Some photobooks are detailed by their direct exercises in story building. In contrast, others ask that the viewer read them holistically as an environment, a stage in which ideas are distributed, but with fewer absolutes regarding their nature. Hints are dropped, and some images carry the conceptual load of what the press release suggests as […]
It is challenging not to mention Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, concerning Bill Henson’s recent book Liquid Night, published by Stanley/Barker. I am unsure why some writers have avoided it, but here we are. Liquid Night is a sumptuous and gem-like nighttime foray into Times Square (1989) and the adjacent cinema district, beginning at […]
Infrastructure and industrial sites offer an abstract alternative to the everyday environment. Though most of the sites associated with infrastructure remain hard to visit for various reasons, most of which deal in “security” issues, their strange form and dispossession of people in general terms make their profiles eerily desirous to photograph. There […]
“Reading through them, I realised that the best ones seemed to create a kind of mental-image in my mind’s eye – which due to the tone of the text often took the form of a very deadpan, monotone, and even monochrome photograph of a little scene in small-town America; I was imagining a very straightforward picture made by Walker Evans or Lee Friedlander or Diane Arbus or others, of four dogs sitting on top of a car, or a guy standing next to a tree in the middle of the afternoon with bloody knuckles…”
“They become meditative plates in which the living continue with all their baggage to be stopped and given a reflexive moment in which to breath out”.