Perfect Bound with Jennifer Yoffy Jennifer Yoffy

Alec Soth is so beautifully human and also a brilliant photographer, and one so obviously begets the other. But if you don't take a listen for the insight into his art practice, new body of work, and upcoming photobook , come for the ping pong stories.

Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (2019), and A Pound of Pictures (2022). Soth has had over fifty solo exhibitions including survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume in Paris (2008), the Walker Art Center in Minnesota (2010) and Media Space in London (2015). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Loock Galerie in Berlin, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

This is a really special episode. Andres Gonzalez talks about American Origami, which not only happens to be an extraordinarily impactful and important project, but also the most dynamically designed photobook. . . maybe ever. Andres is thoughtful, passionate, and extremely talented. Prepare to be inspired and more than a little in awe.

Andres Gonzalez is an educator and visual artist whose current work engages with in-depth research to investigate relationships between ritual, memory, and place within the American social landscape. He has published two books, Some(W)Here in 2012 made over decade while living in Istanbul, and American Origami in 2019 which won the Light Work Photo Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture Book Awards. 
 
 He has received recognition from the Pulitzer Center, the Alexia Foundation, and is a Fulbright Fellow. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Stedelijk Museum in the Amsterdam, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, where he also collaborated with the Columbia College theater department and members from Tectonic Theater Project on a theatrical adaption of American Origami.

To continue our short streak of publisher/designers, I interviewed David Chickey for the podcast. I have often said that I want to be Dave Chickey when I grow up. While we are similar in age, I'd need decades to even come close to his talent and accomplishments. And of course, he couldn't be more lovely or more sincere. (Sidenote: How cool is it that I get to talk to all of these amazing and creative humans? What a life!)

David Chickey is the publisher, designer, and editorial director of Radius Books, a nonprofit publishing company based in Santa Fe. He co-founded Radius Books in 2007 with a mission to encourage, promote, and publish books of artistic and cultural value. Radius titles have received national recognition, including multiple awards from AIGA, American Association of Museums Publishing, and best book nominations from The New Yorker, TIME, PDN, Smithsonian, Independent Publisher, and The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation. 
Chickey is the former board chair of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, and a graduate of Sussex University, England, and UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Jason Koxvold is the kind of person you would hate if he wasn't so smart and talented and thoughtful and kind. Oh, and charming. Did I mention charming? Yeah, he's the worst.
 
Jason Koxvold (b. 1977, Liege, Belgium) received his BSc in Social Science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2000. His fine art practice focuses on the shared spaces between neoliberal economic policy and military strategy; he has made work in diverse locations, from Afghanistan to Nigeria, Arctic Russia to South Africa. His first monograph, Knives, was published in 2017, followed by You Were Right All Along (2018) and Calle Tredic iMartiri (2019). He is the founder of Gnomic Book, an imprint focused on challenging subjects by emerging artists, and Virtual—Assembly, an online book fair to support publishers and artists in our present moment of social distancing. Koxvold has exhibited in solo and group shows in the UnitedStates, Britain, France, and Japan. His work has been featured in publications including The British Journal of Photography, Aperture, the Financial Times Magazine, Der Greif, Wired, Le Litteraire, Newsweek, Gestalten, Thisispaper, The Great Leap Sideways, Mother Jones, and Slate. He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.

This is a super special podcast - mostly because Alan Rapp is an incredible fount of knowledge about the photobook publishing business, but also because we go deep talking shop, and he somehow pulled a switcheroo midway through and started asking me about my process for selecting projects.  If you're interested in photobook publishing, and if you're listening to this podcast I think you may be, there's a lot to learn from this episode.

Alan Rapp is editorial director at Monacelli, a division of Phaidon. He is an editor, book developer, and writer specializing in photography, architecture, and design. He started his visual book publishing career at Chronicle Books, where he developed the photography list and published books by Elinor Carucci, David Maisel, Jona Frank, Jim Marshall, Linda Connor, and Henry Horenstein. Under the Monacelli umbrella, he has collaborated on new works by Elinor Carucci (Midlife) and Jona Frank (Cherry Hill), as well as Cig Harvey's fourth book, Blue Violet. He has contributed to several books and his writing has appeared in numerous print and web publications, including The Photobook Review, Modern Painters, and Urban Omnibus.

I have been a fan of Gail Albert Halaban's Out My Window series for years, so it was a delight to get to speak with her about this long-term project that began in her city, New York, and has since gone global. Tune in to hear about building community through photography and the interesting connections to be made when you look into your neighbors' windows.

Gail Albert Halaban is an American artist born in Washington, DC. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and received her MFA in photography from Yale University. Her work has been widely published including three monographs of her Out My Window work which explores what people see through their neighbors’ windows in the cities of the world. Her work has been exhibited extensively, and she is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City, Jackson Fine Arts in Atlanta, and Weinstein Hammons in Minneapolis.