‘Nat Faulkner’s work is often described as ‘alchemical’ – a term that feels apt, given his fascination with darkroom processes. But writers often reach for descriptions like this to ascribe a kind of quasi-mystical obscurity to analogue photography. In fact, Faulkner rarely describes himself this way, and his characterisation of his practice as ‘collaborative’ – driven by processes he sets in motion but doesn’t fully control – sits awkwardly with the alchemist’s ambition to master the elements. For Faulkner, photography isn’t a metallurgical riddle to be solved, it’s part of the substance of the world.’
Eug wrote about ‘Strong Water’ - Nat Faulkner’s recent exhibition at the Camden Art Center. Have a read! It’s up on the site now 😃
@nat_faulkner@camdenartcentre
UK exhibition: book-liking folks in the UK, Lewisham-way might like 'LIBRARY' on for the next week & a bit at @lewishamarthouse 📚 (also featuring work by our co-editor Callum)
Hi Arturo …
I thought I’d write to you, instead of only about you. It feels less distant that way, which I think too many reviews fall prey to. Anyway, thanks for the book. It’s smaller than I expected, in a good way, and its size and format remind me of a flipbook. It works like one too, and even makes the same soft fluttering noise when you page through it. It makes reading it a casual event: a page or two at breakfast, a story while I wait for the microwave to finish. (In my head this is not so different to how your father shared his stories with you.)
Kris Kozlowski Moore’s review of ‘Border Documents’ by Arturo Soto takes the form of a letter - the primary means of communicating across national frontiers before digital networks. Against the impersonal address of administrative language, the letter evokes the warmth of real human relationships. Up on the site now, link in bio
@arturosotophoto@kriskozlowskimoore@eriskayconnection
This 2025 publication Patterns in Nature – Peter S. Stevens, edited and designed by Yiannis Papadopoulos, is framed as a “book-after-a-book”: a layered object in which Stevens’ original content, Papadopoulos’ contemporary intervention, and an “in-between” mediating field coexist on the same printed surface. Rather than a facsimile, it’s meant as a palimpsest.
If, like me, you read Stevens for the ideas - growth, symmetry, branching, tiling - this conceptual superimposition may feel secondary. But what interests me here is something slightly different: the way mid-century scientific publishing already treated photographs, diagrams and micrographs as aesthetic forms long before the contemporary art world rediscovered them as such. Stevens’ original book belongs to that moment when scientific photography began to circulate not only as evidence, but as pure pattern and visual pleasure.
Papadopoulos’ intervention makes that historical condition visible. By doubling the navigation systems, displacing typography, and expanding the image field, he foregrounds the book as a constructed object - a carefully crafted epistemology. The result isn’t just a reprint - it’s a meditation on how knowledge is formatted, how images accrue authority, and how twentieth-century science quietly shaped our visual culture.
For those of us interested in mid-century book design and the aesthetic charge of scientific imagery, it’s less about nostalgia than about recognising that the photograph-as-pattern was always doing more cultural work than it seemed.
@cubearteditions@bigblackmountain
Only the best street photographers can strike a balance between technique, authenticity, and that indescribable ability of being attuned to the rhythm of the moment. While Mark Cohen is not as well-known as Bresson, Frank, Winogrand, Friedlander, or Erwitt, he belongs to a select group of practitioners able to balance these very criteria. Arturo Soto writes on ‘Tall Socks’, by Mark Cohen - it’s up on the site now, have a read!
@gost_books@arturosotophoto
#markcohen
Today’s charity shop find is ‘Introducing Animals’ by František Vopat and Julius Komárek, published in London by Spring Books around 1958. Vopat’s photographs of animals – most of them napping or pottering about in mid-century zoos, and more than half of them birds – are wonderful character portraits. Komárek, a Czech zoologist and popular science writer, supplies captions for a juvenile readership that veer between earnest instruction and deadpan comedy, registering the looming decline of several species with a breezy matter-of-factness that now feels oddly dissonant. Spring Books was an imprint of Paul Hamlyn’s London-based mass-market publishing group and often produced via Czech printers with a reputation for high-quality gravure work. I’m weirdly attracted to books from this era - that post-war moment when natural history, mid-century graphic design and inexpensive illustrated publishing briefly aligned.
