TheSelby.com has been a must-visit since its launch in 2008. Followers the world over click on regularly to see which artists, designers, performers, and style-makers have been most recently anointed, pictured in their living and working spaces by New York based photographer Todd Selby. Now Selby has compiled some of his best photo essays, along with the watercolor illustrations and hand-written questionnaires that accompany them, in one volume, The Selby is In Your Place.
     Since the website’s launch he’s been inundated by requests from viewers to visit them and photograph their homes. In an email conversation, Selby explained that he typically finds new subjects through recommendations from friends. In addition, he does extensive research before visiting artists’ homes to ensure that their decorative sensibility will suit his own, which clearly tends toward excess. As he states: “Minimalism is boring. Maximalism is exciting.”
     Selby’s photographs have tapped into a brand of interior design that has long been associated with artistic and bohemian living, one in which the home becomes a backdrop for a dense, eccentric, artfully curated display of personal possessions. Selby himself grew up in the suburbs of Orange County, California. ”Our house had tons of funny stuff we had collected from our travels,” he remembers. Similarly, the interiors that he’s drawn to are encrusted with their owners’ things: found objects, momentos, talismans, artwork, and antiques. They’re at once immensely stylish and intensely personal.

In a place like Sinaloa — the Pacific coast state famous for being the cradle of drug traffickers in Mexico — it’s almost impossible to carry out real journalism. After all, if the authorities don’t investigate drug gangs, then how is a reporter expected to? Some who have tried have paid with their lives.
     In this lethal setting, art becomes a powerful tool of expression, and in the last few years, as violence has exploded here, a brave new generation of cartoonists has erupted in the state capital, Culiacán. With few opportunities to publish their bold work in the mainstream press, a group of moneros got together to publish La Locha, a monthly comic infused with an angry blend of black comedy and societal critique.
     Planet recently met up with one of La Locha’s founders, the cartoonist Bobadilla, in a cantina in Culiacán, to have a chat about the situation in Sinaloa and what it means to be a cartoonist here. His strip Ñacas y Tlacuachi (loosely translates to “Rat and Weasel”), about two bumbling hitmen for hire, was recently picked up by start-up newspaper Ríodoce, a courageous new medium trying to tell the truth about what is happening in the drug war around the state. As a result of their candor, their offices fell victim to a grenade attack. Fortunately, nobody was killed. Bobadilla tells us about the incident, his work, and also a family tragedy that could have come straight from the pages of his cartoons. Like he says, in Sinaloa, reality is always stranger than fiction….

An exercise in Biennial belt tightening, the Whitney’s “2010” isn’t quite the visual juggernaut of years past. Pared down to fifty-five artists seeking to convey the anxiety and hope of the last two years, the exhibition is an understated paean to the present. On the modest roster is Vietnamese-born Tam Tran, a 23-year-old photographer whose contribution to a Memphis group exhibition first caught the eye of associate curator Carrion-Murayari. Tran, whose use of stark color and shadow recalls William Eggleston’s saturated depictions of the region, is quirky and disarming in her spontaneity and collaborative approach. In photographing her nephew for the Raising Hell series chosen for the show, the artist remarked, “If I see something I liked I would yell, ‘HOLD!’ and immediately push the shutter button before the moment was gone.” Often her work involves costuming or formal manipulation to emphasize ambiguous roles and narratives. Pool halls, mini marts, backyards, and her body act as canvases for studies in shifting identity and dichotomy. In a self-portrait cycle, for example, the artist transmogrifies from diminutive doll to powerful protagonist. While throughout Raising Hell the artist’s nephew wields a stick against a palpable yet invisible foe in alternating poses of victory and surrender. Rich in metaphorical content, the photograph Battle Cry from this series appeared prominently in media outlets covering the Biennial. “From the stance of an adult, the boy warrior is living out an instance of our childhood that we’ve lost,” Tran comments. It is a layered perspective on innocence, articulating fear and reassurance, force and restraint.

