Sons of the Living (Trespasser 2024) is Bryan Schutmaat’s opus. It is the summation of a decade-plus of making exceptional photographs. I have been familiar with his work for some time, and seeing his work and career grow has been a pleasure. He is also a good dude and supportive of other artists. That should […]
Gregory Halpern’s photobook King, Queen, Knave has been nineteen years in the making. The first images for the photobook were shot while Halpern was a student in the MFA program at California College of the Arts, where he studied under his mentor, the photographer Larry Sultan. At the time, Halpern felt lost and adrift, unsure […]
It has taken me a few weeks to elucidate my feelings in reviewing Gregory’s new book King, Queen, Knave, published by MACK this past month. I had previously seen some photographs in a workshop we facilitated in Athens with Gregory, Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Tim Carpenter. I remember the images well, though I am […]
Paul Graham’s new books Ambergris/Verdigris, published this year by MACK, have several parallels worth exploring. First and foremost, it should be said that these titles feel like a return to form. While I am a fan of most of Graham’s bodies of works, the last books have been very inward and family-oriented. There is […]
Photographer Larry Sultan’s iconic photobook Pictures from Home, initially published in 1992, found renewed acclaim with its 2017 re-release by MACK. Sultan’s intimate exploration of familial bonds captured the attention of audiences worldwide, culminating in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1989. The impact of Sultan’s photographic series resonated […]
Putting my thoughts on this book together has taken me a while. Most of this comes down to trying to understand how I feel about the subject or lack of subject within the work and the position of the author(s) to that. I often have a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to people photographing […]
Keisha Scarville and I spoke via email to discuss her new book lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound (MACK, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award. The book is constructed with images from several bodies of work over the past 20 years, each of which in its own way investigates […]
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. […]
During a talk he gave to his students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1980, Larry Sultan opened up about the challenges he faced with his latest series of photographs featuring swimmers in the community pools of the Bay Area. The young photographer struggled to justify this new body of work, as the […]
Full Article on Patreon …In assessing Dark Matter, I am also reasonably confident that this use of newspaper imagery is lodged in the artist’s practice from influences such as Michael Schmidt, whose book Ein–Heit, produced in the 90s, made great use of similar aesthetics of inconvenient German history, which was photographed and hung […]
“He capered toward Bill, and the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.” William Golding, Lord of the Flies “In Huts, Temples, Castles, MACK returns with a new book from Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. As is the distinct emphasis on architecture and vernacular sensibility, all typological […]
Going through a box of photographic sketchbooks this week after a prolonged studio move reminded me of the importance of sketching ideas for photobooks ahead of or at least coinciding with moving to digital realms to begin the process of editing and sequencing. My book Dein Kampf (MACK, 2019), has precedents in the photographic […]