PhotoWhoa Blog

The interview that follows has been edited for readability. The editing has been limited to concerns of form. Mark Alor Powell’s one of great street photographers answers and my questions have in no way been abridged. The opposite is true, in fact. Where story and metaphor required refining or expanding, story and metaphor have been refined or expanded.

The result is an honest attempt to imagine how two strangers, strangers who have never heard each other’s voice or seen each other’s face, and who live thousands of miles apart, would have spoken to each other if they had met one day. This interview may in fact be considered a true conversation. The conversation may in turn be considered a true fiction.

Mark Alor Powell lives and works in Mexico City. His newest photobook, Open at Noon, is out now.

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A candid moment with Andrea Margaret on her thoughts

There are three people in the above photograph, and it would also be true to say that there are none. What starts as a familiar scene—a young beautiful woman staring into her reflection—has been complicated. Questions peek out. You begin to wonder why her unreflected body is obscured. Who exactly is she hiding? The photograph no longer looks like a self-portrait but one taken by a friend or a partner in a quiet hurry. You can imagine this friend wondering the same questions: “What is she thinking? Why is she making that face?” This friend, or lover, would stand just behind her shoulder, his or her head resting weightlessly on her floral wallpaper. He’s close enough to her, yes. He can almost hear her breathing, but his questions have no answers.

Andrea Margaret is a model and emerging photographer based in California. In this short interview, she talks to me about her recent work in photography, her modeling, and her thoughts on vulnerability.*

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Insight into the works of Charlotte Colbert

The physical boundaries of a photograph are clear: without edges, a photograph would expand forever until light washed out all else. The frame bordering a photograph, the limits of its scope, both bounds and protects it. The boundaries of the mind are less clear. Where do you find imagination’s limits? Where’s the edge between dream and reality? Or, better, where and when does reality begin?

In her latest work, Charlotte Colbert draws from questions like these to explore what the inner states of the mind might look like. Using time lapses and medium-format film, as well as roughly emulsified homemade photographic paper, she materializes images of disconnect and ambiguity. Sticking to no reality other than their own, the photos in Studies and A Day at Home bring to mind our own uncharted inner depths, and point to reality’s tenuous hold.

I briefly spoke to Charlotte over email about her work.

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Experience the streets of New York with Andre Wagner

A city can be hard to love. At times it may even seem maddeningly distant. As the sights go by, some streets will melt into others, as faces do in a crowd. Love spread too thin barely loves at all. When hoping to confront this largeness of presence, an artist often hunts for the stories and lives that form a city’s spirit, the material that shapes its core.

Andre Wagner, a portrait and street photographer based in New York, is one such artist. Eschewing a panoramic view of New York, one that collapses its dizzying heights into a plane of frenetic movement, Wagner instead looks for the sparks of feeling tucked within a gaze. He looks for moments that sing above the rush.

While he doesn’t consider himself creative, saying that the photographs he captures are “far more creative than I ever could be,” he has an undeniable eye for foreseeing where life will pop up. And that foresight, the anticipating of what will be before it’s there, requires him to go near and observe up close. He creates, preferably in film, his own special prints of the world, giving face to all that has moved him.

Wagner’s first solo exhibition, open to July 5th, is on view at the Papillion, Los Angeles. I spoke to Andre Wagner over email about his work.

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“A prisoner exchange, outskirts of Istanbul”—reads one photo’s caption. “A man approaches a murder scene,” says another. “Murder of the mistress.” If you suspect that these captions seem inspired by the plots of a crime novel or a soap opera, you’re not mistaken. They are. Many of the photographs found in City of Dreams, Guy Martin’s Emergency Fund–awarded project, were taken on the sets of Turkish soap operas.

And although a soap opera—with its ever effusive acting, outlandish drama, and tantalizing resolutions—might seem as antithetical a visual medium to photojournalism as can be imagined, what Martin found was that in one sense the two worlds weren’t really that much different. In both worlds, when the camera’s on, life takes its stage and performs.

The late photojournalist Tim Hetherington coined the term “feedback loop” to illustrate a self-perpetuating relationship between those who fight in a conflict and those who capture images of them. He suggested that the movies, television, and photography that people ingest might influence not only their appearance but also their actions on a battlefield. “It’s the fact that there could be a revolution fought by young university students, teachers, and normal working people when they have had no training or knowledge of battlefield tactics or military planning,” says Martin about the feedback loop. “How are you supposed to dress, behave, act, or be a soldier? Where does that knowledge come from?”

Martin was with Tim Hetherington and fellow photojournalist Chris Hondros when they were hit, in Misrata, Libya, by a rocket-propelled grenade. Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed. Martin suffered a severe pelvic wound and underwent surgery at a triage center held by rebels. City of Dreams was his first project after taking a year off shooting. “I felt that there was something that I wanted to say, on a very basic level, that dealt with the way we (as western, foreign photographers) were documenting the region” he says. “I wanted to talk about notions of power and how countries exercise power . . . and as weird as it might sound—Turkish TV was one of those tools.”

I spoke to Guy Martin over email about his thoughts on photojournalism photography and City of Dreams.

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How much of your life has already been forgotten? Which moments would you have remembered instead? Questions of this sort, ones about memory, sparked the Ecuadorian memory photography expert Karen Miranda Rivadeneira to start Other Stories, a project that pulls together her attempts at recreating memories of her childhood, ones that she considers “inaccessible” to her conscious mind or ones already ransacked by the years of time.

Each photograph has a line of words written into its bottom edge. These words give hints of the memory, or invention of one, that has been ciphered within. There’s a pliancy in memory. And Rivadeneira, questioning what it means to remember, stages and directs her family to help her recreate events that might have happened, if only because they’ve happened before (to her family, to others), but may have not actually happened, or happened only theoretically. “Other Stories is, if anything, the antithesis of childhood memories,” she says. Unadorned and softened in natural light, the photos exercise a mental juggling of her past. What’s remembered may only be a clever summary—and a photograph, the dress rehearsal of that remembering.

I spoke to Rivadeneira over email about Other Stories and her ideas on photography.

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Of all Santiago Forero’s playfully mischievous photographs, only one can be said to have gone viral, having appeared, in 2013, on a much-shared Buzzfeed article that grouped together classic works of Western art re-imagined to include people of color.

Santiago Forero’s contribution was a staging of Grant Wood’s masterwork, “American Gothic,” which he shot with a Latino couple (shown above).

The Colombian photographer didn’t suspect that a photograph in his series Mexican-American Gothic would go viral. “I thought that they were just going to be hung in [my boss’s] office,” he says.

But the photograph’s popularity wasn’t a surprise either. Forero has spent a career making work that probes into the cosmopolitan landscape of photography, upending styles and perspectives that attach themselves to what’s most popular now.

Santiago Forero prefers a slight swerve in “the wrong way.” And he just as well dishes out upright irony as he plays with sly humor.

I spoke to Forero over email about his thoughts on photography and his work.

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