Art critic Ida Hiršenfelder interviews Trevor Paglen, a radical geographer with an academic background, muckraking author and outlaw artist who has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies for several years. Hiršenfelder and Paglen discuss here four projects: Simbology (2006) – a collection of insignia and patches used in secret operations, Missing Persons – a list of fake names used to cover up CIA agents in the war on terror, Code Names – a catalogue of words, phrases and terms employed for active military programs, and Limit Telephotography Project, which unveils the geographies of classified ...

Dark Mirrors assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image’s relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life. The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past ...

This week in Russia, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to over two years in prison, partly for violating parole while in a coma from a state-sponsored murder attempt. Following a week of large-scale demonstrations across Russia protesting his arrest, the skilled lawyer and anti-corruption activist stood in court before his sentencing and stated, “I hope very much that people won’t look at this trial as a signal that they should be more afraid. This isn’t a demonstration of strength—it’s a show of weakness. You can’t lock up millions and hundreds of thousands of people. I hope very much that people will ...

This group exhibition brings together artworks and objects to trace various transformations of meaning, reception, and use over time. The titular metaphor of the whale’s belly—a mythic space separated from lived reality—plays on the residual legacy of the white cube as an allegedly bracketed space of reflection, contemplation and perceptual or political transformation. Just as Jonah, who in the biblical account was swallowed by a whale, and perhaps the visitor, are transformed through isolated meditation, In the Belly of the Whale plays content against its framing to question both how an artifact references a given historical moment and how different modes ...

Hito Steyerl has created a two-part edition: a free unlimited digital download and a new limited edition print. The source for both editions is a found image of a woodcut print by Utamaro, which the artist has intentionally corrupted by embedding one of her written texts into the image’s source code. The downloadable code reveals this hidden text, from which it is possible to reconstruct the original jpeg image. The limited edition print is a further derivative of this text, printed with silver ink containing silicone; a component of semiconductors. Instructions for digital edition: Download the image source text (right-click and select ...

There are several ways to reveal the interior of something. The thing can be cut open. It can be broken apart. It can be seen through imaging technologies, such as X-ray and ultrasound. A microscope can discern a certain level of activity just below the surface. For Los Angeles-based artist Kelly Akashi, this line of inquiry leads to a very precise practice of revealing the interior of her works without ever carving them open. Her dissection work is never so crass. Viewers may not even realize that they have been given entry into the internal dynamics of her works—even though ...

Kites and Websites collects a selection of works developed in the framework of Evan Roth’s Internet Landscapes project, an ongoing investigation into the network, nature and the self. Like a new romantic wanderer, he has studied the global submarine fiber optic cables in various countries, often finding himself alone in remote locations. As the art critic Domenico Quaranta explains, the visual language adopted for the project is infrared photography, a conceptual reference to the architecture of the Internet. Roth also collects audio documentation through a device that scans radio frequencies at regular intervals, recording a mix of white noise and audio fragments. While the Internet ...

Before there was Instagram, there was Mark Hunter, AKA, THE COBRA SNAKE, who made his name photographing the alt party scene of the ‘00s and relaying this coverage to his blog before people’s hangovers could even hit. In turn, thecobrasnake.com, along with American Apparel and Vice, became canon for high hipsterdom. For older Millens, it also came to represent an era when signs, language, and social protocol operated quite differently than they do in the ‘20s. With Mark now making a book from his early-Y2Ks archive—Cobrasnake: All Yesterday’s Parties (forthcoming from Rizzoli in 2022)—New Models chatted with him about his ...

Sally Stein reconsiders Dorothea Lange’s iconic portrait of maternity and modern emblem of family values in light of Lange’s long-overlooked ‘Padonna’ pictures and proposes that ‘Migrant Mother’ should in fact be seen as a disruptive image of women’s conflictual relation to home, and the world. Stein is an American academic and cultural theorist living in Los Angeles. The interrelated topics she most often engages concern the multiple effects of documentary imagery, the politics of gender, and the status and meaning of black and white and color imagery on our perceptions, beliefs, even actions as consumers and citizens. Dr. Stein, Professor Emerita, ...

Both embracing and eliding the experience of mediation, (video game environments stage) worldliness for us as a mobile task to explore and engage with, with our eyes, hands, brains, and bodies all participating in seeing and/as doing… Life can thus (also) be redescribed as an ongoing process of navigating between cinema and photography, with image-making becoming a mode of world-making, for gamers and non-gamers alike…

Margo Halverson is a designer, educator, photographer, and artist. She’s a professor of graphic design and Chair of the Graphic Design department at Maine College of Art and the co-founder of DesignInquiry, an amorphous collective centered around ideas of disciplinary discourse, expanded practice, and design research. In this episode, Jarrett and Margo talk about her journey from photography to design, the origins on DesignInquiry, and blending personal and professional work.

Martin Venezky is a graphic designer, photographer, artist, and educator. Since 1997, he’s operated Appetite Engineers to produce books, installations, and illustrations and since 1993, he’s been on the faculty of the California College of Art in San Francisco. A new book of his photography, What I Know About Photography, was released last year by Jon Sueda on Kickstarter. In this conversation, Jarrett and Martin talk about his career and work, the value in image and form making, and why he’s focusing so much of his work on photography these days.