I did not want to use Bladerunner as an analogy for this photobook simply because the title implies an association. I find nothing immediate in the book that relates the film to Uta’s miasmatic and crepuscular photographs. However, I could marginally make that leap if I wanted to chalk the images up to having a […]
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. […]
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 […]
The first time I looked through Igor Posner’s Cargó (Red Hook Editions, 2022) I was bewildered. I did not know, for example, that across 160 pages and what feels like triple that number of images, it would express the disjointedness and poignancy of memory, or that it would render the experience of time passing as […]
Full Article with More Images on Patreon It is essential to understand the biography of Tomatsu to understand what the emotion of rage or anger may be prevalent in his work. As a pubescent teen during the atomic bombing of Japan and the subsequent end of the Second World War, Tomatsu recalls the occupation […]
Full Article on Patreon …Further images within images add to the sense of a lived space as Becher family photos from the 20s and 30s adorn mantels and countertops, with a finesse of an image, ala the Bechers, of a water town, sat, out of frame, lithely resting against a presumed wedding […]
Full Article on Patreon Returning to the idea of memories, one can feel all of these tendencies in the work used to enforce a slippage of time. Close-up images and somewhat obscure faces place the photographs inside a dream factory or memory farm. These fragments of realism play heavily with our ability […]
Full Article on Patreon “The Banquet is a different affair built around the same context of mourning. Instead of pictures of himself or his deceased wife, Araki presents a catalog of their last meals together. The images are shot with a close-up ring flash and a short lens to give a microphotographic feel […]