This book is something of an outlier in the photobook legacy of eminent British artist Jem Southam, whom I usually associate with a type nouveau pastoral, a celluloid Constable traipsing the foggy lands of Ole Blighty. His notable contributions to the photobook include The Moth, Four Winters, The Pond at Upton Pyne, Rockfalls and Ponds, […]
As a species, we have become addicted to the spectacle of political theater. Events are organized to engage our sensitive minds in the furor of ideological division, and arguments become tribal tools meant to manifest the supposed will of Western democracy, though little of this exhibitionism uncovers the true vessel of political life, fueled by […]
The idea of the outsider is fascinating in photography. On one hand, the audience for photography loves a surprise story, one that challenges the canon and one that appears to materialize out of nowhere, without precedent, and shaped from the margins of conventions. What is fascinating is the tendency to think such things are less […]
In full declaration, as a fan of all parties involved, I hereby cannot deny my overwhelming urge to state that this book, in the canon of Raymond J. Meeks Esq., is hitherto unnecessary, but welcomed nonetheless. It is a compilation of misses, outtakes, and the unloved and weeded-out, minus one image of an alabaster girl […]
The Balkans are very hard to describe. Though I have spent an inordinate amount of time in Greece, mostly in its capital, having traveled through the Balkans to get there, I remember a sense of something enigmatic, misty, and compelling as we traveled to and from Greece. I remember thinking about it all on a […]
The ideas of usefulness and aesthetic appearance often come into conflict over time in architecture. Decay, cracks, erosion, and palimpsests of change clash and defy our natural sense of wholeness when we look at buildings that have persisted over decades, if not centuries. I am thinking particularly of 19th and early 20th-century buildings, those that […]
Slightly enamored with the idea of architecture in photography, a clear use of terms that suggests photography to be the primary category of assessment over architecture, I have found myself leafing through books devoted to Hélène Binet, Joachim Brohm, Andrea Gehrke, Lucien Hervé, Karl-Hugo Schmölz, and others who have made architecture a central subject matter […]
Everything feels perched at the precipice of dissolution. Stifled, held in a listless and ambulatory state as the world, governed by men in search of machines, asks us to forgo the rampant onslaught of civil rights, of disagreeable concerns concerning the future, for the contrarily stale epiphany of the Great Progress, a pogrom in silhouette. […]
Throughout the 1990s, there was a distinct emphasis on the body and its decline. Work produced during the 90s, whether from the aids crisis or the ideological shift away from the Catholic church toward an atheistic and bodily autonomy, signaled a visceral approach to photography. The documentary Vile Bodies (1999), produced by Chris Townsend and […]
There are still true eccentrics with exceptional ability out in this world, navigating the trenches of culture, unashamed to live life as art, and art as life. These characters are often characterized by a performative lifestyle that echoes the bohemian notions of 20th-century living. I revel when I stumble across their work, find innumerable reasons […]
In the ever-expanding historiography of photobook culture and history, once we escape the tedium of nationalism embedded in the ceaseless photobooks from “X” country, we can finally begin to untie genre, and to make sense of what attitudes that exceed these nationalistic behaviors have been present in the making of books throughout the 20th and […]
So, I’ve never watched a single one of Lanthimos’s films. Maybe this will change in the near future. Dunno. I am aware that I do not know a Dog’s tooth from a Frog’s gooch. In order to subvert my programming, which some of my more learned friends insisting that I am already in denial over […]