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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Photographer Larry Sultan’s iconic photobook Pictures from Home, initially published in 1992, found renewed acclaim with its 2017 re-release by MACK. Sultan’s intimate exploration of familial bonds captured the attention of audiences worldwide, culminating in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1989. The impact of Sultan’s photographic series resonated […]
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 […]
I’m still determining who needs to hear this, but Mark Steinmetz remains one of the most profound voices in the rising tide of what I suggest is a revisiting of humanism in photography. Given the clamor and tumult of the past years, it is not a surprise that work like Mark’s, which, at its base, […]
I come to this only days after taking my father to a residential care home for the first time. His blindness has added to a list of ailments which has meant looking after him at home is now no longer possible. A feeling of practical sense and reason is slowly being invaded by thoughts of […]