LENSCRATCH

Venessa Monokian initially used photography as a tool for coping with the limitations of her learning disability. She used it as an alternative way of understanding the world, and began experimenting with different ways of presenting images. Monokian photographed the tropical foliage of her home in Florida, and continued that practice after moving to Houston.

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I met Jamie V. Robertson at the FotoFest reviews in Houston, and was immediately struck by the quiet strength of her images of southern swamplands. The pictures are taken with Infrared film, which makes the tree foliage seem luminescent. This haunting effect is tied into her exploration of the maroon colonies of runaway slaves that lived

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The first time I saw Han Sungpil’s work, there was a small crowd leaning over the images in reverential silence. I looked at the photos from the back of the crowd, and saw a multitude of black lines on pristine white paper. When I was able to get closer, I saw that each of the

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We tend to notice trees when they are beautiful, enormous, or planted exactly where we expect them to be. The trees that grow in the cracks of a city, under freeways, beside construction sites, or in whatever scraps of dirt they can find are easier to overlook. But perhaps those are the trees worth paying

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The orbit and arc of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s aesthetic trajectory has steadily tracked across my social media feeds over the last few years. For instance, Sepuya is the juror for this year’s La Jolla Athenaeum 34th Annual Juried Exhibition, which is near the university where he teaches in San Diego, California. He also lives in

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