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 […]
It has taken me a few weeks to elucidate my feelings in reviewing Gregory’s new book King, Queen, Knave, published by MACK this past month. I had previously seen some photographs in a workshop we facilitated in Athens with Gregory, Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Tim Carpenter. I remember the images well, though I am […]
As I found with Whatever You Say, Say Nothing by Gilles Peress (Steidl), The Troubles and their representation are incredibly difficult to write about from the point of view of an outsider. It is a very touchy subject. Even posting about it on social media platforms (as I also found out) will have opposing […]
Forest photography is a challenging art. I mention this regarding the photobook format, as the most significant complication of sequencing a book from a photographic forest yield is the difficulty of repetition. The question is, “How many photographs of trees can I look at without losing interest?” and “How much minute variation of a […]
Some photobooks are detailed by their direct exercises in story building. In contrast, others ask that the viewer read them holistically as an environment, a stage in which ideas are distributed, but with fewer absolutes regarding their nature. Hints are dropped, and some images carry the conceptual load of what the press release suggests as […]
Paul Graham’s new books Ambergris/Verdigris, published this year by MACK, have several parallels worth exploring. First and foremost, it should be said that these titles feel like a return to form. While I am a fan of most of Graham’s bodies of works, the last books have been very inward and family-oriented. There is […]
Moises Saman is one of the most substantive and accomplished conflict photographers working today. A member of Magnum since 2014, he is best known for photographs he has been making for more than two decades working throughout the Middle East, during which time he covered the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. Many of the […]
“After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.” Robert Adams “There is another world and it is in this one.” Paul Éluard There have been few post-war American photographers, if […]