Does Cultural Crisis Breed Artistic Fertility? A Look Through History to Understand Today
As the world faces overlapping crises, from war and displacement to ecological collapse and rising authoritarianism, this 2017 meditation on art’s response to turmoil feels...
In the age of the algorithm, bodies mimic the machine
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2025 issue, Sam Venis examines how the human body is being reshaped in the image of the machines it once controlled
Synesthesia and the scientific process of capturing memory
Hermès maître parfumeur Christine Nagel on the secrets of building a scent for the first issue of Notes on Beauty
The reclamation of beauty as an act of resistance
For the debut issue of Notes on beauty, photographer Gorka Postigo Breedveld documents the queer community of Côte d’Ivoire, alongside words by NGO GROMO founder...
Expressive bodies and gleaming eyes: a glimpse at Lisa Yuskavage’s personal archive of sketches
For Document's Spring/Summer 2025 issue, the painter shares an unseen series of self-reflexive prototypes ahead of her exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum
Love is the message
In a debut portfolio for the inaugural issue of Notes on Beauty, we explore beauty through the lens of those who have indelibly shaped the...
The Last Dinner Party rewrites the rules of pop
To celebrate their fashion portfolio featuring Alexander McQueen in Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, the British band discusses their decadent imagination
Queer collectives are redesigning dystopia
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, Kyle Carrero Lopez examines LGBTQ+ organizations across the globe who are imagining a new definition of home and togetherness
Redefining intelligence through intuition
From medieval mystics to modern radicals, for Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, Ananda Yin explores the suppressed potency of intuitive knowledge
Hermès artistic director Nadège Vanhée’s punk house codes
The French designer explores her vision for the storied maison in Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue
From sacred hot springs to the Esalen Institute, where does the ‘mystical-type experience’ emerge in Big Sur?
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, Angie Sijun Lou reflects on how self-optimization and psychedelic liberation are shaping life in Northern California
Mike Kelley’s final paintings are character studies of the lost self
In this portfolio of never-before-exhibited images from Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, the late artist reveals fractured lines of humor, submission, and solitude
The architecture-forward resort Desa Potato Head is redefining tourism by sustaining an artistic ecology that’s both local and international
For its Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, Document Journal travels to Bali to trace the legacies and futures of hospitality and design
What if the artistic impulse is wisdom from the future?
Inspiration ignites from the most unknown places. For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal posits that creativity could be transmissions from a time...
The Israeli military and tech industry collaborate on user-friendly software tools that automate war and occupation
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, Sophia Goodfriend examines the dark side of big data in Palestine
Ambera Wellmann materializes mortal landscapes
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, the painter unveils a suite of large-scale paintings that fuse mysterious environments with beings alive and dead
Thom Browne’s sartorial encyclopedia
The designer defines the key terms of his fashion lexicon for Document Journal’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue
When post-irony renders real and fake indistinguishable, irreverence becomes a political weapon
Tracing the line from Ancient Greece to David Foster Wallace to the bullet through Trump’s ear, this essay for Document Journal’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 asks if...
Shapeshifting press Semiotext(e)’s five decades of politics and poetics
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 issue, Whitney Mallett talks to co-editors, writers, and collaborators of the legendary publisher of theory and fiction
The lyric monuments of Barbara Chase-Riboud
Currently the subject of a Paris retrospective spanning eight institutions, the artist and author divulges her poetic process for these works-on-paper published for the first...
Lilly Wachowski’s manifesto on New Mythologies
In this exclusive essay for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue, the painter and filmmaker takes a look at the challenges on our horizon, and finds the...
