Lily Frances on William Eggleston

William Eggleston was the first photographer’s work I ever saw in a museum. I was young, and at the time, didn’t like going on those types of outings with my parents. Art was always too serious (and sometimes scary) for a little girl like me, but for some reason I liked Eggleston’s work. I liked it then, because it was pretty. I could understand the images and enjoy the colors. Eggleston’s work was my first introduction to photography as an art medium. It’s funny how time can go on and you can enjoy something in a completely different way. Today, Eggleston represents more to me than just fun cultural images and the bright colors of the 60s and 70s. To me, Eggleston really created a photographic style the especially today, you can see a lot of people imitate. Not only that, but I think he was a really important documentary photographer. He once said, “I am at war with the obvious” which I think really describes his type of work and the time period he comes from.

Lily Frances, Library Intern

Let’s Pretend! The Contemporary American Photobook

Most of the boxes that hit my doormat come from Japan, but more recently with the approaching sneak preview of the 10×10 American Photobooks project, which I am co-organizing with Matthew Carson and Olga Yatskevich, I’ve been receiving a lot of domestic parcels. Rather than Japanese postwar photobooks, my office table is filling with contemporary American photobooks from the past 25 years – books from lists supplied by the ten specialists who have each recommended 10 books for the reading room. As I spend time with these photobooks, before they are carted off for photography, I naively keep asking myself, “What ties them together?” I’m aware that this is a risky exercise with most responses either too simple or too open-ended — yet I persist. With these limitations in mind, here are some observations about the American photobooks that have been passing through my office.

“Have a nice day,” the sunny words that grace the front of those ubiquitous cheap plastic bags with the image of the yellow smiley face. That is what repeats in my mind as I close many of the American photobooks that await shipment to the various 10×10 events that will happen over the next four months. There is an unabashed sensation of artificial optimism, despite many images of destitution, decay and dysfunction. It is a strange sort of optimism, one that comes from a conceptual blurring of fact and fiction. It is not a visual blur, as in the are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus) aesthetic of Japanese Provoke era photobooks, but rather a mash-up of documentary material, personal diaristic archives and snapshots, appropriated pre-existing content, artificial or Photoshopped constructions, and vernacular imagery of the banal. It’s a world where narratives are often based on role-playing and a culture of “Let’s pretend.”  Many of the photographers responsible for the photobooks in 10×10 American Photobooks have been raised in a cultural cocktail that filtered the cheery glow of the Disney channel and its artificial universe through the reveal-all sensibility of reality TV and social media. There is this nagging interest in all the books to mix the ideal and artificial world that we are all supposed to have and yearn for with the raw, unraveling and totally damaged world of our realities. This seems to be the common ground. The blurring of fact and fiction to create a third reality that is then repackaged and given to us in book form as the contemporary American photobook, with many variations explored: the road trip, family diary, beautiful losers, archive of banality, and re-purposed images of identity constructions courtesy of social media.

Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008) by Leigh Ledare is one of those books that on the surface might be viewed as a “factual” family album comprised of ephemera, photos and journal-like entries. It intimately explores Ledare’s relationship with his mother, a former aspiring ballerina who is desperately trying to hold on to and repackage an identity shaped by feminine seductiveness and youth. Now working as a strip club dancer, images of Ledare’s mother in various states of alluring dress or undress are mixed with more banal family snapshots. The result is a factual account that liberally intertwines the fictional dreams and aspirations of Ledare’s mother with the desperate dysfunction of her reality. Pretend We’re Actually Alive is a book that taps many conflicted emotions and leaves viewers uncomfortable in the best sense – all the while wishing them a nice day.

Leigh Ledare. Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008)

Leigh Ledare. Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008)

Leigh Ledare. Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008)

A wishful optimism, but this time focused exclusively on youth, is also at work in the “beautiful losers” themed books of Ryan McGinley, Ari Marcopoulos and Tim Barber. Growing out of the skateboard, graffiti, indie fashion and music subcultures, McGinley’s self-published The Kids Are Alright (2000), a book selected by one of the 10×10 online specialists, chronicles the photographer and his drunken friends as they hang out at home, on the road and in New York’s East Village. Often cited as an heir apparent to the drugged up sexually violent youth culture images of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) and diaristic snapshot aesthetic of Nan Goldin, McGinley’s images lack a similar angst as they radiate a carefree optimism. They lean more towards an idealized lifestyle commerciality than social commentary.

