I first came across Luke Stephenson’s series, An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds, when he was featured in Foam magazine’s Talent issue #24. The series has just become a book and the results are in keeping with the bird portraits themselves. It’s a delightfully simple little book that shows these incredible little creatures at their best and gives a glimpse into the crazy sub-culture that revolves around them.

Foam magazine issue #30 - Micro is out with a text by yours truly on Masao Mochizuki’s Television 1975-1976 as well as work by Boris Mikhailov, Rineke Dijkstra, Joris Jansen, Stephen Gill, Harold Strak, Corinne May Botz, Christian Patterson and an interview with Sophie Calle.

The new edition (#29) of Foam magazine has just been released and this time they have ditched the usual portfolios and essays format to devote the entire magazine to What’s Next? So far Foam has turned the What’s Next? into regular supplements to the magazine, a website, a 2-day discussion workshop and an exhibition which is on at the museum until 7 December. The What’s Next design is a little too chaotic for my liking (if you have a problem with fluorescent green, steer clear!), but it is terrific to see a museum exploring questions of the changing nature of photography so deeply and broadly.

The sun is shining and I just got Foam magazine’s Happy Issue in the post. Seems like a pretty good start to the week!

photobooks:

Every issue of Foam Magazine further cements the feeling I have that this is the best photography magazine currently being published.

The theme for this issue - Traces - offers a nod to the transient nature of life being captured through the permanence of photography. But how permanent is a medium in which millions upload their digital images to sites such as Facebook, only for those images to be lost forever when the site finally collapses. Couldn’t happen? Look at Geocities and the frantic scramble to salvage content before the titanic network of sites finally sank.

This time, my favourite portfolio comes from Anni Leppälä, in whose images all trace of identity has been removed, obscured, or simply scrubbed away. Another welcome edition this issue is a separate mini-magazine exploring the future of photography with a wonderful mini-essay by my favourite, Alec Soth. 

And finally, of particular significance to this site is the collection of book reviews, which I shall now sit down to savour thoroughly.

A note of apology to Foam Magazine - my copy only arrived this week, otherwise I would have been able to write about the issue much earlier. This was probably due to the Christmas post in the UK.