Exclusive Interview with Brooke Shaden

The first career survey on a leading chronicler of the American South.

Examining the deep emotional relationship between people and place, Louisiana-based photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery (born 1948) is recognized as a leading chronicler of the American South. Her shadowy, blurred, black-and-white images thoughtfully reveal shared human experience―childhood, spirituality, labor―and ultimately bring darkness to light.

Debbie Fleming Caffery: Come to Light immortalizes in book form the artist’s first major career retrospective presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The publication is her most comprehensive to date, showcasing projects produced in the American South and West, as well as in France and Mexico, and is the first to feature all series from across the course of her career.

The Eye Mama book is a photographic portfolio showcasing the mama narrative and the mama gaze, what female and non-binary photographers see when they look at, and into the home.
Based on the Eye Mama Project, a photography platform sharing a curated feed by photographers worldwide who identify as mamas, the Eye Mama book brings together more than 150 images to render what is so often invisible―caregiving, mothering, family and the post-motherhood self― visible.
Eye mama was created by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker and photographer Karni Arieli during the pandemic, when everyone around the world was in lockdown and spending more time in the home, often consumed by caregiving. The visual movement centres around the “mama gaze”, an introspective look at home and care by female and non-binary visual artists.
This iconic book of photographs brings together the images from this movement, experiencing the light and dark of care and parenthood, the beauty of close-up details, love and hardship, and most importantly, the personal poetic truths of these mamas and artists.

My father was a spy during the Cold War. Bilingual in German and English, he worked for the U.S. Air Force and sent agents into East Germany and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1960s. The Need to Know, a photo book, is my exploration of the meager details that emerged from brief and cryptic conversations with my father and my curiosity about Cold War espionage and its impact upon my family at the time. The book will be published by the Blow Up Press of Warsaw, Poland in early October.

My father led two lives that rarely intersected. Family members were often the unwitting participants in indecipherable events that left us with many more questions than answers. Mysterious strangers would show up at our apartment late at night only to depart before dawn without saying a word to anyone other than my father. Peculiar encounters, curious radio transmissions, and unexplained coincidences became the norms of my childhood.

The book that I have worked on for the past four years is a photographic re-creation of the intersections and divergences of my father’s secret life and the traditional paternal role he played. The project consists of vernacular photographs, new captures and ephemera to tell a story and investigate a childhood mystery. Ironically, several of the archival photos in the project were photographed by me and my father on separate trips to West Berlin in the winter of 1961 but were only rediscovered recently. The Need to Know is the intersection of the factual and fictional based upon historical research, family archives, my memories, and my imagination.

The project is particularly timely as the issues of the Cold War have evolved but continue to play out on the international stage. The current crisis in Ukraine is just one example of the evolution of that conflict. The espionage tools of the 1960s look primitive to a degree but they, too, have changed to conform to the current applications and tools used for cyber warfare and propaganda purposes. The cycle of history continues to unwind in an ever-repetitive pattern.

This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography.
Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.
This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualizing the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of Tress’s career and the New York photographic scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 31, 2023, to February 18, 2024.