“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb” – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. […]
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.” There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s […]
“It would be easy for me to say that this book is published at the right moment and that it correlates a simple reminder about the inhuman conditions of the past…” It is June 9th, 2020 and as I sit here penning this “review” of Gordon Parks perhaps sadly non-anachronistic and oddly prescient […]
“All are slightly queasy in appearance, the Technicolor saturation making the images unbelievable to some extent, which adds to the delirium of her dream state”. High-intensity color saturation in a photograph creates something of a parallel universe in which things can feel positively uncanny. I would suggest that in terms of historical notation […]
“For Levrat, the idea of heterotopia described both the site itself, and the acts of minor carnage that he carried out there – innocent and playful on the surface, but with a subtext of riotous refusal.”
We confuse ourselves with our recognition of our portrait in a mirror. The hand that brushes away the hairs from the forehead, the sweet sticky perspiration that pins the lock to the crown is read in reverse and yet, this reversal is apathetic to the self that it stares back at. The eyes glare […]
“Every image poses the question of American identity not just from the standpoint of our present reality, but from the playbook of iconic images – most of them from the twentieth century – that make up the history of American photography.”
“Masuda repudiates the spectacle, revealing another side to the existence these creatures face using the simplest aspects of repetition and chance.”
“This is before the Internet and I was living in an isolated place, so access to ‘culture’ was quite limited but I fortunately did have the photography magazines my parents were buying as well as the radio shows I would try to tune into from the countryside to copy the music on tapes…” BF: […]
“Objects are malleable things – mutely concrete, or freighted with almost unbearable significance. Watkins’ photographs share this equivocality, wavering between documents and invocations.”
“Many photographers will know that moment when they cross the path of the sun beaming down from a fifth story window-some will not even see it, they will feel the change of luminescence on their cheek, their hair will feel warmer as they pace” The is a debilitating moment for many photographers […]
“I had a calming moment and I started to nurture my love for cinema. So I guess for me to play the long game was to end up making cinema, starting by photography, then making music and so on. Cinema is the unification of all arts” BF: Michael Kominek-artist, publisher, gallerist, book seller-what […]