This book is something of an outlier in the photobook legacy of eminent British artist Jem Southam, whom I usually associate with a type nouveau pastoral, a celluloid Constable traipsing the foggy lands of Ole Blighty. His notable contributions to the photobook include The Moth, Four Winters, The Pond at Upton Pyne, Rockfalls and Ponds, […]
As a species, we have become addicted to the spectacle of political theater. Events are organized to engage our sensitive minds in the furor of ideological division, and arguments become tribal tools meant to manifest the supposed will of Western democracy, though little of this exhibitionism uncovers the true vessel of political life, fueled by […]
The idea of the outsider is fascinating in photography. On one hand, the audience for photography loves a surprise story, one that challenges the canon and one that appears to materialize out of nowhere, without precedent, and shaped from the margins of conventions. What is fascinating is the tendency to think such things are less […]
To you, Beni Bischof may be a monster. To others, he is an unofficial unsyndicated scribe for the madness of the last half-century of consumer hell that we wade through. They drew first Blood; it wasn’t me. To give context to Bishof’s sprawling and prolific practice from the outside would be an exercise in deep-fried […]
In full declaration, as a fan of all parties involved, I hereby cannot deny my overwhelming urge to state that this book, in the canon of Raymond J. Meeks Esq., is hitherto unnecessary, but welcomed nonetheless. It is a compilation of misses, outtakes, and the unloved and weeded-out, minus one image of an alabaster girl […]
The Balkans are very hard to describe. Though I have spent an inordinate amount of time in Greece, mostly in its capital, having traveled through the Balkans to get there, I remember a sense of something enigmatic, misty, and compelling as we traveled to and from Greece. I remember thinking about it all on a […]
Toxic typology or cultural analysis of Swiss Agro-society, you be the judges. Either way, these little uns gunna smoke these here heaters until the cows come home. There is an amazing history of smoking in photography that Lucy Sante first cottoned onto sometime in the early 2000s with her book No Smoking. Several other smoking […]
Mycellium and fungus in general have been a renewed interest as of late. Some of this is undoubtedly narrowed or zoomed in by the current fear of ecocide most of us are experiencing as we watch wildfires decimate geographies familiar and unfamiliar, as we are forced to watch data centers spring up around natural aquifiers- […]
In these days of irreversible rancor and decimation, one cannot help but look backward through the lens of a type in fogged nostalgia for the second half of the Twentieth Century, in the years prior to 2001, also embedded fairly as a time of grave uncertainty. Notwithstanding, this was a time when the travails of […]
Art School is a process. It is one of those experiences in life that feels uncertain, tempting, and usually administered to those who wander, who are trying to fidn their footing in life, unashamed to be creative, yet unaware of what it will take to make a career in the arts feasible should they continue. […]
This is the second book from MACK offering a look into the theme of contact sheets presented over the past year. The first was David Armstrong’s book Contacts (I mean, how else should you call these, Sheets?), published last October, which similarly examined a brilliant tranche of Armstrong’s work through the diminutive, if plentiful, images on his […]
A field guide in parts, an attempt at shorthand analysis. Places, not much else needs to be said when so much has already been said. The strong presence of Guido Guidi, as if you were to take his large-format images of Cesena and use a 35mm camera to catch some of his shadow work. A […]