What strikes me as an interesting premise in Florian Merdes’s book Steamcracker is the enforced myopic rendering of details and patterns, which turns the book and its intense sequences into something minutely chaotic. There is a world underneath the surface of things, a rhythm and a dedication to line that emanates in Florian’s book. […]
In 1870-1871, during the siege of Paris, better known as the Paris Commune, several ingenious actions were carried out throughout the year to continue the communards’ defense first against the Prussians, then the Thiers government, which sought to suppress the resistance within the heart of Paris. Both of these actions were the result of harnessing […]
There is a small number of essential photobooks that explore the concept of artistic process/practice and performance. Most recently, I have found myself thumbing through Joseph Beuys: Coyote, by Caroline Tisdall (Schirmer/Mosel, 1976), which features photographs of Beuys’ legendary 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me. The performance, arguably Beuys’ most well-known, next to How to […]
And then there was the night—archives from the edge of hell—chimerical dissonance—six cloven hoof Satyrs. Bachanalian. Excremental. Grain, dissolve. Pushing the sword of Damocles in until the hilt fractures on the bone of the pubic mound. A horsehair away from piercing the veil. Scrutinize, Labotomize. Forever roam. Necessarily hexed, vexed, encouraged by nebulous worlds […]
Batia Suter’s work has several substantial iterations at its heart. It stems from an understanding of volume and how images function, both in terms of their materiality and their historical context. This is most evident in her opuses Parallel Encyclopedia I and II, both published by Roma. The work that Suter makes can be […]
As if the war legacy of Dunkirk had not already been recognized as a pivotal shit eating point in its past, its charred hand to swollen coal-crusted mouth, poisoned by ethanol overload and toxic industrial habitat, history has now favored turning it from a battle-scarred historical footnote into a vast hellscape busy with killing off […]
Reading cities by line has become a complicated chore in 2025. There are incongruent movements on the city streets, with all manner of debris and flotsam that collude to control our vision, distorting the potential of reading the city by line and encroaching on a sense of the city and our environment as orderly, maintained, […]
There is something undeniably attractive in small ideas executed with precision and clarity. In receiving Cintia Tortosa Santisteban’s new book Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings (Chose Commune, 2025), I am reminded that it is often the Occam’s razor of production and concept that produces some of the […]
Arguably, the notion of the fragmentary is what drives our collective interrogation of photography as a medium. Photography is an unmitigated discussion regarding what is seen, how it is represented, how it is interpreted, and how the values of the meaning of images circulate, morph, and resist concrete definitions. In this, photography could be considered […]
“The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”-Aby Warburg. Constellations, catalogues, and correlative image processing are at the fundament of Batia Suter’s efforts to respond to images that she deftly places in thick, long-running sequences, in which the associative power of images, in their constellation, invokes a response from the viewer based […]
I am relatively new to Jochen Lempert’s work, or at least his books. I was aware of his book Phenomena from 2013, which seems a favorite among his fans and commands a decent price at auction. I tend to note these things to argue with or argue against about a book’s “weight” amongst the bevy […]
These photographs were taken by weather cameras in Finland every twelve minutes. From that point, the Finnish weather authorities/authorities who observed the weather uploaded the images online to be viewed for 24 hours before they disappeared. This presented an opportunity for Finnish artist Tatu Gustafsson to perform for the weather camera and document […]