The story a nation tells itself is crucially important to its people’s sense of national identity. It serves also as a way of establishing and maintaining a shared set of values. Primordialism is the dogmatic belief that one’s national origins are defined by skin colour, blood and a spiritual belonging, but if you don’t subscribe […]
I am sure many of these people are dead. That is not what distinguishes the book or what makes it great. Instead, what is challenging is being alive during that part of history when the faces and bodies inhabiting the frames are familiar, enhanced by the glow from a window. Some of their bodies […]
I get a rapturous effect when I search through early twentieth-century illustrated books on archaeology. I know that it is a relatively niche endeavor, but there is something otherworldly about the effort that allows my imagination to stir in ways that are not easy to equate. Some of this is because the images are fantastical. […]
Bharat Sikka has been on a substantial creative streak, publishing photobooks often and with high integrity and significance. I had a conversation with him about his last FW: Books titled The Sapper, a tome that explored his relationship with his father, a retired military man. One can see it as a type of collaboration, and […]
This is a fascinating and unexpected title. I suspect that some people might consider it a repeat of images that circulate through Larry Clark’s opus Tulsa, and that is not a wrong way to feel about it, but what is important is how we see the periphery of images from that incredible body of work […]
How does one begin to excavate memories that lie in the distressed trough of the murder of a loved one? When he was seven years old, Jean-Michel André was staying at a hotel with his father and his father’s new girlfriend in Avignon, France, when a robbery turned into a homicide with both his father […]
Nikita Teryoshin returns with another great book in 2024. The German artist continues his typological studies following his award-winning long-term project Nothing Personal (GOST) on private arms dealing fairs. Nikita is the master of working on short—and long-term projects that keep him moving. This strategy is excellent because it allows short-term ideas to become books, filling […]
With the publication of Sergio Purtell’s first book, Love’s Labor (Stanley/Barker, 2020), I found myself thinking that portraiture has a very uncanny way of reaching people to tap into their emotions and nerves, and all of this is done without knowing the person in the photograph. I have spent much of my mid-years avoiding portraiture […]
The Sight of It, Translated as Home Maša Seničić I wished to begin with, “when I saw it for the first time,” but I don’t know if I even have a recollection of looking at the building with intent before, if I had ever paid particular attention to its monumental nature, to its allure, or its […]
Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer of the American West. His work is dedicated to sites along the interstate highway — forgotten mining towns, abandoned truck stops, weathered billboards, the garbage scattered across dirt roads. What he is attracted to is the region’s extremes: the harsh desert sun, its arid fields, trash heaps of tires, the […]
Ben Millar Cole, After ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)’ (2024) After Wall: The Wood Wide Web and AI Art By Ben Millar Cole In 1993, Jeff Wall meticulously reworked Hokusai’s famous 19th century woodblock print A Sudden Gust of Wind at Ejri as a large-scale photograph, spending more than a year in […]
Gregory Halpern’s photobook King, Queen, Knave has been nineteen years in the making. The first images for the photobook were shot while Halpern was a student in the MFA program at California College of the Arts, where he studied under his mentor, the photographer Larry Sultan. At the time, Halpern felt lost and adrift, unsure […]