We Will Return To You reinterprets historical traditional oral storytelling and religious iconography into a choreographed contemporary form.

For access to exclusive episode notes, explore our membership options!

If you are already a member, please log in to jsybyllasmith.com and access the Concept Aware® Show Notes page through your account.

Here we host interviews with artists, curators, academics and writers to discuss concept development and the creative process.

If you are a photographer, mixed media artist, a visual creator of any kind, you have come to the right place for shared inspiration and resources.

Join our Concept Aware® community and be part of an engaging and educational global visual culture conversation.

Julian Sander presents a humanist portrait of society in 619 silver gelatin portraits of 20th-century Germans photographed by his legendary great-grandfather, August Sander.

For access to exclusive episode notes, explore our membership options!

If you are already a member, please log in to jsybyllasmith.com and access the Concept Aware® Show Notes page through your account.

Caroline Mauxion provides an immersive experience in her solo Paris Photo installation illuminating a Crip phenomenology through an autobiographical lens.

For access to exclusive episode notes, explore our membership options!

If you are already a member, please log in to jsybyllasmith.com and access the Concept Aware® Show Notes page through your account.

Éric Antoine is a skateboarding self taught French painter and photographer exhibiting La Forme, a solo exhibition of luminous ambrotypes reflecting a decade of evolution to pare his creative practice to its purest essence.

For access to exclusive episode notes, explore our membership options!

If you are already a member, please log in to jsybyllasmith.com and access the Concept Aware® Show Notes page through your account.

I was stopped in my tracks by the groundbreaking work of Evelyn Bencicova in collaboration with graphic sound innovator Samson G. Balfour Smith being exhibited at the Artemis Gallery in the Digital Sector of the fair.

For access to exclusive episode notes, explore our membership options!

If you are already a member, please log in to jsybyllasmith.com and access the Concept Aware® Show Notes page through your account.

A trailblazing book chronicling the fundamental and consequential contributions of Japanese women photographers.

Mariko Takeuchi and Pauline Vermare discuss their collaborative project creating a restorative history of Japanese photography. Offering a critical and celebratory counterpoint to the invisibility of Japanese women photographers this expansive and rigorously researched book features 25 portfolios, multiple essays and an illustrated bibliography of photobooks by Japanese women photographers. This bold book embraces emotion, experimentation and provocation in myriad forms of beauty, humor, and deeply spirited connections. 

In this conversation, Mariko and Pauline discuss, among other things:

Pulling back layers of cultural understanding of being a women

Expanding vocabulary and objects of study

Womanhood, daughterhood and caregiving 

Physical involvement with the medium

Utilizing self-portraiture to reclaim agency over one's body

Making tangible that which is invisible

An outward expression of internal experience

Including the voices of photographers in the essays and text

Making and remaking meaning

Referenced in the episode:

Aperture

Rencontres d’Arles Exhibition I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese women Photographers From the 1950’s to Now

A World History of Women Photographers by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert

The Third Gallery Aya

PGI Gallery

Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography / Created by Dr. Kelly McCormick and Carrie Cushman

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich

Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics by Marsha Meskimmon

Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed

World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2023

Self-Portraits by Yurie Nagashima

Ume-me - Todays Happening by Ume Kayo

The Memories of Others - Akihiko Okamura / Photo Museum Ireland

Linda Troeller’s self-portraits are compiled into a luscious tour de force of womanhood, identity and aging.

Troeller utilizes her relationship with the camera to understand herself and a woman’s place in the world across decades. Her history traverses that of a beauty contestant, potential lawyer, photojournalism student, model, muse, photo teacher, photographer, provocateur and activist. With conviction, insight and wisdom Troeller celebrates and generously shares her embodied strength and fragility.  

In this conversation, Lindadiscusses, among other things:

Universalizing the personal

Provocation aka myth-busting

The circular relationship of punctum

Linda-ness

Self-portraiture, performance and installation 

Exploring internal and external ageism

Sacred water explorations

Book decisions - ie: including titles

Sequencing, process and collaboration 

Ghost Ranch, Leonora Carrington, Sophie Calle and Carolee Schneeman

Referenced in the episode:

Healing Waters Film

Museum of Sex Exhibition

Chelsea Hotel

Erotic Lives of Women

Orgasm

TBW

Leica Gallery Exhibition - LA

Made of Rivers by Emory Hall

Chico Hot Springs

Neither Give Not Take Away - Sophie Calle at Arles

Two intrepid photographers and professors discuss the myriad educational strategies they activate and lead to enhance and strengthen women’s presence in photography. 

Anna Fox and Karen Knorr share how they empower visual storytellers by engaging a global network of practitioners, academics and curators who exchange resources, challenges and strategies toward achieving gender parity in photography. We hear how they conceived and built Fast Forward, their multi-pronged research organization responsible for establishing data, developing project-based teaching tools and convening worldwide themed conferences. Lastly, we wrap by learning of their 8-year-long road trip following the route established by Bernice Abbott. 

In this conversation, Anna & Karen discuss, among other things:

Data on the underrepresentation of women photographers 

Addressing and critically analyzing gender inequalities in workshop formats

Impact of motherhood and caregiving roles on professional photographers 

Teaching as an adjunct to pursuing one’s photographic work

Coalition-building, nurturing collaborative efforts and creating global conferences to discover hidden stories of and by women visual storytellers

Identifying key gate openers and partnering with willing arts and educational institutions 

Network-building from exhibition practices

Ambition, Synergy and Foresight 

Reaching for inclusion with innovative strategies

Grants, grants and grants

History of their multiple road trips photographing together

Image and text dialog

Referenced in the episode

Manifesto

Report on Equity and Inclusion

Fast Forward 

Putting Ourselves in the Picture

The Other Observers by Val Williams

Impressions Gallery

University of the Arts London

Tate

MEP

Work Show Grow

National Portrait Gallery

Trolley Books

T.J. Boulting Gallery

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography by Dr. Siobhan Angus is the lens through which we explore the multi-media artwork of Rosell Meseguer and Kosisochukwu Nnebe. 

This deeply researched and resourced book contextualizes the dark side of photography, the mining and extraction of elements that make printing possible. Our conversation centers on the many intersections of image-making and resource extraction. The deep scholarship of my guest's practices makes manifest the complex relationship between photography, colonization, labor, ecological, economic and social impact. 

In this conversation, Siobhan, Rosell and Kosisochukwudiscuss, among other things:

Flipping photography on its head

Implication and possibilities of the interaction of light with metals

Extraction of rare earth elements

Process-based practices - artists thinking out loud 

Ideas, materiality & visibility

Art exploring gaps and erasure in archives

Chlorophyll printing

Colonial histories

Food policy, manufacturing and distribution

Talking about the past & the present simultaneously

Connecting science & art

Illuminating economics in our daily life choices

Art creating theory

Referenced in the episode:

Dr. Siobhan Angus

Rosell Meseguer

Kosisochukwu Nnebe

Hiền Hoàng

Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin