Book of the Week
Book of the Week: A Pick by Jenny Riffle
Jenny Riffle selects Outcasts and Innocents: Photographs of the Northwest by Alice Wheeler as Book of the Week.
This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Jenny Riffle who has selected
Outcasts and Innocents: Photographs of the Northwest by Alice Wheeler from Minor Matters.
"Not long ago I received my copy of
Outcasts and Innocents: Photographs of the Northwest in the mail and immediately tore into it. The photographs by Alice Wheeler are vibrant, honest, and beautiful. As a northwest native coming of age in the 90s, I felt nostalgic looking at the images of Nirvana and Bikini Kill playing shows not unlike the shows I was going to myself in basements and community centers from Bellingham to Olympia. The photographs span three decades starting in the 80s and they capture the spirit of the past just as well as they capture contemporary culture. Flipping through the pages, you see the world that Alice is drawn to, the famous and the obscure: musicians, go-go dancers, drag queens, festival-goers, protesters, and everyday people at the county fair. One image that I go back to often is a self-portrait of Wheeler holding out the camera to show herself and a friend in a room full of art and records. In this image you see that she is a part of the world she photographs. Wheeler has an electric personality that comes through in her work. She has captured the beautiful spirit of the northwest through the faces of her friends and the places they inhabit."—Jenny Riffle
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| photo by Molly Landreth |
Jenny Riffle was born in Washington State in 1979. She received her MFA in Photo, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in 2011 and her BA in photography from Bard College in 2001. In 2014 Riffle was chosen as one of PDN's 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch, she received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship grant in 2013 and the juror’s award at Newspace Center for Photography’s 2012 juried show for her project
Scavenger: Adventures in Treasure Hunting.
A book of the
Scavenger photographs was published by Zatara Press in the fall of 2015. Riffle lives in Seattle where she teaches at the Photo Center Northwest.
