“Flipping through piles of photography books at the Brooklyn Public Library, I came upon a cyanotype by Henri Le Secq, entitled Farmyard Scene, near St.-Leu-d’Esserent, dated 1852. Through the blue murk you can pick out bucolic details. Roof thatching, a barrel, some crates. The building on the right appears built into the hillside, its roof indistinguishable from a rock that arches into the center of the image before disappearing into shadow. The shadow is large and blue and bores through the center of the image like a tunnel. It is supposedly a scene, but there is no activity, no focal point. Only this blind blue space between two buildings. Only nothing but blue.”

ben tapeworm, Photo Blues, 2025

Photo Blues is an essay about photography during COVID, vis-à-vis various blues

Copies can be purchased here.

Photo Blues by ben tapeworm 

“Returning to the Kentucky landscape of my childhood and most importantly to the hills, I am able to reclaim a sublime understanding that living in harmony with the earth renews the spirit. Coming home to live in Kentucky was for me a journey back to a place where I felt I belonged. But it was also returning to a place that I felt needed me and my resources, a place where I as a citizen could be in community with other folk seeking to revive and renew our local environ-ment, seeking to have fidelity to a place. Living engagement with both a specific place and the issue of sustainability, we know and understand that we are living lives of interdependence.”

Bell Hooks, Belonging, 2009

Magnús Pálsson and Gapassipi

“I first learned of Magnús Pálsson’s work while organizing a weekly community radio show during a residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. While preparing an episode on sound poetry, I was searching for some Iceland-based artists, and the first name on every Icelander’s lips, when it came to that medium, was Magnús Pálsson. But for an English speaker whose Icelandic is limited to takk (thanks), it was nearly impossible to find any recordings or audio samples of Pálsson’s work, most of which was in Icelandic and distributed via physical media. I have my own personal fascinations with obscurity, and so this unavailability, intentional or unintentional, was intriguing to me.”

- Ben DuVall

More

Robert Adams, Basement for a tract house, Colorado Springs, 1969

“It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.” 

- Robert Adams, Art Can Help, 2017

“The foundational strategy of (Endre) Tót's conceptual oeuvre is this statement "I am glad if...", first found in a 1971 postcard reading, as noted above, "I was glad to print this sentence," and then in his early series of photo and video performances, Joys. In Joys, the artist proclaims his gladness at enacting the mundane or absurd-"I am glad if I can take one step," or "I am glad if I can stare at a wall." In the context of 1970s Hungary, these Joys were subtly subversive-when Tót's first Joys video performances were screened in the presence of a state censor, the film was confiscated and destroyed for its tongue-in-cheek gladness.

excerpted from 
Endre Tót, Gladness and Rain

catalogue available at Printed Matter