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, […]

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 […]

Larry Sultan – Swimmers

During a talk he gave to his students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1980, Larry Sultan opened up about the challenges he faced with his latest series of photographs featuring swimmers in the community pools of the Bay Area. The young photographer struggled to justify this new body of work, as the […]

Allan Sekula: Ask the Dust

“As the project jumps backwards and forwards in time, and geographically, from one city to the next, the sequence returns again and again to Los Angeles”