Dear Readers,

Don’t Take Pictures will cease publication on September 1, 2021. When we launched in the fall of 2013, my Editor’s Letter explained the magazine’s mission as a space to celebrate the thoughtful, creative act of making photographic art. The following year, we launched online to include more timely features about the photographic community. We found that our online and print components needed one another in order to survive. 
 
The world has changed a lot since 2013 and our consumption of print media has evolved as well. In print, our writers and designers spent six months diving deep into the issue’s theme and each artist’s work. Without the distractions of a screen, our readers were encouraged to focus on photography on paper. Online publishing has changed as well. It is time to rethink the purpose of a magazine in the age of social media. For all that is gained by the ability to find photographers with a few clicks of a mouse, much of the grandeur and magic of their artwork is lost when viewed in slideshows, as thumbnails, or as part of an infinite stream of images. The demands of the internet era require a churning of content that is both unfeasible for Don’t Take Pictures’ staff and antithetical to our mission.
 
The decision to close Don’t Take Pictures was difficult, but its ending should not be mourned—change is not a bad thing. As the art world continues to evolve, our team is constantly rethinking how best to engage with photography in print and digital spaces. We are very proud of our past eight years, 16 beautifully designed print issues, and hundreds of online articles that exemplified what Don’t Take Pictures is about—great photography and great writing. We would like to extended a special thanks to the 90 artists we were honored to feature in print. 
 
Readers whose print subscriptions included an issue this September have been refunded. The Don’t Take Pictures website will remain online as an archive and resource for the foreseeable future, with all previous issues available as PDFs. It has been an absolute honor to share the work of emerging photographers and arts writers in print and online for the past eight years. We appreciate everyone who read our articles online, engaged with us on social media, or read Don’t Take Pictures in print.
 
Sincerely,
Kat Kiernan, Editor-in-Chief

The moon does not actually appear blue so where does the name come from? A 1999 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine revealed a confusing origin of the term. The modern custom of naming the second full moon of the month “blue” came from an article published in the 1946 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine titled “Once in a Blue Moon” where the author, James Hugh Pruett, interpreted what he read in the Maine Farmers’ Almanac and declared the second full moon in a calendar month as a “Blue Moon.”

In celebration of the upcoming blue moon, we present cyanotypes by Jesseca Ferguson who has been working with the moon as a recurring motif for many years. 

I have a vivid childhood memory of the full moon. I was about seven or eight-years-old, and I was with a favorite aunt, walking along a beach in the moonlight. The moon shone upon us so brightly that we cast shadows. I saw the moon’s gleaming path across the water, from the horizon to the sand, always just a few steps ahead of me. I tried and tried to catch up to this shimmering reflection. If I could just set foot on it, I was sure that I could march across the waves and right out to the moon. 

In my life as an artist, I have been working with moon on and off for years. My inspirations are both visual and literary. A small Polish lunar atlas, discovered by chance many years ago in an antiquarian bookshop in Kraków, Poland, has been a constant companion and source of imagery. This tiny book is one of many fragments, odds and ends, images that point me again and again toward the moon. Did I find this book or did it find me?

The Farsi moon images came about through a collaboration with Iranian author Hossein Mortazeian Abkenar. I was especially struck by chapter six of his oneiric novel, A Scorpion on the Steps of the Andimeshk Train Station (2006). In this chapter, the moon—now single, now doubled—is a presence, a character, a witness. I layered 19th century scientific images of the moon (daguerreotypes and collodion on glass taken photographed through telescopes) with Abkenar’s handwritten Farsi. The moons were printed in cyanotype, while the text was printed in gum bichromate pigmented with rose petals, wood ash, and clay. The combination produces a surface quality evocative of what Jule Verne called “the ashy light of the moon.”

For the bioluminescent moon cyanotypes, I worked with Dr. Jean Huang, environmental microbiologist. I created negatives in the darkroom using the light generated by bioluminescent bacteria. This process allowed me to discover altogether new moon imagery. 

View the next Blue Moon on August 22, 2021.

It is difficult to imagine the sense of wonder instilled by the earliest photographs. In the 1830s, photography was a marvel and those who viewed those early pictures were amazed by the process that could render a person’s likeness or a scene with exquisite detail. But this amazement was tinged with disappointment in the absence of color. People wondered how something that showed the world so perfectly was not able to show its colors. Early photographers partnered with skilled miniatures painters to color black-and-white photographs. Even at its best, however, these popular hand-colored photographs remained an arbitrary and unsatisfactory means of presenting the world in color, subject to the artist’s interpretation. Almost immediately after photography’s invention, the search began for a process that could accurately show both the forms and the colors of nature. 

