RUSK — A new studio, Alchemy Creative Arts, LLC, has opened in Rusk which includes an art gallery and photography studio.

The studio is owned by Amy Lescoe-Hall who works alongside well-known local photographer Bryan Barrow.

The studio, which offers indoor studio and outdoor photography sessions, original artwork, photo retouching and professional print services on canvas, acrylic, metal, and professional quality photo paper, opened its doors with a ribbon cutting celebration on July 1.

Lescoe-Hall said the duo loves being creative and wanted to offer something new to the community.

“We love art and photography and wanted to offer a studio location that also allows us to offer artwork to the public. The opportunity became available for us to have a location downtown in Rusk, so we took it,” she said. “Plus, air conditioning and heat is a great benefit to have when taking photographs.”

Lescoe-Hall, with help of Barrow’s wife, pulls from her film and professional theater experiences to create sets, wardrobe, hair and makeup, digital backgrounds, and props for themes like Viking Shield Maidens, Fairy Princesses, Elven Queens, Archers, Warriors, Wizards, and many other fantastical and dramatic photography sessions.

“We love themed photo sessions. We schedule special ‘limited edition’ photo sessions in both our studio and various outdoor locations in Rusk and the surrounding areas.”

Barrow is an established photographer in the area, excels at sports photography, action of all sorts, and has a special affinity for capturing images of wildlife in vivid detail. He has been seen on the sidelines of all of the different sports fields the past few years photographing images of students as well as professionals, including Smith County student-athletes and coaches.

Barrow, who has long aspired to follow his photography passion full-time, said he is both excited and a little intimidated to start this new journey.

“I’m excited to open and a little intimidated because I am learning new skills and putting to the test things I’ve already learned. It’s been some hard work already but we’re ready to provide great service and beautiful images to our clients,” he said. “Our studio is a welcoming space that we want everyone to feel comfortable to relax and have fun without the fear of being judged. Our goal is to become the go to photographers for themed style shoots. If you have an idea, bring it to us and we will make it happen.”

Barrow said the reception has been great and he is grateful for the support he has gotten to move forward with this dream.

“Everybody has been so positive and encouraging so that definitely has us excited for the future,” he said. “I can’t say thank you enough to my family and friends that are supporting me following my dream to work as a full-time photographer.”

Lescoe-Hall agreed the reception thus far has been off the charts.

“We were so incredibly blessed to have a great turn out for our grand opening celebration and ribbon cutting. We met so many people that were curious and want to support us,” she said. “We have already begun seeing customers, selling artwork, and scheduling sessions through the end of the year.”

Lescoe-Hall said one of her most important goals is to have fun and bring a positive experience to clients.

“We like to have fun; life is too serious for most people most of the time. Session time with us will be a way to step out of your normal life and just enjoy yourself,” she said. “We are very body-positive and like to bring out the beauty and ‘special-ness’ of the people, animals, and locations that we photograph.”

Lescoe-Hall went on to it was also important for the business to support the arts and other local artists and will soon be having exhibits.

“We love supporting the arts and local artists of a variety of mediums. We want to showcase and sell other people’s artwork as well as our own,” she said. “We will be having exhibits throughout the year that feature a variety of styles and artists.”

Photographers will travel to outside of Rusk to Jacksonville, Tyler, Kingsland, Bertram, and other East Texas communities for sessions. 

Alchemy Creative Arts, LLC offers portraits, both in studio and in a natural setting, senior pictures, school and childhood milestones, sports photography, corporate photography including head shots, products, locations, and more, bridal, boudoir, and body positive photography sessions.

The business is located at 125 East 6th Street in Rusk and can be reached at 903-373-2640.

For more information, visit the Alchemy Creative Arts, LLC Facebook page.

On the surface, the photography festival Rencontres d’Arles looks like a picture postcard; more than 30 exhibitions embedded into the very streets of the ancient French city, long sunsets dipping over the lush Provence landscape, birds roosting in the city’s enduring Roman ruins, an endless stream of young artists, from all over the world, mixing and drinking and talking in the bars by the Rhône, not far from where, in June 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night.

