As an American living in Europe, I have never gotten my head around the vestigial tail of pagan rituals that still occasionally surface here. They do not happen often, but I am continuously bemused when they do. They seem to function on either fire or water. During the opening season, which includes springtime fertility […]
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 […]
Hristina Tasheva’s newest book, Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery (Self-published, 2023), is an ambitious attempt at mapping the disparities between two national experiences of Communism in the twentieth century — the Dutch and the Bulgarian — as they were impacted by the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The […]
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 […]
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 […]
Evgenia Ignatova Highlights “No art is bereft of political possibility, yet, there is a strain of representation and often politicized meaning that photography is asked to perform in the 21st Century. We are perhaps losing sight of what photography does well, which is to give form to the optical unconscious of the moment that […]
Review Excerpt Graubard’s Road to Nowhere is a mercurial title. Published by Loose Joints, the last home of which I might expect to find a book on civil war and discontent to be published, the work reflects neither a war book nor a specific Aftermath book. Aftermath or post-event photography is a genre that looks […]
There are global moments in history that feel like tipping points of major changes when you view them retrospectively. In the case of Michael Kerstgens exceptional new book 1986 (Hartmann Books, 2021), the writing on the wall could not be more clear looking back at the year. I remember 1986. I am old enough […]
Though change is metered through the concept of progress in urban space, oftentimes there is an arrestation of form as its transitions from one set of facades to its new progressive and updated counterpart. This arrestation sees the hybridity of new and old caught in a transitional moment in which both are vying for […]
“Othering of the loser of a war is important for collective consciousness and acts as a bulwark against the tide of human sympathy in the matters of inhumane consequence” There are a number of different ways to approach writing about photography and World War II and to be clear, none of them should consider […]
“In the case of phenomenon, we often commodify our intentions and collude over a recognized minority of experience based on the slight repetition of the materialization of unnatural form” There is a common element that divides the paper-thin system of belief between what we consider phenomenon and what we consider truth. This is the […]
“The historical representations of architectural photography deal in large measure with style and period, but are also concerned with the history that passes through the buildings within the frame”. There are antecedents to every photograph produced in the present day. In the case of architectural photography, there are many ways in which we can […]