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 […]

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. […]

Coca-Cola and the Implied Apathy of Tomatsu Shomei’s Photographs

Full Article with More Images on Patreon   It is essential to understand the biography of Tomatsu to understand what the emotion of rage or anger may be prevalent in his work. As a pubescent teen during the atomic bombing of Japan and the subsequent end of the Second World War, Tomatsu recalls the occupation […]

Mikiko Hara – Small Myths

  Full Article With More Images On Patreon   Throughout the work, Hara photographs portraits. Some of these images are culled from her familiar everyday journeys, with images of people on the street or in trains elegantly abetting the images of her family. Though far from a family book in the traditional sense, the text […]

Tomatsu Shomei <11:02> Nagasaki An Overview

  Full Article on Patreon   …11:02 Nagasaki contains elements of documentary practice mixed with an emotional and highly subjective style of photography. In essence, the book is caught, like Kawada’s Chizu, between two schools of thought regarding photography. On the one hand, there is a legacy of photography that considers politics and a (at […]

Taka Mayumi Koisuru Toriko

  Full Article on Patreon   In Prisoner In Love, the flow is at once calm and exciting. It is similar to allowing one’s body to be carried downstream in a river safely with a bump on the body’s backside every once in a while to remind them of the rocks beneath the surface. Metaphors […]

Toyohiko Yasui One Thousand Millimeter 1973

Full Article and Full Sequence of Book on Patreon   The desire found in that book functions incredibly obliquely. Images of women do not, even when on a bed and nude, represent sex or an objectifying element; they are reduced to the same void as everything else and feel like a piece of the vortex. […]

Nobuyoshi Araki The Banquet (Shokuji)

  Full Article on Patreon   “The Banquet is a different affair built around the same context of mourning. Instead of pictures of himself or his deceased wife, Araki presents a catalog of their last meals together. The images are shot with a close-up ring flash and a short lens to give a microphotographic feel […]

Maki: (A) Japan Somewhere

    Maki’s images in Japan Somewhere (Zen Foto Gallery), produced over a fourteen-year period feel anxious and compressed. Though specific to one country, the Frenchman’s images feel anything but declarative. They feel ambulatory, intrepid,  and often chaotic as if shot in a constant state of momentum and high velocity. The frames are heavily compressed […]

Koji Kitagawa: Mapping the Technical in Dreams

Do robots dream of Black Phillip? Do artists dream in data? Does a spectre haunt the algorithm?     In a world in which we are reduced to bytes, blips, glitch and transmission, we begin to consider where the mapping of our reality in images begins. Our photographic lives are now dominated by the urgency […]

Gerry Johansson- Ehime & Lalendorf und Klaber

    “it is strange for me to consider his efforts as Swedish and yet there is something to the examination of what can only be referred to as the National Camera, implicit in that sentiment are all of the complications of generalizations and archetypes. I am not trying to espouse something concrete, but rather […]

Mayumi Hosokura’s New Skin

  “This ‘gendering’ includes everything from one’s awareness of their own individual body, to global political and social issues (the feminine pose, the masculine blue colour, the ‘masculinity’ of war)”     Mayumi Hosokura’s New Skin begins with a single quote on its inside cover. It is a quote by Donna Haraway, from her 1988 […]