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 […]
There are still true eccentrics with exceptional ability out in this world, navigating the trenches of culture, unashamed to live life as art, and art as life. These characters are often characterized by a performative lifestyle that echoes the bohemian notions of 20th-century living. I revel when I stumble across their work, find innumerable reasons […]
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 […]