Striving for ego-less art is language not often heard in this century, where high profile, market-driven artists fight to see who can be the loudest amongst the shouters. This self-consciousness has been leading the viewer into an inbred funnel vision of narrower and narrower meaning; artist's obsessive attention to style and trend is now producing art about art about art. But ego-less photography is not the point here. It is simply to avoid this artistic pretension to which we are becoming so accustomed to, for it is in reciprocity to the degree of Truth in art. Joel-Peter Witkin better understands the ecstasy and the horror of the human condition than any artist since William Blake. From Ensor through Bacon, our artists of the past century have paraded our masks, our contortions, our lusts, and our brutalities. Yet who but Witkin has better tended to our true humanity—our often good hearts? Witkin’s work may contain a collection of devils, but it also contains a collection of angels. It can be as horrific as we are, yet also as beatific as we often are. In the popular imagination it is his stranger, darker work that he is most known for. But that is only half of Joel-Peter Witkin. Witkin is a deeply religious man, as The Maxims of Men Disclose Their Hearts: The Journal of Joel-Peter Witkin makes clear. He presents us honestly as most of us actually are, as a mixture of good and bad doing hard time and trying our best to survive in these difficult skins. DH: Yes, gay content for sure. I hope you noticed that! And yes, there are beautiful men…yet there are also not so beautiful men. But I find them all beautiful. I would argue what unites them is how they’ve been photographically rendered. I am interested in beauty and where it’s found. Sometimes it exists in the world and sometimes I make it. Or both. In some of the photographs I depict men I love, have loved, could never love, never have, never be, etc. Yet I don’t know if I feel comfortable categorising the work as solely gay. Although I’m a gay man that’s not all I am. It is important for me that the viewer is aware that my imagery, all of my imagery, has been made through the lens of a gay man. This does inform the entire body of work and is ultimately my biggest political statement. CM: Do you feel like your work has a particularly gay content? There are beautiful men, and there is longing and attraction between them, is that enough to categorise the work as gay? Are such categories useful? Saul Leiter, was a very humble man who would rather talk about artists and writers he enjoyed than himself, he was happy to share his memories of other photographers he knew well such as Diane Arbus, or his passion for French photographers such as Boubat or Lartigue who he admired.

This collision between sight and touch where suggestions of the haptic were bound into the concept of a process (the etched line that the finger traces on the plate), stimulated Soltau to work more three-dimensionally. She wanted her ‘drawing’ to be felt by the person, for the body to become central to the action, to physically ‘feel’ the thread.She spoke no Chinese and RongRong no Japanese. Their initial dialogue was almost solely visual—they spoke to each other through their works. For almost two years, before Inri moved to Liulitun, their love subsisted on the sharing of images and rudimentary linguistic communication. They invented a secret language of gestures, expressions, and smatterings of English, Mandarin and Japanese, and collaborated on photography art projects. Their debut collaboration took place during Inri's first visit to China, almost ten months after they met. Naked together on the Great Wall, before the majestic silence of nature, they used a timer and let the camera bear witness. AS: Little Red Riding Hood was a little girl with her first period. That’s what Freud says. It is her sexuality that is emerging. And all the dangers that come with sexuality. The wolf, according to some interpretations, is the lover, according to others, the father. Why does the grandmother die? Because a woman is born, i.e. Little Red Riding Hood, and an old woman dies. The wolf, the lover, replaces the grandmother. The shop window has always been a source of inspiration for Valérie Belin. In the early 90s, she first made photographs of jewelry and trinkets exposed in different shopping malls. Subsequently there came photographs of crystal vases and silverware (Verres I et Verres II, 1993-1994), photographs of glass objects and mirrors in several showrooms in Venice (Venise I, 1997), photographs of mannequins (Mannequins, 2003), and finally, photographs of storefronts in Luxembourg (Vitrines Luxembourg, 2003). AS: Socialist Realism was actually very good for us artists! We could earn money by making official art! Each exhibition contributed to the Revolution, to industry, to the Kolkhoz, or to some other official cause and so our work was bought by the state (laughs). We were the elite! Researching the work of Sofía López Mañán (b. 1982) is like being submerged in an intimate journal that lets you witness someone else’s life through details and fragments of presences. She is an artist who develops each one of her projects by getting involved on all levels. Travels, spiritual retirements, living with foreigners, researching deserted places, dialogues, and films are what define her art not only as photographs but also, as performance works.

