Conscientious Photography Magazine

Art has mostly no power except for the following: it can remind us that at least in theory we have the option to become better people than who we are. By “better people” I don’t mean more productive or more popular or more powerful. Instead, “better” orients itself by the ideals we hold dear deep down inside us (regardless of to what extent we might have repressed our awarene...

As someone who has spent a lot of time with photobooks — presenting them online, teaching how to make them, writing about them in a critical fashion, making them myself, over the years the most common question has been: what makes a good photobook? What is it that makes some books so much better than others?

Inevitably, I have struggled with providing an answer to a se...

Almost twenty five years ago, a few days after 9/11, I went to a restaurant serving food from Afghanistan. At the time, I still lived in Boston, from which two of the planes had departed that were used in the terrorist attacks. For a while, it was not clear whether Boston itself would be a target, so local employers sent people home.

All air traffic had been suspended,...