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 […]
Hristina Tasheva’s newest book, Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery (Self-published, 2023), is an ambitious attempt at mapping the disparities between two national experiences of Communism in the twentieth century — the Dutch and the Bulgarian — as they were impacted by the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The […]
I’m still determining who needs to hear this, but Mark Steinmetz remains one of the most profound voices in the rising tide of what I suggest is a revisiting of humanism in photography. Given the clamor and tumult of the past years, it is not a surprise that work like Mark’s, which, at its base, […]
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; […]
Her work invests the themes of female representation, private space, domesticity and intimacy within the framework of a photographic and material approach which oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes and images documentaries. She explores from the photographic and printed image, collage, sculpture and installation. In doing so, her projects deploy bodies as spaces and unexpected […]
Humans leave traces of their presence almost everywhere they inhabit in the built environment. It’s difficult for humans not to leave a mark, as they have a tendency to leave a marker of their passing, however involuntary or intended. This is partly due to how we view our world and its obligations to suit our […]
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 […]
Keisha Scarville and I spoke via email to discuss her new book lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound (MACK, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award. The book is constructed with images from several bodies of work over the past 20 years, each of which in its own way investigates […]
I did not want to use Bladerunner as an analogy for this photobook simply because the title implies an association. I find nothing immediate in the book that relates the film to Uta’s miasmatic and crepuscular photographs. However, I could marginally make that leap if I wanted to chalk the images up to having a […]