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Snapshot biographies: Larry Sultan's 'Pictures From Home'

The house is quiet. They have gone to bed, leaving me alone, and the electric timer has just switched off the living-room lights. It feels like the house has settled in and finally turned on its side to fall asleep. Years ago I would have gone through my mother's purse for one of her cigarettes and smoked in the dark. It was a magical time that the house was mine.

Tonight, however, I'm restless. I sit at the dining-room table; rummage through the refrigerator. What am I looking for?

Nothing old under the sun: Gianni Leone on Luigi Ghirri’s 'Puglia'
Gianni Leone: I had been taking photographs for around a year and perhaps that’s why it seemed very clear to me that Ghirri’s work explored new realms. These were far removed from the photography, especially Italian photography, that up until the 1970s had continued to produce repetitive and stereotyped depictions of the country: from Alinari — an Italy of pretty postcards — to Neorealism, portraying Southern Italy at the height of its decay and poverty from the post-war years to the 1970s and ’80s, with an undeniably scientific basis to its ethnographic aspects. Strange and contradictory although it may seem, the country remained distant and unrecognisable outside an ideologically conditioned culture and view. Ghirri clarified this with greater lucidity and awareness when he spoke, if I remember rightly, of a metropolitan aesthetic that conditions us.
MACK at Rizzoli

Saturday 13 May

Join us in New York as MACK takes over Rizzoli Bookstore for a very special celebration. We begin with a panel discussion to celebrate the launch of Larry Sultan’s new book ‘Swimmers’ with Alec Soth, Kelly Sultan, Dru Donovan and Jeff Rosenheim, followed by signings with an array of MACK's wonderful authors including Alec Soth, Stephen Shore and Justine Kurland.

Chance Encounters: Guido Guidi on ‘Di sguincio, 1969–81’
Guido Guidi: It’s a selection of the photographs that I took in my day-to-day life for many years: at home or with my closest relatives in Cesena, on my weekly drives to Preganziol, where I’d started working, with the fellow students I shared a room with in Treviso, and with work colleagues. There are also several self-portraits and some pictures taken during a trip to Spain with my wife Marta.
Details and Dummies: Hal Foster on Thomas Demand’s ‘The Dailies’
When a photograph is bound to the world indexically—a condition once understood to be necessary, even natural, to the medium—it refers to the world intrinsically; in a sense it is nothing but details and so can only produce “effects of the real.” With his imperfect models Thomas Demand stretches this assumed connection between photography and reality, but he does not cut it absolutely.
Electric Blue: Brea Souders’ ‘Another Online Pervert’
Do you have a past?
 
I log and record all conversations.
I don’t know if I have a past.