Jörg Colberg's online photography magazine, featuring photographer profiles, interviews, articles, and book reviews.
I think you can trace the degree with which someone will embrace authoritarian thinking by looking at to what extent they will agree with that anyone who has not actually violated the law does not have to worry about dealing with law enforcement. The theoretical
One of the most astonishing aspects of the collaboration between writer Arnold van Bruggen and photographer Rob Hornstra is that the more complex a topic, the sharper the duo manage to bring it into focus, ultimately making their most ambitious projects also easily the best
It seems obvious that social media have drastically changed how photographers engage with the internet. In fact, for many people photographers as much as the rest of the population social media are the internet: this is where you either spend most of your
Art has mostly no power except for the following: it can remind us that at least in theory we have the option to become better people than who we are. By better people I don t mean more productive or more popular or more powerful. Instead,
As someone who has spent a lot of time with photobooks presenting them online, teaching how to make them, writing about them in a critical fashion, making them myself, over the years the most common question has been: what makes a good photobook? What
Almost twenty five years ago, a few days after 9/11, I went to a restaurant serving food from Afghanistan. At the time, I still lived in Boston, from which two of the planes had departed that were used in the terrorist attacks. For a while,
A well known curator once said that the problem with collage was that it s too easy to make a decent one, while it s almost impossible to create something great. Whether or not I am misremembering or paraphrasing I am not sure. But collage seems easy,
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but our world isn’t doing so well. Even as there still is endless denial by fossil-fuel corporations and the politicians they’ve bought climate change has started to wreak havoc. In addition, in many places of the world freedom is
A few years ago, Karin Wieland wrote a double biography of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, two German women whose career ran in parallel and who made very different choices when faced with the rise of the Nazis. Dietrich ended up cheering on the Allied
Just to get this out of the way: the depressing aspect of Sophie Calle’s Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished is the fact that its least interesting ideas still are vastly better than anything we typically come up with. I. Not we. No doubt, you, the
One of the biggest misconceptions of so-called street photography is that it can serve as a descriptor of the world (mostly cities) at large. It simply can t any more (or less) than the rest of photography. What it can do, though, is to serve as
The more I know about photography and the more I have become comfortable making my own photographs, the more I feel the need to experience its interactions with other human activities in which the reality that surrounds us is captured in some fashion. As a
A picture is worth a thousand words, Merriam-Webster states, is used to say that it is often easier to show something in a picture than to describe it with words . The adage is widely used, including by photographers trying to avoid writing or talking about
My first exposure to the idea that the land was not merely some immutable background people were operating against came from the very place I grew up in: the part of the city where I was born had been wrested ( reclaimed ) from the sea. As
I have lived in the United States for almost half of my life, but I doubt that I will ever fully understand its intricacies. This is not because the US is more complex or sophisticated than any other country. It’s because there is a difference
We all carry our hurt with us wherever we are. But often going away, far away, allows us to see that hurt more clearly and feel it more fully. If we allow ourselves to do so we then might find a way to express it. If
Photography operates through the transmission of agreed-upon codes that convey their underlying ideology. Agreed-upon here does not necessarily mean what a surface read might lead to. We do not enter the world in a fashion that at some stage involves us facing some bureaucrat who
My first exposure to Keijo Kitajima s work came in the form of Photo Express Tokyo, published in 2012 by Steidl/Le Bal. Billed as “a facsimile of the legendary series of twelve booklets” originally published by the photographer himself while staging a year-long exhibition at CAMP
If you take photographs out of the context of ordinary life out of the lives lived by people who do not think of themselves as photographers or artists to insert them into an art context, you will have to charge them up (unless
No place experienced more intense suffering for a longer period of time than Poland, the blurb on the dust jacket of Poland 1945 by Magdalena Grzebałkowska notes, the first country to be invaded by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the last to be
Early last year, I wrote about Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, a documentary by Amélie Ravalec on a group of artists that in the 1960s and 70s revolutionized their country s creative expressions. These expressions include the full gamut of what we understand as art, whether photography, printed or painted
I never thought much about how collages might operate in a book context other than in a catalogue. The closest I can think of would be Jindřich Štyrský s Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (I have a copy of this most recent reprint; you can
It is conventional wisdom that you are not supposed to touch pieces of art. That s why museums employ staff that stand around in galleries and berate anyone who dares to get too close to the museum s wares. And mostly, I m not interested in touching art,
In late October this year, I traveled back to the town in northwestern Germany where I was born and where I spent the first two decades of my life. I had not been back since roughly the early to mid-1990s. There had not been a
In the past, I have worked with photographers whose projects involved a lot of very different elements, both photographically and conceptually. While many complex projects are complex because their makers are unable to decide which of the less important aspects they can trim, some projects