We the People
Yes, we the people, we are responsible for the world around us.
The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America. 
Three words that remind the individual power of each and every one of us. Indeed, the world around us is built and transformed by individual acts put together: investment of economic actors, decision-intellectual position or opinion decisions leaders, political leaders, but also and especially succession individual actions that might be considered trivial but, repeated, become major. 

Over the years, we have interviewed many iconic and influential photographers, but none have affected me like Melanie Pullen. Her curiosity in pushing the limits of her viewership is extremely endearing, and her work takes aim at a violence that has now become an all-too-standard aspect of modern media. The way she talks about her work is very precise, she is fully aware of what she wants to convey, but she also allows room for it to take on a life of its own, which can be a very delicate balance to achieve. If I had a list of past interviewees who I would love to learn from, Melanie would be at the very top. -SuzAnne Steben, Managing Editor

Los Angeles- based photographer Melanie Pullen presents an expanded series of portraits featuring men she's met on the street- "lost boys" -holding vintage soda bottles. The lighting is dramatic and evocative of late night haunts, abandoned transit stations and darkened alleys. Simultaneously mesmerizing and bizarre, the images speak to a complicated narrative we'll never know. 

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco presents its first solo show by Los Angeles photographer Melanie Pullen. The exhibition features photographs from Soda POP!, her new series that plays with cultural assumptions; she combines things typically associated with childhood, such as computer games, and places them in adult nighttime settings. The unease is heightened featuring young people marginalized by society, neglected street kids, or male prostitutes.

Issue no 9

1814: Your latest series Soda POP!. Can you tell us a bit about that?
MP: Soda POP! is a tribute to a cross dresser that I became friends with in Greenwich Village in 1983 when I was eight years old. I couldn’t sleep so I would have to sit awake in my room until all hours of the night and my window was level with the street, one block off Christopher Street next to the old pier on the Hudson. So this six-foot seven black man would show up outside my window every night at midnight and would change his clothes in front of me, put on a blonde wig and wait for tricks… he didn’t wear underwear by the way. While he was waiting we’d talk and we became friends.

Despite Art on Paper’s name, the work at the first-time Armory Week fair includes as many different materials as at any other fair, with art created on paper and art inspired by paper on view.