Botanist Anna Atkins’s interest in rendering nature’s forms was not one of art but of science. Seeking to record botanical specimens for a scientific reference book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, she began experimenting with cyanotypes, a process invented in 1842 by Atkins’s neighbor Sir John Hershel. Atkins placed her specimens onto paper coated with an iron-salt solution and left them in the sun. When she developed the paper in water, the specimens left white silhouettes against a vibrant, Prussian blue. While Atkins’s cyanotypes are vibrant, they do not capture the colors of the world they document. 

Half a century after Atkins made history with the first book illustrated entirely with photographs, the Lumière brothers invented in 1903 what is considered the first true color photography process—autochrome plates. Three plates were covered in layers of potato starch grains dyed red, green, and blue. Light passing through the combined filters rendered a full color image. The plates were simple to use but the density of the multiple filters required longer exposure times than traditional black-and-white photographs, resulting in hazy images. John Cimon Warburg was known for his work with autochrome, embracing the atmospheric quality with his seaside photographs. His fixation on the color blue is evident in the color of his subject’s clothing, often contrasted with bright reds, and the slate blues of the ocean.

By the time Kodak introduced color films in the 1930s, interest in color photographs had waned somewhat. Kodak’s films were expensive and could not be developed at home, making them inaccessible to most enthusiasts. Serious photographers conflated color film with advertisements and family snapshots. They saw black-and-white as the more authentic photograph, which could be developed and printed in their own darkrooms.

The 1960s and 70s saw a slight shift in the response to color photography as a fine art. Ernst Haas published color photojournalism in Life, Marie Cosindas received a Guggenheim grant for her work in color Polaroids, and William Eggleston exhibited his color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. Other photographers soon explored color film, but the learning curve proved steep. Unlike working in black-and-white, color film responds to temperature shifts, rendering warmer or cooler tones depending on the temperature in which it is stored and exposed. Andre Kertesz embraced the cool tones of Polaroid color film in a body of work made in the 1960s after the death of his wife. His still lifes made from the windowsill of his New York City apartment are set against the cityscape and feature many blue skies and objects, made almost surreal by the blue tones of the film. 

By the 1980s, technological advancements had made color photography ubiquitous in family pictures and snapshots, fashion photography and photojournalism. As a fine art, however, photography still struggled to be taken seriously and color photography more so. To photograph in color was to make a statement about color—not merely record it, but seek it out, construct it, and tell its story. Joel Meyerowitz explored blue oceans and twilights in Cape Light and Alex Webb’s Hot Light/Half-made Worlds: Photographs from the Tropics silhouetted dark shadows against bright blue skies.

In the digital era, color has become commonplace and the roles have reversed. Color is now the default and it is black-and-white that represents a considered, deliberate choice. Still, some photographers place a special emphasis on color, and on the color blue in particular. Erik Madigan Heck harnesses its power in thoughtful, deliberate ways. His blue portfolio is a spectrum from deep, dark, and moody to vibrant, joyful, and light pastel washes. “For me,” he says, “blue is the color of transcendence.” And transcend it does, through nearly two centuries of photography history, the blue has transformed from a scientific default to an avenue of photographic expression—something to be cherished on its own.

Photography has always claimed a privileged position as an unbiased form of representation, one linked directly to human vision. “[The camera] may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees, the object glass is the eye of the instrument—the sensitive paper may be compared to the retina,” declared William Henry Fox Talbot. In truth, the production and reception of photography has never been so direct or unmotivated as Talbot suggested, it has always been directed by prevailing ideologies. 

While photography reflects social ideologies, it also is an agent in their creation. The unflagging belief in photography’s surrogacy for sight extends to scenes typically unavailable to the human eye and beyond most viewers’ direct experience of the physical world. Yet, the transparency of photography deems such imagery to be truthful extensions of human vision. Bird’s-eye views of reconstructed cities proclaimed the rationality of government, images of the delicate structures of insect wings evinced taxonomic categories, and X-rays, once called “[a] discovery of how to photograph the invisible” by the New York Times, celebrated the ascendency of science and rationality over spirituality and religion. Since the 19th century, photography’s ever-increasing technologies not only introduce new images to the word, often of things intangible and unseen, but also dictates their reception. 

Today’s photographic technologies, notes artist Noelle Mason, “extend vision but also extend a kind of rationalization of people and spaces that can be dehumanizing.” This tension between technology and humanity, between the visible and the physical, is perhaps most clearly perceived at the U.S./Mexico border, a space as Mason sees it, engaged in a “battle of the visual.” Mason’s three-part project X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility appropriates border images from different sources and turns them into physical, tactile works of art. Her choices of media directly challenges the typical reception and understanding of these images. Mason brings forth these supposed truths and power relationships, allowing them to wither in the light of contemplation.

