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 […]