We’re thrilled to introduce the newest contributor to the Art Ruby land in Michael Avedon. Though still in college at SVA, Avedon has already amassed a fantastic portfolio of portraits with his preferred black & white 35mm film camera. Those include beautiful captures of artists like Julian Schnabel, Terence Koh, Richard Serra, and Chuck Close. He’ll be contributing to Art Box with his pictures, musings, and ideas and here are his quotable essentials: Michael on photography: Being able to explain my photography to somebody – why I take photographs, how I intend for them to look, what inspired me to begin – is something I hope to never be able to fully explain. Photography is largely in part a mystery to me. I am drawn to faces, and when I received my first camera as a gift from my grandmother that is where I began. Friends’ faces, strangers’ faces, my own face. As of recently I have found a particular interest in photographing artists at work in their studios. Each space ends up being a reflection or extension of the artist within it, and it therefore seems to be the ideal natural environment to capture some sort of truth about that person. Michael on building a website: Something I noticed early on is that today, the creative (or artistic) development process has become a very public one. In past decades this process had necessarily been a private one (due to lack of platforms like blogs and photo hosting websites), so you didn’t have people sharing all of their work immediately upon creating it. For me, if this process is so public, it all of a sudden becomes easy for me to loose track of my own ideas. Therefore I was quite ardent about waiting to expose myself and my creative ideas to a larger public until I felt that I had an appropriate amount of time to find my own voice, so to speak. Additionally I wanted to create something slightly different from the standard version of a portfolio website. I don’t like thumbnails of photographs, so I worked with my close friend Alex Hollender to design and build a site that would reflect these preferences. Also, since Alex has a certain distance from my work he was instrumental in assisting me edit down and organize the work that has gone up on the site.

Band of Outsiders's Scott Sternberg on working with Ed Ruscha and his Fall/Winter 2012 Collection

Charles Mary Kubricht on her installation on the High Line.