Trent Parke – Monument
Ruptures and Raptures It is hard to know where to start writing about a book with such ominous tendencies at its heart. Monuments by Trent Parke, published by Stanley/Barker in 2023 and its third printing in spring 2024, has a doomsday proximity to it. It is hard to explain why I feel this […]
Trophy Camera: A New Fear of Organizing Principals
“The AI eventually begins making decisions based on the data analyzed and begins to wade through the torrent of images available in its repository selecting successful images for a hierarchy or production and re-distribution of usefulness within the sets of codes previously implied”
Sofia Masini – The body is a revelation as is landscape
Published by Witty Books in 2023 and designed by Giulia Boccarossa, Sofia Masini’s first photobook The body is a revelation as is landscape experiments with reconfigurations of the artist’s body and of the world it inhabits. Through a series of images in which both body and landscape are cut, disassembled, xeroxed, crumpled, recycled, multiplied and […]
Anne Immelé Oublie Oublie
Anne Immelé’s Oublie Oublie is a book about a transitional time and place. Between 2019 and early 2020, the French artist surveyed municipal works and changes in the neighborhood of Le Nouveau Drouot in Mulhouse, France where she lives and teaches photography. The urban environment of her images suggests the 1950s’ and 60’s city planning […]
Gerry Johansson’s Meloni Meloni
“Where is “the thing I am not seeing”?” We’ve become quite accustomed to understanding the importance of photographs based on the frenetic pace that they occupy. Our eyes are expectant. They hover over an image looking at the embedded chaos of news images, photographs of cities, etc. and when they are challenged with a […]
Curran Hatleberg Blood Green
I do not know that much about Hatleberg’s work. I did get a copy of his last book, River’s Dream, as I had missed out on Lost Coast, his first book with eminent American publishers TBW Books. My surface reading of River’s Dream suggested a post-Soth investigation of American topography. I was reminded of Doug Dubois, Alec Soth, Kristine […]
Shoji Ueda: Nagasaki’s Endless Rainbow
“I always imagine that it looks like a whisper would look if a whisper would wail.”
L is for Look Children’s Photobooks
In the ever-expanding historiography of photobook culture and history, once we escape the tedium of nationalism embedded in the ceaseless photobooks from “X” country, we can finally begin to untie genre, and to make sense of what attitudes that exceed these nationalistic behaviors have been present in the making of books throughout the 20th and […]
Graham Macindoe: Excavation. Internalization. Elevation.
“There is some nostalgia, certainly. Music often shares a correlating value to memory, which leads easily to nostalgia. It is no different with photography”
Andrea Modica – Theatrum Equorum
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 […]
Masahisa Fukase: A Procession of Moons
“It is a stasis reflection. At once it is full of possibility, movement, and utilitarianism. It exists in its own chaos and laterality”
Bertien Van Manen: The Unexacting Memory of Wolves
“The trajectory of memory in its successes and failures and the distance from which these punctuating images within are dissolved is an important and very difficult tool to employ post-event.”
Bharat Sikka – The Sapper
“What did we talk about, my dad and I? The different kinds of plyboard and woodworking joints, the correct way to change the bit of a drill and to hold and level and aim the gun of the welder, how to tell when a tyre has gone bald […]” – Sara Baume, Handiwork, 2020 I […]
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 […]
Martin Essl – Le Bateau Ivre
With the recent emphasis on street photography found in volumes such as Matt Stuart’s Think Like a Street Photographer (Laurence King Publishing, 2021) and Reclaim the Street: Street Photography’s Moment, Matt Stuart with Stephen McLaren (Thames & Hudson, 2023), there seems to be a renewed awakening to the genre. If the countless YouTube videos about […]
David Armstrong Contacts
Contact sheets offer an incredible look at the back end of a photographer’s process. Often hidden, they also present a slight enigma in that they also show all manner of warts. Every photographer is aware of the personal nature of contact sheets, which are used as a work tool to decide which images may eventually […]
Iris van der Zee: Violence is an Art Form
“When is an artwork finished? Are the World Trade Centers only finished when the planes sink into their steel bellies? Can we assume Babylon’s work at an end when pneumatic drill erases their façade?” We spend long hours illustrating our human form. We seek a representation of ideals and we look backwards over the canons […]
Matthew Connors: Cairo’s Crow Black Eye
At its surface, the need to stand, to rise, and to disembowel the state looks permeable
Bertien van Manen’s Edges of Cartographic Reason
Bertien van Mannen’s “Beyond Maps and Atlases” is a composition of dis-rhythmic proportion. Her investigation into the Irish landscape is not so much depressing as it alludes to the bittersweet.
