ON DEATH, 2019

*Listed as part of TIME Magazine’s Photobooks of the Year 2019

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Adrienne Defendi, Aline Smithson, Alvaro Deprit, Azin Seraj, Barbara Diener, Cheryl St. Onge, Christine Collins, Cody Cobb, Constance Thalken, Cook Williams, Daniel Mebarek, David Beazley, Deanne Sokolin, Debmalya Ray Choudhuri, Diana Guerra, Edgar Martins, Elea Jeanne Schmitter, Elena Helfrecht, Ellen Jantzen, Federico Vespignani, Jacob Haupt, Jane Waggoner Deschner, Jason Koxvold, Jed Devine, John-David Richardson, Jose David Valiente, Joshua Dudley Greer, Karla Guerrero, Ken Rosenthal, Kevin Cook, Kurt Simonson, Lauren Forster, Lindley Warren Mickunas, Liza Ambrossio, Lori Waselchuck, Louie Palu, Orestes Gonzalez, Paolo Morales, Paul Jimenez Thulin, Preston Gannoway, Rana Young, Riley Goodman, Sue Palmer Stone, Tabitha Soren, Tim Pearse, Tommy Kha, Tony Chirinos

Following Humble's 2018 online group show On Death, and their latest show, Loss, Kris Graves invited Jon Feinstein and Roula Seikaly to team up on a followup photobook: On Death, set to publish later this year. For critics and philosophers including the late Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, photography itself was a "kind of death," or as Sontag put it in On Photography, a "memento mori that enables participation in another's mortality, vulnerability, mutability." Sure, Sontag and Barthes' waxed wisdom is decades old, but we continue to see it transcending time and shifting attitudes towards the medium. Building on the two previous online shows, the book will look at contemporary photographic takes on the end of life, not only as it passes, but conceptually and in the metaphors entangled in the practice – how time and life arrest within a frame.

Text - Roula Seikaly, Jon Feinstein
Design - Kris Graves
Sequence - Tia Weiss

8.5 x 10" vertical, softcover
96 pages, swiss binding
57 plates
limited first edition of 450

ISBN 978-0-9990968-7-1

Jon Feinstein is a Seattle and New York City-based photographer, curator, writer, co-founder of Humble Arts Foundation and content director at The Luupe. Jon has curated exhibitions for Chicago’s Filter Photo Festival, Photoville, Glassbox Gallery in Seattle, WA and Art-Bridge at The Barclays Arena in Brooklyn, NY. Jon and Roula Seikaly, recently won BlueSky Gallery’s 2019 curatorial prize for their exhibition “An Inward Gaze.” His projects have been featured in Aperture, The NYTimes, The New Republic, BBC, VICE, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and Feature Shoot, and his writing has appeared in VICE, Aperture, Photograph, TIME, Slate, GOOD, Daylight, and PDN.

Roula Seikaly is an independent writer and curator based in Berkeley, CA. She has curated exhibitions at SF Camerawork, SOMArts, Blue Sky Gallery, and the Utah Museum of Arts. She contributes to print and online platforms including Aperture, Hyperallergic, Photograph, BOMB Magazine, Afterimage, and KQED Arts. Follow her on Instagram.