But is the city as bucolic as it seems? Because Rencontres d’Arles takes place in a moment of stress. The festival opened on 3 July as violent protests spread across France, sparked by the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent who was shot by a police officer during a traffic stop on 27 June in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris.

The riots have been particularly fierce in Marseille, the main transport link for the festival. Arles itself has faced disruption, unmasking, once again, the long-standing tensions between France’s affluent, chic and peaceful urban centres and its many troubled, disparate banlieues.

LUMA Arles now defines the city’s skyline. The cultural centre, designed by Frank Gehry and paid for by the philanthropist Maja Hoffman, is a monolith of glass and steel and stone; a hymn to what money can buy if you have enough of it. But Arles has a definite peripherique. It is not difficult to spot plenty of poverty here, a poverty which seems clearly delineated along racial lines. In 1988, Van Gogh painted Trailers, Gypsy camp near Arles, and a sizeable travelling community still call Arles their home. In recent elections, far-right nationalist candidates have found plenty of support in Arles’s voting booths.

Is the festival entirely insulated from its setting, or does it have the capacity and mentality to recognise it? The answer is yes—but you have to look beyond the headline acts.

Rencontres d’Arles remains the place for living artists to get a retrospective. Get a survey of your work here and your spot in the establishment is secure. This year, the New York photographer Gregory Crewdson is handed the crown.

His work is shown alongside some big names from the annals of the medium, the biggest of which is Diane Arbus. Constellation, a roaming, amorphous exhibition of Arbus’s portraits, takes up The Tower, the main gallery space of LUMA Arles.

Arbus’s work has been shown a lot recently; indeed, in London, the Hayward Gallery displayed many of the images shown here in 2019. But never before has the work been displayed with such audacity. Walking through the show is like walking through an Escher painting in which you encounter, sometimes again and again, her images of New York’s most marginalised figures. The portraits, ever more strange, are hung at oblique angles and at all levels, on tall, haphazard grids. Mirrors ring the room, allowing the observer to observe themself as they view her work. It’s a disconcerting experience, but it’s appropriate for Arbus. She used her subjects to mirror her own psyche, and, as such, one gets the sense of a manic, compulsive and obsessive artist. It is like being invited into Arbus’s brain.

In the Palais De L’archevêché, we find the perfect accompaniment; Assemblages, an exhibition of work by Arbus’s contemporary, the New York street artist Saul Leiter. He was born in 1923, the same year as Arbus. They often socialised together. But his gentle, tender portraits of New York couldn’t be more divergent. Are these really the same streets, in the same place, at the same time?

Leiter shot for Harper’s Bazaar throughout his adult life, but he never had much in the way of a gallery presence. He became, increasingly, a hermit, feeling marginalised and dismissed by the New York gatekeepers. They missed out on a photographer almost uniquely capable of sublime, sheer beauty, a quality amply demonstrated in Assemblages. Leiter, who rejected his Orthodox Jewish family to pursue photography, was an autodidact of art history; his photography was informed, in particular, by his deep readings of French impressionism and Japanese ma—the theory of negative space, “the nothingness where, in fact, everything happens”, as the Japanese historian Kōtarō Iizawa terms it. Leiter’s paintings are duly included in this intricate exhibition of his work. But the curator could have guided the viewer through the show a little more, displaying how such influences informed Leiter’s utterly distinct usage of colour, framing and bokeh (the art of blur).

