In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg set out to create a work in which erasure/negation would define the principal production method. Instead of building a drawing or painting up from aggregated layers, the artist made a conscious conceptual decision to work backward from the point of completed artwork back to a form of trace in which the […]
In a moment where technology desires to exponentially double and triple its rate of occupancy in our fevered minds with its unlimited growth prospect, followed by its unmitigated potential to cause alarm instead of vague dreams of progress, from the militarism of our economies to the pursuit of transhuman desires of biological co-habitation to […]
Dan Skjæveland is a Norwegian artist living in Trondheim. He recently published his first monograph with Nearest Truth Editions. I spoke to Dan about his way into photography, his process and the making of his book 33 Suspensions. — ASX: Let’s talk about your beginnings. How did you come to photography? Dan Skjæveland: I came to photography […]
Peppered throughout major cities, including Berlin, where the new photobook Triple Seven by Anne Lass was shot, are clandestine spaces that most of the population will never enter or see. Men’s clubs in North London, brothels in Marseilles, and small gambling rooms in Berlin, as Lass has photographed, are secreted behind a façade of […]
I Am Not A Robot (Witty Books, 2023) asks more questions than it answers. How do we differentiate from the illusions of our constructed virtual worlds and that of reality? How do we satiate our requirement and desire for order in ever-changing environments? Are we confined to an existence based on binary calculations, or can […]
During a talk he gave to his students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1980, Larry Sultan opened up about the challenges he faced with his latest series of photographs featuring swimmers in the community pools of the Bay Area. The young photographer struggled to justify this new body of work, as the […]
Coal mining is a very peculiar enterprise. The 19th and 20th Centuries committed untold heaves of labor to its extraction. It fuels communities, yet its extraction suggests a disemboweling of the land where these communities settle. The prospect of coal mining is one of capital and capitalism. The very human clay that mines these enterprises […]
Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]
I feel a common bond with this book. Aapo Huhta has explored a few different terrains that I have also explored or happened upon over the last decade, and he has combined them compellingly. It is another book in an increasingly exciting year for the publisher Kult Books, whose imprint I am following closely […]
Incarceration, one of our great social taboos. Out of sight and out of mind is enough for the majority of society, unaware that in the UK, some reoffending rates are over 50%, costing society £18bn a year. The current system is at the very least creaking, if not fundamentally flawed and failing those who, whilst […]
Equine surgery and medical observation; specialized labor and industrial production. In its study of the Clinica Equina Bagnarola, a renowned horse clinic outside of Bologna, Italy, Andrea Modica’s Theatrum Equorum (TIS books, 2022) touches on each of these subjects fluidly and with considerable grace, in a mode closer to aphorism than to essay. Modica’s images […]
The first time I looked through Igor Posner’s Cargó (Red Hook Editions, 2022) I was bewildered. I did not know, for example, that across 160 pages and what feels like triple that number of images, it would express the disjointedness and poignancy of memory, or that it would render the experience of time passing as […]