Grandpa wearing his best Sunday suit, the second cousin’s first communion, the aunt who made it big as a singer in Bollywood, a family member whose name nobody can ever remember in costume at the carnival parade, the uncle who moved to Brazil never t

It seems strange to say such a thing, as we are repeatedly informed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, aside, perhaps, from a few rough bits around the edges. But anyone who pays any attention at all can see immediately that this is not

Creation Lake weaves together an espionage thriller with an epistolary treatise on the shadowy origins of humanity. What led you to the origins narrative? The human world “before the written down” has always been a site of fantasy, psychoanalytic pro

Robert Frank spent the summer of 1972 crisscrossing America—not in pursuit of the lyrical social documentary for which he was already famed, but as part of the Rolling Stones’ forty-eight-date mobile bacchanal. It had been three years since the disas

i recently clocked into interview a very famous personat not even half the worth of my time giventhe need to corral precursivelya completely wild feeling inside my headover and over he would insert “just”before the predicate noun he chose to describe

Mary Frey’s photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s offer a lesson in the creative power of staying close to home. The microdramas that form her latest book, My Mother, My Son (TBW, 2024; 72 pages, $50), an edit, from her archive, of images m

My first paid job in the cultural sector, in the mid-2010s, was in London at a national museum with an extensive collection of photography, along with printed ephemera, pamphlets, zines, and photobooks, made by British and international artists. I on

“Nor breath nor motion”—the container ships in these photographs by Richard Misrach have the deathly stillness of the becalmed vessel in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, stuck “As idle as a painted ship. /Upon a painted ocea

Titled backstories, the seventh edition of FotoFocus is conceived around “stories that are not evident at first glance,” satisfying desires for secret histories and deepening the art world’s long archival turn. The biennial features more than one hun

Over the last decade, the Art Gallery of Ontario embarked on an initiative to incorporate twentieth-century photography detailing life in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico into its collections. Beyond poetic im

These pictures, each one, turn onSomething mysteriously gruesome.What it is one can’t say, exceptThat they are real and that nothingUnnatural constitutes the amazementThey bring to the domestic gaze.Reality here is uneasy, not becauseAnything unusual

Farah Al Qasimi describes her aesthetic as “so-muchness.” Inspired by everything from SpongeBob SquarePants to Octavia Butler’s dystopian novels, the Emirati-raised maximalist tends toward extravagant ornamentation and sly obfuscation in her photogra

Born into a greedy land, but not to feed it.Play with fire, but you best not feed it. The appetite for truth is cavernous. TooMany brought here. Bought. Not to feed it. What you whispered up close, tooth to ear.Trust flew. Very few thought not to fee

Dalia Al-Dujaili: Tell me about your journey into bookmaking, curation, and design. Roï Saade: After a few years in the corporate world, I felt the need to get out of it and work toward something more creatively fulfilling. While studying graphic des

Emmet Gowin came to photography via a teenage revelation in a dentist’s office in Danville, Virginia. It was the late 1950s. Flipping through magazines in the waiting room, the minister’s son landed on an Ansel Adams photograph of a burned tree stump

River Road descended from soybean fields into swampland on the drive to Jude’s house. The covered dish rode shotgun. I went under the speed limit to avoid any jostling since I had plated the portions so carefully, arranging all of Jude’s favorite foo

How did your new book on gardens and paradise begin? I’ve been working on it since 2020, but the initial stages were restoring the physical garden itself and keeping a garden diary. I originally trained as a herbalist, so I’ve been thinking about pla

Nhu Xuan Hua’s photographs defy easy interpretation. A woman sings karaoke in a shining, armored gown. An archival wedding photograph is beguilingly redacted, dress and suit visible but the bodies of husband and wife absent contours. A black dog gaze

Polymode started as a concept before becoming a business in 2014. Its cofounders, Silas Munro and Brian Johnson—who first met at RISD and have collaborated over the years from North Carolina and California—dismantle the idea of designers who leave th

IMAGINE HAVING LOST A LOVED one in the New England of the 1870s. Then, a knock at your door: a salesman in a suit. He pulls out a bound catalog of albumen-silver prints, with as many photographs in it as you’ve maybe seen in a lifetime, each showing

Jupiter has ninety-five moons. Earth, one. Judging from the number of photographs of our singular satellite, one might think there were more objects in our orbit. Silver moons have filled books, blogs, almanacs, and atlases for almost two hundred yea

The design writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn counts the photographer and filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book of essays Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, in which he argued for the conne

For all their polish, there’s something about Paul Kooiker’s pictures that feels outsider, something obsessive and off. Even when he’s photographing ordinary subjects—an egg, a wig, a shoe, an eyeball—in a relatively straightforward style, the result

Luigi Ghirri did not preoccupy himself with cars, but he did enjoy driving. He owned a number of Volkswagen Beetles that were constantly breaking down. In the 1980s, he switched to a Volvo station wagon, paragon of Swedish vehicular functionality and

The former lawyer turned designer Duro Olowu creates fashion moments on a resolutely human scale. Born in Lagos into a Nigerian Jamaican family, Olowu had a cosmopolitan upbringing, traveling to Europe and absorbing cultural influences ranging from a

Architecture and photography have always been intimately connected. These media share a few fundamentals: impacts of light and air, the balance of surface and depth, interiority and exteriority, and how these relations are mediated by the human body.