“When I graduated from CalArts with an MFA in 1993, I moved to New York City. It’s never an easy time to launch as an artist, but that was a particularly bad time. It was pre-internet, of course, so there were fewer ways to get work seen, and the gallery system was very small […]
“In the case of Arnaud Montagard’s The Road Not Taken, the lens is focused on the remnants of a mid-century American dream as exemplified by gas stations and diners that bear all the vernacular hallmarks of the Atomic Age” The best way to describe human activity in a photograph is to remove […]
“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb” – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. […]
“Photography is the process of discovering the other and, through the other, oneself. Intrinsically, that is why the photographer seeks and discovers new worlds but in the end always shows what is inside himself.” —Claudia Andujar As a child, Claudia Andujar laid awake and listened silently for the spirits the servants were certain inhabited […]
“The de-anthropocentric consideration of nature, of particle, of process is necessary to discuss the framing of new non-human realities” Let’s consider an alternative version of history that is based on material instead of human folly. There must be a history individuated for the way in which non-animate objects such as petroleum, electricity, and […]
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.” There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s […]
Professional photographers are typically trained to hide the mutability of digital images, covering up their handiwork to make their subjects look perfect, moreso than reality itself. Cobayashi toys with this mutability. Swirled up buildings, highways and hair all come together in an ecstatic mix of street fashion-shoot, slice-of-life and cityscape. You can trace the […]
“The photobook is a balance, at least its the intention, between this utopia (or maybe call it heterotopia, a concept made up by Foucault) and a life experience…” Fordlândia is an incredible book. IT is an imagined place where the 20th Century’s technological and capitalist utopian visions collide with the reality of the […]
“It would be easy for me to say that this book is published at the right moment and that it correlates a simple reminder about the inhuman conditions of the past…” It is June 9th, 2020 and as I sit here penning this “review” of Gordon Parks perhaps sadly non-anachronistic and oddly prescient […]
“All are slightly queasy in appearance, the Technicolor saturation making the images unbelievable to some extent, which adds to the delirium of her dream state”. High-intensity color saturation in a photograph creates something of a parallel universe in which things can feel positively uncanny. I would suggest that in terms of historical notation […]