Ryan McGinley. The Kids Are Alright (2000)

Ryan McGinley. The Kids Are Alright (2000)

Ryan McGinley. The Kids Are Alright (2000)

Ari Marcopoulos, who first gained recognition photographing skateboarders and graffiti artists, is represented in 10×10 with his limited edition book Out to Lunch (2012). Printed on matte paper for the most part with the exception of two glossy contact sheet pages, the gritty images in this book span most of Marcopoulos’ career. There is a palpable sense of urban-ness within this very tactile book held together by a visibly stitched spine. Yet, inserted within his raw factual record of street, music and urban counter-culture, Marcopoulos has included portraits of friends and family that are simultaneously fierce and fragile – all presented through an empathetic eye that is conscious of the myth-making power of photography.

Ari Marcopoulous. Out to Lunch (2012)

Ari Marcopoulous. Out to Lunch (2012)

Ari Marcopoulous. Out to Lunch (2012)

Tim Barber’s Mystic Heather & Virgin Snow (2008) is a fairly unpretentious, almost zine-like book that was one of the last photobooks to hit my desk. It is deceptively simple on first viewing. Named after the Manic Panic hair dye used to color the book’s subject Julia’s hair, the portraits have a carefree innocence to them. Shot in Western Massachusetts and New York City, Julia projects a self-assured youthful presence as she plays in a field, stands naked holding a copy of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, and is caught mid-stride in an urban stairwell wearing a “Sex Sells” T-shirt. The images and their sequencing, which combine a beautiful losers aesthetic with the adventures of a road trip, have the casual feel of snapshots uploaded to Facebook.

Tim Barber. Mystic Heather & Virgin Snow (2008)

Tim Barber. Mystic Heather & Virgin Snow (2008)

Tim Barber. Mystic Heather & Virgin Snow (2008)

Archiving the banal and re-appropriating identity in a blurring of fact and fiction à la Disney, Alyse Emdur’s Prison Landscapes (2012) is emblematic of the optimistic “Have a nice day” sensibility that masks many of the books that deal with dysfunction. Growing up with an older brother who was incarcerated, Emdur regularly visited him in various New Jersey prisons. Upon rediscovering a photo from one of these family visits, Emdur was reminded of the painted scenes in prisons that provide backdrops for family portraits on visiting day. For Emdur, these idealized landscapes and urban backgrounds were always in stark contrast to the grim reality of prison life and its oppressive architecture of confinement. In 2005, Emdur began corresponding with prisoners with the goal of creating a series of prison portraits against these ubiquitous fantasy backdrops. The resulting images, presented along with snippets of correspondence from the pictured prisoners, highlight a fictionalized American welding of picture-perfect freedom with the reality of incarceration. Emdur’s snapshot-like photos transform prisoners and their families as she and the prison portrait studio place them into artificial scenes typical of a family vacation.

Alyse Emdur. Prison Landscapes (2012)

Alyse Emdur. Prison Landscapes (2012)

Alyse Emdur. Prison Landscapes (2012)

A similar artificiality is at work in the images in John Divola’s Continuity (1997), a collection of pre-existing 1930s film set photographs from Warner Brothers Studios.  All is perfect in these black and white images of lavish dining rooms, elegant living rooms, familiar office hallways and suggestive bedrooms with ruffled sheets. They project a flawless optimism crafted through the seamless perfection of cinema. All is as it should be and as we dream it to be. Divola collects the discarded and timelessly perfect banal spaces of cinema. They are familiar and pleasant, as they also feel empty and dead.

John Divola. Continuity (1997)

John Divola. Continuity (1997)

John Divola. Continuity (1997)

Archival tendencies are a common thread throughout many of the books in 10×10. One of my favorites books that showcases artist-as-collector of pre-existing banal images is Diane Keaton’s Mr. Salesman (1993). Sequenced from archival 1940s and 1950s Jamison Handy industrial photographs of salesmen and sales culture, the book reads like a film noir with high contrast matte black and white images of men in dated suits at company meetings. Through clever sequencing, Keaton transforms banal corporate photos into cinematic narratives, crafting tales of intrigue and adventure.

