Lens culture Magazine

Jan 12, 2025 | lensculture.com | Alec Soth

New Visions Photography Awards 2025 – Deadline January 15, 2025Enter Today View Images Alec Soth’s new book avoids straightforward answers. Set against the playful, chaotic backdrop of art schools, it delves into creativity, self-discovery, and the existential aspects of becoming—and remaining—an artist. Two clues open Alec Soth’s Advice for Young Artists.

Nov 8, 2024 | lensculture.com | Nigel Shafran

View Images Spanning four decades of Nigel Shafran’s personal journals, this beautiful publication interweaves his life and art to chronicle the British photographer’s loving devotion to the everyday. To take a peek into someone else’s notebook is a rare pleasure. For those that partake, scrapbooking or journaling can be a way to orient our humble journeys through time and space; a small and habitual way of making sense of the day/week/month/year.

Oct 28, 2024 | lensculture.com | Jordan Rathkopf

View Images In this brave account of a family navigating breast cancer, Anna and Jordan Rathkopf turn the camera on each other. Capturing resilience, vulnerability and the tenderness of caregiving, the book offers an honest look at how chronic illness impacts all areas of life. “I heard the word cancer, and I felt like my life ended.

Aug 9, 2024 | lensculture.com | Jacob Aue Sobol

This article was originally published in 2015, and we re-publish this timeless work to honor one of this year’s jury members for LensCulture’s Black & White Photography Awards: photographer Jacob Aue Sobol. As much as possible, I worked from instinct. Taking photos resembles an improvised game. I feel that the more a photo is spontaneous and unplanned, the more it becomes alive, the more it moves from showing to existing. So opens Jacob Aue Sobol’s new exhibition at Polka Galerie, I, Tokyo.

Aug 9, 2024 | lensculture.com | Vasantha Yogananthan

The array of sherbet-colored photographs from Vasantha Yogananthan’s The Myth of Two Souls conjure a delicious state of uncertainty. It’s hard to determine what is illustrated, embellished, or collaged, and what is documentary or staged. An image of an isolated musical instrument reminds us to engage more senses. Listening with the eyes, another string emerges: in this story realism is overrated. Classical perspectives are disrupted with fog and other elements that obscure focal points and horizons.