The bright Prussian blue of Mason’s cyanotypes announces their materiality. First developed by Sir John Hershel in the 1840s as a method of reproducing notes, cyanotypes later became nearly synonymous with the architectural rationalization of space when they were rechristened “blueprints.” Utilizing the cyanotype process, Mason calls forth these ideas of categorization in her translations of images of backscatter x-rays made at the border into cyanotype objects she dubs Backscatter Blueprints. Sourced from the internet chat groups of “Minutemen” —the ad-hoc vigilante groups that patrol the border for illegal crossings­—the images are coldly scientific in their purpose: to expose undeclared products and people entering the U.S.  Liberated from the impersonality of the computer screen, Mason’s Backscatter Blueprints are transformative and heartbreaking. Physically confronted by these prints depicting the typically unseen and intangible realities of migrants, the specific human reality of the scene is manifest. In hunched, protective postures, or crammed into impossible spaces, the humanity of each figure is apparent. 

Another part in Mason’s tri-part project, Ground Control, interrogates the satellite images of along the U.S.-Mexico border made by NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), which combine bands of visible and near-infrared light into a single image. Mason transforms these digital images into large-scale, hand-woven wool Gobelin tapestries. She notes, “Each work in Ground Control was hand woven in Guadalajara by the weavers from the Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos for the amount of money it costs a family of four to cross the US/Mexico border illegally thus transforming the reproducible virtual image into a carefully constructed unique object that is larger than human scale.” Choosing a process that is dependent on time and physical labor, and framing its cost within the unseen economies that characterize the borderland, Mason’s work once again returns the humanity to these stark views of the border. 

The final part of Mason’s project is titled Coyotaje, which consists of x-stitches, or cross stitches, of undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border. Each irregularity in this process serves as a clear sign of its handmade, unique nature. The immigrants are seen as mere black forms, moving amid a stark environment. It is clear why in Border Patrol parlance, migrants are referred to as mere “bodies,” rather than people. In Mason’s translation, each stitch corresponds to one pixel of these infrared source images. The artist’s use of cross-stitch is once again an appropriation of materiality that speaks to the impersonal imagery produced at the border. Here, cross-stitch, like border crossing, feels incredibly dangerous. 

Mason’s works makes the images of the border physical and concrete. While photographic technologies have allowed viewers to see and to experience the world in new ways, our reception of these images is driven by our culture and context. By shifting the context in which these images are encountered—giving them physical presence and carefully choosing meaningful materials—Mason succeeds in reframing their reception and in turn, succeeds in changing how we view images of this contested part of the world. 

This article first appeared in Issue 16, The Blue Issue.

Before photography was an art, it was a science. Its inventors sought how best to “fix a shadow,” as they called it, and render the visible world permanently onto paper. Following in the lineage of the medium’s early pioneers, Brenton Hamilton is both alchemist and artist. He transforms elements into chemistry and sunlight into shadow to find the connective link between photography’s earliest fixed images and modern art-making. Hamilton, however, is not concerned with how the world appears. Instead, he constructs his photographs from still lifes, collage, and silhouettes. “I live in rooms full of objects and I photograph them.” He says, “The collection is the work and the work is the collection.” And he shares this collection with us in A Blue Idyll, the long-awaited monograph spanning his 30-year career. 

Hamilton is enraptured by the origin of the medium and the story of photography. He has, in his own words, “ransacked art history” for imagery. There are references in his work to classical sculpture, English gardens, and the Hudson River School painters. He adds these elements using scissors, compositing and printing in analogue processes. Although he embraces antiquarian subjects and printing, the work is decidedly contemporary. His photographs are not mere documents like those of the medium’s pioneers, but authentic and original works of art in which each image is its own story. Along with the color blue, surrealist motifs appear throughout the pages. He recycles certain images again and again, reassembling and asserting new narratives. There are cutouts—negative spaces left with ragged edges. Their positive counterpart appears in later images as the figures move between the pages of the book. 

Despite the book’s title, not every image included is rendered in blue. Multi-colored gum bichromates, black-and-white platinum and palladium prints, along with other processes, accompany the many blue-hued cyanotypes. For him, blue represents more than a color, embodying an idea, an emotion, and a philosophy. He says his relationship with blue is “endlessness, opaque, infinite. It fuels me. I need that and I go to it as a motif repeatedly.” 

The book is made with the same care as the photographs it contains. Silvery endpapers house large, luminous images on heavyweight paper. It is full of wonderous pictures that are often quiet with subdued colors and elegant compositions, but large in scale and takes up considerable space on the bookshelf. The vibrant blue spine with silvery lettering assumes its place amongst the volumes of art history, as it should. 

A Blue Idyll, Cyanotypes and Dreams
Brenton Hamilton
Schilt Publishing, 2020
112 pp., 93 illustrations
12 x 9.5 in., €50

The great egret lives in the bayous of Louisiana. Tall and graceful, it stands at the water’s edge on stilt-like legs waiting in statuesque stillness for fish. Underneath the dark cloth of his cumbersome 8 x 10 view camera, photographer Yojiro Imasaka waits patiently in the oppressive Louisiana humidity for a photograph to reveal itself. The slim legs of the tripod are slightly sunken into the damp earth, resembling a large, strange bayou bird.

