What strikes me as an interesting premise in Florian Merdes’s book Steamcracker is the enforced myopic rendering of details and patterns, which turns the book and its intense sequences into something minutely chaotic. There is a world underneath the surface of things, a rhythm and a dedication to line that emanates in Florian’s book. […]
A perplexing book, Vittorio Mortarotti’s new publication Soil, released this year by Skinnerboox, hints at, amongst other topics, lives lived at the margins of political existence. It does this without ever pushing an obvious agenda or confirming the bias. Throughout the book, certain themes recur. There is a specific anti-narrative device at play […]
Alessandra Sanguinetti Some Say Ice MACK/Magnum Photo A girl plays the piano convincingly. Another different girl, spotlit, plays a different piano, slightly less convincingly. Steam rises from a river, possibly black, convincingly. A buffalo mourns Its condition confined between fences during a winter snowstorm, most convincingly. A man’s hands clean a six-shooter pistol, and I […]
Diane Arbus, from Untitled This is a 20k-word reaction to Diane Arbus’s posthumously published work Untitled by Aperture. The post comes from a long reaction post on Brad Feuerhelm’s Instagram, where various members of the photographic community replied with their thoughts about the book and its ethical boundaries. The resulting post is a […]
“The de-anthropocentric consideration of nature, of particle, of process is necessary to discuss the framing of new non-human realities” Let’s consider an alternative version of history that is based on material instead of human folly. There must be a history individuated for the way in which non-animate objects such as petroleum, electricity, and […]
“All are slightly queasy in appearance, the Technicolor saturation making the images unbelievable to some extent, which adds to the delirium of her dream state”. High-intensity color saturation in a photograph creates something of a parallel universe in which things can feel positively uncanny. I would suggest that in terms of historical notation […]