Awoiska van der Molen The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves

  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 […]

Bharat Sikka – The Sapper

“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 […]

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 […]

Nearest Truth Year-Long Photobook Program

PHOTOBOOK YEAR-LONG COURSE MAY 2022 – MAY 2023 The Intent ​ I have been enthralled with the photobook medium since the late 90s. I do not see the photobook as a simple vessel for photography. I see it as a medium that can be understood as the final message. The book suits me as a […]

Thomas Kuijpers Hoarder Order American Accumulations

“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” […]

Bertrand Cavalier Concrete Doesn’t Burn, it Crumbles.

  “Struggle is often written in the foundation of our city’s (un)natural architecture”     Struggle is often written in the foundation of our city’s (un)natural architecture. In our rural areas, it is marked by temporary institutions-the grass, trees, fields and clearings bear the organization of bomb craters and sweeps of forest shoulder a mane […]

Marina Caneve: Are They Rocks or Clouds?

“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

Awoiska van der Molen’s The Living Mountain

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 […]