Toxic typology or cultural analysis of Swiss Agro-society, you be the judges. Either way, these little uns gunna smoke these here heaters until the cows come home. There is an amazing history of smoking in photography that Lucy Sante first cottoned onto sometime in the early 2000s with her book No Smoking. Several other smoking […]
Mycellium and fungus in general have been a renewed interest as of late. Some of this is undoubtedly narrowed or zoomed in by the current fear of ecocide most of us are experiencing as we watch wildfires decimate geographies familiar and unfamiliar, as we are forced to watch data centers spring up around natural aquifiers- […]
In these days of irreversible rancor and decimation, one cannot help but look backward through the lens of a type in fogged nostalgia for the second half of the Twentieth Century, in the years prior to 2001, also embedded fairly as a time of grave uncertainty. Notwithstanding, this was a time when the travails of […]
Art School is a process. It is one of those experiences in life that feels uncertain, tempting, and usually administered to those who wander, who are trying to fidn their footing in life, unashamed to be creative, yet unaware of what it will take to make a career in the arts feasible should they continue. […]
Victor Man’s painting presents a miasmic world in which death is presided over by the elegant souls of the living, and the living, in turn, are reminded of their duty as constant eulogizers of what has been lost. Playing technically off a nod to the kitsch black velvet paintings of the 1960s and to the […]
This is the second book from MACK offering a look into the theme of contact sheets presented over the past year. The first was David Armstrong’s book Contacts (I mean, how else should you call these, Sheets?), published last October, which similarly examined a brilliant tranche of Armstrong’s work through the diminutive, if plentiful, images on his […]
A field guide in parts, an attempt at shorthand analysis. Places, not much else needs to be said when so much has already been said. The strong presence of Guido Guidi, as if you were to take his large-format images of Cesena and use a 35mm camera to catch some of his shadow work. A […]
The ideas of usefulness and aesthetic appearance often come into conflict over time in architecture. Decay, cracks, erosion, and palimpsests of change clash and defy our natural sense of wholeness when we look at buildings that have persisted over decades, if not centuries. I am thinking particularly of 19th and early 20th-century buildings, those that […]
Slightly enamored with the idea of architecture in photography, a clear use of terms that suggests photography to be the primary category of assessment over architecture, I have found myself leafing through books devoted to Hélène Binet, Joachim Brohm, Andrea Gehrke, Lucien Hervé, Karl-Hugo Schmölz, and others who have made architecture a central subject matter […]
Everything feels perched at the precipice of dissolution. Stifled, held in a listless and ambulatory state as the world, governed by men in search of machines, asks us to forgo the rampant onslaught of civil rights, of disagreeable concerns concerning the future, for the contrarily stale epiphany of the Great Progress, a pogrom in silhouette. […]
There has been a recent uptick in books devoted to the biographies and writings of photographers, and I am very excited about it. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts on it all. Sultan’s Water Over Thunder, published recently by MACK, includes many personal notes, anecdotes, archival letters, and ephemera from the artist’s oeuvre. It is […]
Throughout the 1990s, there was a distinct emphasis on the body and its decline. Work produced during the 90s, whether from the aids crisis or the ideological shift away from the Catholic church toward an atheistic and bodily autonomy, signaled a visceral approach to photography. The documentary Vile Bodies (1999), produced by Chris Townsend and […]