Then there’s the Parisian polymath Agnes Varda, the late doyenne of the Nouvelle Vague. Tiny in physical stature, Varda was a giant of French culture. Her death is still recent; born in 1928, she died in March 2019. That being the case, it is understandable that the festival wants to recognise her passing. But the handling of Varda’s legacy here feels, to me, too partial. Two separate exhibitions of her work are on show; the first, titled A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day, on show at LUMA Arles and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, focuses on the artwork she made, as an ageing woman, for the 2003 edition of the Venice Biennale. The other, at Cloître Saint Trophime, showcases the photographs she took as a budding young artist in 1947 in Sète, the port town an hour from Arles. The photographs formed the basis for La Pointe Courte, her debut feature film, released when she was just 27. She’s also included in the group show Scrapbooks at the Espace Van Gogh, an exhibition looking at movie directors and their research materials. Each exhibition of Varda’s work has value, but they feel minor and incidental, not capable of capturing what a wonderfully emotive artist she was. She deserves a truly overarching retrospective.

The headline shows go downhill from there. In Église Sainte-Anne, we are given Sosterkap, or ‘Sisterhood’, a group show of female artists from the Nordic countries. The show’s theme—to “explore the welfare state from a perspective of intersectional feminism”—disintegrates at the point of contact. It’s difficult to see how the work on the walls relates to this grand intent, while, too often, the portraits on show are shallow and bland or mere replicas of other series done better elsewhere.

Finally, there’s the blockbuster Crewdson show in La Mécanique Générale, a three-series retrospective which includes the first display of his new series, Eveningside. Crewdson has apparently spent his career “fleshing out a portrait of middle America,” we’re told. Middle America must be a very depressing place.

Crewdson, no doubt, has created compelling and enduring work; his series Beneath the Roses, from 2003 and not on show here, remains potent. But this exhibition cruelly reveals how repetitive and conservative his practice has become. From the beginning, his photographs paid too heavy a debt to Edward Hopper and New Hollywood, yet he continues to churn out derivative fare, yet another variation on a set theme, repeated over decades. The result is deadening.

But push past the top billing and the festival comes alive. At the fringes of Rencontres d’Arles, smaller exhibitions by lesser-known artists feel urgent and of the moment, demonstrating that photography is the one truly global medium.

In the Louis Roederer Discovery Award, for example, there is strong bodies of work by artists from countries as disparate as India, Ecuador, Vietnam and Egypt. But the Discovery section is strong not because of its diversity per se. It’s strong because the work on show doesn’t feel tokenistic or exoticised.

Photography, at its worst, can feel like the creative splurging of a Westerner’s romantic dalliance with a country far from their own; parachute art, as it’s sometimes called. Arles, in years past, has been guilty of sometimes indulging this, while relegating artists from the global south, even ones who have gained acclaim in their own countries, to play second fiddle to known European names.

The Discovery of 2023 is anything but that; 80% of the artists on show comes from the global south, 90% of the work has been shot there. But this is not a group show about the expected concerns of ‘people of colour’.

If one had to capture the unifying theme of the show, it’s the repudiation of migrancy as a burden. Migration, instead, is alchemical, uniquely capable of creating new ways of being. The show discusses “the distance between how we see ourselves and how we are seen by them,” says its curator, the Delhi-based Tanvi Mishra. “I become a person of colour and a migrant when I come to Europe from India,” says Mishra. “Back home, we don’t use these terms.”

Of particular note is Caribbean Dreams, by Samantha Box. The series mediates on Box’s identity with an unmoored thing; based in the US, raised in Jamaica, with Indian and African heritage, she considers her home to be the global diaspora. Her photography, then, considers the daily objects onto which we attach cultural currency; plants and vegetables, indigenous to her ancestral home in the Caribbean but considered alien in the US, are grown under artificial lights before being photographed with a lurid saturation. The plastic stickers attached to such commodified produce are pasted on top, interspersed with archive family portraits. These are packed, multivalent and complicated images, abundant with meaning and power.

Stronger still was the exhibition Light Of Saints. Set in Chapelle du Museon Arlaten, a desecrated Jesuit church from the 17th century, the exhibition is a humanistic history of the annual pilgrimage to the nearby Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, during which local Romani communities honour Saint Sara, the Black Madonna and patron saint of the Romani people. Some will see the setting of this informing, intimate exhibition as sacrilegious; for me, the intention was clear—we all worship the same God.

