Susan Best on Sianne Ngai; Reuben Keehan on Shiga Lieko; Patrick Pound on photobooks, conversations between Tony Albert & Marian Tubbs, Hayley Millar-Baker & James Tylor; Taloi Havini; Kyla McFarlane on the Peter McLeavey photo collection.
Primarily focussing on the still image, this issue takes its cues from two cultural commentators. If the camera eye makes everything interesting, as Susan Sontag noted in her influential 1977 book On photography, how can we distinguish one thing from another? Picking up on Sontag’s reflections, Sianne Ngai has written extensively on the so called minor aesthetics that also pervade 21st century life: ‘Linked always to the relatively small surprise of information, or the perception of minor differences from an existing norm, the interesting is generally bound up with a desire to know and document reality.’ But whose reality are we talking about, and how do we understand what we are looking at?
In amongst the trillions of images currently available on all platforms, some from the past and the present have been sifted out. These are considered in this special edition.