Perpetual Mirage

My long review/essay on Chris Killip, which looks at Isle of Man Revisited, In Flagrante Two, Pirelli Work, and Seacoal (Steidl, 2015/16), is now available in the June issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

My review of PROVOKE: Between Protest and Performance by Diane Dufour and Matthew Witkovsky (Steidl, 2016) is now available on photo-eye. You can read it here and get the book here.

Hold the Line by Siegfried Hansen (Kettler Verlag, 2015)

“If the city provides endlessly human drama, it also offers an equally fertile stage. Concrete, metal, stone, wood, and paint form the foundations of this built environment and shape our lives and interactions. They coalesce in purposeful and temporal ways creating beauty for those attentive enough to look. Lines intersect or break the city apart, while shadows, people and the occasional animal extend or cut off forms in unexpected ways. Riffing off classic street photography and Modernist photography, Siegfried Hansen’s Hold the Line is a playful examination of the city as a graphic playground of color, line, and form. Filled with bold geometric images and brightly colored pages, Hansen transforms the city into a maze of graphic delights and asks us to see the city and the built world with fresh eyes.”

Carmen Winant, My Life as a Man (Horses Think, 2015)

“Finishing a work of art is a mysterious and tentative process. Often it’s better to just walk away. Left “undone” a successful work of art hovers in a state of completion — a stasis of resolution. Carmen Winant’s My Life as a Man documents a large-scale collage as it is brought into being, torn apart and reworked over time. Interspersed with unfinished textual fragments from various authors and paintings of single words or phrases, the book gathers a swirling constellation of image and text that speak not only to the unstable resolution at the heart of any creative work, but also illuminates the fragile beauty of the creative process itself."

Michael Schmelling, My Blank Pages (Ice Plant, 2015)

“Drawn from a personal archive of 4x6 machine prints, the images that make up Michael Schmelling’s My Blank Pages might easily be seen as cast-offs or remainders, either tossed aside or left in a box. Shot on assignment, for fun, or simply out of boredom, they’re tangential shots that never made it, but nevertheless fill a deeper void. Kept for later, they’ve lingered and have found a home in Michael Schmelling’s new book, My Blank Pages. Unbound in a plain manila jacket, the book contains images from Schmelling’s vast archive of photographs dating from 2005 to 2012 when he moved to Los Angeles. Although it may only be a chapter or two, My Blank Pages tells a story about the life of its creator, a photographer driven to photograph the world around him with a relentless eye. At the same time, it’s also an intriguing meditation on the difficulty of creating a personal narrative or biography with photographs. Despite all the hand written notes and the work’s personal nature, there are some things that always remain blank, things that we’ll never know, things that the medium can never divulge.”

Daniel Stier, Ways of Knowing (YES, 2015)

“We take for granted that science is built on a foundation of perpetual doubt. Scientific truths are only true until they are disproven. New evidence supplants the old and temporary truths emerge. At the same time, the paths to these truths are often complex and difficult to understand for laypeople. While this is true of many specialized fields, the sciences are particularly susceptible to mystification by artists. We’re simultaneously bewitched by the unknown and voyeuristically driven to reveal what is often unseen. Separated into two parts, Daniel Stier’s Ways of Knowing pairs clinically shot images of scientific machines being used by humans with absurdist experiments and optical illusions the artist has created in his studio. Playful and parodic, Ways of Knowing explores the complex paths we take to learn about the world while also celebrating the strange beauty of tools, objects, and machines we use to get there.”

Olivia Arthur, Stranger (Fishbar, 2015)

“From a distance, Dubai seems to be an oxymoron — a city of opulent wealth surrounded by barren desert. Built and sustained by oil, it is a playground for the rich and an economic prison for the thousands of migrant workers who build and maintain its gleaming façade. Travelling from China and South Asia, they come to the city seeking a better life for themselves and their families, but often end up working for low wages in stifling heat, and live in work camps far from the luxurious city center. In 1961, tragedy struck a group of migrants travelling to the city from Pakistan and India. Their boat sank off the coast and 238 people drown. This tragic event forms the heart and narrative thread of Olivia Arthur’s new book Stranger, which imagines a survivor returning to the city roughly fifty-years later. Combining her own images with archival pictures and text, Stranger explores the complex present through the lingering tragedy of the past. Avoiding the obvious ironies of the city, while also navigating the challenges of representing the unknowable other, Arthur offers an imaginative entry into the complexities of Dubai that is compelling and emotionally nuanced.”

Ron Jude, Lago (MACK, 2015)

“The heat of the desert has a psychological register—either burning away or searing a mark. Although far from empty, the desert has long been a stage against which we stand in relief—failed settlements, nuclear tests, dumping grounds, and religious yearnings. We look for answers or build our own under the expansive sky and endless terrain. The landscape photography of Ron Jude has always steered a middle path between the evidentiary and metaphoric towards something that is both ontological and autobiographical. Lago, Jude’s latest book, joins both Lick Creek Line and Other Nature in exploring this fertile terrain. Comprised of photographs taken in Southern California near the Salton Sea, Lago is as much a journey into Jude’s past as it is an invitation for the viewer to explore alongside him, probing the dirt, standing in the heat, and feeling ones presence in the sun.”