I stumbled across Message to the Future thanks, once again, to the #believeinfilm community on Twitter. Really, social media isn’t all bad. Mostly, sure, and it’s led me to spend more money on photobooks than I might otherwise, and for that I’ll forever be grateful.

Anyway. Message to the Future is a rather impressive exhibition catalog from the 2016 retrospective of Danny Lyon’s photographs at the Whitney Museum and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with selections from his classic 1960s photobooks, most of which have been in more or less continuous production since, plus his films, later photo series, and collage works.

Continue reading “Danny Lyon – ‘Message to the Future’”

Halfstory Halflife was Charcoal Book Club’s photobook-of-the-month for September 2018… I’m sorta ashamed that it took me this long to get around to looking at it, but, well, here we are: it’s November 2020, and I’m finally getting around to a review…

Continue reading “Raymond Meeks – ‘Halfstory Halflife’”

It’s been almost three years since I unboxed Provoke, and I just finished reading all the text. It sat on the side table next to where I stare blankly at the television night after night, sometimes covered by some other book undergoing one of my casual reviews, sometimes by whatever recent-ish issue of Aperture that I probably didn’t read, sometimes taunting me, most often completely mute. A strip of color negative leader slowly, imperceptibly, glacially, moved from top to bottom, front to back, and every time it caught my attention, I felt a small twinge of shame that sometimes led to a flurry of study, but most often got shunted off to wherever such feelings go.

Is it that dense, that full of mind boggling information and history? Am I just lazy?

Continue reading “‘Provoke: Between Protest and Performance’”