The term bayou is from the Choctaw word “bayok,” meaning a small stream. The bayous in the Southeastern United States are among the most distinctive natural environments in the world. Born and raised in Hiroshima, Japan, Imasaka was intrigued by the famed geography and cultural legends of the low-lying delta at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Following his move to the United States, Imasaka photographed in the Catskills, Hawaiian islands, the Rocky Mountains, and the coast of Maine, yet the shallow and heavily wooded landscape of the bayou was unlike any the Japanese native had ever seen. He found a spiritual connection with the submerged forest’s huge cypress trees and dripping mosses. Immersing himself in its mysterious atmosphere for several months, Imasaka produced a series of stunning, large-scale and richly detailed photographs of the “blue bayou.” 

The series shares its title with the ballad made famous by Roy Orbison in the 1960s. “I’m going back someday/Come what may/To Blue Bayou/Where the folks are fun/And the world is mine...” Despite what the lyrics suggest, the bayous are not, in fact, blue but a palate of greens, yellows, and browns. Under the red light of the darkroom, Imasaka transforms his black-and-white negatives into steely-blue gelatin silver prints through an elaborate process of his own invention. This allows him to realize the landscape not as he saw it, but as he felt it. In some images, the light on the lush vegetation appears white, like a dusting of surreal snowfall. The blue in these photographs, as it is in Orbison’s song, is a nostalgic filter. The coolness of the color recalls an earlier era of photography. Its dream-like quality stirs a longing to return to a place we have never been. 

Despite the vast ecological differences between Japan and the bayous, there are familiar elements found in both, such as the great egret. Dense plant species including alligator weed and water hyacinth run wild throughout the bayou waters in the same manner that Japanese kudzu chokes out the sunlight. Imasaka photographs with an infinite depth of field, compressing the layers of overgrowth into a two-dimensional tangle of vines, tree limbs, and algae. Printed at large scale (32 x 40 inches), the landscape envelopes the viewer. The eye moves frantically among the density of the leaves and the rests in the calm dark water. It could be chaotic, but the consistency of the color cast and the evenness of the light encourages tranquility. We are not overwhelmed, but awed.

Although these salt, fresh, and brackish waters are home to a diversity of wildlife, none, including the great egret, are to be found in Imasaka’s photographs, save for one image with a dissipating water ripple in the foreground, perhaps evidence of a jumping fish or a slowly sinking alligator. Often, it is the quick shutter that records a fraction of a second to pull a moment out of time. Here, Imasaka embraces the slowness of the camera and long exposures to capture the subtlety of slow-moving water and shifting sunlight through vegetation. He is strategic in his depiction of stillness. He says he photographs the bayou “as if I were praying for its everlasting existence.” Indeed, there is a meditative quality to these pictures. Each photograph, made deliberately and with great concentration on his surroundings is like a small prayer to draw the moment out, to suspend time. This stillness isn’t static, it’s electric. One can almost feel the heaviness in the air and hear the buzzing of insects. Imasaka places us alongside him, standing still at the edge of the water and losing all sense of time.

This article first appeared in Issue 16, The Blue Issue.

Imagine that you are a young, successful commercial photographer at the height of your career, living and working in one of the most visual and vibrant cities in the world. You become ill, suffer a debilitating stroke, and survive a life-threatening illness. With help from family, friends, and the medical community, you slowly recover, but lose your eyesight and the career that depend on it. What will you do?

This is John Dugdale’s story, and he chose to move forward.  

Dugdale, now 60 years old, has been blind for nearly half his life from complications related to HIV. After a lengthy rehabilitation period following his illness, his next-door neighbor and close friend, Judy Seigel, an influential practitioner of 19th-century photographic printing processes, showed him how to make cyanotypes. Initially, the lure of cyanotype was its relative ease and non-toxic nature. The color blue, as natural as the sea and sky, symbolizes peace and tranquility. Fittingly, Dugdale views his own life as “a beautiful and unexpected journey.”

Judy Seigel’s generous welcome-home offering of this process was a gift that, like Judy herself, has had a profound and lasting impact on Dugdale’s life. Although Dugdale works in several photographic processes, he is best known for his quiet narratives rendered in rich tones of deep Prussian blue. 

When Dugdale lost his sight, he never once entertained the thought that his photographic career had ended. He felt then, as he does now, that his loss of sight never truly impacted his ability to see. Dugdale asks of himself, “How can I be blind, when I’m able to see so many images in my mind?” He creates his images through an ever-evolving and deeply personal prism of visual narratives, clearly seen within his mind’s eye. Photographed and contact-printed in serene tones of blue, they are about the essence of his life. Never literal, but always autobiographical.

