James Prochnik 2/25/22 James Prochnik 2/25/22

Samantha Box

Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer whose work is an articulation of the ways in which identity – and by extension, community, networks of care and survival, ideas of home and belonging – are formed within spaces of sociopolitical and physical liminality such as Blackness, queerness, and diaspora.

Samantha Box is a photographer whose lush and layered work intrigued me and drew me in as soon as I encountered it. I was reminded of something photographer Alejandro Cartagena said in Sasha Wolf’s great book Photo Work:

“I think in layers. The more layers a project has, the more possibility there is that one of those layers will relate to someone. Something like this: The project needs to be aesthetically, technically, conceptually, and historically relevant; have a personal connection, pull toward some kind of social commentary, be able to show personal and artistic vulnerability; and so on.”

Looking at Samantha’s work, I say to myself, “yes yes yes yes ” because her images are so beautifully answering Cartagena’s wishlist. What also struck me about her work, particularly in her Caribbean Dreams - Constructions series is the way the photographs break open a historical form in a relevant way not simply as critique, but to enlarge it and make the form more expansive. Samantha’s images remind us that the real power of artists is to see the world not simply in categories and niches, but in all its complexity and creativity and beauty and pain and sadness and possibility and all the places and possibilities in between. I asked Samantha to tell me a little more about her work and thoughts on photography:

Tell me about your work
The main idea that undergirds my work is an articulation of the ways in which identity – and by extension, community, networks of care and survival, ideas of home and belonging – are formed within spaces of sociopolitical and physical liminality such as Blackness, queerness and diaspora.

I love full images where all parts of the frame are actively being used, an image that carries a satisfying sense of lushness and tension.

How has your work helped to shape the photos you make?
I’m really fortunate in that most of my work that I’ve engaged in to support my photography has informed my work. For example, for much of “The Shelter, The Street”, I was working at Contact Press Images. I spent a lot of time working with, and learning from, amazing photographs, and this translated directly into my work at Sylvia’s Place.

After, I began teaching photography to at-risk queer and TGNB youth of color at the same time that I began to make the images that comprise “The Last Battle.” Some of the young people that I photographed at Kiki ballroom functions were also my students. It was my students’ work – and community documentation made by the wider Kiki scene - that prompted me to confront the limitations of documentary practice: among them, who has the authority to create a narrative of a community? In other words, I realized that the Kiki Scene was expertly doing the work of documentation already, and so, I decided to take a step back, which partly informed my decision to go to graduate school.

I still support myself through teaching. Researching, editing, and presenting work for in-class lectures – with an emphasis on destabilizing the historical and contemporary white/European/American/male canon - means that I look at work made by a wide range of people, working in a wide range of styles/practices. Regarding my practice, it means encountering work that inspires, summons indifference, or sometimes repulses. This means that I’m constantly thinking of where my work stands, how it’s in conversation with other photographer’s work, thoughts, and practices. All of this shapes my work.

Is there a photo book that’s held a lot of significance for you as a photographer?
Milton Rogovin’s “Triptychs: Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited” is a book – and series - that had a profound impact on me when I first saw it; the same is true of the next (unpublished) iteration of this work, which is a series of quadtychs. This work presented a way of working with a community over time - of making quiet, nuanced, thoughtful and collaborative pictures - that I was hungry for when I encountered it in 2005, and which, at that time, was vanishingly rare. Whenever I think about the arcs of the lives in these multi-part images – the births, deaths, connections, estrangements, generations - I am deeply moved.

Is there anything you’ve had to ‘unlearn’ about photography to make the artworks you now make?
Apart from composition, exposure and lighting, I’m actively trying to unlearn everything.

What advice would you offer to others who see your work and want to get into photography?
The image comes first, not the camera, analog/digital, social media. Work at images that are singularly, visually your own. Share this work with people whose work you respect, and who you can trust with your mistakes and questions. Grow together and support each other!

Has the pandemic influenced your work?
From the early days of our current moment, I realized that the only thing that I could count on was my work. I have learned to trust myself, to follow my ideas, and to give myself a wide berth for experimentation and iteration.

Looking ahead, what are some goals or hopes for your own work in the years to come?
In the next year, I am determined to solidify my studio practice, and to resolve this sense of disconnection between the different bodies of work that make up Caribbean Dreams. I’d also like to start thinking of the best way to archive all of my INVISIBLE work.

Lastly, we’d love to know about what’s happening with your art practice right now? Where, besides the web, might people encounter your work?
My work is currently in a number of places: Subject-Object at St. Lawrence University (until 2/26), Eco-Urgency: Now or Never Part ll at Lehman College Art Gallery (until 4/23), and Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility at Express Newark (until 7/6). A portrait of artist Zachary Fabri – part of Beyond the Flat, a collaboration conceived of by artist and activist Ted Kerr – will be shared at Zachary’s performance at Weeksville on 3/19. And, I will be having a solo show at Light Work in the Fall!