The story of Chris Sky Earnshaw would be a sad one if I did not know him to be such a spirited man, even at this stage of life when it seems he has next to nothing. Without a doubt, he is a masterful photographer, one whose work has been lost to all up until now. As an artist he is nearly anonymous, and as a human being he hovers inches away from a destitute life. To offer him a hand, to save his work for others, is all that one can do to express one’s gratefulness for what truly enriches our lives. Seeing myself as an anonymous person means to leave my individuality. To multiply and mirror myself allows me to become the person portrayed for a short while. I became anonymous to express the emotions of universal characters. Anonymous of me, myself. Anonymous, because it is always easier to talk about someone else than myself. I speak of myself through photographs where characters are nameless. A character without a face. No characters. Anonymous, because what I create is meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted as many times as necessary while being contemplated. The pieces are created, allowing the same photo to reflect any encapsulated emotion. It is me, it was me, but it can also be someone else. A faceless image with the sole intention of engulfing the viewer thereby positioning the viewer as the portrayed,” she says. DH: It’s not so much about my desire to embrace the geriatric crowd but rather a newer project where I’m photographing my mother and her community down in Florida. My parents divorced in the 1970s and have since taken very different paths in their lives. My mother is a born-again Christian and it’s taken me many years to get my mind around that and begin to make pictures. It’s obviously quite difficult due to the fact that the very nature of who I am is counter to her spiritual belief system. We love one another…yet there’s so much that’s wrong. Much of this work is Florida is about what remains unspoken. Outwardly the work is playful and colourful. But in actuality it’s heavy and dark. They’re some of the hardest pictures to make. I feel very disconnected in those moments. SL: No. I had no philosophy about photography. Some people have a vision, an idea. I think, for instance, that at a certain point Diane Arbus was out to explore the strange aspects of life, maybe. For example, she writes in her book that she was in England and she hadn’t found anything weird yet. She was looking for weirdness. I never had a specific approach to photography. There are many photographers that I like. I love Kertész and Atget. I like Brassaï, Boubat and the French photographers. But I was just bumbling along [laughs]. I didn't know what was going to happen. Then Henry Wolf at some point gave me work in Harper's Bazaar. I also had some things at shown at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in the show of Steichen's, and at the time, I didn't appreciate that it was a very special thing to have my work shown at the Museum of Modern Art, because I never had a sense of a career. Having a sense in a career can be very important to an artist. Some people have it, and some people don't. And I definitely don't! My friend Henry once said to me that I had a talent… for ignoring opportunities! So the dark side of the story is Fantômas—Magritte wrote a text about him, saying Fantômas is the Evil. Then we have the bright side of the project, which is a tribute to the surrealists, especially Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp invented the double of himself as a woman and she was called Rrose Sélavy. We twisted the words, but of course they mean something different in French, they are difficult to translate. Duchamp invented Rrose Sélavy. And we created Rose, c’est Paris.accompanied by a first-person testimonial, explaining how the women found themselves in their current situation.