Dugdale has never embraced the ease that 21st century technology affords the contemporary photographer. He prefers to work with his large format 11x14 Deardorff camera, appreciating the deliberate, thoughtful slowness of the process and the quality that film itself possesses—how light interacts with silver halide crystals—a look that is impossible to duplicate in a digital transparency. He also appreciates the exacting limitations a large format camera imposes. For Dugdale, that self-imposed limit is eight sheets of film for one photograph. Often, he knows he has his picture in the very first take. But sometimes, he says, as he edges closer to that last sheet of film—just when he has nearly given up—the image will appear for him. His favorite photograph that he has made, he says without hesitation, is one of him and his mother, made while he was still in recovery. On his last sheet of film, and aware that he had not yet made the photograph he wanted, his mother instinctively reached for him and pulled him close, cradling his head in her arm. Unplanned, this simple gesture is a loving, generous, and intimate connection between mother and son. That singular quiet moment preserved on film and rendered in blue, reveals a personal narrative all its own—no words needed.

Dugdale’s photographs offer a kind of quietude that seem palpable. An inherently spiritual man himself, that quality is often deeply felt by the viewer. He finds that, after having viewed and connected with his work, visitors will sometimes speak to him at his openings in a whisper, as if they are in a holy place.

That Dugdale can create such personal images, culled from an infinite visual library—seen only in his mind—and imbue them with a spirituality that so profoundly resonates with his viewers—seems no small feat. Never sinking into nostalgia or sentimentality, Dugdale innately understands the need for photographs to be communicative. At the same time that he offers a deeply personal look into the essence of his own life, he simultaneously offers wholly interpretive narratives into our own.

Perhaps this universality is achieved, in part, in the way he photographs. Dugdale frequently enlists the help of his subjects. He sets up his Deardorff and arranges a tableau. If he is photographing someone else, he offers his subject a tutorial on how to focus on the ground glass. Dugdale, the photographer, poses as the subject, essentially “becoming the mirror” of what he wants to photograph.

Now when he is photographing, he can simply touch someone’s face to know how the sunlight might be falling on them. He can trace the branches and leaves of the hydrangeas that grow on his beloved property in upstate New York, and feel how the seasons alter them. The touch of antique linen, the tracery of growing vines, the smell of fresh flowers, or the feel of those same flowers bending towards decay, all serve to continually bolster his visual library.

Dugdale’s growing inspiration not only originates from a lifetime of those collected images; he is also greatly influenced by the words in Henry David Thoreau’s journals; in Emily Dickinson’s poems; in The Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal church; and by the photographs of Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron.  

In the end, John Dugdale’s images are all his own—a collective thing of beauty—a gift for our hearts and souls. This from a man who may have lost his eyesight, but never his vision.

This article first appeared in Issue 16, The Blue Issue.

Cyanotype Poems
Dale Rio

Masks
Shel Silverstein 

She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through.
Then passed right by—
And never knew.

Fragmentary Blue
Robert Frost 

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? 

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Photographs
Barbara Guest 

In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak.
Alive, active. What had been distance was memory.    Dusk came,
Pushed us forward,   emptying the laboratory   each night undisturbed by
Erasure. 

      In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips
soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the
window, street lamps at the single tree. 

      Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to
photographs of the improved city. The camera, once
commented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue.
The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft,
unreliable. 

      Now distributed is photography of new government building. We are
forbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs.

We need space. Room to reflect and consider our options. A moment to gather our thoughts in order to see where we’ve come from and consider where we might be going. Oli Kellett reminds us that even as we meet a crossroads, we need to slow down and reflect on where we are and where, exactly, we might be going.

It would be tempting to read Kellett’s series Crossroad Blues as autobiographical, even if only in part. A traveler who over the years photographed people at train stations in England, his home, he later made images of people standing at road crossings in the U.S. He photographed them in the early morning. He found the light and the stillness of morning ideal because in the early hours of the day, people were less harried and more focused. They lingered at intersections even if no traffic was whizzing by. They were often lost in thought, and Kellett’s lens focused on them at that quiet moment when the day ahead is still rich with possibility. 

Growing up north of London, Kellett got his first camera when he was 16. He imagined himself becoming a portrait painter, busking for cash by painting replicas of Old Masters for commuters and tourists. After studying at St. Martin’s Art College, he began graphic design work. Still, he continued to photograph, ultimately finding a breakthrough in a project called Paradise, for which he traveled over an eight-year period, usually during the winter, to all the places in the UK named Paradise (about 50 of them) and photographed the paradises he found. The project would validate to him the value of working around a central idea and reflecting on it over an extended time.

