THE STREETS - 2018 Collection

THE STREETS

A Street Photography Magazine

2018 COLLECTION

And when I say artist, I don't mean artist the way you might think of artist.

When I say artist, I mean somebody who does human work, unpredictable work –makes a connection with someone else and changes them for the better."

– Seth Godin, Author

"There is a new class of person – an artist.

Photograph by Meredith M Howard

THE STREETS

Front cover photo Back cover photo

Editor and Creative Director Creative and Digital Assistant Marketing Consultant Photography Assistant Copy Editors

Special thanks to Contributors and collaborators Website Email Instagram

Publisher ISSN

Tony Maake Patty Jansen

Meredith M Howard Eva Howard Christi Rhyne Julieann Tran Shelley Wunder-Smith and Alicia Kramer Greg Howard and Elise Howard Picolo Diop Artina Emma Zeck H Gay Allen Matthew Stromer Matthew W Warren Ako Julieann Tran Mercedes Bleth Alex Torrey Jyotik Bhachech Kevin Fuentes Cordaro Gross Aimee Labrecque Yan Zheng Eduardo Asenjo Matus Ricardo Delgado López Umcolisi Terrell Chris Veal Mark Miller www.thestreetsmag.com info@thestreetsmag.com @thestreetsmagazine

James Meadows Henry J Parsons Drew Brucker Courtney Jones Howard Levenson Krista Gill olive47 Mary Farmer Lela Brunet Janice Rago Patty Jansen Jennifer McKinnon Richman Dániel Horváth Terence Lester Matt Yung Arlene Brathwaite Elizabeth Bloodworth

Tony Maake Stefan Els Martijn Roos

Meredith M Howard LLC 2476-0927

All work is copyrighted to the photographer, artist, or author. No part of this magazine may be used without permission of THE STREETS.

We didn't have to print this book. We could have just let it exist amorphously in the digital world. Printing is expensive, time-consuming, and – these days – unexpected.

But we want you to have the experience of sitting down and holding this book in your hands, flipping the pages, and enjoying the art in a real, physical way. We want this book to be an extra connection with the community, an encouragement to the artists, and an inspiration to "normal" people who want to do extraordinarily creative things.

This 2018 Collection is full of people "doing the work they didn't have to do" because of the love of the art, the people, and the connections. Seth Godin calls it "generous work" – people sacrificing short-term comforts, time, and money to make long-term change and contributions.

Generous work appears in many different forms. Generous work is a street photographer noticing the value in a stranger and telling that person's story in a way that builds a bridge of empathy. Generous work is a group of artists devoting an entire weekend in the hot sun to create a free outdoor gallery of murals, so that when you drive by, you will smile and think about life in a different way. Generous work is a group of people moving out of the suburbs to Historic South Atlanta in order to transform the neighborhood from the inside out. Generous work is making it out of poverty and then going back to pull others out, too.

Generous work is fueled by love. And when love is involved, the work becomes a gift – both to the recipient and the giver. That doesn't mean the work was free, because sometimes there was payment and usually there was sacrifice. But generous work breathes life into the world. So, we hope that this book full of gifts by these generous contributors encourages you and delights you and inspires you to do your own generous work.

"So much of the future is going to be done by people doing the work they didn't have to do."

– Scott Belsky, Entrepreneur and Author

"A labor of love has a way of paying off. Just not in the way you would expect."

– Scott Belsky

– Meredith

– GettingtoYes by Roger Fisher and William Ury

"People tend to see what they want to see."

ISSUE 8

Photographs by Meredith M Howard

Pictured here: Phil Oh @mrstreetpeeper

Photograph by Tony Maake @tonyshouz. See interview on page 340.

Picolo Diop

Designer and Tailor

Picolo Diop appeared on the cover of THE STREETS – 2017 Collection. At the time of its printing, we didn't know who he was. I have since tracked him down, interviewed him via email, and then had the opportunity to meet him in person at Pitti Uomo in Florence. He is much more than a well-dressed dandy. He is a business owner, a designer, and a tailor. I asked him here about his life and work.

– Meredith M Howard

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I was born in Dakar, Senegal. I moved from Senegal to Europe when I was 14 years old. I continued my studies in Spain and Italy. After that, I started work. Now, I live in Florence, Italy.

What is the name of your business?

My business is called P&T [Picolo & Tiziano]. I am Picolo, and Tiziano is the artist Fiorentino. I used that name because I like to mix art and fashion. I started P&T with my brother Nas six years ago. I started P&T Marketing and Art with Cheikhou Keita, the director of art and my personal photographer. I do this business with passion and love. I do everything with heart.

Photograph by Artina @artina_shin

Photograph by Daniel Horvath @danielhorvathofficial

Picolo Diop

How did you learn to make suits by hand? Are there many other tailors still making suits by hand, and do you think this craft will continue for long?

I learned how to make suits by hand from one of the big tailors in Italy. The suits are made-to-measure and also hand-sewn. The craft is going to continue for a long time.

P&T sells shirts that combine bright African patterns with classic style. Who designs these shirts and where does their inspiration come from?

I am the creator of P&T, and I am the designer, too. The inspiration comes from Western African culture and Italian taste. They are created for men’s elegance. All handmade.

What is your favorite part of your business?

My favorite part of my business is when I put together the combination of the colours and when I walk down the street and see people wearing it.

What do you dream of doing in the future?

I dream of making P&T very big and having shops in all of the big cities around the world.

Photograph by Daniel Horvath

@danielhorvathofficial

Photograph by Emma Zeck @emmaczeck

One of my greatest pleasures is to grab a camera and go “run the streets,” as we used to say in my teens. Idle time chasing designs and making art with the camera, wherever I find it, is as natural to me as breathing. And sometimes I will go to insane lengths to pursue a scene or image that captivates me. I have been chased off of property; lost my car keys down a drain, while hanging from a tree; and ruined shoes and clothing climbing around many construction sites. And when I find an image or design that calls to me, I will take hundreds of shots, until I have exhausted all the pleasure I can. But I am glad to pay the price, because I consider it my creative therapy and the antidote for hassle in my life. These images are the result of pursuing my passion of getting lost in the world of the lens.

H Gay Allen

Photographer and Artist

How did you originally get into photography?

You’ve heard it from others before: "My mother gave me a Brownie when I was five." But the difference is that she also engaged with we in the search for the most artistic way to tell the story. She was a wannabe artist, and we had many fun excursions “chasing” good photos. Those first experiences carried through all of my professional and creative life because it taught me there may be technical guidelines one follows to get good photos, but artistically you have the opportunity to create by any means you want. I speak to the emotions.

You said that you will go to "insane lengths" to pursue an image. Can you tell us your favorite story about one of those situations?

When I was photo editor for Louisville Magazine one of my responsibilities was to capture the flavor and progress of Louisville. I also specialized in the arts. One day I went out to shoot the "topping out" of construction of Citizens Plaza, the (then) tallest building in Kentucky. As you probably know, photographers hate to go to photo ops because the client always wants the photo of the dignitaries and the usual ribbon cutting, speeches, etc. I was determined to do something different.

It was raining that day and unbeknownst to my editor, I talked my way inside the building, took an elevator to the top floor and convinced a construction foreman to let me go up to the driver’s cabin on the crane. In order to get high enough to see the tree being moved to the corner of that building, I had to climb hand-over-hand up the main trunk of the crane with my gear in the rain and wind. Believe me, it gave a new meaning to the phrase "blowin’ in the wind." I really wasn’t scared until I got back down to the ground and realized how high it was.

You have done a lot in your life – majored in art, studied theology, written poetry, created murals, paintings, and pottery, worked as a professional photographer and as a staff photographer for various organizations, taught photography classes, and more. Do you usually focus on one interest at a time and then move on, or do you work on different types of projects at once? How do you feel about focus vs. diversification in one’s career?

In high school I was voted "The Most Versatile." So, I am fortunate to be able do many things at once, and I am energized by the pursuit of various forms of art. I find that my photography informs my collage work, and my fused-glass experiences "ignite" my curiosity about encaustic work, etc. I guess I was meant to be diverse in my interests. I have taken over 20,000 photographs in the last 10 years, with over 4,000 completed works. I have six pieces of photo encaustic and fused glass at APG, each featuring photographs. You could say I focus on diversification.

"I focus on diversification."

Allen

Your images in this series include detail shots that turn the image into an abstraction. And some look cross-processed or infrared. Did you take these photos with abstraction in mind, or did you see it during the editing process?

When I gave a talk to the Art Partners of the High Museum, I explained it this way: "Finding the artistic view of a subject in the camera is, for me, like having an orgasm . . . I’m attracted, intrigued, captivated, and swept up in the imaginings of what will happen when I get to do the post-processing. I get further exhilaration from using current tools to produce images that appeal to me and others who live in the current world. I see possibilities from the beginning, but nothing compares to experiencing the discoveries that happen as I explore them in post."

You preside over the Design Salon at the Atlanta Photography Group. What have you learned from other photographers there?

That there is, in each of us, undiscovered talents and skills that just need to be coaxed out and given freedom. It’s been very rewarding to see that happening in the group and to know that I played a small part in its birth. The energy that I get from this interaction has inspired me to grow as well. Plus, we have a lot of fun.

What do you dream of doing in the future?

Your question is quite on point for me. I’ve been toying with the idea of a retrospective show featuring my photography, fused glass/photography, photo encaustic, photo collage, and other work, but the thought of managing that is daunting. I’ve got the work. I’m just not sure if I have the energy to make it happen.

Find H Gay Allen on her website at www.hgayallen.com

Matthew Stromer

Photographer and Videographer

How did you get into photography and making short films?

My earliest memory of being drawn to photography was playing around with my mother’s Polaroid camera as a child. I remember having this immense joy of being able to capture anything that was going on in front of me and in less than a minute, there it was – a copy for you to hold in your hands and show others.

My mother soon hid the camera from me as I was burning a hole through her pocketbook with flashbulb and film replacements. When I was 17, I bought my first camera, a Ricoh L-20 pointand-shoot for 35mm film. I would take it with me everywhere and spend almost my entire work paycheck just buying and developing film. I would continue to use that camera for the next 15 years until 2004, when I purchased my first digital camera.

I started making videos when I was in high school. We had a television station in our school that allowed us access to equipment we could check out. I would always get the VHS camcorder and make these videos that were very often silly documentaries with me as the narrator and cameraman. There was never a script with any video I would make. I would just give my friends, family, neighbors and anybody else who would help me a starting and ending point of an idea and have them follow my lead as I recorded them. I would edit the footage with two VCRs at home. Since 2009, everything I shoot (video & photos) is with an iPhone.

Matthew Stromer

Your films are pretty quirky. What is your motivation and inspiration for them? And how do people respond to them?

"Quirky" is definitely a reasonable word for some of my video work. I began making videos for YouTube in 2009. Then, my inspiration was making parodies of the types of things I was watching on YouTube around that time like wedding proposals, unboxing videos, fake movie trailers, tech shows, lip-sync videos, all of which are now ubiquitous on YouTube, but at the time were a very small percentage.

Eventually, as the iPhone became a better video camera and the App Store had thousands of apps for creatives to enhance their workflow, I found myself tapping into areas of creation with visuals never before possible for me. I started working more in the abstract and experimenting with filters, effects, distortion, etc. while at the same time trying to create something that was honest and coming from a place of truth. I made several videos where the dominant theme was anxiety and depression but also tried to inject my sense of humor into it to make it a little more palatable.

I’ve had a couple of videos that have won some awards, and I’ve had a video reach a million views in a month. I consider that pretty damn good. People’s reaction to my video work has always been either no comment at all or "that’s brilliant." I know my work is not really commercial, but I also know that there are people like me who enjoy this kind of work. The hardest part has been trying to find them. In the beginning I was fixated on getting hits and subscribers to justify my existence as a creative. Now, I am at a place where that doesn’t matter. Just trust in what you do, be honest, have fun, and my audience will find me.

Do you usually go out looking for something to photograph, or do you just take a picture when something catches your eye? Do you know how you are going to edit it when you take the shot?

There are days when I will specifically go out looking for something to shoot. But I believe most of the time it’s what catches my eye at any given time during the day, and since my iPhone is always with me, it’s easy to do this. A number of times I’m taking still-life photos of common things like buildings, flowers, trees, lighting fixtures, pictures of my friends or strangers. Occasionally, I will take some of those images and import/export them through several of the apps I have, applying many different effects until it looks completely different from the original image. After it rains, I like to experiment with the many ways I can get shots from reflections in the puddles created. I like to take pictures of skyscraper buildings in Chicago and mirror them along with several other tweaks until it looks like something so futuristic or not a building at all. There really is no end to what you can create from any photograph. There’s no such thing as an unusable photo, as you can always turn it into something visually engaging and abstract.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for the ability to create at the speed of thought.”

The friend who connected us said that your son has struggled with PANDAS for years. Can you tell us a little about that experience?

My 13-year-old son has an autoimmune disorder called PANDAS, which causes debilitating psychiatric symptoms. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I am not sure how we survived the past five years. At times, his symptoms were so severe he could not move from one room of the house to another. Every waking moment for him was controlled by intrusive thoughts and compulsions. One of his compulsions was to change his clothes and open the front door. One night last winter, this went on from 7:30 pm until 7:30 am. My wife walked with him around the block and back into the house for 12 hours, as he repeated this compulsion. To watch your child suffer like that is indescribable. We were physically and emotionally drained for years. We also felt that the healthcare system had failed him. We were sent away from the ER on many occasions, being told that he did not meet the criteria for hospitalization.

"Through my work

And did your son receive treatment that helped him?

Luke was on many antibiotics and has had a number of both high dose and low dose IVIGs. The low dose is the one that seemed to work the best and has brought us to where we are today. Much, much better. Miracles happen.

I was able to make a connection with my son."

Matthew Stromer

How has all of this (your son’s illness and journey) affected you as a parent and as an artist?

As a parent, it has affected me greatly. I was not prepared for this fight, and it scared the hell out of me. In my life, up until the point my son was exhibiting the worst of his illness, I had never truly experienced such pain, fear and hopelessness. If it hadn’t been for my wife who discovered this treatment and never gave up on him, I may never have found the strength to keep going, and that makes me feel ashamed. As an artist, it both stalled my work and also helped make it more real when I dealt with themes of sadness and depression. But through my work, I was able to make a connection with my son, as he is a big fan and contributor to my NOT IN FOCUS web series. And through some of the worst times he was going through, he always seemed to perk up and get excited when he knew I was putting a new episode together, which he still helps me with to this day.

I’m sure there were times when other people – friends, family, strangers – didn’t know how to respond to your son or know how to support you. How would you have wanted people to respond to you and support you?

The symptoms of this illness are so bizarre, they are hard to comprehend unless you live through them. What most people don’t understand is how few doctors in this country treat this illness. When people would see the severity of our son’s symptoms, it sometimes felt that they were wondering why we weren’t doing anything. The thing is, we were doing everything we could. That being said, we received much support.

"Miracles happen."

What are your dreams for the future?

For my son to continue to get better and better, which he has by leaps and bounds compared to where we were just a year ago. A night and day difference. Everything else is secondary to that.

Find Matthew’s photos and videos at www.hipbattersea.com and follow him at Instagram @matthewstromer

Matthew W Warren

Matthew W Warren

Photographer

Model: Ako

Matthew: This was one of probably 30 different places that I lived within Clayton County. I lived here with my grandparents, and we were super young. We’re going to go to the spot where we used to play.

Ako: So, what age did you live here?

Matthew: This was from like four to six. This is one of the first places I actually remember living. Yeah, welcome to my home!

Feature photos (color) by Matthew W Warren (including some with a disposable camera). Interview and behind the scenes photos (black and white) by Meredith M Howard and Julieann Tran.

Matthew W Warren put together a photoshoot with Ako and took us back to his childhood home to show us how he uses his roots to make his art.

Matthew (continued): I think Ako can speak for us, too, when we say, "Welcome to where the arts are from." Seriously, they pushed all of us to one spot and were like, "We don’t want nothing to do with you." And out of that, we were like – "OK, we’re just going to tell the story about it then."

I bring you here because I want to show you a piece of my life, but the majority of the spots where I’ll shoot Ako in or Ziggy or other models are places I’ve lived . . . We did another shoot right down the street from my dad’s house because what greater thing than to use where you’re from?

Man, we understand each other when we work together. I told Ako on the way over here, "You know we’re going make it work whenever we get together. It’s not even stressful. It’s fluid. It’s like drinking water."

Meredith: Do you tell Ako what to wear or does he come up with his own outfits?

Matthew: Ako’s style is one of the main reasons I hit him up. I told him . . . what did I say?

Ako: You referenced an idea, and then I just kind of put it together.

Matthew: Yeah, I trust him . . . the color scheme down to a turtleneck. See, I was thinking like a collared shirt or something like that, but I like this. The only thing is I said, "Man, it’d be dope if you would have had some athletic socks and sandals." Or some thermal socks, but he didn’t have any athletic flip flops. But in the future we’re going to do that. We’ll probably focus in just on the flip flops.

Before I began shooting models, I just grabbed architecture around Clayton County . . . I love harsh light – done right, obviously . . . The harsh light reveals colors. Everything’s just totally different when shot in harsh light. Fortunately, with what we do, we’re able to make that work.

to where the arts are from."

"Welcome

Matthew W Warren

[Matthew used a disposable camera for half of the shoot, so we talked about experimenting.]

Matthew: People are so scared to get out of their set editing style. I don’t know where that came about. I don’t know why. Instagram kind of made you do that. You want to look at the squares. But it limits you to color palette. It limits you to experiment with other styles.

Ako: So, you’re saying an artist might have the same style of editing throughout every picture, just to keep it cohesive?

Matthew: Like if you used the same beat on every track. That’s the equivalent of it.

Meredith: I feel like it sometimes makes people more successful if they stay in the same track. But then it gets a little boring for the artist.

Ako: It should be seasonal. Like if you have a project coming out and you need everything to look cohesive for a project, you can stay within one of set of editing. But then if you have another project, you need to switch it up because a new project means a new look.

Matthew W Warren

Matthew: I play drums, too. I like DW kits. I like the wood they use. But I’m not opposed to getting an electric Roland on the next song . . . For the people from 2015 until now, when they go and shoot it has to be a white background, some little green bush in the middle, and maybe a girl with a similar pose. Man, just try to shoot with some 1970s film or something like that. That’s what we do as creatives – we have to constantly challenge our imagination.

Meredith: How did you get into photography originally?

Matthew: When I was in 10th grade, which was 2004, I went up to Pittsburgh with my family. That’s where my mom’s side lives. And at the time photography wasn’t a huge thing. But I thought, "I just want to show my friends what they don’t get to see because I get to go up there and just bring it back to them." So I took a disposable camera.

That was the first time I picked up a camera. It was without the intent of saying, "I’m an actual photographer." I just wanted to show them memories. I just wanted to show them my greatgrandmother. My great-grandmother’s from Mexico, and her style of living – you would walk up in there, and you would smell onions and tomatoes. I wanted to get some of this and show it to some people. Because it looked different than Clayton County. Just the style of houses. It looked more urban than what urban is considered down here.

But actually pursued – like "I want to go do this for a living" – was five years ago. And I had no idea how to pursue it or how to go about it . . . My first gig was a Vacation Bible School at this church called Victoria Christo where my wife went to church, and they invited me because they were like, "Man, you take really good pictures." I thought, "I’m going to give these people documentary-style Vacation Bible School." And I still have those photos. I like looking back on those because it was carefree. Around 2012-2013 while photographing subjects at events I thought, "I want to do this."

“That’s what we do as creatives –we have to constantly challenge our imagination.”

Meredith: Did you have a job back then and transition into photography?

Matthew: I didn’t graduate high school, so I went straight into landscaping, construction, grocery stores. Went back and tried to graduate. Failed again. I remember telling Clayton County school, "Y’all are wasting your time. I’m going to be an artist when I get older." It’s not that I wanted to be famous. I don’t want to be an icon . . . At the time, my mindset was playing drums and keys. I’m a musician. I’ve been playing drums since I was like six . . . I was in a band for two years full-time, so I would play at some of the clubs in Atlanta. We’d get paid off those gigs. We had a distribution deal. I produced and wrote a lot of the material . . . At that time, I was just like, "This is what I’m going to do. I’m either going to be a musician or write music for people." So, I was in a band, but off and on, construction. Sometimes without a job. I worked at a lot of places. Warehouses. When you’re taught that there’s nothing after education. Your mind starts going – "This is it."

Meredith: Your first photography job was for a church. After that, how did you keep it going?

Matthew: I don’t even remember what was after that. Every time I would say, "I’m going to pursue this as a career," people would ask, "You sure you don’t want something on the side?" And after time goes by, you just start getting bombarded with discouragement. You’re like, "Whatever, man. You just a failure in life." And the only person who said, "You should pursue this," was my wife. We got married in 2014, and she said, "I want you to pursue your business full-time." So we took those steps. It was really rough. I was shooting local rappers’ album covers. I worked at John Casablancas modeling agency shooting models’ head shots. I used to shoot a lot of 5ks and marathons. That was exhausting because you had to run with them. I’d get a calendar, and out of the 30 different 5ks that you have this month, I’m going to get four of them. I’m going to have a job every single weekend.

My family always tells me, "You didn’t get a diploma, but you did get a social education." Those high school hallways. The bullying from just one class to another. I was like, "Am I going to get in a fight?" I got to be ready to get roasted on. So, it built all that up to where you go out in the real world and you’re like , "Man, I’ve been through some hell." Social education – I passed with flying colors. That led me into not being scared of rejection from a company. The worst they can do is say "no."

Meredith: Did you consciously develop a retro style? Like Ako’s clothing with the parking lot and the way you put it together and edit it?

Matthew: I believe that anything we do – the arts, whether we’re accountants, or work at a grocery store – our work ethic is a reflection of our upbringing, our experience, things that were said. That’s why some people are lazy, some people aren’t. But it’s all a result of our upbringing.

I love hip hop. Clayton County has an urban vibe. Going back to my actual neighborhood – it should be a reflection of that. It wouldn’t make sense if my photos were bright and airy. I’m not degrading that style at all, but I don’t see things like that . . . There are certain things for certain people. Mine is a result down to the colors. I like warmer photos.

