The first risograph, made by Carmen Winant was described in Objektiv #23 Visual Wanderings. The poster, originally made for the exhibition TRUST curated by Susan Bright and Nina Strand, was placed on light boards all over Leipzig during the photography festival f/stop. What started out as a collection of pictures of the German actress Marlene Dietrich’s hands while performing, cut from a book given to Winant by an elderly neighbour, grew to encompass thousands of other actresses’ hands.
The work Phosphene by Ayo Akinsete is from an ongoing series You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2016–) shown in Objektiv #24 Shaping Space. A visual meditation on Black life in Midwestern and Appalachian spaces in particular and America in general; on being born and raised in something ongoing and brutal in its hypocrisy; on having a privileged relationship to Blackness but not owning it.
The photograph by Ola Rindal is from his 2013 book Night, Light reviewed in our 8th issue. Washed out snapshots of potentially unsettling situations at night, captured with the scrupulous indifference of a machine. Rindal’s images appear to be saved from the archival night if an abandoned camera. It’s almost like found footage of undefined, dark corners of reality.
The work Untitled, 2011 by Lucas Blalock can be seen in his recent book Why must the mounted messenger be mounted? Using notes and photographs, Blalock looks closer at his relationship with the medium. As he writes: ‘I am a photographer. . . but, of late, I seem to mean this in an ever less plausible way. It has turned out that photography was a pretty imperfect vehicle for what I was wanting to do, and I feel that, for a time there, I was driving it like a rental car.’