For Mona Kuhn, the female nude is a vessel, a path, a portal to transcendence between the physical and spiritual planes. Liberated from the earthly draw of desire, it transforms from object to subject, to a state of becoming that is only possible when one is the protagonist of their own story and their own lives.

In She Disappeared into Complete Silence (Steidl), Kuhn takes Paul Nash’s Landscape from a Dream (1936-38) as her departure point and delves into the realm of photography to explore the surreal, symbolic realm of the California desert landscape, her model Jacintha, and elements of architecture to organize chaos. It is here that Kuhn embraces the space where light and shadow engage in exquisite interplay across a myriad of surfaces so that air becomes perfumed and potent, almost tactile itself. Light moves through these images like the hand of God, liberating us from the demands of the world and allowing us a moment of peace in our noisy and tiresome world.

Barkandji Country 5: Though this country is breathtaking in its color and redolent  of a spirituality that can not be easily denied, this image, when enlarged to its full native resolution, is over 2.5 meters wide and clearly shows sheep around the dam whose cloven hooves have denuded the landscape of its natural cover. This leaves the topsoil without structure so the little soil that remains is prone to wind erosion.

Euahlayi Country 1: Because of the natural abundance of vegetation and waterfowl, the ancient fecundity of the Narran Lakes wetlands has been reduced to almost nothing. Once a meeting place of First Nations for trade, festivals and intermarriage, now, with water taken by farming, there are only vestigial ponds that can no longer support the cultural significance they once did.

For 65,000 years, the Murray-Darling basin has been an oasis at the end of the earth — a self-contained world fed by the rivers from which it takes its name, creating a rich, fertile climate in which the Aboriginal people of North South Wales, Australia thrived. Until —

The imperialist forces of the UK settled the continent, destroying the natural ecosystem in more ways than one. Sixty-two species of mammal have gone extinct, while half the 34 native species of fish are threatened. The Aborginal people were either exiles, diseased or otherwise killed by settlers.

Today, the land is a symbol of late capitalism run amok, with climate change heralding the worst drought in 100 years, threatening the livelihood of inorganic businesses draining resources from the land including cotton, cattle and sheep farms.

Perceiving the scope of climate change is daunting to realize – like the rotation of the earth of its axis, the consistently incremental changes go largely unperceived, so that it is only after the damage is done and the time has passed that we begin to understand all the warning signs flashing before our very eyes.

Australian photographer Paul Harmon has been making aerial photographs of the floodplains traditionally owned by the Barkandji, Ngemba, Euahlayi and Wayilwan Indiginous Nations, revealing the horrific impact of imperialism on the continent in his series, WaterMarks.

The Pink Project I – Jiwon (K) and Her Pink Things, Seoul, South Korea,
Light jet Print, 2014

The Blue Project – Kyungjin and His Blue Things, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea,
Light jet Print, 2017

Color is many-splendored thing — a bouquet of sensations we often take to heart. Color evokes emotion and desire, excitement and reserve. It is both curious and telling that color would be genderized, with pink and blue, two opposite ends of the spectrum, used to delineate the poles on the binary. Where pink was once the color of masculinity, drawn from the power of red, it was viciously emasculated on July 18, 1926 when the Chicago Tribune ran a notorious, unsigned editorial headlined, “Pink Powder Puffs.”

In it, the author attacked film star Rudolph Valentino, holding him to blame for the installation of a face-powder machine inside a public restroom for men on the North Side. It was a reach, one that was as bigoted and disrespectful as anything you would see today:

A powder vending machine!  In a men’s washroom! Homo Americanus! Why didn’t someone quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmo, alias Valentino, years ago?… Do women like the type of “man” who pats pink powder on his face in a public washroom and arranges his coiffure in a public elevator?… Hollywood is the national school of masculinity. Rudy, the beautiful gardener’s boy, is the prototype of the American male.

