Matthew Genitempo – Dogbreath
Matthew Genitempo is producing serious photobooks. Of the three books that I am fortunate to have on my shelves, his latest Dogbreath is one of his finest, but it is hard to create a hierarchy between it, Mother of Dogs, and Jasper. All three titles are excellent offerings, and it would benefit photobook makers […]
Raymond Meeks & George Weld – The Inhabitants
Putting my thoughts on this book together has taken me a while. Most of this comes down to trying to understand how I feel about the subject or lack of subject within the work and the position of the author(s) to that. I often have a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to people photographing […]
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 […]
Andreas Gehrke – Flughafen Berlin-Tegel
Full Article on Patreon Andreas Gehrke is someone who I have covered previously for his exceptional photobooks. I have nearly every title he has produced, and standouts include Berlin a Brandenburg, among many others. His output is incredible, and he also self-publishes these titles under his imprint Drittel Books. What I find universal in […]
Regina Anzenberger Gstettn, Bread And Flowers
I’m going to start this review in a slightly off way by suggesting that the subject matter, no matter how expertly handled in the beautifully produced self-published set of books proposed by Regina Anzenberger is not my cup of tea. This will be a failed review as I cannot find the words to speak […]
Jo Ractliffe: Under a State of Emergency
“Ractliffe’s work, whether consciously or not, emerges at a time when the impossibility of representing experience started to gain purchase in discussions around the medium’s shortfalls.”
A Conversation Between Robert Morat and Matteo Di Giovanni
RM: What is “home“ to you? Maybe also talk about where and how you grew up and where you feel your roots are. MDG: This is a question I’ve been asking myself many times in the last few years and – to be frank – I still don’t have a definitive answer. I’m more prone […]
Land’s End: Trauma is a Strange Attractor
“We are on occasion reminded on occasion of a great plague pit, its underground presence rewarded with a blue plaque to signify its existence as both a terrible debacle in our local history and yet it tellingly reminds us of the foreboding possibility for futures yet unspoken” Trauma is a strange attractor. Just as […]
A Conversation with Tim Carpenter
“Maybe just to plant a stake in the ground, I’d also say that topics are not necessary. Which doesn’t at all mean that one can’t have one; just that one needn’t”. This conversation took place over a year of emailing and should be read as informal. The intention was to talk about Tim’s […]
António Júlio Duarte: Against the Blackest of Days
“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 […]
2019: A Short Guide To White People & Their Photography Books
It was the best of years…. Once again it is that time of year where I try to drum up some sort of edit from all of the incredible work the photography book world offers up. This year is difficult as I felt it has been one of the strongest years in recent memory […]
Beyond the Pandemonium of Nowness: Guido Guidi’s In Sardegna
“The photographs in Volume 1 of In Sardegna are extraordinary. It’s as though Guidi was trying to wrap his wide-angle lens around everything at once: people, cars, buildings, gestures, dogs and donkeys, rocks and trees and landscapes.”
Matthew Genitempo: The New Rurality
“Instead, we are given room to ponder the possibility of the magnificent rurality that exists in wide acreage across America unfettered by the charms of free-range, gluten free, soulless vegan cafes and their elite black metal-listening clientele who wander through their doors to write tracts on their apple laptops about metaphysical post-Internet garbage for their PHD colluding with the empire of property developers and poverty to Make Harlem Great Again- Incel, Duracell, creatine cookies and a very nasty reputation for not saying hello”
Thomas Weski: Interview With Cooper Blade
“I think Michael felt the need to discuss the meaning and importance of American photography with a younger generation in Germany who had no experience with these kinds of elderly figures. The National Socialists had either killed or persecuted them in Germany, so for my generation there was no elderly generation in photography.”
Eva Maria Ocherbauer: Interview Berlin West, Haus der Tat
“Berlin was cold and grey… but we made up the “scene” an alien escape from this condition… no morals, cold and hot and cruel and shiny, all at once… excessive for sure. The free spirit of the city supplied a fertile ground for life as an experiment”
Loops and Voids: A Perspective on Michael Schmidt’s Berlin Nach 1945
“Though the clues to what could be considered “absent” “voided” or “gone” are not to be entirely championed nor ignored, the work follows a circular format. It is an examination of place and home and the subject’s way of seeing the familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. This inquiry of Schmidt’s is adept if not deftly demonstrative.”
Peter Piller: Unheimlich As Above…
“A good number of the images allegedly had annotations written on the images such as “not interested in pictures”, “Deceased”, and “Looks better from the ground” written on them”
John Maclean: The Agony and Ecstasy of Artistic Influence
“In a sense I was trying to complete a circle: I travelled to the neighbourhoods that had some bearing on the childhood development of my art-heroes and consequently on the art they made as adults, and then I tried to photograph these places through the ‘afterimage’ of the artistic influences these works had imparted on me”
An Interview with John Gossage: Nothing and the Politics of Nothing (2015)
”I go to places and I have the belief that if I can photograph well, the places will educate me to things I do not know about them.”
Robert Adams on John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ (1986)
One is grateful for The Pond because we are in trouble, and because irony which focuses on the ugliness of man-made juxtapositions does not at this point, by itself, help. By Robert Adams, excerpt from Creative Camera: 30 Years of Writing (Manchester University Press, 2000) Irony, defined as unrecognized incongruity, take many forms as […]
An Interview with John Gossage on ‘There and Gone'” (2000)
“One of the things that helps me with doing a book is getting a title at some point that lets me understand its content. I mean basically, that [points to the title of the book] is what’s in here. This [the first chapter] is ‘There,’ this [the second chapter] is the transition, ‘And,’ and this […]
A Conversation Between Lewis Baltz and John Gossage (2010)
“For me the word ‘photographer’ talks about the means of delivering certain kinds of information, feelings and such. If you’re consistently focused on the means of delivery, it means you’re not getting the message across very clearly.” – John Gossage Interview by Monte Packham Lewis Baltz and John Gossage depict man’s contentious impact on […]