Charlotte Schmid-Maybach: Water, Woods and Sky

My passion lies in finding often unrecognized moments of everyday life, from the mundane to the humorous. I am fascinated by human interactions and how they relate to their surroundings. These visual narratives of amusement, occasional alarm, and poignant reflection, are everywhere, happening continuously and occur simultaneously. I seek to capture those fleeting moments of humanity, moments that exist and then fade away. About the Artist: Charles Ford Charles Ford, raised in Houston, Texas, earned a BBA from The University of Texas at Austin. During his junior year, Charles seized the opportunity to travel to Bolivia, photographing the work of a student medical group. Post-graduation, based on the strength of his work in Bolivia, he was accepted to ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California where he earned a BFA. Charles moved to Dallas, Texas in 1980 where he shot fashion and portrait photography. In 1981, he was invited to teach photography at The University of Texas at Austin. Following two semesters teaching at UT, he relocated to New York, where he continued shooting fashion and portrait photography for magazines such as Vogue, GQ, and Rolling Stone. Whenever on the street, always with his Leica M6, Charles pursued his profound passion for street photography. After a decade in New York City and the birth of his daughter, Charles returned to Texas in 1992. He continued shooting fashion and portraits. Fast forward to 2023 when Charles revisited the contact sheets of his street work from the 80’s and early 90’s, rediscovering images that had been stored away for years, he began printing and sharing these captures of the past on his website and Instagram. Notably, all of Charles Ford's work, spanning from street photography in the 80’s and 90’s to portraits and current projects on his website, was shot on film. Image: © Charles Ford

Clarissa Bonet uses urban spaces as a dynamic backdrops for the subtle, often overlooked dramas of daily life in the city. Bonet studies the shape and behavior of sunlight and shadow, and then carefully constructs street scenes that are suspended in time, briefly illuminating the psychological space that runs under the daily routines. Bonet’s photographs have been exhibited at the Aperture Foundation and the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, and are held in numerous museum collections. The exhibition at Pictura brings together three related series by the artist, City Space, Stray Light, and From Shadow to Sun, each one a distinct expression of her finely-tuned urban light stalking.

Kapp Kapp is pleased to present Bombshell, an exhibition of photographs by Ethan James Green. Shot over the course of a year, Green’s latest body of work subverts the idea of the stereotypical “bombshell,” exploring and reinterpreting the concept by inviting his models to style and pose themselves in ways that embody their personal perspective on femininity, glamor, and sex appeal. Green is known for his uncompromising black-and-white portraits which capture the lives of his New York friends. Bombshell is a continuation of this work, with an increased focus on the collaborative exchange between photographer and subject, further exploring how this relationship manifests in the image. Starring iconic faces such as actress Hari Nef, artist Connie Fleming, Interview Magazine fashion director Dara Allen, artist and actress Martine Gutierrez, and fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the project was produced alongside hair stylists Lucas Wilson, Jimmy Paul, and Sonny Molina. A selection of Polaroids from the project was first published as a zine by Dashwood Books, New York. Green states, “The zine was the first rendition of this collaborative project we embarked on over the summer of 2021. Once we began shooting, the title Bombshell became the driving force behind our days of dressing up and performance. The presentation at Kapp Kapp brings this project full circle.” The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition book published by Baron Books, with art direction by Ben Kelway, the creative director of Arena Homme Plus and POP Magazine, and an essay by Devan Diaz, whose writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and The Guardian, among others.

