The ideas of usefulness and aesthetic appearance often come into conflict over time in architecture. Decay, cracks, erosion, and palimpsests of change clash and defy our natural sense of wholeness when we look at buildings that have persisted over decades, if not centuries. I am thinking particularly of 19th and early 20th-century buildings, those that […]
Slightly enamored with the idea of architecture in photography, a clear use of terms that suggests photography to be the primary category of assessment over architecture, I have found myself leafing through books devoted to Hélène Binet, Joachim Brohm, Andrea Gehrke, Lucien Hervé, Karl-Hugo Schmölz, and others who have made architecture a central subject matter […]
Everything feels perched at the precipice of dissolution. Stifled, held in a listless and ambulatory state as the world, governed by men in search of machines, asks us to forgo the rampant onslaught of civil rights, of disagreeable concerns concerning the future, for the contrarily stale epiphany of the Great Progress, a pogrom in silhouette. […]
Throughout the 1990s, there was a distinct emphasis on the body and its decline. Work produced during the 90s, whether from the aids crisis or the ideological shift away from the Catholic church toward an atheistic and bodily autonomy, signaled a visceral approach to photography. The documentary Vile Bodies (1999), produced by Chris Townsend and […]
First published in 1975, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology has become a classic between categories of production. First and foremost, it is an essential book of photographs that typologically investigates the remnants of Second World War bunker armaments mostly along France’s Western coastline. These heavy structures, though short and squat, are impressive concrete-and-rebar boulders that sit […]
I was never accustomed to the tall tales of muchroom pickling that pervade Europe. Mildly aware of the phenomenon back in Wisconsin around the spring movements of the morel mushroom picking season, born to a family of hunters, I did not grasp the essential nature of mushrooms and fungi until quite late in my lifetime. […]
Agony in the Garden. Parables. Metaphors. Incisive mythology within the realms of the contemporary political landscape of Europe in the 2020s. To reduce Lua Ribeira’s work to any single motif is an exercise in futility. Instead, the analysis must stem from the aggregate means of its parts. Of course, one cannot simply resign the work […]
This is certainly one of the most misleading photobooks that I have seen in some time, despite being a fan of the artist’s previous book. What appears on the outside as a simple reading of America’s vernacular signage is, in fact, a kind of premonition, or perhaps an acknowledgement of where things stand along the […]
I first encountered the visceral photographs of Lucile Boiron a few years ago when I bought a copy of her book Mise en Pièces, also published by Belgian publisher Art Paper Editions (APE), like her new book Bouche. I remember being very excited about the book, as it reminded me of the visceral tendencies in […]
When you think you have seen the model-to-photographer genre wear itself thin, along comes Matilde SøesRasmussen to challenge, deepen, and extract gold from the topic by putting together her second intriguing photobook, which deals with modelling. Søes Rasmussen ’s first book, Unprofessional, published by Disko Bay, was a grand slam that, through her point-and-shoot aesthetic, detailed […]
I do not know that much about Hatleberg’s work. I did get a copy of his last book, River’s Dream, as I had missed out on Lost Coast, his first book with eminent American publishers TBW Books. My surface reading of River’s Dream suggested a post-Soth investigation of American topography. I was reminded of Doug Dubois, Alec Soth, Kristine […]
What to do with the business of time? From 2020 to 2023, we were forced to face this question by the global pandemic. It will forever mark generations of people in the 21st Century by its unnerving qualities, its obvious malady, and, more to the point of this conversation, what we were meant to understand […]