Debsuddha Crossroads
Othering, debated through the discourse of reading the camera as a difference machine, seems at the crux of much of photography’s woes. Challenged by the notion that the machine is neutral in its observational and technical ability, the authorship and cultural means of producing images are undergoing a fruitful re-assessment of its terms to represent, […]
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 […]
Katerina Angelopoulou – Diary Entry #2: The Fumes of Mars
23rd July 2018 16:41pm: First Report of the fire in Ntaou 16:50pm: First Fire Helicopter is directed to the area with ETA 17:10 17:30pm: One Helicopter operates on the fire 18:00 -18:30pm: No Helicopter operates in the area. 18:06pm: The fire enters the village of Neos Voutzas. 18:20pm: The fire crosses the Marathonos Avenue. 18:25pm: The […]
David Heath: “Dialogues With Solitudes”
“It is true that he made images at a distance, at arms length as it were, but there is a considerable, rather a palpable feeling in the images that Heath is almost placing himself next to his subject”.
Aapo Huhta – Gravity
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 […]
Estelle Hanania and The Willful Art of European Disappearance
Estelle Hanania is what I would consider a sort of phenomenological anthropological photographer. When I say this, I mean to consider her an anthropologist with a camera interested in regarding a marginal culture shifts rather than a quotidian and beleaguered photographer attempting to secure an interesting topic. Do we always disappear? Does custom evade […]
2224 Kolkata: Plums Deep In Corpse Fat
“I mean corpse fat and soap, I remember the nazis doing something like that…is that why the women wash their clothes in it while the naked children, with their distended bellies, watch?”
On Robert Adams
“After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.” Robert Adams “There is another world and it is in this one.” Paul Éluard There have been few post-war American photographers, if […]
Nobuyoshi Araki The Banquet (Shokuji)
Full Article on Patreon “The Banquet is a different affair built around the same context of mourning. Instead of pictures of himself or his deceased wife, Araki presents a catalog of their last meals together. The images are shot with a close-up ring flash and a short lens to give a microphotographic feel […]
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 […]
Mary Had a Little Lamb & The Bonin Islanders Shinichiro Nagasawa
The Bonin Islanders, 2021, Shinichiro Nagasawa, Akaaka Art Publishers The Bonin Islands, or Ogasawara Islands, are a very particular, scarcely populated set of thirty islands southeast of mainland Japan. The population consists of around 2,500 inhabitants, comprising an exceptionally interesting demographic. Historically referred to as Bunin Jima, or uninhabited, the islands were visited by […]
Loredana Nemes – Graubaum und Himmelmeer
Look up the beech in a book for plant taxonomy and you will find a picture of a tall tree with a strong trunk and long branches that form a symmetrical crown. Open Graubaum und Himmelmeer (Hartmann Books, 2023), the new book by Loredana Nemes, and the image of the single majestic tree gets shattered […]
Berangère Fromont: Cloud Connected
“…In a landscape where nothing was recognizable, except the clouds, and in the middle, in a field of forces crossing tensions and destructive explosions, the tiny and fragile human body”-from Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.
Shape of Light: One Hundred Years of Zombietude
“While photographic techniques and mysteries are patiently explained, the paintings present are left simply to be. Everywhere one sees photographers paying homage to painters, nowhere the reverse. A fact which speaks inadvertent volumes.”
Max Pinckers & Thomas Sauvin – The Future Without You
The introduction of computers in the workplace well prefigures the advent of the internet. Before the release of the PC in the 80’s, computers were mostly vast, immovable machines which by today’s standards had relatively low processing power. Located in air-conditioned comms rooms, various forms of cabling sprawled out from them into patch cabinets resembling […]
Thiago Dezan When I Hear That Trumpet Sound
I was confronted with three parts of a mental soundtrack while paging through Thiago Dezan’s new book When I Hear The That Trumpet Sound (Selo Turvo, 2021, ed. 200). The first track based on title and the book’s black endpapers and the ominous black cover was Behemoth’s Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel, a rich and […]
Shoji Ueda: Nagasaki’s Endless Rainbow
“I always imagine that it looks like a whisper would look if a whisper would wail.”
Nan Goldin: The Other becomes The One
“Instead of seeing Goldin’s re-edit as encompassing the visibility of any specific group, it invites reconsideration in an approach delinking the narrative of otherness towards what I see as a photographic project of genuine care.”
Raymond Meeks: The Sentimentalia of Alabaster and Leaf
“One does not have to be born of heterogametic sex to be reminded of what erosion means to the limestone cliffs, nor to extrapolate what a spring without rain posits for a summer’s cooling pool.”
American Interiors: This is Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile
“American Interiors feels at a quick glance like a foray into a twisted maneuver in which the typological studies of the Bechers have morphed into a Google Dream version of a nightmare that Hunter S. Thompson would have if he were around to see what is happening in the present field of American anthropology.”
