All in interviews
Visual artist, Nancy Baron, was born in Chicago and is now based in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, California. In her fine art documentary photography, she uses portraits, landscapes, and architectural photographs to record the world nearby with a hopeful bias. Her background in filmmaking, including the documentary form, has inspired her to honor the still image while giving it a cinematic tone.
Nancy’s prints have been shown in group and one-person exhibitions internationally and are held in public and private collections. Her photography has been published in notable magazines and newspapers worldwide, including The New York Times, Madame Figaro, W Magazine, Architectural Digest, The Telegraph Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Fast Times, Mother Jones, and on the Apple, CNN, and BBC websites.
Baron’s two monographs, The Good Life > Palm Springs and Palm Springs > The Good Life Goes On are published by Kehrer Verlag and are held in the collection of the Library of Congress and in various museum libraries, including MOMA, LACMA, the Getty, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
Nancy’s third monograph, Palm Springs Modern Dogs at Home, was published by Schiffer Books in September 2020.
“The stars will never be won by little minds; we must be as big as space itself.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star, 1956
Robert Heinlein’s poetic quote could easily describe Wernher von Braun and Jack Parsons. The engineers - one German, one American - were obsessed with rocketry and blessed with the big thinking that ushered humans beyond Earth’s boundaries in the post-World War II era. But, their biographies are complicated. Von Braun was a Nazi, and Parson’s was an occultist. While the former’s wartime affiliations were scrubbed from NASA’s illustrious institutional history in order to highlight his contributions to the American space race effort, the latter was written out the same history altogether.
Since 2018, Chicago-based photographer Barbara Diener has nurtured a similar passion for the two enigmatic rocket scientists. The Rocket’s Red Glare speculatively reunites the former telephone correspondents, mapping their lives and the selective retelling of significant historical events in which one was elevated, and the other minimized. Diener’s intensive, research-based work is also a personal reckoning with her German heritage and the ever-rippling psychological effect of the war’s humanitarian catastrophe.
Our interview, which started with a Zoom studio visit and continued via email, takes up the origin of this work and how the complicated narratives of two long-dead scientists shapes her photographic practice.
Born in 1982 in Germany, Barbara Diener received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from the California College of the Arts and Masters in Fine Art in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.
Her work has been exhibited at both national and international venues including the Griffin Museum of Photography, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, New Mexico Museum of Art, and Pingyao Photo Festival, China. Currently, she is the Collection Manager in the Department of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her books, most notably with her monograph My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art, summer 2015. She has published eight photography books, including the collaborative books Memory City (Radius Books, 2014) and Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (Radius Books, 2009), both with Alex Webb; the latter exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Le Monde among other publications. A 2019 NEA grant recipient, Norris Webb has work in numerous collections, including the MFA, Boston; The Cleveland Museum of Art; and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Studying at the International Center of Photography in New York, Rebecca Norris Webb first came across W. Eugene Smith’s “Country Doctor,” his famous Life Magazine photo essay. She was immediately drawn to the subject of Smith’s essay, Dr. Ernest Ceriani, a Colorado country doctor who was just a few years older than her father. She wondered: How would a woman tell this story, especially if she happened to be the doctor’s daughter? In light of this, for the past six years Norris Webb has retraced the route of her 99-year-old father’s house calls through Rush County, Indiana, the rural county where they both were born. Following his work rhythms, she photographed often at night and in the early morning, when many people arrive into the world—her father delivered some one thousand babies—and when many people leave it. Accompanying the photographs, lyrical text pieces addressed to her father create a series of handwritten letters told at a slant. Ultimately, Night Calls is a meditation on fathers and daughters, on memory and one’s first landscape, on caretaking of the land and its inhabitants, and on history that divides us as much as heals us.
Mariette Pathy Allen has been photographing the transgender community for over 30 years. Through her artistic practice, she has been a pioneering force in gender consciousness, contributing to numerous cultural and academic publications about gender variance and lecturing throughout the globe. Her first book "Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them" was groundbreaking in its investigation of a misunderstood community. Her second book "The Gender Frontier" is a collection of photographs, interviews, and essays covering political activism, youth, and the range of people that identify as transgender in mainland USA. It won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/Genderqueer category. Daylight books has published Mariette’s books, “TransCuba” in 2014, and her new book "Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand" in 2017. They are both available on Amazon or Daylight.
Mariette’s life’s work is being archived by Duke University's Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's Studies. In addition to her work with gender, Mariette’s background as a painter frequently leads her to photographic investigations of color, space, and cultural juxtapositions such as east/west, old/new, handmade/manufactured.
Mariette is represented by ClampArt in New York City.
Rick Schatzberg s a photographer living and making work in Brooklyn, New York and Norfolk, Connecticut. He received his MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford in 2018. Rick holds a degree from Columbia University in Anthropology (1978), played French horn with Cecil Taylor’s jazz ensemble in 1970s, and was a business executive and entrepreneur in the New York metropolitan area for many years. In 2015 he completed a one-year certificate program at the International Center of Photography. In the same year, his first monograph, Twenty Two North (self-published), was awarded first prize at Australia’s Ballarat Foto International Biennale. His second monograph, The Boys, was published in 2020 by powerHouse Books.
Life as Art | A conversation with photographer Stacy Kranitz
“The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible".
-Allan Kaprow
This interview was conducted on December 20th, 2020 via Zoom.
Stacy Kranitz was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. By acknowledging the limits of photographic representation, she makes images that create an expanded sense of authorship and accountability in which all parties (including the viewer) are complicit in the representational act as a false and yet, ultimately, satisfying and seductive construct. Her images do not tell the “truth” but are honest about their inherent shortcomings, and thus reclaim these failures (exoticism, ambiguity, fetishization) as sympathetic equivalents to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict. In this way, her work acknowledges the failure of representation to ever be able to communicate the other.
Her work has been written about in the Columbia Journalism Review, British Journal of Photography, Journal of Appalachian Studies, Time, The Guardian, Juxtapoz and Liberation. Portfolios of her photographs have been featured in Granta, GUP, Harper’s, Hotshoe, the Intercept, Mother Jones, Oxford American, Photofile, Sewanee Review, Vice and the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Kranitz is a current Guggenheim Fellow (2020). Additional awards include Time Magazine Instagram Photographer of the Year (2015), the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography Award (2017), and a We, Women grant (2020). Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019), and she has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015) and the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France (2019). Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, will be published by Twin Palms.
Born in the island of Jamaica, Al J Thompson moved to an immigrant community in suburban New York in the year 1996. Two decades later he noticed the dramatic changes to the place he once knew, projected by what he termed as 'political figures coiled with greed'.
As a devotee to the science of Psychology and Visual Arts, Thompson sets out to convey the nuances that he believes are circumstances of societal turmoil. His rhythmic approach to photography, at times envelopes people, places, and things that often generates poetic dialogue with subtlety – one that he perceives is consistent to the impression that all things relate.
Thompson has been published in several magazines including PDN, BOOOOOOOM, Ain’t-Bad, The New Yorker, C-41, La Vie, Photo Emphasis, Viewfind, Rocket Science, among others.