Rituals and origin stories across Japan’s southern islands
Land art, mythic stones, Shikoku pilgrims, and contemporary architecture as seen by photographer Laurence Ellis for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue
Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content
This essay for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue traverses arthouse cinema, Shein, and streaming to explore how the ‘technical image’ is changing the nature of meaning-making
New Red Order blends satire and sincerity to deconstruct empire
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue, the public secret society and art collective mobilizes a campaign for returning land to Indigenous Americans
Techno-futurists are selling an interplanetary paradise for the posthuman generation—they just forgot about the rest of us
Inside the cult of TESCREALism and the dangerous fantasies of Silicon Valley’s self-appointed demigods, for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue
An exoplanetary archaeology of the Prada archive
For its Spring/Summer 2024 issue, Document shares a series of fashion artifacts recovered from the interstellar future
Futuristic aspirations and climate limitations collide on the elevations of the Bolivian Altiplano
In the South American highlands, prehistoric landscapes of salt flats and plant life are confronting the environmental challenges of drought and lithium mining
Shahzia Sikander transforms time into a medium
In an exclusive portfolio for Document Journal’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue, the artist merges the present, past, and possible
Inside the secret libidinal archive of George Platt Lynes
Director Sam Shahid joins photographer Bruce Weber to discuss the artist’s clandestine homoerotic nudes, documented in his new film ‘Hidden Master’
Confronting emerging mythologies from the striptease to gang wars to ‘The Sims’
Document asked 15 critics to turn philosopher Roland Barthes’s 1950s magazine column on its head for its Spring/Summer 2024 issue
Second Life’s loyal users embrace its decaying software and no-fun imperfections
Inside the multiplayer virtual world of furries, glitchy landscapes, and digital slumlords, for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue
The sincere glamor of Candy Darling
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue, the artist and trans starlet’s divahood is reconsidered five decades after her passing
Living among the City of the Dead in Colma, California
For Document’s Fall/Winter 23, writer Daniel Gumbiner explores life, death, and industry in the state’s largest necropolis
Iggy Teller does Teller
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, Juergen Teller and Dovile Drizyte reimagine the artist’s iconic works in a portfolio with their baby, Iggy, as its star
Resisting simulations of the self
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, McKenzie Wark grapples with society’s love for identity-making, imagining a future free from flags or labels
B-girls shoulder the history of breaking
Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue profiles the women at the forefront of breakdancing as it makes its way to the Olympic floor
Between mountains and sea, Brioni safeguards traditions of tailoring
For its Fall/Winter 2023 issue, Document travels to Italy’s Abruzzo region where the atelier’s heritage collides with la dolce vita
In the New Hampshire wild, DJs Octo Octa and Eris Drew forage for the sound of home
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, McKenzie Wark is a houseguest of the dynamic pair, picking their brains on what it is to build a life...
Constance Debré on dirty freedoms
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, the novelist muses on love and power across the prison window’s glass
Moments of Respite: A portrait of North Africa’s migrant and queer communities
Photographer Laurence Ellis captures individuals living and dreaming on their own land for Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue
Paul Sepuya holds a mirror up to the medium, in conversation with Ryan McNamara
The photographer presents ‘Setups and In-Betweens’ for Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, a portfolio of improvisational images
Martine Gutierrez deconstructs the avatar, in conversation with Zackary Drucker
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, the artist shares ‘Child Interrupted,’ a portfolio positioning the self as invention
Cherokee Jack takes to Mono Lake for contemplative adventure
Photographer Cole Sprouse and stylist Michelle Cameron capture the activist against natural geometries, equipped with protean garments from the Moncler x Pharrell Williams collection
The sacrament of the secondhand
Amid the crowds of the kilo sale, Shahidha Bari bears witness to the perennial art of passing down and picking up
The erotic architecture of Fire Island, where flesh and fantasy meet
Between the Pines and Cherry Grove rests a legacy of gay desire, treading nature and artifice off Long Island’s South Shore
Chasing the mirage of the “future city”
From Futurama to The Line, Mohamed Elshahed points to the failed promise of the smart metropolis, where yesterday’s dreams make up tomorrow’s nightmares
Epistolary Filth: The life and death of ‘J.D.s’ zine
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2023 issue, Jesse Doris looks back on the transgressive queer digest, and the subculture it willed into existence
The thrills and perils of raw-dogging reality
Untethered from drugs, apps, and shoes, Christina Catherine Martinez charts a journey of physical and psychological undress to Mexico’s only nude beach
Uncovering the photographic archive of Allen Ginsberg
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2023 issue, the Beat poet is recontextualized through his own lens, portraiting the likes of Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, William S....
