Between Fears and Hope

Zeke Magazine, September 2024

“The book is a project of memory, and while Dekoninck is a photographer, the texts throughout are vital to framing his endeavor and expanding what we see in any single image. Accordingly, Between Fears and Hope tackles injustice, genocide, denial, and the ways in which the past seeps forward through generations.”

Womanhood - What does she look like? How is she seen?

Turning Point, March 2024

“Globally, myriad forces continue to suppress, harm, and disenfranchise women; but this body of photographic work asks us to acknowledge, honor, and applaud the vital roles women play and to demand ever better equality.”

Ukraine: Love+War

Turning Point, October 2024

“This book, throughout, reminds that war tears at the seams of society and rips apart the normalcy of domestic routine. Readers behold the visual aftermath of life when it is shattered as homes are destroyed; and view agonizing grief, both unbearable and inescapable, when loved ones die. Meanwhile, families are torn apart when individuals (primarily men) are conscripted or volunteer.”

Making Work Visible: Consumer Awareness and Labor Rights

Turning Point, May 2024

“Campaigns for labor reform rise up. Strikes occur. The media covers. At times, the cameras show up when disaster has happened and lives are lost, because conditions were unsafe, procedures were not regulated, and human lives were sacrificed for capitalist gains.”

Cultural Resistance as Transformation

Turning Point Magazine, February 2024

“What is cultural resistance? I have been thinking about that since I was asked to write this essay on that topic. My words accompany the many profound photographs compiled here by image-makers from around the world, including documentation in Malaysia, Bosnia, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Mauritania, France, United States, Japan and beyond.”

A Photojournalist's Work in Gaza

Zeke Magazine, February 2024

“The headlines have captured the world’s attention. The photographs are starkly painful to view. But view them we must; they are important to see. Such images belong to a long history of terrible yet historically significant photographs—images of atrocity and devastation.”

Ukraine: A War Crime

Zeke Magazine, January 2024

"It is no accident that a majority of the images are by professional photojournalists, because we accord them a special status in the documentation of history. They are not just creating images, but doing so with an ethics that protects and, hopefully, ensures the integrity of the work.”

Picturing Atrocity: Ukraine, Photojournalism, and the Question of Evidence

Zeke Magazine, April 2023

"The International Criminal Court (ICC), working with special investigators, is already probing the possibility that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine—one of the few times in history that such work has been undertaken within just weeks of the apparent crimes.”

The Omni American Author: An Albert Murray Collection

Hyperallergic, January 2017

Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs opens with a seminal piece, The Omni-Americans. In 1970, Murray took on black protest writers and defied establishment thinking with his claims of “a folklore of white supremacy and a fakelore of black pathology.”

Picturing Conflict: An Interview with Michael Christopher Brown

Hyperallergic, September 2016

In 2011, photographer Michael Christopher Brown took a “road trip” through the Libyan Revolution. His new book, Libyan Sugar, chronicles that extraordinary journey. This is a photo book of war, and a painfully graphic one at that. But it isn’t just a book of images; it also offers up journal entries by the photographer, as well as emails that he exchanged with friends, family and colleagues.

The Lost Rolls and the Unreliable Shadow of Memory

The New Republic, March 2016

What does it mean to “read” a photograph? To see an image is to perceive it optically, to read an image is something more….

Gender, Art, Perception: Lauren Walsh Interviews Siri Hustvedt

Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2014

Recently, Hustvedt and I met up in her home, a landmarked brownstone in the heart of Park Slope. In an airy, sundrenched room — an open space with fresh flowers, inviting chairs, and artwork adorning the walls and tabletops — Hustvedt curled into her seat, mug of coffee in hand, and we talked about the new book, and about writing, literature, and culture.

In Memory of Albert Murray

Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2013

“Yet for all the weight of the big questions Murray posed — ‘What is human nature?’ ‘How does art allow people to transcend?’ — conversations with him never bogged down. He mingled gravitas with humor and wit. You can’t persevere without some levity, he’d point out.”