Letter to the Reader, Issue 2

Issue 02

I want to thank you for the overwhelming response and support we have received since our first launch on January 16th. I believe that creating a platform in which artists can both exhibit and write about their own work and process is a significant change in the art world today. The fact that you have supported this change is a sign that the art world needs to reflect on the value, importance and representation of art. If art is not a voice of the people, both individually and as a collective - then what is art?

JOANNA MURRAY | Student Focus

Issue 02

Photos by Mapplethorpe House Residents

When I decided to volunteer at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, I pictured myself in a candy-striper uniform, playing games with the elderly or reading stories to the young. In a conversation with the Volunteer Coordinator, I had the opportunity to explain my newfound passion for art therapy and psychology, my love of photography, and my desire to connect with people. She asked me if I had heard of Robert Mapplethorpe, a renowned photographer who died of Aids. This one question led me to create a unique and meaningful photography project that until this moment, I had never thought possible.

ED KASHI | Three

Issue 02

It came to me in a dream... I was laying in bed one morning and three images from a story in Brazil flowed through my mind's eye like a cinematic strip. This idea of three images... seeing in threes... became a focal point for combing through my more than twenty years of images, looking for the visual connections, visual language and visual poetry of three.

TABLE OF CONTENTS | Issue 2

Issue 02

Featuring

Luis Gonzalez Palma
Shelby Lee Adams
Ed Kashi
Jeff Jacobson
Christopher LaMarca
Julian Faulhaber
Alejandra Laviada
Conrelia Hediger
Amy Stein

SHELBY LEE ADAMS | ­Altered Mountain: Portraits of the Holler Dwellers

Issue 2

Growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky I remember my grandfathers talking about the depression era and how difficult it was. They were descendants of the original Holler Dwellers that settled this land. They both remembered men coming around buying up mineral rights with contracts for what was under the land, and for five cents an acre, the farmers sold it to them. Underground deep coal mining was popular in the 1920s and ‘30s and they used ponies and sleds to pull the coal out of the ground. No one saw any harm then. No one suspected that this was an organized assault on several southern states.

LUIS GONZÁLEZ PALMA | Hierarchies of Intimacy, “Sorrow”

Issue 02

“Sorrow” is the continuation of a larger project, titled Hierarchies of Intimacy, which I began with Graciela De Oliveira in 2004. The titles of the images within the series were created by Graciela De Oliveira and directly relate to each image. Through each title, she attempts to symbolically reflect the experience of absence, in the form of an always-unfulfilled potential, onto relationships with oneself and with the other. I took these photos in austere settings that evince an incomplete world: disturbing and mysterious, but at the same time seductive.

JEFF JACOBSON | In the USA

Issue 02

Deer In The Headlights, Miller Road, Mt. Tremper, NY 2008

JULIAN FAULHABER | Lowdensitypolyethylene

Issue 02

While studying photography, I assisted several still life and fashion photographers who were shooting for commercials. The agencies clearly emphasized their aesthetic interests: life, trends, purity. This was not new to me, but these aspects sparked my interest in the construction of a lifestyle and in the appearance of buildings and their interiors. I started to photograph nightclubs, loading docks, shopping complexes, sports arenas, and apartments at their moment of completion.

CORNELIA HEDIGER | Doppelgänger

Issue 02

I was born in Switzerland and grew up with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Trudi Gerster. At a young age I became fascinated with storytelling and intrigued by the subject of the Doppelgänger.

CHRISTOPHER LAMARCA | Natural Gas

Issue 02

The landscape always speaks for itself. It is devoid of ideology. The land is the truth, its reflection a mirror into our lives. To feel the dirt in one’s teeth is a visceral experience, an experience that requires letting go and having the strength to step out of one’s comfort boundaries, both physical and emotional.

AMY STEIN | Stranded

Issue 02

Stranded began while I was driving 65 miles an hour down I-95 in rural Maryland. In the distance, on the right, I saw a car with its emergency lights flashing, broken down on the side of the highway. As I slowed and approached the vehicle I saw a group of teenage boys crowded under the hood of a souped-up Chevy. Their car was broken down, their day ruined. They were stuck, stranded on the side of one of America’s busiest interstates, waiting for help in the form of a tow truck, the highway patrol or a sympathetic motorist. Cars raced by and no one stopped. Then I pulled up with my camera.

ALEJANDRA LAVIADA | Photo Sculptures

Issue 02

These images are a study of past and future histories, of classicism and modernism, and of photography’s role and relationship to other artistic media.

The abandoned buildings and transitional aura of Mexico City are the starting point and inspiration for my photographic work. For each project I choose an “endangered site,” which refers to places that are in the process of being demolished or transformed completely.