Roy DeCarava, Boy in park, reading, 1950

Roy DeCarava, Swimmers, 1950

“We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” Langston Hughes said of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his landmark art book collaboration with Roy DeCarava recently republished by David Zwirner Books.

In 1952, DeCarava became the first African-American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He used the one-year grant of $3,200 to make the photographs that would appear in the book, a tribute to Harlem glowing in the final years of its legendary Renaissance.

DeCarava gave Hughes a selection of prints from which the poet wrote the story of Mecca through the eyes of Sister Mary Bradley, a fictional grandmother who knows everybody’s business and will put you on if you listen.

© Bri Hammond, The Clams, Better Wetter

© Bri Hammond, The Clams, Crimson Tide

Melbourne-based photographer Bri Hammond captures the refreshing spirit and story of feminist water-ballet group The Clams. A commercial and editorial photographer who has worked throughout Europe and Australia, Hammond uses her visual language and ability to connect with her subjects to illustrate a message of femme strength, confidence, and humor.

In this series, glossy and vivid reds and pinks dominate the compositions, infusing the members of the water-ballet group with elements of a fashion editorial. The members of The Clams put on performances that do anything but shy away from the all-to-relatable and stigmatized themes that many women deal with, such as body hair, periods, and female sexual pleasure.

Although filled with adoration, love and excitement, parenthood can be an equally nervous and daunting process. For Troy Colby, a photographer born and raised in a small rural farming community and now residing in Lawrence, Kansas, he presents his honest experiences of fatherhood in his ongoing series, The Fragility of Fatherhood.

At just 19 years of age, he had already managed to photograph Bob Dylan and David Bowie, hung out with The Runaways, and had his work published in magazines all over the world. This is Brad Elterman, an artist whose work serves as a comprehensive visual history of rock ‘n’ roll.

If such a thing as reincarnation exists, I’d like to reincarnate as Brad Elterman. This is a man who seemed to have the very useful superpower of always being in the right place, at the right time.

Arielle Bobb-Willis. San Francisco, 2017.

Vortex.

Arielle Bobb-Willis. NYC, 2016.

What we see is informed by how we look at it. What gets framed, by who and to what end are some of the questions that occur whenever an image is introduced. In the realms of Western art and history, access has been limited to a select few who hold the power to use iconography to influence and shape ideas about “truth.”

It is only in recent times that the question of intent and exclusion have been put to the pantheon, calling out misinformation and marginalization, over and over again. At a certain point, one ceases to argue and decenter the narratives foisted upon us. Rather than shadowbox with a lie, we can choose to change the paradigm writ large.

Curators Jon Feinstein and Roula Seikaly did just this with An Inward Gaze, recently on view at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. Here, they brought together the work of Arielle Bobb-Willis and Brittney Cathey-Adams, two women who make sculptural, performative images that liberates representations of gender, race, and body size from the strictures of the white male gaze.

A man is laying comfortably on a Persian carpet – his arms folded gracefully, while the soft, hazy daylight peeks through the window. Another scene sees an array colourful fruits and bread artfully cut and spread out on a piece of linen.

Elsewhere, there’s a tree painted gold, a woman taking a selfie during a vibrant light display, and a landscape so beautifully stark that it’s surprising to see any form of the manmade, let alone a road rippling through the hillside like a fierce stream of lava.

These scenes are taken from Tabriz to Shiraz – the debut book by Melbourne-based documentary photographer Sarah Pannell. On two occasions in 2016 and 2017, she went sofa surfing across Iran and collated a dynamic series of photographs captured during her journey.

When German photographer Michael Wolf died in Cheung Chau, Hong Kong, on April 24 at the age of 64, he left behind a prodigious body of work that spans 25 years as a photojournalist. Wolf spent the majority of his career in Asia creating work that defies easy categorization. Rather, Wolf moved as an outsider would, discovering value in the overlooked, mundane details of life and uncovering a deeper symbolic connection to the larger world.

Best know for the series Architecture of Density, Wolf responded to Hong Kong’s skyscrapers as abstractions, finding the beauty that lay within these brutalist blocks of architecture. His was an understanding of life in the city and its impact on the way we see, think, and relate to ourselves, each other, and to the earth.

Wolf’s final book, Cheung Chau Sunrises (Buchkunst Berlin, released earlier this year, presents a series made over the bay in Hong Kong where he lived. The series offers a powerful couunterpoint to his previous work, which addressed the environmental and economic impact of mega-cities.

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Raised in Barcelona and based in Berlin, the photographer Silvia Conde has explored some of the most pristine locations on the planet. Scrolling through her portfolio feels like stepping back in time. From dreamy landscapes to analog portraits, her sun-drenched images remind us of our enduring connection to the environment and the importance of protecting it for generations to come.

Conde’s body of work represents a modern-day Garden of Eden. She’s created a beacon of hope for the environmental movement, a lasting tribute to the resilience of nature in a world where almost everything seems disposable. And with Squarespace as her website builder, she’s also created something else: a lush and dynamic digital space that captures the breadth and beauty of the natural world.

We spoke with Conde about her commitment to making art that makes a difference and the one-of-a-kind website she created to showcase it all.

AMARI, Mount Dora, FL, 33yo. Meet Amari. Amari has one of the biggest hearts of anyone I’ve met. He’s a family man and gave birth to two of his kids before transitioning. It was of equal importance to him to have his own babies as it was to transition.

THOMAS, Athens, GA 27yo. Thomas is strong willed and determined. We’ve spoken as length about a lot of the difficulties he’s encountered being trans and from a small southern town. From getting and holding down jobs to fair treatment from law enforcement, the struggles are real. Despite this, Thomas has fierce determination to continually rises above and channels a lot of his energies into his music and creative pursuits. He’s a beautiful soul both inside and out and has become a great friend.

RUFIO, Atlanta, GA 27yo. Rufio! What an amazing bundle of body building bear like brilliance! Rufio is so full of life and spirit. He’s also a staunch feminist, especially with his experience of white male privilege that came with passing.

“When I started to pass as a man and was stealth, I got white male privilege and I was pissed!” Rufio, 27, reveals in a quote accompanying his topless portrait in Soraya Zaman’s new book American Boys (Daylight). Appearing fully nude in the book after six years on testosterone, Rufio’s portrait fearlessly acknowledges the power that gender in all its complexity and nuance holds.

In a world where binaries are heavily enforced and rigidly policed, Zaman sees her subjects as they are, establishing a profound level of trust with her subjects who reveal their deep, inner selves in a series of portraits and personal quotes, which, when taken together offer a multi-faceted look at our ideas around masculinity in America today.

“I don’t think anyone on Earth is a man or a woman, it’s a reference point,” Elias, 28, says. “Language is a tool but we get so accustomed to using the tool that we start to think it’s dictum from God. It’s like first language existed and then we existed. But no, things exist and then we give them a name and in turn we get overly attached to their definition.”