“There’s just some 70s funk going on. And you can hear it without it being played.”

Matthew (continued): Even with the south side of Atlanta – I’m talking about South Fulton, College Park, East Point, Forest Park – we have this retro style. When I’m driving down Tara Boulevard or going through Main Street of East Point or going down Cleveland Avenue, I feel like an electric guitar is just playing some blues at the moment. There’s just some 70s funk going on. And you can hear it without it being played.

One of the things that I put on my website that I just came to find out is the most beautiful part about us is that we have no say-so in where we were born, what language we will speak, what family we’ll be a part of. And the beauty of that design is that you can not change that. You can try to run from it. You can over-embrace it. But I think the balance of it is remembering it, applying it, but not overdoing it. My style has developed because of my surroundings, my upbringing, down to my father, to my mother, to my friend Damen that lived right next door to me.

Julieann: When Meredith showed me your photos and mentioned that you were from the south side, I thought, "I’m from there!" Your photos definitely portray what the south side has, and it’s amazing to see those photos in such an artful way. I was pretty impressed.

Matthew: Is it a proper translation?

Meredith: She said to me, "How does he make this area look so good?"

Julieann: Growing up here, it’s like you mentioned – gangs, crime. So, I’m impressed by your work.

“I’m not really drawn to the in-between of this life . . . I love extremes.”

Matthew: Even like that – "How do you make this area look so good" – it’s been taught to us that it is so bad. Part of me is like – not that I want people to be poor – but I love the fact that we have that. Like I said, if I had been in Buckhead and went to school up there, it’s not that I would have been basic, it’s just I would have had a different life. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the story like this . . . I’m not really drawn to the in-between of this life . . . I love extremes.

Meredith: I like extremes too. I live in the suburbs, and when people say, "Shoot where you’re from," I keep trying to do that. But then I think, "This is boring."

Matthew: That’s what I thought at first. That’s what I thought about my [photographs of my grandparent’s house]. It was like a typical family vacation, but people were like, "No, I love that." Because even though I thought it was this corny story, people were like, “I didn’t get to live that.” So I was like, "I’m just going to dig into the depths of my childhood –whether or not it will be what I think people are going to like." Maybe that’s hope for somebody. Jon Foreman taught me that – lead singer of Switchfoot. He’s probably one of my favorite poets of all time.

“The most beautiful part about us is that we have no say-so in where we were born, what language we will speak, what family we’ll be a part of. The beauty of that design is that you can not change that. You can try to run from it. You can over-embrace it.

But I think the balance of it is remembering it, applying it, but not overdoing it.”

Julieann: In some of your photos, you incorporate fashion with the location that you’re in. Why do you include fashion?

Matthew: Honestly, I’m not a very experimental person when it comes to fashion because I’m like, "That won’t look right on me." I love fashion. I believe it’s a whole other outlet of the arts. But the real reason is, in high school, my dad shopped at thrift stores when it was just the way to afford clothes for your kids. I’m not saying we were poor growing up, but he was a single dad. He took us there, we got clothes, and we went to school. In Clayton County schools, if you do that, you get made fun of like crazy. That’s the part of social education that’s so vital. Many parents nowadays would be like, "That’s torture for a kid. I would never put my kid through that." I look back on it – it sucked, but I embrace it. Down to where I would get so insecure about what I was wearing that just looking at someone else’s wardrobe that week would just satisfy my eye. To kind of put it on me at the time. Girbauds – I want those. I want to be able to have the velcro strap at the bottom and walk around with the Chuck Taylors on. But I can’t. Free-stylin’ was a big thing in Clayton County schools. You’d be in the lunch room and somebody would come with a beat and you’d start free-stylin’. It was who could make fun of who the best. And there was this guy one day, I saw him look down at my shoes and he said [rapping], "You gonna lose. Matt Warren’s wearing church shoes to school." And the whole crowd busted out laughing. You can’t show your emotions. You have to prove how hard you are. At the time, I was like, "F*** this. I hate this. I hate coming to school."

I stood by the lost-and-found, and at the time, Adidas Superstars were back in style and K-Swiss with the five stripes. And somebody would leave them in gym, and I snatched those things up. At our school, you marked them at the bottom, so somebody knew if you stole them. So, I took a pair of all black Adidas Superstars, and I’m like, "I’m fly. I got this. I’m not going to get made fun of anymore."

That was the desperation. That was the urge to have some kind of minimal fashion just to dress it up enough so you don’t get made fun of. The urgency of that is what started it. Fashion’s everything in urban schools. If you don’t have on a certain article of clothing, you are going to get made fun of. And some people go, "You’re weak for giving into peer pressure." I’m like, "It shaped the way I see myself dress." I would imagine outfits. When you can’t have something, what you produce from that is everything.

Julieann: I’m impressed that you remember what that guy rapped in the lunch room.

Matthew: Those things are the hardest. But in this case, inspired. Thank you, Bernard White! Boy, he got me that day.

Meredith: So, what do you dream of doing in the future?

Matthew: There’s a certain people group that actually have time to think about future plans . . . I’m not trying to create a story of struggle, but we were not taught, "OK, you need to plan for the future. What’s your five year plan?" That vocabulary didn’t exist . . . I want to be able to plan for the future, but fortunately – not unfortunately – it’s always been like, "What do we have going on tomorrow?"

My hopes are – as far as photography goes – I want to put on a national exhibit. To put on the south side of Atlanta as if it were a New York, as if it were a Los Angeles. My boy Tamarcus Brown (@hazelandco), we just got off the phone with each other last night, and he was like, "Homie, nobody’s doing what you’re doing, man." And in my humblest approach to that, I’m like, "Thank you. I hope nobody lived the exact same story as me." We were talking about that and I said, "Why can’t it be as known? Why can’t people think of the south side of Atlanta like that – because when you think of the hip hop industry since 2003, Atlanta has just exploded, and none of those rappers, none of those artists are from the north side of Atlanta."

“They just shoved us all in a corner, but we got the best stories.”

Matthew W Warren

Matthew (continued): There are some from the west side. There are some from the east side. But the majority and the most iconic – Outkast – are from the south side. Young Thug is from Jonesboro south. They fail to tell you that. The only mention of this side of town is filth. Ever since the mid-90s when the projects were torn down, they just shoved everybody – poverty, filth, gangs and crime – to this part. I made a joke back there that they just shoved us all in a corner, but we got the best stories. I love that. I don’t want to be no cookie-cutter. I’m glad I’m not a product of "white flight" in the mid-90s. I’m glad my dad stayed, so that I could see a certain lifestyle and translate that for you. I want to share that.

Meredith: Well, I think you’re doing an awesome job at it. I think that is one of the best ways to do it – through the arts. Showing that everybody’s beautiful in an artful way.

Matthew: That’s the hopes. You’re the first person that I told on a recording – a national exhibit. I want to do a photography tour. I don’t know what steps need to be taken, but that would be dope.

Follow Matthew W Warren on Instagram @matthewwwarren and on www.matthewwwarren.com

Follow Ako @akoslice

Mercedes Bleth

Photographer

Meredith: How did you originally get into photography?

Mercedes: My older sister was starting to get into photography, and I always just copied everything that she did. I got a camera when I was in high school and started taking close-up pictures of plants and all that lame stuff you do when you first get a camera. I really wanted to study photography in school – go to the art school – and my parents didn’t want me to, which is fine. But I found a loophole in photojournalism. I’m really glad I did, because it fits me so much better than I think art school photography would have. I have a lot of respect for more artistic photographers, but I really love the storytelling aspect of photojournalism. I went to Grady College of Journalism [University of Georgia], and then got into the photojournalism program. That’s when I really fell in love with it and really learned how to use my camera and how to tell stories with it.

Meredith: What did you think you were going to do after school?

Mercedes: I really thought that I was going to be a photojournalist. You kind of get intoxicated with it. I think journalism can sometimes be an act of martyrdom. I thought, "I’m going to start at all these really small papers and work my way up to New York Times and be a war photographer." It just gets very intense, and I was really into it.

But when I was the chief photographer for the school newspaper, I had to shoot a tragedy. One of the RAs in a dorm died, and they were like, "Go shoot it!" I’m very soft, and I never really realized it until that moment. I felt like a vulture. And I know capturing those moments is important, but it was at that moment that I realized, "I don’t think I can do this." The picture was awful. It was a terrible experience. It was toward the end of my junior year when that happened, and I only had one semester as a senior because I graduated early. So, I was like, "I don’t know what I want to do now because it’s not this."

I got an internship as a fashion photographer for umano, a small clothing brand in Athens, and I loved it. It was a completely different form of storytelling. It kind of got me out of that mindset and into thinking, "Ok, what else can I do with photography?"

Meredith: What did you do for them specifically?

Mercedes: I started full-time after I graduated. It was really small. It was a startup. There were only five of us full-time, so we were all wearing a bunch of different hats. I was social media manager, blog manager, and photography manager. I did everything from planning shoots and getting models to editing photos, writing copy, and planning all social media layouts.

Meredith: That’s awesome experience.

Mercedes Bleth

Mercedes: Yeah, it was really great. Unfortunately, the company closed in February.

Meredith: That’s a hard industry.

Mercedes: It is. And especially in Athens. It’s just not really a fashion hub at all . . . I’ve been trying to get more into photography this year just because I miss it. I miss being able to be creative every single day. I work at a communications agency right now, which is great. I’m learning a lot. It’s like a 180 from what I was doing before. You learn so many different things working for huge corporate clients than you do for a startup and vice versa. So I’m glad that I’ve had both of them . . . It has been cool because with umano, it was kind of forced creativity every day, and I would leave my camera at the office on the weekends just because I didn’t want to touch it anymore. And now I’m kind of forced to be creative outside of work, which has been fun. I’ve been shooting with friends again and trying to get back into it. I think travel photography can be a lot easier because you’re constantly inspired. There are different things everywhere, so of course you want to take pictures of all these things that you haven’t seen before. Whereas getting inspired in your own city with your own friends who you see every day can be a little more difficult. I’ve been getting excited about that challenge again.

Photograph by Alex Torrey

Meredith: You took a trip to India in March. Why did you decide to go there?

Mercedes: My boyfriend and I love to travel. We’ve both been a lot of places. He’s been more places than I have. I’ve been to Europe a lot, but I had never been to any place like India. I don’t know why we chose India as our first trip together, but we had just never been that far and we really wanted to go experience it and experience the food and the people. I think we kind of wanted an intense trip. My boyfriend founded umano. So after umano closed, we both needed something intense to kind of overwhelm our senses. So we chose India, and it was just that – an overwhelming of the senses.

Meredith: How would you describe it?

Mercedes: A lot. A lot of tastes. A lot of sounds. A lot of religions intermixing. And extremes on every end. The most extreme environment you’ve ever been in of loudness and craziness and people. And then you go into some of the temples and it’s the most extreme peace you’ve ever felt. It’s just like a constant roller coaster.

Meredith: Wow. How long were you there?

Mercedes: We were there about 11 days. I wish we had stayed longer because it’s such a shock when you first get there. It takes a little while to get used to how loud it is. And then by the time you’re settled, you love it, and then it’s time to go home.

Photograph by Alex Torrey

Meredith: I saw the picture of the men peeling the potatoes, and Jyotik (page 64) showed me a similar picture of people peeling potatoes. So what’s up with all the potatoes?

Mercedes: That was at the Sikh house of worship, Bangla Sahib. It was beautiful. They prepare food every day for anybody who wants to come eat. So every day there are people preparing tons and tons of food. And you can worship with them, but you don’t have to pay. Sikhism is a very peaceful and inviting religion.

Meredith: In one of your photographs, there is a man praying on the steps. Was that a common thing to see?

Mercedes: That was also at the Sikh temple. It’s a huge temple with all these different rooms, and then outside there’s people everywhere praying. It’s pretty common to see people praying. And there’s cows everywhere. Most of the traffic jams are because of cows. Traffic there is like nothing I’ve seen ever. We got around in tuk-tuks most of the time – the little open-air cars – and it’s never quiet. Everybody is constantly honking. Nobody pays attention to the lanes really, so everybody’s just swerving. There’s tuk-tuks, there’s cars, there’s whole families on bicycles carrying all of their furniture or all of their food for the week, and then cows just in the road.

Meredith: Were there any times when you felt really uncomfortable?

Mercedes: Yes . . . It was amazing, and I’m so grateful I went. It’s such a celebration of tastes and sounds and culture, but there are so many sad parts that make you check your privilege . . . We stayed in Airbnbs the whole time, which I’m really glad we did to kind of get all angles of it and get to know the people who were hosting us . . . I think it’s really eye-opening because you really do see the wealth disparity. Here it’s segmented. You have your fancy downtown area, and then you have your impoverished areas. But there you’ve got these gorgeous high rises and people walking out in suits, and then literally across the street is the saddest slum that you’ve ever seen. So having all of that right next to each other was really hard to see. And that was everywhere. Agra is the city where the Taj Mahal is, and that’s really all that’s there. The surrounding area is very poor. There’s this huge, gorgeous hotel next to the Taj Mahal, and I think a lot of people will stay at that gorgeous hotel, walk over to the Taj Mahal, and then leave, and that’s all they see. We stayed at an Airbnb that’s more in the village, and I really struggled that day. That day in Agra, there was this huge festival, so the streets were insanely crowded. There were cows everywhere blocking the roads. People everywhere. So our driver was trying to find our Airbnb and pulled into this place that definitely wasn’t it. There were people everywhere surrounding the car, and he started to back out, and there was a baby behind our wheel. The mom picked it up. We didn’t hit it, but I started crying. It was very overwhelming. It was more overwhelming because it didn’t seem like it was that big of a deal. She just picked the baby up, wiped it off, and walked away like it wasn’t a huge deal. And I just lost it. I’m very much an introvert anyway, so that kind of environment is a lot for me and that situation was crazy.

I needed some time, so I just sat in our Airbnb for a little bit. Some of the pictures in this series were actually taken by my boyfriend that night. I like leaving them as part of the story, because while I was having my moment recouping inside, he was able to go out in that festival and capture some really cool images.

Meredith: How do you think the trip affected your view on life?

Mercedes: I think I learned a lot from how accepting they are. There’s a lot of intermixing of religions. There’s Sikhism and the Bahá'í faith and Hinduism, and they’re all very different but they all blend together so peacefully. You’d see a tuk-tuk driver who was a Sikh who had no problem driving a Hindu person. I think there was so much acceptance for other people’s religions that we don’t even really have here.

I’m definitely a lot more thankful for how easy everything is here in comparison. I wouldn’t say that India is this sad country that I want to pity because it’s not. It’s gorgeous. And they have a lot that we don’t have. But the parts that are bad are really bad, and we don’t have anything like that.

Meredith: Earlier, I mentioned Jyotik, the Indian photographer. I was wondering if you would have any questions for him?

Mercedes: Well, like I was saying about having to find inspiration in your own city. It was easy for me to find inspiration in India because it’s so different, but for him, how does he a fresh perspective? And are all of the things he sees still super interesting and unique to him or are they just day-to-day images?

Meredith: That’s a good question. I always struggle to document my own home. I grew up here in Atlanta. Photography has given me a greater appreciation for Atlanta – trying to notice things.

Mercedes: I bet meeting up with a lot of different photographers and being exposed to their world and how they see Atlanta [helps]. I moved to Atlanta in June. I grew up in Georgia and have been to Atlanta tons, but I’ve never lived here until now. And I know there are so many different sides to Atlanta that I’m not exposed to. The first time I met Matthew (page 36), he was wearing a shirt that said "South Side", and I assumed Chicago. And I said, "Oh, are you from Chicago?" And he was like, "No way, I’m from South Atlanta!"

Meredith: That’s so funny. He’s proud of where he’s from . . . In thinking about your career and life, what do you dream about doing in the future?

Mercedes: I really have a heart for startups – especially ones with a social mission. At umano, with every product you purchased from us, we gave a backpack full of art supplies to a kid. And kids drew all of the artwork on our shirts. So, every time we sold a shirt with their artwork, we got to give a backpack to another kid. It was a virtuous cycle. We got to go into schools to hang out with kids, and I love squishy stuff like that. So, my ultimate goal is to get back to that.

I enjoy working in an agency and working with a lot of different brands to kind of get to know how everything works. Umano was my first job, so everything that I learn now, I think, "Oh, I could have done so much better for the company with the stuff I know now." So, right now, I’m just thinking about equipping my toolbox, so that in the future, I can go into a brand I care about and make a difference.

Follow Mercedes on her website at mercedesbleth.com and on Instagram @mercedesbleth

Jyotik Bhachech

Photographer

Where were you born and where do you live now?

I was born and brought up and currently stay in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in the western part of India.

“The streets of my country are my favourite places.”

What do you like about India, and what would you like to see changed?

I like the dynamism of life and people in India. India has an amalgam of culture, religion, technology, and architecture, and every thing survives in its own manner. The streets of my country are my favourite places. When I walk around, I see people in their own livelihood. They carry their own attire. An attire of emotions and personality to come up each day. India is all about diversity.

I would like to see changes in preservation of historical monuments, a justified use of technology and more work to be done on developing humanity and respect for art.

Jyotik Bhachech

I have never been to India, but several of my friends have visited. They loved it, but when they returned home, they felt depressed for a while because of the extreme poverty they saw. However, many of your photographs convey a sense of joy. What is the prevailing feeling and outlook of the people around you?

People have all kinds of emotions here. Keeping aside my patriotic feeling for my country, I neutrally see about what my images could reflect. Do they reflect a sense of happiness, satisfaction, a sense of belongingness as a human being? I always feel that a photograph makes one connected to oneself. If we search for poverty, our camera will capture it; if we seek joy, our lens will make those images. It is how we see things happening – the perspective behind the images in a poor man’s home or his gesture on street or elsewhere is what matters to me.

“If

How did you get into photography?

I used to make drawings and paintings. But they seemed so static and so imaginary. So I initially bought a compact digicam around 2010 or so and started making pictures in my room and surroundings. This exploration with my camera and experiencing life in each moment made me more inclined towards photography. I am passionate about it. My mind gets new forms of inputs and new experiences each time I move with my camera along the streets.

Jyotik Bhachech

What do you do for work, and how do you feel about your work?

I am a psychiatrist by profession. I work with clients having some or the other psychological issues and with people under stress. I try to explore their mind and find out the best possible solution. I love my work, as it fulfills my basic wish of exploration. I also love talking with people and know more about how situations impact a human mind. I like to know how the mind develops its own processes to help a person.

When I interviewed Mercedes (page 56), she said it was easy to find inspiration in India because it is so different from her own life. However, it is often difficult to find inspiration in her own city. Are the people and scenes you photograph interesting to you? Or are they just normal everyday life that you think someone else might find interesting?

There are many people around here. Not everyone is interesting. As a photographer I need to capture emotions to which people can relate. I cannot photograph everything that comes in front of my eye. I try to find positive gestures in chaos or a crowd. Very small moments unseen between many things. I do not know about whether someone might be interested or not. It is an instinct that keeps me moving around Ahmedabad to discover the greatest gift to humans, i.e., life.

Cows are an integral part of the Indian community and culture. Cows are a part of society. We respect and accept their existence. Yes, they are stray animals, yet respected in terms of food, religion, and life. Also, a few people in the city still own so many cattle at home which are often moving around their residence. A few of my images reflect the "urban cow" – existence of the cow in city streets.

Why are there so many cows everywhere?

Jyotik Bhachech

Mercedes also said that many religions blend together so peacefully in India. She feels like there is more acceptance of other religions in India than there is here in America. Do you feel like people are really accepting of other religions, or is there any unspoken discrimination? And how would a Hindu family feel if their child decided to convert to Islam or Christianity or decided not to practice any religion?

This is a very interesting area. I feel religion and culture was there in India ages long. With science, technology, and development in terms of business and education, there is a lot of amalgam. People are now focused on work and development. Acceptance is a virtue. Indians are so very democratic to enjoy each festival of each religion. Atheist ideology also exists here. "We are harmony-loving emotional people. So we don’t mind anyone’s ideology." This is what an Indian thinks in India.

What do you dream of doing in the future?

In the future, I would like to work more on street photography or documentary. Maybe in my city at first and then exploring other cultures as well. The world is so big enough and full of life. When you search for life, life comes back to you with a new gift. I consider this gift to be creativity. With this creativity, I make images and make the connection stronger.

“When you search for life, life comes back to you with a new gift.”

Kevin Fuentes

Photographer

Meredith: I want to start at the beginning with your childhood. You were born in Los Angeles?

Kevin: Yes. My parents are from a little town in Guatemala called Tecun Uman. From there they migrated into the United States in 1989. They went to Los Angeles, California. I was born in 1995, and I have two older sisters.

Meredith: Did your parents tell you any stories about immigrating and how that was for them?

Kevin: Yes, their story is actually really scary. My mom and dad got married at 18. The town they were living in was super corrupt and was getting taken over by drug cartels. The town next to them was where El Chapo was actually caught. They wanted to get away from that. They wanted to have kids and start a family and not have us in such a violent environment.

So their story starts with them getting what’s called un coyote – like a coyote. They take you through a series of paths that the U.S. government doesn’t have knowledge of. They got split from the coyote and had to take their own path because the government showed up. They took a route that took them toward a river. My dad’s a really bad swimmer. He almost died that day, but luckily my mom is super good at swimming. She saved my father’s life when they were crossing into the United States. That’s one of my motivations. My dad almost passed away just to come here for us. Everyday, I think that to myself, and it motivates me to keep pushing and pushing.

"My dad almost passed away just to come here for us.

Everyday, I think that to myself, and it motivates me to keep pushing and pushing."

Kevin (continued): From there they got jobs in Los Angeles. Just random jobs because you can’t really get a career going straight from a different country. They are definitely my number one inspiration. I always hear these immigration stories about firstgeneration kids in the United States, and they’re talking about how they are so thankful. And it’s super true. You have to think about where all that inspiration really came from. And when you look into it, it’s from your parents. They worked so much for me to be here. It’s insane.

Meredith: Where in LA did you grow up?

