Luxury
Luxus — Luxury — is the title of Lambert Wiesing’s most recent book, published by Surkamp in August this year. I’ve translated the introduction, which proposes that that luxury is not a quality inherent...
Category: aesthetics
Photographs and family
Photographs have some effect on “family,” but I seriously doubt whether they actually consolidate or construct it. The idea comes first, I think, and the photographs shore it up. Whatever elusive idea actually ties...
Is Digital Photography?
Betulanimbusi, reproduced here, is one image from the elegant new catalogue of Deborah Baker’s photographs, In Paradiso. Her exhibition opened in London on Thursday, September 4, at the William Morris Museum. The catalogue includes my...
A “good” photograph
Is it “good”? Technically, it’s OK–comprehensible, decent colour, decent resolution. The family doesn’t look hysterically happy; everyone seems a little introspective by contemporary standards.. But it’s from 1947–probably the shot for the Christmas card. Another possible...
Walead Beshty
I’ve just done a review for Source–very short–of a catalogue of Beshty’s work called Natural Histories, a collaboration between a museum in Malmo, Sweden, and another in Madrid. I didn’t have enough space to...
a photograph’s imaginary power
“…though I do not reject the power of magic, the object of the act of photography is something greater and higher. It consists in raising the real object to a new power — the...