On Friday, September 7, 2018, at the SVA Library West, Esopus hosted a dialogue between artist and photographer John Edmonds and writer and editor Marjon Carlos. Edmonds and Carlos went into depth about Edmonds’s work, including his 2018 series Tribe (featured in Esopus 25). They also discussed other topics, including race, representation, art history, and pop culture, focusing on how each has informed and inspired Edmonds’s practice.

Marjon Carlos is a journalist, editor, and brand consultant, living and working in New York. She recently served as the Senior Fashion Writer at Vogue.com, where her work explored the intersection of style, culture, gender, and race—an outgrowth of her academic research in Gender and African American Studies at Brown and Columbia Universities, respectively. A native of Dallas, Carlos previously held editorial posts at Saint Heron and Fusion, and her work has appeared within the pages of American Vogue, Wall Street Journal, ELLE UK, Essence, and Lurve Magazine, and on ELLE, W Magazine, and The Fader’s digital platforms. 

John Edmonds (b. 1989) is an American artist and photographer who first came to public recognition with his intimate portraits of lovers, close friends and strangers.  His work explores themes of identity, community and desire. Noted for his highly formalist photographs in which he focuses on the performative gestures and self-fashioning of young black men on the streets of America, his work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. His debut monograph, Higher, will be published in Fall of 2018 by Capricious Publishing. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  

For more information, contact info@esopus.org.

PHOTOS: Portrait of John Edmonds by Ken Castaneda; portrait of Marjon Carlos by Bec Lorrimer.