If ever the premise of a body of work was betrayed by its execution, this is that work. I should clarify that this statement is not intended as a pejorative, but rather to note that the simplicity of the means in Shea’s initial premise is a bit of a false lead. It starts with a […]
What strikes me as an interesting premise in Florian Merdes’s book Steamcracker is the enforced myopic rendering of details and patterns, which turns the book and its intense sequences into something minutely chaotic. There is a world underneath the surface of things, a rhythm and a dedication to line that emanates in Florian’s book. […]
Batia Suter’s work has several substantial iterations at its heart. It stems from an understanding of volume and how images function, both in terms of their materiality and their historical context. This is most evident in her opuses Parallel Encyclopedia I and II, both published by Roma. The work that Suter makes can be […]
Once on a departing flight from LAX, Mark Ruwedel glanced down from the height of his window seat and noticed a short tract of sand between the runway and the coastal highway. What stretched out below him was the El Segundo Dunes Preserve, the last remaining sand dunes in Los Angeles, still marked by the […]
I am incredibly biased as I write this. I share a close connection with the artist Pieter Hugo through our Nearest Truth workshop programming. Although it might seem counterintuitive to the points I will raise subsequently, I have had a chance to hear Pieter talk about his work in detail, with all the challenging […]
If you happened to attend the 2009 NY Art Book Fair, you might have come across Gregory Halpern’s Omaha Sketchbook on the table of J&L Books. This early version was rough and unassuming, printed on a laser printer and spiral-bound, its pages made from cheap white paper with small contact prints affixed throughout. The images […]
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 […]