Oliver Frank Chanarin
The opening pages of Oliver Frank Chanarin’s A Perfect Sentence (Loose Joints, 2023; 240 pages, $60) relay a set of rules to the reader. “Don’t reduce me to tears as a form of control.” “Don’t capture my image without consent.” “Don’t walk with your hands in your pockets.” The true meaning of these statements is oblique, yet their anxious tenor inflect our reading with a particular unease. When we encounter the first image in the book—a photograph of a middle-aged man, wide-eyed, face injured and violently fractioned by the uneven exposure lines of the photographer’s test print—the combination of the subject’s and Chanarin’s anxieties begins to foment our own.
As one moves through the book, this sense of apprehension reveals itself to be the true focus of the artist’s photographic inquiry. Chanarin explores a variety of subjects: bondage group members, drag performers, shelter residents, young men in military uniform. The connections are vague, but common threads of performance, eccentricity,