OSMOS Magazine Fall/Winter 2025

Founder and editor of OSMOS Magazine Cay Sophie Rabinowitz (formerly of Parkett and Fantom) describes the publication as “an art magazine about the use and abuse of photography.” The magazine is divided into thematic sections—some traditional, and others more idiosyncratic.

For OSMOS 27, curator Marina Chao contextualizes the multiple ranges—historical and physical—through which the sociopolitical content of Justine Kurland’s detailed kaleidoscopic SCUMB Manifesto (2019-ongoing) collage series are drawn to the fore.

Tobi Maier, curator at Amant, Brooklyn, parses through the artistic and enigmatic social life of photographer Dietmar Busse in light of Fairytales 1991-1999, an exhibition of Busse’s polaroids on view at Amant from September 2024 to February 2025.

Additionally, multidisciplinary artist Ian Waelder’s section in “Sample Size” investigates questions surrounding his personal history—close and far—not as a “meditation on the passage of time,” but rather an illustration of “pure background” which results in an open-ended, non-linear representation of time.

Landon Brown deconstructs the meticulous and “endlessly photographed” details of Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium in Finland, “a place in which the body experienced architecture as both patient and partner, within an institution that was both hotel and hospital, in a space that was both nature and nurture….”

The issue closes out with Onaje Benjamin’s images of members attending the CURE Violence program SNUG (a liquid acronym which has been used to represent various meanings, including Should Never Use Guns, though it is officially recognized as the backward spelling of the word GUNS). As Benjamin’s accompanying text, SNUG: credible messengers, first responders states, these digital photographs document “responses,” meetings between SNUG workers and individuals from the local community staged at sites of shootings soon after they occur. The work serves to bolster the substantive efforts of these important practitioners as they tirelessly organize towards social change.