Concept Aware® – Details, episodes & analysis

A trailblazing book chronicling the fundamental and consequential contributions of Japanese women photographers.

Mariko Takeuchi and Pauline Vermare discuss their collaborative project creating a restorative history of Japanese photography. Offering a critical and celebratory counterpoint to the invisibility of Japanese women photographers this expansive and rigorously researched book features 25 portfolios, multiple essays and an illustrated bibliography of photobooks by Japanese women photographers. This bold book embraces emotion, experimentation and provocation in myriad forms of beauty, humor, and deeply spirited connections. 

In this conversation, Mariko and Pauline discuss, among other things:

Pulling back layers of cultural understanding of being a women

Expanding vocabulary and objects of study

Womanhood, daughterhood and caregiving 

Physical involvement with the medium

Utilizing self-portraiture to reclaim agency over one's body

Making tangible that which is invisible

An outward expression of internal experience

Including the voices of photographers in the essays and text

Making and remaking meaning

Referenced in the episode:

Aperture

Rencontres d’Arles Exhibition I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese women Photographers From the 1950’s to Now

A World History of Women Photographers by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert

The Third Gallery Aya

PGI Gallery

Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography / Created by Dr. Kelly McCormick and Carrie Cushman

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich

Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics by Marsha Meskimmon

Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed

World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2023

Self-Portraits by Yurie Nagashima

Ume-me - Todays Happening by Ume Kayo

The Memories of Others - Akihiko Okamura / Photo Museum Ireland

Linda Troeller’s self-portraits are compiled into a luscious tour de force of womanhood, identity and aging.

Troeller utilizes her relationship with the camera to understand herself and a woman’s place in the world across decades. Her history traverses that of a beauty contestant, potential lawyer, photojournalism student, model, muse, photo teacher, photographer, provocateur and activist. With conviction, insight and wisdom Troeller celebrates and generously shares her embodied strength and fragility.  

In this conversation, Lindadiscusses, among other things:

Universalizing the personal

Provocation aka myth-busting

The circular relationship of punctum

Linda-ness

Self-portraiture, performance and installation 

Exploring internal and external ageism

Sacred water explorations

Book decisions - ie: including titles

Sequencing, process and collaboration 

Ghost Ranch, Leonora Carrington, Sophie Calle and Carolee Schneeman

Referenced in the episode:

Healing Waters Film

Museum of Sex Exhibition

Chelsea Hotel

Erotic Lives of Women

Orgasm

TBW

Leica Gallery Exhibition - LA

Made of Rivers by Emory Hall

Chico Hot Springs

Neither Give Not Take Away - Sophie Calle at Arles

This recent Radius release offers an expansive framework of the principles of publishing including the layered roles and responsibilities inherent within the creation of a photobook. NOT a how-to guidebook, this beautiful object elegantly packages decades of research and provides contemporary resources to illustrate the endless possibilities of the photobbook. Swanson and Himes share the mission to create impactful photography books by encouraging all artists to: slow down idea formation, linger in the making mode, and do thy research.

In this conversation, Swanee and Darius discuss, among other things:

The biggest challenge - conceiving the idea

Fostering a dynamic engagement with one's ideas

Seeing the end in the beginning

Play, patience & persistence

Concept guiding context

Stepping outside the medium of photoogrpahy to clarify and deepen your idea

Critical thinking 

Not rushing the monograph

The book as art form

Photogrpahs as raw material

Impact of digital publishing

Pivotal role of self publishing

University Presses

Balancing creative & business perspectives

The evolving life of marketing a book

Photography is innovatively and collectively utilized to create a new narrative challenging the stigma and stereotypes of this indigenous community. This book is a multilingual textural object of beauty and wisdom — a non-linear collective celebration and document of home, belonging, hospitality, reciprocity and the longing to live in communion with the land.