Candela Gallery is thrilled to announce a gallery takeover by Charlottesville, Virginia-based artist and community organizer Morgan Ashcom. Titled the Abstract Land & Filing Co. (ALFC), this exhibition will be Ashcom’s second at Candela, continuing to showcase his love for parafiction and collaboration. Since 2018, Ashcom has operated his studio practice out of an industrial warehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. At one time, employees at this commercial building manufactured products for the analog data industry, commonly referred to as the visible records industry. While the factory is no longer in operation, Ashcom has spent the past seven years reimagining this property to feature a community-directed commons and art space called Visible Records, nestled within a constellation of blue-collar workers. Conceived as a fictional company, ALFC serves as a unique artistic repository for Ashcom's work, exploring the intersections of private property, big data, and industrial remnants. By utilizing discarded factory materials such as card trays, filing cabinets, and pocket frames, Ashcom blends archival images with contemporary photographs of the visible records and land management industries. The ALFC challenges and reconsiders the colonial notion that the power to describe equates to the power to control and invites new ways of imagining our relationships to one another. In addition to a display from the company archives, the ALFC’s takeover will highlight Richmond community initiatives challenging capitalist notions of land use. Through an interactive community-based collaboration, ALFC has partnered with Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, MADRVA, and RVA Community Fridges. Folks are encouraged to invite other co-ops and radical land-based initiatives in the Richmond area for inclusion in a series of community-generated scrapbooks for each collective.

Edwynn Houk Gallery presents Erwin Olaf: Stages, an exhibition of key series centered on the concept of performance, a recurring theme in the artist’s four-decade career. Stages includes Olaf’s 1980s documentation of Amsterdam’s gay and nightlife scenes, highly produced series such as Hope (2005) and Grief (2007) that dramatize social norms, and ongoing engagement with dance. These tableaux — whether occurring on a social stage, theatrical stage, or studio set— portray beautiful but not necessarily camera-ready moments, often lit by a flash of unscripted emotional experience. Erwin Olaf emerged onto the Amsterdam photography scene in his young 20s. His first formal self-portrait shows influence from New York artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, while also signaling the signatures of his aesthetic throughout his career. His compositions emphasized layering props and details in open-ended narrative relationships, leading viewers to fantasize about what story is being told. Throughout the 1980s, Olaf became a well-known and well-loved artist and gay rights activist in The Netherlands, photographing drag queens, bodybuilders, fetishists, and celebrities at discotheques and performances. Olaf’s artwork illuminated and celebrated underground scenes, claiming a spotlight for LGBTQ+ identities that expanded everyday possibilities for gay people throughout the country. Olaf’s meticulously crafted scenes, most of which were produced entirely inside his studio, launched his career onto the international stage. His series such as Gay Couples (2008), Keyhole (2011-13), and Palm Springs (2018) show elaborately designed mise-en-scene and beautifully coiffed ensembles, yet each detail alludes to emotional tension and mystery. As the artist described, each photograph shows “a perfect world with a crack,” as if projecting a private moment to the public, holding a magnifying glass to the uncanny elements of taken-for-granted domesticity. Perfectly polished yet transgressive, these scenes peer into rooms we were told not go into, addressing social issues, taboos, and conventions. Similar to preceding artists such as Mapplethorpe, Olaf also became preoccupied with still life photographs of floral arrangements in his studio, compositions that could be read as evading or embodying these human dramas. Olaf’s intimate and formal relationship with dance is this exhibiton’s final lens onto the stage. The artist discussed ballet as a major source of inspiration for his personal work, in particular the precision and tension between beauty and gritty strength the genre requires. After Rodin (2016) evokes the sculptural characteristics of the dancers of the Dutch National Ballet, paying homage to the founder of modern sculptor and Impressionist artist August Rodin by emulating the poses of his sculptural masterpieces. Olaf’s final completed series, Dance in Close Up (2022), represents a collaboration between the artist and choreographer Hans van Manen, celebrating their shared vision of evocative gesture and the gifts of the stage. Image: The Farewell, 2018 © Erwin Olaf