Crossroad Blues are images primarily from the U.S., reflecting a common theme in American artistic expression. Literary artists from Faulkner to Pynchon have used the crossroads as a trope, and writers in the Harlem Renaissance called on the theme to emphasize how crucial that moment was for African Americans as they sought to establish their own voices as significant to the American imagination. The notion of the crossroads in blues music—the most American of all music forms—is now irreversibly linked to Robert Johnson and the myth of the musician selling his soul to the devil in order to become a great artist. Kellett’s images are named for this tradition, but they seem to invert the devil-deals. They reflect settings that seem decidedly antagonistic to stillness—urban settings, where streets hum and professionals bustle. In Kellett’s images, though, normally busy streets are quiet and pedestrians are still, even meditative. Crosswalks reach out in front, behind, and alongside the figures in the photographs, and they linger in glowing morning light as though they are saints or are approaching an unseen altar. 

“Figueroa St., LA, 2016” illustrates the meditative moment and stillness that Kellett wants us to consider. A lone figure stands in a streak of rich, orange light. At its edges, darkness crowds in, but in front of the figure, a crosswalk leads toward the source of the light. The figure is waiting. The street has no traffic, and no other people crowd into the space. Only the figure, the light, and the crosswalk—and the trembling possibility of the first step toward that light. The figure is upright, stock still. There is no certainty of forward movement. There is only the moment Kellett gives us, when the possibility of that first step is real, even if it’s not assured. 

“Hubbard St., Chicago, 2017” converts that moment of lingering light into a moment of more levity, even play. A small group of kids and teens gather at a corner where dappled light reflected from windows illuminates their time together. One child swings around a street sign. The crosswalk is in the shadows, and as a woman in the background walks away down a sidewalk, the children linger, living in a brief, bright present, with no decision about their future necessary or even visible. 

Kellett describes Crossroad Blues as exploring the idea of guidance. Where do we look when we are seeking our paths in life? Where do we stand and what light do we follow or walk away from? He wants us to experience a charged moment, and by printing the work in large scale, he attempts to immerse us into the scene. The goal of that immersion is not so much to make us a co-participant in the scene. It is not an invitation to walk into that place and feel it as the figures in front of us do. Instead, the immersion acts as a kind of mirror for our own inner worlds, where we see in Kellett’s images our own crossroads, our own destinations, and our own pathways, lit by early sun or cast in shadows of the turning world. Neither light nor shadow here is better or worse than the other. It’s the moment that counts. It’s the guidance we get simply from slowing down and seeing, regardless of where we might be going, what each moment offers us.

This article first appeared in Issue 16, The Blue Issue.

In October 1843, the botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (1799–1871) wrote a letter to a friend. “I have lately taken in hand a rather lengthy performance,” revealed Atkins. “It is the taking photographical impressions of all, that I can procure, of the British algae and confervae, many of which are so minute that accurate drawings of them are very difficult to make.”

Botanist Anna Atkins’s interest in rendering nature’s forms was not a pursuit of art but of science. Seeking to record botanical specimens for a scientific reference book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, she began experimenting with cyanotypes, a process invented in 1842 by Atkins’s neighbor Sir John Hershel. This publication was one of the first uses of light-sensitive materials to illustrate a book. Atkins placed her specimens onto paper coated with an iron-salt solution and left them in the sun. When she developed the paper in water, the specimens left white silhouettes against a vibrant, Prussian blue. Instead of traditional letterpress printing, the book's handwritten text and illustrations were created by the cyanotype method. Atkins printed and published Part I of British Algae in 1843 and in doing so established photography as an accurate medium for scientific illustration.

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We are excited to announce The Blue Issue!

Copies are on their way to subscribers.

Editor’s Letter

The Kennebec River in Maine is a grayish blue. As an undergraduate student, I submerged myself in its cold, brackish water for a self-portrait. In October. I made several exposures with the camera’s 30 second timer before I began to turn blue. 

Rich with emotional complexity, blue evokes sorrow, but it can also conjure feelings of peace and serenity. It is a primary color, from which most others are made. There are no sad reds, no melancholy oranges or somber yellows. We ache with the blues, and we sing them.

We live on a blue planet. But although the color is seemingly all around us, it is rarely found in nature. Mountains appear blue only at a distance, and the sky and water adopt the hue through an illusion caused by sunlight and atmosphere. 

These pages contain blue shades in royal, azure, navy, cobalt, cornflower, sky, and slate. This issue is dedicated to photographers who embrace blue as a color, a mood, a movement, and a metaphor. 

— Kat Kiernan, Editor-in-Chief

How We See: Photobooks by Women
Edited by Russet Lederman, Olga Yatskevich and Michael Lang. Essays by Miyako Ishiuchi, Kristen Lubben and Valentina Abenavoli.
10x10 Photobooks, 2018. 300pp., 9.25 x 6.75 in.

Publisher’s Description:
How We See: Photobooks by Women, 10×10 Photobooks’ latest project and publication, presents a global range of 21st-century photobooks by female photographers.

