Coal mining is a very peculiar enterprise. The 19th and 20th Centuries committed untold heaves of labor to its extraction. It fuels communities, yet its extraction suggests a disemboweling of the land where these communities settle. The prospect of coal mining is one of capital and capitalism. The very human clay that mines these enterprises […]
Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]
I feel a common bond with this book. Aapo Huhta has explored a few different terrains that I have also explored or happened upon over the last decade, and he has combined them compellingly. It is another book in an increasingly exciting year for the publisher Kult Books, whose imprint I am following closely […]
Incarceration, one of our great social taboos. Out of sight and out of mind is enough for the majority of society, unaware that in the UK, some reoffending rates are over 50%, costing society £18bn a year. The current system is at the very least creaking, if not fundamentally flawed and failing those who, whilst […]
Full Article on Patreon Preliminary Analysis of Nakahira Takuma For a Language to Come (Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni) There are several things that I love about Nakahira’s book. The idea that he does not make formal considerations such as vertical vs. horizontal page layout a huge deal. He switched to verticality with […]
Full Article on Patreon Andreas Gehrke is someone who I have covered previously for his exceptional photobooks. I have nearly every title he has produced, and standouts include Berlin a Brandenburg, among many others. His output is incredible, and he also self-publishes these titles under his imprint Drittel Books. What I find universal in […]
There comes a point in our lives when the incessant cavorting, energy expulsion, and general themes of youth come to a crawling end. Associated with the recognition of these moments are a series of mid-life acknowledgments. First, if one takes up the standard biology-the coupling, work, and family routines, the dissipation of specific energies […]
Full Article With More Images On Patreon Throughout the work, Hara photographs portraits. Some of these images are culled from her familiar everyday journeys, with images of people on the street or in trains elegantly abetting the images of her family. Though far from a family book in the traditional sense, the text […]
Full Article and Full Sequence of Book on Patreon The desire found in that book functions incredibly obliquely. Images of women do not, even when on a bed and nude, represent sex or an objectifying element; they are reduced to the same void as everything else and feel like a piece of the vortex. […]
Full Article on Patreon National Identity is loosely based on tropes of uncertain but narrow fixity: culture, language, and nationhood. Several mitigating factors have thwarted this fundamental right to the assembly and persistence of identity in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Historically, conquest and colonial desire have eradicated the national identity of oppressed subjects through […]
“Throughout Meaker’s book, there is a pervasive sense of an unseen world, a drawing back of the curtain to reveal places that are looked over or are content to sit idyll and unobserved for the sale of their posterity. The artist pivots her camera towards the thicket and stagnant pools of water left behind […]
As a collector of vintage photography with a penchant for the curious, horrific, and sometimes downright traumatic, it is no surprise that I gravitated to Ossian Brown‘s book Haunted Air published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. There also appears to be a new 2022 edition available. I am reviewing the book now as it […]