photography
The ALTERATIONS series was published by Italian photography and Visual Culture Magazine, Gente di Fotografia, with an essay by philosopher Oscar Meo, entitled THE “POETRY” AND THE “PROSE” OF AMERICA. Issue 84, 2025
KLOMPCHING GALLERY is pleased to present the Fresh 2024 Photography Exhibition. Now in its 13th year, the annual exhibition is curated from an international open call for contemporary photographs. Twenty photographers are selected as finalists—all are featured online and in a printed catalogue, with five curated into the four-week exhibition at the Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
PROJECT STATEMENT - PORTRAITS OF STUMPS
Walking around my neighborhood at night, I noticed an array of severed tree trunks, their upper limbs and branches sawn off and carted away. Their remaining lower trunk left protruding from the earth, too inconvenient to extract. These stumps became markers or displays for me of human efforts to curtail nature as it outlives its function as a suburban or domestic adornment. The use of studio flash allowed me to bring presence, empathy, and a gaze of care to these severed forms; forms that might otherwise remain unseen, blending into the urban landscape in the light of day.
https://www.klompching.com/fresh-2024-drew-waters
★ Winner of the Svensk Bokkonst, Swedish Book Art Award 2021 ★ Shelf Life, a self published zine, explores the spatial and social landscape in and around the hallowed ground of American consumption, the Supermarket. The average North American supermarket is 40,000 square feet (12,100 m²), roughly the size of a football field or an acre of land.
The commodified space we enter to partake in this final destination of industrial food production is designed to generate maximum ‘cart value’ or expenditure. The over-produced food products bear little resemblance to the land, labor, plant forms or animals from which they were extracted.
In addition to a photographic sequence, a poem unfolds a personal narrative of resistance navigating a Mega Mart, lit up like a stadium, to purchase just a couple of items. A mock Industry Marketing Report reveals proven strategies to make us always buy more.
Published as a limited-edition photo-zine, Shelf Life’s printing style replicates a supermarket discount catalog.
Design by Bedow
edition of 500
Presented work in progress, Blue Tarpaulin Homes, to SFCamerawork in San Francisco.