Kevin: Hollywood. I was born in the Hollywood Hospital. My mom would always tell me, "You were destined to be a star. You were born in Hollywood." I always say, "Calm down, Mom. I don’t want to be a star." I don’t think I would ever want to be famous. It’s too much pressure. Too many people watching you.

Kevin Fuentes

Meredith: How did you get into photography?

Kevin: Photography all started in high school when I was actually skateboarding. I would go out with friends who were amateur skateboarders. They were just skateboarding for the fun of it, and then later on, they actually got signed onto companies. I would take photographs of them and submit it to their companies and they would send me tiny checks like $50 or $100. And I was like, "Wow! You can make a living off this." In high school, I was in a photography class and one of my teachers signed me up for photo competitions. I actually ended up winning the first competition, and they gave me a $1,000 check. I used that to buy my first camera because I was borrowing friends’ cameras.

Meredith: When did you move to Atlanta?

Kevin: Around 1998 my parents made that big move. My uncle offered my dad a job here in Atlanta constructing houses and interiors of apartments. I was three years old when I came to Atlanta.

Meredith: Did you go to Gwinnett Tech?

Kevin: I did go to Gwinnett Tech. It was not my primary choice. At first when I was in high school, I thought, "I’m not going to go to college, because I won’t have enough money." I won a scholarship while I was in high school for the Art Institute, and when I got that scholarship, I thought, "Maybe there’s a little bit of hope." But I ended up not going. I didn’t want to enroll. I just wanted to take some classes, but they wouldn’t let me use the scholarship for that.

I ended up not using it at all and taking loans out to go to Gwinnett Tech. I got a job there as an IT Studio Manager. That really helped me develop what I wanted to do – or what I thought I wanted to do. I feel like there’s always these stepping stones for every artists where you think you want to do one thing, but then you realize it’s either impossible or it’s something you just don’t want to do.

Meredith: So what did you think you wanted to do?

Kevin: I really thought I wanted to be a portrait photographer because that’s what I was doing a lot when I was there. We had these two giant studios there, and every single day I was there until midnight creating portraits and trying to create something new. That’s definitely still something I want to do, but it’s really difficult to make a living off of portraits. That was always my goal – to create artwork that I love but also something that I can give back. At the end of the day, I want to give back to the people who helped me get to where I am. It’s a really important thing that I think a lot of artists forget. I think that’s what a lot of millennial artists forget to do is to look back and to see who actually helped you. Who helped you push your work and expose you to the world of photography.

Meredith: When did you intern for Creative Loafing?

Kevin: I interned while I was at Gwinnett Tech. I was required to have a internship. I contacted Joeff Davis. He said, "Send me your portfolio and resume." I had my professors write me recommendation letters because I really wanted this. He called me and asked me questions and then said, "When can you start?" So, I took that opportunity and pushed it as much as possible to get into as many concerts, events – things that a regular photographer would be restricted to. It was great.

Meredith: Where do you think you’ve learned the most?

Kevin: I think just shooting around the city. At Gwinnett Tech, I definitely learned technical stuff, but not photography related – just organizational skills. I always love taking photos of random people, and there’s something in my imagination that I just like to make up stories about them.

Meredith: I saw that story that you posted the other day on Instagram. Was that a real story or did you make that up?

Kevin: I actually just made that up. I spent like three or four hours staring at this photograph thinking of what this guy’s story could be, and my girlfriend, Sarah, said, "Does everything have to be real? Can you create some sort of fantasy?" And that’s what really pushed me to think, "Maybe I can make

a story up." My mind is full of stories anyway and concepts. So why not put it together with words?

Meredith: I liked it. It sounded real.

Kevin: I think I’ve always wanted to write too. I’ve just never had proper English because Spanish was my first language. So, I’m always like, "Is that the right word?"

[During this interview, we were walking around downtown Atlanta, and Kevin spotted a particular building.]

Kevin: This is one of my favorite buildings that I’ve gone on top of. It wasn’t legally, but I feel as if artists don’t do that legality part.

Kevin Fuentes

Meredith: That doesn’t bother you – going places where it’s not legal?

Kevin: No, definitely not. I think that comes from being a skateboarder because as a skateboarder, you cannot skate any skate spot. People were like, "You can’t skate here. You could get hurt and sue us." But really skateboarders aren’t after a lawsuit. They’re just trying to get their tricks and make art with it. I’m totally against it being in the Olympics because even though you’re being active, I don’t really find it as a sport. It’s more of a lifestyle art.

Meredith: How do you find the abandoned buildings that you shoot?

Kevin: I signed up for this realty website, and it shows you what properties have been abandoned . . . But a lot of the times it’s just exploring. I guess it’s being in the right place – but also the wrong place – at the right time.

"I guess it’s being in the right place – but also the wrong place – at the right time."

Meredith: Earlier you said you don’t think portrait photography is the way to go. So, what do you want to do?

Kevin: First, when I was at Creative Loafing, I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist because I did write some articles for them. I covered the whole Women’s March. I did the MLK march. I got a really good image of some MLK relatives right up front. It was a really powerful image. So I thought I wanted to do that at first, but honestly, I don’t know what I want to end up with. Right now, I’m working with Bhargava with Chil Creative – creating and editing photos and video for clients. I recently came out with a shirt (see "3:00 PM to 3:00 AM" at fourofour.co). I feel that I’m wanted there and that I’m doing something right. Especially with fourofour. I don’t see any other companies offering free workshops to the public. So, I think maybe doing something around that. I want to do everything, but I can’t.

Meredith: Do you think you’ll stay in Atlanta?

Kevin: I think Atlanta is the hot spot right now. I think Atlanta’s definitely the home for maybe 10 years or so. Then I’ll maybe think about moving. Honestly, wherever I can get work and find new opportunities. I was in a business management class, and I got an internship with Bhargava during that class. I ended up dropping out because I was learning so much more with Bhargava.

Kevin Fuentes

Meredith: Is there anything that you know about photography now that you wish you had known when you first started out?

Kevin: Getting subjects comfortable was definitely a hard thing for me to develop. If you had met me a year ago, you would have thought I was super quiet.

Meredith: Really?

Kevin: I was so quiet. I didn’t talk at all. I was very to myself. And then people were saying, "Why aren’t you putting your photography out there?"

What I did was I talked to Sarah who deals with people who are very uncomfortable all the time because they have a psychological problem and are scared to talk about it. She explained to me how to get them to expose who they are. So when I’m shooting a subject, I walk around with them and get to know them. And that way, at the end of our walk, I can say, "Alright, I think I’m ready to take a photo of you." Because I really want to get to know them first before I take a picture of them. That’s definitely the thing I’m really working on in 2018 – getting to know my subjects more and not just have it be a photoshoot but have it be a connection. A new friendship almost.

Follow Kevin on Instagram @kofiphoto

Kevin Fuentes

The TrailofInspiration

When I saw Kevin’s photographs of abandoned buildings (page 76), I was inspired. I immediately envisioned a dancer in that space. I believe you should follow the trail of inspiration when it will stretch you to the next level. So, I decided to shoot a video.

First I had to find a building we could shoot in safely and hopefully legally. Kevin suggested Lindale Mill. And then I had to find some dancers. I wanted either a hip hop dancer or an animator, and the only local source I knew about was Dragon House – a hip hop incubator that has been featured on the television show "So You Think You Can Dance." Through an Instagram search, I found Cordaro (who has since left Dragon House and gone out on his own). I asked Aimee Labrecque, who teaches at my daughters' dance studio, to join us. I found some royaltyfree music on Soundcloud, devised a concept, and we all headed out to make a video. During our drive, we talked to Cordaro about his life and work.

Interview and photos by Meredith M Howard and Julieann Tran Featuring Cordaro Gross and Aimee Labrecque

– Meredith M Howard

The Trail of Inspiration

Meredith: Where are you from originally?

Cordaro: I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I lived there 17 years.

Meredith: What was it like? I’ve never been to Detroit.

Cordaro: And you don’t want to go either.

Meredith: Oh, really?

Cordaro: Yeah, it’s rough out there. It’s one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S.

Julieann: Why did you move to Atlanta?

Cordaro: Dance. I got a few opportunities here that kind of pushed me to keep going. In Detroit, it’s really rough out there. I couldn’t stay in that environment. And I already knew what I wanted to do as a kid.

Meredith: When did you start dancing?

Cordaro: Ten years old.

Meredith: What made you want to start?

Cordaro: Watching Michael Jackson. It actually all started from a Winterfresh commercial. There was this old guy and he was waving and I thought, "That’s cool. I want to learn how to do that." So I just emulated it. As I got older, I got serious about dancing.

Meredith: So how long did it take you to learn what you do now? Would you call it animation?

Cordaro: Yeah, animation. I’m still learning. It’s going to take a long time. But as far as where I am now, I would say about 15 years of being serious about it.

"It actually all started from a Winterfresh commercial."

Meredith: How much do you practice?

Cordaro: A lot.

Meredith: Last summer, I tried to learn how to tut. It is so hard. I mean, it looks hard, but then when I tried to do it, it’s even harder than it looks.

Cordaro: I don’t even remember how I learned how to tut. It just came to me. But I could do a tut set, and you could ask me to do the exact same thing I just did, and I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Meredith: It just flows out?

Cordaro: Yep.

Meredith: I think when you are doing what you were born to do, it kind of flows . . . So, I saw that you used to be a part of Dragon House, but then you recently went out on your own. When you were with them, what were you doing?

Cordaro: We had a house, and we all used to live together. We had an agent that represented us – Xcel Talent Agency. When I was in it, we would do NBA halftime shows, bar mitzvahs, shows with different artists. We’d go out and do it and then come home and practice and wait for the next opportunity.

The Trail of Inspiration

Meredith: How many people are in Dragon House?

Cordaro: There’s 20 now.

Meredith: Why did you decide to go out on your own?

Cordaro: I just wanted to put a little more focus on my name.

Meredith: So you felt you were being promoted as a group as opposed to individuals?

Cordaro: It’s hard to explain. Being in a crew, we all worked under the same agency. We were all in competition. That’s not always friendly. I decided to take a journey on my own.

Meredith: What is your dream job or gig?

Cordaro: Just travel the world and see the whole world. I’d rather live out of a backpack to see the whole world than do anything I don’t want to do.

“How much do you practice?” “A lot.”

Meredith: Is there anywhere specific you want to go?

Cordaro: Tokyo, Dubai, China.

Julieann: Do you see yourself dancing for the rest of your life?

Cordaro: Yeah.

Meredith: Do you have a regular job during the week?

Cordaro: Yes, now I do. For the last four years, I didn’t. I was living strictly off of dance. But I don’t have an agent now, so I’m pretty much rebuilding and starting from scratch. I actually work in electronics now. And when I get home, I practice.

The Trail of Inspiration

Meredith: Do you feel like you need an agent to get booked or can you do it on your own?

Cordaro: It depends. You can put out a video and it can go viral and then the connections will come to you, and you don’t need the middle man. But if you don’t have the connections and you have a middle man, he finds where you fit in.

Meredith: What kind of music do you listen to?

Cordaro: Araabmuzik. Favorite artist of all time. He remixes and creates different beats . . . I love all of these EDM songs. They sound like dreams. Hip hop . . . I’m not too sure about hip hop.

Julieann: So, you’re more into EDM?

Cordaro: Yeah, music that takes my mind to a different place.

Julieann: How did you find this artist?

Cordaro: In high school. I saw a video on Facebook that blew up because he can play the mess out of the MPC.

Julieann: What is an MPC?

Cordaro: It’s a device that has different instruments on there, and he uses it to make the drums and beats. You have to look the video up. I saw it in high school, and ever since, I just liked his music. I started shooting videos to his music. Last year, I ended up working with him.

Julieann: How did that happen?

Cordaro: His manager reached out to me. He flew us out, and we went to Chicago and New York.

Julieann: Wow, that’s awesome.

Meredith: Are there any dancers that you look up to as role models, or are you just trying to be unique?

Cordaro: Both. I actually came up under Nonstop. He made a YouTube video to "Pumped Up Kicks" that got 130 million views. He’s the guy that actually trained me. Then I branched off to learn more on my own.

Julieann: He trained you in Atlanta?

Cordaro: Yeah, Atlanta.

Meredith: Do you think Atlanta is a pretty good market for dance, or do you feel like you have to go to LA or New York?

Cordaro: Yeah, LA would be a bigger market, but as far as freestyle dancers, we have opportunities in Atlanta. It would be Atlanta, LA, sometimes New York. But LA is the main place for marketing because there’s always auditions and stuff going on. Pretty soon Atlanta will be like that too. We’ve got all the movies coming down here.

Julieann: Can you remember a time when you’ve had a creative roadblock?

Cordaro: Yeah, figuring out new moves – sometimes that can get kind of tough. You just have to keep going through it until your brain creates something. Or if you see something, you can use that as inspiration. Every dancer has that creative block. That’s why you have to practice every day.

Meredith: Where do you get inspiration from generally?

Cordaro: Other dancers. Movies. You might see something funny on a movie and think, “Can I make a move out of that?” Or something scary and try to make a move out of that.

Julieann: What do you mean making moves out of scenes in a movie?

Cordaro: Animation is pretty much "whatever you see, you try to bring it to life." If I see a robot acting silly then I’m going to try to imitate that robot. If I see something like "The Ring" – the scary scene with the girl when she comes up the steps then she twists her head – I will try to imitate that the best way I can to make it look almost like that.

The Trail of Inspiration

Julieann: How does your family feel about your dancing?

Cordaro: They love it.

Julieann: They support you?

Cordaro: They always pushed me to pursue my dream. Whatever it is you want to get out of this world, you can get. You have to just keep going. Keep pushing – no matter how hard it gets.

Meredith: Has there ever been a point when you thought, "This is just too hard. Maybe I should do something else?"

Cordaro: Yep. But you just can’t quit. You put all this time into dancing and then you say, "I’m done," then you go to the grocery store and you hear a song . . . I couldn’t quit if I wanted to.

“I couldn’t quit if I wanted to.”

Follow Cordaro @cordaro777 and follow Aimee @aimeelabrecque. Watch the video at www.thestreetsmag.com

Photograph by Meredith M Howard

– Elliott Erwitt, Photographer www.magnumphotos.com

"You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you."

Photographer

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I was born in China. Now I am working in Paris as a photographer and an illustrator. What are three words to describe the city where you live?

I have been living in Paris for seven years. For me, Paris is both familiar and unfamiliar. It’s also a city of fashion and vintage, tension and comfort.

How is Paris comfortable and uncomfortable, and how is it similar and different from China?

I understand the place, the food, the museums, but the people, the culture . . . As I am a stranger who comes from a completely different culture, it is not easy to enter French social circles. It is similar to China in that the people like to stay in familiar social circles. It is different in that France is very, very open to its young creators.

The French talk a lot. That’s very good. And Paris is a huge museum – not just the museum of art but also the mix of people who come from different countries.

Paris c’est un grand musée

How did you get into photography and illustration?

The reason why I got into photography and illustration is that firstly I’ve graduated from L’école Penninghen in art direction. Secondly, I like to observe different people on the street. This is a space of photography and illustration where I enjoy myself. I take pictures of the chicers on the street every weekend, and I also draw illustrations in my spare time.

Which activity is easier for you – photography or illustration?

At the moment, illustration is easier because I have been drawing for five years. I do not have a lot of experience with photography.

Yan Zheng

What is your favorite street?

Allée des Cygnes, in the 15th district. It is just near the Eiffel Tower. I enjoy taking a walk on that street when the leaves are falling on autumn days.

Who or what inspires you?

As Paris is the capital of fashion, the Parisians are always very chic. I draw sketches of the passersby when I wait for the subway.

What are your hopes for the future?

I hope I can carry on taking pictures and drawing images to post on Instagram. This is my little secret garden showroom.

Eduardo Asenjo Matus

Photographer

Eduardo Asenjo Matus

Where do you live, and what are three words to describe your city?

I live in Valdivia, Chile – one of the rainiest cities in my country. Three words to describe it are cold, gray and wet.

“I am inspired by the music and grayness of my city.”

Eduardo Asenjo Matus

How did you get into photography?

It all started with a small Fujifilm x10 – a premium compact camera with a retro style. Then I discovered the world of mirrorless cameras, very similar to my Fujifilm, but with better image quality and the option of changing lenses. I currently use an X-E2S with a 35mm f/2 and a fisheye 8mm. It’s a reflex in a compact body ideal for street photography.

Tell us about your love for the imperfection of the image.

When I started photography I always liked the noise and the movement – something similar to a dream. I have hearing problems, and I wanted to reflect this in my photographs. The speed was perfect to demonstrate the noise in a conversation. It is difficult to try to listen to a person in the city. I represent the noise with the blur in the image and what I can hear with the focus. One of the songs that inspired me for all of this was “The Sound of Silence” by Disturbed.

I realized that this type of photo does not attract much attention in my country since they only look for perfection in the image. My photographer friends made fun of me because I was only taking blurred pictures. They thought they were bad photos. But I was looking in the opposite direction of perfection. I fell in love with the imperfection of the image, sometimes using broken or dirty filters.

“I was looking in the opposite direction of perfection.”

Eduardo

Asenjo Matus

How do you achieve the motion blur and isolation of one subject in your beautiful photographs?

To create the image, I use a very low shutter speed. First, I look for a place that I like and sit down to wait for the moment. I usually photograph the person who calls my attention to the group or people who walk at a different pace – slower or faster than the others. They stand out because of their speed. I use a neutral density filter to compensate for the light and long exposure. I use the intentional movement of the camera to create the blur and movement. It’s something similar to panning.

Who or what inspires you?

I’m very inspired by the music and grayness of my city. I like to meet people from other countries with the same interest and who understand the style of my photography.

Eduardo Asenjo Matus

What do you enjoy doing besides photography?

I am the happiest person in the world riding my bicycle and spending time with my girlfriend.

What are your hopes for the future?

I would like to be invited to and travel to different countries to exhibit my work. I would like to have a photo book and to work for an important magazine.

Follow Eduardo on Instagram @eduardo.asenjo.matus

Ricardo Delgado López

Photographer

Where do you live, and what are three words to describe your city?

I live in Cali, Colombia. There are a lot of words I could use to describe my city, but because of its sunsets, music, and people I’ll say Cali is warm, cheerful, and diverse.

What are your favorite activities?

I ride my bicycle daily around the city and look for stories to tell. I design and make backpacks. I listen to music and write poetry.

Ricardo Delgado Lо`pez

Ricardo Delgado Lо`pez

When and why did you start taking photographs?

I started to take photographs in 2011 when I visited Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city. I walked daily through the center of the city with a borrowed camera, and that is when I began to understand that photography has the power to immortalize stories.

Why is your series titled "Raíz de Árbol"?

"Raíz de Árbol" (Tree Root) was born on a trip to Nariño-Colombia where I sought my identity as a photographer – to understand and recognize where I come from and what I want to preserve. I come from a farming family in Nariño and have another project looking to preserve recipes and family memories. "Tree root" is a metaphor for my photographs. I feel that I am a root, hidden and perceiving, and my feelings are the sprouting branches and leaves. Those are my photographs.

Who or what inspires your style of photography?

Once I discovered Vivian Maier’s work, she was a great inspiration. Her practical choice to work as a nanny – as well as her city scenes and portraits – constantly inspire me as I photograph the city streets in Colombia. The main difference is that I choose to share my work.

“That is when I began to understand that photography has the power to immortalize stories.”

Ricardo Delgado Lо`pez

Ricardo Delgado Lо`pez

Which is your favorite street, and can you describe it for us?

I often visit a block in downtown Cali called "Carrera 10" where there is some destruction and a visible lack of equality, yet it is filled with simply beautiful scenes. I visit this street every week to buy materials for the backpacks I make, and it is full of humble people and contrasts.

What are your hopes for the future?

My hope is to complement my European studies and expand my "Raíz de Árbol" project by exploring different countries via bicycle. I want to tell stories about the cities and rural places I visit. I hope to exhibit a project about my family memories. I also hope to be a part of directing photography for cinema.

Follow Ricardo on Instagram @raizdearbol

Umcolisi Terrell

Photographer

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I’m a musician who plays saxophone and has a love for street photography, travel, the outdoors, and animals. The horn section I play in, Terminus Horns, has been traveling a bit lately, so the fun thing about doing music and photography is wherever music takes me, I can always bring my camera. Finishing a gig in an interesting town or city doesn’t mean it’s the end of the night.

Where do you live and what are three words that describe your city?

I live in Castleberry Hill. I would describe Atlanta and my neighborhood within the city specifically as historic, artistic, and evolving.

How did you get into photography?

Growing up, my Dad had a lot of hobbies and photography was among them. I admired the photos he took from his world travels, and the documentation of our family which was seen in photo albums around the house. I would always play with the Polaroid camera any chance I got. Then when I was five, he bought me a Ninja Turtle point-and-shoot which used 110 film cartridges. Once I got a little older, he bought me my first SLR – Pentax, if I remember. I was addicted to the sound of the shutter, and the camera was well-loved for a couple of years. They say all good things must come to an end, and that’s when I broke my camera. That was that.

I was introduced to music, and photography took a backseat to my saxophone. Studying music brought me to Atlanta, and now that’s what I do. Roughly five years ago, my passion for photography reignited. I found myself hiking trails and exploring downtown Atlanta with an old digital camera. As my love and knowledge grew, so did my equipment, and I eventually bought into the new mirrorless systems. I have never looked back.

You have a photo that looks like you must have been on the ground in between two cars during rush hour traffic. That looks a little dangerous. Can you tell us about that photo?

That photo was taken on Peachtree Center Avenue looking toward John Portman Boulevard. Precautions were definitely taken to get the shot as traffic was moving very slowly, if not at all. I chose to use the red light as a security blanket. I crouched down so the viewer would feel immersed in the shot. It’s not a common perspective in street because it’s dangerous, I guess. I wanted a tunnel vision shot with someone in the crosswalk. There was a convention or two in town at the time, so the odds of my shot coming to life were good.

Umcolisi Terrell

What is your favorite street?

