Editor’s note: what follows is a sort of writing exercise, undertaken in response to Janet Malcolm’s brilliant “Forty-One False Starts.” I didn’t do it justice, though I did have some fun writing it. If you want a proper, if brief, review, jump to the bottom. If you want to see me have some fun, well, read on.

A Peculiar Paradise: Florida Photographs is exactly what it claims to be: photographs, made in Florida, by former National Geographic photographer (and one time head of Magnum) Nathan Benn. Most—if not all—of the photographs were made in two Geographic-funded trips, one in 1973, “to fill out another photographer’s coverage of the flourishing Cuban-born community centered in Little Havana;”* the other in 1981 to photograph the state in general. Most of the photographs included in A Peculiar Paradise are previously unpublished, including, if I read correctly, all of the 1981 pictures due to Benn’s inclusion of a human torso that had washed up on the beach in his selections for the Geographic’s pictures editor…

For Showcaller, the 2018 exhibition at Kölnischer Kunstverein and this 2019 monograph from Mack, Talia Chetrit deftly wove together selfies and pictures of her friends and family from the early 1990s, with early art projects and much later series, to make something of a statement about gaze and agency and power and things. I’m pretty sure I came to it thanks to Jörg Colberg, who has been a major driver of my photobook habit. Colberg describes Chetrit’s book/project, in part, as “photographs that in possibly less photographically competent ways might exist in many people’s phones.”

If that sounds dismissive—and I’m not sure… I honed in on the “possibly less photographically competent” bit, which sounds sorta backhanded to me, but I don’t think Colberg was, not entirely anyway, and I’m not either—it really is part of what’s going on in Showcaller, and to keep in mind when thinking about it, anyway.

The very first picture that appears in Tod Papageorge’s Dr. Blankman’s New York shows a pair of storefronts: a florist, and the titular Dr. S. H. Blankman Optometrist, who offers (small print) Contact Lenses, and, in larger print than his name, claims “EYES EXAMINED.”

Ok. Ok. I’m not that dense. 1) this echoes the opener of Walker Evans’ American Pictures, with its photo studio, but clearly isn’t interested in showing us, well, us, and instead, 2) perhaps wants us to wonder what, exactly, we’re supposed to be looking at…