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 […]
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 […]
Jurgen Maelfeyt: Precious Things
“Lips is just one of his titles that works between the space of desire, appropriation, the body and what I will loosely label as the ethereal space between memory, nostalgia and history considered the “collective design unconscious.”
The Cracks on the Floor: Sebastián Mejía’s “Tempo”
“We often expect high-end production values in contemporary photobooks, but not every publication can afford some of the eccentricities that we have become accustomed to. In this sense, Tempo reminds us that our material expectations shouldn’t dismiss publications that use humble materials, often produced outside the usual centers of culture and power.”
David Fathi: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WHAT Claudia Seidel
“And beyond Fathi’s unique picture album that circles around Pauli and the so-called “Pauli Effect” the publication captures all the facets that finally determine a notable bookwork”
Werner Amann’s “Surf Fiction” and the Nature of the Game.
We spend merciless hours absorbing film, video, and internet collateral. Amann’s greatest trick with this book is to play on the nature of this game. By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, December 2014 Werner Amann’s “Surf Fiction” has landed in my lap at a time when I have been searching for a body of work that […]
Sophie Calle – “Rachel, Monique'” (2012)
By Allie Haeusslein, Associate Director at Pier 24 Photography, ASX February 2013 Given her proclivity for documenting and sharing the most intimate of moments – both her own and those of others – it is hardly surprising that Sophie Calle ultimately turned this probing eye on her mother. Rachel, Monique is an exquisite object; referring […]
Rinko Kawauchi – “Ametsuchi” (2013)
“On the ground of one of the stars among the immense universe, I think of the beginning, The Earth is a mirror to project heaven. Photography captures the mirror. It connects the Earth and heaven. When the darkness reaches at the bottom, the light will arrive.” – Rinko Kawauchi Rinko Kawauchi – Ametsuchi By Sören Schuhmacher for ASX, September […]
Stephen Gill’s “Best Before End” at FOAM (2013)
Talking to Ants 2 © Stephen Gill courtesy of the artist Fanny Landstrom reviews Stephen Gill’s exhibition, Best Before End, at the Foam Museum, Amsterdam (17th May – 14th July, 2013) for ASX, May 2013 “Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of […]
Bunga Bunga: Italian Politics and the Index of Sexual Subversion
…the book is a small marvel that connects Silvio Berlusconi’s late night sex parties to the economy of interchangeable ways in which we, or perhaps better, Berlusconi sees the women involved as further interchangeable fodder for his aggressive Viagra induced fuckathons. Bunga Bunga Self Published Lorenzo Tricoli By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, December 2014 Two […]
Todd Hido: “Ohio” (2009)
From Ohio, 2009 By Doug Rickard The clouds are passing by gently… the pale blue sky smiles because it is summer again and the sun beams its warm rays down into your suburban backyard in the Midwest. You’re standing there looking at the white house next door and the curtains are closed. The dry weeds sting […]
Russian and Ukrainian Citizens are Terrorized in Donald Weber’s “INTERROGATIONS” (2012)
Are these “interrogations” real or is this just a graphic experiment meant to help us imagine the way that power is wielded behind closed doors? By Paul Loomis, August, 2012 Whether or Not the Guns are Loaded Interrogations is a collection of photographs taken in Russia and Ukraine over six years of travel by Donald […]
Jitka Hanzlová – “Retrospective” (2013)
By Benjamin Tree, ASX UK, February 2013 Jitka Hanzlová’s first retrospective exhibition in Britain unifies eight of Hanzlová’s photographic projects via an understanding of their common concerns: that is, what place means to the individual. The exhibit begins with Rokytník, a photo-series which documents the village inhabitants of Hanzlová’s familial homeland, a place she […]
Guided Inquiries into the Promised and Failed Utopian 90’s Rave Culture in ‘Close Your Eyes’
Gareth McConnell’s Close your Eyes is a salient tome of guided inquiries into 90’s rave culture. Gareth McConnell Close Your Eyes Self Publish Be Happy 2014 By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, December 2014 A Metaphor: Wavering, I stood with no grand hesitation towards the lip of the abyss. I shuddered to think once that my […]
Walker Evans: “Message from the Interior”
Evans’ interiors function like landscapes that open up towards other worlds, largely through the particular attention that he pays to the inanimate objects that are present, almost representing them as characters themselves. Ghost is Guest By Anna Solal, Translated from French by Chris Farmer and Florian Aimard The book’s title – Message from […]
Arianna Arcara & Luca Santese – “Found Photos in Detroit”
Arcara and Santese provide an unexpected portrait of Detroit, eschewing the obvious for something more cerebral. The majestic decay of lavish theaters, incomprehensibly large car plants, and skyscrapers of former luxury are not to be found here.