Garden

Summer

Images via the fabulous Natural-Belle and GBW

Wasp — Wespachtig

Mumbai

saved box.

Eat

Flora Nwapa

Often credited with being one of the forerunners to a generation of African women writers, Flora Nwapa began her career as an author with the publication of Efuru in 1966.  She followed with her second novel, Idu, in 1971, and published the rest of her works, as well as many other works from other writers, through one of her two publishing companies. Read more…

Avendon

Judy Garland, isn’t this sweet?

Interview with Photographer & Editor Carla Williams

A Virtuous Negro's Head, from How To Read Character, (1990-1991) Photo via http://carlagirl.net/photographs/

Currently I’m working as the Photo Editor of Inside New York, a NYC guidebook written and compiled by college students. When I learned about 81 Press I immediately knew I wanted to feature them and was really interested in the editing process for their publications. I had the luck of doing an interview with Carla Williams, a photographer, co-founder of http://cadreart.org, writer, and editor of 81 Press.

What is 81 Press?

81 Press has two functions—its primary one is to publish the work of photographers of the African Diaspora in a quarterly journal and book series, and its secondary function as 81Press.net is to catalog and review publications of and by African Diaspora subjects—to create a virtual as well as (eventually) a physical library of these titles. Unfortunately for black photographers, there really haven’t been very many publications to date, but fortunately for readers/collectors, you can amass a pretty comprehensive library of titles. 81Press.net has regular contributors/reviewers—different from carlagirl.net, where I’m the only writer and the content varies. I really want 81Press.net’s sole focus to be on publishing. I’ve just accepted a teaching position at Rochester Institute of Technology which will allow me to develop the press component so that 81 Press can begin producing new titles (to date, 81 Press has published only a couple of small offset titles in conjunction with other collaborators—it hasn’t yet published its own titles). This has been an idea of mine a long time in the making but it is really with the advances in digital printing technology and the move away from traditional offset printing models that it can finally be realized. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities—there is so much wonderful, as-yet-unpublished work!

When did your interest in photography begin and what was your first camera?

My interest began at the end of my freshman year in college—I had been making snapshots since high school and decided I wanted to take a photography class. You had to apply to take the class, and I remember going down to the basement where the darkrooms were for my interview and seeing all the equipment and smelling the chemistry and I felt like I’d entered into a magical world. I just wanted to be a part of it. I’m surprised I got in the class! My first “real” camera was a 35mm Canon, I think, that my father got secondhand—all of my equipment was secondhand until well after graduate school. I remember initially the instructor talking to us about using our cameras and making the basic assumption that we’d all at least used a 35mm before, but I had not, and I was too embarrassed to say I did not even know how to use my camera, so pretty much from the beginning I floundered technically, but I loved it so much I was undaunted.

 
I noticed how influential a book like Sweet FlyPaper of Life was for the photographer Deborah Willis as a young girl, how can publications move us to create new images?

Books have always been my primary inspiration, and to this day I prefer to experience photographs in book format. For me, Jean Paul Goude’s Jungle Fever featuring Grace Jones was the one—it was the first photo book featuring black women that I’d seen and it was taboo and exciting and crazy and awful and great all at once—I couldn’t march to class waving it, proclaiming it as inspiration—in fact, I probably didn’t realize then just how influential it was—but it was always there on the (non-circulating) library shelf where I worked and I could return to it, hold it, sit with it, flip through quickly or linger over it. I don’t think I ever imagined making those kinds of photographs myself, but in time I did, to some degree. Publications allow us a kind of intimate, long-term relationship with images that is harder to sustain with a print on the wall, especially if it’s a gallery or museum wall and it doesn’t hang there forever.

 I have been writing and editing friends’ work since grad school and started as a journal editor (http://spenational.org/exposure) in 2005, though, really, as a photographer and writer you’re constantly editing photographs, both your own and the ones around you. I love it! The most challenging part of editing a journal is figuring out what works well together in terms of getting the right match of content to flow and play off one another—sometimes it isn’t the work you thought you’d go with at a particular time, but somehow it just works with what you already have—plus, you have to be prepared for content falling out at the last minute for a variety of reasons and have to have backup that fits the bill.

 
How did you get involved in editing photos? What has been the most challenging part of the experience?

 

In editing an artist’s images for publication, the challenge is to balance the most interesting work with the work that will reproduce the best, the images that might already have a recognition factor (so that people will want to stop and look), and the images that the artist herself wants to have put forward. As artists, especially, if we meet with some success for a particular body of work, we tire of it and have a tendency to want to show new or different work with each new request, forgetting that just because we’ve seen our own images a million times doesn’t mean that everyone else has. As the editor, you want every reader to have a way in to the work, so you also want to try to be representative without being just a catalog of greatest hits. For a book, though, it’s very different, because what might represent well in 5- 7 images in a journal may not hold up as 40-60 images in a book. I tend to like single-theme books rather than surveys because they have a compact completeness to them, although there’s also something to be said for having a wealth of information in a single volume. Um, yeah, I love books. Love them.
 
When is your next lecture?

I think I am participating on a panel that Deborah Willis is organizing for the Society for Photographic Education conference in Philadelphia in March—until then, I’ll be practicing on my students! I haven’t really taught much before so this will definitely be a new challenge.

You can see more of her brilliant writing and photography here.

Harlem Bookfair