Evgenia Ignatova Highlights

Evgenia Ignatova Highlights   “No art is bereft of political possibility, yet, there is a strain of representation and often politicized meaning that photography is asked to perform in the 21st Century. We are perhaps losing sight of what photography does well, which is to give form to the optical unconscious of the moment that […]

Robin Graubard Road To Nowhere

Review Excerpt Graubard’s Road to Nowhere is a mercurial title. Published by Loose Joints, the last home of which I might expect to find a book on civil war and discontent to be published, the work reflects neither a war book nor a specific Aftermath book. Aftermath or post-event photography is a genre that looks […]

Michael Kerstgens 1986

  There are global moments in history that feel like tipping points of major changes when you view them retrospectively. In the case of Michael Kerstgens exceptional new book 1986 (Hartmann Books, 2021), the writing on the wall could not be more clear looking back at the year. I remember 1986. I am old enough […]

Max Sher Palimpsests

  Though change is metered through the concept of progress in urban space, oftentimes there is an arrestation of form as its transitions from one set of facades to its new progressive and updated counterpart. This arrestation sees the hybridity of new and old caught in a transitional moment in which both are vying for […]

Dieter Keller: Das Auge Des Krieges

“Othering of the loser of a war is important for collective consciousness and acts as a bulwark against the tide of human sympathy in the matters of inhumane consequence”   There are a number of different ways to approach writing about photography and World War II and to be clear, none of them should consider […]

Maria Lax: The Phenomenon of Fire, Regardless Its Truth

“In the case of phenomenon, we often commodify our intentions and collude over a recognized minority of experience based on the slight repetition of the materialization of unnatural form”   There is a common element that divides the paper-thin system of belief between what we consider phenomenon and what we consider truth. This is the […]

Sarah Walker: Pelči Manor A Guide to Attic Photography

“The historical representations of architectural photography deal in large measure with style and period, but are also concerned with the history that passes through the buildings within the frame”.   There are antecedents to every photograph produced in the present day. In the case of architectural photography, there are many ways in which we can […]

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, […]

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Yerevan 1996/1997

    “Armenia and Its role in the central Caucasus make its geography of special geo-political reference given its access point, along with Azerbaijan and Georgia to both the Caspian and Black seas and their lucrative conditions of speculative petrol potential”.   Yerevan, the Armenian capital is built from several considerations of the volcanic. In […]

Mark Power: Good Morning, America Volume II

  “From there it is all ticker tape and pumpkin pie. From the position in front of its double, it’s the smell of Baltimore’s burning brownstone wires and antiseptic hand sanitizer ironically left on the church pew”.     “That is no longer considered autonomy. That friend is unfettered barbarism”. No stronger words have been […]

Boris Mikhailov – A Way Out (2017)

Boris Mikhailov was born in Kharkov, Ukraine and came to prominence in the 1990s. His work often focuses on the politics of everyday life during the Soviet era and its aftermath. In Red 1968-75, Mikhailov depticts life in and around Kharkov, using the colour red as a symbolic reminder of the inescapable presence of the […]

What a 1980’s Tension Memory Looks Like

@ Brad Feuerhelm   “That is just the impatient me waiting for my own teeth to fall out as I doubt I will ever find the bouffant that defines me”.   I stood sifting through the remnants of somebody else’s life, the precipice correlated somewhere between the footnote of commerce and an inability to understand […]