Fumitsugu Takedo – Ambience Decay

  I feel slightly guilty posting this as I know by the time you read it, that it will be improbable you will find a copy as there are only 50 copies in the edition. Hopefully, it will inspire the publisher Photobook Daydream Editions to consider publishing more, as Fumitsugu Takedo’s Ambience Decay is one […]

Katerina Angelopoulou – Diary Entry #1: The Fumes of Mars

    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 […]

Cai Dongdong – Passing By Beijing

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 […]

Mårten Lange – The Palace

Mårten Lange’s The Palace, KARL, 2024, is a brilliant continuation of his last self-published photobook, Threshold (KARL, 2023). The two books share a systematic approach to addressing iterations of architecture that morph and suggest, among other things, portals to history and the domestic interior as ephemeral markers, respectively. The shift from his previous books, Ghost […]

Charles Johnstone – Au Revoir Anna

Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023   The history of the television on art and photography/photobooks is compelling. My interest stems from having grown up with the television as the primary utility of my creative life. When I say television, I am not thinking of regular programming, but instead of the vast array of films […]

Stephanie Kiwitt – Flachenland 2020-2022

  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 […]

Chris Dorley Brown – A History of the East End

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 […]

Michał Sita – History of Poland, Vol.2

The story a nation tells itself is crucially important to its people’s sense of national identity. It serves also as a way of establishing and maintaining a shared set of values. Primordialism is the dogmatic belief that one’s national origins are defined by skin colour, blood and a spiritual belonging, but if you don’t subscribe […]

Gundula Schulze Eldowy – Berlin On a Dog’s Night

  I am sure many of these people are dead. That is not what distinguishes the book or what makes it great. Instead, what is challenging is being alive during that part of history when the faces and bodies inhabiting the frames are familiar, enhanced by the glow from a window. Some of their bodies […]

Bernard Guillot – La Cité des Morts

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. […]

Estelle Hanania – This Causes Consciousness to Fracture

It would be hard to hand this photobook to someone in a decontextualized state and expect them to understand the modalities of ecstasy and horror that permeate the frames. In the first seventy or eighty percent of the book, figures cavort and twist and are undetermined by a common goal. They are bodies of a […]

Muriel Verbist – Recovery

  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 […]