Motel 42 (Leaf, 2024) is another testament to the never-ending slew of American road trip books. However, in Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon’s book, you can’t see much of America outside of the cigarette-stained roadside motel rooms she and her lover Adrien have occupied. You can read about the places they visited in the back of the book, […]
If you happened to attend the 2009 NY Art Book Fair, you might have come across Gregory Halpern’s Omaha Sketchbook on the table of J&L Books. This early version was rough and unassuming, printed on a laser printer and spiral-bound, its pages made from cheap white paper with small contact prints affixed throughout. The images […]
As a collector of vintage photography with a penchant for the curious, horrific, and sometimes downright traumatic, it is no surprise that I gravitated to Ossian Brown‘s book Haunted Air published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. There also appears to be a new 2022 edition available. I am reviewing the book now as it […]
” I think of these efforts often as “Collecting as Practice” and yet most collectors see it simply as a byproduct of their obsession over that of an artistic pursuit” I have been studying collectors of vernacular photography whose drives and holdings pose an interesting possibility for some time. Collectors are an […]
“I have assumed this focus on the found vernacular to be American in nature. However, the details of national ownership is missing apart from the rise of American modernism or the focus on its anti-thesis, namely quaint small town America advertising often hand painted and rough” It is somehow impossible not to mention […]