Mailing List


Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

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

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

READ NEXT

poetry

Issue No. 3

The Far Shore

Michael Hampton

poetry

Issue No. 3

Windblown: gone with the summer wind. Windblown: gone with the autumn wind. Windblown: gone with the winter wind. Windblown:...

Art

Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

Art

Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with China Miéville

Ben Eastham

Interview

Issue No. 1

It is a cliché to say that a writer’s work resists classification. It is ironic then that China Miéville,...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required