Without knowing much about architecture, what I find fascinating is that it is one of the forms of art that its artists can layer with the fantastical and still deliver a direct utility. Of course, most architects and architecture do not work toward abstraction; instead, they look at the medium as one for function […]
I am previously familiar with Berlin-based Chinese artist Cai Dongdong through his interest in re-purposing vernacular photography. A Game of Photos and Left Right, his previous two books present a playful atmosphere of interrogating the past, playing with the physical artifacts of the photographic medium. In some ways, with A Game of Photos, one is […]
I am sure many of these people are dead. That is not what distinguishes the book or what makes it great. Instead, what is challenging is being alive during that part of history when the faces and bodies inhabiting the frames are familiar, enhanced by the glow from a window. Some of their bodies […]
Rodrigo Valenzuela has been producing incredible work for the past couple of years. I was lucky enough to get a copy of his last book, Journeyman, published by Mousse Publishing. It was my introduction to the Chilean-American’s work, and from that point, we managed to have an extensive conversation about his work for Nearest Truth. […]
Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer of the American West. His work is dedicated to sites along the interstate highway — forgotten mining towns, abandoned truck stops, weathered billboards, the garbage scattered across dirt roads. What he is attracted to is the region’s extremes: the harsh desert sun, its arid fields, trash heaps of tires, the […]
War is good business for some, and misery for most everyone else. The executives of defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, people who directly profit from the outbreak and continuation of war, are incentivized to hope for its continuation rather than its cessation, because where there is war (in Yemen, Ukraine, or in […]
My initial response to the massive swell of attention that cryptocurrency received in 2021, and more specifically to the non-fungible token (NFT) hysteria that gripped so much of cultural discourse online and in the press, was a dismissive roll of the eyes. Admittedly, what I was reacting to most were the claims that cryptocurrency was […]
The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter […]
Coal mining is a very peculiar enterprise. The 19th and 20th Centuries committed untold heaves of labor to its extraction. It fuels communities, yet its extraction suggests a disemboweling of the land where these communities settle. The prospect of coal mining is one of capital and capitalism. The very human clay that mines these enterprises […]
Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]