When should you bring a photographic project to an end? LaToya Ruby Frazier, Justine Kurland, Alec Soth, and more reflect on how to know when a series of work is complete.
Over the course of her career, curator and lecturer Sasha Wolf has heard countless young photographers say they often feel adrift in their own practices, wondering if they are doing it the “right” way. This inspired her to seek out insights from a wide range of photographers about their approaches to making photographs and a sustained a body of work, which are brought together in PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, the responses from both established and newly emerging photographers reveal that there is no single path. Below, eleven artists respond to the question: How do you know when a body of work is finished?
Over the course of five summers, Doug DuBois photographed teenagers living in public housing in a small Irish city of Cobh, depicting scenes of the kids drinking, carousing and coping with the boredom and restlessness that characterizes the period between
Over the course of five summers, Doug DuBois photographed teenagers living in public housing in a small Irish city of Cobh, depicting scenes of the kids drinking, carousing and coping with the boredom and restlessness that characterizes the period between childhood and adulthood. Photos from the project, published in his book My Last Day at Seventeen, were shown at the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph
“Was it really that bad?” That’s what Roger DuBois asked after seeing his son Doug’s photograph of their family’s 1987 New Year’s Eve celebration. In it, the DuBois clan sits silently and glumly around a corked champagne bottle. Roger looks at his feet. His wife Ruth and his daughter Lise stare blankly at opposite walls. And his younger son Luke looks emotionlessly at the camera. Given that the photograph was taken soon after Ruth’s attempted suicide, and a few years before the couple’s divorce, was the photograph predicting the events that were to come?
In 1985, the photographer Doug DuBois took a picture of his parents at their kitchen table after dinner. He saw, he says, their “visible estrangement”—their bodies and gazes turned away from each other, their faces long. But he missed something else, present in the scene right before him. Roughly a week after the photograph was taken, his mother attempted suicide.
Continuum: Doug DuBois and Aaron Blum is the first in a series of exhibitions that explore mentorships and influences in contemporary photography, pairing two photographers together that share a mentor-mentee relationship. Selections from New York-based p
Continuum: Doug DuBois and Aaron Blum is the first in a series of exhibitions that explore mentorships and influences in contemporary photography, pairing two photographers together that share a mentor-mentee relationship
