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.”
Ivars Gravlejs: Necessary Book of Wrongs
“The savior of technological disgrace is error and possibly humor.”
Claudine Doury – Solstice
As an American living in Europe, I have never gotten my head around the vestigial tail of pagan rituals that still occasionally surface here. They do not happen often, but I am continuously bemused when they do. They seem to function on either fire or water. During the opening season, which includes springtime fertility […]
Jens Klein Balloons
In 1870-1871, during the siege of Paris, better known as the Paris Commune, several ingenious actions were carried out throughout the year to continue the communards’ defense first against the Prussians, then the Thiers government, which sought to suppress the resistance within the heart of Paris. Both of these actions were the result of harnessing […]
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…”
Stephen Shore: Transparencies VS. American Surfaces 2020
“The Transparencies book published by MACK is also significant in its design, the essay within and sequence of the work, which is chapterized by annual progressions through the 70’s American dream in banal (good word, word of goodness) detail” It is not often that a re-examination of the periphery of a significant […]
Nick Gervin – Portlanders
Full Article on Patreon Gervin’s work reflects the American moment in the second decade of the second millennium through tendencies similar to those seen in a good deal of American photography during the Vietnam War era. I see some resemblances to protest coverage by Gene Anthony, a Black Star agency photographer who captured the […]
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 […]
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018: Refusing Heaven or Confusing as Hell?
“Asselin implicates the prize’s sponsor, using their financial app to display the real-time ballet that is the share price of both Bayer and Monsanto, neatly revealing the complicity of an entity that uses an arts prize to burnish its socially responsible credentials, while assisting a corporation that is a synonym for cynicism.”
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 […]
Raymond Pettibon Nervous Breakdown: Album Covers
If you grew up in a certain period, some of your first experiences with counterculture were inspired by the genius cover artwork of albums by various punk bands, notably Black Flag, by what appeared to be a deranged cartoon columnist. I vividly remember ducking in and out of head/record shops in the Midwest growing up […]
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 […]
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.”
Mark Steinmetz: Long Days Well-Spent in the Comfort of Others
“I tell myself that I am a limitless being until I realize my left shoe is untied and I sit on the curb to attend to its misshapen spaghetti-form of inconsequential circumstance. What point these shoes”?
Julien Langendorff Spell Rider
Julien Langendorff, Spell Rider The roots of cosmic occultism stretch back as far in time as humans have been able to communicate. There is a hermetic order to the universe that has bewildered and engaged the species, giving license to conjecture, theory, and spiritual whim that exceed what lies before our faces. It is a […]
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.”
Camille Vivier: The Twist of Mythical Fantasy
“Hamilton was deeply problematic on many levels and I reference him mostly because of the blur and grain of his pre-pubescent models. That suicide was his final intervention is no large surprise. The debate on his work was over before it started”.
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 […]
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 […]
Mark Steinmetz Berlin Pictures
“Berlin is a peculiar and magnetic geography…There is no real heavy concentration of a “center” or “downtown” though there are clusters of busier topographies within the city. For this very reason, it is easy to pass through Berlin in a very solitary manner” Berlin is a peculiar and magnetic bit of geography. […]
Dana Lixenberg De Wallen Amsterdam
With Dana’s work, one cannot help but be mesmerized by her ability to capture people in situ. Her career has been broadly defined by her portrait work, both commercially and for her own personal subjectivity. Whereas having a career built on poraiture no doubt inspires a healthy relationship with the craft of photography, there […]
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…”
Charlotte Lybeer and the Teletubby Who Hung Himself
Charlotte Lybeer’s “Epidermis II” for APE is not about teletubbies or suicide, but it is about the veil or a practice of shrouding oneself called “Zentai”, which like all things post-taboo seems to be Japanese in origin.
Victor Sira Europass
Notes for a Ritual of Photography Gone Extinct Victor Sira, in his exhibition catalog/new book Europass, published by his publishing house, bookdummypress, examines a common theme in travel photography. The book is based on a series of trips the Venezuelan artist took in Europe from 2001 to 2006, which coincided with the shift from the […]