Book Review Blind Spot Photographs by Julie van der Vaart Reviewed by Madeline Cass "In Blind Spot, Julie van der Vaart crafts images that drift between the abstract and the tactile, the geological and the human. The silvery prints are a study in contrast — both visually and conceptually..."

Blind Spot by Julie van der Vaart.

Blind Spot
Photographs by Julie van der Vaart

Void, Athens, Greece 2023. 220 pp., 7¾x9¾".

In Blind Spot, Julie van der Vaart crafts images that drift between the abstract and the tactile, the geological and the human. The silvery prints are a study in contrast — both visually and conceptually. Over- and underexposed moments create a dreamlike experience that invites viewers into her world of chiaroscuro. The viewer questions not only the nature of our bodies but also how far are we actually removed from the slow drip of time — like stalactites we are shaped by small moments. We are reminded that time is not intuitive but merely moments strung together (much like the function of the camera itself) where seemingly abstract ideas are merged into one continuous loop. The question is this: are we truly outside the natural processes of the earth, of caves, of the slow drip of water within us all? She seems to answer: we are not. This work invites the viewer to look deeper than the skin, this crust of society we are all mired in.

Van der Vaart’s work is visceral, marked by drips, sprays, and textures that resemble acid washes or misty, stormy coastlines. Often, the imagery of bodies alongside caves evokes topographic or geological maps and visually drags us across landscapes both human and subterranean.

The imagery of people highlights humanity’s vulnerability through disassociation of not only body but place, and questions the mystery and solitude found in life. The nudes that are paired with these natural landscapes feel like echoes, their shapes abstracted into formal structures, eliciting the viewer to explore and climb in. Limbs become rivers, and bodies float like celestial objects, at times resembling the moon or stars in motion. There’s a tension here between bodies falling or arching, offering an emotional push-pull between desire and detachment.

The subtle use of color — hints of purples and blues — breaks through the monochrome, allowing for moments of stillness, like musical rests between visual notes. Van der Vaart’s repetition of forms and exposures creates a rhythm that builds, referencing both geological forces and bodily ones. In one double-page spread, the deep blue evokes Yves Klein, while elsewhere, a body and a cave meld together in a shared sense of space and form.

Van der Vaart’s work questions the boundaries of the known and the unknown — inviting us to spelunk through both physical landscapes and emotional depths. Her visual metaphors are provocative, at times playful. Through seeming imperfections, motion blurs, and long exposures, she taps into early photographic techniques, while pushing them into contemporary contexts.

Blind Spot is a journey of texture, shape, and light. Through its inky depths, we are invited to explore not only the natural world but the deeply personal and emotional spaces within ourselves. The experience of looking at these images is as much about what we see as what remains in the periphery — an invitation to uncover and understand our own blind spots.

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mad(eline) cass is an American artist and photographer based in Lincoln, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri. She is the author of how lonely, to be a marsh, published in 2019.

Book Review You Don’t Look Native to Me Photographs by Maria Sturm Reviewed by George Slade "Start at the very beginning. The titular “You” addresses an individual, a group, and in an oblique fashion the reader. The cover repeats the title twice — You Don’t Look Native to Me — and includes matching silhouette busts of someone who might have braided hair, who might be looking away from us, and who is definitely obscuring the word “don’t” in the second iteration of the title..."

You Don’t Look Native to Me. By Maria Sturm.

You Don’t Look Native to Me
Photographs by Maria Sturm
Void, Athens, 2023. English, 112 pp., 8¾x11½".

What’s in a name? Be it Lumbee, Littleturtle, Jacobs, or Locklear.

Start at the very beginning. The titular “You” addresses an individual, a group, and in an oblique fashion the reader. The cover repeats the title twice — You Don’t Look Native to Me — and includes matching silhouette busts of someone who might have braided hair, who might be looking away from us, and who is definitely obscuring the word “don’t” in the second iteration of the title. Ergo, “you look native to me.” (The picture source of the silhouette appears about halfway through the book; they are indeed a pony-tailed figure with an earring and necklace, wearing a vivid sweater, looking away and off screen to the left). Duality is a phenomenon to bear in mind while absorbing this book.

