Category Archives: Reviews

I wish I knew how to add subtitles to WordPress posts… I wanted to title this review/screed “Caveat Emptor” or, better, “Participem Emptor” (Participant Beware), but that’s just a bit too up front, perhaps. Full disclosure: I’m a disgruntled supporter of Five Years, Dee Elegia’s successful 2017 kickstarter for her book of photographs with her […]

Egoïst is a rather fancy French fashion, um, magazine that I ran across a couple of years ago when I was first looking at Ellen von Unwerth’s work. I hesitate to call it a “magazine,” as each issue seems to come out in two parts and it’s huge, rather expensive, and very well done, for […]

Black cats, broomsticks, and Adriana Lima: it’s Ellen von Unwerth’s Wicked.

The Pillar is a sort of follow up, sort of, to Stephen Gill’s Night Procession, if only that 1) it came, as it has, two years or so after the previous volume; 2) that it likewise employed a motion-activated camera and little (active) authorial input; and 3) that the format of the book (jacket design) […]

Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities is the fifth book in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, and it’s a worthy entry to the collection. I’ve learned a few things from the other books in the series—Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic […]

Patrick Demarchelier: Fashion Photography is the second, or other book in the two volume series of American Photographer’s Master Series of workshop-type books from 1989, the other being William Albert Allard: The Photographic Essay. Like its litter mate, Fashion Photography reads like very long puff profile piece from a mass market hobby magazine.

The Photographic Essay was introduced to me via a conversation on Twitter, if I recall. It was a couple of years ago, I think, and maybe I just read it but didn’t participate and that’s why I can’t find it now. No matter. William Albert Allard was a National Geographic photographer in the 1960s, and […]