“On my last evening, Sašo and I sit in the garden of Georgi Marjanovski, a professor of law and one of Macedonia’s great liberals. We talk in the darkness, listen to the crickets who click their legs…| c4 journal
In Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography he describes photographs as harbingers of the post-industrial information economy – their value as unique objects is negligible because what is…| c4 journal
Adam Thorman’s new photobook Creatures Found is a playful inquiry into the concept of pareidolia, the common perceptual phenomenon that triggers the identification of faces on inanimate objects and surfaces. In this interview with Arturo Soto, Thorman discusses his creative process, detailing how the work developed over several years and reflecting on the challenges of […]| c4 journal
Gregory Halpern is an American photographer, born in Buffalo, New York. In 2014, Halpern was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His publication ZZYZX was awarded Photobook of the Year at the Paris Photo in 2016. King, Queen, Knave is his latest title published by MACK and came out in September last year. Lucy Rogers met Gregory […]| c4 journal
Charlie Simokaitis’ The Crisis Tapes opens with an image of a teenage girl. Her glasses have slid down her nose enough for the rim to align with her shut eyelids. Something is unsettling about her…| c4 journal
C4 Journal is a platform dedicated to writing about photography, and the use of the book form as a way of presenting it.| c4 journal
The first time I visited artist Tom Beck at his home and studio, the former Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital on Gray’s Inn Road in London, I didn’t know what to expect of the space. If you’ve lived long enough in London, you know that any building can be turned into a home […]| c4 journal
Fictions are remembered, too, and they are not stored any differently in the mind from other experiences. They are experience. Siri Hustvedt, The Real Story Some of the most fantastic fictions can be…| c4 journal
Know yourself not your role, it’s hellishly hard. – Shere Hite When feminist scholar Shere Hite applied for a doctoral program at Columbia University, she wanted to study with acclaimed scholar Jacques Barzun. She was inspired by the elder scholar’s approach to history and was eager to learn from him. Unfortunately, he was very dismissive […]| c4 journal
Le bateau ivre is a poem by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. It’s famous, but I didn’t know it before Martin Essl’s book of the same name, so I can’t claim to know why. It’s about a boat that becomes…| c4 journal
Abbas Kiarostami’s celebrated 1990 docufiction film Close-Up tells the remarkable true story of Hossain Sabzian, an impoverished cinephile who, after a chance encounter, convinces a wealthy family that he is the renowned Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Under this assumed identity, he ingratiates himself into their lives, promising them roles in his supposed upcoming film. When […]| c4 journal
Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must…| c4 journal
The life of the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin has one of those tragic endings that lingers on the mind, with his last days, in particular, still the subject of debate. However…| c4 journal
‘The primary function of a book is to recreate the author’s ideas in the reader’s mind’. So writes librarian and curator Paul Dijstelberge in the introduction to Máté Bartha’s Anima Mundi.| c4 journal
“The creative encounter with the image happens through interpretation. Much of the time that process is tacit, and often it is banal. Some of the time, however, the image becomes a place for…| c4 journal
Here at c4, we almost always deal with newly-published books. Hastings-based artist Jo Israel works with books at the end of their life cycle, poring through discarded volumes in search of lost images.| c4 journal
Morganna Magee’s book Phenomena, made in collaboration with Orgini Edizioni, is delicate, beautiful, and human. Its clothbound cover is subtly patterned to resemble wood grain. The book is signature…| c4 journal
I always think of Jean-Vincent Simonet’s work in verbs. It seems easier that way, and how else do you talk about photographs that make it feel like you’re tripping (a verb) on mushrooms?| c4 journal
The exhibition Open Books at the NCPA’s Dilip Piramal Gallery in Mumbai situates Belgian photographer Max Pinckers’ evolving body of work in a city that shaped one of his earliest endeavors.| c4 journal
“Evans’s subway photographs of 1938-41 are a bundle of contradictions. They describe people as individuals, and in that fundamental sense the pictures are portraits. But each person is presented as a…| c4 journal
The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) archive serves as a widely studied reference for modern and contemporary art. In The MoMA Plant Collection, Inge Meijer focuses on the institution’s archive during…| c4 journal
There is a moment in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads (2021) where a middle-aged woman who was hospitalized in her youth after a psychotic episode suspects that her teenage son might suffer the…| c4 journal
Staple bound in glossy soft covers with French flaps, with minimal textual elements and simple visual design, Michael Radford’s Crash looks unmistakably like a sales brochure. The reference to sales…| c4 journal
In July 2022, I first reviewed the group exhibition ‘those eyes – these eyes – they fade’, curated by Anne Immelé at Valletta Contemporary, Malta. In recent times, the exhibition has resurfaced and…| c4 journal
The 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, begins with Dorothy returning to her aunt and uncle’s Kansas farm after their neighbour hits her dog for chasing her cat. The entire sequence before the tornado…| c4 journal
“Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement” Michel Foucault Between the middle ages and the present day, the philosopher Michel Foucault suggests…| c4 journal
The seemingly irreconcilable space between photography’s uncompromising objective procedures and its potential for human expression is what Sewell investigates with The Ilford Catalogue.| c4 journal
Arnold Lane had a strange hobby Collecting clothes Moonshine washing line They suit him fine Pink Floyd, Arnold Lane Given that Casa Susanna, a new book from Thames & Hudson, tells the story of a…| c4 journal
I grew up in a large town, (though when I say ‘in’ I really should say ‘just outside of’) a fifteen minute drive would leave me in its then tumbling-down centre. On that short journey I’d pass through…| c4 journal
Just for one moment in time not tomorrow… or the next day, it is… Only For Now. So reads the cover of Joseph Rovegno’s latest publication Only For Now, released in 2023 by Origini Edizioni.| c4 journal
In her essay ‘Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping’, writer Sheila Heti describes one of her shopping lists: “a spiralizer, running shoes, vitamins, books, a pregnancy test, white t-shirts…| c4 journal
Finding its place in the tradition of Robert Adams or Mark Ruwedel, Gabrielle Rossi’s book The Lizard is a road trip and a survey of the most mundane, and maybe the most alien, parts of America. Rossi’…| c4 journal
As a young man from Northern England I am often surrounded by unprovoked violence, casual betting and an unforgiving brotherhood. Alex Picasso-Messer’s Alright, Sunshine provides a nuanced perspective…| c4 journal
I’ve always been fascinated by our relationship with the earth, how our current connection to the environment shifts and changes and how our individual bonds differ and align.| c4 journal
How much should a photographer’s style define the documentation of their subjects? Inspired by religious painting, theater, and film, Lúa Ribeira’s first photobook depicts people in the margins…| c4 journal
Roseanne Lynch has worked with photography for more than thirty years – first as a photojournalist and a commercial photographer, and more recently as a photographic artist. Since completing her MA in…| c4 journal
I’m a slow writer at the best of times, but occasionally, books turn up that hold back the process even more. Ina Kwon’s Piles of Earth and Rubble – München/Gyeongju, and Emanuel Cederqvist’s The…| c4 journal
I’m often put off by the cliquey culture around Japanese photobooks, but there was something hypnotizing about the cover picture in Toshio Shibata’s Day for Night of hundreds of stacked Pepsi Cola…| c4 journal