Also of note is the Abbaye de Montmajour exhibition 50 Years Through The Eyes Of Libération, a curated display of photography commissioned or published by Libération, starting from the newspaper’s founding in 1973—the newspaper turns 50 this year, and has become well-known in journalism circles for its willingness to break with news conventions, especially in its presentation of imagery. The show, then, mediates on the ever-evolving dynamic between documentary and fine art photography, mass media, conflict and political protest, a mash of relationships that seem to become more complex by the day.

Rencontres d’Arles’s opening week crescendoed with Nuit De l’Année, a late night party during which photographic montages were projected, at jaw-dropping scale, onto an abandoned warehouse a mile from the city centre. While the night had a rave-like atmosphere, the work on show was deadly serious.

A projection by Tori Ferenc, a press photographer for The Washington Post, showed, for example, the photographs a young group of teenagers took in the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The group are from Melitopol, Ukraine and did what all groups of teenagers do best; they partied. In voiceover, we hear them reflect on a year of war and the toll it has taken on them after they initially plunged, head-long, into hedonism, even as their city began to be flattened by Russian ordnance.

This was juxtaposed with the meditative images, taken by the Iranian photographer Mahka Eslami, of an Iranian refugee making his way to Coventry in the UK, even as he recovered from the news his best friend and toddler child were killed after a small boat sunk in the English Channel.

Each series kicked like a cart horse, driving home, in the Provence night, how delicate and forceful photography can be.

• Rencontres d’Arles runs until 24 September

Photography wasn’t the only art highlighted Saturday at the grand opening of Maria Mejia Photography. Under the watchful eye of potter Amy Roadman, Bianca Brown, a sophomore at Greater Latrobe Senior High School, tries to make a bowl on the pottery wheel for the first time.

In our regular series Behind the Lens, we get to know the photographers behind the beautiful images that fill the magazine’s pages and illustrate our online storytelling at Harper’s Bazaar. From celebrity cover stories to fairy-tale fashion editorials, every image is lovingly captured by one of our talented pool of visionary photographers, without whom the brand wouldn’t be what it is today.

This month we’re getting to know photographer , who has shot multiple covers for Harper’s Bazaar over the years – including Gemma Chan, Maude Apatow, Olivia Cooke, Elizabeth Olsen and Vanessa Kirby.

Here, we get to know Shinner’s story behind the lens; how he started his photography career, his favourite shoot to date and the biggest lesson he’s learnt from his career so far.

How did you get into photography?

“My mum has a great eye and she used to take wonderful pictures of us as kids. Some of that obviously rubbed off, as I remember the joy of getting films back from Boots fairly early on in life – no doubt with some very average holiday snaps on. It was at university that I realised I could get in to see my favourite bands for free if I just took photographs, which felt like a pretty good deal, so that’s when I really got into it.”

What was your first photography job or commission?

“At 17 years old, I worked for a local paper where I covered a garden party at a nursing home. I think my mum even drove me to the shoot. It was a strong start.”

What was the shoot that changed your career?

“Music had been a big part of my life for such a long time. Shooting my first album cover for Laura Mvula’s ‘Sing to the Moon’ debut, and seeing the vinyl with my photograph in the shops, really made a big difference – both in the level of work I was getting but also how I saw my own work.”

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What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

“Be nice to people and wear comfortable shoes.”

Which person or location that you’ve shot stands out the most?

“Shooting on the summit of Mount Snowdon for Bazaar, having trekked up there with backpacks full of fashion, was pretty special. We were up in the clouds, there was next to no visibility and I was starting to wonder what the hell to do. Then suddenly, the clouds parted and we were left looking and feeling like we were on top of the world. Then followed a frantic 15 minutes trying to get as many shots done up there as possible.”

What’s been your favourite Bazaar shoot and why?

