Author: Ellis Stevenson

On a gloomy Tuesday morning, as you stand on the outskirts of Shoreditch, you notice something that the computer-generated imagery never quite captures. Rising in the middle distance like a diagram of financial ambition is the City of London’s cluster of towers, all polished glass and neat projections, recently mapped in computer-generated imagery by Didier Madoc-Jones for the City of London Corporation. The hyper-saturated portraits wheat-pasted above chicken shops, the peeling murals on shutters, and the visual cacophony of a city that defies neat rendering are all situated between you and those towers. A generation of artists has discreetly taken…

Somewhere in Europe, roses have been in bloom for more than 25 years. According to all accounts, they are now more beautiful than they have ever been. On warm mornings, the aroma wafts across the street. They are as easy for bees to navigate as regulars. Furthermore, very few people now pause to look. On the surface, that detail is unremarkable, but if you look at it long enough, it becomes uncomfortable. It goes beyond the well-known grievance that our attention has been diverted by smartphones. The question of whether reality—the actual physical world we were born into and will…

The Pantanal wetlands were photographed in 2020; there are no flames visible, only smoke plumes rising above a dark tree canopy and a terrible, thin line separating the forest from the haze. No spectacle from a horror movie. No dramatic orange sky, no burning houses. Just the beginning of an irreversible process. It is one of the most disturbing pictures created in recent memory because of its restraint. Additionally, it poses a question that editors, photographers, and climate activists have been debating for years without really coming up with a solution: what does the camera really do when the environment…

When you ask Matt Mullican where his new museum is, he hesitates. It’s a fair question, and he doesn’t have a tidy answer. The exhibition he’s been building in Liechtenstein, called THAT NOTHING SHOULD EXIST, is the largest of his career — hundreds of works spread across rooms that flood with light through enormous skylights. But none of it sits anywhere you could drive to. ‘The scale is massive,’ he says, ‘but in this instance, nothing does exist.’ The whole thing lives inside a virtual world called Roarington Art Center, and it’s set to open to the public in February.…

After a long day, there’s a moment when you’re scrolling through a food delivery app and the photos start to feel almost suspiciously good. The pad thai shimmers. No kitchen pass ever really creates the angle from which the noodles receive light. The cilantro is perfectly positioned in a green crown. Because that’s what the picture is for, you order it anyhow, and forty minutes later a container containing a dish that is both identical and slightly different arrives. Photography used to play a role in the space between those two things: the meal and the image. The question now…

A few years ago, I recall being in one on the outskirts of an industrial park and seeing a camera above a conveyor belt identify a tiny, hair-wide crack in a ceramic tile. The operator hardly raised his head. Regardless of whether the defect it detected was a flaw or, in another context, the very thing that could make an object valuable, the machine had already moved on, scanning the next tile and the next. It’s difficult to ignore that gap. The flaw was detected by the algorithm. It didn’t comprehend it in any significant way. As machine learning permeates…

The first thing the building tries to tell you when you walk into any large supermarket on a Tuesday afternoon is that everything inside was alive yesterday. A fine misting system that hisses on a timer makes the produce section shine. The lettuce appears to have been harvested at dawn. No real farmer would ever arrange the strawberries in this manner. As you pass those displays, you get the impression that the entire space is performing for you. Of course, most of it is untrue. The apples in the bin were most likely picked in the fall of last year…

Once you pass Lake Trasimeno on the autostrada heading south from Florence, the scenery starts to change. The towns sit higher, the hills narrow, and the billboards become fewer in number. Tuscany’s tour buses never stop passing through Umbria, which has always been its quieter sister. It turns out that the silence is intentional. Locals have been defending, debating, and sometimes fighting over it for decades. You’ll understand what I mean if you visit Perugia on a Wednesday afternoon. When they first opened, the escalators that ascend through the Rocca Paolina—the Renaissance stronghold now buried beneath the contemporary city—were a…

Somewhere in a museum, there is a jar of honey that has survived the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and this century. When it was uncovered a few millennia after being buried with a pharaoh, it resembled honey on a kitchen shelf in 2026. When I first read it, that particular detail stuck with me. Not because of the honey itself, but rather because it suggests that some of the most commonplace items in our pantries are actually the oldest records we possess. Stone and parchment are popular resources for historians, but they are not as durable…

A certain type of moment occurs in the produce section of a supermarket, usually around six o’clock in the evening, when the lights are bright, and the apples appear eerily alike. A shopper, such as a woman in her thirties carrying a basket, picks up an apple, turns it in her hand, and replaces it after noticing a tiny brown freckle close to the stem. She chooses another. And one more. She eventually locates the one who has no marks at all. She probably doesn’t realize that she just carried out the most significant ritual in contemporary food economics when…