With historical records establishing 19th-century British photographer Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853) as the first photobook, it is not surprising that women have consistently contributed to the rich history of photobook making. 10×10 Photobooks has organized How We See—a hands-on reading room, “books on books” publication and series of public events—to explore the distinctive content, design and intellectual attributes in photobooks produced by women.

The comprehensive How We See publication—with images and texts for all the photobooks in the project—is an invaluable reference and resource. In addition to all one hundred books in the reading room, the publication includes one hundred historical books by women photographers, an annotated chronology, and several essays on the history and practice of photobooks by women.

Learn more.

Ophelia embodies tragic beauty. Her drowning is quiet, demure as she floats away to her watery demise. Even if one has not read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character of Ophelia has become a part of our cultural vernacular. She has been immortalized as a beautiful but pitiful woman, remembered for going mad and picking flowers before drowning. While her death is not seen on stage, it is announced by Queen Gertrude, who describes how Ophelia fell into the river and drowned slowly by the weight of water on her clothes, too mad to save herself.

Perhaps because the scene is never played, artists have used this description to interpret Ophelia’s tragic end. Sir John Everett Millais, a Pre-Raphaelite painter, completed in 1852 what is perhaps the most famous Ophelia painting. Millais’ Ophelia was a 19-year-old woman named Elizabeth Siddall. To create the effect of drowning, she posed in a silver embroidered dress in a bath of water inside his London studio. His painting, now endlessly reproduced on posters, coffee mugs, and other items, has become the archetypal death of Ophelia. Other artists have taken their visual direction more from Millais than from the text of the play.

About 25 years later, Julia Margaret Cameron made a small series of Ophelia photographs. Photography was invented twelve years before Millais painted Ophelia but lacked color and the detail that painters could produce. Cameron’s portraits embrace the soft, ethereal quality of the medium. Her Ophelia was Emily Peacock, photographed not in the water, but in the studio. She pulls distractedly at her hair, with a cautiously wild look into the camera. Her simple gesture and withered flowers allude to her dissent into madness and inevitable drowning.

In contemporary photography, Ophelia has become a popular figure—reimagined in rivers and lakes but also oceans, swimming pools, ponds, and bathtubs. Photographers who see in themselves the sweet yet sorrowful characteristics of Ophelia are compelled to go to the water and relive her last moments either through models or as self-portraits. 

We are fascinated with female death, and in particular female self-destruction. Edgar Allen Poe, another Victorian luminary, wrote, “the death…of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Although Ophelia vanishes from the play, she is revived through artistic renderings. As cultural histories of gender, mental illness, and beauty have shifted, so too has Ophelia’s. We loved her in Millais’ time for her beauty, in Cameron’s for her suffering, and we love her now as a patron saint—a betrayed woman who was traumatized into madness and who was too beautiful for this world.

This article first appeared in Issue 15, The Fiction Issue

Music can spark ideas for visual artists, providing a mood for editing and sequencing, or even as inspiration for bodies of work. Each month, Lindsey Eckenroth curates a playlist of music to make art to. 

Windows down and volume up, heading determinedly nowhere. A good road trip obviously requires a good playlist, even if—as in my city-dwelling/non-car-owning case—the road trip is only in your mind. Since I’ve lately been preoccupied with a persistent desire to drive off into the sunset of anywhere else, here’s a playlist about and for The Drive.

We pull out with Kavinsky’s foreboding, electropopish Nightcall (featured in Nicholas Refn’s film Drive), followed by The White Stripes’ brutally dense and damning The Big Three Killed My Baby. Gotta Keep Movin’to the first blues overpass with Detroit proto-punks the MC5, and next with the most mythicized of all bluesmen: Robert Johnson, who s(w)ings the Terraplane Blues (spoiler alert: the car is a metaphor for a woman). We pick up Iggy Pop as The Passenger on a detour back to 70s Detroit, and then we turn onto the synth road: Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Windshield Smasher is a cloudy analog wash of “hairspray, gasoline, and roller skates,” and Gary Numan gives us his weird-dorky-dystopian take on Cars. Retro new-wavers Nation of Language remind us that “the only way out’s not the way you came in” on Automobile, and then we simultaneously float and sink through Aix Em Klemm’s Twin-Peaks-referencing Sparkwood and Twentyone.

Death Cab for Cutie’s Passenger Seat provides a reflective emo interlude (“with my feet on the dash / the world doesn’t matter”), and then we’re back in the riff zone with The Stone Roses’ muddy Drive South and Deep Purple’s heavy (pedal to the) metal Space Truckin. Two Road Runners follow. First is Bo Diddley, who invites us to hop on in with a smoothly sensual declamation and a forever-ascending electric guitar slide. Next, with the radio insistently ON, we head to The Modern Lovers. As Greil Marcus wrote of frontman Jonathan Richman: “his themes were traditional (cars, girls, the radio), but with an overlay of moment-to-moment, quotidian realism that made the traditional odd.” The riffs continue on L.A. WITCH’s Drive Your Car, a grippingly moody garage rock jam perfectly punctuated by Sade Sanchez’s flat-affect vocals. Finally, with Future Islands we disappear around the hazy synthpop bend, “flying and free,” hoping to Hit the Coast. 

