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, …

Unboxing ‘Analogue Photography’

Andrew Bellamy’s Analogue Photography: Reference Manual for Shooting Film is exactly what the title says: a film photography reference manual. It reminds me a good deal of the first photography-related book I bought—Technical Manual of Basic Photography, TM 1-219, July 1, 1941, a manual published by the War Department for the Army Air Forces—crossed with a …

Unboxing ‘The Wrestlers’

Michael Watson’s The Wrestlers: Polaroid Portraits 2015-2018 collects a bunch of Polaroids (or, really, Impossible Project black frame black & whites) of amateur wrestlers, shot backstage at various events in Chicago and the Midwest, California, and Florida, in costume/character and more relaxed. I helped to kickstarter it back in January 2018, and it arrived in my …

Unboxing ‘The American Monument’

For The American Monument, Lee Friedlander turned his attention to public monuments, photographed in situ (sometimes more situ than in), with all of our forgetting, misremembering, and disregard fully on display. Thousands of negatives, shot over a 12 year period, were edited down to 213, presented singly, or in groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 9, and …

Unboxing ‘Pages from the Glossies’

I have a modest photobook collection, something in the neighborhood of 150 volumes, give or take, and not counting theory books or zines. I’ve tried to be rather democratic in my collecting, picking up books from professionals and amateurs, masters and novices, documentarians and artists, but upon reading Anil Mistry’s review of Pages from the …