I recently visited Spain and took a side trip to Lisbon, Portugal. While wandering the streets of Lisbon on a rainy day, I stumbled onto a view and immediately fell in love with it. The steep hill with the city’s historic tram line and 18th-century architecture make you feel like you’re living in another era. So at the moment, Rua da Bica de Duarte Belo is my favorite street. That being said, there is so much more to see and I’m sure I’ll be captivated by another soon.

Who or what inspires you?

I find it to be inspiring when I walk into a scene and realize each and every second ticking by is part of a story being told. The moments come to you, and it is a photographer’s job to find it and snap it. No matter what you capture – whether it’s street, nature or portraiture – that organic moment in time will be recorded and never happen again. When I look at work from my favorite photographers past and present, I think about that. I think about how they kept their poise and controlled the scene to make magic happen behind the shutter. It feeds the fire for me to strive to be like them.

What are your hopes for the future?

I am just hoping to continue to grow as a photographer and a person. I strive to create that magic and express more through what I capture. I also want to be more involved with documentary-style photography. I feel like with what’s going on these days, it’s more important than ever for street photographers to be doing their part to document the change happening in our society. In my mind, it’s another example of strength in numbers.

"It’s more important than ever for street photographers to be doing their part to document the change happening in our society."

Umcolisi Terrell

Chris Veal

Artist

Chris Veal’s colorfully graphic murals, complete with their witty social commentary, are continually popping up all over Atlanta (and other cities). I recently caught up with Chris to ask him some questions about his life and work while he painted a mural on Edgewood Avenue.

Interview and photographs by Meredith M Howard (except where noted)

Meredith: How did you start painting and, then specifically, painting this pop art style?

Chris: Originally, I started painting graffiti. Then in 2014, there was a debate about a private event in the Krog Street tunnel. There was a local lady who was promoting the festival, and she got in my inbox bragging about how many followers she had. I wanted to do something making fun of her. I’m terrible at painting females realistically, so I painted a cartoon version of her and wrote, "I have 10,000 followers." I painted it at Krog after a group of us whitewashed the tunnel in protest. People loved it. I didn’t do another one for a while, and then I did the "I Miss Buckhead" piece. After I saw the reception of that I thought, "OK, I’m going to stick with this for a little bit." So, I just started doing more of these.

Meredith: It seems like a lot of your art contains either social or political commentary. Is that because of the first one, or were you like that before?

Chris: It was all because of the first one.

Meredith: For the pieces after that, do you sit around and try to think about it, or does it just come to you?

“What do I think is ridiculous?”

Photograph by Chris Veal

Chris: A little of both. Sometimes I’ll sit around and say, "What do I think is ridiculous?" People freaking out when their iPhone dies. They act like it’s the end of the world. So, that’s why I did the lady crying and saying, "My iPhone’s dead!" I recently did the Casey Cagle piece because when I saw that tweet, I thought, "That’s ridiculous." Generally, when I think something is stupid or ridiculous, I think, “Is that good enough to paint a wall? Will people get a kick out of it?"

Meredith: I thought the Casey Cagle piece was interesting because I had not heard the actual news story. But then I saw your picture and wanted to know what it meant, so I looked it up.1 In a way, I got my news from your art.

1 Tweet by Casey Cagle, Lt. Governor of Georgia, on February 26, 2018 –"I will kill any tax legislation that benefits @Delta unless the company changes its position and fully reinstates its relationship with @NRA."

Photograph by Chris Veal

Meredith: Which one is your favorite?

Chris: Whichever one I’m working on is my favorite, so this one [Blondie] is my favorite right now.

Meredith: Is this one going to have words?

Chris: Yeah, it’s going to say, "I’m not the kind of girl that gives up just like that." I had a couple of people message me and ask, "Why are all the girls crying?" "Why is everything so negative?" So I thought I’d do a positive piece, and Matt had been asking me to paint this wall for a long time. I was sitting around thinking about what to do, and I’ve been listening to Blondie a lot lately.

Meredith: How do you feel about staying in the same style versus evolving to a different style?

Chris: I hate it. I’ll do a couple of these because I know people love them, but then I’ll go do something else. I’ll paint letters or do more realistic looking stuff. Just practice different things. I hate doing the same thing over and over.

Meredith: I always wonder about that, because it seems to make artists more successful if they do the same thing over and over, but it has to be boring for them.

Chris: It’s so boring. I like doing this style, but I’ll get tired of it. So, I do different things to keep it fresh and learn new things. I have friends who paint literally the same thing – the same picture. They make a good living, but they absolutely hate it. And they won’t tell you that until you’re one-on-one with them and they’ll say, "I’m so sick of painting this."

Meredith: Do you think you’ll finish this one today?

Chris: Yeah. The dots are what’s time-consuming. I probably spent half the time doing the dots.

Meredith: Do you have a picture of Blondie you’re working from?

Chris: Yeah, I can show you. I draw everything small first on my iPad.

Options for the mural that Chris sent to the owner of Noni's Deli.

Mural in the courtyard at Noni's Deli

Meredith: Do you sell versions of your walls in smaller versions?

Chris: Sometimes. The "I Miss Buckhead" one, I did because so many people were asking me for it. So, I made a print version. But a lot of times I don’t. I don’t like doing canvases lately. I just like doing big walls. I will do them if someone commissions me. I don’t like repeating the same stuff. The one that said, "Stop Shooting People" – a bunch of people messaged me wanting that one –so I took a picture of it and had digital prints made. Walls keep me so busy, it’s hard to do it all.

Photograph by Chris Veal

Photograph by Chris Veal

Meredith: Since I’ve seen your work in Atlanta, I’ve seen other artists elsewhere doing similar pop art. It seems to be in style right now.

Chris: There’s a lot of people who do the pop art style. DFace – he’s really big. There’s another that lives here that does it named Art Revolts. There’s a guy in New York named Sean. I guess you could say it’s in style. But most people are twisting it and doing it different ways. My piece looks nothing like Revolt’s. And DFace does all of the skeleton faces. Everybody does it a little bit different – their own interpretation. I like doing the commentary. With something bright and bold you can grab people’s eye really quickly, and then you can deliver a message.

Meredith: Your larger murals tend to have a lot of geometric shapes.

Chris: Yeah, I try to blend my love for the 80s design style with the 50s pop art. I try to mix two different things to see what happens. The original design for this one had a lot of 80s influences.

Photograph by Chris Veal

Meredith: Did you grow up here in Atlanta?

Chris: Milledgeville, Georgia.

Meredith: When did you move here?

Chris: ’99.

Meredith: Did you move for any particular reason or just to get out of Milledgeville?

Chris: Yeah, pretty much to get out of Milledgeville. It was kind of an easy move. A bunch of my friends lived in the same complex, and I met a girl that lived there. I was 17, and she was 33. I moved in with her. I didn’t know her. I had $200 and just moved in with this girl.

Meredith: Where did you meet her?

Chris: I was sitting outside on the balcony, and she was the neighbor of my friend. She was talking about how she and her boyfriend just broke up and she said, "I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent." So I said, "I’ll move in." And she was like, "Alright. Cool."

I told her, "I’ve got $200, and I’ll get a job the first week I move up here." I had never even had a job before. I moved in and got a job at Sports Authority.

Photographs on this page and previous page of graffiti by Chris Veal in 2005

Chris: He loves it. He’s really supportive. He doesn’t paint anymore. He got a good job and does the family thing. Yeah, he gets a kick out of it.

Chris (continued): Some of my other neighbors were moving downtown, and they were telling me about this awesome building that had graffiti all over it. So I moved down and slept on my friend’s balcony – exposed to the elements. I stayed out there through the winter. I gave him $100 a month to sleep on the balcony. The people that lived below us were a graffiti crew – most of them from Portland. I would see all the stuff they were doing, and that was my first taste of graffiti. I would go to the Civic Yard on Peachtree and watch people paint.

They would ask me, "Why don’t you paint?" And I was like, "I don’t want to." I would draw, but I had never painted before.

My best friend got into it, so I finally said, "Alright, I’ll try it." He got married and moved, and I just kept painting.

Meredith: What does your friend say now about your painting, since you were like, "No, I don’t want to do that."

Photograph by Chris Veal

Meredith: Have you ever gotten stopped by the police?

Chris: Oh, yeah. Multiple times. I’ve run from the police multiple times. I’ve had a couple times where I’ve had to run and a couple of times there was no way I was going to be able to run. So I had to talk my way out of it: "Oh, I thought it was fine to paint here. I’m sorry. Some people told me it was OK." They let me go.

My best friend did get arrested over by Georgia State painting. That kind of put an end to his painting career. His girlfriend and parents were like, "You can’t be doing this."

I’ve done walls like this and had cops roll up on me and think it’s illegal. And I’ll have to call the owner. That was before murals really blew up in Atlanta. Now they know what’s up.

Meredith: On Instagram, I saw a video of you doing tricks on a bike, and you also mentioned sky diving. Why do you think you are drawn to risky activities?

Chris: I don’t really think of them as risky. I just like to have fun and to try new things. BMX is a huge part of who I am, just like painting. As for graffiti, it was never super risky for me as I liked low-key spots where I could take my time –mostly under bridges and in abandoned buildings.

Meredith: How do you feel when a piece is painted over?

Chris: It doesn’t really bother me anymore. If it’s tagged on, I’ll just fix it. I generally enjoy painting, so it’s not that big of a deal. As long as I get my picture, it’s all good.

Chris Veal

India Revisited

In Issue Eight, we interviewed two photographers about India. This country of 1.3 billion people has so many layers of complexity that we decided to dive in a little further. For this issue, we interviewed Mark Miller, an American media producer who moved his family to India 13 years ago.

Interview by Meredith M Howard Photographs by Mark Miller and James Meadows, as noted

Photograph by James Meadows

India Revisited

Do you remember what it was like when you first moved from the United States to India? Can you tell us about that transition?

My wife and I had the privilege of spending three months in India as part of a research team five years before we moved. As a team, we had spent nearly two years’ worth of man-hours conducting ethnographic interviews of an ethnic group in Rajasthan. So when we moved to India, we came with a wealth of cultural knowledge and experience. Despite that, as the plane landed on that November night in 2004, we held each other’s hand and cried. We didn’t have a return ticket! And we had two small children with us. This felt very different than a short adventure. This was a life change.

Photograph by James Meadows

“Someone once told us that the best remedy for culture shock is more of the culture.”

India Revisited

In our first nine months, we rode the roller coaster of culture shock – from the highs of learning a new language, meeting new people, exploring new foods and new ways of doing things to the lows of only being able to speak like a child in this new language, the tiresome labor of always meeting new people, getting bored with the food and wishing we could do things the way we used to!

Someone once told us that the best remedy for culture shock is more of the culture. At our lowest point of culture adjustment, we took a family "research trip" as part of a documentary project I was working on. We spent two weeks staying in villages and people’s homes. One of these was a huge family that lived in a medieval palace. They made us feel like a part of the family and invited us into their most intimate family moments. Suddenly, our experience had a new filter. That was the medicine we needed to keep going. We are still surprised that India became home and normal. We lived there for almost 13 years.

“They made us feel like a part of the family.”

Mark and his family pictured with their "new family."

India Revisited

What do you like about India, and what do you miss about the United States? And how did your children feel about living in India?

We learned a lot about hospitality from our Indian friends. It was amazing how quickly we could get invited for a cup of tea in someone’s home, but even more amazing how eagerly we were invited into their lives as well. Families welcomed us into their rites and rituals. We celebrated marriages with them, welcomed newborn babies, and mourned with them when members died. I really appreciate that openness. It is a rare quality in the Western culture that I am familiar with.

I remember asking one of my kids once what he thought of living in India and he said, "What do you mean? It’s where I live!" I was experiencing India as a second culture, but their experience in India is the only childhood and life that they know. Going to America to visit grandparents was just a vacation. It is still hard for me to fully comprehend that.

Photograph by Mark Miller. His wife,Heather,is in the center of the photo.

India Revisited

“We learned a lot about hospitality from our Indian friends.”

Photograph of Mark's children at an Indian wedding celebration in 2007

Can you tell us a little about your business – how you originally got into videography and also about your purpose and vision for your media creation business?

I grew up as a PBS junky. Documentary film has fascinated me since childhood. I was inspired by Hugo van Lawick’s career because he lived among his subjects for decades and could tell stories in a different way than if you just showed up for a week. He knew the seasons and cycles of life among the African wild. The cinéma vérité work of the Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker captured my attention when I saw Primary, one of the first sync sound docus. I wanted to make films like that!

Around the same time, I was learning about cultures of the world. I grew up in suburban Atlanta and didn’t think much about the fact that other peoples might see the world different from me. The idea of a Muslim or a Hindu was really lost to me. One summer during college, I did a video project for the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Papua New Guinea. It totally blew the lid off my provincial understanding of the world.

"I want to live here so that I can really understand your life, not just pop in and out.”

Photograph by Mark Miller

From that time on, I felt like God wanted me to be a part of telling the stories of the nations. When we landed in India, that’s what I told people: "I want to tell your stories in your words. And I want to live here so that I can really understand your life, not just pop in and out." The fun part about telling stories is there is an exchange that usually happens. If I take the time to honor them and their story, I then get to share my story with them.

In 2011, we started a small production company (I55 Media) to serve small- and medium-sized companies in India that needed local knowledge and an international aesthetic for their corporate communications. I was uniquely suited for that having a foot in the East and West. We are not making a lot of money, but we’ve shared a lot of stories, and I hope we can continue to do so for a long time and in even better ways.

Photograph by James Meadows

In Issue Eight, we talked to two photographers about India and both of them spoke of religious tolerance in India. Since publishing that issue, several people have directed me toward information that says the opposite. I have read articles that say the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisions India as a Hindu nation and overlooks (and maybe in some ways encourages) violence against Muslims and Christians.1 What is your perspective on this?

I think it is helpful to think of India as several different "Indias." With so many languages, cultures, religions, and geographies, it is astounding that it is able to be one political nation. I think that one of the ways that the dense population has been able to cope with such diversity is to adopt a sense of "tolerance" that says, "You be you and I will be me, and as long as we stay out of each other’s business, we can get exist together." So there is a very fragile veil of peaceful coexistence. But when anyone’s cultural identity is threatened (whether that be about beef or a temple or a government quota), things can explode in a hurry.

Polarization is a global trend these days, it seems. The quarrels and fighting, which sometimes leads to violence, are a symptom of an ancient battle in the hearts of men. It’s really nothing new. We humans love to tear each other apart. It is the result of not getting what we want, even when we get it!

1 See the following articles –Sinha, Shreeya and Suppes, Mark. "Timeline of the Riots in Modi's Gujarat." The New York Times, August 19, 2015. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/06/world/asia/modi-gujarat-riots-timeline.html Bhowmick, Nilanjana. "As India's Muslims are Lynched, Modi Keeps Silent." Washington Post, June 28, 2017. www. washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/06/28/as-indias-muslims-are-killed-modi-keeps-silent Llorente, Elizabeth. "Pastor's grisly death spotlights persecution of Christians in India." Fox News, February 1, 2018. www.foxnews.com/world/2018/02/01/pastors-grisly-death-spotlights-persecution-christians-in-india

Photograph by James Meadows

India Revisited

I read that Prime Minister Modi banned the 500 and 1,000 rupee bills (86% of the cash in circulation) in January 20171. How did that affect daily life?

Those were some crazy months! For the most part, India’s consumer economy runs on cash. This drastic measure to root out black money caught everyone by surprise. There were long lines at ATMs, banks had no cash, and there were all kinds of schemes going on for people to launder their unreported cash stuffed under mattresses. Most people were not used to using credit cards or debit cards, so it was chaos for a while. But as we’ve seen in many different circumstances, the people are resilient and find ways to work around the system. Life goes on. It was another great example of how you never really know what is going to happen in India!

India is registering all of its citizens in a biometric database2 (including fingerprints and iris scans) which is being linked to all areas of life – financial services, welfare, drivers licenses, voter registration. The government claims that it is a way to help people obtain services, but some fear that it is simply a surveillance system that is not well verified or protected. What do you think about this?

This is a development that I have followed for some time. I was an early entry into that system, because it offered me a government-issued ID with my address on it. As a foreigner running a business in the country, it allowed me to do a lot of official things much faster. But after reading Nandan Nilekani’s manifesto of the program (Rebooting India) and following the almost manic adoption of Aadhaar [the biometric database] across all government sectors, I have become quite wary of it and wishing I could get out. It was initially set up to prevent fraudulent access to government welfare schemes but has quickly become the silver bullet for any government administration issue. The fact that nearly 300 million people – most of them India’s poorest of the poor – were enrolled in the biometric scheme before there was even an act of parliament allowing it is clue number one of the potential problems.

1 See Anand, Geeta. "Modi's Cash Ban Brings Pain, but Corruption-weary India Grits its Teeth." The New York Times, January 2, 2107. www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/world/asia/modi-cash-ban-india

2 See Ong, Sandy. "Does the Data Security Risk of a Billion Indians Handing Over Biometric Information Outweigh the Benefits?" Newsweek Magazine, September 3, 2017. www.newsweek.com/2017/09/15/data-security-india-biometric-data-benefits-surveillance-659029.html

Photograph by James Meadows

Mark (continued): With a population of over a billion people, how to govern is an issue. But it seems that the solution being put into practice is to reduce everyone to a number and attach everything you do to that number as some sort of metadata. The biggest problem I see is that in the wrong hands, any one or group could be isolated and restricted unjustly. The trajectory of a system like this could be used to suddenly prevent a minority group or demographic group from buying anything, going anywhere, make any phone calls, or even "exist" in society. That’s the dystopian view of it. Just see how China is using this kind of system to isolate and persecute Uyghurs in Xinjiang. It is a grave use of government power.

I am not saying that India’s Aadhaar is there yet, but it has the potential. That’s why the current supreme court cases judging the legality of the system is so important. It is a viable means for efficient and secure distribution of government subsidies and welfare schemes. And for such things, I might be willing to give up some of my rights to the government. But I would gladly retain my biometric information for the right to be left alone by any State.

Photograph of the Great Wall of India overlooking Jaipur taken by Mark Miller

India Revisited

You recently moved to Malaysia. How does life there differ from life in India?

Wow. It is night and day. We are still getting to know Malay life, but we really like it. There is a long history of cultural exchanges here, so I feel like the diversity has a different flavor. Our apartment looks over a mosque, and we hear the calls to prayer every day. There is a Hindu temple at the bottom of the hill, and we see Taoists and Buddhists lighting fires for ancestral ghosts all the time.

An obvious difference is that we used to live in the desert of India. Now we live on a tropical island! You can’t get much different than that. It’s another adventure, and I am glad that we as a family can do it. If we are to be lights in this world, we love having the privilege of shining that light no matter where we live.

Find Mark at i55media.com

Photograph of Taj Lake in Udaipur taken by James Meadows

"

New forms of street art are flourishing, having adapted the graffiti artists' tactics of expropriating public space for making a public statement. Most importantly, graffiti has given a voice to the people."

– Henry Chalfant, SubwayArt

Photograph by Henry J Parsons Featuring Begr

ISSUE10

Photograph by Henry J Parsons

HENRY J PARSONS

Photographer

How did you get into photography, and then how did you start photographing graffiti artists?

I have always enjoyed looking at photos of the earth’s surface, satellite imagery and other remote sensing systems. I learned the technical aspects of imaging systems though my professional career. When I first began my career, I worked for a firm conducting larger-scale projects of entire cities for Google Maps. In 2010 I was recruited by a digital mapping company and moved from Georgia to California after completing my undergrad. The project team I was working with used Adobe Lightroom to edit high resolution images taken from aerial platforms – typically a Cessna fixed-wing aircraft. It was during this time that I learned the technical facets of cameras and processing digital photography. Living in California exposed me to an elevated amount of graffiti in a urban landscape I had not seen growing up in Atlanta – entire billboards and alleys covered with detailed pieces. It was then I started photographing graffiti as I would visit family in Los Angeles.

After a few years, I moved back to Atlanta and the semi-legal version street art conference Living Walls had begun. At that time, from an outsider's perspective, the introduction of street art into Atlanta’s urban landscape intensified the existing graffiti culture. I took notice of both visual art forms and began documenting street art and graffiti in Atlanta as a full-time hobby with two friends I had met through @weloveatl meet-ups. I would link up with them and explore abandoned parts of Atlanta, rail lines, tunnels, and underpasses. This was before Georgia became a center for film studios, and the "Hunger Games" effect had not yet taken hold of the city's prime industrial abandoned locations. We just covered as much ground and documented as much as we could every weekend. My photographic aesthetic and ability to find hidden locations caught the attention of a writer that moved to Atlanta from New York. He saw something with me that I didn't even know existed. He began allowing me to photograph him painting and mentoring me in the art and culture of graffiti.

Above: Photograph of Nels One WAI @grafilthy_art

Previous page: Photograph of Poest FSA @ggone_poestal

Henry J Parsons

Do you have any crazy stories from hanging out with the graffiti artists, or is it usually pretty chill?

Hanging out is one thing, which is usually pretty chill. Graff artists like the same things you and I do, and some of my closest friends have developed out of this culture. It can be chill, depending on the mission. And documenting and assisting in the production of graffiti is most def a mission. It all depends on the location and medium the writer you are working with has chosen. All the tactical elements are there – you lay out a time, meeting points, strategy, supplies, and recon where you are painting. Often the role of the photographer is to provide an extra set of eyes, carry ladders, rollers or bags of paint. I've been chased out of abandoned warehouses by police, hopped barbed wire fences at construction sites between security shift changes, ducked around security dogs, clawed my way through freshly clipped rips in fences, and had to talk my way out of a trespassing violation more than once. It’s all a part of the mission. The authenticity of what you are doing is so uncommon, witnessing creation of a truly American art form that is anthropological in a sense. Graffiti is the modern form of parietal art.

Photograph of Delvs Few and Far, FS LP @devls102

(HJP, continued) That being said, I would not advise someone to take this up as a hobby. It’s often dangerous – people die painting graffiti, walking train lines, or falling through entire floors of a structurally unsound building. Additionally, as an outsider you are dealing with an element of society that already does not respect the law, and extreme risk-taking behaviors are the norm. What is done on these missions is not safe or advisable to anyone with a reasonable amount of risk aversion.

Who or what inspires you?

My close friends, nature, the artists I am able document. Having authentic friendships with those that will bring out the best in you, pushing you creatively and spiritually and to live with integrity. Trustworthy individuals that are invested in you are hard to find in this world. I try to live every day with gratitude to be doing what I am doing. To travel, to interact with the writers and illustrators, to experience something John Q Public scoffs at or ignores, to walk the line as a outsider/civilian to observe and document this American art form and subculture.

Above and next page: Wane COD @waneonecod

Henry J Parsons

"The authenticity of what you are doing is so uncommon –witnessing creation in a truly American art form that is anthropological in a sense."

You always seem to post a quote – usually from a song – with your Instagram photos. Do you write down the quotes when you find them or do they pop into your head when you are posting?

I am a very moody person. Music and literature have been a staple of my life for a long time. I am usually quoting directly from what I am reading or listening to. When I am editing in Lightroom I always listen to music, so I may pull a quote from one of the lyrics. In the case of literature, I find something I want to read over again, so I will mark it in the book and come back to it later and try to make the quote tie into the narrative of the photography. Right now I am listening to a lot of J. Cole, Radiohead, Anderson Paak, Kendrick Lamar, and Odezza.

Photograph of Poest FSA @ggone_poestal

Henry J Parsons

Photograph of Xaust CBS MFK @heavyhandsx

Henry J Parsons

In your Instagram profile, you have the quote from Valparaiso by Don DeLillo: " I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble." What does this quote mean to you?

Don DeLillo is an often-overlooked American fiction author. His novels are epic staples of postmodern fiction, and often question the things we readily accept as reality and the fabric of our society. What this quote means to me is this: There are people in this world that are wearing facades, disingenuous, self-centered, and opportunistic in how they build relationships. I am not interested in wasting my precious and finite time in listening to someone's deepest desires, ambitions, and how much they want to "help" me with mine, entertaining what is interesting to them. I've reached a point in my life where I carry a different set of values than most. What interests me is authenticity, genuine creative experiences, with meaningful individuals, in uncommon spaces. The soul is the representation for the higher self, our inner divinity. This quote means don’t give me your ego's bullshit. Give tiny sips of your true self. Reveal to me who you really are because I will find out eventually.

"Reveal to me who you really are because I will find out eventually."

The theme of Issue Ten is "Change." Can you tell us about a situation or moment that was lifechanging for you?

Change is the only thing we can count on in life. A moment that changed me is last year after my grandmother had passed away and I had just gone through a divorce, I went on a trip to Indonesia with one of my closest friends. On part of the trip, we hiked at dawn to the top of an active volcano in eastern Java. It was on the descent that when I realized my real worth, what I am truly capable of accomplishing, the well of resiliency within me. When I meditate, I often think of a place that is just like that volcano, standing on the side overlooking the journey that was behind me, realizing that the moment I was experiencing was because of conscious choice – every choice I made up to that point had led me to the volcano in the South Pacific. It was this day I found my higher consciousness and tapped into the universe inside of me.

Follow Henry J Parsons on Instagram @h_j_parsons

Drew Brucker

Photographer

How did you get into photography?

For me, I really got into photography after our Iceland trip last summer. After seeing larger-thanlife waterfalls, witnessing massive geyser eruptions, trekking on glaciers, and snowmobiling down massive mountainsides, it became clear that my iPhone wasn’t cutting it anymore. I had gotten photos and videos on the trip, but they didn’t do the trip justice. Iceland was one of the most unique and captivating experiences I’d ever had, and I felt like I couldn't capture its beauty like I’d hoped.

It really struck me when I got home, showing friends and family photos from the trip. I remember saying, "You should have seen it" and "It was even better in person" over and over again. That really kind of bugged me. I wanted to capture things in a way that others felt like they were there in the present.

I had no photography experience, but I knew that I wanted to learn more. So for the next month or so, I started watching YouTube videos and Lynda courses to learn the basics of photography: aperture, shutter speed, ISO – I had no clue what they meant. I wanted to buy a camera immediately, but I also wanted to make sure I’d still be interested in photography for a little while before I went out and bought expensive camera equipment. Several weeks went by, and I was still just as curious and obsessed as I was at the beginning, so I bought one – and the rest is history.

Who or what inspires you?

I think the art of photography in general inspires me. There’s so much to learn, and lessons are found just about everywhere.

The thing that I love the most is that photography gives us a voice that speaks a universal language, while also allowing the person behind the camera to be completely unique and different.

"Lessons are found just about everywhere."

Drew Brucker

Can you tell us about a situation or moment that was life changing for you?

Over the years, there have been several life-altering moments for me. Most recently though, I’ve become a home owner, landed a key marketing job with a tech unicorn, and married the girl of my dreams. Not too bad!

What is one change – in mindset or gear – that you have made over the course of your photographic journey that helps you make better photographs?

One of the most important things I’ve learned, and subsequently has helped me take better photographs, is to let your intuition speak.

Some of my best photos come from sudden and disguised moments that I wasn’t expecting. Almost a "right place, right time" kind of moment, really. Those are the opportunities I look for and seek out. These are the kind of photos that happen when they happen and disappear forever if you’re not prepared to shoot them.

Drew Brucker

Can you tell us about your n e v e r / h o m e [project]? Why did you start it, and what do you hope to accomplish?

The idea behind the n e v e r / h o m e [project] was essentially formed from an encounter I had while shooting street content in downtown Atlanta.

I crossed paths with a homeless man who was urging me to photograph him after seeing my camera in-hand. He was a very lively kind of guy, and we got into a pretty engaging conversation while I photographed him. After that, I realized that downtown Atlanta had some lost stories to tell by the people most don’t see.

I wanted to step into their world and shine some light on their situations. In order to do that, I knew I had to do something more, and shortly after, I started a GoFundMe page where 100% of the donations will go toward food and clothing for Atlanta’s displaced.

My original goal was to collect $250 or so – collecting donations from a few people in my inner circle. Then social media jumped in, and we surpassed $500 in donations relatively overnight. The new goal is now set at $1,000. We’re about 75% of the way there. Once we hit that number, myself and a few others are planning to personally deliver food and clothing directly to these folks. That will be an amazingly rewarding experience.

I’d never organized a fundraiser before. And that’s essentially the beauty of it. Photography and the stories being told through my lens essentially made that happen.

My encounter with Jermaine was really the jumping off point for the fund raiser. He was all smiles but had the most incredibly heartbreaking stories to tell. Two kids but no relationship with them because of the mother, HIV positive, sexually assaulted and abused . . . the list went on and on, but he was incredibly transparent about everything – and somehow mostly unfazed by all those transgressions.

I noticed he seemed to hang out around this Rising Roll (in the background of the photo). I asked him if there was a particular reason, and he explained it was so he could get Wi-Fi for his mobile phone. It just so happened to reach a few feet outside of the shop, reaching just far enough for him to keep up with the outside world.

Jermaine and I have remained in touch, often communicating through Facebook Messenger. He has finally found a home and is making moves to better his situation.

Jermaine

Digger is another one of those individuals that just struck me immediately when I saw him. His character just seemed to yell out at me. I knew he had some stories to tell.

As a nearly blind vet living nomadically, Digger’s life is something we can only imagine in our nightmares. He often sleeps outside but sometimes will ask shop owners in the Five Points area for a place inside to lay his head. But for him, home is a matter of perspective.

I spent about a half hour with Digger, talking about anything and everything he wanted to talked about. Oftentimes, like with Digger, I find myself just listening. I think that’s what displaced folks enjoy the most about our encounters – I just lend an ear and spend more time listening than talking.

Anthony lives outside, under a church in downtown Atlanta. But you wouldn’t know that meeting him. His character seemed invincible to the trials confronted him, and his smile was as infectious as they come. I spent a good bit of time with Anthony, getting to know some of his story.

I was amazed to learn that in his heyday he used to perform Michael Jackson acts in Las Vegas. Not only did he put those moves on display for me, he also rapped a full-length original song he had written. And pretty well too!

Anthony

I met Darrell in East Atlanta Village as he was idling in a local shop’s back parking lot. As with all my subjects in this project, he had an overabundance of unfortunate events that foretold his state of homelessness. While talking to him, I quickly noticed that he was more curious about what I had to say, and getting to know me, rather than going into detail about his downfalls. One thing he did address was the often misguided perception of who he is based on his current state of displacement: "A lot of folks out here are confused. They look at me and think I’m out here raising hell. I don’t rob. I don’t steal. I don’t take. I don’t hurt nobody. God loves us all. I’m a child of God. We’re supposed to be out here lovin' one another."

The two things that stood out the most to me about Darrell were his unselfish nature and his unfazed joy. Because of that, I wanted to capture and present an image that best represented his soul. I felt like this one did just that.

Darrell

Follow Drew on Instagram @dcbruck

Courtney Jones Photographer

How did you get into photography?

I have two people who inspired me to get into photography. A friend of mine, Asia Dunn, has been into photography since she was a child. Her work always moves me. My second inspiration is Gordon Parks. I went to a Gordon Parks exhibit a few years ago. His photos evoked so many emotions within me that I decided it was time for me to take a shot. My mom surprised me by buying my first DSLR camera. My boyfriend purchased my first lens. I’ve come to love photography ever since. It’s really helped me in many ways as being an outlet for self-expression.

Most of your photographs have a sense of nostalgia. Do you feel that when you take them or edit them?

Honestly when taking photos, I aim to take something so simple and make it beautiful. I really want anybody viewing my photos to feel like they’re a part of the experience that’s taking place.

Can you tell us a little about your trip to Valladolid, Mexico?

I went to Mexico for a quick vacation. While I was there, I went to Chichen Itza, which is an archaeological site built by the Mayan people. Valladolid was a small town that was nearby, and I completely fell in love with how authentic this town felt. I ended up spending a couple hours walking around trying to capture as much as possible.

What was Coney Island like?

Coney Island was definitely a lot of fun! It literally felt I was a kid again. There was so much to do there. You could get on rides, play games, go to the beach, and eat delicious junk food. It was a truly great experience.

In this issue, we are talking about change. What is one thing that you would like to see change in the world?

It’s really disheartening when you hear every day that another black person has been killed or is being treated unfairly because of how society perceives us. I’m tired of the constant suffering of darker-skinned people. I’m tired of feeling that black lives don’t matter. I’m tired of racism. It’s been long overdue for society to change the way it thinks. One change I would love to see, not only here in the United States but in the world, is racial equality.

How

As far as being a better photographer, I definitely would like to challenge myself to take more risks and experiment with other photography genres. Becoming a better person is a work in progress. Everyday, I strive to be better than the person I was the day before.

would you like to change in the future to become a better person and/or photographer?

Follow Courtney on Instagram @courttakesphotos

Howard Levenson

Photographer

Los Angeles, Early 90s

Howard Levenson

Sunday on Broadway, Los Angeles, early 90s

Howard Levenson

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up on Long Island. As an adult I have lived in Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Brooklyn, and the British Virgin Islands. I currently live with my beautiful wife and two dogs in Atlanta. Most of what there is to know about me is tied to the places I have lived, my family, and the friends I spent time with along the way.

How did you originally get into photography?

Close friends of my parents gave me my first camera for my 13th birthday. It was a Canon Canonet Rangefinder. For sure that was what planted the seed. Seven years later, when attending college at The New School, I took a single darkroom class at Parsons. In that class I learned how to process and print black and white film. That class definitely inspired me to take a lot more photos. It was during this time that I realized I had an affinity for street photography. A few years later I purchased a bunch of used darkroom equipment. That’s when it all started coming together.

Cinque Terre, Italy, 2001

What inspires you?

I strongly believe that art, music, and culture make the world a more beautiful and interesting place. The differences between us and the world’s cross-pollination of ideas and cultures are what I find most engaging. Korean tacos are a good contemporary example. Musical mash-ups featuring rock and rap artists is another. The world is a better place as a result of both of these phenomena, and they are just two very small examples of a much broader concept.

I am inspired by the premise that in a post-Trump world, the backlash from his divisive, racist, and shortsighted policies will result in swift and meaningful steps towards a more just, tolerant, and egalitarian society.

Lisbon, Portugal, 2011

What is Real Cool Vibe and how did you decide to start that business?

I started Real Cool Vibe (www.realcoolvibe.com) in the summer of 2017. I sell things like artistdesigned t-shirts, art prints, stickers, and decorative magnets. It was my full-time job for about six months, but it has since evolved into something more akin to my side hustle. I am interested in evolving trends in branding, digital culture, and e-commerce and used this business to do a deep dive on those subjects. I have learned a lot, and I enjoy having a long-term project that I can nurture. Of course to make the project fun, I focus on content that I personally find interesting. Our brand is all about cool art and sharing it with a like-minded audience.

Howard Levenson

Flea, Roxy, Los Angeles, early 90s

Howard Levenson

Can you tell us about living in the East Village of Manhattan and about your neighbor that you photographed?

I lived on Avenue B, between 3rd and 4th Streets, from 1988 to 1990. It was a really vibrant and diverse neighborhood with an interesting mix of residents. I lived in a four-story walk-up building that had four apartments per floor. Most of my neighbors were Hispanic families – some with three generations living in a single apartment. My next-door neighbor was a 93-year-old retired Jewish mobster with lifelong ties to lower Manhattan. We became fast friends. He told me lots of stories about the history of our neighborhood and his life in crime. Sometimes when he’d talk I’d take photographs.

Abe, New York, New York, 1990

One of Abe’s claims to fame was his contention that he invented the insurance scam where flop artists would fall in front of a moving vehicle. With lawyers, doctors, and cons on his payroll, Abe claimed to have staged hundreds of accidents and profited handsomely for his efforts.

I feel fortunate to have lived in this neighborhood when I did. There were dozens of clubs, bars, music venues, and art galleries right at my doorstep. It all left a meaningful impression.

Ronnie, Phoenix, Arizona

When you lived in Phoenix, why did you decide to photograph the women on the street, and what did they tell you about themselves?

I moved to central Phoenix in the summer of 1993 and stayed for almost seven years. I lived in older urban neighborhoods close to the city’s downtown. I cannot say these were good neighborhoods. My various houses were robbed 4 or 5 different times during my time in Phoenix – too many meth heads.

There is an east-west street that runs through Phoenix called Van Buren Street. It was only a few blocks south of where I was living. I haven’t been back in a while, but back in the day, the street was lined with budget motels that were ground zero for sex workers, their pimps, and their clients. I had lived in other big cities, but I had never seen a place where the sex trade was so blatant and exposed.

Doireen, Phoenix, Arizona

During my time in Phoenix, I met and photographed a few dozen sex workers. As you might expect, they typically told stories of being down on their luck. My best photographs are of those individuals who were most willing to tell their story. I found that once my subject was distracted in conversation, they were more likely to drop their guard. When they did, I was able to capture more engaging images.

Mindy, Phoenix, Arizona

This issue is about change. Can you tell us about a life-changing experience or moment?

I believe people are a product of their collective experience and that is certainly true in my case. I lived a few blocks from Tompkins Square Park in the late 1980s during the famous Tompkins Square riots. A few years later, I lived in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots. Both of these events were triggered by social injustice and were influential in shaping my worldview.

ensure the American Dream exists for future generations, we need to take deliberate steps to level the playing field."

I think the most divisive issue in today’s society is income inequality. Minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, and the bottom rung has become way too slippery and unforgiving. Schools and services in low-income neighborhoods are lacking, and so poverty becomes generational.

As a country, we need to acknowledge the fact that the deck is stacked. Our laws are made by wealthy lobbyists and politicians who have done everything they can to consolidate power, increase the wealth gap and promote the status quo. If we do not demand CHANGE from our elected officials, the repercussions on both a national and international front are going to be significant. To ensure the American Dream exists for future generations, we need to take deliberate steps to level the playing field.

"To

Follow Howard on Instagram @realcoolvibe and on his website at www.realcoolvibe.com

Echo Park, Los Angeles, early 90s

Won't You Be

My Neighbor?

Written by Meredith M Howard Edited by Krista Gill Photographs by Meredith M Howard

Atlanta is changing. Young professionals are moving to intown neighborhoods and restoring houses. The Beltline is leading the way for developers to buy old industrial buildings and create new housing and retail sites. All of this improves the quality of life, but as real estate values increase, long-time residents are being displaced. Ryan Gravel, the visionary of the Beltline, actually resigned from the Atlanta Beltline Partnership in 2016 over this very issue. He felt that the city was not providing enough affordable housing in these new developments. How do you revitalize the city and neighborhoods without pushing out those who cannot afford to pay the rising housing costs?

I recently went on a tour of the neighborhood Historic South Atlanta where Focused Community Strategies (FCS) has been working since 2001. FCS has been gradually improving the neighborhood without displacing long-time residents. Jim Wehner, President of FCS, showed us photographs of houses that were vacant just a couple years ago. "These were all houses that were boarded up. One had not been lived in for 15 years. The back half of that one was falling in. People could just get in and out of it. This is where most of the crime in our neighborhood happens – in vacant houses. The houses look pretty rough when we get them."

"How do you revitalize the city and neighborhoods without pushing out those who cannot afford to pay the rising housing costs?"

FCS purchased many of the vacant properties and renovated them, creating beautiful affordable houses. The homes are now owned by low- to moderate-income neighbors. Jim explained, "FCS acts as the bank, and families have 20-year no-interest mortgages with us. Right now we’re managing about 50 mortgages." FCS has been doing this work for a while now, so many families have paid off their mortgage loans and own their homes in full. With stable housing, families are free to invest in other areas of their lives and in their community.

Mural by olive47

"

Living in the neighborhood builds trust and respect – two necessary ingredients for neighborhood transformation."

Housing is not the only thing that has changed in this neighborhood. FCS has created several small businesses that provide needed goods and services and jobs for people in the community. Carver Market and Community Grounds provide healthy affordable food. Jim told us, "Between 8 and 10 a.m. you can get a cup of coffee for $1. Anybody in our neighborhood can afford that. When we first opened, we saw a couple of teens sitting outside and asked them why they weren’t inside. They said, 'It’s too nice. We don’t think it’s for us.’ Of course, we brought them in. People aren’t required to buy anything to use the space, and it’s the only free Wi-Fi in the neighborhood.”

As we walked into Carver Market, we ran into a lady who was just leaving with a bag of groceries. She overflowed with praises for the market, "When I moved into this area I was struggling with my diabetes. I took some cooking classes here which taught me to eat more vegetables. Now my diabetes is under control and I don’t have to take insulin anymore – all because of what this store does. If it wasn’t for Carver, I wouldn’t be eating vegetables." Carver Market is the neighborhood’s only grocery store and offers fresh healthy foods at an affordable price.

Neighbor

FCS is also working with outside partners to help the neighborhood flourish. The public schools in are in the second year of a contract with Purpose Built Schools, which works with the Atlanta Public School system to transform under-performing schools into high-performing schools that put children on a trajectory for success. Jim predicted, "We’re just a few years away from having really stellar schools in the neighborhood."

At the center of FCS’s strategy is neighboring. About half of the people working at FCS live in the neighborhood they serve. This helps the staff really understand what the neighborhood needs and wants. Living in the neighborhood builds trust and respect – two necessary ingredients for neighborhood transformation. FCS staff and leadership experience life in the neighborhood and develop genuine relationships with their neighbors. It makes all the difference.

Anja Williams teaching at class at the Lupton Center

People and organizations all over the country are starting to take note. They began knocking on FCS’s door looking for help with their own charitable efforts. In response to this need, FCS launched the Lupton Center. "The Lupton Center guides people towards a healthier understanding of poverty and how to address it," Jim explained. FCS trains, equips, and partners with other organizations to address the underlying causes of poverty and to help people flourish as human beings. They view each neighbor as an individual created by God who has gifts and abilities that can be used in the cooperative rebuilding of the neighborhood.

Jim described their approach: "It’s really intentional. It’s a long deep dive into a community." FCS has combined smart, generous real estate planning with intentional long-term neighboring to affect positive change in Historic South Atlanta. Consequently, neighbors who have been here for generations are still here – enjoying the benefits of a healthier community.

To learn more, visit www.fcsministries.org and follow them on Instagram @fcsministries

Mural by olive47

Mural in East Atlanta Village. Photograph by Mary Farmer @mferphotography and www.mferphotography.com

After touring Historic South Atlanta (see page 206), I had to find out who was painting the colorfully happy murals that appear all over the neighborhood and signing them "olive47 loves you." I discovered that olive47's murals brighten walls in many other areas of Atlanta and Los Angeles. So I contacted her to talk about her art and inspiration.

– Interview and photographs by Meredith M Howard, unless otherwise noted

We have to start with the tattoo on your back. You say on your website that it is based on the Theory of Reflection. What is that theory, why do you like it, and can you send us a picture it?

First off, one thing anyone should understand about me is that I am a major geek on a lot of levels. According to Merriam-Webster's definition of the law of reflection: "a statement in optics: when light falls upon a plane surface, it is so reflected that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence and that the incident ray, reflected ray, and normal ray all lie in the plane of incidence."

The tattoo on my back is literally an illustration from a vintage science book that was explaining a photo of a cat reflecting in a glass, but I added little antennae to pay homage to "That Darn Cat."

The reason I chose to get that particular one on my back is because the only way I can see it is to look in a mirror.

In art history, a source of light – a candle, lantern, etc. – traditionally symbolizes the presence of god. I actually have three tattoos all regarding light in some depiction. The first one I got indicates luminosity, the back tattoo is about reflection and the other is about refraction. I think as humans, particularly in this day and age, one of our main challenges is to protect our inner light and knowledge of the higher energies beyond ourselves, and my tattoos serve as personal reminders to myself.

Your street art started with collages made from 1950s science books. Is this related to your love of Buckminster Fuller? Do you have any photos of these collages you posted on telephone poles?

As a kid, I could read before I was two. I'm a visual learner. I have a photographic memory and was a voracious reader. I read all our encyclopedias, how-to books, art books, and any and all books about mythology and ancient cultures – particularly Egyptology and hieroglyphics – and also UFO theory. I would pick up these paperbacks for 25-50¢ every time we went to used bookstores. A lot of the books about science and nature I found were already 20-30 years outdated in theory, and there's something about the naivety of the thought and sense of wonder and possibility that these books captured that appeals to me. So I would xerox them and make these new narratives and theories.

