The Cracks on the Floor: Sebastián Mejía’s “Tempo”

“We often expect high-end production values in contemporary photobooks, but not every publication can afford some of the eccentricities that we have become accustomed to. In this sense, Tempo reminds us that our material expectations shouldn’t dismiss publications that use humble materials, often produced outside the usual centers of culture and power.”

Laurenz Berges 4100 Duisburg

    In reading Darius Khondji’s interview with American Cinematographer Magazine from November 5th, 2018 regarding his cinematography work on various films, including David Fincher’s epic noir Se7en (1995), I am reminded of the significance that color balance plays when sculpting atmosphere in a film and also in a photographic body of work. In regarding […]

The Opaqueness of Manifest Destiny: Daniel Reuter’s Providencia

Let’s start at the end with the text that closes Providencia by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra. The author, who lives in Mexico City, felt the urge to visit his country after days of increasingly violent protests against the government due to economic inequality. The unrest eventually led to a curfew and the declaration of a state of […]

Michael Gessner’s Masse

  The age of capital has led civilization to the age of indeterminate surveillance. We are largely unaware of the incremental prying and scrutinizing gestures that global capital has beset upon us. We believe that surveillance, both state and capital are symptoms of our buying patterns in the very least and are maximized by our […]

Nearest Truth Workshop Feature on Patrick Garcia

This begins a series of posts that examine the work of participants and instructors that have featured in the ASX/VOID workshops from 2019 and will now be used to illustrate the Nearest Truth Workshops taking place in Athens in November of 2021.     Nearest Truth is a podcast devoted to photography and culture at […]

Thiago Dezan When I Hear That Trumpet Sound

  I was confronted with three parts of a mental soundtrack while paging through Thiago Dezan’s new book When I Hear The That Trumpet Sound (Selo Turvo, 2021, ed. 200). The first track based on title and the book’s black endpapers and the ominous black cover was Behemoth’s Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel, a rich and […]

Mark Templeton Ocean Front Property

    Original text by Brad Feuerhelm for Ocean Front Property by Mark Templeton Co-Published by Graphical and The Ice Plant     For the Promise of Water     This is my signaling of a complete and utter devotion to the new forms of feral tropicality. I will suggest here and now that for […]

Daniel Stier: A Tale of One City

In 79 a.d, Mount Vesuvius erupted with a volcanic activity that completely destroyed the Bay of Naples region including the small, but thriving community of Pompei. Pompei was a Roman enclave like most at the time. It had markets, homes, and open-air theatres that featured beautiful mosaics, Roman sculptures and was situated close to the […]

Configuring the Archive: Jaime Permuth’s “The Street Becomes”

A few years ago, the Guatemalan photographer Jaime Permuth researched the archives of the Anacostia Community Museum during his Smithsonian Institution Artist Fellowship, where he found images documenting the Latino Festival. According to curator Olivia Cadaval, the event’s first iteration in 1970 came as a response to an inaccurate census count of Latin Americans living […]

Maki: (A) Japan Somewhere

    Maki’s images in Japan Somewhere (Zen Foto Gallery), produced over a fourteen-year period feel anxious and compressed. Though specific to one country, the Frenchman’s images feel anything but declarative. They feel ambulatory, intrepid,  and often chaotic as if shot in a constant state of momentum and high velocity. The frames are heavily compressed […]

Sébastien Cuvelier Paradise City

    Sébastien Cuvelier’s Paradise City (GOST, 2020) combines several rich storytelling elements into one photobook that considers Iran as a historic place pitted against the tumultuous change of the past fifty years as a backdrop for interrogation. Using his own photographs and images shot by his uncle in 1971 on his own odyssey, Cuvelier […]