Conscientious Photography Magazine

In 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura to produce what is widely viewed as the first photograph, an incredibly hazy view of some houses.

“When the great etch-a-sketch is shaken”, Gregor Hens writes in The City and the World, “and the public streets are erased, this microcosm always remains, the memory of the most familiar paths, of the sun falling at a certain angle on the breakfast table,…

With the exception of books originally written in German or in English, I have to rely on translation in order to access world literature.

In the hands of a gifted photographer, their pictures conjure a world different than our own: photographs made in and from our world speak of another world, a world that is different and that, if the intent is artful, is filled with possibilities in a way…

Two seemingly conflicting things can be true at the same time.

In many ways, despite their background against mass carnage on enormous scales the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted something entirely new.

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.

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 a…

It seems obvious that social media have drastically changed how photographers engage with the internet.

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.

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?

Almost twenty five years ago, a few days after 9/11, I went to a restaurant serving food from Afghanistan.

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.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but our world isn’t doing so well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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”.

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.

I have lived in the United States for almost half of my life, but I doubt that I will ever fully understand its intricacies.

We all carry our hurt with us wherever we are.

Photography operates through the transmission of agreed-upon codes that convey their underlying ideology.

My first exposure to Keijo Kitajima’s work came in the form of Photo Express Tokyo, published in 2012 by Steidl/Le Bal.

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 for some reason the pho…

“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.

I never thought much about how collages might operate in a book context other than in a catalogue.

It is conventional wisdom that you are not supposed to touch pieces of art.