Paul Graham’s new books Ambergris/Verdigris, published this year by MACK, have several parallels worth exploring. First and foremost, it should be said that these titles feel like a return to form. While I am a fan of most of Graham’s bodies of works, the last books have been very inward and family-oriented. There is […]
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 […]
Ruptures and Raptures It is hard to know where to start writing about a book with such ominous tendencies at its heart. Monuments by Trent Parke, published by Stanley/Barker in 2023 and its third printing in spring 2024, has a doomsday proximity to it. It is hard to explain why I feel this […]
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, […]
Full Article and Full Sequence of Book on Patreon The desire found in that book functions incredibly obliquely. Images of women do not, even when on a bed and nude, represent sex or an objectifying element; they are reduced to the same void as everything else and feel like a piece of the vortex. […]
In reading Darius Khondji’s interview with American Cinematographer Magazine from November 5th, 2018 regarding his cinematography work on various films, including David Fincher’s epic noir Se7en (1995), I am reminded of the significance that color balance plays when sculpting atmosphere in a film and also in a photographic body of work. In regarding […]
This begins a series of posts that examine the work of participants and instructors that have featured in the ASX/VOID workshops from 2019 and will now be used to illustrate the Nearest Truth Workshops taking place in Athens in November of 2021. Nearest Truth is a podcast devoted to photography and culture at […]
Guido Guidi’s photographs emanate from concerns that underpin a long tradition of art in Italy. While most of his images are consultations of place and perspective, the larger considerations for his work examine a minute rendering of color palette, shadow, and subscribe to a cornucopia or semi-neutral examinations of “the moment”. These images, in […]
Edward Steichen’s gestural Studies of Isadora Duncan at the Parthenon, Charlotte Rudolph’s studies of German dancers, James Abbe’s still frames of Anna Pavlova, Barabra Morgan’s studies of Martha Graham and her Letter to the World, and a number of other medium-defining images can be accredited to an embrace of the body in movement. […]
The scopic drive, or scopophilia, is, as defined by the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, the human unconscious desire being triggered by our looking and being looked at. It is inherently sexual – it’s about pleasure, or lust, derived from observing or being observed. The notion has been heavily surveyed in psychoanalysis and reflected throughout […]
Manifest destiny is an American concept that has been used to propel the country forward to this day. In the Nineteenth Century, the term was used as a way to justify westward expansion and the legitimacy of both slavery and genocide. If God willed that man travel West spreading word, religion and culture, then how […]
Synaesthesia is a condition present in between 2 and 4% of the world’s population. Its literal translation is “joining of the senses” and this is exactly what it means – the combination of visual cues with, for instance, auditory or olfactory sensation. Some people would see the number 4 as always green, no matter the […]