From the category archives:

MATTE

MATTE: Daniel Gordon

by Matthew Leifheit on March 6, 2014
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Photographer Daniel Gordon on painting, surgery, portraiture, and pretty much everything else.

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MATTE: Stephen Frailey, “I just publish what I want to.”

by Matthew Leifheit on December 24, 2013
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Stephen Frailey is a photographer, chair of SVA’s photography BFA program, and editor-in-chief of Dear Dave, an independent magazine that brings together any and all types of photography.

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MATTE: Mossless Magazine’s America

by Matthew Leifheit on December 3, 2013
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MATTE Magazine talks with Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh of Mossless Magazine about their forthcoming third issue, which looks at documentary photography in the U.S. during the last ten years.

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MATTE: Jaimie Warren, “Can your four-year-old dance on stage with a drag queen?”

by Matthew Leifheit on November 11, 2013
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Jaimie Warren is an interdisciplinary artist with a snort-out-loud sense of humor. She started making self-portraits in 1998 as a way to entertain herself in Kansas City, Missouri, where she’s lived for the past fifteen years.

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MATTE: Christopher Schreck, “Denying the Barriers”

by Matthew Leifheit on October 23, 2013
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Christopher Schreck is a writer and sometimes photographer who believes “the way art hits you should be eye to the heart to the brain, in that order.”

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MATTE: Vince Aletti, “Something Soulful”

by Matthew Leifheit on October 16, 2013
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Vince Aletti has been allotted more firsts (and almost firsts) in his life than the average person. He was the first person to write about disco. He was one of the first writers to exclusively focus on photography shows in New York. He is the only person to have penned, “This is Not a Fashion Photo” a regular column in W Magazine, where he choses pictures that look like they were made for a fashion publication but weren’t. It’s all part of his interest in niche culture, photography and fashion. I sat down with Aletti to talk about how he’s spent the last forty years studying, curating and reporting on culture.

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Stephen Koch on Peter Hujar: “If you’re Vincent, you’ve got to have your Theo.”

by Matthew Leifheit on October 15, 2013
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Stephen Koch is the author of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, The Breaking Point and Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol. He is also an educator and owns and manages the archive of the tortured, downtown photographer Peter Hujar. We spoke at length about Hujar’s life—his friendship with Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag, his relationships with Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz, and even his strained relation with Robert Mapplethorpe. The interview touches on the work Koch has done over the past twenty-five years, raising the late underground hero from self-imposed obscurity to widespread recognition.

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Reciprocal Fantasy: Joseph Maida’s New Natives

by Matthew Leifheit on October 9, 2013
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For the series New Natives, Joseph Maida solicited aspiring male models of ambiguous ethnicity, race, and gender through social media, and photographed them against the backdrop of their home state, Hawaii. After I saw his recent show at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, we talked about why he began making these photographs, how masculinity is performed for his camera, and what he considers to be a shift toward acceptance, evidenced by our current president.

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MATTE: Elisabeth Biondi, “The Pictures Have to Be Strong”

by Matthew Leifheit on October 7, 2013
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Even those unfamiliar with Elisabeth Biondi’s name have probably seen her work. Until she left The New Yorker in 2011, she had been their photo editor for fifteen years. Prior to that, she was the photo editor for Vanity Fair. And before that, she was the photo editor for Geo, a German magazine with a focus on geography, history, and world culture that went out of business in the 80’s. For this interview, I talked to Biondi about what it was like to work with photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton, what life at The New Yorker is like and how photography has changed since she got in the game. The short answer to that last question: video is going to have a much bigger presence in the future.

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