PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf - Photography Podcast

Artists Dru Donovan and Jon Rubin join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to share their memories of legendary photographer, artist, and teacher Larry Sultan and discuss the release of Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings (MACK), the first publication devoted to Sultan's wide-ranging use of writing as a personal, artistic, and pedagogical tool, illustrated throughout with previously unseen materials from his archive. Former students, assistants, and friends of Sultan, Donovan and Rubin share personal stories about his approach to photography, teaching, and mentorship, while reflecting on his lasting influence and the privilege of collaborating with his family on this book.

Dru Donovan

Dru Donovan works with both photography and video to examine the connection between physical and emotional occurrences by constructing or revisiting human experiences. Donovan’s work has shown nationally and internationally and was included in reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Fraenkel Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Williamson Knight Gallery and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Donovan’s photographs were published in Aperture Magazine, Blind Spot, Picture Magazine and Matte Magazine. In 2011 TBW Books published her first book, Lifting Water. In 2011-2012 she participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace studio residency. Awards Donovan has received are the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2015 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2016.

https://drudonovan.com

Jon Rubin 

Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates collaborative interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. His socially engaged projects include running a barter-based nomadic art school, founding a national museum, operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers, and co-directing another that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. In 2019, with the support from Creative Capital, Rubin built an exact replica of his friend Sohrab Kashani’s Tehran apartment so they both could live and work together in a parallel universe that bypassed the Trump travel ban.

Rubin has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennial; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial; the Carnegie International; The Lyon Biennale; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. In 2017 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commissioned a major new work by Rubin and collaborator Lenka Clayton, entitled A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. With the participation of six diverse venues around New York City, the artists arranged for an essential element from each site—referenced in the project’s title—to circulate from one place to the next, creating a six-month network of social and material exchange. 

His work has been reported on internationally by outlets including The New York Times, The Associated Press, Art in America, Artforum, The Boston Globe, La Repubblica, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Conflict Kitchen, Rubin’s collaborative seven-year work with artist Dawn Weleski, was named as one of the 100 Artworks that “Defined the Decade” by Artnet News.

Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Columbus College of Art and Design.

https://www.jonrubin.net

Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan (American photographer, b. Brooklyn, NY, 1946; d. Greenbrae, CA, 2009) was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley. His work, heavily influenced by the post-war popular culture of Los Angeles, plays with notions of documentary and staged photography and reveals the psychological nuances found in the everyday suburban landscape and family life. Acclaimed for his use of color and light, Sultan is also known for uniquely collapsing the distance between himself and his subject. His series include Swimmers (1978-82), Pictures from Home (1983-92), The Valley (2004) and Homeland (2006-2009). Sultan co-authored the ground-breaking work, Evidence (1977) with Mike Mandel. A beloved and highly influential educator, Sultan taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, from 1989 to 2009.

Sultan’s work has been widely published, exhibited, and collected worldwide including Tate Modern, London; The National Gallery, London; Stedejik Museum, Amsterdam; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Sultan was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, US Department of International Arts and Lectures Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. Sultan’s project Pictures from Home was developed for the stage and premiered on Broadway in 2023.

https://www.larrysultan.com

Curators Marina Chao & Adam Ryan (CPW) join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss the inaugural Upstate Photography Biennial and the curatorial process behind this major contemporary photography exhibition. Chao, Ryan, and Wolf explore how CPW develops exhibitions with both the local community and broader audience in mind, building meaningful public engagement, and what artists can do to establish and sustain relationships with photography and arts organizations.

https://cpw.org

Marina Chao has previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As assistant curator at ICP she organized the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She was awarded a 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for a project exploring the intersections of image, language, and technology.

Adam Ryan is a photography specialist and curator based in Poughkeepsie, New York. He gained experience working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he focused on the museum’s permanent collection of photographs, while also managing its Collection Study Center. He collaborated on multiple exhibitions such as Japanese Photography from Post War to Now, Selections from the Sack Photographic Trust, and Nothing Stable Under Heaven. Before that, he worked in the Photography Department of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his primary focus was a major retrospective on the work of renowned artist Duane Michals – Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals. As a student, he learned photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and continued into graduate school at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada.

https://www.adamgilesryan.com

Photographers Jarod Lew and Reagan Louie join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss how they explore cultural identity, personal loss, and trauma through photography. Lew and Louie are Asian American photographers from different generations, and their work reflects how the exploration of cultural identity in contemporary photography has evolved over the decades. While Louie takes a documentary photography approach, Lew works through more conceptual constructs. Their conversation with Wolf highlights the visual differences between their practices while revealing striking resonances in how they discuss their approach.

https://www.jarodlew.com

https://www.reaganlouie.com

Jarod Lew is an artist who draws on photography to explore intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement, and postmemory. Through this exploration, his work contends with the performativity of race and its instability as a locus of meaning.

