Daniel Shea Distribution
If ever the premise of a body of work was betrayed by its execution, this is that work. I should clarify that this statement is not intended as a pejorative, but rather to note that the simplicity of the means in Shea’s initial premise is a bit of a false lead. It starts with a […]
Carpani & Verilli: Playfully Hammering Out Memories
“I am sometimes prone to being infuriated by novelty in photography. In particular, when the use of archive or vernacular material is concerned”
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 […]
Nicolai Howalt Fungi
I was never accustomed to the tall tales of muchroom pickling that pervade Europe. Mildly aware of the phenomenon back in Wisconsin around the spring movements of the morel mushroom picking season, born to a family of hunters, I did not grasp the essential nature of mushrooms and fungi until quite late in my lifetime. […]
Carla Rossi Bellissima
She’s posing for consumer products now and thenFor every camera, she gives the best she canI think I saw her on the cover of a magazineNow she’s a big success, I want to meet her again -Kraftwerk, via Big Black Of course, I know nothing about modelling. Still, I can assume that there is a […]
Federico Clavarino: The Errant Future of History
“The castle, which controls the populace, does so through an absolute production of its image. It is a tale in which plebian might is as disorganized as any contemporary parallel for leading a resistance against the juggernaut who rules by fear and an unethical chess game between the citizens and the tyranny of the castle’s own image”
Vince Aletti – The Drawer
I recently picked up a copy of Vince Aletti’s The Drawer from Self Publish Be Happy/MACK, a title released last year that won the 2023 Aperture Photobook award. At the time, I knew about the book. Still, I had not picked it up as I was unsure of what I could add to it, being […]
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”.
What Remains of the Smile? Arko Datto’s Pik-Nik
“There is a carnivalesque feeling through the book, its protagonists purposefully eating, dancing and drinking as if there was no tomorrow. In several instances, we observe the awkward body language resulting from inebriation -including total body collapse- and end-of-party brawling.”
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 […]
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 […]
Ron Jude’s Nausea: The Scissors and the Cockroach
“I think something is amiss or awry with every photograph. What I’ve consistently tried to do is exploit those disjointed qualities and bring them to the surface”
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 […]
Dave Heath One Brief Moment
Dave Heath – One Brief Moment Review by Simon Bray Within the opening pages of Dave Heath’s ‘One Brief Moment,’ there is a certain air of occasion. Gathered masses fill the middle of the street, suggesting that these are not singular moments but a crowd united by a collective sense of anticipation and […]
Avo Tavitian & Daido Moriyama | Los Angeles x Shinjuku
Daido Moriyama I feel bad saying this, and you will have to read on to find more positive suggestions about this book, but I think Moriyama has become quite a pastiche of his earlier glory. I understand how he arrives at that conclusion, and frankly, most people will likely be inclined to argue with […]
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 […]
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.”
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 […]
Curran Hatleberg – Lost Coast & River’s Dream
There is a strange and perplexing photograph in Curran Hatleberg’s photobook, River’s Dream (TBW, 2022), which shows a man with a large swarm of bees attached to his face and body. The image is bewildering. The man is sitting down in a chair, with no protective gear, and his eyes are closed. His hands are […]
Robert Flick LA Diary
Robert Flick’s career is exciting. Born in Holland in 1939, the artist emigrated to North America by the 1960s and had work featured in publications as early as 1966. He has been exhibiting since the 1960s, and his work is featured in many institutions; yet, he is not easily placed in any respective movement, […]
Ruth Lauer Manenti 4 Sides of the Table
It is hard to deny the strange feeling of sharing a room with one of your loved ones who has passed on. The implicit silence is an acknowledgement of toil’s end, though at the time, the personal trauma overtakes this thought in the mind of the living. It casts small echoes. Of course, there is […]
Andrew Ellis Touch Echoes the Soil
There has rightfully been what I might consider an epidemic of navel-gazing in American photography over the last decade. It sounds awful to say it that way, and maybe to unburden the semantic load of the navel, I might consider it inward, or soul searching, if that is more palatable. When I mention this, it […]
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 […]
Death Mort Tod: A European Book of the Dead
“Europe is…people. Its challenge is the bane of enlightenment that various historiographies lament upon its misshapen mass with its fluid borders, its guilt and its appropriated columns of toppled regimes”