EUQINOM Gallery is thrilled to announce "When The Water Sings," the first solo exhibition of Adama Delphine Fawundu with the gallery. The exhibition will run from September 7 to October 26, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 7, 2024, from 2-5 PM, featuring an artist walkthrough. Adama Delphine Fawundu, celebrated for her profound exploration of identity, history, and diaspora, presents a collection of new works developed over the past four years. This exhibition encapsulates Fawundu's rich artistic journey blending personal and collective narratives with ancestral heritage and contemporary discourse. Scholar Niama Safia Sandy eloquently captures the essence of Fawundu's work: “Adama Delphine Fawundu’s work is about finding ways to connect with her kin – a group not merely confined to those who share a direct common ancestor but an expansive definition inclusive of the many who descend from the dispersed, the stolen, those for whom the violence, and opportunity wrought by the sea is at once a specter and a fact of everyday life.” A highlight of the exhibition is the centerpiece "For Mama Adama Hymns & Parables." In these large-scale hanging works, Fawundu manifests her grandmother's presence, incorporating hand-dyed and batik Garra fabrics from Mama Adama's thriving textile business in Sierra Leone. These pieces are created from large film negatives and positives through labor-intensive, camera-less photographic processes. Reflecting on her process, Fawundu states, “So much of this work is about creating new patterns and new languages while activating my body and ancestral memory. My process includes allowing my body to move intuitively as it performs and makes gestures through these camera-less photographic processes.” The completed pieces incorporate a mélange of materials and techniques such as photo lumens, cyanotypes, screen printing, mixed media on Guinea Brocade textiles, and cotton paper. The materiality of the work and the layered compositions speak to the complex nature of identities and the multifaceted connections between the African continent and its diaspora. The exhibition also features a selection of self-portraits, including "Ngewo Whispers." In this work, Fawundu occupies ghostly sites that bore witness to events of the African diaspora, such as Savannah, GA. Dressed in a bright blue dress and wearing cowries in her hair, she captures herself amidst a verdant setting. This scene situates the artist's body as a bridge between the human and more-than-human worlds, threading a connective strand of exchange between the energetically active space of nature and the material structures of history. In "Black like Blue in Argentina" and "Oxum at Eko," Fawundu generates connective threads of exchange between the magical space of nature and the material structures of history. Inhabiting colonial architecture, wooded forests, balls of cotton, and her childhood hairdo of the crescent curl, she reformulates spaces of positivity and empowerment in the shadows of cultural annihilation and historical violence. In "For Mama Adama," Fawundu appropriates motifs from her grandmother's fabrics, transforming them into patterns of exploration. Using textiles, papers, and various photographic processes, she examines the relationship between materiality and identity. Reflecting on her connection, Fawundu writes, “For Mama Adama is a spiritual conversation between myself and my grandma Adama, who passed away in 1997. Inspired by her Garra textile business in Pujehun, Sierra Leone, I use her 50-year-old textiles to generate the negatives and positives for my prints. By combining these processes, I create new patterns and languages, activating body memory and ancestral consciousness. This work explores the complex nature of identity and reproduction, awakening the radical imagination to dynamically express who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.” The "For the Ancestors at Malaga Island" series honors the legacy of the inhabitants of Malaga Island in Maine, a fishing community of African and European descent forcibly removed by the state in 1912. Communicating with that ancestral energy and earth, Fawundu made a series of monoprints on silver gelatin prints using photographs and organic materials from Malaga Island. In each of these works from "When The Water Sings," Fawundu explores the symbolic depths of water and hair, weaving narratives that confront historical traumas and celebrate the power in cultural endurance. Water serves as a life force and a portal between the past, present, and future, highlighting the symbiotic nature between humans and the environment. Hair represents DNA, indigenous intelligence, and ancestral memory. Through these symbols, Fawundu reimagines and glorifies the strength of her identity, culture, and network of kin. Additionally, she delves into how indigenous knowledge can be harnessed to activate our radical imaginations for equitable and sustainable futures. Adama Delphine Fawundu's work is a testament to the power of art in connecting the past and present, the individual and collective, and the material and spiritual. Her exploration of identity, history, and diaspora offers a rich and nuanced perspective on the complex nature of our shared human experience. Image: ADAMA DELPHINE FAWUNDU Black Like Blue in Argentina, 2018

