Reflecting on the motif of painting with a title. One of the soft critiques I have of the book is that, despite its holistic considerations and the fundamental declarations of artist and publisher working closely together to create a special object, the title leaves something less than imaginable. It is somewhat self-referential regarding the artist’s […]
What strikes me as an interesting premise in Florian Merdes’s book Steamcracker is the enforced myopic rendering of details and patterns, which turns the book and its intense sequences into something minutely chaotic. There is a world underneath the surface of things, a rhythm and a dedication to line that emanates in Florian’s book. […]
In 1870-1871, during the siege of Paris, better known as the Paris Commune, several ingenious actions were carried out throughout the year to continue the communards’ defense first against the Prussians, then the Thiers government, which sought to suppress the resistance within the heart of Paris. Both of these actions were the result of harnessing […]
And then there was the night—archives from the edge of hell—chimerical dissonance—six cloven hoof Satyrs. Bachanalian. Excremental. Grain, dissolve. Pushing the sword of Damocles in until the hilt fractures on the bone of the pubic mound. A horsehair away from piercing the veil. Scrutinize, Labotomize. Forever roam. Necessarily hexed, vexed, encouraged by nebulous worlds […]
Batia Suter’s work has several substantial iterations at its heart. It stems from an understanding of volume and how images function, both in terms of their materiality and their historical context. This is most evident in her opuses Parallel Encyclopedia I and II, both published by Roma. The work that Suter makes can be […]
As if the war legacy of Dunkirk had not already been recognized as a pivotal shit eating point in its past, its charred hand to swollen coal-crusted mouth, poisoned by ethanol overload and toxic industrial habitat, history has now favored turning it from a battle-scarred historical footnote into a vast hellscape busy with killing off […]
Once on a departing flight from LAX, Mark Ruwedel glanced down from the height of his window seat and noticed a short tract of sand between the runway and the coastal highway. What stretched out below him was the El Segundo Dunes Preserve, the last remaining sand dunes in Los Angeles, still marked by the […]
Photography has always had a complicated relationship with memory. It promises to hold on to moments, but it also shows how unreliable memory really is. This tension runs through two recent photobooks by one of the most interesting Japanese photographers working today. Family of Lies (Three Books, 2024) and Tebajima (Kawazu Kikaku, 2024), by Hajime […]
Reading cities by line has become a complicated chore in 2025. There are incongruent movements on the city streets, with all manner of debris and flotsam that collude to control our vision, distorting the potential of reading the city by line and encroaching on a sense of the city and our environment as orderly, maintained, […]
While reviewing my work over the past few days, I have begun to realize the essential nature of architecture in my oeuvre, as well as in contemporary photography in general terms. I think most of this is due to its observable primacy in our environments. Buildings, structures, and other habitable (and inhabitable) objects reign over […]
*not pictured My version of this film begins with the establishing shot in the same manner as Désirée’s. I pan over downtown Los Angeles. I try to skip the normative sunset, smog-ambitious, clichéd photographs of the city. I am not focusing on anything in particular. I am not overly concerned with landmarks, not interested […]
These are postcards from the lip of a commoditized and disheveled Eden masquerading as progressive life on planet zero. These rasterized observations are the Cliff Notes to the end of natural occurrence and abundance. Everything has a place so long as it has a price or a presence deemed valuable. If it cannot be brokered […]