Author Archives: James Cockroft

It’s probably heresy to talk about Larry Sultan’s Swimmers (1978-1982) before mentioning Evidence. I mean, Evidence is famous, and Swimmers, while exhibited a few times, was never before published and was (as far as I know) largely unknown prior to this book coming out. I don’t feel too bad, though: I seem to be going …

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For a photo series about a backyard swimming pool that proves I’m not a total prude or landlubber, I present Charles Johnstone’s The Summerhouse Pool, featuring Lea Simone Allegria.

Maybe I don’t really get it, and if I said I vastly preferred Deanna Templeton’s What She Said to her sorta conceptual The Swimming Pool, would you hold it against me?

If you don’t have enough reasons to leave Twitter, I may have another:

Mika Ninagawa‘s Tokyo is a nice-enough foil to, and last round of, my silly back and forth between Daido Moriyama’s super-saturated, high contrast, gritty black & white photography (made fairly continuously from the mid 1960s to the present*) and Hiromix’s color work made between ~1995 and 2000. Why Ninagawa and not another Hiromix book? Well, …

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Tokyo is an exhibition catalog from ‘Tokyo: Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu,’ which ran at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, November 11, 2020 through February 28, 2021. I wasn’t in Paris at the time, and bought this from publisher Akio Nagasawa, and I very much hope it’s the last Moriyama book on my …

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Polaroid Now: the History and Future of Polaroid Photography collects recent (2010s) work on expired Old Polaroid and Impossible/Originals New Polaroid stocks by rising (Insta)stars of the medium. There’s some killer work in it, for sure, and seeing the images larger in print—in this book, anyway—gives a slightly different impression than the images did when …

Continue reading “‘Polaroid Now’ – Steve Crist & Gloria Fowler, ed.”