Désirée van Hoek Talking About L.A.
*not pictured My version of this film begins with the establishing shot in the same manner as Désirée’s. I pan over downtown Los Angeles. I try to skip the normative sunset, smog-ambitious, clichéd photographs of the city. I am not focusing on anything in particular. I am not overly concerned with landmarks, not interested […]
Matthew Harvey Future Estate
These are postcards from the lip of a commoditized and disheveled Eden masquerading as progressive life on planet zero. These rasterized observations are the Cliff Notes to the end of natural occurrence and abundance. Everything has a place so long as it has a price or a presence deemed valuable. If it cannot be brokered […]
Christine Furuya-Gössler Photographs (1978-1985)
The fever dream that never ended. The late Christine Furuya-Gössler is one of the more complex icons in photographic history. Her face is recognizable at a distance, and numerous exhibitions and books have been made about her and her family, mostly by her husband Seiichi Furuya, a Japanese photographer living in Austria. What makes her […]
Pierfrancesco Celada When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley
I do not believe that humans have developed a sympathetic or synergistic relationship with the cities they passionately build. Enclaves of identity, bastions of activity, cities are, in contemporary times, behemoth-like organims that must be fed, have their circulatory system, and often spread, not unlike a type of virus, slowly devouring everything that lies at […]
Cintia Tortosa Santisteban Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings
There is something undeniably attractive in small ideas executed with precision and clarity. In receiving Cintia Tortosa Santisteban’s new book Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings (Chose Commune, 2025), I am reminded that it is often the Occam’s razor of production and concept that produces some of the […]
Nolwenn Brod Le Temps de l’Immaturité
I know very little about Witold Gombrowicz, let alone Witold Gombrowicz’s book, Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity. Still, upon reviewing his biography, one can’t help but find him a fascinating character. One part Jean Genet, one part Jean-Paul Sartre, Gombrowicz’s work seems to embody the twentieth century’s anxieties, both in terms of the Holocaust and […]
No Photo 2025
I think by now it is really no surprise how governments, state and corporate sponsored institutions are purposely ignoring any support for the plight of Palestinians. Their silence and complicity are nothing short of disgusting. In the face of witnessing this wholesale murder these entities cite national security and human rights but clearly in a […]
Gael del Río and Luca Bani Oddments
Arguably, the notion of the fragmentary is what drives our collective interrogation of photography as a medium. Photography is an unmitigated discussion regarding what is seen, how it is represented, how it is interpreted, and how the values of the meaning of images circulate, morph, and resist concrete definitions. In this, photography could be considered […]
Barbara Kruger Interview on Race, Stereotypes, Public Art and Interviews (1991)
Barbara Kruger Untitled (Your body is a battleground) 1989 Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery New York “I hate to get to you on these words, but I wouldn’t call it an agenda-but I would say that I am interested in sort of, in not just displacing and questioning stereotypes.” Barbara Kruger Interview, excerpt from […]
The Last Francis Bacon Interview – On Violence, Meat and Photography
“We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.” Excerpts from Francis Bacon: I Painted to be Loved Interview by Francis Giacobetti conducted on February 1992, published in The Art Newspaper, no. 137, […]
Ken Schles on ‘Invisible City’ and ‘Night Walk’
“For generations the Lower East Side was a churning cauldron of activity. Site of immigrants (my own family passed through there more than a century ago), it already had a long history of renewal and decay.” Alex Bocchetto of Akina Books Interviews Ken Schles Alex Bocchetto: With Invisible City you narrated New York’s […]
Raymond Pettibon on Zines, Manifest Destiny and Teaching Math (2011)
“The tracks divided the good and bad parts of town. I wasn’t exactly on the good side. You weren’t encouraged to play around the demarcation lines.” Interview with Raymond Pettibon By Eric Nelson When I was 15, I became obsessed with Black Flag, playing everything up until “My War” on full blast at […]
Ed Ruscha on Route 66, Making Books and “Choppy Movement”
“So in a sense they (books) had no–there was no school of thought, and I felt at that time that it was unexplored. That’s one reason it attracted me.” MR. KARLSTROM: What about your books? This is a last thing that I’d like to at least get started on. You have created I don’t know […]
Ed Ruscha on Studio Life, Domestic Life and Its Tax on the Creative Drive
Dirty Baby, 1977, Graphite and acrylic paint on paper “I couldn’t mix the domestic life and the free form life, I just couldn’t. They’re sort of difficult to mix.” MR. RUSCHA: There was one period when I moved to Pasadena. I had a studio at 60 West Colorado Boulevard that was about 20,000 […]
Robert Adams on Working at Home and Photography as Metaphor (2009)
“By definition art is not propaganda; the goal is not to excite people to action but to help them find a sense of wholeness and thereby a sense of calm.” Excerpt from a 2014 Hasselblad Award chat transcript Question: Congratulations! You have been taking pictures of the American West for four decades now. Why […]
Lewis Baltz on ‘New Topographics and Exhibition ‘Remakes’ (‘A Very Bad Idea’)
39, WEST WALL, SMICOA, 333 MCCORMICK, COSTA MESA © LEWIS BALTZ, IP 39, FROM THE SERIES “NEW INDUSTRIAL PARKS, NEAR IRVINE, CALIFORNIA”, 1974; STEIDL Interview (excerpt) with Lewis Baltz Conducted by Matt Witkovsky At Baltz’s home in Paris, France. 2009 November 15-17 MR. BALTZ: You aspire to making something – at least at the time, […]
Araki Loves Polaroids
“The time when a picture is taken is like an emotion, it’s like a sexual encounter. It’s like a fuck! So, timing is very important.”
WALKER EVANS: “DRIVE-BY PICTURES”
Walker Evans, pictures taken from a moving automobile or train. EXPLORE ALL WALKER EVANS ON ASX (© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Lewis Hine: “Wanted Small Boys – Apply 1st Floor”
KARLHEINZ WEINBERGER: “REBEL YOUTH” (1950-1960’s)
(Images © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger) For decades the work of Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger was shrouded in obscurity. In the 1950s he published numerous homoerotic photographs under the pseudonym “Jim” in Der Kreis (The Circle), the legendary international gay magazine that featured highly sophisticated photographs by, among others, George Platt Lynes and […]
Berenice Abbott – The Photographer of New York City
Berenice Abbott can be considered the photographer of New York City. A revolutionary documentary photographer, Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, and studied for one year at Ohio State University, Columbus, before moving to New York in 1918.
ASGER CARLSEN: “WRONG”
Todd Hido: “House Hunting” (2001)
“Todd Hido’s large color photographs of suburbia are lonely, forlorn, mysterious… and strangely comforting. Hido photographs the interior rooms of repossessed tract homes, and the outsides of similar houses at night whose habitation is suggested by the glow of a television set or unseen overhead bulb. Seldom does the similar evoke such melancholy. Yet rather […]
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 […]