During a talk he gave to his students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1980, Larry Sultan opened up about the challenges he faced with his latest series of photographs featuring swimmers in the community pools of the Bay Area. The young photographer struggled to justify this new body of work, as the […]
Full Article on Patreon …In assessing Dark Matter, I am also reasonably confident that this use of newspaper imagery is lodged in the artist’s practice from influences such as Michael Schmidt, whose book Ein–Heit, produced in the 90s, made great use of similar aesthetics of inconvenient German history, which was photographed and hung […]
Full Article on Patreon Returning to the idea of memories, one can feel all of these tendencies in the work used to enforce a slippage of time. Close-up images and somewhat obscure faces place the photographs inside a dream factory or memory farm. These fragments of realism play heavily with our ability […]
” I once wrote an article that attempted, through literary aspirations, to tie our willingness to utilize memory with gaming and strategic and beneficial outcomes. The simple idea outlined in the writing was that when something is at stake, our memory functions on a high level. When we are asked for something specific, where […]
Alessandra Sanguinetti Some Say Ice MACK/Magnum Photo A girl plays the piano convincingly. Another different girl, spotlit, plays a different piano, slightly less convincingly. Steam rises from a river, possibly black, convincingly. A buffalo mourns Its condition confined between fences during a winter snowstorm, most convincingly. A man’s hands clean a six-shooter pistol, and I […]
An Interview between Zak R. Dimitrov, Beata Bartecka, and Łukasz Rusznica regarding their book How to Look Natural in Photos Palm* Studios and OPT. How to Look Natural in Photos is a functional, yet very aesthetically pleasing book. It examines the way photography operates as a mechanism and a tool for […]
The photograph on the cover of Jardín de mi padre (My Father’s Garden, 2020) shows Luis Carlos Tovar, carried in his mother’s arms as an infant. On the right side of the image, a man’s arm reaches from outside the frame towards Luis Carlos – his fingers are only a few centimeters away. Time is […]
The history of the Doppelgänger-the German word for a look-alike is long and has its roots in a form of teratology or study of medical abnormalities both in human and animal form. These abnormalities can be seen as an example in conjoined or “Siamese” twins. Further to the conjoined version of twinning is […]
” I think of these efforts often as “Collecting as Practice” and yet most collectors see it simply as a byproduct of their obsession over that of an artistic pursuit” I have been studying collectors of vernacular photography whose drives and holdings pose an interesting possibility for some time. Collectors are an […]
“The images do not look like images from the present. This suggests the potential for these objects to be lodged in a strange time-warp of consumer nostalgia. In some cases, the images appear as though they are from Dutch products thus complicating their geo-specificity and asking larger questions of tribute and nostalgia in equal measure” […]
“Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” This […]
“I’d been playing drums in a few bands, Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab among others, and between tours and photo jobs I’d take off on photo projects of my own, often to Berlin. Eventually I got a place in Berlin, because I realised it had a lot of what London was losing, it’s a […]