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 […]
“Of course they will find it difficult to situate them historically. They must feel free to see them as images that evoke something in their own minds. They’re illustrations inspired by a theme, actually, rather than depictions of a particular story, I think.” – Paula Rego Though she was speaking about her own images, Paula […]
Gregory Halpern’s photobook King, Queen, Knave has been nineteen years in the making. The first images for the photobook were shot while Halpern was a student in the MFA program at California College of the Arts, where he studied under his mentor, the photographer Larry Sultan. At the time, Halpern felt lost and adrift, unsure […]
Moises Saman is one of the most substantive and accomplished conflict photographers working today. A member of Magnum since 2014, he is best known for photographs he has been making for more than two decades working throughout the Middle East, during which time he covered the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. Many of the […]
Photographer Larry Sultan’s iconic photobook Pictures from Home, initially published in 1992, found renewed acclaim with its 2017 re-release by MACK. Sultan’s intimate exploration of familial bonds captured the attention of audiences worldwide, culminating in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1989. The impact of Sultan’s photographic series resonated […]
For the complete list, please consult the Nearest Podcast in the following weeks, where I will MC over a much longer list of the great books published this year. For this list, I wanted to keep the books down to five that I feel will define the artist’s career or are crucial to the medium. […]
Alessandra Sanguinetti Some Say Ice MACK/Magnum Photo A girl plays the piano convincingly. Another different girl, spotlit, plays a different piano, slightly less convincingly. Steam rises from a river, possibly black, convincingly. A buffalo mourns Its condition confined between fences during a winter snowstorm, most convincingly. A man’s hands clean a six-shooter pistol, and I […]
The original source material from this post comes from a long-format discussion with many different voices penning their thoughts on Instagram. I wanted to discover what people thought of Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi in 2022. Of course, this is culled from the people who follow me on Instagram and are interested in […]
Every photographer parent that I know has what to the non-parenting world seems like a self-indulgent family album project. Every. one. of. them. Myself. included. Some have several. Making photographs of the family is part of the experience of getting through life. We use the camera to illustrate the mundane, the banal, and the exciting […]
In memory of a young woman that I never knew. This reflection is dedicated to Carol Jenkins-Davis I find myself combatively trying to embed myself in the images, memories and families of others. My initial hesitancy in this pursuit comes from acknowledging the failure of such an enterprise. It comes from a point […]
“Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” This […]
It was the best of years…. Once again it is that time of year where I try to drum up some sort of edit from all of the incredible work the photography book world offers up. This year is difficult as I felt it has been one of the strongest years in recent memory […]