The journalistic expression “If it bleeds; it leads” is particularly resonant in Mexico, where an entire subgenre of daily tabloids, devoted to crime and disaster, cover train wrecks and murders in lurid detail. Enrique Metinides made a career as a crime photographer for these nota roja (“bloody news”), earning the sobriquet the “Mexican Weegee” for his obsessive chronicling of accidents and crime scenes throughout Mexico[.....]

Watching “Five Broken Cameras” and “How to Survive a Plague”—two outstanding documentaries nominated for yesterday’s Academy Awards—it’s easy to be reminded of what a gift this kind of attention can be for the community or person being featured. Yet watching Emad Burnat’s young son Gibreel stand center stage with his own camera, filming the Docuday audience during Saturday’s question-and-answer session, it’s also hard to shake[.....]

Born in 1962 of parents who were attached to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Geng Jianyi grew up in a country shaped by rigid, state-mandated structures that had, by the late 1960s to the early ‘70s, fallen a long way short of the idealistic socialist Chinese state that Mao Zedong had envisioned. Where solidary socialism was intended to create commitment to the system by way[.....]

Artist Jeremy Bolen brought back a lot of pictures from his trip to Geneva, Switzerland last year, which are currently on view at Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago. Bolen’s one-man show titled CERN, features conceptual photography that is driven by unique processes of exposing film, processes which point toward challenging questions about the veracity of art. The Geneva photos aren’t exactly your standard images of a bucolic European countryside,[.....]

Standing before the photographs from Bill Armstrong’s Infinity series, resistance is futile. Intense washes of color and uncertain, alluring forms beckon yet elude one’s grasp, and the encounter between viewer and work becomes a question not of looking but, more powerfully, of experiencing. Critical distance is collapsed, vision becomes a channel for sensation, and image expands into an all-encompassing, alternative reality. Such is the effect[.....]

Today’s feature is from our  good friends at KQED Arts in San Francisco. Writer Roula Seikaly discusses Too Hard to Keep, a new project by Chicago-based photographer, Jason Lazarus, currently on view at SF Camerawork. One of the less understood figures in Christian folklore is the sin eater. This person, usually a beggar, was charged with absolving someone of their sins by consuming food and drink that[.....]

For this edition of Fan Mail, Jason Gowans of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada has been selected from our worthy reader submissions. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! If you would like to be considered, please submit your website link to info@dailyserving.com with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line. ———– Vancouver-bases artist, Jason Gowans currently serves as the Director of Gallery 295 and[.....]