A and not THE. Let’s be clear from the get-go that what we are talking about is A, or one, interpretive history of London’s East End through the prism of photography and, arguably, property and labor by esteemed archivist/documentarian Chris Dorley Brown, whose recent book A History of the East End, published by Nouveau Palais […]
I am sure many of these people are dead. That is not what distinguishes the book or what makes it great. Instead, what is challenging is being alive during that part of history when the faces and bodies inhabiting the frames are familiar, enhanced by the glow from a window. Some of their bodies […]
I get a rapturous effect when I search through early twentieth-century illustrated books on archaeology. I know that it is a relatively niche endeavor, but there is something otherworldly about the effort that allows my imagination to stir in ways that are not easy to equate. Some of this is because the images are fantastical. […]
I’m listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Two (Expanded Version), though I should be listening to the original score for Ilias’s book Forecast (Origini Edizioni, 2023, Second Edition). I apologize to Daphne Kotsiani, Y. Fotiadis, D. Joss, and I. Dimitriadis, who have added an audio piece of sculpted piano interludes that one […]
In the realms of art, we celebrate a single act of creation. We give license to a nearly ideological pursuit of aura, a way in which we receive the act of a single creation as a roughly divine measure of human success. Yet, in photography and creating a photobook, which begs for narrative and […]
It would be hard to hand this photobook to someone in a decontextualized state and expect them to understand the modalities of ecstasy and horror that permeate the frames. In the first seventy or eighty percent of the book, figures cavort and twist and are undetermined by a common goal. They are bodies of a […]
Bharat Sikka has been on a substantial creative streak, publishing photobooks often and with high integrity and significance. I had a conversation with him about his last FW: Books titled The Sapper, a tome that explored his relationship with his father, a retired military man. One can see it as a type of collaboration, and […]
This is a fascinating and unexpected title. I suspect that some people might consider it a repeat of images that circulate through Larry Clark’s opus Tulsa, and that is not a wrong way to feel about it, but what is important is how we see the periphery of images from that incredible body of work […]
In her first book, Arbeit, Laura Bielau found monumental images of tiny things in her studio workspace. The notion of art and labor were at the fundament of the documents she produced. Everything from an empty Amazon envelope to a rubber band was magnified and challenged for their quotidian usage. Enlarged and brought into […]
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 […]
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 […]
Nikita Teryoshin returns with another great book in 2024. The German artist continues his typological studies following his award-winning long-term project Nothing Personal (GOST) on private arms dealing fairs. Nikita is the master of working on short—and long-term projects that keep him moving. This strategy is excellent because it allows short-term ideas to become books, filling […]