Category Archives: American photography

Review: Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder

“I like seeing things and I like words. There is something revelatory about the two together, an almost pentecostal feeling of seeing in tongues” Lewis Koch Lewis Koch’s Touchless Automatic Wonder started out as a web-based project quite a few years ago (the site is optimized for Internet Explorer 5, so it shows its age) and [...]
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Review: Steven B. Smith, The Weather and a Place to Live

I wrote about Steven B Smith’s series, The Weather and a Place to Live, in passing recently, but I’ve now got my hands on a copy of the book, which won the Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography in 2005, and have had the chance to have a more in-depth look.
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J Wesley Brown

J Wesley Brown is a fan of the night and of the solitary figure. I was less convinced by his portraits, some of which felt a little too staged for my liking, but I enjoyed the atmosphere of his nighttime images of urban or suburban landscapes. They have a strange sense of abandonment and unease, [...]
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Review: Andrew Phelps, Not Niigata

As soon as I heard the name of Andrew Phelps’s latest book I was intrigued. Niigata is not the most obvious prefecture in Japan for a foreign photographer to choose as a photographic subject (Tokyo’s magnetic pull certainly doesn’t seem to be weakening). I was all the more interested as Niigata is an area of some [...]
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James Griffioen’s Feral Houses

Try conjuring up an image of Detroit in your mind. I can pretty much guarantee that it looks nothing like James Griffioen’s series Feral Houses. The city has been making headlines in the last couple of years for being one of the places worst hit by the recession (and other headlines in the photo-community for [...]
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Matthew Swarts

Matthew Swarts has a lot of intriguing and really diverse work on his website. He has done some fairly straightforward series on children with cancer and people with developmental disabilities, but in his recent work he seems more interested in exploring the limits of photography and its changing borders as a result of the internet. [...]
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Steven B. Smith

Steven B. Smith’s Close to Nature and The Weather and a Place to Live “chronicle the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia.” They are studies of the ridiculous ways that man interacts with nature, by turn extraordinarily strange, funny and depressing in their bleakness. The man-meets-nature-and-produces-weirdness thing is not exactly uncommon, but I think [...]
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Richard Barnes

I used to live near this amazing taxidermist’s shop in London called Get Stuffed. When I say amazing, I mean it: on top of cats, dogs, badgers, and a couple of penguins, they had a polar bear in the window. A while further back, during my student years, I made a few trips to Dublin’s [...]
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Olivier Laude Esq. etc.

I am thoroughly enjoying Olivier Laude’s portraits for their inventiveness, unrestrained use of colour, and particularly for their all-around hilarity, something which there is just not enough of in contemporary photography. Special mention for his titles too.
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André Kertész @ Photographers’ Gallery, London

I made a quick trip over to London last week and managed to squeeze in a visit to the Photographers’ Gallery new location on Ramillies Street. Summer shows can often be a disappointment: place-holders while everyone is away on holiday. So this André Kertész show came as a very pleasant surprise.
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