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 […]
Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]
The world as will. And representation. Time is a flat circle, The Returnal, Cosmic materiality, and our conceptual place within it. Quantum feelings, quantum seeing. Numerous artists have grappled with our place within the sublime, rotating blue rock we call home as it spins through the vast cosmos, manacled to a bright ball of fiery […]
I wake under a blanket of gritty black ash; my bare limbs are as swollen and as calcified as the enduring night above me. No rag swaddled or other can be found to leverage my cooling body against the rising cold. I lie as naked as a grape. I turn my head to the side; […]
The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter […]
The photographs in this series were taken between 2020-2022 in Germany. Taken in seemingly forgotten spaces that bear the traces of past human intervention. The places are in a state of transformation, which is slowly taking place. Sometimes, it is a seeming recapture of nature or a blurred state of abandonment. In photographically precisely […]
In sleep or in wakefulness, we are inhabited by images. Swimming just below the surface, they sometimes dash before us with the swoop of the flying fish. Slippery, they can be hard to hold onto. We are a repository of latent images that linger within us, awaiting to be conjured. Whilst the primary visual cortex […]