The Easel

2nd July 2019

Cindy Sherman’s first UK retrospective

Tim Clark | British Journal of Photography | 24th June 2019

This exhibition, a lap of honour for Sherman, tells an important art story. Sherman doesn’t try for excellent photography. Her work shows the “gestures and tropes of womanhood” and is a commentary on images. As one writer puts it “Her work signaled the arrival of photography on art’s main stage … There is no real Cindy Sherman, only infinite characters who reflect the countless mediated images that bombard us daily”.

25th June 2019

Geoff Dyer on the poetry of motels

Geoff Dyer | The Spectator | 22nd June 2019

Beautiful writing. Old style Las Vegas motels are celebrated in a recent photography book. A straightforward review is here. The linked piece is something else. It starts as a review but untethers, becoming a reverie.” The defining architectural feature of the motel — no need to go through a public lobby to get to your room.  [But] romance shrivelled the moment you entered the room. The smell …” More images are here.

Photographing the Otherworldly and the Abject

Barry Schwabsky | The Nation | 14th June 2019

Surely photography cannot get further away from the ‘decisive moment’ than Ess’s images. They are blurry, indistinct, cheap, sourced from pinhole cameras and surveillance footage. Their allure is that they deter interpretation, thinks one critic. Or do they entice us look even harder for meaning? Says Ess, these images have the “capacity to transform the ordinary into the symbolic”.

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