Staple bound in glossy soft covers with French flaps, with minimal textual elements and simple visual design, Michael Radford’s Crash looks unmistakably like a sales brochure. The reference to sales is reinforced by the embossed title in a font resembling a manufacturer’s logo and the exaggeratedly large ISBN number in the same font on the […]
At first encounter, Aleksei Kazantsev’s Relaxing Chamber strikes the viewer with an ambiguous title. From a layperson’s point of view, the phrasemight suggest a space designed for ordinary relaxation: a spa steam room or massage chamber to release muscles tense from the stresses of life. One might think that the book somehow seeks to put […]
Around 2003-2006 Thom Yorke, the frontman of the band Radiohead, wrote an angry song titled Harrowdown Hill. Its lyrics quite clearly referred to the death of Dr David Kelly, the respected Welsh scientist and UN weapons inspector, and to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a coalition led by the USA and the UK. Yorke […]
Experiencing Nicolai Howalt’s A Journey: The Near Future is a complex process. Or at least it was for me. At first glance, I saw just reprints of photographs taken by rovers on Mars, some of which I thought I had already seen online. Barren landscapes of Martian dust, in irregularly shaped, jagged panoramas stitched from […]
In 1931, Walter Benjamin castigated Albert Renger-Patzsch for his photo book titled The World is Beautiful. In Benjamin’s view, the book used photography to aesthetically transform its subject into something larger than itself, yet without educating the viewer at all as to the social conditions of that subject. Renger-Patzsch’s book, Benjamin wrote, is full of […]