Anna Galí Time on Quaaludes and Red Wine
Anna Galí’s book makes me sick. It makes me sick with pain as the father of a young boy whose interior world I think I understand, but, in reality, can probably only guess at, and this will only get more pronounced as he breaks from adolescence into young adulthood. I feel enormous pain when I […]
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”.
Pedro Alfacinha 1985
Full Article on Patreon Returning to the idea of memories, one can feel all of these tendencies in the work used to enforce a slippage of time. Close-up images and somewhat obscure faces place the photographs inside a dream factory or memory farm. These fragments of realism play heavily with our ability […]
Gareth McConnell: The Dream Meadow
“Though I do not believe Gareth’s aims as overly facilitating the need for politics, I cannot help but feel the naked bodies found in the work, their arms outstretched towards something greater are indicative of an aversion to the concrete matters just outside the door of wherever the Dream Meadow itself had been manufactured”. […]
Narelle Autio Place in Between
” In levitating the body, it gives the psychological state of the subject’s mind and its place in the world unto slippage-a format defined by its inability to be calculated. Remove gravity, remove fixity. Employ risk” The way we navigate our heft through space is built on its being pinioned to the ground […]
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 […]
Akihiko Okamura – The Memories of Others
As I found with Whatever You Say, Say Nothing by Gilles Peress (Steidl), The Troubles and their representation are incredibly difficult to write about from the point of view of an outsider. It is a very touchy subject. Even posting about it on social media platforms (as I also found out) will have opposing […]
Christopher Anderson: Manic Compression, High Definition Society
“Cameras are now so advanced that the way we look at our image is now under the threat of becoming unrecognizable with its intense dedication to the state of high definition-pores counted, we recognize a hyper version of our once-future self absconded just far enough to promote simulation and techno-progress, but still close enough to give us doubt about our reflection.”
Coca-Cola and the Implied Apathy of Tomatsu Shomei’s Photographs
Full Article with More Images on Patreon It is essential to understand the biography of Tomatsu to understand what the emotion of rage or anger may be prevalent in his work. As a pubescent teen during the atomic bombing of Japan and the subsequent end of the Second World War, Tomatsu recalls the occupation […]
Gregory Halpern: “ZZYZX” This Town Could Be Anywhere
“The bucolic west is no longer a benign horizon in which to measure the imagination and fantasy of pioneer aspirations”
Roger Eberhard’s Faux-Familiarity & Standard Suffocations
“The utter faux-familiarity of these rooms, from the plastic painting on the wall to the synthetic bed spread made from all manner of recycled and threaded nylon from fish net stockings to actual fish netting makes one queasy”
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 […]
‘Daido Tokyo’ at Fondation Cartier (2016)
Moriyama admits that repetition is his way of working, and that his impulse to reproduce his surroundings today is much the same as it was when he got his first camera, in junior high.
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 […]
Yelena Yemchuk – Odesa
Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]
Philip Best “Alien Existence”: Interview With Infinity Land Press
“Safe art is useless to a publisher such as ILP, and just like the work of other ILP artists that goes along with our personal taste – Dennis Cooper and Michael Salerno – this stuff is loaded”
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”
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 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.”
Daniel Shea: A Purpose-Built Citadel of Economic Despair
“What do the citadels of disaster capitalism tell us about our New World Reich-The Trump Tower, but also the Lehman Brothers buildings, the ING Insurance Corp building, the Rockefeller Center etc? It tells that Epcot Center looks great on bath salts under all those gleaming lights and mirrored windows-prohibitive to the many, inviting to the few”.
Alejandro Cartagena: Cultural Picture Coding and Collapse
“This symbology, this fervent fabric of decline is screened within the book, but it is subtle and perhaps that is why, it is doomed, like human behaviour and meaning, to the sidelines of a genetic and shared understanding of images. “
Jean-Michel André – Chambre 207
How does one begin to excavate memories that lie in the distressed trough of the murder of a loved one? When he was seven years old, Jean-Michel André was staying at a hotel with his father and his father’s new girlfriend in Avignon, France, when a robbery turned into a homicide with both his father […]
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, […]
Matilde Søes Rasmussen Inspiration
When you think you have seen the model-to-photographer genre wear itself thin, along comes Matilde SøesRasmussen to challenge, deepen, and extract gold from the topic by putting together her second intriguing photobook, which deals with modelling. Søes Rasmussen ’s first book, Unprofessional, published by Disko Bay, was a grand slam that, through her point-and-shoot aesthetic, detailed […]