With the prevalence of social media and a digital camera in every pocket, photography seems to be experiencing its heyday now.
“We’re all making more pictures than ever,” said Andy Adams, founder of FlakPhoto, an expansive photography newsletter. “That’s a wonderful thing.
“(But) what ends up happening is our ability to pay attention to these kinds of pictures is really diminished. The way we appreciate photography, it’s a struggle online, right? Algorithms are hiding things from you. News feeds are bursting with imagery flying at you.”
PhotoMidwest’s 13th Biennial Exhibition, a juried show held every other year in Madison, invites viewers to slow down, share space and look a little closer.
Work by Phillip Heying is featured in the 2024 PhotoMidwest Biennial.
Images are on display now at Arts + Literature Laboratory at 111 S. Livingston St. The PhotoMidwest Biennial festival weekend opens with a reception on Friday, Sept. 27, and continues with a day of workshops and lectures on Sept. 28. The work will be up through Nov. 9.
Andy Adams is the founder of FlakPhoto, an expansive newsletter celebrating photography. Adams collaborated with PhotoMidwest on this year’s Biennial celebration.
The Biennial coincides with the launch of one of Adams’ new projects with Arts + Lit Lab: the ALL Flat File Project, a rotating collection of 2-D printed works by Midwest artists. Adams curated the inaugural Flat File cohort of 10 Midwest photographers. That exhibition is up through Nov. 9.
“We’re trying to show the breadth and depth of talent of who is making pictures, riffing on all kinds of themes,” Adams said. “We’ve got family, memoir, portraiture, some landscape works and reflections on nature.”
Madison-based Sarah Stellino, whose work is shown here, is among the photographers chosen for the first FlakPhoto Flat File Project at Arts + Literature Laboratory.
Adams referenced another Madison photographer, Sarah Stellino, who’s doing “traditional silver gelatin darkroom photography.” Others are making work on film, and others are digital. But the point is to celebrate “the thing-ness of photography,” Adams said. “The physical qualities of it.”
Building a Biennial took searching
Tasked with sorting through some 900 submissions from photographers working in 13 Midwest states was juror Kris Graves, an artist and publisher based both in New York and California.
Graves makes work to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon, as well as to start conversations about race and urban life. According to his bio, he makes work that “deals with societal problems” and aims to “inform people about cultural issues.”
Peaceful protests at the Robert E. Lee Circle on Monument Avenue at night.
Graves doesn’t think social media has made us more visual consumers, but he echoed Adams’ thoughts about how we engage with images.
“Culture was visual always,” Graves said. “The only new issue is that everyone has access to make a picture. Thirty years ago, no one really had access besides their home footage, film you had to get printed in a lab. Now you can post something that you shot five seconds ago. So that’s a big difference.”
For this exhibition, Graves wasn’t looking for an attractive picture — or at least, not just that. To whittle down the list to roughly 50 photographers took him several days of searching.
“For me, it’s important that work can bring knowledge to something,” he said. “Usually it’s not about making a beautiful picture of flowers. It’s more complicated scenes … things that make you think.
“(It could be) a portrait, a landscape, a still life, an interior. It’s usually about — what photograph will people be able to hold onto, and keep their attention?”
Photographs by Vincent Glielmi are featured in the PhotoMidwest 2024 Biennial.
Graves chose several images by Vincent Glielmi, an Illinois photographer, whose work stood out because it was so consistently good.
“A lot of photographers can make one photograph, maybe two that are really great, and then a bunch of other photographs that fit into a series,” Graves said. “But some photographers are able to make a good photograph over and over again. And that’s very rare.”
“Betsy, Lake Ediza,” by Kelli Connell. Connell will speak at the 2024 PhotoMidwest Biennial.
Graves will give the keynote lecture on Saturday, following photo-focused talks by Kelli Connell and Deanna Dikeman. Biennial exhibitions have expanded beyond Arts + Lit Lab, with a concurrent show in Overture Center’s Playhouse gallery, the Pyle Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the PhotoMidwest gallery on Rayovac Drive.
Evey had a big, beautiful lilac bush in her yard. Photographer Deanna Dikeman will give a talk on Saturday, Sept. 28 at 1:30 p.m. as part of the 2024 PhotoMidwest Biennial.
There’s a book release for John Murray Mason’s “Madison Trees in Season” at U-Frame-It, a trio of photographers showing at Promega, and a “walking installation” along a path at the Malcolm Stack Foundation in Ridgeway.
Also at ALL, Adams curated a show of photography by Rashod Taylor called “Little Black Boy,” featuring images of Taylor’s son LJ. “Those prints are gorgeous,” Adams said. Taylor’s gallery talk will be Nov. 2, one of several photography events that continues further into the fall.
In “Little Black Boy,” photographer Rashod Taylor uses photography to document his young son LJ’s experience growing up in the American Midwest. Taylor’s work is up now in connection with the 2024 PhotoMidwest Biennial.
Beyond these exhibitions and talks, photo programming at ALL is expanding to include a speaker series and a documentary film series, all focused on photography. Adams is calling it a “campfire for photography people.”
“Photography used to be a really strictly physical medium,” Adams said. “Now it’s become an electric, digital, non-physical medium for most people. We’re creating space for people to come and appreciate photography together offline, which is very much a community gathering space.”
