Spatial chess with assorted studio materials. Made with Boris Granche.

Lambert et Fils is a design studio based in Montreal, Canada that specializes in lamp & lighting design. I’ve been making photographs for them over the last two years. In addition to making beautiful design objects, a central goal to the organization is to promote creative initiatives within Montreal.

The L&F Lab is a pilot project that aims to give employees at the company time and space to creatively experiment and develop knowledge with a range of materials – everything from working with molding concrete, to shaping brass offcuts, creating three dimensional paper collages, metalworking, technical drawing, and many other possibilities, usually using recycled materials. This means once a week, an artist or designer is invited to come and teach a workshop of the history, basics, and methods of how to approach a given material, with the aim of enriching the skills and knowledge of anyone interested. Eventually, the project may encompass larger creative projects and lead to other opportunities. Currently, the structure is a bit like a Bauhaus School approach to learning and creating.

The images here are from two workshops from recent weeks: a Halloween Mask-making workshop led by Chris Tucker, and a concrete molding workshop led by Nick Castonguay. Images by Arseni Khamzin for L&F, and all creations by their respective owners.

American Interiors depicts the psychological repercussions of war and military service through images of the interiors of cars owned by veterans in the USA. Over the course of the 5 years ML Casteel spent working with veterans, he became aware of subtle indications of past traumatic experience. Recognizing that the condition of one’s dwelling can often be a signifier for one’s state of well­being, Casteel began to see the state of the car interiors as manifestations of human interiors.

American Interiors is Casteel’s attempt to bridge a deep sense of rebellion and outrage towards institutionalized violence via warfare and the American military industrial complex with the empathy he holds for the people who have survived the military experience.

I first met ML Casteel while studying together at the Hartford Photo MFA Limited Residency Program. We quickly became friends, and during his first year at Hartford spent he completed his project “American Interiors.” As of yet this series has not been featured online widely, and I hope more people are able to see and consider the work. American Interiors is scheduled to be released as a monograph by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2018.

You’re caught in an arc of light during the splitting of an atom. Spilled into a stream of water flung against stark night. Or in a spaceship orbiting some distant star, shuddering in the dark. You’re floating along the top of a cold mountain lake among caked soil. You are speed, you’re glistening.

Flying Frying Pan is a project by Japanese photographer Hitoshi Fugo. Over the course of fifteen years between 1979 and 1994, Fugo photographed the same subject: an iron frying pan against the light of his kitchen window.

Imagine spending fifteen years photographing the same thing. A surface, a form, a light source, and a camera attached to a living, breathing body. These are the basic elements you can reduce most scenes to, and yet still. How does limiting your variables help you look at things, help you learn through images?

Keeping a practice with photography can be challenging. Keeping a practice with looking mindfully even more so. What I find beautiful about Fugo’s Flying Frying Pan is that when I look at his images, I imagine a man standing in his kitchen each day, looking for new ways to understand the things in front of him, searching for sense and potential in ordinary things, and doing all this while holding a camera.