Letters to the Editor
Matthew Connors & Curran Hatleberg
November 15-17, 2019
About: This November, The Humid hosts Matthew Connors and Curran Hatleberg who are teaming up to co-teach Letters to the Editor, a workshop aimed at photographers eager to expand their vision. Through group critique, editing and sequencing exercises, and by sharing insight into their own approaches, Matt and Curran will help participants refine their process and give shape to a body of work. Photographers of every level are welcome.
Maximum students: 12
Tuition: $500; $400 for current students and recent grads (one year out). Contact us with need based situations.
Schedule:
Friday, Nov 15, 7pm introductory evening presentations & pizza
Saturday, Nov 16, 9:30am: light breakfast, coffee; 10am critiques; 12:30-1:30 lunch; 1:30-4pm critiques
Saturday, Nov 16, 7pm: public artist discussion with CH & MC
Sunday, Nov 17, 9:30am: light breakfast, coffee, critiques/other topics; 12:30-1:30 lunch; 1:30-4pm CH & MC share more work
Matthew Connors
Matthew Connors uses photography to interrogate the frictions between states and their citizens, and understand the relationship between collectives and individuals within them. In recent years this has led him to embed himself in the Occupy movement in New York; haunt the periphery of revolutionary activity in Cairo; chart the legacy of revolutionary monuments in Cuba; glimpse the mechanisms of totalitarianism in North Korea; and track the paroxysms of protest after the 2016 United States presidential election. Rooted in these specific currents of history, his bodies of work create a new visual encyclopedia of recurrences, portraits, symbols, and simulacra. His lyrical yet methodical approach resonates with political documentary and street photography, but continually challenges and transforms these categories.
Matthew’s photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague and Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. His monograph Fire in Cairo (SPBH Editions) was awarded the 2016 ICP Infinity Award for best artist book. He has also been awarded the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Lightwork Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. He received a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and a MFA in Photography from Yale University. He has taught in the Image Text Ithaca MFA Program, the Yale Photography MFA Program and in the Photography Department at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design where he has been a Professor since 2004. www.matthewconnors.com
Curran Hatleberg’s photographs are products of his extensive travels around the United States. Following his intuition, he records his observations of America’s landscapes, towns, and people, fusing the traditions of documentary photography and portraiture. In each new place he spends time getting to know its people—sometimes briefly, sometimes for months at a time. The portraits result from these relationships, and those depicted are actively involved in his representation of them. In the resulting images seemingly quotidian scenes take on surreal qualities as he locates the inexplicable details within the everyday. Although Hatleberg’s photographs are recognizable as America, there is a dreamlike ambiguity about the exact settings or narratives, preventing us from reducing these moments to offhand assumptions and leaving us open to the subjects’ lives. The artist aims to use photography to undermine bias and forge understanding across difference and distance. (from the Whitney Biennale).
Born in Washington, DC in 1982, Curran received his MFA from Yale in 2010. Most recently, his work was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennale and has been shown at MASS MoCA, Higher Pictures and Fraenkel Gallery. He is the recipient of a 2015 Magnum Emergency Fund grant and a 2014 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship grant. His work has been published in Harpers, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vice and The Paris Review. Lost Coast, his first monograph, was released by TBW Books in fall 2016. Somewhere Someone, a collaborative artist book with Cynthia Daignault was released by Hassla Books in fall 2017. Curran has taught photography at numerous institutions, including Yale University and Cooper Union. He lives in Baltimore, MD. www.curranhatleberg.com
