In the 1911 Boy Scouts of America Handbook for Boys, there’s a diagram showing ten different tents that can be created from a single piece of canvas. The diagram resembles something you might find in a geometry textbook, carefully marked with lines, semicircles, angles and numbers. Contained in a single rectangle are the plans for […]
… how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. Marcel Proust The charm of memory, Proust says, lies in the fact that it can’t […]
Moe Suzuki’s father suffers from glaucoma – a disease of the eye which slowly robs the individual of their sight. The condition is usually associated with a loss of peripheral vision, but it brings other symptoms too – glare, halos around objects, voids or absences in the visual field. Glaucoma sufferers often describe the world […]
I’ve been wondering lately why it is that abstract photography is so often assumed to be politically neutral. It’s tempting to treat the experience of abstract images as a kind of formal exercise or ocular game, but there’s no rule that says a photograph must resemble the real world in order to express concerns about […]
A few years ago, I had the chance to spend an afternoon inside Mario Ciampi’s 1970 Berkeley Art Museum – a Brutalist labyrinth of overlapping concrete galleries and walkways jutting out into the middle of an enormous central chamber. The building – damaged by earthquakes and already reinforced in numerous places with i-beams – had […]
Argentinian publishing house SED Editorial was founded in 2019. SED’s publications take a unique approach to the photobook, combining literature and fiction with images that challenge both the form of the photograph and the way it is created. Eugenie spoke with founding editor Martín Bollati late in 2021. ES: I want to start by asking […]
Seascape: two basal planes of water and sky in symbiosis, drawn together at a horizon, proximate but never touching. An island, crystalline sand along the shoreline. Palm trees. Paradise, adulterated. What kind of legacy will we leave our planet, long after humanity is nothing more than a degraded biochemical trace, bubbles of organic vapour circling […]
The first known maps – simple diagrams of the earth and sky – date back tens of thousands of years. Looking at these early representations now, it’s unlikely that we’d recognise them as maps, because they contain no instructions for finding our own position in the landscape. Like their ancient precursors, modern maps record the […]
I first encountered the work of photographer Jo Ractliffe in 2008, around the time her book Terreno Ocupado was published. For many outside her native South Africa, Terreno Ocupado – and the two books that followed, As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2010) and Borderlands (2015) – marked an entry point into the remarkable work […]
The idea of the city as a historical and political text has been around for most of the modern era, but it reached a critical point amongst urbanists and intellectuals in the last decades of the twentieth century. Architecture and urban space were seen as a codex onto which layered narratives – of history, politics, […]