EDITOR’S LETTER
b y A ndrea B la nch
The extraordinary humans profiled for this issue of Musée Magazine — photographers, visual artists, journalists, two
mountain-climbing filmmakers — share at least one trait: an ability to grapple with doubt, take risks, and emerge
triumphant from the experience. Seven years ago, I opened this magazine determined to build an online community,
champion passionate photographers everywhere, and keep my sanity. Whether I have succeeded or not I’ll leave to the
judgment of my friends and colleagues. But sane or crazy, I am better for the attempt.
While it would be churlish to compare the risks our featured artists take, some risks do tend to command more attention
than others. For instance, scaling a 3,000-foot granite cliff face freighted with filmmaking equipment has the undeniable
effect of throwing other achievements in the shade. Jimmy Chin, co-director, with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, of oscar
award-winning documentary Free Solo, did just that when he documented mountaineer Alex Honnold’s completion of
the first ever ropeless, solitary ascent of El Capitan.
There is the work of Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley, who merge painting, sculpture, poetry, social satire, performance art,
costume design, and video: an audacious combination of elements that in the hands of lesser talents would yield only
incoherence. Joan Jonas is another bold synthesizer of mixed media. In conversation with fellow artist Steve Miller, she
recalled her installation on Jones Beach in 1970, which had to be viewed from a quarter-mile away, and which forced
audience members to experience art outside of the traditional gallery space. Meghann Riepenhoff, influenced by early
photography pioneer Anna Atkins, eschewed her darkroom and began experimenting with cyanotypes, exposing them
to the chaotic flux of ocean waves for the creation of abstract images of startling beauty. George Platt Lynes was issue
No. 21’s “master photographer.” A prominent 20th-century fashion and advertising photographer, he was forced to
keep hidden from the general public his personal work, which is explicitly homoerotic and could have resulted in im-
prisonment and ruin.
In my interview with veteran photojournalist Ron Haviv, he painted a vivid picture of life’s fundamental precarious-
ness: “There have been times when pieces of shrapnel landed so close to my head that if it had turned a different way
I’d be gone, where people next to me were shot and killed and I somehow survived.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof said, in a column published on December 18, 2018, “Noth-
ing I write can be as searing or persuasive or true as Abrar is in this photo.” The referenced photo depicts a sick, starving
Yemeni girl (Abrar) crouched in a hospital. Kristof had taken the unusual step of dedicating his column’s space to the
image, stating in his Musée interview that “photography is better suited to create that channel of empathy than words.”
Although spatial limitations prevent us from mentioning all of this issue’s artists, a few, taken as a group, offer compel-
ling contrasts. First, there is Nona Faustine, who deftly combines the personal and political by posing herself (often
fully or partially nude) in front of a variety of landscapes, including city intersections and courthouses. In conversation
with Musée, Dawoud Bey described the challenge involved in moving from portrait work into landscape photogra-
phy. He affected this transition for Night Coming Tenderly, Black? , a series depicting locations along the Underground
Railroad. Finally, Noah Berger and Josh Edelson — two friends who are technically competitors in their work — go to
extreme lengths to photograph wildfires together.
The risk may seem compelling, but when successful it often involves prior preparation, a state of readiness which comes
from many failures. Riepenhoff went through hundreds of cyanotypes before the project’s ultimate fruition; Chin and
Vasarhelyi were already highly accomplished filmmakers before their perilous (and Oscar-nominated) work on Free
Solo. Kathy Griffin, opposite, took an enormous risk when she and the photographer, Tyler Shields, released this image
depicting Griffin holding the bloody, severed head of Donald Trump. Neither Griffin nor Shields could have predicted
the backlash they would receive for the image, nor how it would reshape the future of Griffin's career in comedy. Like-
wise, my decision to bring Musée Magazine into being was preceded by over three decades as a professional photog-
rapher. That being said, believing we are ever fully prepared for anything is hubristic. Here, then, is our ode to daring
souls, both the circumspect and the spontaneous.
Kathy Griffin photographed by Tyler Shields.
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