It was spring of 1998 when I first met RongRong and became a frequent visitor at his courtyard. Almost four years had passed since the legendary Beijing East Village artist colony was forcibly dispersed and RongRong made a new home for himself in Liulitun—one of countless Chinese "villages within the city," on the outskirts of Beijing, kilometres to the East of the neon-spangled Sanlitun barstrip. He lived in this spacious, simple dwelling at various times with fellow East Village performance artist/painter Ma Liuming, video artist/photographer Zhao Liang, photographer Huang Lei and others. At the time, they were still sharing dinners and dreams, still struggling to make the rent, and RongRong was continuing the sort of documentary art photography work in their courtyard that initially brought him to fame as the chronicler of the Beijing East Village, but by 1999 their international art careers would take them in separate directions. One by one they would all leave Liulitun, but it was RongRong—and soon a Japanese woman named inri, in whose quiet strength and trenchant vision he would find a creative equal and a life partner—who would cleave to the cradle of their courtyard home until its destruction in 2003. He even says his “definition of art” is being able to see “the face of the Divine” which then leaves us “gratified, even healed as we enter again onto the streets of the world and engage our destinies.”Publication: Recent book by Joel Simpson, Playgrounds for the Mind: The Art of Geological Photography (2021) is completely devoted to geological art photography. Many of these images may also be found on joelsimpsonart.com. Samples of such images may also be found in Joel Simpson’s 2019 Nautilus-Gold-Award-winning book Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of Our Planet (earthforms.net). never seen their children again. But there were also stories of widows who came from well-to-do families and had children that wanted them to remain at Earlier examples of this kind of approach may be found in the work of Aaron Siskind, Minor White, Andreas Feininger, Ernst Haas, and Heinz and Elizabeth Bertelsmann among others, but none of them seem to have traveled extensively in search of of unusual formations, as Simpson has been doing for over a decade. That is what my work speaks to. That is why I make the work. I take on western civilization’s highs and lows through the medium of photography.” I see Liulitun now through inri's eyes, its rambling, riot of greenery—vine tendrils reaching out into space, grasping for each other, like the new lovers united after a nine month separation of agonising, mute phone calls—and bohemian ambience offering a delicious space in which to breathe freely. I see the sensuality of their half-eaten dragon fruit, suggestive, moist and magenta-skinned; the shy declarations of their bare feet touching; inri's wonder at the unfamiliar foods in local stores, the rows of strange meats in plastic wrap, culinary mysteries to lay on their table; red roses, hot crimson and belligerent with fragrance; carnal-ethereal moments of the sort we pray never to end, those moments of corporeal discovery in which the tangled limbs of self and other become momentarily indistinguishable, and in the eyes of one's mate you see your own soul; the journeys and homecomings; the mundane rituals of the everyday that make the string of moments hold together in the irreducible chain of subtle repetitions and variations that you come to call your life.

I see Liulitun now through Inri's eyes, its rambling, riot of greenery—vine tendrils reaching out into space, grasping for each other, like the new lovers united after a nine month separation of agonising, mute phone calls—and bohemian ambience offering a delicious space in which to breathe freely. I see the sensuality of their half-eaten dragon fruit, suggestive, moist and magenta-skinned; the shy declarations of their bare feet touching; Inri's wonder at the unfamiliar foods in local stores, the rows of strange meats in plastic wrap, culinary mysteries to lay on their table; red roses, hot crimson and belligerent with fragrance; carnal-ethereal moments of the sort we pray never to end, those moments of corporeal discovery in which the tangled limbs of self and other become momentarily indistinguishable, and in the eyes of one's mate you see your own soul; the journeys and homecomings; the mundane rituals of the everyday that make the string of moments hold together in the irreducible chain of subtle repetitions and variations that you come to call your life. cast aside. This sadness was often countered by the heartening bonds and sisterhood that the widows created amongst themselves, bolstering one other and empowering the community in a way that I hadn’t expected. Barbara Oudiz (BO): Life for you as a student and an artist in Communist Ukraine was not particularly difficult, you say. Isn’t that surprising? DH: My early passion as an undergraduate was film making. I wanted to tell stories. Yet as much as I loved film and video I was continually left slightly disappointed at its inability to linger and stare in quite the same way that a photograph could. I also have to confess that I was at times a bit overwhelmed by the expectations to say something larger in a film. I was taken by a photographs ability to depict slices of topics that I was interested in talking about; each one being a sentence of sorts. Yet I wanted to challenge the static nature of the photograph by linking them together and activating them; playing them off of one another. So I then began making linear panoramas with a view camera. I began using it in much the same way I was using the video camera…moving across my subject matter, shifting the focus from image to image and displaying the photographs side by side. It was as if I found a way to take the best of film and photograph and join them together in a kind of hybrid studio practice. I was also excited that I could, within one piece comprised of various images, possess a still life, a portrait and even a landscape. It’s a bit decadent.Beneath his lens, the women are freed from the gaze by which they are usually seen—sexual objects to be used and discarded. His images dig deeper into who they are. When possible, he has heard their stories; he has given them the dignity that most people crave—to be heard. I’m interested in working in a collaborative way with the people that I photograph; often the sitter looks at me, the photographer, and – by extension – you, the viewer. I always ask permission to photograph people so it’s clear what my motives are. Because it’s collaborative, people who are not interested don’t become involved. It might also be the first time that people are “given the opportunity” to tell their story; having someone listen to it can be cathartic.