January 20, 2018
Interview with Andrew Seguin
Combining the poetic, photographic and historic, Andrew Seguin’s collection The Room In Which I Work (winner of the 2015 Omnidawn Open Book Contest) is immersive on a variety of different […]
March 24, 2016
Your Skin or Your Soul
In the photograph “Frustrated Lynch Mob,” a group of about 15 boys and men fill the frame, as they stand outside a courthouse in Shelbyville, Tennessee. The mob had attempted to […]
March 8, 2016
Why the Klan Branded a White Pastor
In July 1924, Oren Van Loon, a white minister in Michigan, posed for a news photographer, who focused his lens on the letters “KKK” branded into Van Loon’s back. Intrarracial […]
January 31, 2016
Kanye West’s New Slave Daguerreotypes
Kanye West premiered his song and video “New Slaves” by projecting it on the exterior walls of 66 buildings throughout the world. The shots in the video have only two […]
August 25, 2015
Sugimoto’s Movie Theaters
“Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?” The answer: “You get a shining screen.” […] One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village […]
June 17, 2014
Sugimoto’s Darkness
You’re unlikely to find a more beautiful book than Hiroshi Sugimoto, designed by Takaaki Matsumodo. The book is cloth-bound in shadow-blue, with a slight sheen, only a shallow stamp of […]
October 17, 2013
The Thin Red Underline
In his essential, slim volume Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes elaborated his theory of the punctum–that element of a photograph that “pierces” you, haunts you, pulls you into […]
July 31, 2013
Life is Like a Comic Book
I was raised on comic books. I never read them, but I did flip through them, since my dad gave me one of those long white boxes full of them. […]
December 22, 2012
Language as an Artistic Medium
Visual art, language, and music fall along a spectrum whose two ends are the “representative” and the “nonrepresentative.” By “representation” I mean of the physical world. Historically, a visual art […]