"As an editor, I’m drawn to photography that expands my understanding and perception of the world around me. When I’m in a prickly mood, “understanding” is a flat word – one of those terms that is so ubiquitous that it carries little resonance in a sentence. I think repeatedly about Hunter S. Thompson’s diatribe on the “big” words like “Happy” or “Honest” or “Love.” “Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them, and I am no exception,” he wrote in one of his novels. The big words, he continued, “are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.” I’m not a priest, though I’m sometimes a fool, and maybe it is foolish to swim through the sea of meaning behind any given word. On generous days, understanding is not flat, but rather expansive and deep and overwhelming in its breadth. This is why I turn to images. Understanding is not always based in fact, and so photography is a fitting medium, as the relationship between a photograph and fact is slippery. Nonetheless, some photographs have a closer relationship to reality, like Elliot Ross’s series on the people and landscapes in the San Luis Valley. These are her hands – this is his home. Elliot’s photographs expand my knowledge of that area. This bridge is real. How about relationships? We have a finite number in our lives, and photographs that place two people in proximity to one another, like Margaret Liang’s, offer a lens through which we can consider our own affectionate or romantic dynamics. Lately I’m ravenous for imagery that cleverly manipulates or distorts reality in order to create a new world out of our own. Though they’re hugely different in form, Fiona Howarth’s tactile landscapes and Sterre Arentsen’s hallucinogenic photographs of plants both tweak my eye when I look at the scenery that surrounds me. Jean Jasper Gruis’s photographs of empty construction sites in South Africa carry deep meaning about labor and inequity. I Google “housing crisis, mossel bay, south africa.” I look at their surreal photographs and see Edward Hopper. I absorb something new." - @coralie.kraft, JRNL 14 Guest Editor Print copies at the link in bio!🗞 Spreads © #ed artists