Larry Clark – Return
This is a fascinating and unexpected title. I suspect that some people might consider it a repeat of images that circulate through Larry Clark’s opus Tulsa, and that is not a wrong way to feel about it, but what is important is how we see the periphery of images from that incredible body of work […]
Maki: (A) Japan Somewhere
Maki’s images in Japan Somewhere (Zen Foto Gallery), produced over a fourteen-year period feel anxious and compressed. Though specific to one country, the Frenchman’s images feel anything but declarative. They feel ambulatory, intrepid, and often chaotic as if shot in a constant state of momentum and high velocity. The frames are heavily compressed […]
José Bértolo Moraesu St.
Japan is a country that pulls many artists into its clutches like a cultural tractor beam. For reasons unknown, Japan has dominated the imaginations of travellers, writers, artists, and historians to a degree that borders, for many, on obsession. I have never been to Japan, but I can admit being caught in the clutches of […]
Cucurrucucu: Considering the Crime
“Perhaps it is a fantasy that one could wield power over the representation of death by its abstracted nature? Is this not a dangerous game to play god over the image of death?”
Andrea Alessandrini – I Am Not A Robot
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 […]
Gareth McConnell: The Dream Meadow
“Though I do not believe Gareth’s aims as overly facilitating the need for politics, I cannot help but feel the naked bodies found in the work, their arms outstretched towards something greater are indicative of an aversion to the concrete matters just outside the door of wherever the Dream Meadow itself had been manufactured”. […]
Colin Pantall – All is Seen on the Homefront
“Photography is many terrible things, but one thing it is great for is fascination. It harnesses the possibility for playing out in a different way giving the child a look into adult possibility, while also reminding the adult what it was like to look at the world with young and/or un-jaded eyes.”
Robert Flick LA Diary
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, […]
Francesca Todde: A Sensitive Education
“If one day we reduced our bestiary knowledge to flight, I would wake to a world brimming with potential calamity” It is possible that I have not met the right type of bird. I will admit a deep distrust with their whole phylum. If one day we reduced our bestiary knowledge to flight, […]
Thomas Albdorf: The Uncanny Valley of Yosemite
“Everything is unknown, sifted through bit by byte and re-assembled for the purpose of defining the in insalubrious possibility of chance and enforced meaning- Nothing exists, Everything exists if harvested and re-distributed credibly and with rugged vigor”
Hayahisa Tomiyasu: TTP, An Immoveable Feat
“In a dialogue where it is often difficult not to mention “medium specificity”, it would be fair in jest to contemplate why photography’s utility is toward change and simultaneously toward stasis. Stasis is where comfortablility lies, but this position also breeds contempt.”
Thomas Manneke’s Mutatio: The Precision of the Single Image
“Obviously, the European annual of the 30s and 40s such as Das Deutsche Lichtbild catered to various image-makers and sensibilities that would end with the war” The tradition of the 20s, 30s, and 40’s photoannual provided for a number of great image-makers to exhibit some of their finest single images. Annuals such as […]
Thana Faroq – How Shall We Greet the Sun
I am quite taken with the text in Thana’s excellent new book, How Shall We Greet the Sun, published, like her last book, I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows, by Lecturis. I am uncertain exactly how she is engaging with the concepts of sentimentality and nostalgia, being that she seems to be using […]
Kristian Krän – La Soufrière
What we do not talk about, dare to concern ourselves with, or pay much attention to are the men who fall through the cracks toward the end. We are happy to discuss the problems associated with masculine behaviour. Yet, we can’t imagine a discussion about men left wandering by their own devices or by […]
Chaos in the Landscape: Nico Krijno’s How to Leave Your Body Behind
“Krijno’s images are threaded through with references to South Africa’s colonial history and its fragile post-apartheid democracy.”
Kinky City: Tokyo’s Listless Sexual Banality
There was something nearly satisfying in the midst of tying his sister’s best friend to a board of broken glass
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 […]
Margot Wallard’s Natten: The Phoenix Condition
“The phoenix condition is a dilemma that is induced by trauma. The person operating under its influence must find absolute zero in order to rebuild and rejuvenate oneself against the grain that death provides”
Gundula Schulze Eldowy – Berlin On a Dog’s Night
I am sure many of these people are dead. That is not what distinguishes the book or what makes it great. Instead, what is challenging is being alive during that part of history when the faces and bodies inhabiting the frames are familiar, enhanced by the glow from a window. Some of their bodies […]
Roger Eberhard’s Faux-Familiarity & Standard Suffocations
“The utter faux-familiarity of these rooms, from the plastic painting on the wall to the synthetic bed spread made from all manner of recycled and threaded nylon from fish net stockings to actual fish netting makes one queasy”
Jean-Michel André – Chambre 207
How does one begin to excavate memories that lie in the distressed trough of the murder of a loved one? When he was seven years old, Jean-Michel André was staying at a hotel with his father and his father’s new girlfriend in Avignon, France, when a robbery turned into a homicide with both his father […]
Sofia Coppola – Archive 1999-2023
I have never seen a single Sofia Coppola film. This might be surprising for someone reading this book review. Of course, I know her presence and work, but I have not seen the movies for any outward reason. I probably know more about her as a person and a cult hero than I do about […]
Suwon Lee Mr. & Mrs.
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 […]
Lee Friedlander Fundación MAPFRE
There isn’t much more that can be said regarding the importance of Friedlander’s work on the psyche of subsequent generations of photographic enthusiasts and artists alike. From his self-portraits to his Little Screens, Friedlander’s work is simultaneously charged with an inner and external pathos that presents both as a partial reflection of the artist’s psyche […]