Taryn Simon. An American Index of the Hidden and Familiar (2008)

Taryn Simon. An American Index of the Hidden and Familiar (2008)

Taryn Simon. An American Index of the Hidden and Familiar (2008)

Perhaps the same can be said for Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Familiar (2008), another book included in the 10×10 American Photobooks reading room. In this case, the rooms pictured seem ordinary, but upon reading Simon’s extensively researched captions for each image, one becomes aware that these are secret and undocumented spaces that are the site of covert and rarely seen activities. Simon, through these beautifully lit and carefully staged images, asks us to reassess our opinion of the banal and commonplace. Nothing looks out of place, but her captions tell us otherwise. In these images, we are asked to suspend our optimism and no longer “have a nice day.” In fact, Simon is directing us to stop pretending and extract fact from fiction.

10×10 American Photobooks will preview in NYC from May 3-5, 2013.

Opening Reception: Friday, 3 May 2013, from 7 to 9
4-5 May from 12-8pm
Ten10 Studios
10-10 47th Road
Long Island City.

Further information can be found at:
http://www.10x10photobooks.org/.

Books Mentioned in the ICP Library:

Leigh Ledare. Pretend We’re Actually Alive (2008). TR179 . L43 2008.

Ari Marcopoulos. Out to Lunch (2012). R TR179.5.M369 .O98 2012.

Taryn Simon. An American Index of the Hidden and Familiar (2008). TR647 .S56 2007.

Diane Keaton. Mr. Salesman (1993). TR681.S2 .K43 1993.

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Kevin Romero on 360 New York

During the time I spent as a teen intern in the ICP library I came across a book that I loved. The book’s name is 360 New York by Nick Wood. I like this book because it shows us places that are popular here in New York. I could  go visit these places myself. This book also talks about the history of the places. For example, Coney Island was known for giving all sorts of weird and wonderful freak-shows. I did not know that about Coney Island. I always enjoyed coming back to and reading this book because New York City is my home.
Kevin Romero , Teen Intern

Josh Lutz’s “Hesitating Beauty”

The cover of faculty member, Josh Lutz’s new book lures you in; it’s title, “Hesitating Beauty” is printed directly across the blinking eyes of a woman in pearls and an evening gown. She has been caught mid-blink, or possibly mid-sneeze, during a formal portrait session. Something is curiously amiss.

To fully appreciative Lutz’s unsettling story, one has to spend engaged time with  “Hesitating Beauty”.  It is not a coffee table book to be casually flipped through or decoratively displayed.  Lutz combines his family’s photos seamlessly with his own narrative images, as well as disorienting text from myriad unnamed sources in an endeavor to explore his mother’s decent into mental illness.

There is an unsettling contrast between Lutz’s family photos, full of smiling faces, and his more recent images of his mother in various hospital settlings. The text further complicates the narrative, painting an even more incongruous story.

During his lecture at ICP this past month, Lutz shared deeply personal stories from his childhood: watching his mother unscrew the phone looking for hidden recording bugs and searching for patterns in license-plate numbers.   This apophenia is artfully conveyed in Lutz’s narrative images: a crashed school bus and suburban mailbox each bare the numbers 666, a highway exit sign has no street information.

“Hesitating Beauty” ’s mix family’s photos, narrative images and disorienting text fosters uncertainty, both in the nature of memory and the authority of photography.  The disoriented reader experiences what dealing with illness feels like, rather than how illness looks.

“Hesitating Beauty” is available for review at the ICP Library or for sale at the ICP Store.

“Hesitating Beauty” will be on display at New York’s ClampArt Gallery, from April 11th to May 18th. Below is a selection of pictures and text from the book.

Teeny Academy

Saturday March 9th, the ICP Library and the ICP Store hosted “Teeny Academy”, our story time for young photobibliomaniacs. This time teeny readers were treated to the debut of Rachel Hulin’s new book Flying Henry, read by the artist and author Rachel Hulin with a book signing afterward.

Flying Henry is a children’s photobook that follows the story of a baby, Hulin’s son Henry, who gains the ability to fly. Henry flies through his home and out into unfamiliar places, embarking on great adventures. Rachel Hulin excellent photographic and graphics editing skills allowed her to render realistic looking portraits of her baby in flight, engendering teeny readers with a palpable sense of wonder and excitement.

