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Just last weekend, a piece of Carmen’s - a portrait in multiple images of Toni Morrisson was featured on the last cover of the New York Times Magazine of the decade. The culmination of an eventful past couple of years for Carmen, she released two new books - Notes on Fundamental Joy with Printed Matter and My Birth with SPBH Editions. That book accompanied her show of the same name in MoMa’s New Photography in 2018. In that powerful installation, she used two facing walls to tape up over 2000 found photographs of women giving birth.

Winant was born in San Fransisco, studied at UCLA and the California College of the Arts and now lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, artist Luke Stettner and their two sons, Carlo and Rafa. She is the Roy Lichtenstein chair of studio art at Ohio State University where she teaches as well.

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I remember the first time I met Patrice Aphrodite Helmar. It was around this time in 2017, and a friend asked if I wanted to go and check out the Backyard Biennial that she was putting on at her place in Ridgewood. A self-initiated curatorial effort, she showcased the work of emerging and established photographers alike. There was food and drinks, a slideshow going, and prints untraditionally arranged within the orange walls of her backyard. As we walked in to her ground floor apartment, she greeted and hugged us as if we were old friends. I remember we talked about Friedlander’s Nudes and EJ Belloq’s Storyville portraits at some point that night, but what stuck with me most was a kind of energy that she filled the room with.

Patrice makes heartbreaking photos - lots of pictures of people, often in intimate settings. She’s made lots of her work in bars, where she’s also worked quite a bit, and she’s spent a lot of time shooting in New Orleans. She’s exhibited work across the country, but, she also gives so much back and makes such an important contribution to the photo community in New York. Aside from the Backyard Biennial, she teaches at Pratt and Fordham, and she's the founder Marble Hill Camera Club.

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Matt Grubb is sitting in his car in the parking lot outside his favourite movie theatre in Queens, sipping a Diet Coke. As we're coordinating a time to meet for this interview, he tells me that he’s about to go see the new Avengers movie for the third time. It had just come out two weeks ago….I’m amazed and laughing to myself just thinking how much i love that compulsion. I think that same kind of curiosity and passion goes into his work and is one of the reason’s he’s such a brilliant image maker. His pictures, often varied genre’s, are unified somehow in this mysterious, very original combination of eloquence and strangeness.

Matt grew up in San Francisco, earned his MFA at Yale and has done editorial work for the New York Times, Vice and most recently, Gayletter. This past summer, he published his first, now sold out book, Brian Singer 2001, which was launched at 56 Henry in New York alongside a selection of new photographs made this year.

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In 2010, with a feeling that the traditional publishing industry was not going to last, Bruno Ceschel founded Self Publish Be Happy, an initiative to support and promote the work of emerging photographers. Originally, it functioned as a platform for artists making DIY Books and Zines, but eventually would become more expansive, getting involved in educational activities, the curation of exhibitions and events, and with their own publishing initiative. Through its imprint SPBH editions, Ceschel has published books by Carmen Winant, Lorenzo Vitturi, Nicholas Muelner, Peter Puklus and Chritina de Middel to name a few.

In addition to his work with Self Publish Be Happy, Ceschel is also a lecturer and a curator and has organized events at numerous international institutions such as C/O Berlin, The Photographers Gallery in London, MiCamera Mian and Printerd Matter in New York. He also writes regularly for publications such as Aperture, the British Journal of Photography and FOAM.

Ceschel began his career in photography working at Colors Magazine as a journalist, then edited by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.

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I went to go visit Paul Mpagi Sepuya on a cool day this past winter at his studio in the Boyle Heights area of LA. In one room, test prints, book mockups His desk and a big printer filled the space. In the other, a Russian plywood bench, a big mirror on the wall, a velvet curtain hanging and a camera on a tripod. He suggested we do the interview in that room, the set where many of his photos have been made, and maybe somehow, maybe the setting would provoke more interesting conversation. The items in that room are the elements in his photographs, and they all have significance in relation to his interests in portraiture, but what I found equally as interesting was the economy he used with those props in order to produce varieties of different, complex images. Nothing about his picture making process is really fancy, but that simplicity allows him to roam around in, and complicate the frame.

In the past few years, Sepuya has really been on a roll - he’s had work in Moma’s most recent New Photography exhibition, is currently in the Whitney Biennial. He’s had had numerous solo shows, most recently at Team Gallery in New York and his photo Darkroom Mirrors was featured on the cover of Artforum’s March 2019 issue.

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It seems to me like the more dramatic the subject matter a photographer takes on, the more difficult their job becomes. When what is in front of the camera has so much visual appeal already, how do you make pictures that are more interesting than the event?

Jeff Burton’s pictures are such a great example of how brilliantly someone has dealt with that problem. His work, much of which was made on gay adult film sets in LA, rarely just documents what is in front of him, but rather uses that material to construct his own personal and mysterious world that's more suggestive than explicit.

Burton was born in Anaheim, California and grew up in Texas where he studied at the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. He then pursued his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts as a painter before moving back to LA where he got a job at Catalina Films shooting stills on on gay porn sets.

We had this conversation in the garden outside his home in Silver Lake in Los Angeles.

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Jo Ann Callis’ photographs have such an uncanny strangeness to them. They often feel like they could be stills out of a David Lynch film, but she was making them long before Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive came to be.

She was born in Cincinnati and pursued her interest in art at Ohio State University, though her eduction was interrupted by marriage, moving our to LA and having kids. These challenges, though, would end up becoming a big part of her subject matter. She’s always been interested in the domestic, the body , femininity and sexuality but her pictures always complicate something that might seem so familiar to us all.

She enrolled at UCLA and it was there that she studied under the highly inventive Robert Heinecken in the early 70’s, who made a big impact on her. He turned her onto the the work of Paul Outerbridge and encouraged her to pursue what was going on in her life and inside her head as fodder for work.

We conducted this interview at her home in Culver City, Los Angeles where she’s been living for the past 38 years where we talked about her life and work.

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