In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha sits down with Melissa Catanese—photographer, publisher, and educator. They dive into Melissa's array of book projects, including her 2023 release, "The Lottery" (The Ice Plant), inspired by Shirley Jackson's classic tale, perfectly resonating with today's uncertain world. They also have an honest and in-depth conversation about Melissa's life in photography, her commitment to pursuing her diverse artistic interests, and her innovative approaches to making a living as an artist.

http://www.melissacatanese.com/index.html |||
https://www.instagram.com/melissa_catanese/ |||
https://theiceplant.cc/product/the-lottery/

Melissa Catanese combines her images with archival images into a fluid, sensorial experience that pushes the image beyond its nostalgic surface and challenges ideas of authorship, representation, consumption, and the life cycle of images. She plays with images as raw material, intuitively teasing out oblique and guttural interpretations, tapping the inexplicable, and often dormant space within the surface of a photograph where meaning extends and recedes, comforts and disturbs. She is the author of "Dive Dark Dream Slow", "Voyagers", “The Lottery”, and “Fever field”. Her work is currently included in “Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape” at Carnegie Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award and has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. Catanese contributed texts to “Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot” (Aperture, 2021), “Photographers Looking At Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation” (Pier 24, 2020), The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014) and to the project “Words Without Pictures” (Aperture, 2010), among other publications. She is a Teaching Professor at University of Pittsburgh and holds visiting appointments at Hartford Art School Photography MFA and Image Text Ithaca MFA.

This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha has a warm and deeply personal conversation with photographer Gregory Halpern. They discuss his latest book, "King, Queen, Knave," published by MACK, and also revisit "ZZYZX," the 2016 monograph that significantly elevated Greg's career. Together, they emphasize the importance of knowing when to assume the roles of photographer and editor, and when to let the audience engage with the work on their own terms.

http://www.gregoryhalpern.com/ |||
https://www.mackbooks.us/products/king-queen-knave-gregory-halpern

Gregory Halpern is an American photographer born in Buffalo, New York. He is the author of eight monographs, including King, Queen, Knave (2024), Omaha Sketchbook (2019), and ZZYZX (2016), his fantastical book of photographs of Los Angeles, now in its fourth edition. Halpern is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of Magnum Photos. His photographs are held in the collections of several major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, and the Fotomuseum Antwerpen. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the George Eastman Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Fotomuseum Antwerpen, and Pace/MacGill in New York. He holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. He lives in Rochester, New York with his wife, Ahndraya Parlato, and their two daughters. He is a professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha is joined by Pauline Vermare, Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, and Lesley A. Martin, Executive Director of Printed Matter. They discuss their collaborative efforts on "I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now," published by Aperture. This publication offers a counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography. Lesley and Pauline share their connections to Japanese society and their interest in the representation of women in photography. Together, Sasha, Lesley, and Pauline explore how they balanced the academic and historical aspects of their work with the artistic appeal of a photobook that highlights the contributions of Japanese women photographers.

https://aperture.org/books/im-so-happy-you-are-here-japanese-women-photographers-from-the-1950s-to-now/ ||| https://www.instagram.com/la.martin_/ ||| https://www.instagram.com/paulinevermare/

Pauline Vermare is the Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum. She was formerly the cultural director of Magnum Photos NY, and a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, in Paris. She sits on the boards of the Saul Leiter Foundation and the Catherine Leroy Fund.

Lesley A. Martin is executive director of Printed Matter. Prior to that, she was the creative director of Aperture, founding publisher of The PhotoBook Review, and co-founder of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. She has edited more than one-hundred and fifty books of photography, including An-My Lê’s Small Wars; Illuminance by Rinko Kawauchi; LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family; and Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama. Martin has curated several exhibitions of photography, including The Ubiquitous Image; the New York Times Magazine Photographs, co-curated with Kathy Ryan; Aperture Remix, a commission-based exhibition celebrating Aperture’s sixtieth anniversary; and most recently, I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers Since the 1950s, co-curated with Pauline Vermare and Mariko Takeuchi. She received the Royal Photographic Society award for outstanding achievement in photographic publishing in 2020, and has been a visiting critic at the Yale University Graduate School of Art since 2016.

This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

Image © Mikiko Hara