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The encounter with Erwin Olaf’s Strange Beauty is a heavy dose of artistic embarrassment. I have to admit that I hadn’t truly grasped how big a name he is in the photographic world, which is a failing I feel keenly, especially when the work itself is so meticulously brilliant. But the immediate, impact of turning…
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Tessa Boffin, edited by Sunil Gupta for Stanley/Barker is not a book one simply reads; it is a visceral, philosophical declaration of war against shame, silence, and institutional neglect. Presented with the care and unflinching honesty we expect from Stanley Barker, this book arrives less as an archive and more as a powerful, necessary call…
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There are some books that demand to be read in a single, unbroken, visceral sitting, and then there are books like Dona Ann McAdams’s Black Box. This is a volume that felt less like a photobook and more like the discovery of someone’s deeply personal diary, a collection I had to keep putting down, not…
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I have been waiting for what feels like an eternity to properly sit down with Ala Ebtekar’s Thirty-Six Views of the Moon. Family life, site projects, and the inescapable gravitational pull of daily chaos meant I had to keep putting it down, always promising myself I would return. Last night, however, I finally got the…
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There are some photobooks that you read, and then there are others that read you. They arrive in your hands not as curated collections of beautiful prints, but as an unflinching challenge to your very soul, forcing you to confront the ethical and emotional cost of simply looking at the world today. Alfredo Jaar’s magnificent,…
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Streuli is a photographer of such a rare brilliance, dismantling the polished, protective veneer we wear as travellers. We cling to the worn cliché that urban exploration is boundless, yet we betray ourselves by treading the familiar, safe paths, viewing the world from a certain elevated perch, and noting only the most superficial fragments.
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I first stumbled upon the work of David Hoffman last month. I was reading an interview with him on the Socialist Worker website, and I was at once taken by his photograph of the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common from 1982. I loved it so much that I featured it as one of my…
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Reading Carmen Winant’s book, The Last Safe Abortion, stirs a profound emotional reaction within me, it blows my mind how this conversation is still so prevalent, not only in America but right here at home in the UK. I see the utter idiocy of those still protesting outside hospitals and clinics across Scotland, and I…
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I remember the first time I saw one of Elisa Miller’s photographs. An image of a woman sprawled on a thick red rug, wearing a green dress and a white blouse, smoking a cigarette with a slash of bright red lipstick. Her red hair seemed to burn against the carpet, and I felt a sudden,…
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Gazing at these snapshots from Jack Lueders-Booth’s American Motorcycling Culture transports me straight back to my skateboarding youth, from 1989 to 1999, when the thrill of carving concrete roads and skating the council build ramps mirrored the raw freedom these riders chase. The book stirs that same unshakeable passion for a subculture that defined me,…