This is a fascinating and provocative volume. Photographer and interviewer Maria Sturm’s work is eloquently presented by the edit, concept, and design team João Linneu and Myrto Steirou. There are no captions. You will find explication and dates, however, if you read the excerpts of transcriptions interspersed between the photographs. The conversations must be read to flesh out the visual narrative.

While the photographs feel very quiet — stilled lives, one could say — the verbal exchanges humanize the imagery and articulate the impetus for Maria Sturm’s project. Amidst the pervasive pensiveness more animated photographs include flames, a female dancer (seen in a sequence of shots), a mural of a rearing horse, and two women laughing together.

“Orality shapes origin stories.” Kaya Littleturtle’s words from April 2017 close the book. Littleturtle’s voice resounds throughout the transcript. It may even be appropriate, or accurate, to identify her as a heroine, a leading character in the book; judging from the words she speaks, and what others have to say about “Kaya,” one might link the voice to the recurring figure of a woman throughout the photographs. This individual appears first behind a heart-strewn storm door, then holding a phone displaying an image of a drum, fixing her hair, dancing in the above-mentioned sequence, and tucked in close to another slightly taller, maybe male figure. Collectively she emerges as a standard-bearer for a tribe, the Lumbee of North Carolina, that has been both recognized and slighted. Its creation and destruction myths seem conjoined with U.S. legislation from 1956 that inexplicably defines the Lumbee and withholds privileges accorded to other tribes.

Who are the Lumbee? Evidence is present throughout Sturm’s book. Sovereignty is perhaps a more important topic. According to “Chris” on October 25, 2016, what Sturm is depicting “is not about color, or look, what you’re capturing is about sovereignty and the definition of sovereignty.” He continues: “Sovereignty is not the people discovering who they are. Sovereignty is Indian people discovering what sovereignty is to them. And when they discover it, they have sovereignty. It’s like a mirage.”

Let’s allow the 1956 House of Representatives a word about Lumbee identification. “Tribal legend,” “a distinctive manner of speech,” and “family names such as Oxendine, Locklear, Chavis, Drinkwater, Bullard, Lowery, Sampson, Jacobs and others” are cited as fundamental to their recognition. In the same stroke of the legislative pen, however, the “Act” proclaims that “Nothing…shall make such Indians eligible for any services…and none of the statutes of the United States which affect Indians because of their status as Indians shall be applicable to the Lumbee Indians.” The hand that giveth also denieth.

Visually, the quandary could be summed up by two photographs that appear on adjoining spreads. The first being the previously mentioned image of someone (Kaya?) regarding a cell phone showing an image of drummers. Turn the page, and the second image is another over-the-shoulder shot, this one depicting a man regarding himself in a mirror, perhaps reflecting on a new, very close-cropped haircut. On one hand a view into the distance, echoing that of the silhouetted cover figure, that nonetheless looks backward at tribal tradition, followed by a more narcissistic self-regard, looking inward at “me” in the now.

The duality of looking Native is the paradox beating at the heart of Sturm’s project. Voice and vision collaborate in the mission to ascertain origins and forge identity.

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George Slade, aka re:photographica, is a writer and photography historian based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization TC Photo. georgeslade.photo/

Image c/o Randall Slavin

Book Review Terra Vermelha Photographs by Tommaso Protti Reviewed by Blake Andrews “If you are like most photo-eye readers, you have a nagging sense that the Amazon rainforest is endangered. News outlets regularly report on a barrage of development threats, including logging, ranching, fires, roads, extinction, lost languages, and creeping monoculture. Whew, did I miss anything? The rainforest is under fire, literally..."

Terra Vermelha. By Tommaso Protti.

Terra Vermelha
Photographs by Tommaso Protti
Void, Athens, 2023. 224 pp., 8¼x11".

If you are like most photo-eye readers, you have a nagging sense that the Amazon rainforest is endangered. News outlets regularly report on a barrage of development threats, including logging, ranching, fires, roads, extinction, lost languages, and creeping monoculture. Whew, did I miss anything? The rainforest is under fire, literally. But what exactly does that look like? Is it heavy equipment? Stacks of timber? Indigenous kids in NFL jerseys? Smartphone screenshots viewed in a distant coffee shop?