His project, Please Take Off Your Shoes was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021, and was exhibited in a group exhibition at SFMOMA titled Kinship: Photography and Connection in 2023. His other project, In Between You and Your Shadow, examines his relationship with his mother, who was the fiancé of Vincent Chin--the subject of a hate-crime that brought national attention to matters of Asian American civil rights. In 2025, Lew will mount his first museum exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art titled- Strange You Never Knew. 

His works are held in public and private collections including the Cantor Art Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Kadist, San Francisco, Harvard Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lew’s work has been written about in Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Aesthetica Magazine.

Lew graduated with an MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art.

Reagan Louie’s photography and installations explore global transformation and cultural identity. He is currently at work on several projects that focus on the relationship between home and homeland; including a book about his family’s immigration from China to America. And a Virtual Reality experience about his ancestral home, Wing Wor.

His work is exhibited at institutions: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art NY, Philadelphia Art Museum, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Gwangju Biennale. Louie’s photographs are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Cantor Art Museum.

Louie’s photographs are widely published. His books have received critical acclaim. The New York Times Book Review named his first book on China, “Toward a Truer Life”, the photography book of the year.

He is the recipient of numerous awards - The Guggenheim fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Lange-Taylor Prize, and Fulbright Fellowship.

Photographers Cheryle St. Onge and Scott Offen join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss their photobooks, Calling the Birds Home and Grace, both published by L'Artiere Editions. In this conversation, St. Onge and Offen generously share their deeply personal approaches to collaborating with and photographing people with whom they have profound emotional connections. St. Onge reflects on documenting her mother's experience with dementia, describing the work as an act of communication, care, and connection. Offen discusses his collaborative portrait project with his partner, Grace, exploring themes of co-authorship, gender, representation, and aging.

https://www.cherylestonge.com/

https://www.scottoffen.net/

Scott Offen (b. 1960) is an American East Coast photographer whose work has been exhibited across the United States and prominently featured online. Scott holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He was selected as a finalist for the Critical Mass top 200 Photolucida award in 2021 and has been chosen as a participant in the Chico Hot Springs Portfolio Review in 2020 and 2021. Scott became a recipient of the MassArt Graduate Thesis Award in 2024.

Cheryle St. Onge was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She grew up on college campuses as the only child of a Physics professor and a painter. She received an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts.

St. Onge's work focus on the crossover of art and science and photography's ability to distill our sense of time and curiosity. She makes pictures predominantly with an 8 x 10 view camera and considers her work a collaborative process.

Her photographs have been widely exhibited, most notably at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Princeton University, Griffin Museum, University of Rhode Island, Massachusetts College of Art, Rick Wester Fine Arts, and with the American Institute of Architects traveling exhibition. She has received numerous awards and residences, among them a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Critical Mass Finalist Exhibition Award, Polaroid Materials Artist Support Grant, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Graduate Fellowship, and was named one of the ‘Top 50 Photographers’ in the country by Time Magazine.

Photography Historian and Curator Audrey Sands joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss her book, Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (Eakins Press Foundation). Drawing on years of research, Sands presents Lisette Model's rarely seen archive of photographs of 1950s jazz legends, including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Percy Heath, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Sands and Wolf discuss the rise of fine art photography as a collectible medium in the latter half of the 20th century, the role of museums and institutions in shaping the narrative of photographic history, and the role of the historian in editing and interpreting an artist's work posthumously.

https://harvardartmuseums.org/about/press-media/audrey-sands-appointed-associate-curator-of-photography-at-the-harvard-art-museums

https://www.instagram.com/audreyleesands/ 

Audrey Sands is a historian of photography and curator who specializes in twentieth-century American photography.. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in the History of Art from Yale University, an M.St. in the History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in Art History from Barnard College.

Since February 2025, Sands has served as the Richard L. Menschel Associate Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, where she oversees a collection of approximately 75,000 photographs and time-based media ranging from the early 19th century to the present. Her appointment followed a postdoctoral fellowship as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2022–25), during which she contributed to the exhibitions Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection (2024–25) and the multi-venue Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 (2025–26).

Prior to the NGA, from 2019 to 2022, Sands held the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography position at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), University of Arizona—a joint appointment with Phoenix Art Museum—where her exhibitions included Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi's America, 1940–1978 (2021–22) and Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs, 1961–1989 (2022). Earlier curatorial positions include the Department of Photographs at The Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Sands has been the lead scholar on the work of photographer Lisette Model for over a decade, beginning with her Yale dissertation, “Lisette Model and the Inward Turn of Photographic Modernism.” Her most recent publication, Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (Eakins Press Foundation, 2025), realized a suppressed collaboration between Model and Langston Hughes that had been shelved during the McCarthy era, publishing for the first time nearly 200 of Model's approximately 1,500 jazz negatives alongside Hughes's original essay and new scholarship by Sands.

Her ongoing research on flash photography—supported by a 2021 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts—is developing toward a publication and exhibition titled The Shape of Light: History, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Flash Photography.