These are postcards from the lip of a commoditized and disheveled Eden masquerading as progressive life on planet zero. These rasterized observations are the Cliff Notes to the end of natural occurrence and abundance. Everything has a place so long as it has a price or a presence deemed valuable. If it cannot be brokered […]
The fever dream that never ended. The late Christine Furuya-Gössler is one of the more complex icons in photographic history. Her face is recognizable at a distance, and numerous exhibitions and books have been made about her and her family, mostly by her husband Seiichi Furuya, a Japanese photographer living in Austria. What makes her […]
I do not believe that humans have developed a sympathetic or synergistic relationship with the cities they passionately build. Enclaves of identity, bastions of activity, cities are, in contemporary times, behemoth-like organims that must be fed, have their circulatory system, and often spread, not unlike a type of virus, slowly devouring everything that lies at […]
There is something undeniably attractive in small ideas executed with precision and clarity. In receiving Cintia Tortosa Santisteban’s new book Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings (Chose Commune, 2025), I am reminded that it is often the Occam’s razor of production and concept that produces some of the […]
I know very little about Witold Gombrowicz, let alone Witold Gombrowicz’s book, Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity. Still, upon reviewing his biography, one can’t help but find him a fascinating character. One part Jean Genet, one part Jean-Paul Sartre, Gombrowicz’s work seems to embody the twentieth century’s anxieties, both in terms of the Holocaust and […]
“The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”-Aby Warburg. Constellations, catalogues, and correlative image processing are at the fundament of Batia Suter’s efforts to respond to images that she deftly places in thick, long-running sequences, in which the associative power of images, in their constellation, invokes a response from the viewer based […]
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 […]
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 […]
There is a photograph by Frederick H. Evans from 1896, entitled “In the Attics,” in which the artist captures the improbably clean space of Kelmscott Manor, the home of Arts and Crafts movement pioneer William Morris. The photograph presents the attic as a type of raw liminal space, where the viewer can identify […]
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 […]
I have just returned from a workshop trip from São Paulo, Brazil, a vertiginous and bustling city. My experience in returning from the city has been marked by an extended rumination on my experiences there. I am still processing the city, its architecture, and its artists whom I was very fortunate to meet in abundance. […]
I have just returned from a workshop trip from São Paulo, Brazil, a vertiginous and bustling city. My experience in returning from the city has been marked by an extended rumination on my experiences there. I am still processing the city, its architecture, and its artists whom I was very fortunate to meet in […]