Love Maine Radio #346: Sean Alonzo Harris and Richard Russo

Sean Alonzo Harris

Sean Alonzo Harris is an editorial, commercial, and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. Over the past 25 years his work has been included in a range of national publications, advertising campaigns and exhibitions. In these varied contexts Harris’s work focuses on human experience and identity, and examines how individuals visualize themselves and how they are portrayed. His images bear witness to often invisible or overlooked members of our communities, and create portraits that provide a counterimage and narrative of self worth and personal agency.

Harris has also received critical acclaim for his fine art work. Recently, he was awarded a Kindling Fund grant from Space Gallery and the Warhol Foundation for his project, Visual Tensions. This collaborative photographic project and community dialog pairs people of color with members of law enforcement. Harris will create photographic portraits as a means to confront and question cultural and racial assumptions, stereotypes and fears. He has also been selected for the 2018 Portland Museum of Art Biennial.

Richard Russo

Novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two short story collections, and the memoir Elsewhere. Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002 and was made into an Emmy nominated HBO miniseries starring Ed Harris and Helen Hunt. His most recent novel, Everybody’s Fool, is a sequel to the earlier Nobody’s Fool, which was made into an award-winning movie starring Paul Newman. Russo is currently vice president of the Authors Guild. He lives with his wife Barbara in Portland, where his daughter Emily recently opened a bookstore called Print.  He’s collaborated with his other daughter—artist Kate Russo—on the book Interventions and more recently on screenplays. His most recent book of stories, Trajectory, was published in spring 2018 by Knopf, and a collection of essays, The Destiny Thief, comes out in May of 2018. He’s currently at work on a new novel.