Persistently, and since the most remote antiquity, the moon has acted as a trigger for the human imagination. It has agitated artists and writers, the deranged of every kind, poets, philosophers, spiritual beings, night wanderers—but above all, lovers. Perhaps because it casts that faint light which outlines the features of the desired body: the point of light, the delicate glimmer that ignites along the maiden’s lower lip...

There are artists whose work is born of skill; others, of obsession; others still, of a wound. In Aaron Kent, all three converge. His practice resists reduction to any single discipline or stable technique. Although it may be inscribed, under a taxonomic logic, within the territories of ceramics, printmaking, or sculpture, the truth is that his work moves through far more uncertain zones.

I have developed a faint affection for photography competitions. I go through them with an almost childish curiosity, looking for the good photographs the jury overlooked and the bad ones it chose to reward. In the latest issue of Camera Craft, its sixty-ninth, for March and April of this year, some of the results are published from the competition that The Guild of Photographers organizes annually.

Everyone in Cincinnati’s artistic community knows Katherine Hurley. They have for a long time. In my own case, for just under ten years. And we all know her solid career and her exceptional body of work, delicate and subtle as few others.
I have always found it difficult to comment on the genre of landscape. Not because I do not like it, but because, when it reproduces what nature itself has taken millennia of patient execution to achieve...

Anyone who approaches Pedro Abascal’s photography and speaks with the author about the spontaneous nature of his scenes cannot help but think: he’s taking me for a fool. So accustomed have we become to an art of effects—an art frequently structured around spectacle, one that opportunistically deploys “the technological” to shield the fragility of its premises—that it feels like a deception when he claims he neither goes out hunting for images nor resorts to manipulation of any kind to produce photographs of such suggestive force...

In his dialogue with reality—understood as an expansive living nature, and therefore never still before the artist’s pretensions—Pedro Abascal, who requires the road as much as the camera for his vital labor, has come to discover the possibility of drawing through the lens.
When I was a child, we lived in Santa Isabel, one of my grandfather’s farms. We were surrounded by trees, animals, and ravines. At that time, I did not know how to measure distance in kilometers...

There are cities that return the gaze: they do not yield docilely to the frame, but rather address those who contemplate them. They demand a way of seeing that does not reduce, that does not foreclose. Havana, in this Dossier conceived by the Cuban photographer Pedro Abascal, appears as an entity that observes, folds, and tenses; it refuses to become a mere stage or backdrop.

I have known Pedro since 2004, perhaps even earlier, from the time I began attending the exhibitions held in the dozens of galleries and institutions of Old Havana. I do not remember how we became friends; it seems we were so before we had properly met. Pedro is one of the great Cuban photographers of the past decades. Some of his photographs would make Cartier-Bresson raise an eyebrow.

Edvard Munch was one of the most finely tuned loudspeakers of his time’s spirit—the Zeitgeist. Dostoyevsky had been one before him, and Kafka would be another later on. He belonged to that rare class of human beings God seems to have assembled in haste—leaving the skull half-finished, the sutures open, the nerves exposed—those daemons of History chosen to transmit its message to humanity.