It is perhaps unsurprising that humans cling to material relics that remind them, in their shallow wisdom, of former glories that they themselves may never have lived. Monuments, crumbling statues, cenotaphs, and national symbols are built in order to honor perceived historical moments that shutter the mind, present illusions of grandeur, and present failed […]
I was confronted with three parts of a mental soundtrack while paging through Thiago Dezan’s new book When I Hear The That Trumpet Sound (Selo Turvo, 2021, ed. 200). The first track based on title and the book’s black endpapers and the ominous black cover was Behemoth’s Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel, a rich and […]
Thana Faroq’s I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows is a book of complicated subjects. First, there is the subject at the heart of it all, namely Thana and her experience as a Yemeni Refugee who found her way to the Netherlands through the gruelling and heart-wrenching ordeal of leaving her family in Yemen where […]
The gravity of our current moment lies not only in the event itself, but the image that the event has been spun into; namely a large web of the intolerable. Throughout the past year, the constant pressure of the Covid situation has led to a new depiction of the world in which fear, sickness, and […]
Bas Losekoot’s Out of Place is a study of people meandering through urban environments. The locations that Losekoot photographed in the book are cited as Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Mexico City, New York and more. At first glance, the work reminds me of a number of urban image projects of a similar fashion by […]
Jindřich Štreit is a Czech photographer that I was not much aware of before recently receiving his book Village People 1965-1990 published late last year by Buchkunst Berlin. I was curious about the artist as Buchkunst Berlin has been publishing quite interesting, if at times haunting and punishing books such as the Dieter Keller Eye […]
In memory of a young woman that I never knew. This reflection is dedicated to Carol Jenkins-Davis I find myself combatively trying to embed myself in the images, memories and families of others. My initial hesitancy in this pursuit comes from acknowledging the failure of such an enterprise. It comes from a point […]
” In levitating the body, it gives the psychological state of the subject’s mind and its place in the world unto slippage-a format defined by its inability to be calculated. Remove gravity, remove fixity. Employ risk” The way we navigate our heft through space is built on its being pinioned to the ground […]
“Everything seems somehow familiar and distant at the same time. It is as if time has wedged us between the fever dream of summer and the insoluble gaslighting conjured up from what was believed to be a significantly flawed, but tolerable near past” The way we live now. It all seems so easily […]
“The conservative government was in power with reports of David Cameron and his infidelities with swine breaking the news Murdoch-owned dailies” Estate by Robert Clayton was published in 2015 and I am in no way trying to declare any different, but 2015 was a very different year for Britain. It was the year […]
“The phrase “necessary fictions” both characterizes state-created realities, whether simulation in the military training context or the deployment and consumption of fictions in civilian society, and also comments on the documentary form.”
“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 […]