I get a rapturous effect when I search through early twentieth-century illustrated books on archaeology. I know that it is a relatively niche endeavor, but there is something otherworldly about the effort that allows my imagination to stir in ways that are not easy to equate. Some of this is because the images are fantastical. […]
It would be hard to hand this photobook to someone in a decontextualized state and expect them to understand the modalities of ecstasy and horror that permeate the frames. In the first seventy or eighty percent of the book, figures cavort and twist and are undetermined by a common goal. They are bodies of a […]
I recently picked up a copy of Vince Aletti’s The Drawer from Self Publish Be Happy/MACK, a title released last year that won the 2023 Aperture Photobook award. At the time, I knew about the book. Still, I had not picked it up as I was unsure of what I could add to it, being […]
How does one begin to excavate memories that lie in the distressed trough of the murder of a loved one? When he was seven years old, Jean-Michel André was staying at a hotel with his father and his father’s new girlfriend in Avignon, France, when a robbery turned into a homicide with both his father […]
I know very little about architecture. I am aware of certain Starchitects, of which Mexican architect Luis Barragán could be considered part of the milieu. A starchitect is one of the high-profile architects who became a household name. A list of starchitects could include, but is not limited to, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Frank […]
“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 […]