Photo L.A. 2019

Charles Hartman is featuring Mark’s work at Photo L.A.

BOOTH #B03

Location:
Barker Hangar
3021 Airport Ave,
Santa Monica, CA 90405

Show hours:
Opening Night to Benefit Venice Arts
Thursday, January 31, 6 – 9 pm

Public Hours
Friday, February 1, 11 am – 8 pm
Saturday, February 2, 11 am – 8 pm
Sunday, February 3, 11 am – 4 pm

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The Humid's Debut Workshop October 12-14, Athens, GA

Announcing workshops in Athens, Georgia hosted by Mark Steinmetz & Irina Rozovsky. Our first workshop is with Baldwin Lee and Mike Smith, two fabulous photographers from Tennessee working in the lyrical documentary tradition. Sign up here.

Baldwin Lee

Baldwin Lee

Signs of Boom and Bust

Topic, an online story telling platform commissioned Mark to photograph in response to Walker Evans 1936 photograph taken in Atlanta. See the full story here.

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Photographer Steinmetz Casts Serene View Of Hartsfield-Jackson At High Museum

Originally published on WABE.org | By Myke Johns

14:06 | Play story Add to My List

If you step back from the awesome amount of traffic that passes through Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport – both of the human and vehicular variety – you might find moments of serenity. That’s what photographer Mark Steinmetz found, anyway.

The Athens-based artist was commissioned by the High Museum of Art as part of their “Picturing the South” series. The result is the exhibit “Terminus,” which is on view now.

“He gets into a lot of the ambiguity and paradox that the airport embodies,” The High Museum’s assistant curator of photography Greg Harris tells City Lights host Lois Reitzes. “On the one hand, it’s this big, complex, modern construction. And yet all around are these undeveloped areas, there are forests. So there’s this contrast between the natural and the man-made.”

“Mark, generally speaking, as an artist is really interested in people who are in transition of one kind or another,” Harris says. “The airport really is this transitional space.”

“And within the airport, it’s this bureaucratic mess,” he laughs, “people are stuck in lines, they’re being delayed for one reason or another. And yet Mark photographs people who are having these quiet, contemplative moments in the middle of this chaos going on around them.”

Mark Steinmetz’s photographs are on view at the High Museum now through June 3.

Stolen Moments of Solitude at the World’s Busiest Airport- The New Yorker Photo Booth

By Charles Bethea | Originally published in The New Yorker

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport—which is located a short drive south of Georgia’s capital, and within a two-hour flight for eighty per cent of the U.S. population—is visited daily by more than a quarter of a million people, making it the busiest airport in the world. That’s a lot of luggage, to say nothing of the emotional baggage rolling through its concourses. I live in Atlanta and, this past month alone, have hovered along Hartsfield’s moving sidewalks, ridden its ricocheting trains, and inhaled its jet-fuel and French-fry fumes a half-dozen times while waiting to be transported somewhere else. I nodded off once at my departure gate, only to be awoken, thankfully, by the nearby theatrics of a travelling teen-age baseball team.

Mark Steinmetz, a photographer based in Athens, Georgia, and best known for his black-and-white portraits of strangers—accumulated through prolific wandering and watchfulness—has, in recent years, turned his attention to Hartsfield’s labyrinthine spaces. As he explained in an episode of the “Magic Hour” podcast, he photographed the airport from all sides: “outskirts, the people on the sidewalk, the drop-off, the pick-up locations, in the terminals—because I fly so much—and pictures of the planes taking flight, pictures in planes, pictures of planes.”

But his images, now on display at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, do not offer the encyclopedic view of airport travel seen in Garry Winogrand’s posthumous, pre-smartphone opus “Arrivals & Departures,” published in 2004, which captures the beehive activity of pre- and post-flight moments. In Steinmetz’s Hartsfield, we instead find moments of intimacy and solitude. A baggage cart becomes an unlikely beach chair, and a sidewalk a waterfront. A disembodied hand reaches for a sliver of light let in by an airplane’s triple-paned window. A jumbo jet passing overhead blends into a tree, and, beneath it, kudzu—the invasive, voracious, photographically beloved plant that has swallowed up vast swaths of the South—continues to do what it does best: grow unimpeded.

The kudzu is just one motif through which Steinmetz seems to remind us that the natural world remains supreme, that even our unnatural ability to fly is less impressive than the rising of the sun or the moon; he captures the latter glowing against a pitch-black night sky, the thin, white streaks of what look like runway lights forming the only sign of human activity below.