Mural at Happy Tabby Cat Cafe, Atlanta

When I was putting these up on telephone poles and in the free mag/flyer holders you used to find in record/counterculture stores in the 90s, obviously digital cameras weren't around and "street art" wasn't a thing. I didn't even think about documenting them. I was just doing it for myself because it amused me. Unfortunately, when I moved from Los Angeles to London in 2007, my subletter threw out a ton of my belongings, which included all my old sketchbooks, paperbacks and copies of the collages, so it's all gone – most likely rotting away in a landfill.

In a way, I suppose it is loosely related to my love of Buckminster Fuller – the whole modern futuristic aesthetic and such. My appreciation for Fuller lies in his lucid visions of a better world and the holistic ideas he brought to art and design. He was a true problem solver and didn't just limit his vision to a single field and truly wanted to solve our problems on a global scale to make our planet sustainable. He was all about the possibilities.

"He was all about the possibilities."

"When we see something cute... it instantly softens our demeanor and puts us in a more relaxed/ better state of mind."

Mural on the Atlanta Beltline

Your murals are so happy, childlike, colorful and cute. Can you tell us a little about your interest in the "psychology of cute"?

Hearing people describe my work as childlike always makes me bristle a bit, as I feel like it discounts all the thought and consideration I put into my work, and others don't take what I am doing seriously. But then, as artists, we can't really control how others see our work once we put it out there, and it doesn’t just belong to us anymore.

I see what I am doing as taking common symbols from various cultures and breaking them down into the most basic shapes to form narratives usually dealing with protection, community and the higher calling of nature in itself. Throughout history, many cultures have covered themselves with animal/nature drawings when in ceremony to promote communication with our ancestral spirits. In the best situations without distraction, I am able to go into a meditative state when working, and I aspire to channel/infuse my intent into the piece I am working on – much like a "visual prayer" or sigil.

I push the cute thing on some of my platforms because it's a quick visceral way to illicit instant sympathetic emotion. When we see something cute, whether it's a kitten or design object, it instantly ignites brain activity in regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex, which are linked to sympathetic emotion and pleasure. It instantly softens our demeanor and puts us in a more relaxed/better state of mind. A lot of companies use this to drive sales (like talking babies in car commercials) or even trying to change the perception of a corporation through use of animals in their logos or advertising. In my work, I’m attempting to trigger this on a number of levels through form, colour and symbolic narrative to elicit an immediate emotional response of happiness and release of our worries, even if it's just for a moment.

olive47

I read in an interview in Drifter Media that your tag "olive47" was a name you made up in 1994 for use in AOL chatrooms. Is your name actually Olive and why don’t you want to attach your real name to your art?

My name is not actually olive, though that's what most people call me these days because explaining over and over gets old. olive47 (all lowercase and one word) was basically an online troll name that I would use to mess with people in chatrooms. For instance, there’d be a chatroom titled "Three's Company" (people looking for threesomes) and I would go in raving about Ms. Roper's caftans or whether Mr. Furley was hot. It was just totally stupid stoner fun, to be honest.

I chose the name "olive" because my housemate was helping me think up a name and asked what vegetable I hate. Even though it's technically a fruit, I hate olives. They're disgusting, and I have no need for them.

I don't use my real name for several reasons. I originally started using it for my art because I didn't want people to be affected by attaching a person to the work, and rather the work would stand on its own, and not be about me, as art often is. This isn't an ego thing for me. Second, I have had way more than my fair share of stalkers and #metoo situations, so it was a way to be able to make myself harder to find and separate myself from that a little. People seem to think if one is an even remotely attractive woman, that they belong to the world, and my privacy has been breached enough that my government name is reserved for actual friends and municipal utility companies only. Finally, these days there is another artist/muralist here in Southern California who shares my real name (but it's a guy), so it's just easier to avoid confusion.

I read in that same interview that you came up with Miss Cupcake in 2005 at the beginning of the cupcake trend. You stuck Miss Cupcake up everywhere as you traveled, and then a producer asked if you wanted to make a toy. How did you decide if that was the right project for you to do, and what is the process of actually producing and distributing the toy? And then you just released a DIY Miss Cupcake and also mentioned a possible artist series. Is that still in the works?

Honestly, the answer to this stuff is super boring and the producer handles all the getting it produced at a factory in China and to a distributor here in the States that gets them to all the stores . . . Also, I got really lucky in that it wasn't something I was really pursuing but was presented to me. Obviously it's interesting to see one's work in new formats. I didn't deal with anything but the design end on that stuff. There was actually a DIY version of Miss Cupcake released back in 2009 with the rest of the original series, and those were sold in Urban Outfitters and a bunch of toy stores as well. The original artist series was cancelled due to the producer overextending his company and not being able to focus on his projects, which really sucked, to be honest. When you trust someone to produce your work and they don't care to give it the attention that it needs to come to fruition, it can really muck things up.

The new cupcake is an XL version of that toy by a different production company. So, if the original was the size of a regular cupcake, the new size is that of one of those giant muffins.

Miss Cupcake at Zimmer Museum in Los Angeles.

Photograph by olive47

You mentioned on Instagram that April 2018 was the first time you ever painted Miss Cupcake big because everyone kept asking you to do it, but you are a contrarian so you kept saying "No." I’m a contrarian, too, so I’m wondering –How has being a contrarian helped or hindered you? And sometimes it seems like an artist can be more commercially successful when they stick with one thing – i.e., doubling down on Miss Cupcake vs. doing random projects that may interest you. What are your thoughts on that?

I originally drew Miss Cupcake to make fun of the ladies in my office that were obsessed with the cupcake craze of the mid 2000s. Even though she's "super cute" and visually enticing, if you really look at her expression, she's completely banal, which is what I think of people who follow most food trends (or trends in general.) In a way, it's kind of ironic that of all my stuff, it's one of the things that got the most response. In regards to doubling down on painting her in hopes of more commercial success, imagine being told you have to paint the most meaningless thing you've ever created over and over for years. That seems like a special sort of Hell. No thanks. If I was going to paint the same thing over and over, it never would have been her. That said, I don't mind painting her every now and then these days. If I had to choose one symbol, I would just paint the one-eyed sperm EVERYWHERE, as sperm are meaningful facets in the creation of life, yet hilarious and super fun for me to paint. However, a lot of stupid sexscared people find the idea of them to be gross, so my dream of painting a pink sperm covered building will have to wait. For now.

" They are comfortable seeing the same thing over and over because it isn't challenging to thought."

Yeah, it’s definitely a fact that the most successful people in art, street art in particular, have figured out a gimmick. However, a lot of the time, it seems that it doesn't matter if the thought behind the work is original or clever or even if the work is technically good. People like to see the familiar. They are comfortable seeing the same thing over and over because it isn't challenging to thought. A lot of people just don't like to think for themselves. They like to be told what's cool, who to listen to, how to dress, what to think, who to follow. And a lot of "artists" doing this aren't even interested in truly immersing themselves in the dialogue of art. They just see that it's a quick way to the fame quotient and Instagram "likes" that everyone is obsessed with these days. And honestly, that's pretty f**king sad. I certainly struggle with this sometimes, as I've often been told I should find my gimmick by others. I know it would probably make me more instantly accessible or categorized. But that’s not my path, nor the point of art for me nor why I am compelled to make work, and certainly not what drives my soul. I find it boring and think often limits growth. My art heroes are Paul Klee and Buckminster Fuller. They never limited their work like that, and I don't want to either.

"There's no reason to hold back from doing the things you desire, because you could be gone in a matter of just one wrong step."

The theme of Issue Ten is "change." Can you tell us about a situation or moment that was lifechanging for you?

The last day of my freshman year of art school, one of my best friends was urban exploring in a building across from our dorm and accidentally fell three stories after stepping onto a ledge that crumbled beneath her feet. Berni was in a coma for a week before she passed. It wasn't the first time I had dealt with death in my life, but it was the first time it seemed completely senseless. It changed my whole approach to life in a profound way. I lost a lot of fear in my life. There's no reason to hold back from doing the things you desire, because you could be gone in a matter of just one wrong step. Not that I've always made the best decisions, but that's what life is about – learning from our mistakes and missteps, whether in our art or just on a dayto-day basis. Life is ever changing so if stuff is going shitty for you, it can turn around in an instant because tomorrow is always going to be different from yesterday. And tell your friends you love them often.

Female Warriors

This is a HUGE WALL. Painting the wall in one week while battling the cold wind and navigating a lift around a staircase and strings of lights was not easy. But these two strong and creative women got it done – beautifully. In the middle of this project, I sat down to talk to Lela Brunet and Janice Rago about how they met, how they collaborated on this project, and their thoughts on being women in the Atlanta art scene.

– Interview and photographs by Meredith M Howard

Meredith: How did you meet, and then how did you decide you wanted to do a project together?

Janice: We met at Drink and Doodle for ABV Gallery. They choose 12 artists every few months, and we were two of the artists there one night.

Lela: I had gone through the list of artists and saw that you are friends with Caitlin on Facebook, so I thought I should say "hey."

Janice: So we had fun at Drink and Doodle talking and hanging out. We both do figurative. My figures are all oils. I do a lot of mixed media in my backgrounds. And then Lela does figures, too, but mainly graphite.

Lela: And I do a lot of mixed media. So we just start talking about all of that, and I was doing a lot of walls. It was starting to pick up a little bit. Oh, I remember. I was super pregnant, and I needed help. I thought, "Who is an amazing artist and would be able to execute this?" So it kind of came about like that. We did two walls, and it was kind of a tester to see if we could work together.

Janice: We worked long hours.

Lela: We’re both chicks, and I trust her. It was amazing. So we’ve been wanting to do a project where we were going to get the wall 50/50 and start from ground zero. This was our first. We both do figurative, but we both have an abstract style that we like to play with. This was a really fun, playful one, too, where it’s not high-stress figurative.

"This was a really fun, playful one."

Janice: We did a show in January that was collaborative, too. It was fun. I pulled out some paintings that I had kind of given up on. I passed them to Lela and she was like, "OK, I’ve got it." And then when she passed them back, I was like, "Oh, my God!" It’s fun passing a painting off and trusting someone to work on your work and not ruin it but make it better.

Lela: And it’s work that’s been in "Time Out" – where I just can’t look at it or don’t know what to do with it. So, giving it to someone and saying, “Just do whatever you want with it,” and having it come back and feeling like – "Yes!" – is awesome. That was another good way to collaborate. And our studios are in the same warehouse, so it's really fun to be able to knock on the door and ask, "What do you think about this?" Having a true collaborator and peer that you trust. This is my biggest wall, and I wanted Janice on this project from the beginning. I fought really hard for that.

Meredith: I’ve watched you do this very physical work all week. How do you feel? Are you exhausted? Are you sore at the end of the day?

Janice: You kind of just push through it. I am tired, but it’s also exciting, and I think the adrenaline comes each day when you come back to it. You can do a big project and you’re tired and you think, "I’m not going to do it again for a while," but then another project comes and you say, "I’ll take it!" You enjoy it, and I’d rather be doing this than sitting behind a desk every day.

Lela: We were here until 10:00 last night, crawled into bed, woke up, and then once I get here, I’m energized and I know I have all of this stuff to do. An outdoor mural is hard because our deadline is Tuesday, but it’s probably going to rain Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, so we have to use our time wisely. With indoor murals, too, we’ve worked all night. We did one for Fritti, and we would leave at like 8:00 in the morning. But you do it. You love it. How many people can say they get to do what they love and feel like a warrior?

Janice: Yeah!

Lela: There are sacrifices, though. Like your dog – you were calling to make sure your boyfriend was taking care of the dog.

Meredith: But, Lela, you have a baby.

Janice: It is different.

Lela: Yes, my husband and my baby are feeling very neglected. I want to make sure I see my baby, and then I have to work. There’s this crushing feeling, but then I get to my wall, and I’m like, "You know what? I’ve got to do this." It’s love.

Meredith: When you were coming up with concepts for this wall in particular, how did you work together?

Janice: Lela had done a lot of sketches on the computer prior to this. And I had done a whole series of these diamonds in all different colors. We just took the images and played around with them.

Lela: Having someone there and being able to pull their images in and look at it, it’s nice. Those other sketches that we proposed for this project are going to stick around. We’re looking for more projects.

Meredith: Where do you get inspiration from?

Lela: For me, I’ll take a break and go to another city and go to the art museums. Museums always get me super inspired. That’s why you’ll see certain influences in my series. "Wow, you must have been looking at a lot of Byzantine art." Or – "You were totally in the Modern section." A lot of times, I have to go exercise or meditate, and something will inspire me. I have to be careful of looking at other artists on Instagram because I get overwhelmed.

Janice: It can be discouraging.

Lela: We’ve talked about that. When I start looking at what other mural artists are doing, my mind gets blown. And I think, "I want to do that." But then it freaks me out because I think, “How am I going to scale a 15-story building and also put a figure on it? How the hell am I going to do that?” And then, I tell myself, "Stop." Like Hense just did that massive Midtown building with an installation.

Janice: But he also has that whole crew that helps.

Lela: Yeah, well, I want a crew.

Janice: I can’t afford a crew.

Lela: We’re each others’ crew. One day, we’ll have minions. Mark our words.

"How many people can say they get to do what they love and feel like a warrior?"

Meredith: I’m curious, from an artist’s perspective, does your art usually turn out how you pictured it, or does it evolve and become better, or does it fall short of your vision?

Janice and Lela: All of those.

Janice: It’s all of it, but I feel like I’ll have a picture planned but it becomes better. I’ll have a certain thing in mind, but then it changes because happy accidents happen. Then I just play off of that.

Lela: I admire that about her because my work hasn’t been able to do that in a while. If I have a series I have to get done, these days, I don’t have the time to make a mistake. But that’s made me be more strategic, and my stuff is distinctively mine. I’ve discovered what works for me. But that can be bad because I have to change as an artist. How can you change but also still be "you.”

Janice: It’s hard.

Lela: Experiment – but still remain true to yourself. I admire Janice for her spontaneity. Her work is a living thing. It’s growing as she does it. I love that.

Meredith: Janice, I’m interested in how you got into figurative art because I read in your interview in Voyage ATL that you were originally painting flowers and that you hated painting figures. How did you start painting figures?

Janice: My last year of college is when I took on the challenge and thought, "OK, I’m going to start doing more figurative." During high school, I did fashion design, so there’s a fascination in it because it’s so challenging. I actually grew to enjoy it.

Meredith: So it got easier?

Janice: Yeah, it got easier. And now knowing how shadows go, it’s kind of just second nature. I used to believe in not buying your blacks. I mixed all my colors from primaries. I bought my first blacks about four years ago. I used to always mix. Because you get your richest blacks from mixing. You can’t get that from a tube of paint. So I’ve always done that and the bigger my projects got, I finally had to let go.

Lela: Did a professor do that to you?

Janice: Yeah, I was trained like that. The thing is, if you mix your own blacks, you’ve got to mix enough. You have to get it done before it dries because you can’t remix the same color. But one time I was working on this eight-foot painting in Austin, Texas at one of the bars down there and I got it all done and got to the last day and the pigment changed on part of it. I looked at my roommate and said, "I am going to cry right now." I stayed up all night and had to redo the entire painting.

Lela: I can’t hear that right now.

Janice: That sinking feeling was mortifying. I got it done, but now I just buy the black paint. I still enjoy it. On my Instagram feed you can see a color series I did. I just love color combinations. I’m fascinated with color. I think a lot of that came from mixing my own colors. It’s like a formula in your head.

Meredith: How would you describe the Atlanta art scene as opposed to other cities?

Lela: I would say that we have a very special Southern renaissance going on right now.

Janice: Yeah, that’s pretty big. From my perspective, I feel like it’s pretty diverse. There’s a whole range of artists in different mediums. I was talking to somebody a week ago and in their opinion they didn’t think it was diverse at all, and I was taken aback. I see people thriving in all mediums, not just painting. I feel like everyone embraces it all. I think Atlanta is starting to figure it out a little bit more. It’s not New York or California.

Lela: I don’t want it to be New York or California.

Janice: I don’t either, but it’s getting to that point where people are actually acknowledging it. A lot of cities still don’t want murals everywhere.

"We have a very special Southern renaissance going on right now."

Lela: I think there are some heavy-hitters in Atlanta that are making some big moves and doing some really awesome stuff. Like Hense is a wonderful example. He’s all over the world. And then you have people like Peter Ferrari and Greg Mike and the galleries that are showing local Southern artists. We’re staying here and putting our stamp on the city. And people are moving here. The movie industry. The technology industry. I just did the NCR building, and they said, "We want this to be the Southern technology hub." Music, food, and fashion. My sister lives in LA and is a fashion designer and she said, "Man, Atlanta. There’s some stuff happening there." I make a full-time living as a professional artist, and I’m busy. I can’t ask for more.

I will say that we’re a very welcoming city. If someone comes and wants to paint . . . like Greg Mike always brings in international artists. Peter Ferrari gave me my first wall for Forward Warrior, and I had never painted a wall. He’s doing that constantly with artists that are Atlanta-based. We were just talking about Forward Warrior. For murals and artists, I think it’s great. If you want to be a professional artist and you work hard enough, you can do it. The whole starving artist thing is not true. I’m making a full-time living, and I’m a mom and I’m a woman. I think it’s a great place that’s thriving.

Janice: I think it’s true on certain levels. I think we all go through that starving artist phase.

Lela: Yeah, and that’s important.

Janice: You grow from that.

Lela: I think in any profession, you start off with very little experience and having to work to get it.

Janice: I’ve gone through the phase of eating a banana and granola bar every day, but it’s worth it when you look back on it.

Lela: As a photographer, Meredith, what do you think? Yours is a different medium. What do you think about Atlanta?

Meredith: I think it’s great. Like what you were saying, Atlanta is very welcoming, and there is untapped opportunity. The art scene is actually growing. Whereas I think if you were to go to New York, there are so many people packed into such a tight space that it’s much more competitive and harder to find your niche. Here, there is more space.

Lela: I went to the Midtown Alliance and they were talking about how fast the city is growing and how to make it more people-friendly. And one council woman said, "People love art. So, we should have art." It’s funny to say it like that, but it’s true. Like Lauren Pallotta, she’s always doing things with the community and getting the neighborhoods involved.

[I had the opportunity to interview Lela about her background in Issue Two, so I took this opportunity to find out more about Janice.]

Meredith: Janice, I read that you were born in Hawaii and that you also lived in Germany and England. Is that right?

Janice: Yes, my dad was in the Air Force. He was a Master Sergeant for 25 years.

Meredith: At what age did you move to Germany?

Janice: I moved to Germany when I was in first grade. So, all of elementary school I was in Germany. Then, I moved to England in middle school and part of high school.

Meredith: How was all of that moving around?

Janice: When I was younger, it was tough. I always hated it because you would have to make new friends every time you moved. We even moved bases within the countries, too. As I got older I learned to appreciate it, and then you miss it . . . [When we moved to the United States] it was a little bit of a culture shock because my mom wanted Texas, my dad wanted Colorado, but we got Valdosta, Georgia. Bible Belt area. But I met some of the best people there, so it was great. I went to college down there. Then I moved to Austin, Texas for a couple of years. Then I came back to Georgia. And I’m glad. Atlanta’s great.

Meredith: Do you miss Germany?

Janice: I do. The food is so good. My all-time favorite restaurant is there. It’s called El Perada. The owners were phenomenal. I miss the traveling. When you’re in Germany you can just drive and go to the countries all around it.

Female Warriors

Janice (continued): Every summer, we would go to Korea for three months. So I’ve kind of always just been all over. My mom would leave my sister and I at my aunt’s house in Seoul, and Mom would be an hour and half away at her mom’s house. My mom’s sister’s family can’t speak English. They are all Korean. So, you have to speak Korean or you can’t communicate. I’ve been going since I was a baby, so I would go and I would forget English and come back only speaking Korean . . . I was always just moving. I think that makes it easier for me to move – to kind of drop and go. In Austin, I didn’t know I was coming to Atlanta until three months prior, and I thought, "I’m just going to try out Atlanta."

Meredith: How do the murals compare to your studio work? Do you enjoy one more than the other?

Janice: I like the variety. You always miss the other, but then you get excited to do the other. For me, I need the challenge. If I don’t have the challenge, I get bored. I like these [murals] because it’s challenging. And it’s just fun . . . I haven’t even started on my personal work this year. I’ve been so busy with murals. Well, I did the show with Lela in January. And I’m working on work in a couple of restaurants . . . I just need to remember to schedule time to focus on my own work. It’s hard for me to find the balance. My boyfriend is teaching me a lot in that area.

Meredith: Is he an artist?

Janice: No, he and his brother started King of Pops.

Meredith: Oh, I didn’t know that! I saw the mural you painted for them, and I didn’t realize that was your boyfriend's company.

Female Warriors

Janice: Yeah, he’s been trying to teach me the business side. And he’s got a creative side to him, too. He doesn’t think so, but he’ll see things in my work that I never thought of.

It was funny because I had just finished that Bishop’s wall in Chamblee on Friday afternoon, and I was talking to Nick later and saying, "The colors are just beautiful. Each diamond is kind of like it’s own painting in itself." And he said, “Do you think you could do one at the office?” (They have that new headquarters that’s massive.) And I said, "Sure." And then he said, "But by Monday." He wanted to surprise the employees. And I was like, “What?!” But I had all of this paint left over, so I said, "Alright. Let’s do it." So, I did that 30-foot mural right after I had just finished a 40-foot mural. But it was fun . . . I just love this diamond pattern. You can’t ever replicate the exact same thing.

Meredith: So, Lela, while Janice is working on some restaurants and some personal work, what will you be doing next?

Lela: I just finished a wall at Soul Cycle and have one more before the month of May is over. And of course Forward Warrior in June! As the summer rolls in and the heat wave really starts, I will be moving indoors to work in my studio on a large series for a solo show that will be in August at Kai Lin Gallery. I am really aching to switch to smaller works compared to the massive walls and to have a little time to reflect and create in the privacy of my studio. Mural work is so physically demanding, so while I work on walls I really don’t get in much running, which is a passion of mine. I look forward to having the time and energy to start training for my next half-marathon. My mural schedule will pick back up in early September.

