Often, the kind of visual chaos work like this employs can be difficult to grasp initially. It can be hard to comfortably know what it’s doing at a glance. Such opaque work can be said to feel a certain way, but this is often based in intuition; it feels indescribable, and so nothing can be […]
I met Wen at The Photographer’s Gallery in early 2020. Talking over coffee, we shared book dummies with one other. We discussed concerns in making and showing work: one in how viewers engage with work based on one’s personal history and context, and the other the challenge of translating ideas and standards between cultures. I […]
Zaido is a book that is best sat with and read multiple times over a few days. I write “read” because Chikura’s book seems to engage with storytelling and myth methodologically as much as it does with its images themselves. The first thing a reader will see upon opening Zaido is a short pamphlet detailing […]
N.B. I first saw this work when I met Charles Fox at Nottingham Trent University in 2017, where we were both employed. I have since worked with him in a professional capacity on several projects, including with the publisher of this book. Though my appreciation of Buried can’t be separated from seeing it develop in […]
No line of sight, no clear view of the land before. Or perhaps it is the open sea. That pattern — sunlight reflecting off rippling water. Or, nothing. Only grain, blurring slightly into a distance-like fuzz. Trying to find a landmark or signal. A vista muddied by analog smog, like the final playthrough of a […]
Recently, the artist Bruno Roels has been making short runs of postcards, tear-off flyers and silkscreens, and sending them out to people on Instagram. Known for his framed grids of tea-toned darkroom prints of palm trees, he exhibits with galleries and fairs worldwide. Though playful in form, Roels’ interest in these trees is a serious […]
Nature is more raw out in the provincial areas. The desolate and the blooming sit aside one another. Coiling vines and sprawling undergrowth, windswept and seldom-travelled rivers and lightning-cracked trees all impose a stricken grandeur. Out here, angels in old graveyards wear in gusts while livestock are born. At least in Britain, the church is […]
Koji Kitagawa works in Tokyo, Japan, and is best known as one third of SPEW, a collaborative project between himself, Daisuke Yokota and Naohiro Utagawa. One day when searching online, I came across a website showing scans of some particularly unusual and enigmatic books, without any explanation or context. Kitagawa’s books and zines have a […]
For humans, politics and history permeate every place we are in. Although it’s often impossible to actually see that history within a given location, our awareness of it is always there, hanging about us like air. But on Iberia’s forest floor there are only trees. A flashgun lights the way like a torch. Through the […]
Published in 2017, Red Flower 赤花 consists of photographs shot between 1975 and 1977 in Kin and Koza, two towns in Okinawa, Japan. Though most of the images are from Ishikawa’s 1982 debut “Hot Days in Camp Hansen”, Red Flower also shows unpublished images from this same period.