Joe Maloney was a pioneer of color photography in the late 1970s and a member of the now-legendary LIGHT gallery in New York. He is known for his vivid and sometimes surreal use of color, his unique large format landscapes depicting his native northern New Jersey suburbs, and his evocative pictures from the waning days of Asbury Park on the New Jersey shore. During the 1980s, he largely stepped away from the art world, raising a family in upstate New York and becoming a contractor and furniture maker. However, he never completely left photography behind, and now over the last couple of years he’s spent an increasing amount of time diving through his voluminous archives and sharing his work to an entirely new audience through Instagram. I had a great time talking to Joe about rubbing shoulders with Ansel Adams and Julian Schnabel, driving around the New Jersey backroads at night, leaving the art scene to “live alone at the end of a dirt road,” and discovering a new audience for his work through Instagram.

William Eggleston may be the closest thing in the world of art photography to a rock star. Not so much a swaggering front man like Mick Jagger or Freddie Mercury, but perhaps more akin to Bob Dylan – an eccentric personality, but nonetheless a driven and prolific artist with a willingness to push the boundaries of his medium and reject popular expectations and commercial pressure. And much like Dylan, Eggleston has become a somewhat legendary figure, surrounded by a great deal of myth and misconception.

For me, especially as a photographer, that reality is far more inspiring than the legend.

Kyle Myles is a photographer currently living and working in Baltimore. I got to know Kyle a few years ago through Instagram and mutual friends in the photo community, and I’m proud to count him as a friend. Long before I met him, I knew Kyle for his beautifully composed and heartfelt work, mostly focusing on personal and family documentary, as well as for his mastery of black and white - which he used almost exclusively until recently. I had the pleasure of speaking to Kyle a few weeks ago, and we talked about living with the ongoing uncertainty of coronavirus, his recent use of color, the impact of the iPhone, and hot dog days at the pool.

Ian Johnson is a photographer from Seattle, currently living in New York City. He’s also a talented musician with a BA in jazz bass performance. I’ve known Ian for several years; he’s become a great friend, and one of my favorite photographers. Amongst a sea of often derivative NYC street-based images, his work stands out for striking compositions, a strong sense of visual intelligence, and recently, a relentless exploration of color. 50 years after the lessons learned from Eggleston, Ian’s images prove that there is still plenty of work to be done exploring the meaning of color in a photograph. We recently spoke over video chat, and talked about coping with quarantine, photography as jazz, conscious intuition, and the importance of walking.

Garry Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum in New York is a photography exhibition quite unlike any other I’ve ever seen. Through a radical presentation as large-scale projections, Garry Winogrand’s remarkable, energetic and challenging color photographs come alive on the wall. The combination of Winogrand’s incisive and voracious eye with the rich and vivid color of the vintage slides allows the photographs to reach through time and space, in some ways even more powerfully than his classic, virtuosic black and white images.