Financial Surrrealism (World Trade Center II) Zuidas Financial District, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2015, from THE MARKET – It’s a paradox that one of the great strengths of photojournalism and documentary photography can also be one of its great handicaps. That is the tendency to employ a laser like focus, conducting photographic micro-studies which encompass a very small field in great detail. It’s the approach many of us learn from the start, being advised (with good reason) as students not to overextend ourselves and to restrict our focus. But it’s also an approach many of us continue to use even as we…
2 CommentsTag: interview
– It’s really, really rare that a photobook speaks to you in a way which feels important beyond the narrow realm of photography, and even does so in a way which feels desperately urgent. This was the precise experience I had the first time I came across Mathieu Asselin’s Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation when it was on display as part of the dummy book table at Bristol Photobook Festival, and again when I saw it at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival this summer. The title of Asselin’s book needs little elaboration, the work scrutinizes the activities of this multinational agrochemical company,…
4 CommentsThe Arbitrator from Spirit is a Bone by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin – One of my aims for this year is to drastically reduce the number of reviews I publish here. For a brief period this way of engaging with work was good for me, and I felt a vague sense of satisfaction when people described me as a critic. Increasingly though I dislike the word with it’s implication of being an all knowing arbiter or judge of what is good and bad in photography. I would much rather use this platform to share thoughts which more generally reflect…
1 CommentWar Primer 3 For a while I’ve been meaning to sit down and pen a few thoughts on the subject of self-publishing, and specifically print on demand publishing. My hand has been forced a little by the appearance of a nice interview with the Artists Book Cooperative over on The Photographer’s Gallery blog. ABC’s members have pretty much written the book (excuse the pun) when it comes to this form of publishing and the interview does a great job of outlining many of the things that I think make print on demand books a powerful means of expression and dissemination…
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The Blind Eye and the Vision Machine
The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, North Dakota, USA. Became operational September 1975, deactivated eight months later. – This text is based on a talk given at a symposium the London College of Communication on January 14th 2016 to mark the opening of The Forest of Things. This talk and draws together a few different ideas I’ve been thinking about over the last year around the status and place of the photograph today, and expands on some of the darker implications of algorithms and photography which I first speculated about in An All Seeing Eye. In The Forest of Things, the…