Conscientious Photography Magazine

It’s probably fair to say that the one place that has most severely been photographically misrepresented is the continent of Africa. There are many contributing factors, most notably, of course...

https://cphmag.com/the-african-gaze/

In a conversation I had with a photographer a little while ago, she mentioned how terrible most of her teachers had been at the art school she had gone to. However, there had been one exception, ...

https://cphmag.com/advice-for-young-artists/

If you want to destroy a democracy, you need to do two things. First, you need to destroy the idea of a greater good. Over the course of the past roughly 45 years, neoliberal capitalism has done ...

https://cphmag.com/encyclopedia-of-the-uncertain/

After 300 years of self-imposed isolation, in 1868 Japan opened to the world again. The regime, essentially a feudal military dictatorship, was toppled, and a new order was installed. With Europe...

https://cphmag.com/japanese-theaters/

A sense of quiet runs through Caroline Kist ‘s book It’s that you’re here. A softcover that despite its relatively large size feels delicate, in page after page after page the viewer comes ...

https://cphmag.com/its-that-youre-here/

Up until now, Chinese artist Cai Dongdong has been known for working with found photographs. The work he has done with his massive archive of photography taken in China over many decades divides...

https://cphmag.com/passing-by-beijing/

A few days ago, I wrote an article for a German newspaper about THAT Trump picture. Given the typical length of such opinion pieces, there were a few strands that I was only able to allude to. T...

https://cphmag.com/thoughts-on-that-photo/

Last week , I wrote that I don’t look at photobooks to see photographs. I look at photobooks to encounter life. Of course, that’s not the entire story, because I also look at photobooks for t...

https://cphmag.com/ando/

Sometimes, I wonder why I’m supposed to meddle in the lives of strangers. OK, I understand that I’m not really meddling when I’m looking at an art book in which a total stranger exposes the...

https://cphmag.com/fugue/

Even as there are some fluctuations between the statistics available online, the reality of sexual assault is that it’s very common. “Every 68 seconds another American is sexually assaulted,�...

https://cphmag.com/27-drafts/

I’ve lost track of the number of photo festivals and photobook/photobook-dummy awards. Typically, these events come with shortlists. Often, these shortlists stretch the actual meaning of the wo...

https://cphmag.com/casino-capitalist-photobook-festival/

Every once in a while, some photography comes along — or, as it typically the case, is being discovered long after it was made — that has the potential to radically change our ideas and views...

https://cphmag.com/the-memories-of-others/

For the past few years, on and off I have been looking at some photographs that intrigued me ever since I first saw them. If you know what to look for, they are easy to find online: The photograp...

https://cphmag.com/the-hampton-book/

The world of photography (aka photoland) stubbornly clings to a rather limited set of beliefs, even as the way photographs are viewed and used has changed considerably over the past decades. Phot...

https://cphmag.com/the-meme-is-the-message/

I have long been baffled by the fact that if you want to learn more about photography, arguably the most important medium of our troubled times, you’re made to face a library of writing that is...

https://cphmag.com/ordinary-notes/

If, like me, you have a hard time remembering people’s names, reading history books becomes a real chore, especially in cases such as Japan. There, for the longest time the ruling class played ...

https://cphmag.com/the-japanese/

In early 2021 I reviewed Thana Faroq ‘s I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows , a book that foregrounded the photographer’s and other people’s experiences as refugees in the Netherlands. Th...

https://cphmag.com/conv-thana-faroq/

(A preface of sorts:) As events have shown over the past decade (or more), we are collectively unable to keep more than one thought in our minds, especially if thoughts might be competing, whethe...

https://cphmag.com/lebensborn/

The project has taken on an outsized and, I would argue, partly counterproductive role in the world of photography. Most photographers work with projects, whether one or any number at the same ti...

https://cphmag.com/the-project-is-not-your-friend/

The very first thing I noticed about Martín Bollati ‘s Hermes/Unesco is that it’s a little paper brick. It has more than 1,000 pages, 999 of which are taken up by images. I’m thinking tha...

https://cphmag.com/hermes-unesco/

Even as the following exercise is limiting in a number of ways, it would be instructive to describe the state of German photography since the end of World War 2 as being caught between two marrie...

https://cphmag.com/ein-dorf/

The other day, I found a long list of tips around how to go about writing one’s novel. I have no intention of writing one. But I read a lot about writing simply because for some reason, essays...

https://cphmag.com/merely-a-series/

We are so used to handling printed matter that we do not pay much attention to its physical properties. Looking at a book requires work: you have to hold it or use a table for support, and you ha...

https://cphmag.com/strange-land/

Ordinary People , the catalogue produced at the occasion of Rob Hornstra ‘s mid-career retrospective at Fotomuseum Den Haag , might feature the most atypical cover photograph. It’s slightly w...

https://cphmag.com/ordinary-people/

“A mysterious, malevolent-looking mermaid mummy that was brought back to the U.S. from Japan more than 100 years ago,” a recent article noted, “appears to be a mix of fish, monkey and liza...

https://cphmag.com/digital-wunderkammer/