There has rightfully been what I might consider an epidemic of navel-gazing in American photography over the last decade. It sounds awful to say it that way, and maybe to unburden the semantic load of the navel, I might consider it inward, or soul searching, if that is more palatable. When I mention this, it […]
First published in 1975, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology has become a classic between categories of production. First and foremost, it is an essential book of photographs that typologically investigates the remnants of Second World War bunker armaments mostly along France’s Western coastline. These heavy structures, though short and squat, are impressive concrete-and-rebar boulders that sit […]
Agony in the Garden. Parables. Metaphors. Incisive mythology within the realms of the contemporary political landscape of Europe in the 2020s. To reduce Lua Ribeira’s work to any single motif is an exercise in futility. Instead, the analysis must stem from the aggregate means of its parts. Of course, one cannot simply resign the work […]
I am writing this dispatch from Athens, Greece, where we are currently on the third day of shooting. The following work is part of the Nearest Truth Workshops, The Dailies workshop, which includes instructors Bryan Schutmaat, Matthew Genitempo, and Brad Feuerhelm. The workshop outline is detailed as follows: Dailies is a newspaper term for a daily […]
You have to admire the rise of Bharat Sikka’s career over the last decade. I have had the opportunity to speak with him several times, both about his practice and his interest in book-making. One of the exciting things about Bharat is that he has been working for a long time, but it wasn’t until […]
I do not know that much about Hatleberg’s work. I did get a copy of his last book, River’s Dream, as I had missed out on Lost Coast, his first book with eminent American publishers TBW Books. My surface reading of River’s Dream suggested a post-Soth investigation of American topography. I was reminded of Doug Dubois, Alec Soth, Kristine […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Growing up in the 90s, transgression in art, as far as I understood, stemmed from the oppressive neoliberalist tendencies carried over from the 80s. Degrees of Thatcherism and Reaganism haunted the landscape of artistry, alongside many questions arising from social issues concerning the body. Gay rights and the grappling of feminism, and more essentially, its […]
Reflecting on the motif of painting with a title. One of the soft critiques I have of the book is that, despite its holistic considerations and the fundamental declarations of artist and publisher working closely together to create a special object, the title leaves something less than imaginable. It is somewhat self-referential regarding the artist’s […]