Italian photographer Tommaso Protti devoted ten years to exploring these questions. He travelled thousands of miles across the Brazilian Amazon, photographing prolifically, often in the company of journalist Sam Cowie and local fixers. As he explains in the introduction, his efforts kicked into high gear with the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. “I felt that the slow-motion social and environmental breakdown I had seen in the previous years was about to get worse.” An accurate prediction, as it turned out.

Protti’s alarming findings are compiled in the recent book Terra Vermelha. The title — Red Land — takes its name from the iron-rich soil exposed by cleared rainforest, but Protti’s subjects extend far beyond devegetated landscapes. His book is a deep dive into the modern human condition, viewed through the lens of communities and villages in the Amazon. In recent decades, these places have endured rapid change and stress. Terra Vermelha doesn’t spend much time in the natural forest, nor does it need to. Wounded communities tell the whole story, mirroring and symbolizing the ongoing environmental carnage. Cultural scars manifest in Protti’s pictures as visual PTSD.

Photographically speaking, this is a journalistic exposé in classic tradition. Shooting in good ol’ monochrome, Protti made his way through Brazil’s disparate communities, sourcing inroads, befriending potential leads, and trusting his instincts to both generate pictures and keep him in one piece. His photos reveal intimate access into a variety of situations. The photos begin with overviews of the broken forest, then progress to shacks, stumpage, meals, kids, truckers, lovers, and more. We see native gatherings, vice squads, industrial sites, and domestic scenes. Like weeds moving into cleared acreage, missionaries and multinationals are a constant invasive presence. Protti treats everything with even-handed aplomb. Most subject are shot with flash and most situations are nocturnal. These factors combine to lend the book a dramatic film noir flavor.

Terra Vermelha is dense with images, all with solid reproductions and center-weighted tonality (reminiscent of Soth’s Songbook). Those features would be enough to carry it, but there are a few nice perks that make it even better. Void’s design has an exposed-spine binding with paper dust jacket. When opened to just about any spread, it lays flat on a table, allowing full visual access to photos across the gutter. Brief sections of white pages and portraits keep the book’s dark edge from dominating too much. Void also had some fun with Protti’s first-person text. It spills like a rubber tree across the end pages in a series of oddly spaced columns.

These are nice design treats, but the book’s most innovative and interesting aspect is the caption index. It’s located in the back of the book as usual, but cleverly disguised as nota roja tabloid headlines. Words blare in breathless all-cap warnings: JAMAXIM FOREST FACES BURNING AND DESTRUCTION…IN THE SEARCH FOR ILLEGAL LOGGERS…VULTURES IN THE PORT OF MANAUS.

The blurbs are mixed with thumbnail versions of interior photos, and multicolored ink. If the combination is not very useful as a practical index, that’s no matter. This section is explosive and fun, and it gets the point across in a way that Protti’s photographs cannot. The index puts an exclamation point on the book’s dystopian mood. That nagging sense I mentioned earlier, that the Amazon rainforest is endangered? By the time you finish this book, it will be flashing red alert. Terra vermhelha indeed. The lungs of the planet are in rough shape. Time for a deep breath of fresh photography.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Book Review Hunger – Epilogue Photographs by Michael Ackerman Reviewed by Shannon Taggart "Michael Ackerman’s Epilogue reminds us that photography is a death-defying feat. The book, his fourth, concludes Hunger, an anthology of photographs in seven parts, published by Void. The project is inspired by Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist — the tale of, literally, a ‘starving artist’ who displays his emaciated body with enthusiasm, despite losing his audience to new amusements..."

Hunger – Epilogue. By Michael Ackerman.

Hunger – Epilogue
Photographs by Michael Ackerman

Void, Athens, Greece 2020. 48 pp., 8¾x12½".

Michael Ackerman’s Epilogue reminds us that photography is a death-defying feat. The book, his fourth, concludes Hunger, an anthology of photographs in seven parts, published by Void. The project is inspired by Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist — the tale of, literally, a ‘starving artist’ who displays his emaciated body with enthusiasm, despite losing his audience to new amusements. Epilogue, the series’ lone solo act, is a shrewd tribute to another practice past its golden era. Ackerman’s photographs confront us with the medium’s primary power — its spooky ability to transform time. Here, reality is altered. The dead are present, and the living preserved. Photography’s death and resurrection show is on parade.

