Peter Van Agtmael – ‘Sorry for the War’

I always thought that if I were to make a war story about these conflicts, it would be about a unit that goes on patrol. Their vehicle gets blown to pieces by an improvised explosive hidden in the road, burning to death several soldiers and taking the limbs off of others, who barely survive. The rest of the unit searches desperately for something to shoot. They fail and return to base, where they go to the dining hall and decide which of the ten varieties of pie they’d like to eat.

Van Agtmael, Peter. Sorry for the War. Mass Books, MA. Unpaged, in the discussion of an image titled “Atlanta, Georgia. USA. 2016.”

If I wasn’t fairly sure of Peter Van Agtmael‘s view of the various wars and interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan after his excellent Disco Night Sept 11, the quote above, from Sorry for the War, makes it absolutely clear.

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Peter Van Agtmael – Disco Night Sept II

Peter Van Agtmael‘s Disco Night Sept 11 was on the shortlist for Aperture’s Book of the Year back in 2014. I missed it at the time, and I picked this copy up, if I recall, during a Magnum book sale in 2019 or 2020. I botched the unboxing video, lost track of the book, and it wound up on the “already reviewed” shelves somehow.

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Enter the Minuta Stereo (preproduction model)

It was an early, sleepy Monday morning, the first of February, 2021, and the year was off to a frustrating start, when I opened my email to find a note from Dominick Oczkowski, creator of the Minuta Stereo camera. I knew something of Oczkowski already, thanks to a podcast or something I saw on Twitter back in January, and within 3 minutes of hearing of his project had signed up for the mailing list, and I felt honored and strangely validated when he offered to send me a preproduction model to try out, try to break, etc.

Well, after six weeks and (shamefully) only four rolls, and with about 10 days left on the Kickstarter, I haven’t managed to break it… But what do I think about it?

Well…

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Mark Steinmetz – ‘Summer Camp’

I never went to Summer Camp. Boy Scout camping weekends and that one Jamboree, a couple of weekends with various church groups (one at a summer camp that was closed, because it wasn’t the summer, and so it was only the two vans from the church) and a family trip to (another closed) vacation camp thing was as close as I ever got. So Mark Steinmetz‘s Summer Camp presents something of a foreign land to me. I recognize some of the features, and, of course, I’ve seen many movies and television shows about camp, but it’s still foreign.

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Quick Walk with a Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim

I didn’t (and don’t) need another camera. Really and truly. I don’t.

And then, one early morning, I noticed a Twitter post* claiming the Vivitar UWS to be the end all and be all, and 10 minutes later, I found one for a good-enough price on the ‘bay, and, well, here we are.

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Liam Wong – ‘TO:KY:OO’

TO:KY:OO is something unique in my photo library. I’m not sure where I came across his work. It was probably recommended by someone or something. I don’t really remember.

Long term readers will know that I’m mostly a film photographer, for the past 6 years or so, anyway, and that I never did a huge amount of manipulation, but I really like the look Wong pulls out of his images. So when he announced a crowdfunding campaign for his first book, I jumped on it.

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