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It was in the summer of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with an acute case of Paranoid Schizophrenia. I was 17 then. The doctors, in retrospect, had said that she had already started developing the symptoms many years prior to that. Symptoms that nobody had noticed. But it was the break up with my father that caused her condition to suddenly come alive and then deteriorate. Over the years, the walls of our home started to peel off, people had stopped coming to our home because my mother was too scared to let anybody in and all that remained were the traces of a life that no longer existed. Our initial years were spent hiding from the world. Hers out of paranoia and mine out of embarrassmen...
"Over the years when my mother’s condition started to improve I started to photograph at home more. Apart from my mother the focus of the photographs also included her dog Elsa who had been her sole companion at home for many years and also the house itself whose condition deteriorated or improved as my mother’s illness regressed or progressed." -- photographer website
"'The physical coastline becomes a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode." 'The book opens with an absurd short story that leads into a sequence of images taken along the Indian coastline. While the photographs are made in real situations, the continuous removal and addition of context manipulates the line between what is a fact and what is not, in a way not unlike how new realities are increasingly being engineered today. Some might imagine the book to be a fable like tale while others might recognize in it, reality. Either way, the book in its stories alludes to undercurrents in a country that is seeing higher frequencies o...
Award-winning photographer Matt Black traveled over 100,000 miles to chronicle the reality of today’s unseen and forgotten America. When Magnum photographer Matt Black began exploring his hometown in California’s rural Central Valley—dubbed “the other California,” where one-third of the population lives in poverty—he knew what his next project had to be. Black was inspired to create a vivid portrait of an unknown America, to photograph some of the poorest communities across the US. Traveling across forty-six states and Puerto Rico, Black visited designated “poverty areas,” places with a poverty rate above 20 percent, and found that poverty areas are so numerous that they’re...
In spring 2016, Sohrab Hura traveled the lower Mississippi with Postcards from America, a loosely collaborative documentary project conceived in 2011 by Alec Soth and Jim Goldberg and funded by Pier 24 Photography. Hura's trip down the levees had been shortly preceded by his father's journey on the river itself, on a commercial ship navigating up to New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. The work that resulted, The Levee, embodies the artist's impressions of place through the prism of his relationship with his father. The first museum exhibition dedicated to Hura's work, The Levee: A Photographer in the American South (October 5, 2019-February 2, 2020) celebrates the Cincinnati Art Museum's ac...
Art as Witness is a cluster of barbed writings and biting images from the underbelly of turbulent India and its neighboring countries. Relying on the sustained work of eminent photographers and artists on rights issues in and around South Asia, and on writings by courageous activists, lawyers, journalists, and social scientists, the book focuses on the terror unleashed by armies, states, and courts of law, and tells the stories of brave survivors. Here, text and image are strained to their limits to convey the hopes and anguish of prisoners, death-row victims, murder-victim families, families of missing people, populations living under martial law, and displaced communities, in a world where...
Centralia exposes hidden crimes of war as an indigenous people fight for their survival. In war, truth is the first casualty and Centralia explores the unsteady relationship between reality and fiction and how our perceptions of reality and truth are manipulated.
David Horvitz's Sad, Depressed, People looks at a set of images circulating within stock photography collections. These photographs, in which actors are photographed holding their heads in their hands, ostensibly depressed, are here shown to contain a bizarre tension between their status as stock images and their supposedly emotional content.
How We End is a book of 41 illustrated short stories chronicling the romantic and sexual history of an unnamed and unreliable narrator. Each story details the moments in which the narrator realizes a relationship is over. The images are a visual representation of where that moment took place. The illustrations collage public imagery, sourced from the Internet, with private, intimate narratives to create scenes that are just as distorted and fragmented as the stories themselves. Break-ups are nothing if not one-sided, skewed. The book is about intimacy and heartbreak, but it is also about the way we communicate these things and the way truth deteriorates every time we tell a story. The relationship between the text and images is representative of the collaboration and friendship between writer and artist. There is an openness and a desire to communicate, but also a disconnect. Something is lost in translation, always.
'Sacks is rightly renowned for his empathy . . . anyone with a taste for the exotic will find this beautifully written book highly engaging' – Sunday Times Always fascinated by islands, Oliver Sacks is drawn to the Pacific by reports of the tiny atoll of Pingelap, with its isolated community of islanders born totally colour-blind; and to Guam, where he investigates a puzzling paralysis endemic there for a century. Along the way, he re-encounters the beautiful, primitive island cycad trees – and these become the starting point for a meditation on time and evolution, disease and adaptation, and islands both real and metaphorical in The Island of the Colour-Blind.