Photograph by Meredith M Howard

Beyond Walls

"How can I live my life as a conduit to ensure that the people around me are better?"

– Terence Lester, Love

Patty Jansen Photographer

Patty Jansen

Where do you live, and what are three words to describe your city?

I live in Amsterdam. The three words to describe my city would be home, multicultural, world city.

Can you tell us a little about yourself, and why you take photographs?

I’m a medical doctor working in an academic setting who has specialized in hematopathology. As such, I look through the microscope for hours per day and diagnose and research hematologic diseases such as lymphomas and leukemias. In my profession, I’ve learned to look for patterns, colors, forms, consistencies and aberrancies in human disease. I noticed that when I was walking outside, I looked with a similarly curious eye and felt the urge to document the patterns, different types of people and beauty I saw, so I bought my first decent camera a year ago. Since then, I rarely go out without taking it with me.

Your photographs have strong composition, and some of them remind me of a Mondrian painting. Can you tell us how you learned to see compositionally? What are you saying to yourself when you are looking for a scene to photograph?

The eye of the pathologist is trained to move around and explore the whole frame. I'm not sure if that helped me to see in compositions, but it helps in the visual awareness of detail and context. I like lines, patterns and abstractions a lot. I’ve always been fascinated by modern art, and maybe that helped as well. It makes me very shy to be compared with a great painter like Mondrian, of course, although I live in the land where he was born. Maybe I was subconsciously influenced by his work, which I admire very much.

Patty Jansen

Patty Jansen

Who or what inspires you?

I really don’t have a straight answer to that. Since I started my account on Instagram, I’ve looked at photos posted by other accounts, but mostly as an observer of art, and not primarily to study the photos posted or to be inspired. My own pictures are usually shot on intuition and not constructed or planned. It’s only recently that I’m actively studying some of the photographers I follow on Instagram more closely, as well as the classic and famous photographers like Saul Leiter, Fred Herzog and Ernst Haas, to understand why or why not a photo is beautiful and what makes the difference to create something extraordinary. This also has made me a lot more selfconscious, because there now are a lot of pictures I take that I don’t think are good enough – but maybe that’s all part of the learning process and being confronted with sublime and experienced photographers. I also try to comfort myself with the thought that I’ve only really started a year ago.

Patty Jansen

Patty Jansen

Patty Jansen

What is the biggest struggle that you have overcome – or are working to overcome – in your life?

I think I’m not in the position to call anything in my life a struggle, which is a word I associate with threatening life circumstances like war, famine or other extreme socioeconomic circumstances. I would rather think in terms of challenges, like combining work and family life and still find the space for photography, literature, concerts, alone time, etc. Of course compared to most of the rest of the world, this is quite a luxurious position.

What gives you hope?

I can get really hopeful when I see young people fight for their ideals and be willing to take risks for them. A good example was the founding of the "Never Again" movement by students of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February this year, which was spurred by the killing of 17 students and staff members by a gunman and former student of that school, and which sparked demonstrations and unprecedented demands for gun control, resulting in legislative actions.

Follow Patty on Instagram @patty_jansen

JENNIFER MCKINNON RICHMAN Photographer

Jennifer McKinnon Richman

Where do you live, and what are three words to describe your city?

I have lived in Atlanta, Georgia for almost 11 years, but I was born and raised on the West Coast.

Historic. Diverse. Developing.

Can you tell us a little about yourself, and why you take photographs?

I have always enjoyed piecing things together, whether it was through decoupage (the art of adhering paper to items), quilting (the art of piecing together different fabrics), or collage (the art of layering papers). It wasn't until about five years ago, when my three children were all in elementary school, that I dusted off my Olympus and started to put it to good use. My original plan was to use my photographs as inspiration for mixed media pieces, but I fell in love with the instant gratification that digital images brought me.

"My original plan was to use my photographs as inspiration for mixed media pieces, but I fell in love with the instant gratification that digital images brought me."

Over the last few years, I have taken several art classes including drawing, composition, color theory, and collage. In addition, I took photography classes and learned how to use editing software. I approach my photography by shaping each composition as I do a collage. I enjoy capturing small details – focusing on layers created by color, texture, and shapes – and seeing how they interact with one another. But perhaps what I love most about photography is that it forces me to really stop, look around, and be present in my surroundings.

I love wandering the streets of a city and capturing the little details that are often overlooked but tell a story. In Cuba, I found the laundry hanging out to dry fascinating. In Amsterdam, it wasn't the old buildings that I fell in love with; instead, it was a wharf full of shipping containers covered in layers of paper and spray paint. But most of the time, I'm driving soccer carpool and shuttling my kids around Atlanta where I enjoy spotting a dumpster on the side of the road or a construction site for me to explore. For me, photography is a way to take the mundane, ordinary objects we find in a city and make them interesting.

"For me, photography is a way to take the mundane, ordinary objects we find in a city and make them interesting."

Your photographs are very colorful and often so close they become abstract. What made you start to see this way?

I started to notice my love of the "up close" about 15 years ago while on my honeymoon in Belize. We had the opportunity to hold a fist-sized tarantula in the palm of our hands while walking through the jungle. The photo my husband took of me includes the tarantula but also my face, my arm and a lot of the background. It’s clearly me holding the tarantula. The photo I took of my husband was of just the tarantula in his hand. He still likes to joke (though it’s true) that the picture I took could have been of anyone holding the tarantula. I just tell him that I was much more interested in capturing the details of the tarantula than the person in the photo. Focusing in on the details helps me to be present – to appreciate my surroundings. My photos are like colorful layered cakes, rich in texture and color. That is where I see beauty.

Jennifer McKinnon Richman

Cuba seems right up your alley with its colors and textures. What were your impressions of Cuba?

It is an interesting place, a city of juxtapositions. As you said, the colors and textures are fantastic, giving Cuba an amazing outward beauty, but what I found is that this beauty is mostly a facade. Many buildings look great from the outside, but once you go inside, the colors fade. Quickly. When I wandered off the main streets away from the tours, I was immediately met with poverty and deterioration. Sometimes I would come across a dilapidated building that I thought would be vacant, but would then catch a glimpse of laundry drying outside and realize that a family lived there. At the same time, I felt incredibly safe walking around the streets of Havana on my own. The people were incredibly friendly. The streets were filled with music and dancing. Along with my laundry photos, my favorite memories of Havana were the hours I spent walking along the Malecon, people watching and taking photos along the way.

"Photography forces me to see the world from a different angle, a different perspective –to study the small details that make up the big picture."

Jennifer McKinnon Richman

McKinnon Richman

Who or what inspires you?

My mom. Though seeing the work of Edgar Degas and Gustav Klimt in person in my early 20s was the beginning of my art education and appreciation, and while this past summer I visited the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and fell in love with her work from both New York City and Santa Fe, unquestionably my mom has been my greatest inspiration. She pursued her art career while raising four children and now enjoys her life as a successful mixed media artist. My mom also happens to be my favorite travel companion, as she too loves to wander the streets of a new city while always on the lookout for ripped paper, deteriorating billboards, and color.

As for what inspires me, I would have to go with weathered urban areas and Mother Nature's creations. I love finding dumpsters, construction sites, graffiti, and torn paper. At the same time, I am continually in awe of nature's beauty, colors, and textures. Among my favorite natural creations are naked tree branches, flowers, silhouettes of landforms at sunset, and just about anything against a blue sky.

Jennifer

What is the biggest struggle that you have overcome—or are working to overcome—in your life?

My biggest struggle is how to find enough time to devote to my art. (And if anyone has suggestions, I am all ears.) With three young kids (ages 12, 10 and 8), I am constantly trying to figure out how to squeeze in as much work as I can while my children are in school and how to appreciate my time with them when they are home. I am always trying to remember to be thankful for the time I have to work and the time I have to spend with my children, but at times I would love to be able to work for days on end in my studio with no interruptions, or pick up and travel on short notice, alone and unencumbered. Give me another 6 or 8 years and maybe I will have overcome this struggle, but it is a constant in my life.

This past summer I took the kids on a cross-country road trip for five weeks so I could explore new cities and places while spending the summer with my children. It was an amazing experience, and while I didn't get to take nearly as many photos as I would have liked, I was creating memories and having adventures with my children that we will all remember for a lifetime. And I paid (bribed) my kids with Monopoly money to allow me the occasional photograph whenever inspiration struck (that is, whenever we passed a vista, a construction or garbage site). The kids loved it.

Jennifer McKinnon Richman

What do you hope for in the future (either for yourself or others)?

I hope people stop and take the time to look around at their surroundings focusing on all of the little details that make up the big picture. Sometimes it feels like we are all so busy running around, texting, emailing, keeping up with social media, the news, etc. that we forget to stop and appreciate where we are in that moment. While I would love to be out traveling the world, most of the time I am driving soccer carpool and taking trips to the grocery store. But when I stop for five minutes to photograph a dumpster on the side of the road, it forces me to stop and really study it looking for interesting angles and strong compositions. Photography forces me to see the world from a different angle, a different perspective – to study the small details that make up the big picture.

Jennifer McKinnon Richman

Follow Jennifer on Instagram @jennifermckinnonrichman

Roberto Milizia @this.is.malice, Pitti Uomo, Florence

Dániel Horváth

Photographer

Dániel Horváth

I see that you live in Budapest, Hungary. From the photographs, it looks beautiful. How would you describe your city, and what is unique about life there?

Yes, Budapest is beautiful but could be more beautiful if we would take care of it and repaint the houses and try to make the portals more solid. Our architecture is beautiful, but we destroy it with these ugly plates. In Paris, you don't see ugly plates outside of the stores up in the air from the buildings. You see only a lovely designed front door and window.

I think it is very different to be a local or to be a tourist. As a local, I see so many sad and bad things – like how many tourists are here. How they destroy our city. I see a lot of dust. But what you say is true. We have very beautiful buildings. Happily, the city center is very big and full of old buildings. I think our Parliament is the most beautiful parliament in the world!

Everything is close to your hand. Stores, markets, public transport are great here. I live in the city center so going for meetings or shooting for restaurants is easy. I will be everywhere within 30 to 50 minutes. Hungary is very good in natural and biological things like agriculture. However, the agriculture is a bit under what it should be from the market side, but facilities are great. We have four seasons and thanks to the Carpathian Basin, we are rich in fresh-water, soils and minerals. In Budapest we have lot of thermal baths. Sometimes they say it is the City of Baths. However I have only been once in the past 10 years. Even if I had a little bit of time to relax, I would avoid going to baths because of the tourists. Sooo . . . :(

The Hungarian Parliament Building

Brian Lehang @brianlehang, Florence, Italy

Trevor Stuurman, @trevor_stuurman, Pitti Uomo, Florence

Beer Kitchen, Chef Matthew Spiteri, @matthewspiteri88, Malta

Dániel Horváth

You do so many different things – model, play the drums in a band, cook, travel, and photograph food, architecture, and street style. Can you tell us about yourself and how all of this evolved?

I degreed as a classical percussionist and teacher at a music university. After that, I started teaching in a music school. But ever since I was a kid, I was on the stage. The stage is my life. My parents were photographers. They did commercials in the golden age. Me and my sis were in front of the camera several times as child models. Children and pets are still the best for selling products. As a kid, it was so much fun posing with chocolate and ice creams. But when the 90s came along with the digital world, my parents left photography. I went to music school and focused only on music. But I always had digital cameras and shot everything – just collecting the moments. Never composed.

Lemon tart by Dániel Horváth

When I moved to Budapest and left teaching, I ran out of money. So I started to cook at home. I read recipes and asked my mum and sis, but that was not enough. Then I found Gordon Ramsay. That was the turning point. I spent a year and a half cooking all of Ramsay's recipes from the "Ultimate Cookery Course." Because I watched him on YouTube, I learnt cooking techniques and also how to serve and plate. So I started to take photos with my phone. I really wanted everything to look the same as Ramsay's does. And that is how I learnt to take pictures of food.

Because I was a musician at the time, I travelled all over the world with a band and wrote a blog about what we ate backstage and in different countries. Then a magazine asked me to write restaurant reviews for them. I became a food critic and developed myself as a food photographer. I also talked with chefs, so I learnt a lot of cooking techniques.

Bartender Norbert Nagy @norbert_the_great, Ritz Carlton, Budapest

Dániel Horváth

Then I tested mirrorless cameras for a blog and found Olympus. I fell in love. By this time I had reached around 8K followers on Instagram and worked to brand myself as a bearded model. I am good at self-promoting, and Olympus trusted me. I became an ambassador. That was two years ago, and now I am an official ambassador for Olympus. The German headquarters invites me to talk at workshops about myself and my vision. It has been an amazing opportunity to work for this company.

Architecture comes with traveling. I am always on tour with my band. And fashion comes from the time I started to look at gentlemen on Pinterest and found Pitti photos. I was amazed. I didn't know how this could be – lots of gentlemen walking on the streets and wearing amazing suits and dressed up as hell. So I think I went to Pitti for the first time four years ago. And because I loved photography, I started to take pictures at Pitti and not only pose. Then my friends asked if I wanted to go to the other fashion weeks, so I went for women's fashion week in Paris, Milan, etc.

Salomon DuBois Thiombiano @ducdubois and Menzi Mcunu @menzi_xonx Pitti Uomo, Florence

Francesco Di Pinto Cavalli @dipo, Pitti Uomo, Florence

Dániel Horváth

Thomas Reichegger @thomas.reichegger, Milan

Stella Luminosissima @stella.luminosissima, Milan

Benjamin Migsch, @bennirollbrettfahrer, Milan

Dániel Horváth

I had the pleasure of meeting you at Pitti Uomo. It seems like a family reunion (although a very well-dressed family reunion). Can you describe Pitti, and how do you wear a suit in that heat? Haha. It's hard. Fortunately, I am not sweating, BUT I am not a top-level stylish man like the Italians or the African dandies who have their own tailors. They have breathable fabrics, and if you see them in three layers or more, it doesn't mean its hot. The fabric they use is very thin. It would be nice to find a good tailor for myself.

Pitti Uomo, Florence

Your photographs all have this elegant, classic charm, but then you throw in a quirky sense of humor (as in your video of people eating at the Gourmet Festival and your Facebook profile picture). Do you find it hard to balance the two, or is that just your natural personality?

Yes, I think it's my personality. I am so diverse. Did I mention that I am a commercial model, so you can see me on the TV worldwide and also in some small movie roles? When I am on stage, I look like a crazy or drunk man. When I leave the stage, I go back to normal and a bit shy. People are always asking what I am drinking or what drugs I use. Fortunately I never drink alcohol and never used drugs.

I started street photography one year ago watching others how they shoot but also trying to find my voice. Trying to do it differently. As a food photographer, I like dark mood photography. As a travel photographer, I like bright things. So, as you see, I am open for any style. I have four different Instagram accounts. Nobody believes they belong to the same person. But I like thunderstruck people.

"I always had digital cameras and shot everything –just collecting the moments."

What has been your biggest struggle in life that you have overcome or are working to overcome?

TIME. I never have enough time. I always think I am nowhere in life, but then I look back and say, "I started photographing only two years ago. And I work for Olympus as a brand ambassador. I work for Manfrotto. And also for Photokina, the biggest trade fair for cameras, to be on the stage and talk about myself, my vision, and how I take my pictures. I have to say I am in the right place."

My next big goal is that I want to get hired by magazines as a street photographer. It's crazy how the fashion cities increase the price of accommodations during fashion weeks so that we pay thousands of euros for our passion.

You have traveled so many different places. Where is your favorite place and why?

Honestly, I have to say Italy is my second home. I really love the architecture, the food and the people – how they resonate to the world. I like the weather as well.

But the most amazing world to me was Japan. I was there around 13 or 14 years ago, and we could not use our phones and had no connection to the outside world. So we spent one week just touring with a percussion band in amazing places.

Paris

Who or what inspires you?

As a street style photographer I would mention two names – Jonathan Daniel Pryce (@garconjon) and Adam Katz Sinding (@AKS). I have followed @garconjon for a very long time. When I started to grow my beard, he was one of the first names who popped up. At this time I didn't know anything about Pitti. I saw his beard project and started to follow him. Then I saw this Pitti thing, searched the web, and saw Adam's pictures. These are the two guys who I have followed from the very beginning.

As a travel and food photographer, everything that is vintage and kind of old school inspires me. I think it doesn't make sense, but I am in love with fine dining, which is a very sophisticated and elegant thing, but I also love getting lost in the tiny streets of Italy and going to small local restaurants.

Menzi Mcunu @menzi_xonx

Mike Rubin, Creative Director of Krammer and Stoudt @krammerstoudt Lourens Gebhardt @louxthevintageguru

Get lost in this beautiful world with Dániel on Instagram @danielhorvathofficial and for food @gasztronota, for travel @dho_travel, for streetstyle @styletaster, and on his website at horvathdaniel.eu

The Old The New

and

Words and photographs by Meredith M Howard

Italy is a striking intersection of the old and the new. My favorite piece of architecture, the Duomo di Milano, was started in1386 and completed in1956. It is comprised of an amazing level of detail and craftsmanship for this size of a structure. Looking out across the city from the roof of the Duomo, one can see the spires of modern sky scrapers, which took a significantly shorter period of time than 600 years to construct. Graffiti and street art dot the streets surrounding the Duomo. I personally like both the old and the new, but as we say in photography, "It's very contrasty."

Art by Blub @lartesanuotare Exit Enter @exit.enter.k and Carla Bruttini

*Con l' acqua alla gola? No problem. L' arte sa nuotare!

The historical artifacts are plainly seen, but the street art, overlooked by many, can become a scavenger hunt.

Blub is a street artist who pastes up portraits of historical characters underwater with goggles in his current series titled "L’Arte Sa Nuotare." According to Daily Art Magazine, his art illustrates "the fact that the art survives and swims on regardless of whatever happens."

If you don't know to look for them, you will walk right by Clet Abraham's altered street signs. His recreation of these government installations makes a statement about their irony. The city places "No Entry" signs in an effort to preserve the aesthetics of the city – thereby disturbing the aesthetics of the city. Some people view Clet's modern guerrilla-style art as a degradation of the historical facade of the city, but Clet told The Florentine in an interview in 2011, "Street art, when done well, is a gift to the city and its residents."

Scavenger hunt –Clet Abraham's work has already appeared in a previous interview. Did you spot it?

Clet Abraham @cletabraham

Old and New

Even the fashion in Italy is an intersection of the old and the new. Every year in January and June, Florence hosts Pitti Uomo, the most sartorial event in mens' fashion, featuring beautifully hand-tailored suits worn with a classic flair and often with a modern twist.

Mr. and Mrs. Decorum always appear in matching suits and pull it off like no one else can. They got engaged the day after this photo was taken, so I am predicting they will continue to make appearances like this for a long time to come.

Mr. and Mrs. Decorum (Mphahlela Mokgatle and Rethabile Makhetha) @pat_cwa with @decorum_stylists #couplegoals

Picolo (whom we interviewed on page 12) puts a new spin on custom-made shirts and suits by combining traditional Italian tailoring with African prints. The tailoring and hand-crafted details of the clothing worn at Pitti Uomo stand in contrast to the mass production of the bulk of fashion today.

Wearing outfits by P&T @pt.official: Picolo Diop @picolo_diop, Brian Rensoli @briankowski31, Aron Martini Da Silva @aronmartinsss

Is there anything that is truly new? We are building on the past whether we realize it or not – responding to what has come before. And more than any time in history, we have the means to be aware of it if we seek it out. The co-existance of the old and the new provides a rich foundation on which we (and future generations) can build.

The Dream Continues

The first time I met Terence Lester was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January. My daughter and I drove downtown at 7:30am to join a hundred other people at Gather Atlanta – an event organized by Love Beyond Walls to provide food, clothing, showers, haircuts, and, most of all, relationships to the poor and homeless. Before they sent us out into the area with donated items, Terence spoke to us with deep empathy about his desire to care for those who are overlooked by society and to give a voice to the voiceless. He spoke about bringing together people from all backgrounds to take a stand against racial division and injustice and systemic poverty. He encouraged us to think about how we can be connected to a greater purpose in life and how we can create change in the city of Atlanta and beyond. I was recently blessed with the opportunity to sit down with Terence to talk about his work, his passion, and his vision.

Pictured here: Terence Lester, Founder of Love Beyond Walls

Photograph by Meredith M Howard

Interview by Meredith M Howard

The Dream Continues

Meredith: I want to start with your childhood – what is your background and what led up to you having this passion for the poor and homeless. Because when you speak about it, you have this fire and this passion that not everybody has.

Terence: What do you mean?

Meredith: I can tell that you have this empathy and drive to make change that comes from somewhere personal. A lot of other people might think, "Why do I need to care about the poor and homeless?" or “That’s too big of a problem. I can’t change that.” So I’m just wondering from your background, what was it in your personality or your experience that gives you such empathy for people who are marginalized?

Terence: I would start in my teenage years. I had a lot of challenges. I would say that my home life experience wasn’t the best. I saw my mom struggle. Because of some of the dysfunction I experienced early on, I felt very disconnected. I internalized that, and it started coming out through my behavior in school. In school, I was popular but oftentimes very misunderstood in that teachers saw me as a troublemaker, a person who didn’t want to listen. And they didn’t understand all of the social challenges that I was facing in my home life. That caused me to rebel a lot more. I was put out of the high school and ended up going to an alternative school less than a mile from here.

"I felt very disconnected."

I remember vividly the day I told my mom that I wasn’t going to school again – period. It was hard for me to function and maintain my sense of self in a school where teachers and counselors misunderstood me and labeled me. So, I’m walking away from the alternative school (this was the day I was going to drop out of school – not going back), I was in this group and I meet this homeless guy. He calls me over to himself out of the group like I’m being singled out. I walk over to him. We dive into conversation, and he asks me if I go to that school. And I said yeah. And he said, “You gotta go. You need to finish school because if you don’t”– and he pointed at himself –"you’re going to end up like me.” He was in his mid-50s, trash hanging from his beard. He said, “One day, you’re going to be a leader.” So one of the first times I ever heard a man tell me I was going to be a leader was from somebody experiencing homelessness.