In this conversation, Rehab discusses, among other things:

Personal exploration as motivation and inspiration

Connecting to the protagonists of your stories

Seeing with an empathic eye

Giving voice to the voiceless

Blending practice and process

Calling out visual references

Internalization of the ubiquitous colonial gaze 

Being Modern vs Western

Progressive traditional gender roles 

Symbols & Metaphor

Empowerment & Elevation

Incorporating soundscapes

Fashion history as a cultural, socio-political window

American Bedroom: Reflections on the Nature of Life is a messy, energetic, playful and heart-stoppingly poignant romp into the intimate spaces of ordinary Americans. Each portrait is accompanied by text by the subject. The result is an anthropological study of the physical, emotional, spiritual, political and psychological landscape of 21st century America. Peacock brings a wealth of experience and a very expansive heart to this tour de force of human cartography.

In this conversation, Barbara discusses, among other things:

Leading with the light - especially cascading amber light

Grabbing the details

Serendipity

Being bold and thinking big

Following instinct and intuition

Envisioning

Street photography skills

Building an archive of inspiration

Brutal editing

Choral (collaborative) Editing

Crowdsourcing

Grants and funding

Capturing the climate of the country

Social media as help and hindrance

Doing the “Barb thing”

Anastasia Samoylova furthers her exploration of place and the ability of photography to shape our perceptions of reality. Central to her investigation is the geography of human relationships to our natural and man-made environments. Utilizing her masterful ability to collage in-camera, her flattened imagery provides us with a kaleidoscope of ideas surrounding globalization, historical heritage, and cultural idealism.

In this conversation, Anastasia discusses, among other things:

Geometry of the frame

Alignment of elements

Figures in the landscape

Spatial interplay

Illusion of scale

Inviting interpretation

Dialoguing with a targeted audience

Exposing tools of the medium

Gendering of cities

Feminist geography 

Stoic philosophy

Open enacts metaphor to make visible the layers of oppression experienced by Palestinian apartheid. Exposed documentary images and HTML-coded emails are bookended with Arabic calligraphy and poetry. Delivered in a sealed cardboard film box, this soft-cover book utilizes photography as a tool to activate our imagination, reveal expansive truths and offer a revision of what hope and resilience look like. 

In this conversation, Morgan discusses, among other things:

The poetic capacity of an image

What makes a successful photo

Pivoting

Enacting of metaphor

Chemistry & materiality

Experimenting & refining

Activating the medium

Shifting failure

Pointing towards possibility

Collaborative sequencing

Mythmaking

Challenging pretend knowledge

Sharing agency

Sign-Up for Email Newsletter for Got Punctum? News and Other Happenings

Engage with J. Sybylla Smith 

Instagram and Facebook

Another Online Pervert creates a visual and text dialog between photos from Souders’ image archive and snippets of written copy from a two-year engagement with an AI personality chatbot. Utilizing prompts from her childhood journals, an emotional call and response is created between human sense and sensibility and machine capability and capacity. Photographs, including a few family snapshots, weave a parallel narrative blending the notions of perception that we all possess between time, memory and meaning. 

In this conversation, Brea discusses, among other things:

Real-world vs virtual world

Dislodging gendered social constructs

Cathartic spaces for non-conformity

Enabling surprise

Being bot-ified 

Originality aka going off script

Evolution of a project

Memory vs past vs time without borders

Engaging archives

Collaborative editing

Mixing formats

Mean playfulness

Women being erased from technology history

In this conversation, Todd discusses, among other things:

Working in archives

Thinking in books

Approaches to appropriation

Running amok

Parameters for sequencing 

Perceived opposites

Light leaks

Colliding technologies

Data corruption

Observation & measurement

Falsehoods & mystery

Artist Resources/Inspiration

Discovering Peary Land by Todd Forsgren

Phase Faze 2001/2021

Driving Into the Sunset

A Constant Wind Between a Breeze and a Gale

Old Pictures from Paradise

Untitled Re:Iterations Photographs from 2000-2014

Ornithological Photographs

Daylight Books

Pavel Banka

John McKee

Michael Kolster

S. Billie Mandle

Jenny Riffle

Rocky Mountain College

Ryniker-Morrison Gallery

Michael N. Meyer: SpectacleBox 

AgX Arts

Atlantika Collective

f/4.5 Collective

Okkervil River Band

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