Reading Photographs Notes #04
What happens when a body of photographs becomes a publication? In Reading Photographs Notes #04, five photographers take us through four recently published works, opening up conversations around editing, sequencing, collaboration, materials and production. Through their different approaches, we look at how the decisions made beyond the photograph can shape how a body of work is ultimately seen, held and experienced.
The Photographs We Almost Erased
Among thousands of photographs, we keep the perfect frame and leave the rest behind, but meaning often waits inside the images we almost erased.
A Metaphysical Slot Machine: Jason Fulford on Frozen Features
In Frozen Features, photographer Jason Fulford surrenders his 30-year archive to chance, explaining in an interview with Nathan Leigh Taylor how he used a “metaphysical slot machine” approach to pair negatives into unexpected juxtapositions. Co-edited with Sarah Chaplin Espenon down to fifty unresolved pairings, the Loose Joints publication draws on the history of photomontage to avoid fixed narratives, inviting readers to engage their own subconscious to complete each image’s meaning.
Reading William Eggleston (II): Reading Guide
Published for William Eggleston’s landmark 1976 MoMA exhibition, William Eggleston’s Guide remains essential reading nearly fifty years later. More than a mere catalogue, it demonstrates how editing and visual rhythm can transform individual snapshots into a coherent, authored experience that teaches us how to see.
Reading Photographs Notes #03
The third Reading Photographs Notes explores three works that challenge a familiar assumption: that a photobook must behave like a book. Together, they prompted conversations about material, memory, authorship, and how the form of a book can become inseparable from the photographs it carries.
Against Legibility: Pale Flare and the Art of Refusal
Pale Flare describes an observation about photographic culture in Thailand, though it applies well beyond. Exhibition statements tend to close down interpretation rather than open it.
The Invisible Rainbow of Shanghai Remembering a City Through Mi Lu’s Rainbow at Night
Behind Shanghai’s familiar skyline exists another city, one that few people ever see. Rainbow at Night is Mi Lu’s portrait of that hidden world, and of photography’s quiet power to preserve what time eventually takes away.
Reading Photographs Notes #02
The second Reading Photographs Notes gathers conversations inspired by three photobooks that approach family from very different perspectives. Together, they prompted reflections on memory, inheritance, and the ways photographs sometimes help us begin conversations that are otherwise difficult to have.
Reading Photographs Notes #01
Although Reading Photographs has been quietly taking place for several months, these are the first notes we’ve chosen to leave behind. They gather together conversations inspired by three photobooks and the people who made them—an evening of shared observations on quietness, memory, books, and the many ways photographs invite us to slow down and look.
Yoese Mariam: A Visual Memoir in Two Acts
Yoese Mariam’s photobooks Three Photos Left and Landep form a visual memoir on grief, memory, family and cultural inheritance.