“Of course they will find it difficult to situate them historically. They must feel free to see them as images that evoke something in their own minds. They’re illustrations inspired by a theme, actually, rather than depictions of a particular story, I think.” – Paula Rego Though she was speaking about her own images, Paula […]
Moises Saman is one of the most substantive and accomplished conflict photographers working today. A member of Magnum since 2014, he is best known for photographs he has been making for more than two decades working throughout the Middle East, during which time he covered the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. Many of the […]
“After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.” Robert Adams “There is another world and it is in this one.” Paul Éluard There have been few post-war American photographers, if […]
War is good business for some, and misery for most everyone else. The executives of defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, people who directly profit from the outbreak and continuation of war, are incentivized to hope for its continuation rather than its cessation, because where there is war (in Yemen, Ukraine, or in […]
Hristina Tasheva’s newest book, Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery (Self-published, 2023), is an ambitious attempt at mapping the disparities between two national experiences of Communism in the twentieth century — the Dutch and the Bulgarian — as they were impacted by the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The […]
My initial response to the massive swell of attention that cryptocurrency received in 2021, and more specifically to the non-fungible token (NFT) hysteria that gripped so much of cultural discourse online and in the press, was a dismissive roll of the eyes. Admittedly, what I was reacting to most were the claims that cryptocurrency was […]
Keisha Scarville and I spoke via email to discuss her new book lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound (MACK, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award. The book is constructed with images from several bodies of work over the past 20 years, each of which in its own way investigates […]
Carla Williams can make the world beyond us seem a simple place. Looking at the self-portraits she made over a fifteen year period, from 1984-1999, may briefly lull us into a false apprehension of the world as containing little interest of its own. Such is the poetic depth of these pictures, which, when edited and […]
Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]
Equine surgery and medical observation; specialized labor and industrial production. In its study of the Clinica Equina Bagnarola, a renowned horse clinic outside of Bologna, Italy, Andrea Modica’s Theatrum Equorum (TIS books, 2022) touches on each of these subjects fluidly and with considerable grace, in a mode closer to aphorism than to essay. Modica’s images […]
The first time I looked through Igor Posner’s Cargó (Red Hook Editions, 2022) I was bewildered. I did not know, for example, that across 160 pages and what feels like triple that number of images, it would express the disjointedness and poignancy of memory, or that it would render the experience of time passing as […]