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 […]
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 had to take a bit of time to digest this book. I remember receiving it before the end of the year and being genuinely overwhelmed with it for a few different reasons that I will outline here. I think the feeling of being overwhelmed first stemmed from the photographs being of an […]
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg set out to create a work in which erasure/negation would define the principal production method. Instead of building a drawing or painting up from aggregated layers, the artist made a conscious conceptual decision to work backward from the point of completed artwork back to a form of trace in which the […]
Full Article on Patreon This is an incredibly complicated book. It is one that I have been chasing for a year or so since I first became aware of it. It has a cult-like status for many reasons, least of all are the photographs, which are also incredible. The story of Baitel amid a […]
Full Article on Patreon Gervin’s work reflects the American moment in the second decade of the second millennium through tendencies similar to those seen in a good deal of American photography during the Vietnam War era. I see some resemblances to protest coverage by Gene Anthony, a Black Star agency photographer who captured the […]
I was confronted with three parts of a mental soundtrack while paging through Thiago Dezan’s new book When I Hear The That Trumpet Sound (Selo Turvo, 2021, ed. 200). The first track based on title and the book’s black endpapers and the ominous black cover was Behemoth’s Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel, a rich and […]
An Interview between Zak R. Dimitrov, Beata Bartecka, and Łukasz Rusznica regarding their book How to Look Natural in Photos Palm* Studios and OPT. How to Look Natural in Photos is a functional, yet very aesthetically pleasing book. It examines the way photography operates as a mechanism and a tool for […]
“It would be easy for me to say that this book is published at the right moment and that it correlates a simple reminder about the inhuman conditions of the past…” It is June 9th, 2020 and as I sit here penning this “review” of Gordon Parks perhaps sadly non-anachronistic and oddly prescient […]
We confuse ourselves with our recognition of our portrait in a mirror. The hand that brushes away the hairs from the forehead, the sweet sticky perspiration that pins the lock to the crown is read in reverse and yet, this reversal is apathetic to the self that it stares back at. The eyes glare […]
“We are on occasion reminded on occasion of a great plague pit, its underground presence rewarded with a blue plaque to signify its existence as both a terrible debacle in our local history and yet it tellingly reminds us of the foreboding possibility for futures yet unspoken” Trauma is a strange attractor. Just as […]
Excerpts from the forensic photography archive at the Justice & Police Museum in Sydney, Australia which contains an estimated 130,000 negatives created by the New South Wales Police between 1910 and 1960.