DIARY ENTRY 25/01/2025 Today I went back to writing. There has been very little time to work on the text accompanying the book in the last few months. Re read notes, retracing steps – yet again. I close my eyes and everything is there in front of me. The only thing I do not remember […]
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 […]
Change is not always a fast process. Stating what is an obvious observation, ruminating over the nature of change or our perception of change in local geography is pertinent. I think we like to denote the object status of “change” as being implicit, noticeable, and understood as event-driven, clear, and not necessarily attached to […]
A and not THE. Let’s be clear from the get-go that what we are talking about is A, or one, interpretive history of London’s East End through the prism of photography and, arguably, property and labor by esteemed archivist/documentarian Chris Dorley Brown, whose recent book A History of the East End, published by Nouveau Palais […]
I get a rapturous effect when I search through early twentieth-century illustrated books on archaeology. I know that it is a relatively niche endeavor, but there is something otherworldly about the effort that allows my imagination to stir in ways that are not easy to equate. Some of this is because the images are fantastical. […]
I’m listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Two (Expanded Version), though I should be listening to the original score for Ilias’s book Forecast (Origini Edizioni, 2023, Second Edition). I apologize to Daphne Kotsiani, Y. Fotiadis, D. Joss, and I. Dimitriadis, who have added an audio piece of sculpted piano interludes that one […]
In the realms of art, we celebrate a single act of creation. We give license to a nearly ideological pursuit of aura, a way in which we receive the act of a single creation as a roughly divine measure of human success. Yet, in photography and creating a photobook, which begs for narrative and […]
Recovery – Muriel Verbist by Sofie Crabbé A woman is looking at us. She stares at us. We stare back. An act we can carry out rather casually, given that we’re observing photographic portraits. The format is reminiscent of identity card photos. We see a face, shoulders, and part of an upper body. A […]
This is a fascinating and unexpected title. I suspect that some people might consider it a repeat of images that circulate through Larry Clark’s opus Tulsa, and that is not a wrong way to feel about it, but what is important is how we see the periphery of images from that incredible body of work […]
In her first book, Arbeit, Laura Bielau found monumental images of tiny things in her studio workspace. The notion of art and labor were at the fundament of the documents she produced. Everything from an empty Amazon envelope to a rubber band was magnified and challenged for their quotidian usage. Enlarged and brought into […]
How does one begin to excavate memories that lie in the distressed trough of the murder of a loved one? When he was seven years old, Jean-Michel André was staying at a hotel with his father and his father’s new girlfriend in Avignon, France, when a robbery turned into a homicide with both his father […]
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. […]