When you think you have seen the model-to-photographer genre wear itself thin, along comes Matilde SøesRasmussen to challenge, deepen, and extract gold from the topic by putting together her second intriguing photobook, which deals with modelling. Søes Rasmussen ’s first book, Unprofessional, published by Disko Bay, was a grand slam that, through her point-and-shoot aesthetic, detailed […]
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 […]
Notes for a Ritual of Photography Gone Extinct Victor Sira, in his exhibition catalog/new book Europass, published by his publishing house, bookdummypress, examines a common theme in travel photography. The book is based on a series of trips the Venezuelan artist took in Europe from 2001 to 2006, which coincided with the shift from the […]
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 […]
Place de la République is a central meeting point in Paris. Several underground metro lines stop at its station, and its wide-open square is a gathering place for many people, particularly younger people. When you first enter the square, there is a flurry of activity, but it never feels overly crowded. Suppose you […]
She’s posing for consumer products now and thenFor every camera, she gives the best she canI think I saw her on the cover of a magazineNow she’s a big success, I want to meet her again -Kraftwerk, via Big Black Of course, I know nothing about modelling. Still, I can assume that there is a […]
With Dana’s work, one cannot help but be mesmerized by her ability to capture people in situ. Her career has been broadly defined by her portrait work, both commercially and for her own personal subjectivity. Whereas having a career built on poraiture no doubt inspires a healthy relationship with the craft of photography, there […]
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 […]
I have mentioned several projects in the past here that use the window as a mechanism for photographic discourse. There are quite a few mentions of the window as a source for inspiration; perhaps the most well-known is eminent curator John Szarkowski’s discourse about mirrors and windows, and the difference between how an artist […]
Julien Langendorff, Spell Rider The roots of cosmic occultism stretch back as far in time as humans have been able to communicate. There is a hermetic order to the universe that has bewildered and engaged the species, giving license to conjecture, theory, and spiritual whim that exceed what lies before our faces. It is a […]
I am trying to equip my early-morning brain with enough reference points to connect the dots in Marie Quéau’s book Le Royaume (Area Books). I should have been better prepared, as I have seen variations of work over the past decade and have been anticipating its release for some time. As I brood over […]