New profiles every Monday, starting 4/12 on ACT-I-VATE.com
Seth Kushner loves comics and loves taking photos of interesting people. Over the past year, Seth began experimenting with combining the two passions, in the form of photocomix, AKA fumetti, first popularized in the U.S. with Harvey Kurtzman's Help and later in Robert Crumb's Weirdo. In those cases the photocomix were played for laughs, but Seth's doing something different: a fusion of photojournalism, personality profile, and comix. His first photocomix profile was of Harvey Pekar, for GRAPHIC NYC, the comics journalism site he co-edits, and the reception was so positive it set Seth to concocting an ongoing photocomix project.
"What Seth achieved with that Pekar interview-cum-comic was a triumph," said Jeff Newelt, Harvey's editor on The Pekar Project. "He took key moments of an interview, matched the words with photos he took, and sequentially arranged the results so as to read as smoothly as an American Splendor comic. I work with four artists who masterfully illustrate Pekar's words, and I was dumfounded by how much Seth's experiment succeeded."
"Seth Kushner's omniscient lens distills NYC's brave and bold into graphic time capsules," says Dean Haspiel, creator of Billy Dogma, & The Alcoholic.
With Culture POP, Seth's shines his flash on the lives of subjects including poet Caits Meissner, sousaphonist/producer Clark Gayton, singer/songwriter Elyssa Loveless, designer John D'Aponte, graffiti artist/sculptor Carlos "Mare 139" Rodriguez, yoga instructor Melisa Winitzsky, former US champion rhythmic gymnast Olga Karmansky, toy designer Super Sucklord, author Douglass Rushkoff, VJ Jonny Wilson of Eclectic Method, artist Jen Ferguson and more TBA.
CulturePOP is co-curated by Jeff Newelt, and edited by Dean Haspiel.
Seth Kushner — shoots portraits of celebrity-types for such publications The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Businessweek, L'Uomo Vogue and others. Seth's first book, The Brooklynites, (with Anthony LaSala) was published by powerHouse Books in 2007 and was) considered ”a terrific coffee table photo/interview book” by The New York Times. Currently, he's co-editing the comics journalism site Graphic NYC (www.NYCGraphicNovelists.com) with Christopher Irving and working on his next book on comic book creators. Seth first comics work was Schmuck, with artist Kevin Colden and can be seen on ACT-I-VATE.com