It was a sentiment that the American public loved, one that held fast as the color pink received gender reassignment. Blue, which was traditionally for girls, was given to boys, and once complete, the color/gender binary became the latest socially constructed fait accompli.

Because gender is assigned at birth along with sex, paroxysms of cultural hysteria follow in the simplest of terms, when the seeds of identity politics planted in something as inherently universal as color itself. It’s popular because it’s easy — and just a little too obvious.

But sometimes, you can’t see it until it’s arranged in such a way that the undeniable truth is taken to absurdist heights. In JeongMee Yoon: The Pink and Blue Project (Hatje Cantz), Seoul-based photographer JeongMee Yoon sets out to explore the striking intersection between color, gender, and late capitalism.

Ron, surrounded by one of his famous nests. He was rescued by Save the Chimps and lived his remaining years at their sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida, where this photo was taken. © Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

Knuckles, Las Vegas, NV 2011 © Michael Joseph

We’re honored to announce that the first episode of the Feature Shoot photography podcast is now available. Featuring first-person stories from photographers Jo-Anne McArthur and Michael Joseph, this episode dives deep into the moving and untold stories behind the pictures that stayed with them long after they clicked the shutter. Future episodes will follow the same format: photographers will recount the tale behind one of their images.

For the eight-plus years, Joseph has met and photographed individuals in an American youth subculture, known commonly as Travelers. He’s journeyed throughout the country, collecting portraits and stories from people who spend their days on the go, exploring the United States by freight train or car, and living according to their own set of rules. In this episode, he introduces us to Knuckles, a Traveler he first met in Las Vegas. Over the years, the two of them have stayed in touch, and the photographer has also visited Knuckles’s family.

Throughout the last two-plus decades, McArthur has traveled to more than 60 countries documenting the lives of animals who are exploited by humans. Through her images, she reveals the individuality and dignity of creatures we largely ignore and overlook, from those we eat to those we use for entertainment. In this episode, she introduces us to Ron, a chimpanzee who spent years of his life in a laboratory, where he lived in a 5’x5’x7’ cage, was anesthetized more than a hundred times, and had a healthy disk surgically removed from his neck. Ron and McArthur were born in the same year, though their lives followed very different courses. By the time they met, Ron had thankfully been rescued by Save the Chimps, and he lived out the rest of his life at their Florida sanctuary.

Though their careers are unique, McArthur and Joseph do share a similar dedication in giving voice to invisible or otherwise forgotten individuals: people and animals who have value and who deserve to be seen and heard.

If you’re a photographer and you’d like us to consider your story for an episode of the Feature Shoot podcast, please send us your story idea to [email protected]

Alena plays with a cat and a cow. Merkenbrechts, August 2013

Victor is enjoying his mother’s legs. Merkenbrechts, July 2018

In her project I am Waldviertel, Dutch photographer Carla Kogelman travels to the Austrian region of Waldviertel to the small village of Merkenbrechts, population less than 200. Here, Kogelman transports us into an eternal moment of fleeting childhood summers, a moment where time eclipses in that it is both fast with outdoor adventure, and slow with restless boredom—imagination and play often being its only respite.

Jack’s reflection through a bathroom mirror. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 2018

Millette and her two grandchildren, Anthony and Allana. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 2018

Back in 1971, Larry Clark introduced Tulsa (Lustrum Press) to the world, transforming not only documentary photography and art book publishing but pulling back the curtain and exposing the secret truth about the heroin epidemic that had begun to sweep across Middle America.

Nearly half a century later, things have only gotten worse as the government has used the “War on Drugs” to propel the prison industrial complex to extraordinary heights while simultaneously cultivating an opioid crisis has been created and fueled by the pharmaceutical industry.

The realities of drug use, abuse, and recovery are much closer than we think, often within our most intimate circles of family and friends. Recognizing this truth in his own life, photographer Jordan Gale decided to revisit his upbringing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for the series It Is What It Is, which will be published by Daylight Books in 2020.

