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, […]
A certain portion of our early adulthood is marked by a sense of continuity: the person I feel myself to be today is not much different in essence from the child I once was. This continuity can often be felt in images: the self looking out at me from old photographs is a younger but […]
Based in New York, photographic artist Miranda Lichtenstein has spent almost two decades exploring the dialogue between image and abstraction. Although she studied under American documentary photographer Joel Sternfeld, Lichtenstein soon began pushing the boundaries of traditional photography, using varied techniques such as collage and abstraction to interrogate the material properties of the medium. Lichtenstein’s […]
A few years ago, as I was leaving a gallery following an artist’s talk, a woman approached me and handed me a piece of paper. It was a drawing of me. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘it’s a bit of a habit of mine. I enjoy drawing interesting-looking people.’ The sketch was beautifully […]
When I walk along a shingle beach, my focus is seldom on the view out to sea, but on the stones beneath my feet. I always pick one up to take away with me, and the one that I choose always has a special quality that sets it apart from the rest: the pattern on […]
Some years ago, at an estate sale in the town of Hastings-on-Hudson – a small town about 20 miles north of New York City – filmmaker Peter Ward purchased the archive of an amateur photographer called Bernard Taylor. For forty dollars, Ward took home six boxes of newspaper and magazine clippings, handwritten and typed notes, […]
In the mountains on the western fringes of Tokyo prefecture are the relics of a long-vanished civilisation, its ruins scattered and overgrown among stands of pine. The inhabitants once carved terraces into the sides of these hills, blasted roads through living rock, filled the darkness with light and the sound of machines. Not much remains […]
When Tyrone Williams’ recent book, Aesthetix, was published by Bronze Age Editions in late 2020, the Northampton-based photographer was already known for his singular visual style. Developed over the course of several years and two collaborative books (Ordinary Fragments 1 and 2), with French photographer Jean-Christophe Recchia, Williams’ eye singles out the clean-lined graphic forms […]
The idea that built structures are vehicles for expressing ideology is widely accepted in architectural circles – think of the cool rationality of Le Corbusier’s apartment blocks, or the hubris of Albert Speer’s New Reich Chancellery. The political dimensions of architecture, on the other hand, emerge more spontaneously, in the gap between architect’s plan and […]
‘Nature, always simple, employs but four materials in the composition of her scenes, ground, wood, water, and rocks.’ So remarked English politician and writer Thomas Whately, in his 1770 book Observations on Modern Gardening. It’s a simple statement, but it sets out a complex problem. For the eighteenth-century observer, nature was something of a contradiction, […]