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Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

Articles Available Online


Cosy Violence

Book Review

June 2023

Leon Craig

Book Review

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

Fiction

September 2021

Lick the Dust

Leon Craig

Fiction

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

I’ve often wondered how high finance has ended up so closely involved with the earnestly ethical practice of documentary photography The Swiss asset manager Pictet Group sponsors Photo London fair, JP Morgan sponsors Paris Photo, and the Frankfurt stock exchange sponsors and names the Deustche Börse prize Mathieu Asselin is the only nominee for the latter prize who has incorporated this contradiction into his exhibition, albeit in a small way Placed among his photographs, on the wall at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, is a neatly framed electronic screen, ‘provided free of charge by the official Börse Frankfurt App’, showing in real time the stock price of Monsanto, the corporation which Asselin hopes to bring down   Asselin is part of a wave of documentary artists using film and photography to powerful effect His project, a book entitled Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation (Kettler Verlag, 2017), is a sprawling five year project tracing the long destructive history of the eponymous chemicals manufacturing and agroindustrial company   The 43 year old French-Venezuelan photographer first made his name covering large scale disasters – a destructive tornado in the American Midwest, and the BP Gulf Oil Spill in Florida For these projects Asselin expertly employed a common trope of disaster photography – portraits of victims amongst the wreckage In the case of Monsanto there are plenty of victims, but tracking and photographing the wreckage left by the company is a more complicated task How do you photograph economic structures, unseen illnesses, pollutants with effects that unfold over decades, a relentless public relations machine? In the face of this challenge Asselin evolved his methods The resultant book is halfway between a beautifully designed report and an eclectic scrapbook It tells the history of the company across four linked projects – ‘House of the Future’, ‘Agent Orange’, ‘Monsanto City’ and ‘The Contract’ – using carefully composed photographic landscapes, portraits and still lifes, corporate contracts, collages, adverts, videos (via QR code), maps, tables, letters, doodles, slogans and postcards   As the pages turn, and this material piles up, Monsanto comes across as a kind of sprawling voracious monster, twisting and devouring the

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

Art Review

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

Leon Craig

Art Review

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

Feature

November 2018

Leon Craig

Feature

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

Prize Entry

April 2016

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

READ NEXT

poetry

Issue No. 3

Camera & Even After He is Gone, the Cat is Here and I Cast My Suspicions on Him

Toshiko Hirata

TR. Jeffrey Angles

poetry

Issue No. 3

Camera You take my sweet sleeping face You take my innocent smile You take my large breasts Even though...

fiction

November 2014

The Ovenbird

César Aira

TR. Chris Andrews

fiction

November 2014

The hypothesis underlying this study is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive programme, which governs...

fiction

May 2016

Panty

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

TR. Arunava Sinha

fiction

May 2016

She was walking. Along an almost silent lane in the city.   Work – she had abandoned her work...

 

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