Lindsey Eckenroth is a Brooklyn-based musicologist, flutist, and lover of sounds. When she's not teaching at Brooklyn College and working at RILM, she likes thinking and writing about popular music, documentary films, music and/as affective labor, rock stardom and celebrity, and psychogeography.

A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936
Photographs by Richard Samuel Roberts. Edited by Phillip C. Dunn and Thomas L. Johnson. 
University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 208pp., 12 x 10 in.

Publisher’s Description:
A True Likeness showcases the extraordinary photography of Richard Samuel Roberts (1880-1935), who operated a studio in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1920 to 1935. He was one of the few major African American commercial photographers working in the region during the first half of the twentieth century, and his images reveal the social, economic, and cultural realities of the black South and document the rise of a small but significant southern black middle class.

The nearly two hundred photographs in A True Likeness were selected from three thousand glass plates that had been stored for decades in a crawl space under the Roberts home. The collection includes 'true likenesses' of teachers, preachers, undertakers, carpenters, brick masons, dressmakers, chauffeurs, entertainers, and athletes, as well as the poor, with dignity and respect and an eye for character and beauty.

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In the years following the end of the Civil War, 27,000 formerly enslaved people migrated from the Jim Crow South to Kansas. They called themselves the “Exodusters” and their migration journey came to be known as the “Great Exodus.” Many Exodusters settled and made new lives in Leavenworth, Kansas where the proliferation of photo studios in the 1870s allowed the Exodusters and other Black Americans in the community to create a visual record of their new community. A compelling selection of these photographs are now on view at the Black Archives Museum in St. Joseph, MO. 

The studio portraits depict soldiers, couples, baseball teams, and community members of all ages. Sometimes posed with props and sometimes against a painted backdrop, each sitter is gorgeously rendered in black-and-white. These photographs almost didn’t survive the era. As Leavenworth’s photographers retired, their negatives were discarded. In the 1920s, a photographer named Mary Everhard moved to Leavenworth, purchasing photographers’ archives as they shuttered their studios. Over time, she amassed a collection of 40,000 negatives depicting Leavenworth’s early history. In 1967, a collector from Chicago purchased the negatives, selling them off in batches to various museums including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas which loaned a portion of its 6,000-photograph collection to the Black Archives Museum for this exhibition.

Don’t Take Pictures is pleased to announce the results of our online exhibition Dusk to Dawn. 50 photographs depicting the night were selected and will be on view through May 25. Visit the exhibitions page to view the entire show.

Between the last light of day and the first rays of dawn, the world as we normally see it transforms to one in which nightclubs, all-night stores, third shift workers, and nocturnal wildlife take center stage. Spaces abuzz with activity during the day become quiet and desolate, and artificial light transforms mundane spaces into something almost magical. Photographers who work at night experience a nocturnal world that most sleep through.

The perception of night is different for each photographer. For some, the darkness can present a time for reflection and repose, for others, the feat of the unknown instills feelings of anxiety and uncertainty within them. For this online exhibition, Don’t Take Pictures presents photographs that explore the night. 

Don’t Take Pictures holds free, quarterly calls for work for online exhibitions.

The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship
By Deborah Willis. 
NYU Press, 2021. 256pp., 99 illus., 10 x 8 in.

Publisher’s Description:
A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers

Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed--marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier, Deb Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged.

With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle--from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing; responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and--most predominantly--African American resilience.

The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance.

Learn more.

Get Inspired

To coincide with our current issue’s theme (The Fiction Issue), each month our editors select a passage from literary fiction to inspire your image-making.

How It Works

If this month’s literary quote inspires your imagery, post your photographs on Instagram and tag us @donttakepictures with #fictiontophoto. We will be featuring photographs on our Instagram stories throughout the month.

Diversify Photo is a database and online showcase of BIPOC and non-western photographers, editors, and visual producers. Created by photo editors Brent Lewis and Andrea Wise, their goal is to foster “a more inclusive and equitable photo industry.” The accessible database provides photo editors, art buyers, and creative directors access to over 700 talented and experienced photographers of color and non-western photographers available for assignments.

Membership is free and divided into two groups. Full members are approved, assignment-ready photographers with over three years of experience and “Next Up” members are up-and-coming photographers working toward full membership. BIPOC and non-western photographers actively working (or working towards) a career in commercial photography may apply during the open call periods. A team of photography professionals review each applicant, vetting for assignment-readiness. Once approved for membership, photographers become part of the database. The organization is more than just a listing, offering its members networking, exhibition, speaking, and community-building opportunities.