The idea, a loose brief, of following the Nile to Aswan, close to where the river enters Egypt from Sudan, I would talk to farmers and fishermen and those whose livelihood depends on the seemingly eternal flow of the longest river in Africa. I wanted to learn of the potential risks posed by climate change on rural Egypt. I also wanted a photo or two, and, an anecdote would be good.
“For me, photographs are always about time, always about the past, as soon as they are made. So they are about preserving life, or an illusion thereof — people, places, parties, events, celebrations, and even death.”
Hogancamp is a true American eccentric, just as the people who first came to America must have been, and the people who created our country, and forged a path out west, surely were. He’s a flawed, brilliant, pessimistically-hopeful, demon-haunted world-builder.
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
In Appalachian folklore, there is a belief that through witchcraft one can shapeshift, changing one’s physical form … The photographs in this project, which also shapeshift, are evidence of my sorcery.
I am now forever connected to that city but not because of the house, because of the people and relationships that were forged over that time.
“When one embarks on an uncertain venture, silence is often an ally,” Berenice Abbott’s philosophical tribute to Eugene Atget’s work
So the sense of the ephemeral quality of life and the knowledge that the present and soon-to-be-gone can inhabit the same frame may come to play in my work.
Wabi-sabi embraces the natural cycle of growth and decay. The life of an object and its impermanence are evidenced in patina and wear, including rips, any visible repairs (scotch tape or glue) or additions: pen, ink, stains, pencil marks.
In the course of my travels I have had many unforgettable conversations, many from dusk to till dawn, entire train and plane rides, fascinating people with incredible stories or theories on the point of our existence, and yet, more often than not, it’s the conversations in silence I remember most fondly.
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