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 […]
Moises Saman is one of the most substantive and accomplished conflict photographers working today. A member of Magnum since 2014, he is best known for photographs he has been making for more than two decades working throughout the Middle East, during which time he covered the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. Many of the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Full Article on Patreon So, the dig at post-industrial decay has put a giant bee in my bonnet. But what should I expect about the unspoken class issues that revolve and permeate through and in photography these days? I mean, if you have a New York-London-based photographer stat in your bio and are in […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
When violence broke out in Ukraine in 2014, many young people left, while the elderly stayed behind just barely surviving. After almost five years of conflict, large areas of the Donbas region, which includes a 500-km “contact line”, remain under the control of separatists amid a war that has displaced more than 1.5 million with […]
“The ability to disseminate information via photographic images, no matter their actual content, will to representation, or state of factual existence has provided us with what we are currently experiencing in contemporary times as media language and the post-truth image”.