With great power comes great responsibility. The power of visual images and the unregulated dynamic of AI have created a world untethered from reality. Disinformation and misinformation in this election year is at an all time high. The ability to think critically is challenged. The general public being swayed or falling into rabbit holes or the digital abyss is not only possible but probable. Artificial intelligence, taking data sets to perform complex tasks to mimic human behavior including the various virtual assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini, or art generators Mid-Journey, Dall-E all scrape data in a large feast, learning, growing, expanding. The programs complex computations become better at anticipating behaviors and inevitably rewrite our history based on the information exchange. This exhibition, focused on Artificial Intelligence, includes five artists all looking at the complexities of the visual image as truth, fiction, muse and outlier. All use technology to inform their work, stretch their truth, follow myths and legends, rewrite history and manufacture new realities. Image: Another America © Phillip Toledano

Blank Generation presents a panoramic visual survey of the tectonically shifting arts culture of the 1970s–80s in downtown New York City, and the raw and dynamic new ideas in music, film, art, literature, graffiti, fashion, queer culture, and performance that it spawned. The bleak and bankrupt NYC of Travis Bickle and Ratso Rizzo felt like a city teetering on the verge of collapse, but in the dive bars, abandoned buildings, and squats of the grimiest neighborhoods, a cultural renaissance was taking place. The iconoclastic writers, musicians, scenesters, performers, outsiders, and other creators whose life and work energized this underground world had a profound and continuing impact on mainstream global culture. The exhibition features photography, film, and photo-based work by influential artists living and creating in that petri dish of inspiration, as well as documentary photography and ephemeral material including posters, fliers, and publications. The diverse New York underground community was populated by people who needed to create—for whom ideas, authenticity, and innovation were far more important than aesthetics or commercial success. Hence the works in Blank Generation are layered, delving into significant and often uncomfortable social issues, new ways of communication, and cultural touchpoints. In many cases, the image is not the end game, but rather a means to visually communicate an often-complex underlying story or idea. In conjunction with Blank Generation, Alternate Projects presents a pop-up shop featuring a curated selection of rare artist publications, ephemera, artwork, and photographs. Artists: Charlie Ahearn, Roberta Bayley, Jimmy DeSana, Darrel Ellis, Barbara Ess, Allen Frame, Godlis, Nan Goldin, Bob Gruen, Richard Hambleton, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, Richard Kern, Marcus Leatherdale, Judy Linn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ari Marcopoulos, Gordon Matta-Clark, Peter Moore, Mark Morrisroe, Jamie Nares, Franc Palaia, Steven Parrino, Jack Pierson, Ricky Powell, Mick Rock, Tabboo!, Gail Thacker, Alan Vega, John Waters, David Wojnarowicz, Russell Young Image: Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz Smoking, 1981. Black and white photograph, 14¾ x 14¾ inches. © 2024 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Using a camera or my smartphone to record the events I attend, I capture images of the people around me. Photography these days is so ubiquitous, who even notices? Software then extracts the faces for me, and connects them to a location, date and time, which is used as a title. I manipulate the images, crop and enlarge the faces, and create a layer of digital glitches and errors to exaggerate the degradation of image I often see in surveillance photos on the news. I also add a custom facial recognition grid. All of this plays with perception and identification. Under the digital noise there is still a person, but reality has been altered on a screen. Size also matters, and these faces are more recognizable when small, so I enlarge the final images for print. (If you can’t see the face in the photograph, try looking at it on your cellphone) Sometimes my subjects don’t even recognize themselves. My work shifts back and forth between highly manipulated, computer-enhanced imagery and recognizable documentary-style photographs. I know how easily technology can be used to transcend truth, distort reality and produce unintended consequences. Facial recognition seems inescapable, but it is not always accurate, especially with women and people of color. The misuse of these tools is all too possible. Image: © Sheri Lynn Behr