Most of the works at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, on view now through May 30, are mixed-media pieces that have strong ties to performance art, combining elements of installation, dance, music, theater, and video. One featured artist whose work falls far from these categories is photographer James Casebere. Amid the visual and literal noise of the exhibit, his two giant digital chromogenic prints, each about six feet by eight feet, possess a classical stillness and quiet subversiveness.
     For more than thirty years Casebere has constructed scaled paper models of existing buildings and photographed them from naturalistic points of view, in the same way that an architectural model-maker would. While an architect constructs models to anticipate what a structure will be, Casebere commemorates what a structure has been. In the structures he chooses to commemorate, and in the tone of the commemoration, his work offers pungent political references. He has based works on contemporary American prisons, European mosques, Caribbean plantations, and the Reichstag. The models in many of his recent photographs depict darkly-lit basement spaces flooded with water, images with nightmarish, apocalyptic overtones.
     At first glance the two photos on display at the Biennial, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County NY) #1″ and “#2,” seem cheerfully apolitical.

Céline Clanet was born in 1977 in the French Alps, leaving only at 18 to study photography at the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie in Paris. She has since produced series upon series of evocative images documenting her obsessive explorations of place, identity, death, and memory. Currently, Clanet has a stunning show on display until April 4 at the Pohjoinen Valokuvakeskus/Northern Photographic Center in Oulu, Finland. Clanet was gracious enough to respond to a few questions via email about the current show, her fascination with Lapland, and the village Máze in particular, as well as her deep connection to the place and its people.

Can you give us some background on yourself?

I am French, and was born and raised in the Alps. When I was 18 I moved to London, and then Arles (southern France), where I studied photography for some years. I now live and work in Paris, with my man and son. I started photography when I was a teenager. I started playing with chemicals, films, and papers, and I soon realized the fantastic tool it was for saving memories and sharing thoughts.

Many Americans are well familiar with Kiki Smith, who came up on the latter end of feminism’s second wave as a member of the activist art collaborative Colab. She achieved prominence a decade later with her major New York exhibition in 1988. Now, at 56, she seems to be at the height of her career.
     For her most recent site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Museum, Smith takes as her inspiration a remarkable 18th-century needlework from the Federal period by a woman named Prudence Punderson, entitled The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality. Read from right to left, the parlor room scene depicts three stages of a woman’s life: birth (symbolized by a cradle), adulthood, and death (a coffin). What is rare for a work of that period is that female adulthood is symbolized not by a domestic act, but a creative one — the central figure appears to be drawing. Also unusual is the prominent inclusion of the nursemaid, an enslaved woman of African descent, which raises issues of historical oppression that fall not just along gendered, but also racial lines, and the pressing need for individual as well as creative freedom.

Many Americans are well familiar with Kiki Smith, who came up on the latter end of feminism’s second wave as a member of the activist art collaborative Colab. She achieved prominence a decade later with her major New York exhibition in 1988. Now, at 56, she seems to be at the height of her career. 
     For her most recent site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Museum, Smith takes as her inspiration a remarkable 18th-century needlework from the Federal period by a woman named Prudence Punderson, entitled The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality. Read from right to left, the parlor room scene depicts three stages of a woman’s life: birth (symbolized by a cradle), adulthood, and death (a coffin). What is rare for a work of that period is that female adulthood is symbolized not by a domestic act, but a creative one — the central figure appears to be drawing. Also unusual is the prominent inclusion of the nursemaid, an enslaved woman of African descent, which raises issues of historical oppression that fall not just along gendered, but also racial lines, and the pressing need for individual as well as creative freedom.   

As global consumers we have become accustomed to beauty with exotic trimmings. For French VOGUE and i-D photographer Viviane Sassen, however, fashion trends are not to be confused with a deeper heartfelt mode of expression. Now on view at Danziger Projects through Apr 10 are selections from her three series ‘Die Son Sien Alles’ (The Sun Sees Everything), ‘Flamboya’, and ‘Ultra Violet’. Not quite haute couture, not quite documentary, Sassen’s photographs are the result of directed African pilgrimages and fall into an enigmatic category incorporating personal memory, imperialism, and sensual beauty. Evoking South Africa, Zambia and East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), they intimate the mythologized ‘Other’ but moreover signify the fruits of close collaborative efforts. African models bathed in shadows or fog, configured in abstract sculptural formations, or marked with strident color, dually invoke indigenous spirituality and colonial superstition. In Sassen’s world of magical realism, bodies overlap or emerge in lush, unusual settings, intertwining the oft-illusory politics of ethnicity and aesthetics.

The artist discussed her work and ties to Africa in a candid interview with PLANET