I stopped going to school for six months. It put me behind. But that interaction with that guy stayed in the back of my mind. That and my mom showing me tough love and telling me,“You need to finish school. You don’t need to become a statistic,” gave me the encouragement to go back.

"One of the first times I ever heard a man tell me I was going to be a leader was from somebody experiencing homelessness."

Photograph by Arlene Brathwaite www.queenseyephotography.com

The Dream Continues

So, I went back – 5th-year senior – most embarrassing time of my life. For the first time, I felt like I had something to fight for, and what I was fighting for was not being controlled by what I experienced in my childhood and teen years. I was being governed by this idea that I want more for myself.

Me and my mom were still at odds. I ran away from home. Living out of the trunk of my car as a senior in high school. Many of the teachers didn’t even know. There would be times I would go and live in parks or I would move from place to place. I had one friend, Jeremy Smith, and his mom would allow me to stay with them for a few months – all of my stuff in a trash bag. And this guy who was a couple years older than me would go to work and come home and give me lunch money just to give me encouragement to finish school.

So, I graduated. I went on to get married, turned my life around. I went to college and obtained four degrees. I have two graduate degrees. Then I started sharing my story in youth detention centers and prisons and anywhere there were other youth to share this message of, “You are more than your environment. You can be more than your experiences.” That evolved into community work. I was really advocating for people who were isolated, singled-out, misunderstood. Sometimes the greatest treasure comes from what other people perceive as trash. So all of that developed this deep empathy to see the best in people.

Meredith: How did that evolve into Love Beyond Walls?

Terence: Speaking to youth. Leading other young adults out into the community to be among people who are homeless or impoverished. My mentor at the time – he’s passed –Mr. Moore, he had a ministry where he would be among the poor and homeless, and I kind of identified with that. Over the years, it became a burden to turn it into something more formal.

Photograph by Arlene Brathwaite www.queenseyephotography.com

The Dream Continues

Meredith: You were talking about identifying with the poor and homeless. I remember at one point you went and slept under a bridge for three days. What was that experience like?

Terence: It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life because I wasn’t physically homeless, so it had to be a choice to leave my comfort zone. But the flip side of that, being articulate and being able to fully understand and connect dots, I wanted to do it in a way where I could advocate and really explain that experience. Eating out of trash cans, having people look down on you, being put out of restaurants, being put out of shelters, standing around campfires without firewood but burning clothes that people brought under a bridge and donated in the middle of winter, having to stay up 24 hours just to stay in a warm place when it was in the teens, helping one of my friends beg for dollars just so he could raise enough funds to purchase medication, to seeing the immoral and prejudice and stereotypical mistreatment from others, to being called obscene names and having people not fully understand the experiences.

It changed me. It changed me in very real ways. Because when you’re younger and you’re going through [certain things], you’re not processing all of this information to speak on behalf of [other people]. You’re just trying to get through. On this side, it’s eye-opening. You begin to see gaps in people’s thoughts, in their ideas or presumptions about the poor. It was also the most educating thing I’ve ever experienced in that you’re not sitting in a class reading theoretical research. You’re having these existential encounters where you’re being informed directly from sources. If you want to know real information, get to know the source. That source is people who are going through the plight. You can’t get information from a source apart from building a relationship with the source. So we use relationships for the foundation of the work we do.

Meredith: What is the mission and vision of Love Beyond Walls, and what are some of the programs and projects you are working on to get there?

Terence: We’re trying to solve a couple of problems. We are trying to solve the invisibility of the people who are on the margins. How do we tell stories in such a way where people in their distracted lives take time to notice others? And not just notice others but be invited into an empathetic service opportunity that leads to relationships. The second problem that we’re trying to solve is the false narrative of the poor and people experiencing homelessness. You hear a lot of sweeping statements: “Why don’t they just get a job?” “Why don’t they just work harder?” “Poor people are lazy.” “They want to be in that situation.” It goes on and on.

This false narrative creates a perception that governs the behavior of those who mistreat the poor. That legislate things that keep people in systemic poverty. That withhold access to resources that give them equity – not necessarily equality – but equity to have the same footing. We’re fighting against that narrative because the narrative is a generalization. We kind of put people into buckets as opposed to understanding that everybody arrives into poverty or the experience of homelessness differently. Some women from domestic abuse. We’ve met some women who lost a spouse. We’ve met some people who were abandoned because they were adopted. Some people lost a job. Some people have mental health issues.

Photograph by Meredith M Howard

The Dream Continues

Terence (continued): There’s an article in The Atlantic that says poverty changes the brain. What it is basically saying is that it changes how a person thinks and perceives and views the world and responds to the world. There was another study that suggested that to get out of poverty it takes 20 years without anything going wrong. And they were basically talking about the compounded experiences that a person has without the social support structure in place to withstand the bouts that life will throw at you. In knowing that information, just those two articles alone will deconstruct any ideology that you have about the poor, but when you really get to meet people you will understand that everyone’s story is different.

Then, you start reading books like The Color of Law that deals with residential segregation and the concentrated effort by the FHA to racialize housing and withhold access to wealth through housing for minorities. You can look at other policies and gentrification that kind of keep people at bay. It gives you a greater understanding of how we really have some problems that people are dealing with. It really makes you start to think about the greed issue that we have in our country. When you define greed, it is this pursuit of more without concern for anybody else. It’s this individualistic pursuit of more. If you have this as a framework in how you’ve been influenced by a consumer society then – “Neighbor, who?” It leaves out this concept of being a part of a deeper and more robust fabric. Like MLK says, “It’s a global society. We’re all interconnected.”

Photograph provided by Love Beyond Walls

My metaphor is a shirt – you’ve got a thread and when it’s hanging from the shirt, if you pull it, it ruins the whole fabric. Until we start to see that one person is connected to the entire fabric and we are ready to care for those strands, then we are doing ourselves a disservice.

We have two audiences – the servers and the served. And what binds the two together is that we are all impoverished in some way. Somebody’s poverty who has excess [resources] may look different from the physical poverty of somebody else. But if we can help people understand it’s this common thread of human suffering that we are all experiencing, then we can have greater empathy for one another and build authentic relationships in a vulnerable way.

Meredith: I know you do the Gather Atlanta. Is that a monthly gathering?

Terence: Yes. We have all these vehicles – Gather Atlanta, the art program, bus, shelter, closet, wash house, shower – all of those things are vehicles. I don’t even like to call them programs. I call them vehicles because what we’ve seen, our greatest successes in helping people get off the streets is when we see relationships built between two groups of people that would never cross paths. And we use these vehicles to make that happen. Because at the end of day, I’m trying to build a bridge between two worlds. For me, in my personal experience, it wasn’t until I had total strangers who had access and networks and a level of exposure that I didn’t have come into my world and poured into my life in a way that caused me to have my greatest growth. I didn’t get to where I am today apart from relationships, even when the relationships weren’t from my own family.

Photograph provided by Love Beyond Walls

The Dream Continues

Meredith: What you are saying is so interesting because those are some of the same words and phrases that I use in my experience with street photography – realizing that I live in a totally different world from the people that I’m meeting. Sometimes I use the word “bubble." We all live in bubbles and see the same types of people every day and go to the same places and do the same things, and then you meet someone totally different and think, “Wow, you live a completely different life from me!” And like you are saying, it's through a vehicle like street photography or these gatherings where you can meet a complete stranger and intersect two different worlds.

Terence: You just hit the nail on the head. Our whole organization is centered on intersectionality. How do we bring different people and different groups together? Even racially – right? We use service as a way of reconciling races because our service base is very diverse. It’s just a joy to see when relationships are formed healing occurs. There are so many different aspects to the work that we do.

Meredith: I do see it as a vehicle. Because our world is so fast and busy, you can run through life with blinders on, and you need the intersections to force you to see something from a different perspective and to build different relationships.

Terence: Yeah, even with the awareness campaign that we do (we’ve done seven or eight), those campaigns are done in a way that not only provide demonstration, education, and bringing attention to an issue, but it causes people to be introspective and to redefine their core values as a person. It’s just like a car – we all get out of alignment from time to time. Those campaigns help people to center themselves and to think about things that really matter in this life.

Photograph by Arlene Brathwaite

"Our greatest successes in helping people get off the streets is when we see relationships built between two groups of people that would never cross paths."

The Dream Continues

Meredith: I want to ask you about MAP18 – your walk from Atlanta to Memphis. That is a really long walk. It took you how long?

Terence: 33 days.

Meredith: 33 days of walking. I know you previously walked to Washington, DC, so what made you think, "I’m going to do a walk," and then what were you trying to accomplish?

Terence: Fifty years ago Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, and one of the last stances he was taking before he was killed was against poverty. Not just poverty on behalf of poor brown and black folks, but poverty that was affecting all citizens and poverty that was affecting all people across the globe. That’s all that we are about, and I wanted to tap into that vein to lift the idea that this is a national crisis. There are 150 million people in this country that are living near or below the poverty line. You’ve got 40+ million under the poverty line and another 100 million one check away that are considered the working poor. It’s not like we don’t have the resources or the excess to solve the problem.

I was sitting on a panel at the King Center when I got back and I was sitting next to Liz Theoharris, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and she made a statement: "The word poverty in the last eight to ten years in political campaigns was mentioned less than three times.” That this is something we need to be concerned with because it affects half the country.

Photograph by Matt Yung www.mattyungphotography.com

Terence (continued): So I wanted to bring attention to that, but I also wanted to lift up this idea of what it means to have reconciliation – how do we come together and heal? I wanted to bring people together from different walks of life, different racial groups (and race is a social construct – it was invented). We live in a racialized society. I wanted to continue to advocate on behalf of those who are impoverished. MAP18 was the hardest demonstrative campaign that I’ve ever done out of all of them because of my many experiences.

Meredith: I read that you had dogs chase you, people try to run you off the road . . .

Terence: Dogs chase me, people try to run me off the road, people threaten my life, in small towns people calling the police on me 8 times, encountering white supremacist motorcycle groups in Alabama. If I could describe it metaphorically, it’s almost like getting in an accident but not really. You know how when you are in the car and you are almost in a bad accident, and after it your nerves are on edge and kind of shot? That was the feeling that I had every single day. I was on edge like that because it was like almost getting hit by a truck by somebody who wanted to hit me, almost having things done to me by people who threatened my life, having cops called on me, police officers hopping out of the car with false narratives with their hands on pistols – all of that stuff, it had me in the constant state of – “Am I gonna live the next day?”

Photograph by Arlene Brathwaite www.queenseyephotography.com

The Dream Continues

Terence (continued): But I was reading a lot of Martin Luther King quotes and quotes from Civil Rights leaders who fought and did this work and sacrificed their lives. There’s this one King quote, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” People ask me, “What kept you going?” What kept me going was the cause and knowing that the cause affects everybody – even the people who showed me mistreatment and hate were impoverished themselves. So, love caused me to rise above that. And that was hard. But it’s how many of the leaders I look up to led. They led from that place.

Meredith: When you got to the Lorraine Motel, what was that like?

Terence: Me and my friend, James Brookshire (he walked with me a lot of the way,) we joke about it, walking out of Mississippi and into Tennessee, you could almost sense a relief. And the closer I got, the more emotional it was – getting closer to the day and knowing I had made it through some pretty hard states and was going to end up at Lorraine. It was exciting. It was surreal. It was humbling. And it just felt really great to be one of the few people a part of so many people advocating on behalf of those who are impoverished and advocating for racial justice and equity. There were people from all walks of life there. From all around the world. And it just felt great to be among that side of history.

"Love caused me to rise above that."

Photograph by Matt Yung www.mattyungphotography.com

Photograph by Elizabeth Bloodworth

@justapinchofsouth

The Dream Continues

Meredith: You were saying that a relationship helps get someone off the streets and out of poverty. I wanted to ask if you could talk specifically about the process of walking someone – like Mark, whom you've talked about on your website – through that. It seems very time-intensive, emotionally-intensive, labor-intensive to get one person from living on the streets to getting them stable housing and finding them a job. What is that process like?

Terence: I use the Wellness Wheel as the framework. The Wellness Wheel is like a pie that deals with different categories such as spirituality, emotional, social, physical, environmental, occupational. If you use that as a backdrop up against the person you encounter, once you get to know them, you are able to access where they are. Mark was adopted, so he really lacks the social piece. He doesn’t have access to food, so it’s environmental that could affect his physical. Where is this person at really? Then, you start to mobilize people around those areas to build relationships with him or her in those areas. I’m using him as an example, but we’ve done this with a few hundred now. The process is long, it’s tiring, but you’re not doing it alone. You’re inviting other people into the process. And that’s what I was talking about having this pool of doers and also them needing to be in a relationship outside of their bubble. And it’s a lot of bridge building.

"I’m trying to build a bridge between two worlds."

Or Ronald – we were working with a guy who hadn’t been in touch with his family for 30 years. He was locked up and got out and his close relatives kind of died off. A volunteer who had a skillset for research helped us find his sister. It’s about giving opportunities to one group of people who have an excess of skills and talents and giving them the opportunity to serve this other group. We are basically building bridges between people who have gaps and people who have the skills and the resources to fill those gaps, centering all of that around a relationship.

"We are building bridges between people who have gaps, and people who have the skills and the resources to fill those gaps centering all of that around a relationship."

Photograph by Arlene Brathwaite www.queenseyephotography.com

The Dream Continues

Meredith: If there is someone who wants to try to help, should they just email you?

Terence: We have people like that who come up and hang out and meet people and forge relationships. We have some guys we’ve worked with where people who own their own businesses, construction or whatever, and have given guys a shot. We’ve had people who work in the business community who have lended their networks to help people get jobs. We’ve had church communities come and get around people. And all driven by storytelling and social media. We have such a trusting community now that when we put out stuff, people support. And we’re not always going to one group or one person asking for things. It takes everyone.

Meredith: In thinking about excess assets, you wrote something in the "Poor People’s Manifesto" about the usage of abandoned buildings in Atlanta. You proposed that the government allocate tax dollars to the usage of these buildings if they sit idle for over five years. What would you envision doing with those buildings?

Terence: Using them for whatever the community needs. It could be used for job creation. It could be used for housing. It could be used for skill development. I read a quote that went along the lines of "True revitalization is about building up the people who are already in the community." We normally take the opposite approach. We focus on building buildings and bringing other people in. Moving a population out. When you can start from the bottom up and have a marriage of the two. Like right now, there are buildings in this community that are vacant, and it’s a food desert. Why couldn’t one of those buildings be turned into a grocery store where people have access to fresh produce? When you look at the Wellness Wheel, people who don’t have access to healthier foods will be physically disabled at some point.

Photograph by Arlene Brathwaite www.queenseyephotography.com

Meredith: Have you talked to the people at Focused Community Strategies? Because I just talked to them last month in Issue Ten about facing the same problem in Historic South Atlanta that the community had no grocery store, and they tried to get Publix or Kroger to come in, but it wasn’t economically feasible for them. So they started their own grocery store. They’re doing it, but they are having to raise money to support it. They’re making it work, but it takes people dedicated to make it work.

Terence: Yeah, Bob Lupton. He’s a good friend. I was talking to Bob last year. We interviewed him for our documentary "Voiceless." During our conversation, we talked about how he had given 44 years of his life. He left a comfortable lifestyle and intentionally moved to a part of town and gave 44 years of his life. When you think about the normal person, who thinks about giving their whole life away to ensure that the world is better? You know what I’m saying? People are mostly accumulators. Trying to accumulate a bunch of things for themselves. That takes a distributors mindset. How can I live my life as a conduit to ensure that the people around me are better? We need more people like that. And that’s how I’m trying to live my life. It’s hard. But legacy is something that is left in the hearts and minds of people – not in trinkets and toys and things that will fade eventually.

"Who thinks about giving their whole life away to ensure that the world is better?"

Photograph by Meredith M Howard

The Dream Continues

Meredith: I have one last question. What gives you hope that there will be change?

Terence: What gives me hope? When I was just outside earlier and opened the gate for you, and Mr. Carl says, “Hey, man. Are you doing alright?” – it spoke to the value of us knowing each other. I think what gives us hope are the people that we know. What else can you measure it by? Being able to look people in the eyes, hug people, to have conversations – authentic, real, transparent – and share in this life with people who need social equity and capital. Because in a real sense, we all need that. Connect

Photograph provided by Love Beyond Walls

Art Regeneration

Forward Warrior continues to help set the tone for the Atlanta art community with its generous and collaborative weekend public mural event. Every year, in the midst of hot and humid weather, over 40 artists (along with their friends and family) come out to paint. Outdoor murals are generous by nature, in that they are available to everyone, and their size often makes them collaborative by necessity. But Peter Ferrari, the founder and organizer, is also very intentional in inviting new artists. This is where so many muralists get their start. Some old murals are sadly covered as new murals are born, but this is also the nature of murals. It reminds us to appreciate the beauty of the moment. The following pages contain just a few of the amazing pieces that are currently on display in Cabbagetown (east of Atlanta) for all to enjoy (until next year).

Previous page: Jessica Caldas @zinkaproject with Angela Bortone @angela_bortone Krista Jones @jonesyartatl

Words and photographs by Meredith M Howard

Art Regeneration

Jessica Caldas @zinkaproject with Angela Bortone @angela_bortone Krista Jones @jonesyartatl

Art Regeneration

Shanequa Gay @shanequagay and www.shanequagay.com assisted by her son and Sachi Rome @sachistudioart

Art Regeneration

Faatimah Stevens @thepainterbae

Art Regeneration

Erin Nicole Henry @soil.mate

Art Regeneration

Cousin Dan @cousindan

Art Regeneration

Jurell Cayetano @turnjurell

Art Regeneration

Niki Zarrabi @nikizarrabi

Art Regeneration

Mónica Alexander @itsmmmonica

Art Regeneration

Austin Blue @proper_blue

Art Regeneration

Mario @doitdoitleague

Pierre Cerrato @ohyeahpyeah

Art Regeneration

Michi Meko @michimeko

Mike Black @blackmike_art

There are many other awesome murals not pictured here, so if you are in Atlanta, head down to Wylie Street and Tennelle Street to check them out.

Follow @forwardwarrior to find out about future events.

Brandon Sadler @risingredlotus

Tony Maake

Photographer

Tony Maake with children in a South African Township. Photograph by Martijn Roos @martijnroosphotos.

Photograph of Tony Maake by Martijn Roos @martijnroosphotos

Tony Maake

Tony Maake embodies the past, present, and future of South Africa. He grew up in a township in poor conditions but obtained an education and is now working as a microbiologist in Johannesburg. As a part of the AfroDandy movement, he artfully honors his elders and culture through his dress and photography. And he uses his time, talents and resources to help other children along the same path. His work on a photography project inspired him to start the Tonys Houz Children's Foundation to bring practical help and support to the children and schools in the Townships of South Africa. He continues to tell the story of South Africans through his photography in a beautiful way.

Where did you grow up?

I used to live in Limpopo because my father didn’t want me to grow up in the city. He didn’t want me to lose the sense of culture and elders. Then I moved to back to Joburg.

You said on your Tumblr, "Working harder from your poor background that’s makes you who you are." What does this quote mean to you?

It simply means that you shouldn’t let your poor background hold you back and define who you are nor determine your future.

How did you get into photography?

I started with photography in 2012, when I used to take pictures of everything, trying to find something that I can use to tell a story to the world. Telling untold stories was my first platform I used to speak through my photography.

Tony Maake

A few years ago, you photographed children for your series “Behind the Smile of an African Child." Why did you do this project?

"Behind the Smile of an African Child" was a project I came up with to take pictures of children going through devastating and emotional abuse. Most of us only take pictures of children if they smile conveniently.

What motivated you to start the Tonys Houz Children’s Foundation, and what does this foundation do?

When I was staying in Limpopo I used to cross a river when I had to go to school, and the teachers didn’t take any excuses for being absent. During break, you’d have to walk home for lunch and then cross the river again. I’d stay after school to study and do other things. I’m trying to tell this story through the images I take that there is a lot going on behind the smile of an African child. The images I took of children are reflections of my journey when I was child.

The mission of TH Children’s Foundation is to help over 20,000 students within the next five years to inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities. We want to provide learners with the necessary tools to alleviate their poverty and to provide them with the teaching and mentoring they need.

TH Children’s foundation vision is to create programs that help the communities and schools in Townships by empowering them with tools and providing clothes, uniforms, stationery and school for children living under poor conditions.

"Through the young people of South Africa

see change and hope."

Kholofelo Selatlha @dr.kselatlha (a doctor as well as a model) and Noluyolo Yola Dlwati @noluyolodlwati

I

start going to Pitti?

I started going to Pitti in 2016. My network is my networth; therefore, Pitti Uomo is a great platform on which to build your global network and make new friends.

What is the AfroDandy movement all about?

Our parents or elders were dandies during apartheid; therefore, I feel honored to be one generation to continue the legacy of who we are and what we strive to be. To be a dandy is another fortunate platform to change how we want to be seen and to express ourselves, because dressing up is part of who we are as black people. We were born with it and it is in our blood. AfroDandyism is not a new fashion style in our country. It existed long ago during the apartheid era. Perhaps the style was named AfroDandyism as time went by. The special thing about AfroDandyism is that you become unique and proud as an African.

Your beautiful photo of Picolo Diop at Pitti Uomo appears on page 12. When and why did you

Terence Moeketsi Khala @terencekhala and Bradley Moshokoa @bradmosh100 (who is a neurosurgeon as well as a stylist and model)

Do you see lingering effects of apartheid in South Africa, and what does the future hold for South Africa?

Yes, I do see that because our country is still corrupt and racism still exists in our country. The majority of black people are still oppressed. Corruption of politicians, capitalism and white supremacy is what's holding us back. The previous generation did not have many opportunities compared to the new generation in terms of technology, education, and freedom. Through the young people of South Africa I see change and hope.

Follow Tony on Instagram @tonyshouz and Tonys Houz Children's Foundation @thcfoundation

Menzi Mcunu @menzi_xonx

been brainwashed into thinking

– Seth Godin, Author

"You've