I’ve been looking at a lot of street photography recently, full of all the glorious noise and chaos of human life; barely constrained visual hubbub. So it was a nice change of pace when I fell into Scottish photographer Soo Burnell’s ongoing Poolside series (via Blind Magazine), collected in her book To the Water. All that light and geometry an eery sterility. Love it.1
Stepping away from the water, Soo recently started a new series looking at cinemas, starting with The Scotsman Picture House in Edinburgh and the Regent Street Cinema in London. It’s fascinating to see how her poolside aesthetic translated to this new environment – expanses of water and tiling replaced with seats and curtains; sunlit blues and whites replaced with musty reds and greens.
I’ve put together my annual list of the year’s best film posters for Creative Review. It takes a lot of shortlisting and whittling-down, but it’s always a joy to compile, especially when I stumble upon something like this – Percival & Associates’ poster for All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the feature debut from award-winning poet, photographer and filmmaker Raven Jackson. Using an image from unit stills photographer Jaclyn Martinez, it pulls you right into a single gentle embrace, capturing the essence of the film; a big story told in small moments. Just gorgeous.
No particular reason for sharing this 2007 Juergen Teller portrait of Björk eating at Spaghetti Nero, Venice. It appeared on my Pinterest yesterday and … look at it. I need to watch whatever movie this isn’t a still from.2
“A 30 day walk in Japan. A memoir. Fishermen, foul-mouthed kids, and terrible miserable wonderful coffee.” Things Become Other Things, the latest in Craig Mod’s photography plus narrative non-fiction walk-a-very-long-way-in-Japan books, looks utterly gorgeous. I love the attention he puts into the physical design of these books – here’s something you want to feel the weight of, touch, sniff.3
- I hate that my first response when seeing immaculately composed photography like this is now ugh midjourney. Along with everything else wrong with AI-generated images, it’s undermining the immediacy of photography – I don’t want to have to study an image for increasingly abstruse clues as to whether or not it’s real! With art it’s bad enough, but now it’s seeping into news media. Fake photojournalism isn’t just directly insidious, it’s programming us to doubt the authentic. ↩︎
- All title suggestions and plot synopses welcome. ↩︎
- Right? Right? ↩︎
This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.
Banner by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.