First things first: I feel irresistibly drawn to the cover of this tome without being really aware what I’m looking at for I’m not thinking, or so it seems, I simply surrender to the simplicity of colour and form of this photograph. I only later learn what it shows: a shrine in David. T. Hanson’s
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Fred Baldwin, born in 1929 in Lausanne, Switzerland, a self-declared “academic disaster,” learned “that to pass through the portals of privilege it was necessary to walk a straight line, suffer every test without complaining, follow the program no questions asked, and recognize authority from the top down.” In other words: This very well-written tome introduces
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Hilary Duffy is a New York City-based photographer whose “ongoing practice is rooted in visual storytelling through collaboration.” I understand this to mean that her pictures are staged – and quite some obviously are. Probably not all of them because collaboration can also mean that the persons photographed agreed to being photographed or that they
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It is rare, at least in my experience, that so many (five plus the photographer) contribute texts to a book on photography and so I first go to the book jacket’s inner sleeve to see who they are. Unsurprisingly – we are living in narcissistic times – all of them (with one exception) are described
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In order to survive, we human beings do just about everything. We’ve even invented time – an organisational tool that is immensely useful (and secures Swiss watch makers a decent income) but also terrorises us. From Lisa Volpe, who contributed the essay “Natural Rhythms: Time in the Cumberland Plateau” to this tome, I learn that
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Given the present political climate in the United States of America, I automatically think of Mr Trump’s border wall obsession when being confronted with the subtitle of “Sol y Tierra” which is, “Views Beyond the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1988-2018.” Photographer Emily Matyas however does not engage in a discussion about border security but shows with a
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What you get to see in this tome are colour photographs of animals and people in situations that seem somewhat unreal and, I learn from reading the accompanying texts, are staged. Photographer Nick Brandt writes that “with absolute inevitability, nearly everyone is assuming that I photographed the animals and then dropped them, via Photoshop, into
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“Why New York and Paris?” journalist and photographer Frank Van Riper asks. “New York is simple: It’s what I am. I was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx, just blocks from Yankee Stadium. New York is in my blood, along with egg creams, the Daily News, the subway pastrami, and cannoli. Paris
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