109 - Ed Panar
© Ed Panar
American photographer Ed Panar has a BA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He has published several photobooks including: In the Vicinity (Deadbeat Club, 2018), Animals That Saw Me Volume One and Volume Two (2011 and 2016, The Ice Plant), Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes (Spaces Corners & The Ice Plant, 2013), Salad Days (2012 Gottlund), Same Difference (2010, Gottlund), and Golden Palms (2007, J&L Books).
Ed “is a compiler of small moments, a celebrant of the everyday. Nothing dramatic happens in his photographs; nowhere exotic is shown. Rather, his prosaic images force us into a sustained encounter with the ordinariness of urban life, bringing together both meanings of the word pedestrian. In his ongoing body of work Out West, Panar reveals the fluidity of the interaction between the banal and the beautiful. (Panar also has a series, Back East, that produces a similar effect.) Some of the photos do indeed display the striking beauty of Western landscapes, but even this is contained within the bounds of ordinary life: Panar’s views are the kind you might have walking home from somewhere not far away, if you were to take that little detour that goes up the hill just a bit. We are a long way here from the majestic waterfalls and granite domes in Ansel Adams’s work. Panar’s photos seem to be saying that if we pay attention there is no need to venture far and wide, to scale the peaks or traverse the wilds — that something of value is just around the next corner.” (Aaron Rothman)
Ed’s photographs have been widely exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The New York Photography Festival, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. Ed is co-founder - with his partner, photographer Melissa Catanese - of the project space and photography bookshop Spaces Corners, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he currently lives and works.
On episode 109, Ed discusses, among other things:
Learning from Todd Hido in San Francisco
Figuring out how to keep going no matter what
Walking Home - his first series, still not a book
The importance of editing and how it starts while shooting
His interest in speculative realism
The importance of walking… and humour
HIs project space in Pittsburgh, Spaces Corners
Referenced:
“If I’ve figured anything out it’s how to kinda keep going no matter what. And I think maybe Todd [Hido] instilled that in me, that sort of work ethic. You have to get it done. You have to find a way. Make things now, ask questions later, kind of thing.”
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