PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf
A Photography & Visual Arts Podcast

Melissa Catanese - Episode 86

4 months ago

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha sits down with Melissa Catanese—photographer, publisher, and educator. They dive into Melissa's array of book projects, including her 2023 release, "The Lottery" (The Ice Plant), inspired by Shirley Jackson's classic tale, perfectly resonating with today's uncertain world. They also have an honest and in-depth conversation about Melissa's life in photography, her commitment to pursuing her diverse artistic interests, and her innovative approaches to making a living as an artist.

http://www.melissacatanese.com/index.html |||
https://www.instagram.com/melissa_catanese/ |||
https://theiceplant.cc/product/the-lottery/

Melissa Catanese combines her images with archival images into a fluid, sensorial experience that pushes the image beyond its nostalgic surface and challenges ideas of authorship, representation, consumption, and the life cycle of images. She plays with images as raw material, intuitively teasing out oblique and guttural interpretations, tapping the inexplicable, and often dormant space within the surface of a photograph where meaning extends and recedes, comforts and disturbs. She is the author of "Dive Dark Dream Slow", "Voyagers", “The Lottery”, and “Fever field”. Her work is currently included in “Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape” at Carnegie Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award and has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. Catanese contributed texts to “Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot” (Aperture, 2021), “Photographers Looking At Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation” (Pier 24, 2020), The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014) and to the project “Words Without Pictures” (Aperture, 2010), among other publications. She is a Teaching Professor at University of Pittsburgh and holds visiting appointments at Hartford Art School Photography MFA and Image Text Ithaca MFA.

This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com

From the PhotoWork Foundation, the PhotoWork Podcast, hosted by Sasha Wolf, features in-depth conversations with influential figures in the fine art photography world, including photographers, curators, and publishers. Through personal and insightful discussions, the podcast serves as a vital resource for artists, students, and professionals—offering inspiration, education, and a platform for anyone passionate about photography. The PhotoWork Foundation supports the development and education of post-documentary photographic artists and cultivates an audience for their work. Through a diverse program of outreach to individual artists and those who will be enriched by the results of their sustained efforts, the Foundation seeks to empower an aspect of photography that is most often not commercially viable but is essential to the collective understanding of what it looks like to be living in society today. To learn more about the podcast, see additional content related to individual episodes and other opportunities for artists visit: www.photowork.foundation and follow us on Instagram @photowork.foundation.