Ossian Brown Haunted Air

  As a collector of vintage photography with a penchant for the curious, horrific, and sometimes downright traumatic, it is no surprise that I gravitated to Ossian Brown‘s book Haunted Air published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. There also appears to be a new 2022 edition available. I am reviewing the book now as it […]

Rob Ball Silent Coast

    Rob Ball‘s Silent Coast, published by Photo Editions (2022), suggests a distorted type of lyrical documentary investigation where the cruel conditions of political complications atomize the social concerns of a place and its people, reducing the everyday plight of the individual as small, unheard, and unnecessary. An opaque and uneasy accent of dissolve […]

Tomaso Clavarino Padanistan

The full 2100 Word essay with 11 photographs on Tomaso Clavarino‘s Padanistan published by Studio Faganel and Guest Editions can be found here. Thank you for your support. Summary Text below     “My suggestion is that this is a vital book. I am not sure if it is a bit regional in scope. One […]

Mathieu Chaze Rock, Paper, Scissors

  Does one need a photobook about someone else’s family? What universal aspects of image-making allow the work to transcend from a family album to a book that illustrates the broader condition of human understanding, behavior, and endeavor? There are notable examples throughout the history of photography where images of an artist’s family are remembered […]

Paul Graham: Troubled Land

We fail our images and images fail our desires. In trying to deliberate over which side of failure images are consigned to, the human side versus the side of the function of the image itself, it is hard to not implicate oneself in misunderstanding the function of a photographic image. We have come to expect […]

Nearest Truth Year-Long Photobook Program

PHOTOBOOK YEAR-LONG COURSE MAY 2022 – MAY 2023 The Intent ​ I have been enthralled with the photobook medium since the late 90s. I do not see the photobook as a simple vessel for photography. I see it as a medium that can be understood as the final message. The book suits me as a […]

Francesco Merlini The Flood

  Note: There is a soluble parable lurking in the back of my mind that I wish to tether to this review of Francesco Merlini’s photobook The Flood. I am not sure I believe in it myself. Parables are strange pronouncements offered by someone as if in authority, moral or other. Therefore, one cannot help […]

Mark van den Brink The Minox Files

  The Minox pocket camera was developed in 1936 by Walter Zapp to provide the public with a small compact camera that was easily portable and that was economically feasible for a budding amateur class of photographers to purchase. Its innovative design, compact, small, and easily hidden were later co-opted as something of a novel […]

A Short Interview with Alexis Fabry

I had the pleasure of talking to Alexis Fabry on the publication of the catalogue of Battered Latin America, the exhibition he co-curated earlier this year at the Fondation A Stichting in Brussels. The book compiles the work of twenty photographers, including lesser-known names (Jaime Villaseca, Agustín Martínez Castro) and many of the region’s luminaries (Paz […]

Luis Baylón Madrid en plata

    Luis Baylón or simply Baylón is a Madrid-based photographer who works on the streets of Spain’s capital, sculpting images from the thousands of possibilities in front of his lens on his daily walks through the city. The images, in their minimal and contrasty monochrome palette, feature a number of different possibilities from which […]

The Opaqueness of Manifest Destiny: Daniel Reuter’s Providencia

Let’s start at the end with the text that closes Providencia by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra. The author, who lives in Mexico City, felt the urge to visit his country after days of increasingly violent protests against the government due to economic inequality. The unrest eventually led to a curfew and the declaration of a state of […]

Laura Bielau Arbeit 2016-2019

  Laura Bielau’s Arbeit 2016-2019 (Spector Books, 2021) is a stripped-back and minimal series of investigations that regards the environmental working effects and detritus of art labor in 2021. Though the aims are not overtly class-oriented or political, they function as a personal case study between the artist and the alien consumer objects that become […]