Larry Fink’s Social Graces series contrasts two social worlds that seem a world apart: those of Manhattan high society and Pennsylvania farm country. In the city, coiffed and bejeweled patrons of the arts dance and drink at gallery openings, benefits, and the famed Studio 54 nightclub; in Martin’s Creek, Pennsylvania, a farming family and their circle celebrate birthdays and graduations, gathering at the roller rink and the Legion. The dress and comportment of Fink’s subjects, and the environments in which they exist, diverge as one might expect. What they share is a desire to be seen—to be photographed. “People like to have their pictures taken,” Fink wrote. “It is a profound aspect of our culture, this compulsion for proof. It allows me to wade into a party.” Fink was born in 1941 into a politically radical Brooklyn household, and his images in this series dramatize the class divide that long fascinated and troubled him. When he began photographing Manhattan galas in the mid-1970s, he was driven by curiosity about and anger at the rich, and his images of the people he winkingly called his “political enemies” are often unflattering. But so too are those he made in Martin’s Creek, to where he moved from New York City around 1980. Ultimately, the series is a highly subjective view of the actions and interactions of people Fink observed as an outsider, and a monument to his ability, with his cameras and flash, to make a theater of everyday life. Social Graces was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1979 and published as a book in 1984, establishing Fink as one of his generation’s great photographers of people. It remains his best-known series. Larry Fink died at his home in Martin’s Creek in November 2023. The photographs on view were gifts to the permanent collection from Gary Davis, Class of 1976. This exhibition was curated by Kate Addleman-Frankel, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, and supported in part by the Appel and Ames Exhibition Endowments.

The Bronx Documentary Center’s exhibition, El Salvador: Legacy of Violence, pairs two important and historic photographic projects done three decades apart–one by American Robert Nickelsberg, the other by Salvadoran photographer Fred Ramos–bodies of work that mirror, inform and resonate, each with the other. The two projects define El Salvador's troubled Cold War history, document today's political evolution and focus on US complicity and negligence in the small Central American country's troubled past and present. Ramos, born in 1986, and a World Press Photo Award winner, shows us the current land of unfortunate extremes–in the past decade, El Salvador has gone from being one of the most violent countries in the world, largely controlled by heavily armed gangs, to today being the country with the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Ramos’ photos document, as well, some of the millions of Salvadorans who have made a dangerous trek north to seek refuge in the United States, and the brutal, autocratic and wildly popular crackdown by President Najib Bukele. Upon viewing Ramos’ troubling photos, the obvious question is, “How did this small, stunningly beautiful country of six million get to this point?” Veteran photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg answers this question with more than three dozen black-and-white photos taken shortly before Ramos’ was born. Nickelsberg, who covered most of the world’s conflicts and cultural and political revolutions for 30 years as a Time Magazine contract photographer, spent years documenting El Salvador’s brutal civil war during the early 1980s. His photos show us everyday life in the Salvadoran countryside, set off by jarring, violent images of combat and death as American advisors and Latin American leftists turned El Salvador into a Cold War pawn littered with tortured bodies, primarily those of civilians. Together, Ramos’ and Nickelsberg’s photos reflect on this often ignored history, triggering questions about US foreign policy and the legacy of the Cold War. Their work also looks at issues of dictatorship versus democracy at the ground level, as Salvadoran’s struggle to live daily lives filled with dignity and peace. Image: Guerrillas from the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, ERP, speak with local residents of San Agustín, Usulután department, July 5, 1983. © Robert Nickelsberg

Atlanta native Tyler Mitchell (born 1995) ascended to global prominence when he photographed Beyoncé for the September 2018 issue of Vogue — the first Black artist to shoot the cover in the magazine’s history. This summer, the High will present a major exhibition featuring his seamless blend of fine art and fashion photography, along with a new photo-sculptural artwork. In his practice, he centers Black self-determination and empowerment with affirmative images of people who are often shown enjoying the freedom of leisure, play, and recreation. This homecoming exhibition will feature more than thirty photographs considering his examination of themes such as masculinity, motherhood, domesticity, rest, and the natural world. The playfully theatrical, expressive works explore style, beauty, and identity and delve into the profound themes of family and connection, capturing not just moments but the essence of relationships, as they weave a narrative of love, intimacy, and shared experiences. Image: Ancestors, 2021, archival pigment print, courtesy of the artist © Tyler Mitchell.