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 […]
As an American living in Europe, I have never gotten my head around the vestigial tail of pagan rituals that still occasionally surface here. They do not happen often, but I am continuously bemused when they do. They seem to function on either fire or water. During the opening season, which includes springtime fertility […]
Editor’s note: I just got some more background info on the making of the book. So, it turns out this has always been the intended size (as designed in totality by Chris) and that Steidl actually did print it one point, but the estate rejected the printing for it being overly muddy, which is really […]
Letting my unconscious, rather than my intellect, dictate the progression was important. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, being nude became part of the project early on. And working against that white wall near the two front windows in the so-called living room became a central point. —Melissa Shook I might’ve mistakenly read Sally Stein’s […]
Finding a nameless source’s review of The Lizard online, I read about how I should interpret Gabriele Rossi’s outsized publication published by Deadbeat Club. In its summation, the author points out several pictures from the book from which they wax lyrical about the sublime qualities of the photographs from the position of a non-American, likely […]
Everything in this book reminds me of my upbringing in the Midwest. It feels so painfully familiar. When I mention pain in my assessment, it is because some of this experience gnaws at me and upends the chapters of my life that I have found hard to celebrate or close. I am woefully disobedient […]
It is challenging not to mention Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, concerning Bill Henson’s recent book Liquid Night, published by Stanley/Barker. I am unsure why some writers have avoided it, but here we are. Liquid Night is a sumptuous and gem-like nighttime foray into Times Square (1989) and the adjacent cinema district, beginning at […]
Mikael Siirilä’s Here, in Absence, published by IIKKI in an edition of 500 copies with a soundtrack, is one of 2024’s finest photobook offerings thus far. It was lodged between the somnambulist type of photography previously found in Ralph Gibson and Duane Michal’s dream-state work. The book explores singular images in monochrome that have […]
I am quite taken with the text in Thana’s excellent new book, How Shall We Greet the Sun, published, like her last book, I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows, by Lecturis. I am uncertain exactly how she is engaging with the concepts of sentimentality and nostalgia, being that she seems to be using […]
Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen’s new book Self Reflection, published by Danish young heavyweight Disko Bay, is a fascinating foray into the psychic territory of mirror play, in which bodies double, dissolve, and align with the subconscious. It would be easy to call the work psychedelic, but that precludes pre-existing conditions, which, like Surrealism, are contained in […]
Ruptures and Raptures It is hard to know where to start writing about a book with such ominous tendencies at its heart. Monuments by Trent Parke, published by Stanley/Barker in 2023 and its third printing in spring 2024, has a doomsday proximity to it. It is hard to explain why I feel this […]
“Of what one cannot speak, whereof one must be silent.” L.W. Sure, it’s slightly glib to usher in a review with Wittgenstein’s oft-quoted (often misaligned, here too) citation regarding meaning and language. It will surely make scholars of the philosopher’s work uncomfortable/annoyed. Yet, I frequently think of this quote for my purposes […]