To you, Beni Bischof may be a monster. To others, he is an unofficial unsyndicated scribe for the madness of the last half-century of consumer hell that we wade through. They drew first Blood; it wasn’t me. To give context to Bishof’s sprawling and prolific practice from the outside would be an exercise in deep-fried […]
In full declaration, as a fan of all parties involved, I hereby cannot deny my overwhelming urge to state that this book, in the canon of Raymond J. Meeks Esq., is hitherto unnecessary, but welcomed nonetheless. It is a compilation of misses, outtakes, and the unloved and weeded-out, minus one image of an alabaster girl […]
If you grew up in a certain period, some of your first experiences with counterculture were inspired by the genius cover artwork of albums by various punk bands, notably Black Flag, by what appeared to be a deranged cartoon columnist. I vividly remember ducking in and out of head/record shops in the Midwest growing up […]
Sure, why not? Technically speaking, or at least relatively speaking, this is a kindly trove of American sculpture, itinerant in feel, something like an archaeological project that hints at Irving Penn, Avedon, and the side of Walker Evans people like to speak about ad infinitum as if we were all to marvel at the notion […]
In these days of irreversible rancor and decimation, one cannot help but look backward through the lens of a type in fogged nostalgia for the second half of the Twentieth Century, in the years prior to 2001, also embedded fairly as a time of grave uncertainty. Notwithstanding, this was a time when the travails of […]
This is the second book from MACK offering a look into the theme of contact sheets presented over the past year. The first was David Armstrong’s book Contacts (I mean, how else should you call these, Sheets?), published last October, which similarly examined a brilliant tranche of Armstrong’s work through the diminutive, if plentiful, images on his […]
Everything feels perched at the precipice of dissolution. Stifled, held in a listless and ambulatory state as the world, governed by men in search of machines, asks us to forgo the rampant onslaught of civil rights, of disagreeable concerns concerning the future, for the contrarily stale epiphany of the Great Progress, a pogrom in silhouette. […]
There has been a recent uptick in books devoted to the biographies and writings of photographers, and I am very excited about it. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts on it all. Sultan’s Water Over Thunder, published recently by MACK, includes many personal notes, anecdotes, archival letters, and ephemera from the artist’s oeuvre. It is […]
There are still true eccentrics with exceptional ability out in this world, navigating the trenches of culture, unashamed to live life as art, and art as life. These characters are often characterized by a performative lifestyle that echoes the bohemian notions of 20th-century living. I revel when I stumble across their work, find innumerable reasons […]
In the ever-expanding historiography of photobook culture and history, once we escape the tedium of nationalism embedded in the ceaseless photobooks from “X” country, we can finally begin to untie genre, and to make sense of what attitudes that exceed these nationalistic behaviors have been present in the making of books throughout the 20th and […]
The life of Sarah Schumann should be much better known to the world. As a proponent of the New Women’s Movement, a talented painter, collagist, designer, and all-around life of post-war intrigue suggests a profound tie to the German movements of the mid-century, and yet, like many artists, particularly female artists of the Twentieth Century, […]
First published in 1975, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology has become a classic between categories of production. First and foremost, it is an essential book of photographs that typologically investigates the remnants of Second World War bunker armaments mostly along France’s Western coastline. These heavy structures, though short and squat, are impressive concrete-and-rebar boulders that sit […]