“In literature and film, the desert often serves as a topographic metaphor for interior emptiness, but the reality of this kind of aloneness goes beyond linguistic abstractions – it’s a presence, as palpable as hot sand on the skin.”
“For Levrat, the idea of heterotopia described both the site itself, and the acts of minor carnage that he carried out there – innocent and playful on the surface, but with a subtext of riotous refusal.”
“Every image poses the question of American identity not just from the standpoint of our present reality, but from the playbook of iconic images – most of them from the twentieth century – that make up the history of American photography.”
“Objects are malleable things – mutely concrete, or freighted with almost unbearable significance. Watkins’ photographs share this equivocality, wavering between documents and invocations.”
“Asteroid mining might create a new Arcadia here on earth. But it might also bankroll the creation of gilded playgrounds in the sky, leaving behind a planet full of ruins and redundant humans.”
“Krijno’s images are threaded through with references to South Africa’s colonial history and its fragile post-apartheid democracy.”
“Loder’s constructions may appear simple, even whimsical, but they subvert conventional ideas of landscape in a really clever way.”
“Omaha’s attitudes towards gender are somewhat unreconstructed – when it comes to masculinity, either you’re a man, or you’re not, and it would be easy enough to describe the place with a set of cartoon signifiers: cowboys and cars, guns and tattoos, high-school football and hard men in uniform.”
”It was in the ambivalence of my situation between being a builder and an artist that I realised the rigidity of the class structure in British society and a certain inescapability of this categorisation.”
“The photographs in Volume 1 of In Sardegna are extraordinary. It’s as though Guidi was trying to wrap his wide-angle lens around everything at once: people, cars, buildings, gestures, dogs and donkeys, rocks and trees and landscapes.”
“There’s something unnatural and coercive about the idea of ‘making memories’. Surely memories can’t simply be fabricated at will? Forming a memory is something more organic, more random, and it’s all the more precious for this unpredictability.”
“I think I was working in places like those for quite a while before I knew why I was working in them. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license, so I navigated Virginia on my bicycle or on foot the majority of the time.”