Jamie Murray – Folly

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 […]

Andrea Modica – Theatrum Equorum

Equine surgery and medical observation; specialized labor and industrial production. In its study of the Clinica Equina Bagnarola, a renowned horse clinic outside of Bologna, Italy, Andrea Modica’s Theatrum Equorum (TIS books, 2022) touches on each of these subjects fluidly and with considerable grace, in a mode closer to aphorism than to essay. Modica’s images […]

Igor Posner – Cargó

The first time I looked through Igor Posner’s Cargó (Red Hook Editions, 2022) I was bewildered. I did not know, for example, that across 160 pages and what feels like triple that number of images, it would express the disjointedness and poignancy of memory, or that it would render the experience of time passing as […]

Julie van der Vaart – Blind Spot

Full Article on Patreon Julie van der Vaart‘s Blind Spot (VOID, 2022) aims to reconcile the body with geological formations that illustrate the schism between the notion of time and its readability by the mind and body of humankind. A long-term project, the book is a thick volume of van der Vaart’s photographs veiled in […]

Valerio Polici – Interno

Full Article on Patreon   …The book is well-sequenced and edited by the Studiofagnel team, with passages of images coordinated by gold and brown to off-white images of textiles and walls. A labyrinthian element asks the viewer to navigate through the corridors of Polici’s world akin to reading Borges. Nothing is inevitable, but the viewer’s […]

Coca-Cola and the Implied Apathy of Tomatsu Shomei’s Photographs

Full Article with More Images on Patreon   It is essential to understand the biography of Tomatsu to understand what the emotion of rage or anger may be prevalent in his work. As a pubescent teen during the atomic bombing of Japan and the subsequent end of the Second World War, Tomatsu recalls the occupation […]

Ishiuchi Miyako Club & Courts Yokosuka Yokohama

Full Article on Patreon   So, the dig at post-industrial decay has put a giant bee in my bonnet. But what should I expect about the unspoken class issues that revolve and permeate through and in photography these days? I mean, if you have a New York-London-based photographer stat in your bio and are in […]

Ron Jude – Dark Matter

Full Article on Patreon     …In assessing Dark Matter, I am also reasonably confident that this use of newspaper imagery is lodged in the artist’s practice from influences such as Michael Schmidt, whose book Ein–Heit, produced in the 90s, made great use of similar aesthetics of inconvenient German history, which was photographed and hung […]

Laurenz Berges – Das Becherhaus in Mudersbach

  Full Article on Patreon     …Further images within images add to the sense of a lived space as Becher family photos from the 20s and 30s adorn mantels and countertops, with a finesse of an image, ala the Bechers, of a water town, sat, out of frame, lithely resting against a presumed wedding […]

Esaias Baitel – Zonen 1982

Full Article on Patreon   This is an incredibly complicated book. It is one that I have been chasing for a year or so since I first became aware of it. It has a cult-like status for many reasons, least of all are the photographs, which are also incredible. The story of Baitel amid a […]

Nick Gervin – Portlanders

Full Article on Patreon   Gervin’s work reflects the American moment in the second decade of the second millennium through tendencies similar to those seen in a good deal of American photography during the Vietnam War era.  I see some resemblances to protest coverage by Gene Anthony, a Black Star agency photographer who captured the […]

Dave Heath One Brief Moment

  Dave Heath – One Brief Moment Review by Simon Bray   Within the opening pages of Dave Heath’s ‘One Brief Moment,’ there is a certain air of occasion. Gathered masses fill the middle of the street, suggesting that these are not singular moments but a crowd united by a collective sense of anticipation and […]