This is certainly one of the most misleading photobooks that I have seen in some time, despite being a fan of the artist’s previous book. What appears on the outside as a simple reading of America’s vernacular signage is, in fact, a kind of premonition, or perhaps an acknowledgement of where things stand along the […]
I first encountered the visceral photographs of Lucile Boiron a few years ago when I bought a copy of her book Mise en Pièces, also published by Belgian publisher Art Paper Editions (APE), like her new book Bouche. I remember being very excited about the book, as it reminded me of the visceral tendencies in […]
I do not know that much about Hatleberg’s work. I did get a copy of his last book, River’s Dream, as I had missed out on Lost Coast, his first book with eminent American publishers TBW Books. My surface reading of River’s Dream suggested a post-Soth investigation of American topography. I was reminded of Doug Dubois, Alec Soth, Kristine […]
It is hard to deny the strange feeling of sharing a room with one of your loved ones who has passed on. The implicit silence is an acknowledgement of toil’s end, though at the time, the personal trauma overtakes this thought in the mind of the living. It casts small echoes. Of course, there is […]
What to do with the business of time? From 2020 to 2023, we were forced to face this question by the global pandemic. It will forever mark generations of people in the 21st Century by its unnerving qualities, its obvious malady, and, more to the point of this conversation, what we were meant to understand […]
The cyanotype is a very flexible process developed from water. One paints or layers ferric ammonium oxalate and potassium ferricyanide on a substrate, usually paper, but also fabric. One then exposes a negative or an object to direct sunlight. After a test has been made, the print is washed in water, revealing a beautiful Prussian […]
There is a penchant, over the past ten to fifteen years or so, for photographic image-making to re-examine landscapes as scratchy abstractions, almost imperceptibly detailed beyond the reach of their granular vistas. This is most evident in the work of Korean/American artist Jungjin Lee, whose series of books and bodies of work detail the shift […]
I have mentioned several projects in the past here that use the window as a mechanism for photographic discourse. There are quite a few mentions of the window as a source for inspiration; perhaps the most well-known is eminent curator John Szarkowski’s discourse about mirrors and windows, and the difference between how an artist […]
Julien Langendorff, Spell Rider The roots of cosmic occultism stretch back as far in time as humans have been able to communicate. There is a hermetic order to the universe that has bewildered and engaged the species, giving license to conjecture, theory, and spiritual whim that exceed what lies before our faces. It is a […]
I am trying to equip my early-morning brain with enough reference points to connect the dots in Marie Quéau’s book Le Royaume (Area Books). I should have been better prepared, as I have seen variations of work over the past decade and have been anticipating its release for some time. As I brood over […]
Growing up in the 90s, transgression in art, as far as I understood, stemmed from the oppressive neoliberalist tendencies carried over from the 80s. Degrees of Thatcherism and Reaganism haunted the landscape of artistry, alongside many questions arising from social issues concerning the body. Gay rights and the grappling of feminism, and more essentially, its […]
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. […]