In Ackerman’s dead/alive universe, the fourth wall is broken. The photographic process speaks directly to the viewer. Anomalies read as auras, unseen forces, or time itself: a horse trots into a void of fogged film lined with sprockets; an orbit of dust and scratches embeds a woman frozen in a hammock; a child floats in a glob of white chemistry, as if held by an apparition. People and places materialize through Xerox-like patterns of film grain. Holocaust victims beam brightly in pictures of pictures, projecting the uncanniness of copies. The book eulogizes photography’s analog age with contact-sheet sequences, polaroid grids, and prints with full-frame edges intact. Epilogue amplifies all of photography’s visible features.

This second edition is shrunk down from the original massive broadsheet to a standard size. Its newsprint paper stock emphasizes Ackerman’s use of chiaroscuro, and fans of his previous books will note how the repeated pictures vibrate differently here. As always, his pictures are instantly mesmerizing and need no introduction. However, the included short texts add dimension. Ackerman himself contributes a poetic piece about the outsider status of both being a photographer and being a father. An essay by filmmaker Jem Cohen touches on the many layers at work in Ackerman’s art, such as how he masterfully ‘respects and destroys’ time, and the way he brings back dead friends, just ‘a little bit.’ 

Cameras entangle light, time, observation, and automation. It is a curious thing. Michael Ackerman’s Epilogue celebrates photographic reality. In its pages, transfigured beings and landscapes flicker like memories, or hallucinations. The book’s tone is mournful and strange: everything depicted seems to acknowledge that its dance with death is being recorded. Epilogue memorializes life’s impermanence, and photography’s mysterious gift to capture it.

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Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.

Book Review Mayflies Photographs by Dimitra Dede Reviewed by Blake Andrews After the loss of her mother the artist experiences the interruption of her own timeline on one end while having to fulfill her own role as a mother to the other end...

Mayflies. By Dimitra Dede.

Mayflies  
Photographs by Dimitra Dede

Void, Athens, Greece, 2019. 112 pp., 8¾x12½".

Taking a page from the playbook of Gustave Courbet, Dimitra Dede’s debut monograph, Mayflies, begins at L’Origine du monde. The Greek photographer’s cover photo is less explicit than Courbet’s, but its yonic form is just as striking. It’s a hazy, vertical opening traced in faint silver on a black surface. The image resists immediate resolution. Is it a galaxy? A ghost? A vagina? …? It turns out to be none of these, just a dark hollow in the trunk of a tree. Even after the photo is decoded, it’s hard to escape comparisons to the Origin of the World. A fitting starting point, considering that the photos to come meander through themes of motherhood, death, and ephemerality.

All of these ideas are encapsulated in the title. Mayflies are insects whose brief lifespans are measured in hours; their scientific name, Ephemeroptera, refers literally to passing events. For Dede, life’s transitory nature intruded in the worst way possible, the premature death of her mother. This event — described poetically in the books’ final text passage — was the impetus for the monograph itself, as well as the experimental processes explored within.

Mayflies. By Dimitra Dede.

The cover is merely the entrance to confusion. On the inner pages, pictures of torsos, icescapes, clouds, portraits, and tarps revel in ambiguity. None are printed “straight”. Instead, Dede is focused on physical alteration; her pictures are the visual equivalent of screams, hair-pulling, and deep grief. Dede attacks them with chemical burns, wax, fire, solarization, paint, air bubbles, and more, teasing them away from whatever documentary instincts they might have once possessed.

For the first three-quarters of the book, her tweaked monochromes are printed in dark greyscale on black matte paper — the combination creates an extremely compressed tonal range. There are a few color photos in the mix, printed with a palette so desaturated and subdued that they feel underwater. All are enlarged past the point of comfort and printed full-bleed, so that they defy easy absorption during a casual reading. They take a bit of time, perhaps another reading, or three or four.

A chaotic quality spans throughout this work, which lends it emotional punch. Dede’s are-bure-boke recalls the Provoke-era Japanese provocateurs, whose impulses were also born out of trauma. Although the experience of losing a parent defies photographic description, Dede has fashioned a response that feels more honest and truthful than any straight photograph. This is Dede’s “way of dealing with life, coming to terms with reality, isolation, distance, thoughts, questions, and creating pictures, decoding subconscious images, or coding them.”

