Fotograf Magazine

Book reviews

#44 empathy — Book reviews

Praga Obscura

Josef Šnobl. Praga Obscura. Erinnerungen an eine graue Stadt 1970–1979 / 1990–2005. (Praga Obscura. Memories of a Gray City 1970–1979 / 1990–2005) Köln: Emons Verlag, 2022. ISBN 978-3-7408-1662-9…

Read more

#41 postdigital photography — Book reviews

Myšlení hranice / hranice myšlení

As a prominent pedagogue at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University and the Film and Television Faculties of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Miroslav Petříček has now influenced several generations of (not only, but probably primarily) Czech and Slovak students of philosophy, film, photography and related fields…

Read more

#41 postdigital photography — Book reviews

Myšlení hranice / hranice myšlení

As a prominent pedagogue at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University and the Film and Television Faculties of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Miroslav Petříček has now influenced several generations of (not only, but probably primarily) Czech and Slovak students of philosophy, film, photography and related fields…

Read more

#41 postdigital photography — Book reviews

Theater of the Street

The book Theater of the Street accompanies readers through the streets of the First Republic flooded with neon lights. Together with several other authors, Lada Hubatová-Vacková presents the history of display cases, illuminated advertising, and window displays in the context of modernism…

Read more

#41 postdigital photography — Book reviews

Capitalism and the Camera

It is not at all surprising that the history of photography is connected with the history of capitalism, but it can be more difficult to capture how and why this is the case. Among other things, this anthology of texts published by Verso is valuable because it is based on a meeting of leading theorists of photography and theorists of capitalism…

Read more

#39 delight, pain — Book reviews

No Modernism Without Lesbians

Paris’, Gertrude [Stein] said, ‘was where the twentieth century was’, ‘the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth-century art and literature”. It is in this Paris of the interwar period that Diana Souhami portrays those that, according to her, contributed con-siderably to the inception of Modernism and yet have been time and again written out of history: lesbians…

Read more

#38 death, when you think about It — Book reviews

Incalculable Loss

This 2018 collection of texts by Manuel Arturo Abreu (who uses the pronoun they) ages like wine, particularly in these times of hyper-digitalization of everyday activities. Abreu, who is best known thanks to their poetic and artistic work, this time applied themselves to the field of the essay and critical theory (although they themselves would probably use the term “anti-theory”)…

Read more

#38 death, when you think about It — Book reviews

The Metabolic Museum

“I imagined the museum as if it were a body, a metabolism built on the cohabitation and interchange between different organs with symbiotic functions.” Clémentine Deliss, currently a curator at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, describes in this book her experiences gleaned from five years of directing the Museum of World Cultures in Frankfurt, which she attempted to transform into a progressive and interdisciplinary institution…

Read more

#38 death, when you think about It — Book reviews

The Imagination of Otherness

Filip Herza’s excellent and academically dutiful book represents a significant contribution to the discussion on the perception and reproduction of (ab)normality. It makes use of specific examples to demonstrate how the concept of the normal was created through popular entertainment culture and how it became part of the social establishment and its institutions…

Read more

#38 death, when you think about It — Book reviews

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

How do our ideas about photography change if we also begin taking into consideration that which was not photographed? What if one part of photography consists of its very absence from particular situations? And how can we think about the camera before its discovery? These are some of the questions posed by theorist and political scientist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, in which she entwines photography into networks of power relationships between nations and cultures…

Read more

#36 new utopias — Book reviews

When Fact Is Fiction

The newest in a series of publications focused on emergent so-cio-political phenomena in the context of art and architecture, with a unified design by the Dutch duo Metahaven, is another compilation of texts, artistic commentaries and projects…

Read more