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. […]
In the ever-expanding historiography of photobook culture and history, once we escape the tedium of nationalism embedded in the ceaseless photobooks from “X” country, we can finally begin to untie genre, and to make sense of what attitudes that exceed these nationalistic behaviors have been present in the making of books throughout the 20th and […]
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 […]
First published in 1975, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology has become a classic between categories of production. First and foremost, it is an essential book of photographs that typologically investigates the remnants of Second World War bunker armaments mostly along France’s Western coastline. These heavy structures, though short and squat, are impressive concrete-and-rebar boulders that sit […]
So, I’ve never watched a single one of Lanthimos’s films. Maybe this will change in the near future. Dunno. I am aware that I do not know a Dog’s tooth from a Frog’s gooch. In order to subvert my programming, which some of my more learned friends insisting that I am already in denial over […]
Agony in the Garden. Parables. Metaphors. Incisive mythology within the realms of the contemporary political landscape of Europe in the 2020s. To reduce Lua Ribeira’s work to any single motif is an exercise in futility. Instead, the analysis must stem from the aggregate means of its parts. Of course, one cannot simply resign the work […]
Sometimes, all it takes is a corner and a series of evaporating shadows to serve as a conduit to greater understanding of the built environment and all the human activity that has transpired within it. In studying Charles Johnstone’s court photography, what is exceptionally evident is the simplicity with which the rendering of space […]
Imago Mortis translates to “Image of Death.” It is a concept that has representations as far back as the Middle Ages, likely exploding across imagery as an extension of the mood following years of bubonic plague, which killed off nearly 1/3 to 2/3’s of Europe’s population over the course of a decade. Over the years […]
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 […]
This is certainly one of the most misleading photobooks that I have seen in some time, despite being a fan of the artist’s previous book. What appears on the outside as a simple reading of America’s vernacular signage is, in fact, a kind of premonition, or perhaps an acknowledgement of where things stand along the […]
I first encountered the visceral photographs of Lucile Boiron a few years ago when I bought a copy of her book Mise en Pièces, also published by Belgian publisher Art Paper Editions (APE), like her new book Bouche. I remember being very excited about the book, as it reminded me of the visceral tendencies in […]
Amongst the wreckage of the past fifty years, one of the fundamental erasures, or perhaps the co-opting, of our diversity of ideological thought has come from the slow decline of subculture, transgression, and punk rock values. During my lifetime, I have seen anti-authority ideologies reconstituted into a hot-topic t-shirt carousel. It plays out, when it […]