What is (im)material in the world of photography? What does it mean to be modern? What is the role of the photobook today? How do artists and scholars work across disciplines to craft unique ideas and objects of reflection and how do those objects live on, beyond us? And, what is the meaning of contemporary art in the American Midwest?

In this episode, Immaterial Voices host and Immaterial Books curator Brian O’Neill sits down in Champaign, Illinois with Phillip Kalantzis-Cope. Immaterial Books is a publishing project that grew out of Phillip’s motivations as an image maker, scholar, designer, and long-time publisher, where he could combine his expertise with his aesthetic interests across his diverse practice. Founded in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he began to see more clearly how “books are something that happen in the world, whether they are digital or print.” Furthermore, Phil brings a unique voice to bookmaking and publishing, as he also holds a PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research where he focused on intellectual property and digital platforms, like Flickr. Such spaces, Phil argues, at one time both constituted a commons and a space for the work and play of the mind in an earlier age of the internet. Digital spaces, he offers, still can constitute an emancipatory space, providing productive alternative avenues for authors young and old. As Phil continues to develop these ideas, he has been working to bring together diverse voices, while building community and providing a multi-modal platform for independent creation. Thus, Immaterial Books has expanded its operations and titles in the past few years since its first title, Middlescapes.

Brian and Phil also discuss Mid-continent Modern, a book that had its opening exhibit at the Krannert Art Center in Champaign Illinois earlier this year. Mid-continent Modern was the culmination of a 10-year collaboration between Phillip Kalantzis-Cope and architect Jeff Poss. Phil talks about the development of this project from its inception all the way to the ongoing work surrounding it, such as working with the University of Illinois Architecture Department to uncover the past history of the sites, as well as their ongoing, living present.

This conversation took place just a few hours before the Fields of Vision exhibition, held at Analog Gallery in Urbana, Illinois.

Links

Mid-continent Modern: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/mid-continent-modern-book

See it when I believe it: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/see-it-when-i-believe-it

Jeff Poss: https://www.jefferypossarchitect.net

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope: https://www.phillipkalantziscope.com

Fields of Vision Exhibit: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/fields-of-vision?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2YpvQ_WT2kYv-D_jU6ibnv7TVO-9Kf6zzyk7A4XiArznGjcoyHhDJ6VIg_aem_ojNGzeS6OSr7KcGWWk-zsA

Music provided by Wyoming Toad: https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com

The Visual Politics of Elections: A Conversation with Matt Schneider and Gizem Melek

Are visuals biased? Is the media biased? Is it possible to be politically neutral? What is the role of “fairness?” How do visuals make themselves felt in elections and who is giving them their meaning?

In this episode, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill sits down with two scholars to understand the visual politics of elections. First, Matthew Schneider of the University of North Carlina at Wilmington discusses what President Trump means in terms of the visual culture of American Presidential elections, getting into topics about race and racism in America, the role of whiteness in the election cycles of recent memory, and the limits of news media communications. Then, sociologist and former journalist Gizem Melek of Queen’s University Belfast, discusses her research on the media framing of elections. In so doing, we talk about the rise of social media and the polarization of politics and society in the United States. And, she also draw parallels and contrasts with election politics in Turkey. Taken together, we hope this episode provides a well of insights about the role visual media in elections globally and across different visual and political regimes.

Additional Notes:

The opinions expressed here do not reflect the position of the University of North Carlina Wilmington, nor do the opinions that might be expressed reflect those of Queen’s University Belfast. In the same way, the opinions expressed here do not reflect those of the University of Washington.

This episode contains explicit content, because profanity is used to describe signage visibilized (meaning, there is profanity on the signage) on some of the images that the conversation unpacks.

Links:

Matt Schneider: https://mjschneider.net

Gizem Melek: https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/gizem-melek

The Grift: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/grift

Matt Schneider’s Review of The Grift: https://photobookjournal.com/2023/06/14/andrew-kochanowski-the-grift/

Gizem Melek’s article on US elections: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2209050

Gizem Melek’s article on Turkish elections: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15551393.2023.2232292

Music provided by Wyoming Toad: https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com

Brian O’Neill: https://www.brianfoneill.net

Immaterial Books: https://www.immaterialbooks.com

How do photographers deal with elections? What is the role of the visual in election politics?

In this episode, Brian O’Neill interviews three photographers and scholars of visual arts and media to help contextualize the visual culture surrounding elections. Photographer and sociologist Tim Hale revisits the podcast and discusses two books little talked about together. The first is Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations, and the second is William Eggleston’s Election Eve. Tim, a one-time newspaper photojournalist, provides insights into his history of image-making around elections. Then, he sets that as the context for beginning to understand Winogrand’s concept of Public Relations. This book corresponds to what sociologist Erving Goffman called the interaction ritual at the “front stage” v. the “back stage” of social life. As Brian and Tim work through the book, they share stories from their experiences photographing the “spectacle” of the so-called “target-rich” environments that engender rallies and other political events.

Brian and Tim then pivot to discussing Election Eve, a lesser-known and discussed project of lauded photographer William Eggleston. A book that emerged as a self-published artist book in an edition of 5 in the 1970s was re-released in 2017 and chronicles Eggleston’s journey across the South leading up to the election of Jimmy Carter. What was Eggleston looking for? What did he find? Tim and Brian discuss this elusive work, which they argue is interesting because of the way it speaks to a historical moment in a way that is rare for Eggleston, who, as it is widely known, seldom edited his own sequences of images or worked on what might be called documentary projects. Contrastingly, Election Eve makes one wonder what America Jimmy Carter had in mind, for he too was a man of the South, a place where the land itself was troubled, with histories of colonialism, racism, and slavery. Furthermore, and unlike Winogrand’s Public Relations, Election Eve presents an overall troubling ambiance, in which one can speculate about the societal impact of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Oil Crisis.

Links:

Tim Hale: https://www.timhale.net/about-the-photos

The Grift: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/grift

Election Eve: https://steidl.de/Books/Election-Eve-0812354652.html

Public Relations: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2372

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: https://monoskop.org/images/1/19/Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf

The Photobook Journal: https://photobookjournal.com

Music provided by Wyoming Toad: https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com

Brian O’Neill: https://www.brianfoneill.net

Immaterial Books: https://www.immaterialbooks.com