“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 […]
Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]
An image I find myself returning to over and over again is a photograph by RaMell Ross titled Dream Catcher (2014). The photograph pictures a young boy lying down on a chain-link fence, staring up at the sky as if enchanted and transfixed by a spell. The photograph was shot at midday in Hale County, […]
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 […]
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 […]
This conversation was recorded as a podcast and then translated into text. With this in mind, familiarity becomes more apparent. Simon Bray is a British artist working on his first photobook, tentatively titled Dear Kairos. Simon is part of the Nearest Truth Year-Long Photobook Program. He has also attended several NT workshops with Raymond […]
“The act of ritual implies transcendence through repetition” I am curious as to where the intersection of our digitally performed lives meet the physical form that we inhabit. I am also interested in how our physical selves occupy a space in a frame. I would go as far as to say that I […]
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.” There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s […]
“All are slightly queasy in appearance, the Technicolor saturation making the images unbelievable to some extent, which adds to the delirium of her dream state”. High-intensity color saturation in a photograph creates something of a parallel universe in which things can feel positively uncanny. I would suggest that in terms of historical notation […]
“This is before the Internet and I was living in an isolated place, so access to ‘culture’ was quite limited but I fortunately did have the photography magazines my parents were buying as well as the radio shows I would try to tune into from the countryside to copy the music on tapes…” BF: […]
“I’d been playing drums in a few bands, Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab among others, and between tours and photo jobs I’d take off on photo projects of my own, often to Berlin. Eventually I got a place in Berlin, because I realised it had a lot of what London was losing, it’s a […]