Back in High School, and for some time thereafter, off and on, I sported a sort of abbreviated version of Liberty Spikes, colored in a shade of purply-red called “Bodacious Burgundy.” The effect was somewhat subtle, alternating between preppy and mildly punk, just enough to get occasional looks of curiosity or disdain, but not enough …
Category Archives: Photobook
Luigi Ghirri – ‘It’s beautiful here, isn’t it…’
It’s beautiful here, isn’t it… was the first book published on Ghirri in the United States. It appeared in 2008, and I found my way to Ghirri in 2016, I think, maybe thanks to Teju Cole’s article in the New York Times Magazine, following an interview I heard with him on the Magic Hour podcast (and saved for later …
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Luigi Ghirri – ‘Kodachrome’ and ‘The Complete Essays 1973-1991’
By all rights, these two books should be reviewed separately. Sadly, though, they arrived in the same box and I unboxed them together, so here we are. Kodachrome is MACK’s 2013 reprint of Ghirri’s 1978 classic. From what I understand, it’s a facsimile of the original, albeit with the inclusion of a pamphlet containing a …
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Joel Meyerowitz – ‘Where I Find Myself’
What can I say about the first lifetime retrospective of Joel Meyerowitz’s work, with comments throughout by Meyerowitz himself? If you’re the least bit aware of Meyerowitz and his practice, you probably know something about his trajectory, from 35mm street shooter to 8×10 landscape and still life, and Where I Find Myself has it all.
Khalik Allah – ‘Souls Against the Concrete’
Several years ago, I took a screengrab of a photo for my ‘Inspiration/To Try’ collection. I’ve returned to it many times, wondering how to get the light, the focus, the blur. I had no idea who took the photo, and at the time, I really didn’t care. It’s a portrait of an older man, close …
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Jo Ann Walters – ‘Wood River Blue Pool’
Jo Ann Walters’ Wood River Blue Pool is a collection of her photographs of mostly women and girls, photographed around Alton, IL and all up and down the Mississippi river, mostly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It comes with a companion volume, Emma Kemp’s Blue Pool Cecelia, a wonderful meditation on violence and the Blue …
John Irvine – ‘Partition’
Growing up as a purple-haired punk rocker in the 1990s, I was aware of the divisions between the Catholics and Protestants, (the winding down of) the Troubles, Bobby Sands, the IRA, the Sinn Féin, the Good Friday Agreement, and all that, but had no idea, beyond what I read in some Punk and Anarchist zines, …
