Thought Pieces

What can instructional photographs teach us about ways of seeing? This is the question asked by artist Carmen Winant in the introduction to her book Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now (2021). Drawing from books, catalogues and pamphlets on bereavement, meditation, sex and childcare, Winant examines these ubiquitous and often strange images with references to Leo Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath and Julio Cortázar.

Order Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now by Carmen Winant here. Shipping worldwide.

Our podcast Thought Pieces is back this spring, featuring episodes with Stephen Shore, Moyra Davey, Tracy K. Smith, Carmen Winant, Amelia Abraham, Ishion Hutchinson and more. Thought Pieces brings you the best of arts writing across literature, poetry, and criticism. Each week, discover a new piece of writing from one of our books, read by the authors themselves.
Upcoming episodes include Moyra Davey on encountering Peter Hujar’s photographs through the archive, Ishion Hutchinson’s homage to the British artist Donald Rodney, Stephen Shore on the importance of the everyday in his practice, Tracy K. Smith’s poetic response to the photography of RaMell Ross in Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body and Amelia Abraham’s essay on the changing nature of sexual subcultures from her new visual history of queer nightlife Sex, Clubs, Dissent.

In Ep. 8 of ‘Thought Pieces’, Ahndraya Parlato reads from her multi-faceted rumination on the contradictions and complexities of motherhood, 'Who is Changed and Who is Dead'. Drawing on her own experiences as both a parent and a child, Parlato strives to find clarity around the fundamental questions of parenthood, mortality, and gender. Are her contemporary fears any different than the fears felt by mothers throughout history? Which anxieties are specific to having female children? And how is motherhood itself a construction?

In episode 7 of 'Thought Pieces,' Collier Schorr and Angel Zinovieff give an intimate reading of 'Notes on Tricks,' an explores the roles we inhabit as the photographer and the photographed, drawing on themes of closeness, sexuality, and the rescued relics of our childhoods. 
About 'Paul's Book' by Collier Schorr
Collier Schorr met Paul Hameline, a young French artist and model, in New York in 2015, when they began to meet to make a project that lasted two years in which Collier would visit Paul at his parents’ house and take pictures and talk. The idea was for Paul and Collier to experience photography as a social space, a conversation in which his body and her eyes could try and understand each other’s fascinations and fantasies. Paul’s Book expands that magazine story to form a larger piece about the way in which a photographer and model can search for some greater revelations with the simplest movements and various states of undress.

In Ep.6 of Thought Pieces, writer, editor and curator Lou Stoppard discusses the incredible – and much overlooked – work of Shirley Baker, considering her place in the male-dominated history of photography, together with the compassionate and attentive ways in which she captured everyday life in Salford, London and beyond.