Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now by artist and writer Carmen Winant, is an investigation of a genre of photographs Winant calls “instructional”, it asks: can photographs teach, in and of themselves? If so, how might we look to them to demonstrate new possibilities, from social organizing to self-actualization?

Alternating between found images and shorter, text-based observations (which serve to reinforce, rather than explain, one another), Winant delves into this new category of images through her own collection, understanding them as something beyond, or at least in between, documentary and fine art.

American poet Norman H. Pritchard’s second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard’s writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page.

First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness.

Originally created as part of Green’s contribution for the group exhibition Cocido y crudo/The Cooked and the Raw at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the text is written in both English and Spanish, and accompanied by an appendix of photographs and ephemera tracing Madrid’s La Movida, a Spanish countercultural moment from the 1980s.

Intro – 4 Bars
Chorus 1 – 2 Bars
pity the nation… pity the nation
pity the nation… pity the nation
Pause – 2 Bars
Verse 1 – 8 Bars

pity the nation that is full of empty faith
pity the nation that wears cloth it does not weave
eats gluttony breads it does not harvest
drinks wine that flows not from its wine press
pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero
hails and deems the glittering conquerer bountiful
pity a nation that despises passion
only in its dreams submits to awakening

Images & Text by Khaled Sabsabi. Typography by Ruud Ruttens.

‘By the fig, by the olive, by Mount Sinai and by this city of refuge’

وَٱلتِّينِ وَٱلزَّيْتُونِ‎
وَطُورِ سِينِينَ‎
وَهَٰذَا ٱلْبَلَدِ ٱلْأَمِينِ‎

Quran: Chapter 95. At-Tin

Continuing with these ideas: Alif, Meem, أم, Arabic letters laid out in this path spell out the mother and or source of origin, leading the way by perspicuous examples that makes the oppressed heart clear.

And if Meem, Alif, ما, order is reversed it spells the name for water and the unexplained parallels of the possibilities of the unseen in which there is no doubt or guide. The wisdom of the living and eternal symbols of whatever makes honest.

Free from Fear and Reward.

Images & Text by Khaled Sabsabi. Typography by Ruud Ruttens.

By the secret and the intimate, I am not trying to hint at seductive innerwear. I am trying, instead, to think about things as banal as, say, the linings of pockets, collars, jackets and bags. This is where skin meets stuff in order to create for us the experience, rather than the appearance, of what we choose to wear. And this is not, or not just, about comfort and convenience, but about a quality that has nothing to do with how we want to be looked at by others. It is what makes us who we are, purely to ourselves, when we put something on, be it a shirt, a shawl or a perfume. For those who wear clothes as well as for those who make them, the invisible is what lies closest to the person, and hence to personhood.

Edited by Tom Melick. Photocopies by Simryn Gill. Typography by Ruud Ruttens.