Category: Image
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Peculiar Photo Books
Once in a while, I write about children’s photo books. Nowadays, most children’s books are illustrated, but there was a glorious period from the 1950s to the early 1980s when the format thrived, only to decline and almost disappear. I researched and collected those books to assess their unique narrative qualities and why the genre […]
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Loose teeth
Some years ago, I collected several instances of the same engraved denture for an exhibition. Initially, it appeared on a Deberny & Peignot catalog of stock engravings. Then it found its way to a David Pelham Penguin cover, a recent book about censorship, a thick Portuguese humor anthology. I keep seeing it in all sorts […]
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Graphic Design Tropes: Water on Flat Image
I love Oliver Munday’s cover for The Water Statues. It risks a literal interpretation of the title but pulls it off with an understated suggestion of tears. The use of drops of water over a flat surface, a drawing, or a photo of a statue hints at layers of distance and emotional unavailability. The subdued […]
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Children’s photobooks
I found Amadou Alpiniste at a used bookshop half a decade ago. It’s such an uncanny object, a story about a little boy that climbs a mountain alone carrying a metal cross to honor his truck driver friend who died struck by a thunderbolt while mountain-climbing. It’s part of a series by photographer Suzi Pilet […]
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Image in Spite of It All
This image haunts me since I learnt about its existence. It’s one of four images taken inside of a functioning nazi-camp by a Sonderkommando using a camera smuggled by the Polish resistance. It looks almost abstract but is nothing of the sort. It looks absent of all human and inhuman evidence except for the traces […]
Unseen by Design 