Thomas Demand: House of Card
“Demand found in Lautner’s dusty models a way of problem solving and working through designs even though these were for Lautner’s building proposals that never saw realisation.”
Category Archives: Germany
Photobooks of the Year 2020/Welcome to the Castle
“Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” This […]
Gerry Johansson- Ehime & Lalendorf und Klaber
“it is strange for me to consider his efforts as Swedish and yet there is something to the examination of what can only be referred to as the National Camera, implicit in that sentiment are all of the complications of generalizations and archetypes. I am not trying to espouse something concrete, but rather […]
Mischa Dickerhof’s Rear Window
“In the case of the schism between our home life and the outside world, it takes a taxing event to traction our movements in order to think through the slowness of change beyond the window sill” Frame by frame, the casualties of observance are often manacled to an enveloping banality, a nothingness that […]
Hans-Christian Schink’s Slowness as Method in Hinterland
"Slowness as an idea is to suggest something still in the photographic image. If not still, it suggests something tectonic or glacial in pace" Slowness in photographic terms reflects an indebtedness to a few varying factors. One is of course technical. Large cameras take by comparison a very long time to set up and [...]
A Texture Akin to Language: Alan Huck Revisits Michael Schmidt’s Waffenruhe
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.” There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s […]
Kominek Books: Support Photography Book Shops #4
“I had a calming moment and I started to nurture my love for cinema. So I guess for me to play the long game was to end up making cinema, starting by photography, then making music and so on. Cinema is the unification of all arts” BF: Michael Kominek-artist, publisher, gallerist, book seller-what […]
Bildband Berlin: Support Photography Bookshops #3
“I’d been playing drums in a few bands, Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab among others, and between tours and photo jobs I’d take off on photo projects of my own, often to Berlin. Eventually I got a place in Berlin, because I realised it had a lot of what London was losing, it’s a […]
Land’s End: Trauma is a Strange Attractor
“We are on occasion reminded on occasion of a great plague pit, its underground presence rewarded with a blue plaque to signify its existence as both a terrible debacle in our local history and yet it tellingly reminds us of the foreboding possibility for futures yet unspoken” Trauma is a strange attractor. Just as […]
Udo Hesse: Tagesvisum Ost-Berlin
“The moat as it were, was governed by armament and barbed wire with an intervening hinterland of desolate stretch impolitely, if realistically referred to as the Death Strip. You can consider the Death Strip as an evaporated moat in which many escapees gave their lives fleeing the reverse castle. The reverse castle in real terms, […]
A Conversation with Tim Carpenter
“Maybe just to plant a stake in the ground, I’d also say that topics are not necessary. Which doesn’t at all mean that one can’t have one; just that one needn’t”. This conversation took place over a year of emailing and should be read as informal. The intention was to talk about Tim’s […]
Benjamin Pfau: Isthmus, A Nocturnal Biopic
“So, why do you go to Bangkok if you are under 50, able-dicked and not looking to run an anti-biotics course every Monday morning? You float, you drift and you embed yourself in loose associations that prohibit direct and long-term commitment to form, but rather situate the time spent in a separate category that […]