Photography Now

"The purpose of my feed is to express a feeling of invisibility that I have felt for most of my career. I have always felt irrelevant and voiceless. My Instagram feed is my way of talking about the issues that plague not just me but other members of my community. For me it is not so much giving voice to the issues – I don’t believe I am qualified – but rather an attempt to amplify some of the injustices I see in my community of Bedford-Stuyvesant [in Brooklyn, New York], the African American community and the diaspora."

"I love working with books, it’s sort of my roots in an art practice. I am trained as a graphic designer and making books-as-art projects is how I came to art. I like the serial nature of the book, the potential in it to equalise a large number of images, making one no less important than the next, in opposition to the way that work in a gallery is often a smaller number of very preciously treated images completely extracted from the context you get in a book."

"Winogrand was often combative and sometimes defensive, and his evasiveness sometimes expressed this. But more importantly, he understood how untranslatable a photograph is, how it says something that can’t be said in speech. I think that the main reason he resisted explaining himself was that he didn’t want to smother under a pile of words that special, poetic ambiguity that makes a photograph beautiful."

This is a book i will certainly look into.

"Yet, regardless of the difference in genres, styles or intentions, the sense of overall community, camaraderie and collaboration was inspirational. The work of today's emerging photographers also served as a reminder that without their dedication and bravery, many stories across the world might never be shared; their efforts are not to be taken for granted, we are dependent on them."

"Pourquoi avoir décidé de te concentrer sur l’Afrique ?

C’est une zone géographique en pleine transformation. L’évolution économique y est assez fulgurante en ce moment. Observer ces changements à travers le mariage est un point de vue intéressant. Ça me permet de documenter une transformation sociale dans un évènement très spécifique et universel. En Afrique, on observe depuis plusieurs années l’émergence d’une classe moyenne importante. Ce phénomène s’observe particulièrement bien dans les mariages. Mes clients ont un pouvoir d’achat en hausse et cela se voit dans leur mariage."

"Africa is as complex and varied as Latin America, and this series wants to recognize the current engagements of photographers from the continent with their own histories and the current environments of contemporary photography."

Black and white photography, cats and kids. It seems like the road to clicheland, but Alain Laboile manages to avoid all those traps. These few images available raised my enthusiasm to read the book.

"When I started, I used Instagram just as a photo app like everybody else. If you look at my first posts, the photos use a lot of filters, [they are] pictures of what I’m eating and such. I used to post my illustrations on Flickr, and once I started to realize that Instagram was a place where you could share with a big community of creative people, I started to skew more towards making stuff other than selfies. Some of the images on my feed are from client work, but there are also a lot of self-initiated projects from a long list of ideas that I’m always keeping track of. When I have some downtime, I work on these ideas. I have a lot of fun."

"Talking to Ants is a kind of state of mind for me during the picture-making process. Perhaps the title stems from childhood immersion and tapping into a similar frame of mind where you loose yourself with objects, creatures and thoughts. It is a kind of freedom but in way, perhaps, for the subject too, as it allows both me and the subject to breathe and get to the other side of the glass wall that you sometimes reach at the parameters of a photographic study or project."

"Si la photographie finale est désormais moins importante, que devient la notion d’auteur ? Vito Acconci est-il l’auteur de ses photos ou est-ce le programme qui en est l’auteur ? Et que dire de l’œuvre de Dennis Oppenheim où ce n’est même pas lui qui a réalisé la photo finale ? Avec l’apparition de cette photographie conceptuelle, c’est toute la notion d’auteur qui se déplace. Il devient alors possible de faire des photos sans auteur, bientôt d’être l’auteur de photos qu’on n’a pas prises."

"I became interested in formal studio portraits in 1979 while observing it’s lower Manhattan youth (my peers) and it’s present counter-culture, and decided early on to use a single-light source and simple mottled backdrop, and when I needed to, I would set this up as a portable studio, one highly mobile. This was then used to document global sub-cultures. Many of the projects – referred to as “Social Studies” – became documents of indigenous people."

High end sports photographers work with expensive equipment and seem to live a fantastic life, but can be compared to highly skilled workers in a factory. A image factory that never shut's down.

"All in all we are just another brick in the wall". I can't remember what else to say when i look at these pictures.

“The idea came along of creating rhythm by alternating spreads with one or two pictures, always combining a black-and-white with a color photo. It was interesting to see that you could play a kind of memory game: to create a relation between photographs that, in time, were far apart. For example you could sometimes make believe that a black-and-white picture copied elements of a colour photo that was actually taken years later.”