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 […]
The gift of Japanese photography is that it feels like a never-ending field of exploration. It is a wide field of study, and if one invests in the material created in Japan from around 1958 forward, the returns are plentiful. Having put off embracing the canon of Japanese photography for most of my career […]
Finding a nameless source’s review of The Lizard online, I read about how I should interpret Gabriele Rossi’s outsized publication published by Deadbeat Club. In its summation, the author points out several pictures from the book from which they wax lyrical about the sublime qualities of the photographs from the position of a non-American, likely […]
A perplexing book, Vittorio Mortarotti’s new publication Soil, released this year by Skinnerboox, hints at, amongst other topics, lives lived at the margins of political existence. It does this without ever pushing an obvious agenda or confirming the bias. Throughout the book, certain themes recur. There is a specific anti-narrative device at play […]
“What did we talk about, my dad and I? The different kinds of plyboard and woodworking joints, the correct way to change the bit of a drill and to hold and level and aim the gun of the welder, how to tell when a tyre has gone bald […]” – Sara Baume, Handiwork, 2020 I […]
There has been a much-needed turn away from the constraints of documentary photography over the past couple of years in favor of something less direct and more lyrical. I can think of several fantastic artists working away from the documentary with a tendency toward erasing its constrictive need for relational dialog. Federico Clavarino, […]
I am quite taken with the text in Thana’s excellent new book, How Shall We Greet the Sun, published, like her last book, I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows, by Lecturis. I am uncertain exactly how she is engaging with the concepts of sentimentality and nostalgia, being that she seems to be using […]
War is good business for some, and misery for most everyone else. The executives of defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, people who directly profit from the outbreak and continuation of war, are incentivized to hope for its continuation rather than its cessation, because where there is war (in Yemen, Ukraine, or in […]