Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon – Motel 42
Motel 42 (Leaf, 2024) is another testament to the never-ending slew of American road trip books. However, in Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon’s book, you can’t see much of America outside of the cigarette-stained roadside motel rooms she and her lover Adrien have occupied. You can read about the places they visited in the back of the book, […]
Irina Rozovsky Mountain Black Heart
The Balkans are very hard to describe. Though I have spent an inordinate amount of time in Greece, mostly in its capital, having traveled through the Balkans to get there, I remember a sense of something enigmatic, misty, and compelling as we traveled to and from Greece. I remember thinking about it all on a […]
Lena C. Emery: Yuka & The Indeterminate Forest
“When I consider Japanese forests, I am always distracted by Aokigahara and in doing so, I have to place our protagonist there amongst the Durkheimian realities that it ensues”. It somehow seems pertinent to have left this title too long to review having been caught in the deluge of books landing on […]
Francesco Merlini – Better in the Dark than His Rider
In sleep or in wakefulness, we are inhabited by images. Swimming just below the surface, they sometimes dash before us with the swoop of the flying fish. Slippery, they can be hard to hold onto. We are a repository of latent images that linger within us, awaiting to be conjured. Whilst the primary visual cortex […]
Lúa Ribeira – Subida Al Cielo
“Of course they will find it difficult to situate them historically. They must feel free to see them as images that evoke something in their own minds. They’re illustrations inspired by a theme, actually, rather than depictions of a particular story, I think.” – Paula Rego Though she was speaking about her own images, Paula […]
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 […]
Laura Bielau Arbeit 2016-2019
Laura Bielau’s Arbeit 2016-2019 (Spector Books, 2021) is a stripped-back and minimal series of investigations that regards the environmental working effects and detritus of art labor in 2021. Though the aims are not overtly class-oriented or political, they function as a personal case study between the artist and the alien consumer objects that become […]
Rodrigo Valenzuela – New Works For a Post-Workers World
Rodrigo Valenzuela has been producing incredible work for the past couple of years. I was lucky enough to get a copy of his last book, Journeyman, published by Mousse Publishing. It was my introduction to the Chilean-American’s work, and from that point, we managed to have an extensive conversation about his work for Nearest Truth. […]
Los Angeles Plays Itself: Anthony Hernandez at SFMOMA
“No, Anthony Hernandez’ sober look at his hometown reminds us that Los Angeles is not the most photographed city in the world, but rather, one of the most culturally, economically and racially divided places in America.” It often said that Los Angeles is the most photographed city on earth. It’s not true. It is also […]
Gerry Johansson’s American Winter: A Contemptible Season Dawns
“Visually and technically for photography, the season is something of a conundrum, it is firstly a phenomenon that catches our impassioned attentions but it is also incredibly loathsome to be captured on film…”
Walter Keller: Beruf: Verleger. A Tribute
“So, when we consider respect in the medium, we can limit our discussion by looking at who is contributing to our world and who is not. Publishers by and large are the unsung heroes of the day”. A friend of mine recently commented on the lack of risk-taking in publishing. I took some […]
David Brandon Geeting: Everything is Nature
“He plays with the disruption in the aesthetic surfaces of our daily life and this allows him (and us) to experience a reality which might be bypassed.”
Stephen Shore Steel Town
Glancing at Steel Town by Stephen Shore (MACK, 2021) gives the reader the impression that what they are looking at has a point of fixity in the past. The images, produced in 1977 for Fortune Magazine, and have a quality that suggests a bygone era. Whether it is the kitsch interior of Eddie’s […]
Narelle Autio Place in Between
” In levitating the body, it gives the psychological state of the subject’s mind and its place in the world unto slippage-a format defined by its inability to be calculated. Remove gravity, remove fixity. Employ risk” The way we navigate our heft through space is built on its being pinioned to the ground […]
‘Daido Tokyo’ at Fondation Cartier (2016)
Moriyama admits that repetition is his way of working, and that his impulse to reproduce his surroundings today is much the same as it was when he got his first camera, in junior high.
John Divola: Chroma and Spectrum Opposition
“Animals by evolutionary prowess and survival mode are given differing powers of sight. Humans with the benefit of great vision are still limited to a fairly diffuse understanding of the wider spectrum. Such is the case of our art as well” On the face of it, color or chromatic evaluation of form is spectrum […]
Yelena Yemchuk – Odesa
Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]
Shoji Ueda: Nagasaki’s Endless Rainbow
“I always imagine that it looks like a whisper would look if a whisper would wail.”
One Wall a Web: An Interview with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
“I think I was working in places like those for quite a while before I knew why I was working in them. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license, so I navigated Virginia on my bicycle or on foot the majority of the time.”
Charles Johnstone’s Polaroid Memory Screen Tests
“It is as if we believe this concept of memory to be an organ unto itself, a strange piece of twisted tissue resting perhaps off to the side of the whole of the cerebral hemisphere…”