Photon News

Uncompromising, fiercely independent, and deeply personal, Blagovesta Semkova’s photography transforms a lifetime of adversity into images of remarkable emotional power.

Along East London’s River Lea, which was once a vibrant industrial artery, Mattia Corato traces a landscape where wild nature, urban history and unconventional ways of living quietly converge.

Horses, dust, strength and spectacle collide in Todd Antony’s visceral portrait of Buzkashi, Tajikistan’s ancient and fiercely contested national tradition.

Twenty international artists working with archival images come together to form a polyphonic reinterpretation of history, drawing out stories of belonging and identity that resist colonial-era narratives.

Beneath Bermuda’s image of paradise, Nicola Muirhead uncovers a complex inheritance of slavery, migration, resilience and community carried across generations.

A political exile from Belarus, Sasha Velichko uses uncanny staged photography and AI-generated visuals to tell the buried stories of everyday violence enacted by the dictatorship of her home country.

Following a group of Ukrainians who fled the war to Bratislava, this collection of portraits balance sadness and humor to explore what it’s like to start a new life over the age of 60.

What does it mean to “not work” when your days are consumed by keeping a family and household together? Olga Steinepreis answers with wit, surrealism and a camera.

National Character is a geographically broad rendering of social landscapes across the American Realm. These photographs inhabit the post-eclectic age, a current epoch bridging the gap between the culturally rich post-industrial era and the encroachingly antiseptic technological age.

In January 2024, Isabelle Hayeur began a close examination of the borderlands of Southern California—the latest chapter in a decade-long engagement with the American West that has repeatedly taken her into the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

In the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Transnistria remains an isolated, self-proclaimed republic, unrecognized by any UN member state. Suspended between Moldova, Russia, and its Soviet past, the region struggles with an uncertain identity.

12:05 p.m. The residents stand sighing before the swinging doors of the dining hall. The ones in wheelchairs are up front, all in a row. The able-bodied are in the back. Mr. Jacques, a newcomer, is first. Nobody cuts the line.

Portals of Displacement began with photographs that did not fit anywhere else. While working on other series and researching plant-based film developers, I often made images that fell outside the direction of the project at hand. They stood on their own, yet had no place within the visual language of those series.

For two decades, Hanne Lamon (b. 1982) has been making tranquil photographs of her everyday life that possess an unruly beauty. Her poetic universe evinces great sensitivity and melancholy. The photographer creates images that shed light on a fragile and intimate world.

CAT ISLAND BLUES is a project that explores the urgent issue of demographic decline in Japan through the singular yet emblematic story of Aoshima — the “blue island” — a small fishing island off the coast of Ehime Prefecture, more widely known as “Cat Island.”

The island and megacity of Xiamen and the Taiwanese island of Kinmen lie barely six kilometres apart. From the Taiwanese perspective, this is referred to as the Frontline of Democracy. Yet Xiamen lies on the other side of that so-called line, in what is supposedly barbarism.

To you, Beni Bischof may be a monster. To others, he is an unofficial unsyndicated scribe for the madness of the last half-century of consumer hell that we wade through. They drew first Blood; it wasn’t me. To give context to Bishof’s sprawling and prolific practice from the outside would be an exercise in deep-fried […]

In full declaration, as a fan of all parties involved, I hereby cannot deny my overwhelming urge to state that this book, in the canon of Raymond J. Meeks Esq., is hitherto unnecessary, but welcomed nonetheless. It is a compilation of misses, outtakes, and the unloved and weeded-out, minus one image of an alabaster girl […]

I was fortunate enough to interview Steven Shearer a few years ago for his exhibition at the Brant Foundation. Their publicity team had reached out to ASX, and I was perplexed that they found us, given how most of our reviewing happens predominantly within the realm of photography, with some emphasis on painting and video […]

If you grew up in a certain period, some of your first experiences with counterculture were inspired by the genius cover artwork of albums by various punk bands, notably Black Flag, by what appeared to be a deranged cartoon columnist. I vividly remember ducking in and out of head/record shops in the Midwest growing up […]

The Balkans are very hard to describe. Though I have spent an inordinate amount of time in Greece, mostly in its capital, having traveled through the Balkans to get there, I remember a sense of something enigmatic, misty, and compelling as we traveled to and from Greece. I remember thinking about it all on a […]

Toxic typology or cultural analysis of Swiss Agro-society, you be the judges. Either way, these little uns gunna smoke these here heaters until the cows come home. There is an amazing history of smoking in photography that Lucy Sante first cottoned onto sometime in the early 2000s with her book No Smoking. Several other smoking […]

Sure, why not? Technically speaking, or at least relatively speaking, this is a kindly trove of American sculpture, itinerant in feel, something like an archaeological project that hints at Irving Penn, Avedon, and the side of Walker Evans people like to speak about ad infinitum as if we were all to marvel at the notion […]

Street photography has always appealed to me because of its ability to visually document everyday life without a predetermined script. When I began taking a more serious interest in the…

“The modern art world can be divided into two groups: Izabella Barta and everyone else” – thus Helen Mirren, playing a television host, opens the mockumentary Waiting for the Artist,…

My first encounter with Ana Opalić’s work was not a direct encounter with her photography. As a child, I heard a story about an old maple tree in front of…

The black-and-white photograph is framed so that most of it is taken up by a high fence made of wooden slats. Our vantage point, just as that of the photographer…

I say: Whatever you do, as artists, be brave. But he says: This is not my world. Together, these catchphrases denote the content we fell into in the midst of…

Often in the evening, when everything is quiet and all the movement around me has died down, I look towards one of my living room walls. It took some time…

Contemporary Slovenian photography, or at least the selected fragment of it was presented to the domestic public in another exhibition of the Croatian Photographic Union, this time held in KlovićeviDvori….

In 1929, German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) published a book with sixty photographs portraying the people of his time. In genre terms, one might call these photographs portraits which either…