August 2021
#157

Our new issue holds focus on photography and doesn’t pull back.

To close the summer and get ready for the sense of anticipation the fall always brings, we have produced a large, rich issue. The feature interview is commensurate with this—in length, in subject, in glamour and beauty and tenderness and regard. We talked with the photographer Nan Goldin and the conversation is stunning. Her response to the period of enforced Covid isolation was a beautiful body of intimate new photographs—tender careful images of writer Thora Siemsen.

In this issue we are also treating readers to three Photo Portfolios. The first is the poignant, exquisitely printed photographs of William Eakin whose response to the initial pandemic lockdown was to walk Winnipeg’s forested, frozen river banks, noting and capturing his reading of “Shelter”. The elegant Introductory essay is by photography historian Zoe Tousignant.

The second Portfolio is by Canadian photographer Sandra Brewster who looked back at the significant and iconic faces looking at her. She calls this new work, “Take a little trip: work depicting those who have taken us with them”. She gives us: Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, Claudia Jones, Josephine Baker, Frantz Fanon, Minnie Riperton, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The strong, point-on Introductory essay is by poet Canisia Lubrin who must now be the most awarded poet on the continent. Name: The Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, The Griffin Poetry Prize and be dazzled by her writing here and in the her poetry suite, “One Bronze Hand, Another Gleaming: A suite for Basquiat.”

The third Photo Portfolio is by the young Winnipeg photographer, Hannah Doucet who slips aside, and queries, the Disney-fied screen that has been applied to the wishes of critically ill children.

Engaging a full range of photography and photo-based work, this issue has an interview with Lori Blondeau, a Cree/Saultaux/Metis photographer and performance artist who is one of the 2021 recipients of the Governor General Awards in Visual and Media Arts, another with photographer and shape-changer Chuck Samuels, an article on

The Otolith Group, and on the precise and quietly astonishing work of James Nizam.

This issue introduces a new column, “PictureLibrary”, by noted critic and writer Barry Schwabsky, which will look, in each issue, at a current range of photo books.

The issue includes the recent work of cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph and the velvety platinum/paladium prints of Diana Michener.

Also find in this issue: Marie Hupfield, Yayoi Kusama, Caroline Monnet, Michael Morris and Nelson Henricks, Kapwani Kiwanga, Rita McKeough, Walker Evans, Elaine Stocki, and others.

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