Our smaller patrons were also regaled by Alex Nathanson, who screened his stop-motion animations. The short film, Anchorage, in particular had teenies and their parents squealing with delight. I am so happy to be a part of story time and I believe, as usual, a good time was had by all.

 

 

Many, many thanks to Kate Cunningham and the ICP Store!

 

 

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Collaborations in Japanese Photobooks: Shuji Terayama, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno

Photobooks by their very nature are collaborative endeavors. On their most basic level they involve a photographer and a printer. More often than not, they also engage a collaborative dialogue with a designer. During the 1960s in Japan, as traditional artistic boundaries blurred to form truly interdisciplinary creative think tanks, photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Issei Suda and Eikoh Hosoe formed collaborative relationships with performing artists in dance, film and theater. These creative exchanges, which merged the visual with the performative as photographers sought to uncover a new language beyond words, were the seeds for many of the most inventive photobook collaborations. By working as set photographers for the highly experimental intermedia filmmaker, theater impresario, and tanka poet Shuji Terayama, photographers Moriyama and Suda engaged in a dialogue that created hybrid forms of artistic expression from a mash-up of traditional Japanese folk arts, highly eroticized gender explorations, and Dada inspired happenings.  Similarly, in collaborative experiments that began in the early 1960s and continued throughout his career, Eikoh Hosoe worked with dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno of the influential Butoh dance-theater. The photobooks that resulted from these unions of performing arts with photography formed the basis for explorations that emphasized the spontaneous and unmediated in a blurring of art forms.

As one of the most inventive and experimental interdisciplinary artists of the 1960s and 70s Tokyo art scene, Shuji Terayama is relatively unknown in western art circles. His Tenjo Sanjiki Theater (loosely translated as “Peanut Gallery” Theater) staged wildly provocative events that challenged traditional Japanese customs as they simultaneously embraced them. Not limited to a single art form, Terayama was the ultimate artist-impresario. His creative vision flourished in theater, film, photography and poetry, with results that often confronted socially acceptable norms (both then and now). Included in this prolific and provocative creative outpouring were numerous collaborative photobooks.

Shuji Terayama. Saa Saa Otachiai (1968).

Shuji Terayama. Saa Saa Otachiai (1968).

Shuji Terayama. Saa Saa Otachiai (1968).

Shuji Terayama. Saa Saa Otachiai (1968).

Shuji Terayama. Saa Saa Otachiai (1968).

A little known and beautiful example is Terayama’s Saa Saa Otachiai (1968). Often found in the film or theater section of libraries, this book includes photographs of Tenjo Sanjiki performances by Moriyama and Suda, interwoven with text by Terayama and fantastic illustrations by Shiro Tatsumi. Designed by Kiyoshi Awazu with contributions from Tadanori Yokoo and Yutaka Higashi, this book begins with Terayama’s well-known play Oyama Debuko no Hanzai as it elegantly integrates typography, illustration and photography into distinct visual sections identified by green, purple, black, pink and red monochrome pages. Interestingly, this might be Moriyama’s first photobook contribution and may even predate his often cited “first photobook” Japan, A Photo Theater (1968), whose images include actors from the Tenjo Sajiki with text by Terayama.

Shuji Terayama. A Collection of Stage Fantasy Photos: Tenjo Sajiki People / Genso butai shashin cho: Tenjo Sajiki no hitobito (1977).

Shuji Terayama. A Collection of Stage Fantasy Photos: Tenjo Sajiki People / Genso butai shashin cho: Tenjo Sajiki no hitobito (1977).

Shuji Terayama. A Collection of Stage Fantasy Photos: Tenjo Sajiki People / Genso butai shashin cho: Tenjo Sajiki no hitobito (1977).

Another photobook that showcases the collaborative efforts of photographers and performers is Terayama’s A Collection of Stage Fantasy Photos: Tenjo Sajiki People / Genso butai shashin cho: Tenjo Sajiki no hitobito (1977). With contributions from Ikko Narahara, Hajime Sawatari, Issei Suda and Kishin Shinoyama, this book is a collection of wildly extravagant and absurd images that document the gender-bending and groundbreaking stage performances / street happenings of Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki troupe.

