Alejandro Acin The Rest is History ICVL Studio and supported by Sala Kursala Programa Cultural The machinations of history are in constant flexes of exchange. They are impermanent, their concept a flux, or are often a mess of contradictions. We are taught history as if it were permanent, an established and often binary set of […]
Full Article on Patreon This is an incredibly complicated book. It is one that I have been chasing for a year or so since I first became aware of it. It has a cult-like status for many reasons, least of all are the photographs, which are also incredible. The story of Baitel amid a […]
Full Article on Patreon …11:02 Nagasaki contains elements of documentary practice mixed with an emotional and highly subjective style of photography. In essence, the book is caught, like Kawada’s Chizu, between two schools of thought regarding photography. On the one hand, there is a legacy of photography that considers politics and a (at […]
Alessandra Sanguinetti Some Say Ice MACK/Magnum Photo A girl plays the piano convincingly. Another different girl, spotlit, plays a different piano, slightly less convincingly. Steam rises from a river, possibly black, convincingly. A buffalo mourns Its condition confined between fences during a winter snowstorm, most convincingly. A man’s hands clean a six-shooter pistol, and I […]
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 […]
A few years ago, the Guatemalan photographer Jaime Permuth researched the archives of the Anacostia Community Museum during his Smithsonian Institution Artist Fellowship, where he found images documenting the Latino Festival. According to curator Olivia Cadaval, the event’s first iteration in 1970 came as a response to an inaccurate census count of Latin Americans living […]
“Ractliffe’s work, whether consciously or not, emerges at a time when the impossibility of representing experience started to gain purchase in discussions around the medium’s shortfalls.”
The photograph on the cover of Jardín de mi padre (My Father’s Garden, 2020) shows Luis Carlos Tovar, carried in his mother’s arms as an infant. On the right side of the image, a man’s arm reaches from outside the frame towards Luis Carlos – his fingers are only a few centimeters away. Time is […]
Keld Helmer-Petersen is predominantly associated with the early use of color photography as an art form. His book 122 Color Photographs self-published in 1948 is considered a pioneering photobook for its use of color though it makes up a very marginal amount of the artist’s entire body of work. Keld Helmer-Petersen’s concerns in […]
” I think of these efforts often as “Collecting as Practice” and yet most collectors see it simply as a byproduct of their obsession over that of an artistic pursuit” I have been studying collectors of vernacular photography whose drives and holdings pose an interesting possibility for some time. Collectors are an […]
“The images do not look like images from the present. This suggests the potential for these objects to be lodged in a strange time-warp of consumer nostalgia. In some cases, the images appear as though they are from Dutch products thus complicating their geo-specificity and asking larger questions of tribute and nostalgia in equal measure” […]
“Of unpaid ills and the blueish glue of a child’s discarded gum ironically stretched between the hairy toes of an accidentally sandalled foot on a blistering hot and abusive Portuguese summer day” Of electric ecstasy and tiger milk. Of unpaid ills and the blueish glue of a child’s discarded gum ironically stretched between […]