“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.”
“I think what was really drawing me to Marina’s book was how it was animating this story of the mountains, their potential and actual destructive forces and how human lives are so dwarfed in the scale of that force yet so emotionally attached to life in the mountains.” – Sunil Shah
“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 the best of years…. Once again it is that time of year where I try to drum up some sort of edit from all of the incredible work the photography book world offers up. This year is difficult as I felt it has been one of the strongest years in recent memory […]
”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.”
“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.”