” I once wrote an article that attempted, through literary aspirations, to tie our willingness to utilize memory with gaming and strategic and beneficial outcomes. The simple idea outlined in the writing was that when something is at stake, our memory functions on a high level. When we are asked for something specific, where […]
Editor’s Note: I wrote the original press release for this book. Pointing this out before you read the review for transparency is fair and necessary, as it will inevitably show some bias. In place of a review for this concern, I have decided to extend the format with what appears as inanity but […]
Evgenia Ignatova Highlights “No art is bereft of political possibility, yet, there is a strain of representation and often politicized meaning that photography is asked to perform in the 21st Century. We are perhaps losing sight of what photography does well, which is to give form to the optical unconscious of the moment that […]
Going through a box of photographic sketchbooks this week after a prolonged studio move reminded me of the importance of sketching ideas for photobooks ahead of or at least coinciding with moving to digital realms to begin the process of editing and sequencing. My book Dein Kampf (MACK, 2019), has precedents in the photographic […]
Full Article on Patreon Absalon Kirkeby Still Fantasy Published by Disko Bay |…There have been precedents of abstraction with photography from early 20th Century experiments with photograms, Vortographs, and mid-Twentieth-century experiments in Konkrete Fotografie, or the photography of post-AbEx forms of photographic experimentation with chemigrams and darkroom light painting. Recently, artists from Wolgang Tilmans to […]
Full Article on Patreon National Identity is loosely based on tropes of uncertain but narrow fixity: culture, language, and nationhood. Several mitigating factors have thwarted this fundamental right to the assembly and persistence of identity in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Historically, conquest and colonial desire have eradicated the national identity of oppressed subjects through […]
Review Excerpt Graubard’s Road to Nowhere is a mercurial title. Published by Loose Joints, the last home of which I might expect to find a book on civil war and discontent to be published, the work reflects neither a war book nor a specific Aftermath book. Aftermath or post-event photography is a genre that looks […]
Alessandra Sanguinetti Some Say Ice MACK/Magnum Photo A girl plays the piano convincingly. Another different girl, spotlit, plays a different piano, slightly less convincingly. Steam rises from a river, possibly black, convincingly. A buffalo mourns Its condition confined between fences during a winter snowstorm, most convincingly. A man’s hands clean a six-shooter pistol, and I […]
“Throughout Meaker’s book, there is a pervasive sense of an unseen world, a drawing back of the curtain to reveal places that are looked over or are content to sit idyll and unobserved for the sale of their posterity. The artist pivots her camera towards the thicket and stagnant pools of water left behind […]
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‘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 […]
Diane Arbus, from Untitled This is a 20k-word reaction to Diane Arbus’s posthumously published work Untitled by Aperture. The post comes from a long reaction post on Brad Feuerhelm’s Instagram, where various members of the photographic community replied with their thoughts about the book and its ethical boundaries. The resulting post is a […]