Smoke – Umihara Chikara
I am confident that most of us are stringing life together one moment at a time without a significant game plan or goal to outline our actions’ progression. Nothing is holding the seams of it all together, and for that, I am partially thankful and partially disappointed. Life is a never-ending chain of circumstances […]
On Robert Adams
“After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.” Robert Adams “There is another world and it is in this one.” Paul Éluard There have been few post-war American photographers, if […]
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 […]
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 […]
Michael Ashkin – There Will be Two of You
The discourse surrounding this book is less bleak than the images themselves. Being a fan of Michael Ashkin’s work, I find this book to be his bleakest, yet when I read his words about the meaning of the book, I do not get the impression that it is necessarily its intention. First, we will start […]
Mark Steinmetz – ATL
For such impersonal architecture, the environments of airports are rife with sentiment and emotion. When I say that they are impersonal, like much of the Twentieth Century’s functional public meeting spaces, they are often streamlined and defined by their sameness. The function has to override form in such spaces, which disallows individuality. There […]
Gabriele Rossi – The Lizard
Finding a nameless source’s review of The Lizard online, I read about how I should interpret Gabriele Rossi’s outsized publication published by Deadbeat Club. In its summation, the author points out several pictures from the book from which they wax lyrical about the sublime qualities of the photographs from the position of a non-American, likely […]
Vittorio Mortarotti – Soil
A perplexing book, Vittorio Mortarotti’s new publication Soil, released this year by Skinnerboox, hints at, amongst other topics, lives lived at the margins of political existence. It does this without ever pushing an obvious agenda or confirming the bias. Throughout the book, certain themes recur. There is a specific anti-narrative device at play […]
A Conversation with Camilo Jose Vergara
“America was supposed to be a country of big buildings, of ever-growing construction of roads, and stuff. And it is; and it is. But in addition to that, there is another America that has all of these things left behind.” Conversation with Ilan Stavans and Camilo Jose Vergara STAVANS: Camillo Jose Vergara, you are a […]
Everything is Sacred – An Interview with Bruce Davidson (2006)
“For me, everything is sacred, whether I’m photographing a human being or a statue or the good earth. It’s sacred, I absorb it. I want to absorb it.” Interview with Bruce Davidson, The Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU/Chicago), November, 2006 Q: You’re on the streets of Chicago, wandering into Pentecostal churches, how did that initial […]
An Interview with Stephen Shore (2005)
“I remember thinking that it’s important to put cars in photographs because they are like time seeds. And I learned this from looking at Evans.” By Noah Sheldon and Roger White Noah Sheldon: I heard a lecture once where you said that when you teach, you try to think about how you felt when […]
An Interview with Marion Post Wolcott (1965)
“I think that most people feel, or felt at that time, that it was a man’s field and that a man would just automatically do a better job and be better equipped to do it.” By Richard Doud, Oral history interview with Marion Post Wolcott, January 18, 1965 RICHARD DOUD: This is an interview […]
INTERVIEW: “Dru Donovan” (2011)
Dru Donovan in conversation with J.W. Fisher about Lifting Water. New York 2011 J.W. Fisher: I probably should begin by stating that I feel very fortunate to have seen Lifting Water through it’s various stages from concept, to image-making, to editing, and final sequence. Would you mind talking about the cultivation of ideas for the […]
Interview with John Collier (1965)
Hispanic boy. Trampas, New Mexico. 1943 Interview with John Collier Conducted by Richard K. Doud at John Collier’s home in Sausalito, California. January 18, 1965 RICHARD DOUD: This is an interview with John Collier at his home on Muir Beach, Sausalito, California; January 18, 1965. The interviewer is Richard K. Doud. JOHN COLLIER: I got […]
An Interview with Walker Evans Pt. 1 (1971)
“I was damn well going to be an artist and I wasn’t going to be a businessman.” Interview Excerpt from, Leslie Katz with Walker Evans, 1971. Leslie Katz: You took photographs of whatever interested you? Walker Evans: Oh yes. I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily. I thought it was […]
An Interview with Walker Evans: ‘The Thing Itself is Such a Secret and so Unapproachable’ (1974)
Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama, 1936 “I didn’t like the label that I unconsciously earned of being a social protest artist.” “The Thing Itself is Such a Secret and so Unapproachable” George Eastman House, Image Magazine, Vol. 17., No.4, December, 1974, Originally Published in Yale Alumni Magazine, February, 1974. Walker Evans, the eminent American […]