current and previous posts at MoMa and the Columbus Museum of Art, he recently gave the Russian Ghanian photographer Liz Johnson Artur her first solo museum exhibition, resurrected the color work of Gary Winogrand and put together an incredible survey of queer work in the past 50 years in Art After Stonewall. Drew earned his Ph.D in art history and archeology at Columbia University, where his dissertation was a critical re-examination of Walker Evans. 

Garry Winogrand: Color, May 3–December 8, 2019 at Brooklyn Museum curated by Drew Sawyer

Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha, May 3, 2019 through August 18, 2019, curated by Drew Sawyer

Art After Stonewall 1969-1989, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, curated by Jonathan Weinberg, with Tyler Cann, and Drew Sawyer