Issei Suda. Fushi kaden (1978, reprinted 2005, 2012).

Issei Suda. Fushi kaden (1978, reprinted 2005, 2012).

Issei Suda. Fushi kaden (1978, reprinted 2005, 2012).

Issei Suda’s Fushi kaden (1978, reprinted 2005, 2012) is an individual photographer’s book, whose images can also be connected to a collaborative dialogue with Shuji Terayama. As the set and publicity photographer for the Tenjo Sanjiki Theatre in the late 1960s, Suda was strongly influenced by Terayama’s integration within his creative oeuvre of northern folk traditions and their associated mystical rituals. The original Asahi Sonorama version of Fushi kaden, which was recently reprinted in a luxurious over-sized edition by the Japanese publisher Akio Nagasawa, reveals a strong debt to this interest in the mysterious at the edge of ordinary. Taken during several road trips throughout Japan in the early 1970s, Fushi kaden presents images of fading rituals and traditional life with a hint of mysterious spirituality. Suda’s images are the folk and traditional interests of Terayama without the theatrics.

Eikoh Hosoe. Man and Woman / Otoko to Onna (1959, facsimile 2006).

Eikoh Hosoe. Man and Woman / Otoko to Onna (1959, facsimile 2006).

Eikoh Hosoe. Man and Woman / Otoko to Onna (1959, facsimile 2006).

In contrast, an embrace of theatrics is exactly what the photographer Eikoh Hosoe addresses in his photobook collaborations with the dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. As prominent figures in the 1960s Tokyo cultural scene, Hijikata along with Ohno were the founders of Butoh, an experimental dance form that explores the duality of human strength and fragility through a choreographic focus on twisted and contorted bodies. Hosoe’s life-long collaborations with Hijikata and Ohno began in 1959, after he attended the scandalous one-night performance of Hijikata’s Forbidden Colors / Kinjiki, a homoerotic tale of youth based on Yukio Mishima’s eponymous novel (Badger/Parr, The Photobook 279). Inspired by the highly theatrical, often extreme imagery found in their dances, many of Hosoe’s best-known photobooks involve Hijikata, Ohno or members of their Butoh group. Beginning with Man and Woman / Otoko to Onna (1959), Hosoe used Butoh dancers as photographic models to explore a highly staged formalism of fragmented body parts that initially seems abstracted and detached, but is actually a stark poetic commentary on sexuality and the human condition.

Eikoh Hosoe. Kamaitachi (1969, reprints: 2005 and 2009).

Eikoh Hosoe. Kamaitachi (1969, reprints: 2005 and 2009).

Eikoh Hosoe. Kamaitachi (1969, reprints: 2005 and 2009).

Eikoh Hosoe. Kamaitachi (1969, reprints: 2005 and 2009).

Eikoh Hosoe. Kamaitachi (1969, reprints: 2005 and 2009).

Eikoh Hosoe. Kamaitachi (1969, reprints: 2005 and 2009).

As a creative zenith in the union of dance and photography, Hosoe’s next photobook, Kamaitachi (1969, reprints: 2005 and 2009) presents Hijikata running through the fields of his native northern Tohoku with rural villagers acting as casting extras. Kamaitachi’s dramatic images are based on the mythical Japanese folktale of a demon-like ‘sickle-weasel’, who haunts the rice paddies of the region, materializing at random intervals to slash villagers and run off with small children. Having spent several of the war years during his childhood in a northern village where the weasel legend was a cautionary tale known by all, Hosoe revisits this mythological narrative to further emphasize his vision of the expressive and symbolic quality unique to the photographic image.  As a multi-tiered collaboration, Kamaitachi also includes a preface by Shuzo Takiguchi, poetry by Toyoichiro Miyoshi and graphic design by Ikko Tanaka.

Eikoh Hosoe. The Butterfly Dream (2009).

Eikoh Hosoe. The Butterfly Dream (2009).

Eikoh Hosoe. The Butterfly Dream (2009).

