As a lecturer in documentary photography, there is one particular session I whip out with some regularity. In it, I present case studies centred around roughly the same topic, but produced with different methodologies and presented in different media formats. More specifically, I show documentary work that has been done surrounding Cancer Alley, that heavily […]
Pleased to meet youHope you guess my nameBut what’s puzzling youIs the nature of my game The Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil Perhaps astonishingly, Riley C. Goodman’s From Yonder Wooded Hill is the second book I have reviewed for this platform that invokes the devil, both photographically and textually. Not only that, Goodman’s […]
Doris A. Derby was, by all accounts, a formidable person. Her credentials include becoming a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at sixteen, being a student activist at university, and ultimately going down to Mississippi by special request of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to develop an adult […]
In the dying days of 2017 I decided to embark on an American road trip. Rather than travelling from east to west, I made my way from south to north instead, by loosely following the trajectory of the Mississippi. I drove from New Orleans to Chicago, via Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, Jackson, Memphis, St. Louis, […]
By simply glancing at the pictures and scanning the accompanying texts, you can generally ‘get’ the subject matter of most photo books, even if you return to them at a later date and discover unexpected hidden depths. Not so with the recent publication of Bill Dane’s work. For this is no ordinary photo book. Assumption […]
It’s the witching hour. A dog barks, a wolf howls, a coyote shrieks. The piercing sound travels through the woods, bounces off the hills, echoes through the valleys. It shatters bones, reverberates through the body. It is an ominous, mournful, otherworldly melody that lasts for hours. Awake I lie, snug in my sleeping bag and […]