These are my initial reactions to Blind Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in Photography. As I crafted a polite response to another situation earlier this week, I have to admit that I’m a little out of fucks to give about tidying things up to be persuasive about my points, so some of this might come […]
Today, or at least slightly before I started writing this, I received an email from one of the world’s most significant biennial photography festivals, which awards a substantial financial prize. There are two awards, in fact. One is a general photography award to develop a new project, and the other is a book award. I […]
Anna Galí’s book makes me sick. It makes me sick with pain as the father of a young boy whose interior world I think I understand, but, in reality, can probably only guess at, and this will only get more pronounced as he breaks from adolescence into young adulthood. I feel enormous pain when I […]
Daido Moriyama I feel bad saying this, and you will have to read on to find more positive suggestions about this book, but I think Moriyama has become quite a pastiche of his earlier glory. I understand how he arrives at that conclusion, and frankly, most people will likely be inclined to argue with […]
What appears as fok or “primitive” in the handling of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s exceptional sculpture is illusory. Instead, what the work relies on is a consistent production of cultural comic and cartoon icons ad infinitum, their forms shaped not by Frimkess’s vision of a new form but by the replication (at volume) of these cultural […]
There is a photograph by Frederick H. Evans from 1896, entitled “In the Attics,” in which the artist captures the improbably clean space of Kelmscott Manor, the home of Arts and Crafts movement pioneer William Morris. The photograph presents the attic as a type of raw liminal space, where the viewer can identify […]
Robert Flick’s career is exciting. Born in Holland in 1939, the artist emigrated to North America by the 1960s and had work featured in publications as early as 1966. He has been exhibiting since the 1960s, and his work is featured in many institutions; yet, he is not easily placed in any respective movement, […]
I sometimes wonder how much room there is for careful debate and an effort to understand what happens around us – positions and outrage are usually quite fixed. Recently, I have been looking out for photographic work that attempts to complicate seemingly simplistic arguments or binary oppositions through approach and practice. This review is the […]
Archival projects rarely offer a great conceptual rigor, in my opinion. As a collector of vernacular photography for over thirty years, I am often at pains to parse through projects that employ archival material, as I frequently feel that they are unfamiliar with the tropes associated with the material. I frequently struggle similarly when those […]
I have just returned from a workshop trip from São Paulo, Brazil, a vertiginous and bustling city. My experience in returning from the city has been marked by an extended rumination on my experiences there. I am still processing the city, its architecture, and its artists whom I was very fortunate to meet in abundance. […]
I have just returned from a workshop trip from São Paulo, Brazil, a vertiginous and bustling city. My experience in returning from the city has been marked by an extended rumination on my experiences there. I am still processing the city, its architecture, and its artists whom I was very fortunate to meet in […]
I do not know much about the war in Ukraine, despite living in a country that borders it. I don’t know much about it as the fog of war hangs heavily, like a thick, void-like curtain over the whole mess. The principal idea is clear. Russia has invaded its neighbor and, in doing so, […]