In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg set out to create a work in which erasure/negation would define the principal production method. Instead of building a drawing or painting up from aggregated layers, the artist made a conscious conceptual decision to work backward from the point of completed artwork back to a form of trace in which the […]
From Gui Marcondes I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me …By having our monthly meetings, the artist, who may work a day job or run a family, is encouraged to return to work to provide progress notes. There is no strike against them if they cannot bring something new every month as we […]
Paolo Gasparini’s lengthy career and intense scrutiny of the Latin American social and political landscape from the point of view of an outsider looking in has produced, by proxy of his many photobooks and serial investigations of place, an incredibly rich document of Latin America caught in-between disjointed moments of upheaval and the hope […]
I had the pleasure of talking to Alexis Fabry on the publication of the catalogue of Battered Latin America, the exhibition he co-curated earlier this year at the Fondation A Stichting in Brussels. The book compiles the work of twenty photographers, including lesser-known names (Jaime Villaseca, Agustín Martínez Castro) and many of the region’s luminaries (Paz […]
Geographies, histories, feelings, and representations are often interwoven in narrative tapestries, though the patterns created by their threads don’t always yield a unifying image. Raquel Bravo’s Mato Grosso opens with a man’s silhouette, the artist’s father, followed by several shots of dense foliage. How this man’s story relates to these landscapes will slowly unravel through […]
“We often expect high-end production values in contemporary photobooks, but not every publication can afford some of the eccentricities that we have become accustomed to. In this sense, Tempo reminds us that our material expectations shouldn’t dismiss publications that use humble materials, often produced outside the usual centers of culture and power.”
Let’s start at the end with the text that closes Providencia by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra. The author, who lives in Mexico City, felt the urge to visit his country after days of increasingly violent protests against the government due to economic inequality. The unrest eventually led to a curfew and the declaration of a state of […]
I was confronted with three parts of a mental soundtrack while paging through Thiago Dezan’s new book When I Hear The That Trumpet Sound (Selo Turvo, 2021, ed. 200). The first track based on title and the book’s black endpapers and the ominous black cover was Behemoth’s Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel, a rich and […]
La Calle Abierta Como Un Sueño Hacia Cualquier Azar (The Street Open Like A Dream To Chance) documents the wanderings of Bolivian photographer Ignacio Prudencio throughout different areas of Lima. As a newcomer to the city, Prudencio purposefully got lost in the Peruvian capital to better understand it. The ensuing sequence is highly abstract, composed of unrelated images […]
A few years ago, the Guatemalan photographer Jaime Permuth researched the archives of the Anacostia Community Museum during his Smithsonian Institution Artist Fellowship, where he found images documenting the Latino Festival. According to curator Olivia Cadaval, the event’s first iteration in 1970 came as a response to an inaccurate census count of Latin Americans living […]
“Searles believes that everything in nature has a soul, and these images show her desire to connect with it, calibrating color and composition to establish actual and abstract relations between time, culture, and the natural world.”
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 […]