“After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.” Robert Adams “There is another world and it is in this one.” Paul Éluard There have been few post-war American photographers, if […]
Ikko Narahara – Where Time has Vanished by Joel Pulliam It has been on my mind for a while to write about something that I am provisionally calling “New Orientalism.” It is the phenomenon of highly regarded photographers dropping into Tokyo for a few weeks or months, taking pictures, and then publishing a book. I […]
War is good business for some, and misery for most everyone else. The executives of defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, people who directly profit from the outbreak and continuation of war, are incentivized to hope for its continuation rather than its cessation, because where there is war (in Yemen, Ukraine, or in […]
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 […]
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, […]
There is a strange and perplexing photograph in Curran Hatleberg’s photobook, River’s Dream (TBW, 2022), which shows a man with a large swarm of bees attached to his face and body. The image is bewildering. The man is sitting down in a chair, with no protective gear, and his eyes are closed. His hands are […]
Carla Williams can make the world beyond us seem a simple place. Looking at the self-portraits she made over a fifteen year period, from 1984-1999, may briefly lull us into a false apprehension of the world as containing little interest of its own. Such is the poetic depth of these pictures, which, when edited and […]
During a talk he gave to his students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1980, Larry Sultan opened up about the challenges he faced with his latest series of photographs featuring swimmers in the community pools of the Bay Area. The young photographer struggled to justify this new body of work, as the […]
Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]
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 […]
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 […]
Christine Gössler exists in my mind, or rather the photographs of her, as the eternal notion of elegy in the photographic medium. Whereas she does not haunt my own memories, I feel the burden and the weight of her portraits through the images shot and books made by her husband Seiichi Furuya. When I suggest […]