I was drinking tequila in the back of a beat-up Ford Explorer with my girlfriend, my sister, and a couple of friends the night I discovered Otis Ike’s work. We were in Woodstock, New York, to see an exhibition co-curated by the photographer Juan Madrid. Eating at a Thai restaurant, moments after the tequila, I asked a group of artists and writers with us if they had noticed a photograph of two men wrestling in blood. No, they said, picking at their food, as if I were crazy and hadn’t said a thing. While I’m unsure I remember the night word for word, I do remember describing how strange the photo was. It was, to start, a photo of two men interlocked in a gruesome hug — one giving a chokehold and another receiving it. The strangest thing, though, was that the man receiving the chokehold, the man who seems to be swimming in his own blood, was grinning. He was laughing, I told them, as if he just overheard a good joke or learned that a good friend was in town.

That photograph, shown above, was taken by Otis Ike(a self-taught photographer) and was on display at the exhibition we traveled to see that night. I would later find out that Otis Ike is only a nickname. Otis Ike’s real name is Patrick Bresnan. Bresnan started shooting photography in the 80s when his mother gave him her Canon AE-1. She would keep on supporting him as he practiced, even developing his 4×6 prints. Bresnan now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Ivete Lucas. Their film, The Send-Off, was awarded at the South by Southwest Film Festival and had its world premiere at Sundance. Here, Ike talks briefly about this work and about his thoughts on shooting candidly.

Continue reading →

© Rosalind Solomon, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY

In 1968, at the age of thirty-eight, Rosalind Fox Solomon a well-known fine art photography expert began shooting photography during a trip to Japan. She was living with a family who spoke little English and slept on their futon. The pictures were in color and mostly experimental. In the early 70s, Solomon would switch from color to a black-and-white square format and begin a forty-eight-year-long exodus from the suburban East Coast— settling, instead, in the role of far traveling portrait maker, shooting extensively in Israel, Peru, and South Africa, among others.

Now, at the age of eighty-five, Solomon’s fine art photography work is receiving the frequency of critical recognition that seemed to evade her. This past month she was featured at Bruce Silverstein Gallery and Brooklyn Museum. In February, her latest book, “Got to Go,” a collection of over seventy images that survey her work across time and geography, was published by MACK. The photographs all share an intensity of perception. They illuminate through an attraction to an unknowable interior, expressing the rough course of experience like a finely detailed biography or poem. Here, Rosalind speaks about the emotional and philosophical understandings of her work.

Continue reading →

A longer version of this article was originally published in Remezcla.

In 2014, Stephanie Segura, a Brooklyn-based photographer, helped found an art collective of writers, musicians, and visual artists called La Chamba Press. Pulling together unique histories and points of origin— ranging from the Caribbean to Mexico— the members aim to create work that makes the experience of the Latino diaspora easier to picture.

Segura, whose zines of Mexico were featured this year at Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair in Los Angeles, looks specifically at Mexican-American diaspora. Her bleached-processed Polaroids of home, ritual, and celebration bring to light Mexican culture as viewed through the eyes of a first-generation U.S. citizen. And although the photos catalog new experiences, they are rich with nostalgia, as if Segura is creating memories of a life that could have been, a history that anticipates her own.

I met Segura at El Regalo de Juquila in Bushwick, New York, to talk about her work. Telenovelas played loudly from a television sitting atop a row of refrigerators. We ate tacos, drank aguas frescas. In her zines, I see a political argument against ingrained images of Mexico that come from its own citizens or tourists. She disagreed. Instead, she sees her vibrant photographs of Mexico as nothing more than personal mementos. “If somebody connects with them, then fine,” she told me. “In the end, they’re just for me.”

This interview has been edited and condensed from the conversation Segura and I had at Regalo de Juquila.

Continue reading →

A longer version of this article was originally published in Remezcla.

