Ben Millar Cole – After Wall: The Wood Wide Web and AI Art

  After Wall: The Wood Wide Web and AI Art  By Ben Millar Cole   In 1993, Jeff Wall meticulously reworked Hokusai’s famous 19th century woodblock print A Sudden Gust of Wind at Ejri as a large-scale photograph, spending more than a year in his local vicinity constructing scenes and orchestrating actors to produce a […]

Akihiko Okamura – The Memories of Others

  As I found with Whatever You Say, Say Nothing by Gilles Peress (Steidl), The Troubles and their representation are incredibly difficult to write about from the point of view of an outsider. It is a very touchy subject. Even posting about it on social media platforms (as I also found out) will have opposing […]

Yasuhiro Ishimoto – Lines and Bodies

  The gift of Japanese photography is that it feels like a never-ending field of exploration. It is a wide field of study, and if one invests in the material created in Japan from around 1958 forward, the returns are plentiful. Having put off embracing the canon of Japanese photography for most of my career […]

Joel Pulliam on Ikko Narahara

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 […]

Yoshi Yubai – Asakusa

I recently came across Yoshi Yubai’s work. I was fortunate enough to nab a copy of his last book, Radiation Inspiration (2023), published by La Generale Minerale (screenprinted by Ben Sanair), which I purchased through Le Plac’Art Photo in Paris. The screen printing by Sanair in that book is phenomenal. The book has an introduction […]

Toshio Shibata – Day For Night

  The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter […]

Five Photobooks from 2023

For the complete list, please consult the Nearest Podcast in the following weeks, where I will MC over a much longer list of the great books published this year. For this list, I wanted to keep the books down to five that I feel will define the artist’s career or are crucial to the medium. […]

Coca-Cola and the Implied Apathy of Tomatsu Shomei’s Photographs

Full Article with More Images on Patreon   It is essential to understand the biography of Tomatsu to understand what the emotion of rage or anger may be prevalent in his work. As a pubescent teen during the atomic bombing of Japan and the subsequent end of the Second World War, Tomatsu recalls the occupation […]

Mikiko Hara – Small Myths

  Full Article With More Images On Patreon   Throughout the work, Hara photographs portraits. Some of these images are culled from her familiar everyday journeys, with images of people on the street or in trains elegantly abetting the images of her family. Though far from a family book in the traditional sense, the text […]

Tomatsu Shomei <11:02> Nagasaki An Overview

  Full Article on Patreon   …11:02 Nagasaki contains elements of documentary practice mixed with an emotional and highly subjective style of photography. In essence, the book is caught, like Kawada’s Chizu, between two schools of thought regarding photography. On the one hand, there is a legacy of photography that considers politics and a (at […]

Taka Mayumi Koisuru Toriko

  Full Article on Patreon   In Prisoner In Love, the flow is at once calm and exciting. It is similar to allowing one’s body to be carried downstream in a river safely with a bump on the body’s backside every once in a while to remind them of the rocks beneath the surface. Metaphors […]

Toyohiko Yasui One Thousand Millimeter 1973

Full Article and Full Sequence of Book on Patreon   The desire found in that book functions incredibly obliquely. Images of women do not, even when on a bed and nude, represent sex or an objectifying element; they are reduced to the same void as everything else and feel like a piece of the vortex. […]