Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023 The history of the television on art and photography/photobooks is compelling. My interest stems from having grown up with the television as the primary utility of my creative life. When I say television, I am not thinking of regular programming, but instead of the vast array of films […]
Change is not always a fast process. Stating what is an obvious observation, ruminating over the nature of change or our perception of change in local geography is pertinent. I think we like to denote the object status of “change” as being implicit, noticeable, and understood as event-driven, clear, and not necessarily attached to […]
What can be said other than Thank You?
A and not THE. Let’s be clear from the get-go that what we are talking about is A, or one, interpretive history of London’s East End through the prism of photography and, arguably, property and labor by esteemed archivist/documentarian Chris Dorley Brown, whose recent book A History of the East End, published by Nouveau Palais […]
I am sure many of these people are dead. That is not what distinguishes the book or what makes it great. Instead, what is challenging is being alive during that part of history when the faces and bodies inhabiting the frames are familiar, enhanced by the glow from a window. Some of their bodies […]
I get a rapturous effect when I search through early twentieth-century illustrated books on archaeology. I know that it is a relatively niche endeavor, but there is something otherworldly about the effort that allows my imagination to stir in ways that are not easy to equate. Some of this is because the images are fantastical. […]
I’m listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Two (Expanded Version), though I should be listening to the original score for Ilias’s book Forecast (Origini Edizioni, 2023, Second Edition). I apologize to Daphne Kotsiani, Y. Fotiadis, D. Joss, and I. Dimitriadis, who have added an audio piece of sculpted piano interludes that one […]
In the realms of art, we celebrate a single act of creation. We give license to a nearly ideological pursuit of aura, a way in which we receive the act of a single creation as a roughly divine measure of human success. Yet, in photography and creating a photobook, which begs for narrative and […]
It would be hard to hand this photobook to someone in a decontextualized state and expect them to understand the modalities of ecstasy and horror that permeate the frames. In the first seventy or eighty percent of the book, figures cavort and twist and are undetermined by a common goal. They are bodies of a […]
Recovery – Muriel Verbist by Sofie Crabbé A woman is looking at us. She stares at us. We stare back. An act we can carry out rather casually, given that we’re observing photographic portraits. The format is reminiscent of identity card photos. We see a face, shoulders, and part of an upper body. A […]
Bharat Sikka has been on a substantial creative streak, publishing photobooks often and with high integrity and significance. I had a conversation with him about his last FW: Books titled The Sapper, a tome that explored his relationship with his father, a retired military man. One can see it as a type of collaboration, and […]
This is a fascinating and unexpected title. I suspect that some people might consider it a repeat of images that circulate through Larry Clark’s opus Tulsa, and that is not a wrong way to feel about it, but what is important is how we see the periphery of images from that incredible body of work […]