Magic Hour – Details, episodes & analysis

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan Weitzman gets together with painter and photographer Billy Sullivan at his loft on the Bowery, where he's been living for over 40 years.

Jordan also makes a special announcement about a new imprint that's been in the works for the past year - Magic Hour Press - and new books coming this fall by Ian Lewandowski and Linda Rosenkrantz.

Visit www.magichourphoto.org to find out more.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

While preparing to interview Moyra Davey, I started to really try and figure out what it is that I love so much about her work.

Is it that she is able to deal with the most mundane, everyday subject matter in such a personal, unpretentious, electrifying, simple and complex way?

Is it her subject matter that’s so appealing? Artists that she’s interested in, diaries, ephemera, hang-ups, let downs, preocupations, inspirations, quotes, books? Is it that she speaks of those things in the first place?

Is it her form? The simple elegance of it which is a through line in all her work from the writing to the films to the mailers.

“I’m trying to write in the forms of the work I want to read” she writes in her title essay of her recent book Index Cards published by New Directions. That seems like such a simple and easy thing to do, but it’s really the most challenging place to get to.

Moyra was born in Toronto in 1958, grew up in Montreal and lives in New York now, where she’s been for some 30 years.

She is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and just last month, she opened a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I have an interesting relationship to Mike Marcelle’s work. On the one hand, I totally get it, but on the other, i so don’t relate to where it comes from. I get the seeing, I feel the strength of the pictures, but his reference points feel so different than mine in a way. Like, for example, the new Suspiria would probably NOT come up in every conversation of mine, and with him, welll….. 

Process though - that’s another story. Hearing Mike speak about his way of making pictures, often involving ideas as starting points for photos i totally get. In his case, he jots them down in a several year long email to himself that he replies to over and over. Those ideas, though, are just to get off the couch, to try something out, to roam around and find things. The photos that he makes are always completely different and unexpected. 

Mike grew up in New Jersey where he recently made photos of his family which ended up in his book Kokomo, published with Matte in 2018. In Gregory Crewdson’s essay in the book, he says that Marcelle's photographs employ various conventions of the beloved horror and B-movies of his youth - self-consciously low-end special effects and garish, technicolor lighting - the materials of the domestic and familial are reconfigured into an uncanny, alien world. 

We conducted this interview remotely, i in Montreal, and Mike at his home in upstate New York that he shares with his husband Danny.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.