I’m not sure where or how I came across Debi Cornwall‘s Necessary Fictions. I suspected Jörg Colberg, but nope. I thought maybe Charcoal. Nope. It could’ve been an email from Radius Books, or maybe someone mentioned it on a podcast or something. Allahu Alim. However it got into my hot little hands, I’m glad enough that it did.
Continue reading “Debi Cornwall – ‘Necessary Fictions’”What was I thinking?
smh. I don’t know what I was thinking…
It was sometime in early March, 2021, and I got the crazy idea to shoot some slide film. Now, I self-process everything (b/w, c-41, and e6) and chemicals to process slides are sorta expensive and I believe them to be rather short-lived.* So, I reasoned, if I’m going to shoot slide, I need to shoot a bunch of it in relatively short order, then develop it all in a week or two before the chems start to go off.
Now. I planned to shoot almost exclusively slide on a trip to Arkansas in early April, so I figured March would be the perfect time to start putting away some rolls, and so one morning I grabbed a roll of the new Ektachrome (which I had never shot before) and looked around for something to shoot it in.
What did I find? Well… here comes the head-scratcher:
Continue reading “What was I thinking?”Nick Waplington – ‘Anaglypta’
Nick Waplington‘s Anaglypta was the Charcoal Photobook of the Month selection for April, 2021, but I didn’t receive it from Charcoal, as I preordered this signed copy from Dashwood almost a year ago.* I’m not sure where I heard about it… maybe an email from Dashwood, even, but it’s been sitting on the to-be-reviewed shelf/shelves since I received it, well, until I started work on this review, anyway.
Continue reading “Nick Waplington – ‘Anaglypta’”Richard Bram – ‘Short Stories’
Richard Bram began making street photographs in the early 1980s and was a founding member of In-Public (the part that split off to form UPPhotographers). If you’re aware of all that, then you sort of have an idea of what his pictures might look like: he knows what he’s doing and knows how to do it.
‘Short Stories’ is an exhibition catalog from his 2020 exhibition at the Mannheimer Kunstverein.
Continue reading “Richard Bram – ‘Short Stories’”LomoChrome Purple Fun with the Minuta Stereo
Well, so much for best intentions… I started this roll of LomoChrome Purple to test the 35mm square mask about a week before the Minuta Stereo Kickstarter ended, and finished it… well, the week after the Kickstarter ended.
So apologies to Dominick, and anyone who missed the Kickstarter and that would’ve been swayed by my purple pics, but better late than never, I guess.
Continue reading “LomoChrome Purple Fun with the Minuta Stereo”Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes – ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’
Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’ The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a classic that I heard of many times, but never really looked too hard for. I can’t say why, really, but when Alec Soth mentioned it during his “Pictures & Words #2,” I ended up jumping on it.
Continue reading “Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes – ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’”Gordon Parks – ‘The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957’
The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 presents images Gordon Parks made while working on “The Atmosphere of Crime,” a 1957 photographic essay in Life magazine, and that are now in the holdings of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). I started reading the essays and looking through the images a few days before jurors in Minnesota handed down their too-rare guilty verdict. Insofar as the pictures included were made, at time of writing, 64 years ago, they seem, with the clothing and vehicles and grain, like something out of history; insofar as Parks’ photographs point to the ways police operate, largely against economically disadvantaged black and brown people, they seem prescient and timely, even if the cops have a bit of a Sheriff Andy character to them that seem quaint today, in the age of tanks and body armor and tear gas and rubber bullets, not to mention “I can’t breathe.”
Continue reading “Gordon Parks – ‘The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957’”