2024 has been an excellent year for photobooks. I am surprised that after the past few years with fewer titles surfacing into greatness, 2024 has presented so many outstanding titles. It gives me a bit of hope that the medium is picking up again, though I suspect inflation and a general shrinkage of audience […]
The discourse surrounding this book is less bleak than the images themselves. Being a fan of Michael Ashkin’s work, I find this book to be his bleakest, yet when I read his words about the meaning of the book, I do not get the impression that it is necessarily its intention. First, we will start […]
“What did we talk about, my dad and I? The different kinds of plyboard and woodworking joints, the correct way to change the bit of a drill and to hold and level and aim the gun of the welder, how to tell when a tyre has gone bald […]” – Sara Baume, Handiwork, 2020 I […]
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 […]
“The images do not look like images from the present. This suggests the potential for these objects to be lodged in a strange time-warp of consumer nostalgia. In some cases, the images appear as though they are from Dutch products thus complicating their geo-specificity and asking larger questions of tribute and nostalgia in equal measure” […]
“Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” This […]
“I think what was really drawing me to Marina’s book was how it was animating this story of the mountains, their potential and actual destructive forces and how human lives are so dwarfed in the scale of that force yet so emotionally attached to life in the mountains.” – Sunil Shah
Everything is reducible to carbon. From the tip of the pencil that provides musical annotation on a score to the living forest in front of the camera. Carbon provides the means for life and all living forms bend to the will of carbon. Carbon is elemental and essential. It forms more compounds than all the […]
It was the best of years…. Once again it is that time of year where I try to drum up some sort of edit from all of the incredible work the photography book world offers up. This year is difficult as I felt it has been one of the strongest years in recent memory […]
“I was raised alongside the internet, so there was never an othering effect from the introduction to newer technologies, especially the internet.”
“In comparison to film, where a whole instrumentation is at ones disposal to gain and keep a viewer’s attention and involve him or her into an emotional state and consequently within the story, photography and how it is exhibited formed a pretty stark contrast”. -IS