The U.S.-Mexico border is typically thought of as a place where people flow from south to north. They leave Mexico, it’s thought, in search of something better in the United States – not the other way around. But Americanos, a series of photographs taken by the Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, contradicts this south-to-north view of immigration by showing those who move the opposite way.

Called “silent citizens” in Mexico, “Americanos” are legal citizens of the United States who, either by choice or through circumstance, return to Mexico. Some are children who were born in the United States and leave with their parents once citizenship is guaranteed. Others are older and cross back into Mexico illegally. “Most of them seemed completely uninterested in living in the U.S.,” Cartagena told me. “One went to high school for a year and decided to come back to Mexico because he didn’t ‘get’ the culture.”

Continue reading →

The advertisement was short: I’m searching, it began in Spanish, for men between sixty-eight and seventy-two years old. On a corner was a portrait of man with closed-cropped hair and a warm smile. With clear eyes, it went on, who look like the man in the photo. At the bottom was a phone number.

The number belonged to Mariela Sancari, a photographer based in Mexico. Sancari posted the advertisement to begin a series of portraits about her father, Moisés Sancari, who killed himself in 1980. She sought to photograph men who might resemble her father had he lived to this day. The resulting portraits are collected in a critically acclaimed photo book Moisés, published in 2015.

I reached out to Sancari to learn more about Moisés and her work. We spoke briefly over email.

Continue reading →

An interview with Laviada on how she effectively makes a  perfect photo sculpture from scratch.

In 2006, Alejandra Laviada spent time photographing the remains of a once prominent hotel in Mexico City named Hotel Bamer. A landmark of 1950s Mexico, the hotel was demolished soon after she left. From what remained after the demolition, Laviada took pieces of discarded wood and furniture to build sculptures that would serve as subjects for the subsequent series Re-Constructions.

Like the hotel they come from, the sculptures photographed in Re-Constructions are transient. Her photographs explore what it means to play with the camera’s relationship to time.

A tension is brought out by the sculptures’ vulnerability. Inches from collapse, each one is seen a beat before a leg gives out or a stool topples over. The photographs reveal, like ones that can still the folds of a windswept curtain, time’s physical bearing — only these look backward. It’s the second before that you look, the moment when not moving comes closest to resembling permanence.

I spoke to Laviada over email about Re-Constructions and her ideas about photo sculpture.

Continue reading →

Boris Mikhailov. Untitled, from the series Case History. 1997–98. © 2011 Boris Mikhailov

The High Dive, in Prospect Park, is a fine, little bar in Brooklyn. In the back, there are two pinball machines that glow the color of orange-red. Popcorn is free to grab. And Brooklyn Lagers are served $5 a can on most days. In short, it’s not a bar you’d go to if you’re expecting to talk all night about the Ukrainian provocateur Boris Mikhailov. Grotesque, dark, and brutally honest—Mikhailov’s work picks at a scab covering middle-class sensibility (above is one of his photos).

Two weeks ago, I invited Juan Madrid, co-founder of the Free Lunch Cartel and a VICE contributor, for drinks at the High Dive. I wanted to finish a talk we were having over email about Mikhailov. A photography savant, Madrid combines a single-minded focus on all things photo with an ego so large that it doesn’t exist. I thought he’d be the perfect guide to introduce Boris Mikhailov’s work to the blog.

That night at the High Dive, I began to realize that I led Madrid to a sad, sad joke. A couple of Brooklyn Lagers had failed to tune out a neon-lit gloom. Madrid and I exited, in hopes of another bar. There, he showed me two of his photo books and catalog of an exhibition he co-curated at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. We switched to Tecates and lime. At one point, Madrid looked at his reflection in a window and summoned the golden ratio. In some of his photos, he said, he had found its hand, his photographs laid out like the spirals in nautilus shells, unaware he captured its composition. We drank, talked photography, and drank again.

This interview is from the questions and answers Juan and I sent back and forth over email.

Continue reading →