Thought Pieces

In this final episode of Thought Pieces S2, listen to photographer Stephen Shore read from his experimental memoir Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography. Citing Mozart and Shakespeare, Shore writes about the importance of attending to the everyday, revealing the influences behind his seminal project ‘American Surfaces’ (1972-73).⁠

Amelia Abraham reads her essay 'Paradise Lost: The Life and Death of Sexual Subcultures' from her new visual history of queer nightlife Sex, Clubs, Dissent. Abraham charts an underground history of sexual subculture from London's Spunk & Chain Reaction parties in 1980s Vauxhall to the San Francisco SoMa leather scene photographed by the likes of Catherine Opie and Phyllis Christopher, to the Mapplethorpe censorship⁠ trials of 1990.⁠

In this episode, listen to Kelly & Maxwell Sultan read their favourite passages from Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings by their beloved husband & father, the great photographer Larry Sultan. They read extracts from throughout the collection, illuminating Sultan’s approach to photography, teaching and popular culture.

Listen to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and educator Tracy K. Smith interpret the photography of RaMell Ross into a lyrical and uncanny text. Taking five images from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (2023), Smith’s poem complements photographs taken by Ross in Hale County, Alabama, the setting of his Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018).

In this episode, artist Moyra Davey describes encountering Peter Hujar’s photographs through the archive. Reading from a passage The Shabbiness of Beauty, Davey focuses on Hujar’s lesser-known work of farm animals and babies, culminating in a thoughtful reflection on the artist’s legacy and the inherent mystery of photography.

In this episode, artist Moyra Davey describes encountering Peter Hujar’s photographs through the archive. Reading from The Shabbiness of Beauty, Davey focuses on Hujar’s lesser-known work of farm animals and babies, culminating in a thoughtful reflection on the artist’s legacy and the inherent mystery of photography.

Jamaican poet and essayist Ishion Hutchinson reads ‘Splash Crowns: On Donald Rodney’ from Fugitive Tilts (2025). This piece is a tender homage to the life and work of British artist Donald Rodney, a leading figure of the BLK Art Group during the 1980s. Through careful observation and imagination, Hutchinson dissects Rodney’s mysterious drawings from a sketchbook he made while in hospital suffering from sickle-cell anemia.

What can instructional photographs teach us about ways of seeing? This is the question asked by artist Carmen Winant in the introduction to her book Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now (2021). Drawing from books, catalogues and pamphlets on bereavement, meditation, sex and childcare, Winant examines these ubiquitous and often strange images with references to Leo Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath and Julio Cortázar.

Order Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now by Carmen Winant here. Shipping worldwide.

Our podcast Thought Pieces is back this spring, featuring episodes with Stephen Shore, Moyra Davey, Tracy K. Smith, Carmen Winant, Amelia Abraham, Ishion Hutchinson and more. Thought Pieces brings you the best of arts writing across literature, poetry, and criticism. Each week, discover a new piece of writing from one of our books, read by the authors themselves.

Upcoming episodes include Moyra Davey on encountering Peter Hujar’s photographs through the archive, Ishion Hutchinson’s homage to the British artist Donald Rodney, Stephen Shore on the importance of the everyday in his practice, Tracy K. Smith’s poetic response to the photography of RaMell Ross in Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body and Amelia Abraham’s essay on the changing nature of sexual subcultures from her new visual history of queer nightlife Sex, Clubs, Dissent.

In Ep. 8 of ‘Thought Pieces’, Ahndraya Parlato reads from her multi-faceted rumination on the contradictions and complexities of motherhood, 'Who is Changed and Who is Dead'. Drawing on her own experiences as both a parent and a child, Parlato strives to find clarity around the fundamental questions of parenthood, mortality, and gender. Are her contemporary fears any different than the fears felt by mothers throughout history? Which anxieties are specific to having female children? And how is motherhood itself a construction?