Butoh dance was a regular thematic thread throughout Hosoe’s work and is once again the focus in The Butterfly Dream, a beautiful and extravagant volume published in 2009 to commemorate the 100^th birthday of Kazuo Ohno. Presented in a clamshell case designed by Tadanoori Yokoo, another fixture of the collaborative and interdisciplinary 1960s Tokyo scene, the book collects 46 years of photographs of both a young and old Ohno taken by Hosoe – many of them first appearing in Kazuo Ohno, an earlier 1997 volume, which documented Ohno and the Butoh dance form. Unlike Hijikata, Ohno’s dance style was less anguished; rather it championed a lighter and more fluid formal quality as an expressive exploration of symbolic release in tandem with its opposite: pain. As both a document and an art object, The Butterfly Dream, is a wonderful example of a photobook collaboration that thoughtfully constructs a balanced stage for the creative talents of all its participants.

Eikoh Hosoe’s Photographic Theater: Ukiyo-e Projections (2004),

Eikoh Hosoe’s Photographic Theater: Ukiyo-e Projections (2004),

Eikoh Hosoe’s Photographic Theater: Ukiyo-e Projections (2004),

A few years prior to The Butterfly Dream, the Howard Greenberg Gallery published a large format, limited edition photobook that features an additional layer of technological collaboration to Hosoe’s ongoing multi-decade exploration of Butoh dance. In Eikoh Hosoe’s Photographic Theater: Ukiyo-e Projections (2004), Hosoe merges the traditional with the modern by photographing projections of traditional ukiyo-e prints on the bodies of Butoh dancers, and then printing the resulting images on Japanese washi paper. This reworking of Hosoe’s dance/photography theme masterfully employs old and new technologies to pay tribute to the collaborative nature of his theatrical imagery as he continues to expand a dialogue at the intersection of art, dance, photography, theater and traditional ink painting. It once again confirms Hosoe as the ultimate collaborator, who is not afraid to embrace the new as he champions the old in a symbolic photographic language that exposes a rough sexuality interwoven with questions of human fragility.

The Hollywood version of art history often portrays the solitary artist working alone in a studio.  Theater, dance, art and photography keep to their respective arenas. Everything is tidy. However, the reality is quite different – especially in the free-flowing artistic circles of the 1960s and 70s. The blurring of boundaries was the mantra of the day, and Japanese artists were at the forefront of this dialogue. Dancers inspired photographers; photographers inspired dramatists; and dramatists brought it all to the streets in happenings that engaged the public in a larger collaborative and intermedia exchange that is now cited as the foundation for much of the current juncture of performance, art and photography… And photographers made photobooks that preserved it all for future generations.

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Books mentioned:

Shuji Terayama, Daido Moriyama, Issei Suda, Shiro Tatsumi. Saa Saa Otachiai. Tenjo Sajiki Shijo Koen /Performance on paper by Tenjosajiki. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, Showa 43, 1968.

Shuji Terayama, et al. Genso Butai Shashin Cho/ Tejo Sajiki No Hitobito (A Collection of Stage Fantasy Photos / Tenjo Sajiki People). Tokyo: Doyobitjutsu-Sha, 1977.

Issei Suda. Fushi kaden. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama, 1978. TR680 .S83 1978

Hosoe, Eikoh, Man and Woman / Otoko no onna [facsimile]. Tokyo: Camera Art Inc., 2006. TR676 .H68 2006

Eikoh Hosoe. Kamaitachi [reprint]. New York: Aperture, 2005. TR654 .H67 2005

Eikoh Hosoe. Kazuo Ohno. Tokyo: Soshi Seijusha, 1997.

Eikoh Hosoe. The Butterfly Dream (Kazuo Ohno). Seigensha Art Publishing, Tokyo, 2006.

Eikoh Hosoe. Eikoh Hosoe’s Photographic Theater: Ukiyo-e Projections. New York: Howard Greenberg Gallery, 2004. TR654 .H67 2004

Why I Like This Book: W The First 40 Years

I like W The First 40 Years because there is so much in it! I enjoy looking through fashion magazines and books because I love to see all the combinations one can make with fabric and other materials. In this book you can see how W Magazine has evolved through 40 years. For example, the first few covers looked a bit like newspapers, but now each cover has only one or two people on it with the text over parts of the photograph. There are also people I know of now that were interviewed and/or did a shoot with the magazine in previous years. It is interesting to look at these photos and see how that person has changed or grown. The different portrait styles really interest me as well.

Angelica, Library Intern via Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies