Hi Arturo, I thought I’d write to you, instead of only about you. It feels less distant that way, which I think too many reviews fall prey to. Anyway, thanks for the book. It’s smaller than I expected, in a good way, and its size and format remind me of a flipbook. It works like […]
Le bateau ivre is a poem by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. It’s famous, but I didn’t know it before Martin Essl’s book of the same name, so I can’t claim to know why. It’s about a boat that becomes unmoored and travels across the sea before wishing to sink. That summary is painfully thin. […]
I always think of Jean-Vincent Simonet’s work in verbs. It seems easier that way, and how else do you talk about photographs that make it feel like you’re tripping (a verb) on mushrooms? So I was surprised to see a photograph that instead felt like nouns on the first page of Kitengela, his latest book. […]
“Evans’s subway photographs of 1938-41 are a bundle of contradictions. They describe people as individuals, and in that fundamental sense the pictures are portraits. But each person is presented as a single unit in a potentially infinite series, and the environment could hardly be more impersonal. Unlike most photographic portraits, these exclude any possibility of […]
In her essay ‘Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping’, writer Sheila Heti describes one of her shopping lists: “a spiralizer, running shoes, vitamins, books, a pregnancy test, white t-shirts, light bulbs, an iPhone case, a milk frother, batteries.” I like this description and Heti’s plain view of desire because it reminds me that it is […]
I’ve always liked Ruth van Beek’s work. It’s tempting to say it’s collage — and in some thin and pragmatic way it is — but I’m also iffy about the term. Doing so throws her work too close to the handful of artists who inevitably spring up as soon as the word “collage” is mentioned: […]
Phil Jung’s Windscreen presents twenty-six photographs of windscreens. Or rather, twenty-six photographs of cars (both interiors and exteriors), mostly taken either through windscreens or with a windscreen in view. The cars are bygone and tired; paint faded, held together by tape and polystyrene. According to Jung, Windscreen is about a social landscape; about “class mobility” […]
Change is felt through repetition. If I run once and never again, I can’t know if I am now a faster runner or not. If I run twice, I may be able to say if I am now faster or not, but there will be no subtlety, only two stark facts facing each other. If […]
Looking at a photograph of something that has passed is a peculiar thing. In doing so, we are able to bring whatever it is into the present, abruptly and with such clarity that the past seems no longer over there but here and now. It is as if, through an image alone, we can delay […]
Most photobooks say something about something. Perhaps it is a photobook’s completeness that is the precursor to this; a chance to put forward a thought, mould it, emphasise it, reiterate it and refine it until it feels undeniably right. But what if a photobook didn’t do this? What if a photobook didn’t try to say, […]