Follow Samantha Box to see more and stay up to date!

Photo at top of post: Construction #6, 2019 © Samantha Box

↓ ↓ ↓ All Photos in this post © Samantha Box (@samantha.box) ↓ ↓ ↓

*Construction #1(3)*, 2018 © Samantha Box

*Realness, The Miami to New York Ball*, November 2013 © Samantha Box

*Face, The This is It Ball*, April 2014 © Samantha Box

*Team Performance, The Marciano Ball*, October 2015 © Samantha Box

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James Prochnik 2/4/22 James Prochnik 2/4/22

Beregovich

Beregovich is a Brooklyn-based street photographer and oral historian.

Street photography continues to be a very popular genre of picture making, particularly for those who live in a city like New York where opportunities for making this kind of work are plentiful. The consequence of this popularity is an endless stream of street photos posted to social media platforms. In such a crowded space cliches are easy to spot, and a lot of the work starts to blend together. But in that often unvaried stream of images, some work still delivers. Beregovich is making that kind of work.

Maybe a person in one of Beregovich's photos is doing something mundane like waiting at a bus stop. Maybe, as they wait, a breeze blows their hair, and a memory runs through their mind of the way it felt when their mother would run her fingers through their hair.

That's the kind of moment I feel like Beregovich's best photos take us. We weren't there at the beginning, we won't be there at the end, we can't know what's really going on, but for a brief moment, we are in the middle of some stranger's life in all its strangeness and beauty and mystery.

I asked Beregovich to tell me a little about their life in photography:

“My last name is Beregovich and I don't know what my first name is yet. I think that's also representative of my photography, that I don't really know what to go by and I've noticed that a lot of my photos recently focus on an unknown individual. I'm a super privileged gay and non-binary person born in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn my whole life and that's where I prefer to photograph nowadays.
“When I was 15, I got the iPhone 6 just in time for a vacation with my dad to Germany and Switzerland and took a ton of photos when we were there. I wasn't ever really interested in photography but the photos I took there of the lakes and mountains in the fog and small cities made me super excited to take more and that kind of excitement was new for me and I dug it big time. Soon after, I asked my parents if we had any cameras that I could use and they handed me a Nikon D60 that we've had for years. It came with 18-55mm and 55-200mm kit lenses and that thing went almost everywhere with me. That excitement kept growing and turned into a need. I got my first "serious" camera, the Nikon D750, in late 2017 and that excitement and need only got stronger.
“When I got the D750, I turned from cityscapes and portraits of my friends to street photography pretty quickly. There's really nothing like street photography. The rush is insane and it becomes close to an addiction. But I think what makes me so attracted to it is getting to see people you would never notice otherwise and places you've walked around a thousand times become completely new and I think that's pretty neat. I especially love photos that isolate one or two people. You get to learn a lot about social behavior and learn that, as predictable as some people and scenes can be, you can't really be prepared for any one scenario or encounter and have to be open to most everything. When you start to think that way, you never get bored again. And once you start thinking that everyone is just a person and no one is above or below you, more of the world opens up to you.
“I don't think there should be any standard rules for photography. That gets boring as fuck. I think it's a good idea to learn some of the rules of composition and lighting at the beginning, but once you have that foundation, you should throw it away and do whatever you want. I focused a lot on the technical side of photography at first- all the gear and techniques- and still love learning about it, but I've learned that if I stuck to those rules written by old, straight white guys all the time, I would never get to a place where I would be happy with what I would be producing. Everyone's eyes and personal experiences are different and should influence their art first.
“Outside of photography, I'm a senior at Brooklyn College studying to be an oral historian. I really do love people and my place, I think, is to be an observer. That's what street photographers and oral historians do and that's what I'm pretty comfortable with. I think oral history and photography make a great pair for a story. Deeply listening and watching are two of the most important things I think someone can learn to do and conducting oral histories has made me a more patient photographer. I'm still semi-impatient and wanna go go go all the time but much more ready to stop and look and listen.
“Right now, I'm working on my thesis project which is an oral history and photography project called Queer People in Isolation. The project focuses on intergenerational isolation experiences of queer people aged 18+. I conduct oral histories and use photo elicitation as a tool to generate memories while integrating photography as a core part of the project. After the interviews, I take film and digital portraits of the interviewees to form a cohesive collection of people as a whole. For now, because of Covid, I'm only interviewing/photographing queer people in NYC, but if anyone would like to participate or knows someone who would and would be okay with their interviews, full names, and images being put into the public domain, please DM me @55thand3rd or email beregovich.nyc@gmail.com!”

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