Reviews

Prior to the arrival of Zak Waters‘ Birdmen, I was wholly unaware of pigeon racing. My grandfather kept pigeons for awhile near the end of his life, and I feed dozens of pigeons who roost in the neighbor’s roof tiles and hang around my neighborhood for most of the year. And my mother in law looks at them and remarks what good eating they are, but racing them? I had no idea. Not that I remember, anyway. Continue reading “Zak Waters – ‘Birdmen’”

In 1980, the Sunday Times Magazine sent Raymond Depardon to Glasgow, on an assignment to show the wealth disparity in Glasgow. After many years photographing in the desert—the Algerian war, liberation forces in Chad, the Nigerian desert, etc.—he found little interest in the discrete displays of wealth around the golf courses and fancy parts of town, and instead found himself drawn to the slums: children playing in the streets; drunks getting there or already passed out; proud, downtrodden women pushing prams; all of it against the backdrop of wide boulevards and solid buildings from Glasgow’s earlier boom.

The assignment was never published, and Depardon shoved the Kodachrome 64 slides in a box and forgot about them. Continue reading “Raymond Depardon – ‘Glasgow’”

On April 18, 2015, following the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police, residents took to the streets to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Devin Allen was there, with his camera, capturing life in his West Baltimore neighborhood before, during, and after the Baltimore Uprising, and A Beautiful Ghetto is the result. Continue reading “Devin Allen – ‘A Beautiful Ghetto’”

David Freund‘s Gas Stop: the Gas Station in American Life and Landscape: 1978-1981 was a long time (and a lightning strike) in the making. He made the photographs over a 3 or 4 year period 40 years ago, and only a chance, fairy-tale-type meeting with Gerhard Steidl brought the project to light, in the form of an impressive four volume set, 574 photos over 720 pages, with short essays by Feund at the end of each, in the quality that we expect from Steidl productions.  Continue reading “David Freund – ‘Gas Stop’”

A Plain View is a new-ish body of large format photography from skateboarder cum actor cum photographer Jason Lee, shot over 3 months (25 days of shooting) on a 5000 mile tour of Texas. If information in Will Gillham’s Afterword, “On the other side of everywhere else,” is correct (and I have no reason to think it’s not), it looks like Lee started out at his home near Denton, took 287 northwest to 83 and wiggled around into Spearman, then south through Lubbock and Midland/Odessa and west to Van Horn, then Southeast to Victoria, and Northeast up to Liberty, TX, and then back up to Denton, sticking to small state highways and farm-to-market roads, exploring the small- and ghost-towns that dot the wide expanses of Texas. Continue reading “Jason Lee – ‘A Plain View’”

With And Without You is a retrospective/best of book of photographs by Jacob Aue Sobol, featuring selections from four published projects—Sabine, The Gomez Brito Family, I, Tokyo, By the River of Kings, and Arrivals and Departures—and three unpublished (at time of publication) projects—Home, America, and Road of Bones. If you can’t find (or afford) the published projects, and want to see the work in print, then With and Without You is an excellent option.  Continue reading “Jacob Aue Sobol – ‘With And Without You’”

Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment is the most recent (last?) volume in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, and was published in 2015, shortly before Mark’s death. As with other volumes in the series, it’s full of wisdom, acquired through decades of professional photographic practice, and for under $30, probably about as close as I’m likely to get to a weekend workshop with someone like Mark, or Fink, or Webb & Norris Webb, or Hido. Continue reading “Mary Ellen Mark – ‘on the Portrait and the Moment’”