Cai Dongdong – Passing By Beijing

I am previously familiar with Berlin-based Chinese artist Cai Dongdong through his interest in re-purposing vernacular photography. A Game of Photos and Left Right, his previous two books present a playful atmosphere of interrogating the past, playing with the physical artifacts of the photographic medium. In some ways, with A Game of Photos, one is […]

Martin Essl – Le Bateau Ivre

  With the recent emphasis on street photography found in volumes such as Matt Stuart’s Think Like a Street Photographer (Laurence King Publishing, 2021) and Reclaim the Street: Street Photography’s Moment, Matt Stuart with Stephen McLaren (Thames & Hudson, 2023), there seems to be a renewed awakening to the genre. If the countless YouTube videos about […]

Trent Parke – Monument

  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 […]

Yoshi Yubai – Asakusa

I recently came across Yoshi Yubai’s work. I was fortunate enough to nab a copy of his last book, Radiation Inspiration (2023), published by La Generale Minerale (screenprinted by Ben Sanair), which I purchased through Le Plac’Art Photo in Paris. The screen printing by Sanair in that book is phenomenal. The book has an introduction […]

Lee Friedlander – Workers: The Human Clay

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 […]

Igor Posner – Cargó

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 […]

Dave Heath One Brief Moment

  Dave Heath – One Brief Moment Review by Simon Bray   Within the opening pages of Dave Heath’s ‘One Brief Moment,’ there is a certain air of occasion. Gathered masses fill the middle of the street, suggesting that these are not singular moments but a crowd united by a collective sense of anticipation and […]

Ulrich Wüst Cityscapes 1979–1985

  I am attracted to the idea of audibility in photographs. In assessing my desire to hear photographs, I would suggest that this stems from a few reasons. Firstly, the static and still nature of a photograph rent from the passing and often raucous movement of life is singular in its condition to be viewed […]

Luis Baylón Madrid en plata

    Luis Baylón or simply Baylón is a Madrid-based photographer who works on the streets of Spain’s capital, sculpting images from the thousands of possibilities in front of his lens on his daily walks through the city. The images, in their minimal and contrasty monochrome palette, feature a number of different possibilities from which […]

Jermaine Francis Something That Seems So Familiar Becomes Distant

The gravity of our current moment lies not only in the event itself, but the image that the event has been spun into; namely a large web of the intolerable. Throughout the past year, the constant pressure of the Covid situation has led to a new depiction of the world in which fear, sickness, and […]

Bas Losekoot Out of Place

Bas Losekoot’s Out of Place is a study of people meandering through urban environments. The locations that Losekoot photographed in the book are cited as Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Mexico City, New York and more. At first glance, the work reminds me of a number of urban image projects of a similar fashion by […]

Mihai Barabancea: Falling On Blades RomanianAF

  “I actually have no idea what street photography is, but I can oddly sense its look-off-tilted cameras, bit of asphalt, coupla ppl, maybe a mean looking dog, some bit of crazy occurring in the corners, some action as it were”     It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to understand where street photography […]