Ruptures and Raptures It is hard to know where to start writing about a book with such ominous tendencies at its heart. Monuments by Trent Parke, published by Stanley/Barker in 2023 and its third printing in spring 2024, has a doomsday proximity to it. It is hard to explain why I feel this […]
“Of what one cannot speak, whereof one must be silent.” L.W. Sure, it’s slightly glib to usher in a review with Wittgenstein’s oft-quoted (often misaligned, here too) citation regarding meaning and language. It will surely make scholars of the philosopher’s work uncomfortable/annoyed. Yet, I frequently think of this quote for my purposes […]
I recently came across Yoshi Yubai’s work. I was fortunate enough to nab a copy of his last book, Radiation Inspiration (2023), published by La Generale Minerale (screenprinted by Ben Sanair), which I purchased through Le Plac’Art Photo in Paris. The screen printing by Sanair in that book is phenomenal. The book has an introduction […]
I’m still determining who needs to hear this, but Mark Steinmetz remains one of the most profound voices in the rising tide of what I suggest is a revisiting of humanism in photography. Given the clamor and tumult of the past years, it is not a surprise that work like Mark’s, which, at its base, […]
Nucleo is the newest in a series of remarkable books by Belgian artist Wouter Van de Voorde. Living in Canberra, Australia, for a sizable number of years (the Belgian/Aussie accent is a thing to behold), Wouter has been consistently and obsessively photographing his local landscape, family, and whatever bramble or dilapidated structures he can find. […]
The world as will. And representation. Time is a flat circle, The Returnal, Cosmic materiality, and our conceptual place within it. Quantum feelings, quantum seeing. Numerous artists have grappled with our place within the sublime, rotating blue rock we call home as it spins through the vast cosmos, manacled to a bright ball of fiery […]
I wake under a blanket of gritty black ash; my bare limbs are as swollen and as calcified as the enduring night above me. No rag swaddled or other can be found to leverage my cooling body against the rising cold. I lie as naked as a grape. I turn my head to the side; […]
Constellations, compositions, and a caring look at one’s family life make up the mass of Thomas Manneke’s melancholic and melodic ode to often-overlooked photographer Francis Bruguière. Bruguière, an American artist who studied painting at the turn of the Twentieth Century, is known mainly for his photographic abstractions. In line with artists like Alvin […]
Humans leave traces of their presence almost everywhere they inhabit in the built environment. It’s difficult for humans not to leave a mark, as they have a tendency to leave a marker of their passing, however involuntary or intended. This is partly due to how we view our world and its obligations to suit our […]
The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter […]
I did not want to use Bladerunner as an analogy for this photobook simply because the title implies an association. I find nothing immediate in the book that relates the film to Uta’s miasmatic and crepuscular photographs. However, I could marginally make that leap if I wanted to chalk the images up to having a […]
For the complete list, please consult the Nearest Podcast in the following weeks, where I will MC over a much longer list of the great books published this year. For this list, I wanted to keep the books down to five that I feel will define the artist’s career or are crucial to the medium. […]