Mari Katayama Synthesis
There is a small number of essential photobooks that explore the concept of artistic process/practice and performance. Most recently, I have found myself thumbing through Joseph Beuys: Coyote, by Caroline Tisdall (Schirmer/Mosel, 1976), which features photographs of Beuys’ legendary 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me. The performance, arguably Beuys’ most well-known, next to How to […]
Magdalena Wysocka & Claudio Pogo And Then There Was the Night
And then there was the night—archives from the edge of hell—chimerical dissonance—six cloven hoof Satyrs. Bachanalian. Excremental. Grain, dissolve. Pushing the sword of Damocles in until the hilt fractures on the bone of the pubic mound. A horsehair away from piercing the veil. Scrutinize, Labotomize. Forever roam. Necessarily hexed, vexed, encouraged by nebulous worlds […]
Batia Suter La Nonpareille
Batia Suter’s work has several substantial iterations at its heart. It stems from an understanding of volume and how images function, both in terms of their materiality and their historical context. This is most evident in her opuses Parallel Encyclopedia I and II, both published by Roma. The work that Suter makes can be […]
Vincent Jendly One Millimeter of Black Dirt and a Veil of Dead Cows
As if the war legacy of Dunkirk had not already been recognized as a pivotal shit eating point in its past, its charred hand to swollen coal-crusted mouth, poisoned by ethanol overload and toxic industrial habitat, history has now favored turning it from a battle-scarred historical footnote into a vast hellscape busy with killing off […]
Mark Ruwedel – The Western Edge
Once on a departing flight from LAX, Mark Ruwedel glanced down from the height of his window seat and noticed a short tract of sand between the runway and the coastal highway. What stretched out below him was the El Segundo Dunes Preserve, the last remaining sand dunes in Los Angeles, still marked by the […]
Hajime Kimura’s “Family of Lies” and “Tebajima”
Photography has always had a complicated relationship with memory. It promises to hold on to moments, but it also shows how unreliable memory really is. This tension runs through two recent photobooks by one of the most interesting Japanese photographers working today. Family of Lies (Three Books, 2024) and Tebajima (Kawazu Kikaku, 2024), by Hajime […]
Pino Musi Polyphōnia
Reading cities by line has become a complicated chore in 2025. There are incongruent movements on the city streets, with all manner of debris and flotsam that collude to control our vision, distorting the potential of reading the city by line and encroaching on a sense of the city and our environment as orderly, maintained, […]
Andreas Gehrke TOTALSANIERUNG
While reviewing my work over the past few days, I have begun to realize the essential nature of architecture in my oeuvre, as well as in contemporary photography in general terms. I think most of this is due to its observable primacy in our environments. Buildings, structures, and other habitable (and inhabitable) objects reign over […]
An Interview with Bruce Jackson: American Prisoners, Death Row and Walker Evans
Cummins Prison, 1975 “Always when I went to prisons before they would say, ‘Do you want to see death row? Do you want to see the electric chair?’ I always said no. I didn’t want to see the electric chair because I figured it was just a voyeuristic trip.” By Geoff Kelly Bruce Jackson […]
Dreamscapes and Sensory Experience – An Interview with Bill Henson (2015)
“It was the dreamscape of the suburbs that interested me.” An Interview with Bill Henson by Sabine Mirlesse Sabine Mirlesse: 1985 is work you shot thirty years ago – what were you doing in Egypt? Bill Henson: As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I’m convinced it’s not that uncommon. A […]
Analog, Digital and Copyright – An ‘Early Internet’ Interview with Lewis Baltz (1998)
“I never had any profound loyalty to the idea of photography as a medium but simply as the most efficient way of making or recording an image.”
Flat, Dead, Boring Light – An Interview with John Myers (2015)
“The New Topographics has to some extent had the effect of ‘steamrollering’ people into believing that the American model was the progenitor of lots of current photographic approaches.”
Francis Bacon – Photographs, Painting, Destructive Criticism and More
“I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them.”
JH Engstrom Talks Photography, Transformation and Love for Paris
“I’m still in love with Paris. But then we are not in the beginning of our relationship, so I might look at it with more nuances than before.” JH Engstrom Interview, Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, April 2015 JH Engstrom’s incredible body of work circumnavigates the contemporary tradition of big dumb color photographs of abstracted nothingness for […]
Exploring, Entering a World and Earning Your Dues – An Interview with Bruce Davidson
USA. Hampton, Virginia. 1962. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos “Look, I’m kind of an explorer. I’m entering a world and it takes time.” A Magnum photographer, Bruce Davidson has been renowned since the late fifties for his photographs of gangs in Brooklyn, and subsequent projects including New York’s East 100th street, circus performers, civil rights marchers […]
Gritty 1980’s NYC and the Glorious Intuition of Richard Sandler
“Street photography is very difficult. The number of really good pictures that you get is very small in comparison to the number of pictures taken. You’re better off, I think, letting your intuition completely run wild… and even when you find yourself […]
Dorothea Lange: “Portraits” (1935 – 1939)
American photographer. From 1914 to 1917 she attended the New York Training School for Teachers and there decided to become a photographer, partly influenced by visits to the photographer Arnold Genthe. From 1917 to 1918 she attended a photography course run by Clarence H. White at Columbia University, NY. Lange moved to San Francisco […]
WALKER EVANS: “POLAROIDS OF WOMEN”
“I’ve now taken up that little SX-70 camera for fun and become very interested in it. I’m feeling wildly with it. But a year ago I would have said that color is vulgar and should never be tried under any circumstances. It’s a paradox that I’m now associated with it and in fact I intend […]
Vivan Maier: Chicago’s Street Photographer
Vivian Dorothea Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was a street photographer.
PAUL KWILECKI: “GEORGIA”
Paul Kwilecki’s Photograph Collection at Duke University contains 583 black and white prints made in and around the town of Bainbridge, Georgia from 1960-2008. A self-taught photographer, Kwilecki honed his craft by photographing the broad spectrum of daily life manifested in Bainbridge and the rural areas of Decatur County. From the Shade Tobacco workers in […]
KEIZO KITAJIMA: “USSR 1991” (2012)
In the fall of 1990, Keizo Kitajima received a commission from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper to visit the Soviet Union, the opportunity to spend a year documenting both people and places in what was then a monolithic entity. 15 republics, 11 time zones, and thousands of miles spanning the two—the task was daunting in […]
ROBERT K. HOWER: “KENTUCKY”
Lolita by Stanley Kubrick (1962)
Lolita is a 1962 comedy-drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on the 1955 novel of the same title by Vladimir Nabokov, who also wrote the screenplay. It follows a middle-aged literature lecturer who becomes sexually obsessed with a young adolescent girl. The film stars James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Sue Lyon as Dolores Haze (Lolita), and Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze, with Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty. […]
Eihoh Hosoe: “Photographs”
“To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression… the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.” – Eikoh Hosoe ASX CHANNEL: […]