Inspired by artists including Danny Wilcox Frazier, Larry Clark, Robert Frank, and Eugene Richards, Gale traveled through Eastern Iowa between 2015 and 2019 creating images that offer intense, introspective explorations of the relationship the self and our environment.

Gale’s photographs pose poignant questions, and provoke thoughtful consideration of the underlying issues at stake: Why do some escape and others don’t? What is our responsibility to tell the story of our communities?

It Is What It Is has just launched on Kickstarter. Support the project here. Here, Gale shares his insights in creating this powerful body of work.

Grace Phillipa Israel-Albertine

Ashleigh Beugre Joncourt

A testament to the power of youth culture, independence, and creativity, Dazed Magazine has been at the cutting edge of media since being founded in 1991. Seamlessly moving between print and digital, Dazed stays fresh by keeping its connection to the community fully versed in the power of the present.

Most recently, Dazed teamed up with Red Hook Labs, a Brooklyn-based public benefit corporation, to create Dazed+Labs, a series of free classes and mentoring in the arts to UK youth — a concerted effort organized in response to cuts in UK education funding.

The partnership premiered in November 2018 with a ten-week, two-hour photography class held at the Rugby Portobello Trust, a West London youth center, led by photographer Eddie OTCHERE  and Dazed’s Arts & Culture editor Ashleigh Kane.

Students were given cameras and film to shoot, while a makeshift darkroom was set up in the center’s kitchen, giving students an opportunity to work with photography in a manner that few do these days. The course culminated in an exhibition of nine photographers in the class: Ashleigh Beugre Joncourt, Edward Jia Jun Kau, Sofia Marijuan Carreno, Grace Phillipa Israel-Albertine, Reece Yeboah, Tyler England, Omar Gommari, and Mischa McRae.

Here OTCHERE, Kane, and Leone Buncombe, Service Coordinator of Rugby Portobello Trust, share their experiences collaborating on the first iteration of Dazed + Labs.

Time Dilation © Amelie Satzger

Femme Fiction #1 © Lauren Menzies

In conjunction with the Fourth Annual Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Awards, United Photo Industries (UPI) in Brooklyn, NY is showcasing the work of two awardees: Amelia Satzger and Lauren Menzies. These two artists were selected by Laura Roumanos, who is executive producer and co-founder of UPI and one of the jurors for the award. With United Photo Industries having a mission to exhibit thought-provoking and challenging photography, Roumanos has certainly chosen two artists whose work encompasses the organization’s ideals in ways that are both complimentary and striking in their contrast.

Blue Like Black, Argentina, 2018

Still from video short “the cleanse” 2017

Born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Adama Delphine Fawundu is the only first first-generation American of her siblings. Her brother and sister were born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and lived there until 1975, when Fawundu and her mother returned to bring them to the United States.

Fawundu would not return again until 1992, at the age of 21, during the Christmas holidays, during the first year of a decade-long civil war. Though she was unable to return to her homeland, Fawundu traveled the continent, visiting South Africa in 1995, early in Nelson Mandela’s presidency, as well as Ghana and Nigeria. And when she finally could come home, she brought two of her sons, then ages ten and seven, to create the foundation for a lifelong connection to the motherland.

Embracing the power of connection, Fawundu takes an expansive, inclusive approach, personifying the water spirit that connects Africa and its Diaspora using photography and film. In The Sacred Star of Isis, now on view at Crush Curatorial in New York through April 6, Fawundu travels the globe to create images from the New York State forests and the waters of the coast of Freetown, Sierra Leone, to cities within Argentina, a place known to systematically attempt to erase its Black presence.

The exhibition includes “the cleanse,” Fawundu’s first film — a glorious celebration of rhythm and ritual contained in the moments when Fawundu places her perfectly pressed tresses under the shower and begins to wash her hair, an incantation filled with magic, power, and wisdom. Here, Fawundu shares her journey creating The Sacred Star of Isis.