Lara Shipley’s latest book Desire Lines is one of those books that genuinely does manage to tackle a lot and do it justice. Desire Lines is an examination of the desert of the Southwest of the USA. It draws a parallel between the fraught migration of white settlers during periods of manifest destiny and the […]
For better or worse, something I think is often true is that most of the photography we see is produced for commercial purposes. Whether it’s a thoughtfully produced series of images or the endless stream of catalogued products on an online store, our collective visual vernacular is, at least in some part, dominated by commercial […]
Ewan Telford’s Ecology of Dreams is a searing criticism of Los Angeles, directly undercutting the glitz and celebrity of the city by emphasising its industry, roads and inequality. Over the course of this book, Telford unpicks much of southern California’s self-smug marketing showing, from the outset, a much more uncanny and unpleasant place. While Los […]
In 2019, a friend of mine and I decided to go hiking in the Isle of Skye in the middle of winter. While we’re both life long environmentalists and both love nature, we found that we come to the same things from different places. Talking about photography, he (a British man) remarked that he felt […]
Kat Wood’s Skudde (Ceremony Press, 2022) is a slow look at the lives of shepherds, sheep and the work that they do. Photographs in this book show the routines and labour that shepherds engage in: watching the sheep, caring for them, observing and even providing surgery. While the book is quite short, it does successfully […]
One of the most common narratives in science fiction is the risks and gains of humans playing God. Yet while, for most of us, these stories may seem far-flung and unlikely, in very odd places human intervention is creating new life. Klaus Pichler’s book The Petunia Carnage probes the confusing man-made creation of a new […]
Dairy Character (Saint Lucy Books, 2021) is a book through which Odette England seeks to unpack the tangles of femininity, labour, childhood, love and home. Much of the book is concerned with England’s formative experiences: observing and participating in the work of a dairy farm; learning what being a woman on the farm could mean; […]
Laurel Mountain Laurel (Deadbeat Club, 2021) is a book that sits well within the wider photographic exploration of America’s Rust Belt. It seems that there have been many bodies of work about this region: Gregory Halpern’s A and Jason Koxvold’s Knives are two that come to mind. In Laurel Mountain Laurel we see the tropes […]
Chloe Dewe Mathews’ Thames Log uses the river Thames as a place to explore ritual, history and connection. Drawing on interests that the photographer has explored in previous projects, Thames Log represents a continuation of her style, approach, research and sensibilities. While most of the time this plays well into her strengths, the images do […]
While Virginia Wilcox’s debut book Arboreal (Deadbeat Club, 2021) may appear to be about trees, it is much more about honesty and acceptance. Among the harsh sun, skeletal trees and hewn pathways of the parks, Arboreal feels, to me, as much about taking somewhere on its own terms as the plants that are the subject […]