“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 […]
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 […]
“I exhibit a strange tendency in airports to curse, eyeball other people with malice and regard the general process of shuttling and hefting my mass through antiseptic tunnels and bizarre space age flat Jetson walklavators with contempt…” A commonality between train stations and photography is the architecture of waiting. Waiting can be read in […]
“Othering of the loser of a war is important for collective consciousness and acts as a bulwark against the tide of human sympathy in the matters of inhumane consequence” There are a number of different ways to approach writing about photography and World War II and to be clear, none of them should consider […]
“Objects are malleable things – mutely concrete, or freighted with almost unbearable significance. Watkins’ photographs share this equivocality, wavering between documents and invocations.”