I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours..✨
Who wouldn’t be drawn to this poetic title, borrowed from Bob Dylan?
This book is brilliantly enigmatic:
…Traversing towns and waterways along the US-Mexico border, in this collaborative project photographers Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez create an imaginative portrait of life on borderlands.
Photographing the same subjects from different perspectives, they capture dualistic accounts of scenes that appear both staged and ad hoc.
The resulting series of often uncanny pairings evokes the joys and challenges of human relations. In the background are Drake's and Gonzalez's different family histories of migration and the ways these histories intersect and diverge.
(Source: MACK)
#Migration #border #photography #publishing myphotobookfinds
@drakeycake@andresvgonzalez@mack_publishing
One more week to pre-order your copy of Yard Work with an 8x10 inch print from the book. You can order through the link in my bio.
Note to bookstores: the first books off the press will ship directly from Europe with a discount. Please DM me for details.
Next week is the opening of the 21st edition of Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The theme of the festival this year is “Ghosts of the Present” and I was invited to show a chapter of my Next Door project called Sleepers.
I started playing with consumer surveillance cameras when I moved to Vallejo, a city where lots of people use them to track suspicious people and spread warnings about them online.
For the Sleeper series, I installed surveillance cameras over my neighbors’ beds and activated them at bedtime. I wanted to make the cameras do the opposite of what we are conditioned to with them, so I turned them inward.
A line of seven color photos on a second wall were made in my neighborhood at night while walking alone in the street.
On a third wall are 25 pairs of cat eyes glowing under the gaze of the surveillance camera in my backyard.
It was such an honor to photograph this story by @pamela_colloff about the law that was supposed to let some long-incarcerated women out of prison in Oklahoma. The story was a collaboration between @propublica and @nytimesmag . Thanks @nickoxfordphoto and @natylonglegs for assisting and producing and thank you @coralie.kraft for the opportunity to spend time with these women.
Oklahoma consistently ranks among the states with the highest rates of domestic violence; it also has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment.
Cover: Norma Jane Lumpkin is serving a life sentence in connection with the murder of her husband, who abused her. She has been behind bars since 1981.
Slides 3 & 7. April Wilkens’s case was the impetus for the passage of the Survivors’ Act. Wilkens was serving a life sentence for shooting and killing her ex-fiancé after years of abuse and stalking and indifference from the police. When I photographed her in August there was hope that she might be set free soon, but prosecutors have advocated to keep her in prison.
Slide 4. Tyesha Long is serving a 27-year sentence for killing a man she had a protective order against (as did several other women). The Oklahoma County district attorney’s office opposed her application for resentencing as well.
Slide 5. Lisa Wright was released from prison last year under the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act. She had been serving a life sentence.
Slide 9. Amanda Ross was 7 when her aunt April Wilkens was arrested. Her research helped bring attention to Wilkens’s case. @freeaprilwilkens
Slide 11. Attorney Colleen McCarty advocated for the passage of the Survivors’ Act. She saw it as a corrective to a justice system that punishes domestic-violence survivors who fight back. She is now running for Tulsa county DA against the incumbent Steve Kunzweiller, who wants to keep the women locked up.
Trying to use up all the Art Forums and Glorify Yourself pages that have been taking up space around here for the last five years while also revisiting a five year old photograph of myself.
I’ll be giving a short talk in Germany at @coberlin on Nov 18 at 18:00 about the relationship between books and exhibitions in my practice, alongside @biekedepoorter . Looking forward to seeing many of you in Paris this week too!
1-2: Glorify Yourself in Arles 2024
3: Glorify Yourself @yanceyrichardsongallery 2024
4-5: Glorify Yourself and Men Untitled @fondationhcb 2023
6-8: Men Untitled and Knit Club with @tbwbooks
Wallace and I traded clothes and took turns role playing each other for a photo shoot at his motorcycle clubhouse in 2021. Neither of us was much of an actor but we had so much fun typecasting each other and laughing about it.
This year Ive done a total of one editorial assignment. It was for The New Yorker. They asked me to make a portrait of Curtis Yarvin in a way similar to how I worked in Men Untitled. Some folks were surprised Id be willing to have any contact with a person with such repulsive ideas, but I agreed to it thinking of it as an opportunity to play with the power dynamics of photography and the ways that two seemingly dissonant people might relate to each other with a camera between them. I invited him to a friends Oakland condo, covered the windows, and asked him to sit on a high stool where his feet couldn’t touch the ground. I asked him to sit still, turn his head up, sideways, shift his hand, pull his knees together, etc., moving him slightly this way and slightly that way, wanting to include his whole figure in the frame so we could inspect him from head to toe. Then I asked him to run his fingers through his hair. I was pretty satisfied with the result and surprised by his willingness to follow my directions. I decided I should try a tighter shot for the magazine so I asked him to get down off the stool and stand behind it, twisting his body so that one arm was forward and one was behind his back. The editors also wanted a horizontal shot and we were running out of time at this point, so i decided to push him a bit further. I asked him to take off his shoes and lay sideways across the couch, with one arm resting on his body and the other propping up his head. He agreed. Then I asked him to remove his socks, and that was his limit. So there he is, reclining as I wished but adamant about not revealing his toes. All pretty benign but it felt subversive at the time. Or maybe just stressful. Thank you @jonahreenders for helping! @newyorkermag
NEW EPISODE OF THE MESSY TRUTH. In this episode, I talk to photographers and longtime partners Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez about their collaborative project and book, “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,” published by Mack. For the last five years, the two artists have traversed the border between Mexico and the United States, working together for the first time and ruminating on ideas about human connection, migration and the mechanics of photography itself. I loved talking to them about the reality of collaboration, and how as they studied the borderlands they were faced with an unavoidable reckoning that, over time, offered them a deeper understanding of each other and their work. Thank you @drakeycake@andresvgonzalez@mack_publishing 💫
