The Halftone

Publisher and photographer Paul Schiek joins me on the show this week. Schiek is the founder of the photobook publishing outfit TBW Books and over the past ten years he has released titles with many enduring artists including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Alec Soth, Jim Goldberg and Katy Grannan as well as break-out young photographers like Mike Brodie and Christian Patterson. Listen in as we discuss Paul’s move out West as a teenager, the origins of TBW and his love of work.

Leslie Williamson joins us today on the Halftone! We recently met up in San Francisco to talk about growing up in the Bay Area, photographing brain surgery and her love of midcentury design. Over the past few years Leslie has published two wonderful books which showcase designers’ homes from around the world: Handcrafted Modern and Modern Originals. She's a writer as well and her stories of the places she visits fill her books and as well as her People Watching blog for the style section of the New York Times.

My guest this week is photography curator Sandra Phillips from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Listen in as we talk about her start in New York, hanging around the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a young woman and her move to SFMOMA. We also talk about some of her work with greats like Andre Kertesz, John Szarkowski and Robert Adams as well as her travels as curator and a daguerreotype of a five-pound potato! This episode is sponsored by Ahorn Books.

Doug DuBois joins me for this episode of the Halftone! Listen in as we discuss Doug’s discovery of photography, his working relationships with Jerome Liebling, Larry Sultan and Mitch Epstein as well as his long-term book project All the Days and Nights and his newest book My Last Day at Seventeen.

My guest this week is Alec Soth. We met up to talk about his early days in Minnesota, how Prince bought his childhood home, studies at Sarah Lawrence and the travels behind bodies of work like Sleeping By the Mississippi, Niagara and Songbook.

For more than thirty years Thomas Palmer has been making printing separations for books. His credits include work by Lee Friedlander, Nicholas Nixon, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and many others. In spring of 2015 I visited Palmer at his home in Newport, Rhode Island to talk with him about his start in photography, his earliest job in printing and making books with Irving Penn and Lee Friedlander. The Newport Art Museum is currently hosting a show of Palmer's photographs titled "This Newport," on display until September 5, 2016.

As a young man Jon Goodman set out from the United States for Europe to learn photogravure printing. At the time of his journey in the mid-1970s the practice of making flat plate gravures had all but disappeared. After years of travel and trials in Europe and the United States, Goodman began printing work by some of the greats: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange and Paul Strand. I sat down with Goodman in his Northampton, Massachusetts studio to talk about his travels in Europe, working on photogravure with Richard Benson and working with Michael Hoffman at Aperture.

This spring I traveled to New England to visit with a few of the printers behind some of my favorite photobooks. Robert Hennessey makes printing separations for books. His work is behind some of the best photography books of the last several decades, including titles by Paul Strand, Helen Levitt, Robert Bergman, John Szarkowski, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann. I visited with Hennessey at his home in Middletown, Connecticut to talk with him about his early days as a dye-transfer printer, working in photo-offset printing and carrying a boxful of Cartier-Bresson prints from the Museum of Modern Art home with him on the subway!

For the past several years Bryan Schutmaat has been making photographs around small mountain towns in the American West. We recently met up in Philadelphia to talk about his Texas upbringing, ditch-surfing, his early work in photography and his recent book Grays the Mountain Sends.