“I actually have no idea what street photography is, but I can oddly sense its look-off-tilted cameras, bit of asphalt, coupla ppl, maybe a mean looking dog, some bit of crazy occurring in the corners, some action as it were” It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to understand where street photography […]
“I have assumed this focus on the found vernacular to be American in nature. However, the details of national ownership is missing apart from the rise of American modernism or the focus on its anti-thesis, namely quaint small town America advertising often hand painted and rough” It is somehow impossible not to mention […]
“The Transparencies book published by MACK is also significant in its design, the essay within and sequence of the work, which is chapterized by annual progressions through the 70’s American dream in banal (good word, word of goodness) detail” It is not often that a re-examination of the periphery of a significant […]
“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 […]
“I exhibit a strange tendency in airports to curse, eyeball other people with malice and regard the general process of shuttling and hefting my mass through antiseptic tunnels and bizarre space age flat Jetson walklavators with contempt…” A commonality between train stations and photography is the architecture of waiting. Waiting can be read in […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“The moat as it were, was governed by armament and barbed wire with an intervening hinterland of desolate stretch impolitely, if realistically referred to as the Death Strip. You can consider the Death Strip as an evaporated moat in which many escapees gave their lives fleeing the reverse castle. The reverse castle in real terms, […]
“There is noise, distortion, grain and the magnetic tape in my mind completely fails in parts to distribute any information at all. The images are dark, stained by the passing of time and the incredulous weight of dry heat. Throughout the song “Blackened” by Metallica plays over and over…” When I look at […]
The hunter is not hunting a person, nor an animal. The species of its intent is not pulsating, but rather imagined-it is the photographic. When I blather hot steam, a forceful wind, a speech upon the youth-less cuspids in my mouth of what I portend to mean about the “photographic”, I realize that it […]
“The path of paranoia leads us to a pizza parlor, armed to the teeth and utterly convinced of the righteousness of the mission. At the other end of the spectrum, we’re left with doubt, uncertainty, and a recognition of our own limitations.”