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 […]