Author: Ellis Stevenson

There is a sort of theater going on when you walk through the produce section of any supermarket. The rows of peppers were almost identical. No apple hanging from a real tree ever quite reaches the shine of an apple that has been waxed. Geometrically consistent cucumbers could have been engineered, and in a regulatory sense, they were. You’re not witnessing abundance. It’s a meticulously crafted illusion with a price that most consumers are unaware of. Globally, up to 40% of fresh fruits and vegetables are rejected before they ever make it to retail shelves. This is not because they…

Jim Mortram’s photographs have a certain stillness to them. Welfare letters piled on kitchen tables, people sitting in tiny rooms with half-drawn curtains, and light coming in sideways are examples of lives that have slowed to almost nothing. Mortram has been documenting people living on the very edge of Britain’s social safety net for more than ten years in Dereham, Norfolk. Small Town Inertia is the title of the piece. Nearly everything is stated in the title. These folks are not being visited by Mortram for a weekend assignment. He returns to them, sits with them, and lives among them.…

Maeve Gilmore created a gentle oil painting of a bowl of pears around 1949 while giving birth to her daughter. She just went to her painting room and got to work. At first glance, the image appears unremarkable. Perhaps a bit domestic. Silent. However, understanding the circumstances surrounding its creation alters every aspect of it. In the same way that some rooms retain the memory of what happened there long after the furniture has been removed, the canvas contains a birth that is both invisible and permanent. The long, contentious history of the genre revolves around this tension between what…

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…