Ruptures and Raptures It is hard to know where to start writing about a book with such ominous tendencies at its heart. Monuments by Trent Parke, published by Stanley/Barker in 2023 and its third printing in spring 2024, has a doomsday proximity to it. It is hard to explain why I feel this […]
“Of what one cannot speak, whereof one must be silent.” L.W. Sure, it’s slightly glib to usher in a review with Wittgenstein’s oft-quoted (often misaligned, here too) citation regarding meaning and language. It will surely make scholars of the philosopher’s work uncomfortable/annoyed. Yet, I frequently think of this quote for my purposes […]
I recently came across Yoshi Yubai’s work. I was fortunate enough to nab a copy of his last book, Radiation Inspiration (2023), published by La Generale Minerale (screenprinted by Ben Sanair), which I purchased through Le Plac’Art Photo in Paris. The screen printing by Sanair in that book is phenomenal. The book has an introduction […]
Hristina Tasheva’s newest book, Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery (Self-published, 2023), is an ambitious attempt at mapping the disparities between two national experiences of Communism in the twentieth century — the Dutch and the Bulgarian — as they were impacted by the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The […]
I had to take a bit of time to digest this book. I remember receiving it before the end of the year and being genuinely overwhelmed with it for a few different reasons that I will outline here. I think the feeling of being overwhelmed first stemmed from the photographs being of an […]
I’m still determining who needs to hear this, but Mark Steinmetz remains one of the most profound voices in the rising tide of what I suggest is a revisiting of humanism in photography. Given the clamor and tumult of the past years, it is not a surprise that work like Mark’s, which, at its base, […]
Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]
The world as will. And representation. Time is a flat circle, The Returnal, Cosmic materiality, and our conceptual place within it. Quantum feelings, quantum seeing. Numerous artists have grappled with our place within the sublime, rotating blue rock we call home as it spins through the vast cosmos, manacled to a bright ball of fiery […]
I come to this only days after taking my father to a residential care home for the first time. His blindness has added to a list of ailments which has meant looking after him at home is now no longer possible. A feeling of practical sense and reason is slowly being invaded by thoughts of […]
Constellations, compositions, and a caring look at one’s family life make up the mass of Thomas Manneke’s melancholic and melodic ode to often-overlooked photographer Francis Bruguière. Bruguière, an American artist who studied painting at the turn of the Twentieth Century, is known mainly for his photographic abstractions. In line with artists like Alvin […]
An image I find myself returning to over and over again is a photograph by RaMell Ross titled Dream Catcher (2014). The photograph pictures a young boy lying down on a chain-link fence, staring up at the sky as if enchanted and transfixed by a spell. The photograph was shot at midday in Hale County, […]
Look up the beech in a book for plant taxonomy and you will find a picture of a tall tree with a strong trunk and long branches that form a symmetrical crown. Open Graubaum und Himmelmeer (Hartmann Books, 2023), the new book by Loredana Nemes, and the image of the single majestic tree gets shattered […]