Tommaso Protti – Terra Vermelha

    I had to take a bit of time to digest this book. I remember receiving it before the end of the year and being genuinely overwhelmed with it for a few different reasons that I will outline here. I think the feeling of being overwhelmed first stemmed from the photographs being of an […]

Mark Steinmetz – France 1987

I’m still determining who needs to hear this, but Mark Steinmetz remains one of the most profound voices in the rising tide of what I suggest is a revisiting of humanism in photography. Given the clamor and tumult of the past years, it is not a surprise that work like Mark’s, which, at its base, […]

Yelena Yemchuk – Odesa

Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]

RaMell Ross – Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body

An image I find myself returning to over and over again is a photograph by RaMell Ross titled Dream Catcher (2014). The photograph pictures a young boy lying down on a chain-link fence, staring up at the sky as if enchanted and transfixed by a spell. The photograph was shot at midday in Hale County, […]

Danny Franzreb – Proof of Work

My initial response to the massive swell of attention that cryptocurrency received in 2021, and more specifically to the non-fungible token (NFT) hysteria that gripped so much of cultural discourse online and in the press, was a dismissive roll of the eyes. Admittedly, what I was reacting to most were the claims that cryptocurrency was […]

Toshio Shibata – Day For Night

  The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter […]

Curran Hatleberg – Lost Coast & River’s Dream

There is a strange and perplexing photograph in Curran Hatleberg’s photobook, River’s Dream (TBW, 2022), which shows a man with a large swarm of bees attached to his face and body. The image is bewildering. The man is sitting down in a chair, with no protective gear, and his eyes are closed. His hands are […]

Five Photobooks from 2023

For the complete list, please consult the Nearest Podcast in the following weeks, where I will MC over a much longer list of the great books published this year. For this list, I wanted to keep the books down to five that I feel will define the artist’s career or are crucial to the medium. […]

Joachim Brohm LESSMORE Interview

  Joachim Brohm’s work has influenced my way of thinking about photography, particularly his work regarding architecture. Though Joachim might not say that his work is directly about architecture, how he photographs sites and buildings has been vital in opening my eyes to new possibilities for seeing potential subject matter. Known for several high-profile and […]

Anne Lass – Triple Seven

  Peppered throughout major cities, including Berlin, where the new photobook Triple Seven by Anne Lass was shot, are clandestine spaces that most of the population will never enter or see. Men’s clubs in North London, brothels in Marseilles, and small gambling rooms in Berlin, as Lass has photographed, are secreted behind a façade of […]

Bertien van Manen – Gluckauf

Coal mining is a very peculiar enterprise. The 19th and 20th Centuries committed untold heaves of labor to its extraction. It fuels communities, yet its extraction suggests a disemboweling of the land where these communities settle. The prospect of coal mining is one of capital and capitalism. The very human clay that mines these enterprises […]

Jamie Murray – Folly

Incarceration, one of our great social taboos. Out of sight and out of mind is enough for the majority of society, unaware that in the UK, some reoffending rates are over 50%, costing society £18bn a year. The current system is at the very least creaking, if not fundamentally flawed and failing those who, whilst […]