Issue 32 - Contents

Kalen Na’il Roach’s My Dad Without Everybody Else utilises family photographs as tangible bases for the creation of personal histories and here Taous R. Dahmani considers the alteration of the photographic surface as an updated resurgence of nineteenth century Pictorialism.

Sondra Meszaros has amassed an archive of photographic imagery of the female body, as a way of thinking through the aesthetics and power dynamics of sexuality. Sara Knelman contemplates the artist’s use of appropriation that reflects our freedom to find ways of seeing that unsettle expectations and question desire.

On the occasion of Sirens, Nan Goldin’s exhibition at London’s Marian Goodman Gallery, Max Houghton discusses a body of work borne of a deeply personal impetus and with connections to loss and love; the repetitions of faces illuminated like old friends, or like someone passed in the street, half-noticed, yet intensely felt.

Michael Ashkin’s exterior shots of unnamed places – vacant lots, empty ground, roadsides – have 680 lines of anaphoric verse assigned as captions. Eugénie Shinkle examines this elegy for a landscape shaped by cumulative minor desecrations, inevitable outcomes of the violence that inheres in casual acts of consumption.

Clare Strand remakes a series of black and white photographs remotely, by painting from a series of instructions communicated to her across the English Channel whilst on a residency in Paris. Duncan Wooldridge explores a work that plays with and amends our relationships to technology, drawing comment on the information society and its digital swarms.

Liz Orton’s collaboration with Professor Steve Halligan that meditates on the relationship between the body and medical imaging technologies. An essay from Diane Smyth unpicks Michel Foucault’s term, ‘medical gaze’, the dehumanising medical separation of the patient’s body from his or her person or identity.

Book Review

Top 10

Photobooks of 2020

Selected by Alex Merola and Tim Clark

Features

Mark McKnight

Heaven is a Prison

Book review by Eugénie Shinkle