Toxic typology or cultural analysis of Swiss Agro-society, you be the judges. Either way, these little uns gunna smoke these here heaters until the cows come home. There is an amazing history of smoking in photography that Lucy Sante first cottoned onto sometime in the early 2000s with her book No Smoking. Several other smoking […]
Mycellium and fungus in general have been a renewed interest as of late. Some of this is undoubtedly narrowed or zoomed in by the current fear of ecocide most of us are experiencing as we watch wildfires decimate geographies familiar and unfamiliar, as we are forced to watch data centers spring up around natural aquifiers- […]
The life of Sarah Schumann should be much better known to the world. As a proponent of the New Women’s Movement, a talented painter, collagist, designer, and all-around life of post-war intrigue suggests a profound tie to the German movements of the mid-century, and yet, like many artists, particularly female artists of the Twentieth Century, […]
I was never accustomed to the tall tales of muchroom pickling that pervade Europe. Mildly aware of the phenomenon back in Wisconsin around the spring movements of the morel mushroom picking season, born to a family of hunters, I did not grasp the essential nature of mushrooms and fungi until quite late in my lifetime. […]
Day 1, February 4, 2026 I am writing this dispatch from Athens, Greece, where we are currently on the second day of shooting. The following work is part of the Nearest Truth Workshops, The Dailies workshop, which includes instructors Bryan Schutmaat, Matthew Genitempo, and Brad Feuerhelm. The workshop outline is detailed as follows: Dailies is […]
Imago Mortis translates to “Image of Death.” It is a concept that has representations as far back as the Middle Ages, likely exploding across imagery as an extension of the mood following years of bubonic plague, which killed off nearly 1/3 to 2/3’s of Europe’s population over the course of a decade. Over the years […]
Daan Paan’s Floating Signifiers, published by The Eriskay Connection is a fascinating study of a type of aesthetic evolutionary morphology as evidenced through several case studies concerning image typology from trees, hinting at ecological questions through fantasy-driven tropes such as the Panta Rhei birthing figure, executed from popular culture, culled from Stephen Spielberg’s Indiana Jones […]
I do not know that much about Hatleberg’s work. I did get a copy of his last book, River’s Dream, as I had missed out on Lost Coast, his first book with eminent American publishers TBW Books. My surface reading of River’s Dream suggested a post-Soth investigation of American topography. I was reminded of Doug Dubois, Alec Soth, Kristine […]
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 […]