Pieter Hugo – Californian Wildflowers
I am incredibly biased as I write this. I share a close connection with the artist Pieter Hugo through our Nearest Truth workshop programming. Although it might seem counterintuitive to the points I will raise subsequently, I have had a chance to hear Pieter talk about his work in detail, with all the challenging […]
Yoshi Kametani’s Played: Margins of Timing
“We have inherited a way of understanding events and time through images or are allowed to fashion our own prognosis of the interpretation of linear elements by looking inward and at the spaces between images…”
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…”
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.”
Roman Vishniac – ‘Rediscovered’ at ICP (2013)
People behind bars, Berlin Zoo, ca. 1930-1935 © Mara Vishniac Kohn. Courtesy International Center of Photography. By Lew Schwartz, ASX NYC, February 2013 Kudos all around. “Rediscovered” in the exhibition’s title is somewhat misleading because the Vishniac whom we encounter here is an entirely new construction for most of the photo viewing public. The story of how […]
Roe Ethridge at Capitain Petzel – “Sacrifice Your Body” (2014)
“Untitled (Alexis Bittar)“, 2013 © the artist, Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York & Capitain Petzel, Berlin. Roe Ethridge, Sacrifice Your Body, at Capitain Petzel, Berlin, Feb 1-March 8, 2014. By Fanny Landstrom, for ASX, March 2014 Located amongst the monumental GDR architecture on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin’s district of Mitte is the East German modernist […]
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 […]
Co-ordination and Re-assignment in the Dissonant Steel Fish Tank
@ Giuseppe Micciché Co-ordination and Re-assignment in the Dissonant Steel Fish Tank By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, December 2014 Cento passi is a affectionate, yet somnambulant and lightly traumatic study of photographer Giuseppe Micciché’s father’s decline into Alzheimer’s disease between 2011/2012. The book is an effective mediation on the oscillating and often times confusing […]
Focus on the Feminine Self and Set Aside the Suicide of Francesca Woodman
To interpret Woodman’s work entirely through her death is reductive and backwards-facing. It’s the stated goal of this monograph to set aside the dominant interpretation of Woodman’s work, which sees her photography as an anticipation of her suicide. Focus on the Feminine Self and Set Aside the Suicide of Francesca Woodman By Owen Campbell, ASX, […]
EAMONN DOYLE: “i” (2014)
Here the street is the background upon which single figures stand. (Or rather, lean). The streets become backdrop, grey slate with stripes and arrows, designs on the pavement. Doyle is more of a stalker than a flaneur. Eamonn Doyle i, Review by Ellen Wallenstein for ASX, June 2014 Eamonn Doyle’s book i is a […]
Luigi Ghirri: ‘Kodachrome’ (2013)
Egmond am Zee, 1973 Despite exposure in Europe during his lifetime, Ghirri remained relatively unknown outside of Italy. More than a decade after his death in 1992, galleries throughout Europe presented his work, and Aperture published his first monograph in English. By Allie Haeusslein, Associate Director at Pier 24 Photography, June 2013 The […]
Petite and Magical, Luigi Ghirri’s: ‘Kodachrome’
For Ghirri, the world was a labyrinth and making pictures was a means of “tell[ing] the real identity of man, of things, of life, from the image of man, of things of life.” By Vladimir Gintoff, ASX NYC, March 2013 In 1935 Eastman Kodak introduced Kodachrome. A film stock praised for its idiosyncratic, hyper-saturated, […]
America’s Most Prominent Locus of Stupidity (Florida) – Paul Kwiatkowski ‘And Every Day Was Overcast’ (2013)
The recent past has seen the amplification of Florida as America’s most prominent locus of ignominy. And Every Day Was Overcast By Owen Campbell, ASX, November 2013 The recent past has seen the amplification of Florida as America’s most prominent locus of ignominy. Florida’s lavish multitude of embarrassments are mostly trivial and comic, yet […]
Louis Stettner – “Louis Stettner” at Bonni Benrubi (2013)
Elbowing, Out of Town Newstand, New York, 1954 Louis Stettner at Bonni Benrubi. The Fuller Building, 41 E 57 St, NYC By Lew Schwartz, ASX NYC, March 2013 [column width=”45%” padding_right=”20px”]The first image you see in this small show, Out of Town, Newsstand, is of a neatly tailored woman, perhaps a model, looking down into […]
J Carrier’s “Elementary Calculus” (2012)
These are people who have arrived with ambitions, but are hampered by political conflict, by language, by finances and by time and distance; as well as alienated as a result of their efforts. By Paul Loomis, September, 2012 J Carrier’s new book Elementary Calculus is a collection of 74 luminous photographs shot in Tel […]