Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon Motel 42

Motel 42 (Leaf, 2024) is another testament to the never-ending slew of American road trip books. However, in Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon’s book, you can’t see much of America outside of the cigarette-stained roadside motel rooms she and her lover Adrien have occupied. You can read about the places they visited in the back of the book, […]

Charles Johnstone – Au Revoir Anna

Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023   The history of the television on art and photography/photobooks is compelling. My interest stems from having grown up with the television as the primary utility of my creative life. When I say television, I am not thinking of regular programming, but instead of the vast array of films […]

Bernard Guillot – La Cité des Morts

I get a rapturous effect when I search through early twentieth-century illustrated books on archaeology. I know that it is a relatively niche endeavor, but there is something otherworldly about the effort that allows my imagination to stir in ways that are not easy to equate. Some of this is because the images are fantastical. […]

Estelle Hanania – This Causes Consciousness to Fracture

It would be hard to hand this photobook to someone in a decontextualized state and expect them to understand the modalities of ecstasy and horror that permeate the frames. In the first seventy or eighty percent of the book, figures cavort and twist and are undetermined by a common goal. They are bodies of a […]

Jean-Michel André – Chambre 207

How does one begin to excavate memories that lie in the distressed trough of the murder of a loved one? When he was seven years old, Jean-Michel André was staying at a hotel with his father and his father’s new girlfriend in Avignon, France, when a robbery turned into a homicide with both his father […]

Margot Jourquin – Transi

Within the context of death, I have spoken about, and I am sure that I am not alone in this, the strange feeling when a person, persona, and life slip from the realm of the personable to the world of an object, a thing, a husk, though still loved, ultimately lacking the anima necessary to […]

Martin Essl – Le Bateau Ivre

  With the recent emphasis on street photography found in volumes such as Matt Stuart’s Think Like a Street Photographer (Laurence King Publishing, 2021) and Reclaim the Street: Street Photography’s Moment, Matt Stuart with Stephen McLaren (Thames & Hudson, 2023), there seems to be a renewed awakening to the genre. If the countless YouTube videos about […]

Mark Steinmetz – France 1987

I’m still determining who needs to hear this, but Mark Steinmetz remains one of the most profound voices in the rising tide of what I suggest is a revisiting of humanism in photography. Given the clamor and tumult of the past years, it is not a surprise that work like Mark’s, which, at its base, […]

Esaias Baitel – Zonen 1982

Full Article on Patreon   This is an incredibly complicated book. It is one that I have been chasing for a year or so since I first became aware of it. It has a cult-like status for many reasons, least of all are the photographs, which are also incredible. The story of Baitel amid a […]

Elise Toïdé Les Vagues

Full Article on Patreon   There are pleasant reminders through the book of our interconnectivity and the reach of summer, as seen through the beach environment, which has a very appealing significance to memory, as does the use of golden light in the work. The trigger for possible memories does not end with those images. […]

Teo Becher: Charbon Blanc

  There is a resurgence in recent years to look at the topic of industry and labor among artists considering the monumental shift that society is experiencing from manual labor to skilled labor. Over half of the projects that I encounter regarding the shift to automation revolve around digital territories-projects about AI, automation, cryptocurrencies, and […]

Alexis Desgagnés: Ammoniaque

  Ammoniaque is a simple book. I would almost describe the images within it as minimal. Alexis Desgagnés, a Canadian photographer working in Montreal has chosen to focus his attention on one wall, an intimate object oddly teeming with signs of life or human intervention in an industrialized area of the city situated off Moreau […]