“Killip was a human first and an observer or lucid chronicler second” Chris Killip is known for his immeasurable and singular vision of Britain during the 70’s 80’s and 90’s. To place emphasis on his work in a genre-fied manner would belittle his and its true humanity and potential. Killip was a human […]
“The way in which we write history is tinged with this conundrum. It suggests blinders in the very least and in doing so, should compel an understanding of context that is piecemeal or limited” It’s often difficult to unpack a particular body of work or historic book that has been republished without regarding […]
“One can use a camera to explore or utilise philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis and what not and this is wonderful as it broadens the scope of what is achievable with this tool. It tends to be forgotten that this is not, however, the be-all and end-all technique” When one thinks of photographic projects, which more […]
“I have assumed this focus on the found vernacular to be American in nature. However, the details of national ownership is missing apart from the rise of American modernism or the focus on its anti-thesis, namely quaint small town America advertising often hand painted and rough” It is somehow impossible not to mention […]
“Sunlight arms color photographs with daisies and when it refutes initiation, it instead lends pestilence to limbs that once lovingly embraced the nectar of its floral inhabitants” Color is a very sensitive pursuit. It curries favor with no artist. It has an understanding about it that exceeds what appears outright as a seasonal […]
“Are classifications necessary? What are there limits? Who can photograph who and what? “ I am always curious by what we consider the exotic in photographs. I often find myself thinking of the vestigial media forms of the past- all the inconsistencies, problematic discourses, and general selling of anything “other” in photographs, magazines and […]
“Engman himself is absent from the work, and his interest in the figure of his mother most often seems like the distant one of the artist: she is a familiar material, repeatedly made strange by his methods.”
“In the case of Arnaud Montagard’s The Road Not Taken, the lens is focused on the remnants of a mid-century American dream as exemplified by gas stations and diners that bear all the vernacular hallmarks of the Atomic Age” The best way to describe human activity in a photograph is to remove […]
“I think what was really drawing me to Marina’s book was how it was animating this story of the mountains, their potential and actual destructive forces and how human lives are so dwarfed in the scale of that force yet so emotionally attached to life in the mountains.” – Sunil Shah
“The Transparencies book published by MACK is also significant in its design, the essay within and sequence of the work, which is chapterized by annual progressions through the 70’s American dream in banal (good word, word of goodness) detail” It is not often that a re-examination of the periphery of a significant […]
“This is a so much about family that the idea of the hotel and its function as the construction and as a dwelling for temporary accommodation, reflected through the blueprint cover and letterheaded endpapers is anything but the impersonal experience of temporary lodging.”
“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 […]