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 […]
There is a penchant, over the past ten to fifteen years or so, for photographic image-making to re-examine landscapes as scratchy abstractions, almost imperceptibly detailed beyond the reach of their granular vistas. This is most evident in the work of Korean/American artist Jungjin Lee, whose series of books and bodies of work detail the shift […]
Whether it is a proponent of exoticism and all that it entails — both fascinating and ethically dubious — photography has, at its core, an ability to reveal. It can reveal that which is shuttered, hidden, and usually unobservable. In the case of the colonial camera, much of this fascination with otherness leads to the […]
Reflecting on the motif of painting with a title. One of the soft critiques I have of the book is that, despite its holistic considerations and the fundamental declarations of artist and publisher working closely together to create a special object, the title leaves something less than imaginable. It is somewhat self-referential regarding the artist’s […]
What strikes me as an interesting premise in Florian Merdes’s book Steamcracker is the enforced myopic rendering of details and patterns, which turns the book and its intense sequences into something minutely chaotic. There is a world underneath the surface of things, a rhythm and a dedication to line that emanates in Florian’s book. […]
As if the war legacy of Dunkirk had not already been recognized as a pivotal shit eating point in its past, its charred hand to swollen coal-crusted mouth, poisoned by ethanol overload and toxic industrial habitat, history has now favored turning it from a battle-scarred historical footnote into a vast hellscape busy with killing off […]
Once on a departing flight from LAX, Mark Ruwedel glanced down from the height of his window seat and noticed a short tract of sand between the runway and the coastal highway. What stretched out below him was the El Segundo Dunes Preserve, the last remaining sand dunes in Los Angeles, still marked by the […]
While reviewing my work over the past few days, I have begun to realize the essential nature of architecture in my oeuvre, as well as in contemporary photography in general terms. I think most of this is due to its observable primacy in our environments. Buildings, structures, and other habitable (and inhabitable) objects reign over […]
These are postcards from the lip of a commoditized and disheveled Eden masquerading as progressive life on planet zero. These rasterized observations are the Cliff Notes to the end of natural occurrence and abundance. Everything has a place so long as it has a price or a presence deemed valuable. If it cannot be brokered […]
There is a photograph by Frederick H. Evans from 1896, entitled “In the Attics,” in which the artist captures the improbably clean space of Kelmscott Manor, the home of Arts and Crafts movement pioneer William Morris. The photograph presents the attic as a type of raw liminal space, where the viewer can identify […]
Between the Skin and the Sea is the new book by German artist Katrin Koenning. Katrin lives abroad in Australia, and that will factor into the discussion regarding her latest book, published by Chose Commune, the wonderful French publisher who put out her book with equally talented Sarker Protick in 2016, entitled Astres Noirs. […]
Once in a while, I’ll encounter photographs that scratch or even scar me, embedding themselves into the same subconscious archive that catalogs and buries trauma. I can’t eliminate them; they resurface at the strangest times. Whenever my daughter’s bath water gets too cold, or I’m standing over a tub from a particular vantage point, a […]