In the book’s last quarter, there’s an abrupt shift as the pages transition to white. A beautifully scripted poem and colophon are followed by several more pages of blurred landforms. Photographically the material is similar to its predecessors. But set against a bright background, this section feels surprisingly hopeful, couched in the deep red endpapers that tighten the book into a cohesive whole. It’s on this brighter note that the book closes, a hint of better times ahead. This too shall pass. Time heals all wounds. Humans live and die just like mayflies, albeit on a slightly longer scale. All bodies return eventually to the origin of the world.

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Mayflies. By Dimitra Dede.

Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Book Review Oyster Photographs by Marco Marzocchi Reviewed by Blake Andrews Made over the course of 10 years, ‘Oyster’ is a visual diary compiled by Marzocchi as clues to understand his absent parents. At times bordering on frustration and violence, his images express his search for a ‘culprit’, a cause for his dysfunctional childhood environment..

Oyster. By Marco Marzocchi.

Oyster  
Photographs by Marco Marzocchi

Void, Athens, Greece, 2019. 84 pp., 5½x6¾".

Judging by his photographs, Marco Marzocchi has packed a lot of experience into his forty-six years on the planet. So it’s no surprise that his debut monograph is audacious. For starters, every copy of Oyster (Void, 2019) is printed with a unique cover graphic on the front and back. Each book is individually signed and numbered, the title handwritten on the binding. Such attention to detail is demanding, and is typically only seen in handmade books limited to a few dozen copies. Oyster’s press run is 500. The front and back covers of the book can be linked together into unique pairings with other copies of the same title, by which each individual copy forms a small component of a larger, grander image.

Oyster. By Marco Marzocchi.

The photographs in Oyster depict a diaristic chronology of Marzocchi’s life. The series begins with a childhood photo of his grandmother, then continues in scrapbook fashion to the present. At this point the river of images widens into a short series of monochrome full-bleed photos. Marzocchi’s life has been eventful. His parents split up during his childhood, then died young. “Drugs, addictions, jails, and dysfunctional environment…were constant elements [of his youth],”, according to the photographer’s bio. Captions spread throughout the book hint at even more turmoil. “I had to tell my fiancé ‘the truth’,” says one. Another shows various life components — Dad, faith, job, etc. — as vectors that surround the word “LOST”.

Oyster. By Marco Marzocchi.

Turbulent stuff. The text, however, is not the main attraction. This is a visual book narrated largely by the photographs themselves. Marzocchi is a talented photographer whose gritty, diaristic style is reminiscent of Nan Goldin and Corrine Day, to name a few. Many of the images appear plucked from old family scrapbooks, repurposed with various physical applications still affecting them: tape marks, torn edges, folds, and scribbles run throughout, lending a spirit of whimsy. But, when the book is taken as a whole, these facets — source and physicality — fade into minor details, subsumed by Marzocchi’s commanding narrative.

Oyster. By Marco Marzocchi.

One of Oyster’s early photos depicts an arm entwined around by a snake. This image stands as something of a totem for Marzocchi (An Ouroboros floats near his name on his website). The front and back covers feature snake illustrations by 18th-century Dutch naturalist Albertus Seba. Pull back the front cover and you realize that the very structure of the book is rather snakelike in its long accordion-style construction. At its mouth, the psychedelic duotone of the arm/snake photo mentioned above. A handwritten colophon follows, scribbled in verse around an old snake illustration by William Skelton. All this material is hidden within the cover, out of immediate view — perhaps consumed whole by the snake? — and it takes a bit of investigation to unearth.

Photos and design combine into an elegant package, the result of 10 years of work according to Marzocchi’s site. The road to production was spurred along by several laudations, a Gomma Grant in 2017, a Helsinki Photo Award in 2018, and a Temps Zero award in 2019, to name just a few. “This work is focused on dealing and replacing all the doubts and the fears that I had. Exorcising the pain and the [longing] for love." That’s a labor, here richly rewarded.

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Oyster. By Marco Marzocchi.

Oyster. By Marco Marzocchi.

Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.