“I still always think back to the first shoot that Cathy Kasterine and I did together in the Lake District. The story was all about wild swimming and the incredible Amber Witcomb and I both got in the freezing water multiple times to do some underwater shots. I had to wear a 20kg weight belt so I’d be heavy enough to sink a few metres down and I remember holding my breath and sitting on the bottom of the lake taking a photograph of Amber swimming over me on the surface and thinking that this is an interesting career I’ve chosen.”

Who or what do you find interesting subjects to photograph?

“I’ve always loved portraiture and the people I most enjoy photographing are those that take some warming up. Maybe they’re nervous or they don’t want to be there, or perhaps they find having their picture taken as pleasant as going to the dentist, but I love trying to make those people feel at ease and chatting to them – normally about anything other than the shot we’re about to take – then making them comfortable enough to take a good picture. The feeling when it all comes together and you make something you’re both happy with is hard to beat.”

What makes a good photo?

“Different people will give you different answers, but to me, a good photo is when there’s a fleeting moment of connection between the sitter and the lens in that small second. It’s the magic that happens in those few feet between two people, who might have just met or might have known each other for decades, that I find so special. When you look at a photograph and find yourself wondering what they were thinking about, what they’d just been discussing or you just feel inexplicably drawn to their gaze – these are all things that make for a compelling photo in my opinion. Trying to find that magic will always be what draws me to photographing people.”

Shop Josh Shinner’s work online .

Perusing through journals of months and years past can bring us right back to feelings of the time, and in some cases summon a new wave of creativity. Both are particularly true for London and Shanghai-based photographer Jiayueyue Li, whose old diaries gave her a window into her rough start in London — fraught with intrusive neighbours, struggles to find accommodation and pursuing a degree outside of her native language — and the solace she found in her room. “Daily life outside was like a war at times, and my room was always a place for healing,” she tells us. “Reading back through my diary, images of other girls in their rooms, in a similar situation, started coming to mind,” she adds.

Jiayueyue’s journey doesn’t stop at introspection or nostalgia. She wants to know how Asian women who have emigrated to London are feeling now; developing from self to friends and eventually strangers. Her very personal style captures these women in a way that doesn’t strive for perfection or immediate clarity to us as viewers. Some images are of near silhouettes and in others, faces are obscured by furniture and keepsakes. But the emotions of the subjects – whether distraught, joyful or jestful – come to the forefront, allowing us to read the room. “Things have changed a lot since I started the project [in 2016], a lot of the girls I documented in the early years have moved out of those rooms. It could be the pandemic, new policies or the rental market”, she says. “When you come to a new city, your decision to stay or leave is deeply personal, but when you zoom out these choices draw a portion of history”.

Photography students at Oak Harbor High School are the featured artists at the Oak Harbor Library for the month of July.

The featured students were in Jana Jansen’s photography and digital arts class during the last school year. Jansen said the 13 digital photographs and two digital art pieces on display at the library showcase the skills taught in her classes.

“I hope the visitors will very much enjoy the artwork and be amazed at how much creativity, talent and skill our high school students have,” she said.

This is Jansen’s second year in a row showcasing her students’ work at the library. Some of the photographs on display this month advanced to the final round of the Washington State High School Photography Competition this year.

Matthew Ackerman was one of the students who had a photograph advance in the contest. He started taking photos over the summer of 2020 and most greatly enjoys taking photos of landscapes and old architecture.

Ackerman, who will be a senior next year, said he learned how to compose a photo in Jansen’s class.

“I would characterize my style as emphasizing the interplay between light and texture,” he said. “Most of this is achieved through the use of a slower shutter speed and picking the right time of day to photograph.”

The students’ photographs will be on display through July 31.

Photo by Bailey Darnell

Photo by Bailey Darnell

Photo by Roann Barrera

Photo by Alex Merrill

Photo by Bailey Darnell

Photo by Taylen Bader

Photo by Matthew Ackerman

Photo by Matthew Ackerman

Photo by Laurianna Newcomb

Photo by Faith Dalio

Photo by Alex Merrill

Photo by Thatcher Tennal

Photo by Thatcher Tennal

Photo by Thatcher Tennal