Letting my unconscious, rather than my intellect, dictate the progression was important. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, being nude became part of the project early on. And working against that white wall near the two front windows in the so-called living room became a central point. —Melissa Shook I might’ve mistakenly read Sally Stein’s […]
I am confident that most of us are stringing life together one moment at a time without a significant game plan or goal to outline our actions’ progression. Nothing is holding the seams of it all together, and for that, I am partially thankful and partially disappointed. Life is a never-ending chain of circumstances […]
Matthew Genitempo is producing serious photobooks. Of the three books that I am fortunate to have on my shelves, his latest Dogbreath is one of his finest, but it is hard to create a hierarchy between it, Mother of Dogs, and Jasper. All three titles are excellent offerings, and it would benefit photobook makers […]
The gift of Japanese photography is that it feels like a never-ending field of exploration. It is a wide field of study, and if one invests in the material created in Japan from around 1958 forward, the returns are plentiful. Having put off embracing the canon of Japanese photography for most of my career […]
The discourse surrounding this book is less bleak than the images themselves. Being a fan of Michael Ashkin’s work, I find this book to be his bleakest, yet when I read his words about the meaning of the book, I do not get the impression that it is necessarily its intention. First, we will start […]
For such impersonal architecture, the environments of airports are rife with sentiment and emotion. When I say that they are impersonal, like much of the Twentieth Century’s functional public meeting spaces, they are often streamlined and defined by their sameness. The function has to override form in such spaces, which disallows individuality. There […]
Finding a nameless source’s review of The Lizard online, I read about how I should interpret Gabriele Rossi’s outsized publication published by Deadbeat Club. In its summation, the author points out several pictures from the book from which they wax lyrical about the sublime qualities of the photographs from the position of a non-American, likely […]
A perplexing book, Vittorio Mortarotti’s new publication Soil, released this year by Skinnerboox, hints at, amongst other topics, lives lived at the margins of political existence. It does this without ever pushing an obvious agenda or confirming the bias. Throughout the book, certain themes recur. There is a specific anti-narrative device at play […]
Everything in this book reminds me of my upbringing in the Midwest. It feels so painfully familiar. When I mention pain in my assessment, it is because some of this experience gnaws at me and upends the chapters of my life that I have found hard to celebrate or close. I am woefully disobedient […]
There has been a much-needed turn away from the constraints of documentary photography over the past couple of years in favor of something less direct and more lyrical. I can think of several fantastic artists working away from the documentary with a tendency toward erasing its constrictive need for relational dialog. Federico Clavarino, […]
It is challenging not to mention Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, concerning Bill Henson’s recent book Liquid Night, published by Stanley/Barker. I am unsure why some writers have avoided it, but here we are. Liquid Night is a sumptuous and gem-like nighttime foray into Times Square (1989) and the adjacent cinema district, beginning at […]
Mikael Siirilä’s Here, in Absence, published by IIKKI in an edition of 500 copies with a soundtrack, is one of 2024’s finest photobook offerings thus far. It was lodged between the somnambulist type of photography previously found in Ralph Gibson and Duane Michal’s dream-state work. The book explores singular images in monochrome that have […]