Danny Franzreb – Proof of Work
My initial response to the massive swell of attention that cryptocurrency received in 2021, and more specifically to the non-fungible token (NFT) hysteria that gripped so much of cultural discourse online and in the press, was a dismissive roll of the eyes. Admittedly, what I was reacting to most were the claims that cryptocurrency was […]
Benjamin Pfau: Isthmus, A Nocturnal Biopic
“So, why do you go to Bangkok if you are under 50, able-dicked and not looking to run an anti-biotics course every Monday morning? You float, you drift and you embed yourself in loose associations that prohibit direct and long-term commitment to form, but rather situate the time spent in a separate category that […]
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 […]
Jonathan Meese Buch der Bücher Annotated Catalogue Raisonne 1993 – 2025
Jonathan Meese is one of those artists compelled by an unseen, yet pernicious, towering force that many of us cannot recognize as anything else but a steam engine powered by Satan and maybe curry wurst, lager, and a cartoonish desire to paint the times as a disgraceful embodiment of human spirit, causality, scum, and victory. […]
An Endless Golden Carefree Summer – on Maude Schuyler Clay’s ‘Mississippi History’
“Many photographers focus on capturing their loved ones, but it is difficult to give such portraits a universal dimension so as to be interesting to a larger audience than the immediate circle of friends and family”. By Karin Bareman, ASX The first image in Maude Schuyler Clay’s Mississippi History that mildly piqued my interest is […]
Jonas Feige This Soil We Create For Ourselves
Editor’s Note: I wrote the original press release for this book. Pointing this out before you read the review for transparency is fair and necessary, as it will inevitably show some bias. In place of a review for this concern, I have decided to extend the format with what appears as inanity but […]
Kenta Cobayashi’s Radiant Techno-dissolved Glitchgraphy
“The glitch is worshipped and the dream weave of the matrix spews forth an undeniable feeling of dissolve”
Bryan Schutmaat – Sons of the Living | Perspective 1
Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer of the American West. His work is dedicated to sites along the interstate highway — forgotten mining towns, abandoned truck stops, weathered billboards, the garbage scattered across dirt roads. What he is attracted to is the region’s extremes: the harsh desert sun, its arid fields, trash heaps of tires, the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Kentaro Kumon – Smoke and Steam
With Japanese photography, I have had to change how I look at it from the surface level toward something much more intricate in my understanding of how Japanese artists approach the camera. When I first started looking into the national camera of Japan, the obvious references were already a known quantity to me. Classic […]
Nikita Teryoshin – Nothing Personal: The Back Office of War
War is good business for some, and misery for most everyone else. The executives of defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, people who directly profit from the outbreak and continuation of war, are incentivized to hope for its continuation rather than its cessation, because where there is war (in Yemen, Ukraine, or in […]
Ivars Gravlejs: Necessary Book of Wrongs
“The savior of technological disgrace is error and possibly humor.”
Billie: Before Our Limbs Soften
“On a functional level, and trying to remove myself from the subjects involved, what “Billie” does besides pull on your emotions is to punish photography in a small way…”
Photography Class of 2017 – Kittens, Rainbows and Unicorn Supplement
“Finally, a “Eureka Moment”- the image I “took” belongs to Martin Parr, the Godfather of Gaudy. I know this not because I have any of his books or any desire to devote much attention to his work, I know this because I have the Internet”
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.”
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 […]
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”
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 […]
Katerina Angelopoulou – Diary Entry #1: The Fumes of Mars
DIARY ENTRY 25/01/2025 Today I went back to writing. There has been very little time to work on the text accompanying the book in the last few months. Re read notes, retracing steps – yet again. I close my eyes and everything is there in front of me. The only thing I do not remember […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]