- feeds
- popular
- recent
- reader
- about
- story
- technologies
- what is rss
- connect
- dmca
- contact
- Feed Preview Conscientious Photography Magazine
The Hampton Book
For the past few years, on and off I have been looking at some photographs that intrigued me ever since I first saw them. If you know what to look for, they are easy to find online: The photograp...
The Meme Is the Message
The world of photography (aka photoland) stubbornly clings to a rather limited set of beliefs, even as the way photographs are viewed and used has changed considerably over the past decades. Phot...
Ordinary Notes
I have long been baffled by the fact that if you want to learn more about photography, arguably the most important medium of our troubled times, you’re made to face a library of writing that is...
The Japanese
If, like me, you have a hard time remembering people’s names, reading history books becomes a real chore, especially in cases such as Japan. There, for the longest time the ruling class played ...
A Conversation with Thana Faroq
In early 2021 I reviewed Thana Faroq ‘s I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows , a book that foregrounded the photographer’s and other people’s experiences as refugees in the Netherlands. Th...
Lebensborn
(A preface of sorts:) As events have shown over the past decade (or more), we are collectively unable to keep more than one thought in our minds, especially if thoughts might be competing, whethe...
The project is not your friend
The project has taken on an outsized and, I would argue, partly counterproductive role in the world of photography. Most photographers work with projects, whether one or any number at the same ti...
Hermes/Unesco
The very first thing I noticed about Martín Bollati ‘s Hermes/Unesco is that it’s a little paper brick. It has more than 1,000 pages, 999 of which are taken up by images. I’m thinking tha...
Ein Dorf
Even as the following exercise is limiting in a number of ways, it would be instructive to describe the state of German photography since the end of World War 2 as being caught between two marrie...
Is your project merely a series of photographs?
The other day, I found a long list of tips around how to go about writing one’s novel. I have no intention of writing one. But I read a lot about writing simply because for some reason, essays...
Songs in a strange land
We are so used to handling printed matter that we do not pay much attention to its physical properties. Looking at a book requires work: you have to hold it or use a table for support, and you ha...
Ordinary People
Ordinary People , the catalogue produced at the occasion of Rob Hornstra ‘s mid-career retrospective at Fotomuseum Den Haag , might feature the most atypical cover photograph. It’s slightly w...
Behold the digital Wunderkammer!
“A mysterious, malevolent-looking mermaid mummy that was brought back to the U.S. from Japan more than 100 years ago,” a recent article noted, “appears to be a mix of fish, monkey and liza...
Exteriors
You only realize to what extent alienation drives one’s experience of city life when you travel to a distant locale where the rules of conduct differ. Transplanted to Tokyo, a Western visitor w...
Rental Person Who Does Nothing
There is the temptation in the West to see what comes out of Japan as playful and slightly weird. A quote by Ruth Ozeki on the American cover of Sayaka Murata ’s Convenience Store Woman descr...
Women at Work
On 5 February 2024, Helga Paris died at age 85. This had me think that I needed to look at her work again. Rummaging through the boxes of my books, still packed away in an unused room, would not...
Deutschland im Herbst
It’s one of those amazing coincidences that in Germany a single day is the anniversary of a number of essential historical events, most of which are interconnected: 9 November . That day marked...
Ordinary Things
The world of contemporary art photography (photoland) lives with a very basic contradiction. On the hand, it routinely belittles all those who are not part of it as shallow when they take photogr...
Laurie
“The works on pages 13, 17, 21, 49, 51, 47, 49, 65 and 97 were made by my daughter Laurie,” writes Thomas Manneke in the very brief afterword in the colophon of his book Zillion (yes, 49 ap...
Gerry Johansson — The Beginnings
Swedish photographer Gerry Johansson is widely known for his mastery of the square format. His square pictures typically cover some geographic region, ranging from countries to towns. They each ...
A new view of photography
Given that the world of photography has much more in common with the world of filmmaking than with the world of painting, one might as well ask why we treat photographers the way we treat painter...
Packing My Library
The other day, Collector Daily published their 2023 Photobook Review Statistics . Something like that had never occurred to me, even as it makes a lot of sense: looking back to see how you have ...
Was Ray a Laugh?
Ray, Richard Billigham’s father, is a laugh — according to the title of the book (Scalo 1996; there’s an early 2024 re-release in modified form by MACK). It says so right on the cover, whic...
Claire Dederer’s Monsters
Every once in a while (and it’s typically a long while), a book comes along that blows my mind. Typically (and maybe that’s why it’s a long while), such a book offers me more than merely ce...
how shall we greet the sun
We have to think of the photographer as her own subject in Thana Faroq ’s how shall we greet the sun . For most photographers, this would be an impossible approach to take — doesn’t the cam...