New Farmers: D. Bryon Darby, Tim Hossler, Paul Stock

Contributors:

D. Bryon Darby, Photographs

Tim Hossler, Graphic and Exhibition Design

Paul Stock, Interviews and Writings

Project Website:

http://newfarmersproject.com

Biographies:

D. Bryon Darby creative research investigates perceptions of place as mediated through culture, technology, and experience. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Notable exhibitions have included Paris PhotobookFest, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, the 2012 International Symposium on Electronic Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Tim Hossler is the former in-house art director for photographer Annie Leibovitz, the Director of Design at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and the Art Director of The Wolfsonian– Florida International University in Miami Beach. He has worked on books and exhibitions for artists, photographers, and cultural institutions including KU’s Spencer Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and The Detroit Institute of Arts.

Paul V. Stock’s primary interests as a rural sociologist include food, agriculture, family farmers, and the Catholic Worker movement’s farms. His books include Food Systems Failure (2011) and Food Utopias (2015).

Statement:

“The truth is, farming is so bloody romantic you can’t escape it. And don’t believe anybody who tells you otherwise. It is diving deeply into the complete mystery of the black soil. It is sex in the rain and the mud and the dew and the snow. It is messy, exotic, untamed birth, it is a riotous adventurous life; it is dying when the time arrives. It is the violent storm and gentle rain, the nurturing warmth and the oppressing heat, it is happiness and joy and exhaustion and despair. It is a parched throat and a full belly and sweet dreams and sleepless nights. It is an unceasing grind, and it is constant wonder. This is the truth." - Phil Holman-Hebert, Jefferson County, Kansas

New Farmers is a collaborative research project between photographer D. Bryon Darby, designer Tim Hossler, and sociologist Paul Stock. An observation of today's independent farmer, the project is an ongoing exploration of experiments in contemporary farming and seeks to document and empower the first-generation, small-scale, and sustainable farmer.

New Farmers was generously supported with a Starter Grant from The Commons with funds from the University of Kansas Office of Research and by a Collaborative Research Seed Grant from the Hall Center for The Humanities.

Rachel Jump

Rachel Jump's black and white work explores themes addressing ideas of home, belonging, memory, and absence, and have been exhibited throughout the United States. Rachel is represented by Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL, and had her first major solo exhibition in November of 2015. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA PH’14), where she received the Harry Koorejian Memorial Scholarship in 2013 and the Haining Family Scholarship in 2012. Her photographs are a part of the RISD Museum Special Collections, where she was also a visiting artist in conjunction with the exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, in 2012. Rachel has taught at the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts and Maine Media Workshops + College and spent the last year working as a studio assistant for the photographer, Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Rachel lives and works in the Chicago area.

Rachel's solo exhibition, Origins, is currently open until December 24, 2015 at Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL. She will be giving an artist talk in conjunction with the exhibition on December 19, 2015 from 4:00-5:00pm. Check it out if you are in the area!

Artist Statement: Origins 

The core of my photographic practice stems from a place of pure empathy- a desire to share my story within the collective human experience. My visual trajectory has always centered on the disparate nature of my own family, and my desire to reconnect us.

For most of my childhood our lives were scattered over countless households. My disparate memories of these places merely composed a fragmented idea of home. Later in life I began to question how my identity was shaped without a point of origin. Photography provided a way in which I could eternalize these fleeting moments, a fiction entangled by my truth. As a way to cope with these feelings of isolation, I created a narrative hoping to connect these places and reunite my family. Through this shared experience, my family and I appear to search for one another within the various environments that divided us. As a result of our efforts to find solace and intimacy, I conjured a myth of a home; a sanctuary where my loved ones and I could finally belong.

My photographs are relics of loss; traces of a family that I tried to piece back together.

Lori Vrba Interview and Monograph Giveaway

 

Welcome back to Light Leaked! We hope your summer was productive and inspiring! Ours certainly was. We’re excited to be back and even more excited to be sharing with you this special conversation between acclaimed photographers Lori Vrba and Eliot Dudik. The two artists chat about Lori’s new monograph The Moth Wing Diaries, family, art making, and inspiration VIA text messages.

This post also marks three years of Light Leaked—that’s three years of community engagement, growth and the opportunity to showcase amazing photography. We are so pleased that you have continued to support Light Leaked.

This year, we are offering a special give-away courtesy of our featured interviewer Lori Vrba. We will be giving away a copy of Lori’s monograph, The Moth Wing Diaries. The monograph’s elegant design and stunning print quality makes The Moth Wing Diaries a must have addition to any photographic book collection!

You can enter this giveaway by sharing this post on social media and/or by leaving a comment (on this post OR the original Facebook post). The giveaway will run Monday August 17 - Sunday August 23. A winner will be selected at random and announced on Monday August 24. 

 Introduction of The Moth Wing Diaries, in Lori Vrba's words:

"I grew up in a little house on a dead end dirt road with no street sign, buried deep in the tall pines of Southeast Texas. I was a scrappy, out-the-door little girl with wild, uncombed hair, entertaining myself most days by stick-drawing in the dirt or playing house in the woods. I spent more time alone than not and don't remember wishing for company.

Mom had a chest-of-drawers in the front hall. On the occasions I found myself sick and tired of the oppressive heat and humidity, I would plop down on the cool linoleum floor and pull out the bottom drawer on the left side and stay for a long, long time. This drawer is where she kept the photographs. There were decades worth of family history in that drawer but I knew none of it. My parents left behind hard lives. They never talked about it, and I didn't grow up knowing extended family. So the photographs were just photographs; intriguing, anonymous faces, mostly in black and white, whispering stories from a piece of time that mattered to Someone. Someone pressed the shutter. Someone made choices about light and composition. Someone had a story worth telling. I sat alone, mesmerized, with the pictures piled up all around me on the floor, in what I now know to be the very beginning of my passionate love affair with photography.

My life experiences have brought me to this place where I find myself overwhelmed with the drive to make photographs about who I am: what I feel inside, what I believe to be sacred and enduring. I am inspired by moments that hold contradictions…like a big lightening storm that is really uncomfortable and really beautiful at exactly the same time. Such duality is true for the very best things in life. Loving someone is uncomfortable and beautiful. Having children is uncomfortable and beautiful. Being an artist is uncomfortable and beautiful. I kept a journal for most of my youth and this work is very much the same. It is a visual diary of my grown up, conflicted, complicated, rich, womanly, mother-nature-loving life. And maybe someday if my children's children find the drawer full of my photographs…they will spread them out and sit criss-cross-applesauce in the middle of it all and they will know me…as if I were right there with them."

Take a look at a selection of images from the book and continue downward to read the text message interchange between Lori and Eliot: