What a strange process it is to sift through the remains of an anonymous person’s photographic trail. You look for clues of authorship, economic circumstance, and their loved ones who emerge through their images in repetition. You try to stitch together a narrative when there may very well not be one to consider. This is […]
The gravity of our current moment lies not only in the event itself, but the image that the event has been spun into; namely a large web of the intolerable. Throughout the past year, the constant pressure of the Covid situation has led to a new depiction of the world in which fear, sickness, and […]
The term family is a loaded concept. It suggests something intimate and forged of a bond that is hard to break though it can be called into question. It never feels like a neutral term. From its earliest days, photography has made use of subjects closest to the operator. Photographing children, partners and parents is […]
Bas Losekoot’s Out of Place is a study of people meandering through urban environments. The locations that Losekoot photographed in the book are cited as Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Mexico City, New York and more. At first glance, the work reminds me of a number of urban image projects of a similar fashion by […]
“Accompanied by a textual silence throughout the book, the repetition of the same gesture forges a totemic significance by accruing an emotional and auditory power similar to the effects of mantra-chanting.”
In leafing through Anton Roland Laub’s critical “Last Christmas (of Ceaușescu)”, I find myself thinking about how traumatic justice is performed for a public and how we respond to images broadcast in which death is used to reclaim sovereign unification. I am reminded that these documents or transmissions facilitate belief that is necessary to […]
Manifest destiny is an American concept that has been used to propel the country forward to this day. In the Nineteenth Century, the term was used as a way to justify westward expansion and the legitimacy of both slavery and genocide. If God willed that man travel West spreading word, religion and culture, then how […]
I was convinced that before writing this that I would have a few examples of books about hunting in my mind when I began to type, but I am drawing a blank. I can think of a few things like Les Krims The Deerslayers, I can imagine or conjure up some images of hunting in […]
Jindřich Štreit is a Czech photographer that I was not much aware of before recently receiving his book Village People 1965-1990 published late last year by Buchkunst Berlin. I was curious about the artist as Buchkunst Berlin has been publishing quite interesting, if at times haunting and punishing books such as the Dieter Keller Eye […]
“The act of making a portrait can be a genuine form of bonding, a way for an artist to show empathy for what he or she believes that people represent other than themselves.”
RM: What is “home“ to you? Maybe also talk about where and how you grew up and where you feel your roots are. MDG: This is a question I’ve been asking myself many times in the last few years and – to be frank – I still don’t have a definitive answer. I’m more prone […]
“Berlin’s character is not in its facade, but rather its margins” Berlin’s legacy of the wall and the legacy of the war mark its facade and its imperial history like a pock-marked child whose scars were never allowed to heal due to the constant re-opening of their scabrous surface. Berlin is a […]