The life of the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin has one of those tragic endings that lingers on the mind, with his last days, in particular, still the subject of debate. However, Benjamin’s relevance in contemporary culture transcends his complicated biography, resting firmly on the quality of a corpus of writing that includes influential […]
There is a moment in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads (2021) where a middle-aged woman who was hospitalized in her youth after a psychotic episode suspects that her teenage son might suffer the same fate. In a poignant scene, she struggles to talk to him about her past and how anxious she feels about the possibility […]
How much should a photographer’s style define the documentation of their subjects? Inspired by religious painting, theater, and film, Lúa Ribeira’s first photobook depicts people in the margins, a fuzzy category that, in this case, includes economic migrants, religious communities, residents of special needs institutions, and those living and working on the streets. Subida al […]
I’m often put off by the cliquey culture around Japanese photobooks, but there was something hypnotizing about the cover picture in Toshio Shibata’s Day for Night of hundreds of stacked Pepsi Cola crates illuminated by the fervent light of dusk. Simply put, it made me want to see more, which is as good a job as a […]
I came to Small Myths entirely unfamiliar with Mikiko Hara’s work, but I was immediately taken by the beauty of her images, which lingered in my head for months after encountering them. A functional book design (lustre paper, paperback cover, manageable size) guarantees that the focus remains on the work, not on the empty pyrotechnics that materiality […]
Curran Hatleberg’s River’s Dream (TBW, 2022) is a personal exploration of the American South. The book – an eagerly awaited, critically acclaimed, and exquisitely printed object with plenty of good pictures – didn’t resonate with me as much as I wanted. It all starts with how Hatleberg posits the sequence as a journey into a dream world, […]
The melancholy of Ben Huff’s Atomic Island is palpable before even opening the book. The textured cloth gray cover evokes the muddiness of melting snow and, as an extension, beauty’s ephemeral nature. A tipped-in picture on the back of a nautical horizon offers a pensive respite to end (or begin) our journey into the city where this […]
In the same way that we tend not to think of novels as archives of words, even if philologists can study them in such a way, it seems odd to describe photobooks as archives of images, even if that’s what they are on a fundamental level. Aglaia Konrad’s book Japan Works (2021) includes colour and […]