Mårten Lange – Threshold

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 […]

Toshio Shibata – Day For Night

  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 […]

Uta Genilke – Replikant

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 […]

Five Photobooks from 2023

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. […]

Henry Schulz – People Things

  The photographs in this series were taken between 2020-2022 in Germany. Taken in seemingly forgotten spaces that bear the traces of past human intervention. The places are in a state of transformation, which is slowly taking place. Sometimes, it is a seeming recapture of nature or a blurred state of abandonment. In photographically precisely […]

Alejandro “Luperca” Morales – El Retrato de Tu Ausencia

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg set out to create a work in which erasure/negation would define the principal production method. Instead of building a drawing or painting up from aggregated layers, the artist made a conscious conceptual decision to work backward from the point of completed artwork back to a form of trace in which the […]

Petra Stavast S75 1280 × 960 pixels

  In a moment where technology desires to exponentially double and triple its rate of occupancy in our fevered minds with its unlimited growth prospect, followed by its unmitigated potential to cause alarm instead of vague dreams of progress, from the militarism of our economies to the pursuit of transhuman desires of biological co-habitation to […]

Interview with Dan Skjæveland on 33 Suspensions

Dan Skjæveland is a Norwegian artist living in Trondheim. He recently published his first monograph with Nearest Truth Editions. I spoke to Dan about his way into photography, his process and the making of his book 33 Suspensions. — ASX: Let’s talk about your beginnings. How did you come to photography? Dan Skjæveland: I came to photography […]

Bertien van Manen – Gluckauf

Coal mining is a very peculiar enterprise. The 19th and 20th Centuries committed untold heaves of labor to its extraction. It fuels communities, yet its extraction suggests a disemboweling of the land where these communities settle. The prospect of coal mining is one of capital and capitalism. The very human clay that mines these enterprises […]

Aapo Huhta – Gravity

  I feel a common bond with this book. Aapo Huhta has explored a few different terrains that I have also explored or happened upon over the last decade, and he has combined them compellingly. It is another book in an increasingly exciting year for the publisher Kult Books, whose imprint I am following closely […]

Julie van der Vaart – Blind Spot

Full Article on Patreon Julie van der Vaart‘s Blind Spot (VOID, 2022) aims to reconcile the body with geological formations that illustrate the schism between the notion of time and its readability by the mind and body of humankind. A long-term project, the book is a thick volume of van der Vaart’s photographs veiled in […]

Valerio Polici – Interno

Full Article on Patreon   …The book is well-sequenced and edited by the Studiofagnel team, with passages of images coordinated by gold and brown to off-white images of textiles and walls. A labyrinthian element asks the viewer to navigate through the corridors of Polici’s world akin to reading Borges. Nothing is inevitable, but the viewer’s […]