“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 […]
“I think what was really drawing me to Marina’s book was how it was animating this story of the mountains, their potential and actual destructive forces and how human lives are so dwarfed in the scale of that force yet so emotionally attached to life in the mountains.” – Sunil Shah
“The Transparencies book published by MACK is also significant in its design, the essay within and sequence of the work, which is chapterized by annual progressions through the 70’s American dream in banal (good word, word of goodness) detail” It is not often that a re-examination of the periphery of a significant […]
“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. […]
“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 […]
Everything is reducible to carbon. From the tip of the pencil that provides musical annotation on a score to the living forest in front of the camera. Carbon provides the means for life and all living forms bend to the will of carbon. Carbon is elemental and essential. It forms more compounds than all 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 […]
“For Levrat, the idea of heterotopia described both the site itself, and the acts of minor carnage that he carried out there – innocent and playful on the surface, but with a subtext of riotous refusal.”
We confuse ourselves with our recognition of our portrait in a mirror. The hand that brushes away the hairs from the forehead, the sweet sticky perspiration that pins the lock to the crown is read in reverse and yet, this reversal is apathetic to the self that it stares back at. The eyes glare […]