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For the first time ever, I got to participate in National Bike-to-Work Day. It was a highlight this week. Despite the fog and spitting rain, nearly 50 colleagues from the IMF and World Bank met at the Georgetown waterfront park and biked the last few miles downtown together. Waiting for us was a nice breakfast spread (bagels, smoothies, coffee, fruit, and yogurt), sponsors giving out swag, and camaraderie. It was a lot of fun riding in Critical Mass. I’d love to do it monthly.
Here are 5 things I was looking at and loving this week:
For over a decade, Larry Cohen has walked Baltimore’s sidewalks and back alleys in search of images that feel so real you can “smell the street in them.”
Across the great divide, Larry Fink documented the things we have in common. Who’s currently doing this — and doing it well?
I love getting a peek into artists’ spaces. Check out this well-preserved building in SoHo where Christo and Jeanne-Claude lived and worked for 50 years.
Damn. What an incredible backstory. With a surprise positive ending. (AND THEN surprise — a new twist and turn. I saw Donna Ferrato’s Instagram post just a few hours after this Substack went live, so I wanted to update the update.)
My Brain Finally Broke by Jia Tolentino
Not sure if this fits what you're looking for with the Fink work, but I love the book Let Me Sow Love by Roger Richardson: https://deadbeatclubpress.com/en-nl/products/roger-richardson-let-me-sow-love
"When politicians and pundits talk about the heartland, or the heart of the country, they’re generally not pandering to places like Roger Richardson’s Middletown, which is located in Orange County, in New York’s Hudson Valley. Yet the people and places in Let Me Sow Love exist right smack in the middle of myriad 21st-century American realities. Refreshingly, though, there’s not so much as a whiff of polemic in Richardson’s photographs. As the title suggests, this is a book full of what feel like genuine and compassionate interactions and engagements, as opposed to the now-expected confrontations. You sense right away that Richardson knows this place intimately, and these are his people. As a result, Let Me Sow Love presents with remarkable clarity a compelling portrait of an utterly realistic human community at a unique and radically insecure moment in the country’s history.
The late Philip Levine, arguably the greatest working-class poet of the late 20th century, once said that his goal was to write poems so transparent that “no words are noticed. You look through them into a vision of the people, the place.” Time and again, Richardson realizes Levine’s vision through his photographs, and it’s a vision that will be achingly familiar to anyone who grew up in or has spent time in strikingly similar working-class cities and towns all over the United States."
Great post Melissa! Larry Cohen's work is amazing! I met him last August at a DCSPC event in Mt. Pleasant at Lost Origins Gallery. We should all meet up in Baltimore sometime.
I've been a fan of Larry Fink's for decades and met him through Tina Schelhorn when she curated a festival on Contemporary American Photography in 2006 in Germany in Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. https://www.shutterbug.com/content/contemporary-american-photography-germany-7th-international-photo-days-mannheimludwigshafen The list of about 100 American photographers there was an amazing who's who led by Larry Fink and Alex Webb, and included Maggie Taylor, Jeff Mermelstein, and Lilli Almog among others.
And the stories about Issac Wright / driftershoots! OMG!