In ‘La Nonpareille’, Batia Suter works with reproductions of glass slides once used to teach ‘mechanical technologies’ - the study of machines used in industrial and manufacturing applications. Reprinted, they begin to misbehave: subtle doubling occurs when slides are reproduced upside down, the glass interfering with its own reflection. Elsewhere, composites created by layering slides recall Francis Galton’s attempts to extract an ‘essential’ type by superimposing multiple images.
The result is more than archival. Time seems to thicken within the image itself - not as narrative, but as a kind of friction between objects and their qualities. Philosopher Graham Harman talks about this in his book ‘The Quadruple Object’, and Suter’s work speaks to me in the same language. The cumbersome machines, once emblems of industrial power, now feel estranged and obsolete - out of time, but as stubbornly, tangibly present as the displaced apparatus in Mike Nelson’s ‘Asset Strippers’. What remains is a meditation on mediation: on glass, machinery, reproduction, and the slow afterlife of technological vision.
Fangirl moment incoming .... every time I see something new by Suter, I think to myself ‘this is her best yet’ - but this one is, as the title suggests, ‘without equal’.
#batiasuter
@roma.publications
I’ve been waiting for this to land on my desk and it was sooooo worth it .... Tyrone Williams’ AI mediations meet Kenta Cobayashi’s characteristic digital interventions in a collision of surface and signal. Pixels flare across the page like electronic pigment; alien forms - somewhere between dropped bouquet and outer-space invader - strike the pavement and detonate into unstable blooms. What started out as organic accelerates away from it at hyperspeed and the result hovers between hysteria and exhilaration: dense, ecstatic, and unapologetically synthetic. This is ‘Flowers’ and it’s iconic. Published by Photobook Daydream Editions.
@tyswills@kentacobayashi@photobook_daydream_editions
I recently spoke with Michael Lundgren about his new book, Glass Mountain, and our conversation kept circling around a kind of quiet mysticism. We talked about stones that seem to move, about the feeling that something in the landscape is looking back at us, about more-than-human time, about moments when the world slips out of what we think it is and becomes newly animate. Lundgren describes taking a photograph as entering a state of not-knowing, where a rock might not be a rock, where scale falters, where consciousness may not belong to humans alone. The book itself reinforces that sensibility: bound like a calendar, shimmering like a cracked geode, its images rise and dissolve rather than progress in linear time. What emerges is less a project than an accretion - an intuitive practice shaped as much by energy and presence as by intention. The full interview is up on the site now! Link in bio
@likemundgren@stanleybarkerbooks
Artist’s multiples are a staple of many artists’ oeuvre. Typically produced in small, affordable editions, they test the limits of originality under conditions of intentional reproducibility. Luke Harby’s ‘Multiples’ uses the photograph to unsettle the notion of the multiple. Do his images depict individual iterations of actual multiples? Or does the title refer to the photograph itself? As Serge Vessel writes in the book’s essay ‘Harby has used photography, an inherently reproducible and multiple form, to create images of sculptures that are unclear as to their relationship to uniqueness, reproduction, seriality and repetition...’ Thank you Luke for sending this! Silly Gooze Editions 2025.
@lukeharby@sillygoozeuk
Feiyi Wen’s exhibition ‘The Garden and the Gaze’ (with Xiaochi Dong) is on for three more days at London’s Albion Jeune gallery - if you can’t get there (and even if you can) then Sarah Jitjindar’s excellent review is up on the site - have a read
@feiyi_wen@jitjindar@albionjeune
In ‘A Desert Transect’ Brian O’Neill turns the quotidian act of riding Phoenix’s Light Rail into a methodological inquiry – where a transect becomes both a line in the landscape and a way of seeing, thinking, and feeling a city. What looks like a simple commute unfolds as an auto-ethnographic experiment, mixing images, writing, and sound to press back against abstraction and ask: how do we describe a place we barely notice? His approach refuses tidy documentation in favour of an engaged, sensory, and critical encounter with urban life - one that insists sociology and photography can co-exist as ways of knowing and that attentiveness, not just aesthetics, reveals why the everyday matters.
@socioneill@arturosotophoto@immaterialbooks
