In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg set out to create a work in which erasure/negation would define the principal production method. Instead of building a drawing or painting up from aggregated layers, the artist made a conscious conceptual decision to work backward from the point of completed artwork back to a form of trace in which the […]
Peppered throughout major cities, including Berlin, where the new photobook Triple Seven by Anne Lass was shot, are clandestine spaces that most of the population will never enter or see. Men’s clubs in North London, brothels in Marseilles, and small gambling rooms in Berlin, as Lass has photographed, are secreted behind a façade of […]
I Am Not A Robot (Witty Books, 2023) asks more questions than it answers. How do we differentiate from the illusions of our constructed virtual worlds and that of reality? How do we satiate our requirement and desire for order in ever-changing environments? Are we confined to an existence based on binary calculations, or can […]
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 […]
Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]
I feel a common bond with this book. Aapo Huhta has explored a few different terrains that I have also explored or happened upon over the last decade, and he has combined them compellingly. It is another book in an increasingly exciting year for the publisher Kult Books, whose imprint I am following closely […]
Equine surgery and medical observation; specialized labor and industrial production. In its study of the Clinica Equina Bagnarola, a renowned horse clinic outside of Bologna, Italy, Andrea Modica’s Theatrum Equorum (TIS books, 2022) touches on each of these subjects fluidly and with considerable grace, in a mode closer to aphorism than to essay. Modica’s images […]
The first time I looked through Igor Posner’s Cargó (Red Hook Editions, 2022) I was bewildered. I did not know, for example, that across 160 pages and what feels like triple that number of images, it would express the disjointedness and poignancy of memory, or that it would render the experience of time passing as […]
Full Article on Patreon …The book is well-sequenced and edited by the Studiofagnel team, with passages of images coordinated by gold and brown to off-white images of textiles and walls. A labyrinthian element asks the viewer to navigate through the corridors of Polici’s world akin to reading Borges. Nothing is inevitable, but the viewer’s […]
Full Article on Patreon Preliminary Analysis of Nakahira Takuma For a Language to Come (Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni) There are several things that I love about Nakahira’s book. The idea that he does not make formal considerations such as vertical vs. horizontal page layout a huge deal. He switched to verticality with […]
Full Article on Patreon I am curious as to what lies between the notion of glancing versus that of observation. Can an observation be reduced to a glance? Can a more prolonged glance become an observation, and what do these questions pose to how we make photographs and how do we view them […]
Full Article on Patreon Andreas Gehrke is someone who I have covered previously for his exceptional photobooks. I have nearly every title he has produced, and standouts include Berlin a Brandenburg, among many others. His output is incredible, and he also self-publishes these titles under his imprint Drittel Books. What I find universal in […]