Book Review – The Grind by Steve Madden The photographs in The Grind were made over three winters during the evening rush hour on London buses. That is the project’s simple structure. After finishing his morning work at the BBC, Steve Madden would return to central London when the weather turned cold, wet or usually both. He wasn’t waiting for dramatic events or decisive moments. He was waiting for condensation — the kind that fogs bus windows so completely that the interior begins to dissolve into light and colour. Anyone who has travelled through London in winter knows that surface. London carries millions of bus journeys each day, yet these…

Book Review – Death and Other Belongings by Will Green Will Green’s Death and Other Belongings refuses to instruct the viewer on what grief looks like. Instead, it pulls the viewer into its atmosphere. The black-and-white photographs stay expansive yet restrained, devoid of the drama that typically accompanies grief.  Green turns his camera toward what stays behind. He focuses on a chair in the garden, the fabric still creased by the weight of a body; a bee lies in the dust; apples sink into the soil. Each photograph insists that the world continues to act in its ordinary way. Green meets that continuation with steadiness and records it without ceremony. Before…

Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death: A Meditation on Beauty, Mortality, and the Intimacy of Looking It’s almost impossible to open Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death and not feel that peculiar hush that settles over you in the presence of something both beautiful and unsettling. The book — first published in 1976 and reissued in 2024 — remains one of the most haunting and quietly magnificent works of photography in the twentieth century. It is not a grand statement, nor a coffee-table monolith of glossy spectacle. It is, instead, an austere, personal object: forty-one black-and-white photographs that carry within them an entire philosophy of seeing. At first,…