Federico Clavarino Interview: Hereafter, Escaping Nihilism

  Editor’s Note, This interview was conducted over the period of months. Federico and I would ping pong ideas back and forth. Being a busy artist, Clavarino had already moved into several different territories from my principal point of trying to tackle Hereafter, his great opus about power, family, archive and how history is activated […]

Mark Power: Good Morning, America Volume II

  “From there it is all ticker tape and pumpkin pie. From the position in front of its double, it’s the smell of Baltimore’s burning brownstone wires and antiseptic hand sanitizer ironically left on the church pew”.     “That is no longer considered autonomy. That friend is unfettered barbarism”. No stronger words have been […]

Gordon Parks: Collected Works of an Alien Afloat In Genius

  Gordon Parks was first described to me as a renaissance man for his enduring and unfailing talent behind a lens. I think in those terms adding to this moniker Renaissance Alien would not be incorrect.   There are certain people in this world in which there is no other possible recourse but to name […]

Exploring, Entering a World and Earning Your Dues – An Interview with Bruce Davidson

USA. Hampton, Virginia. 1962. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos “Look, I’m kind of an explorer. I’m entering a world and it takes time.”   A Magnum photographer, Bruce Davidson has been renowned since the late fifties for his photographs of gangs in Brooklyn, and subsequent projects including New York’s East 100th street, circus performers, civil rights marchers […]

America’s Race Riots of the Sixties

In the early 1960s, African Americans in cities nationwide were growing frustrated with the high level of poverty in their communities. Since the years immediately following World War II (1939–45), middle-class white Americans had been leaving the cities for nearby suburbs. Businesses that had once provided jobs and tax funding in the cities were leaving […]

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE: “The Voices of the White South” (1956)

  In the mid-1950s, LIFE magazine published a multi-part series that was titled “The Background of Segregation” exploring how the politically-violently-ethically charged issue was playing out from a Jim Crow South to the first fiery stirrings of the heroic Civil Rights movement. Today, here we sit, our cities crumbling – segregation (race, socio-economics, class, ideology) […]

Everything is Sacred – An Interview with Bruce Davidson (2006)

“For me, everything is sacred, whether I’m photographing a human being or a statue or the good earth. It’s sacred, I absorb it. I want to absorb it.”   Interview with Bruce Davidson, The Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU/Chicago), November, 2006 Q: You’re on the streets of Chicago, wandering into Pentecostal churches, how did that initial […]

An Interview with Charles Moore

Birmingham, Alabama, 1963   “I believe in something strongly, and I’m going to stand up for it. And I knew and my father knew – he taught me, that I better not ever mistreat people, just because of color. That is really where I come from.”   Oral History: Charles Moore, Interviewed by Mary Morin […]