Around 2006, a transition occurred in Walead Beshty’s work that brought him from the margins of photography-as-art to the center of art photography: the catalyzing “Travel Pictures,” 2006–2008, a group of photographs shot in an abandoned Iraqi embassy in the former GDR using film that, in transit back to the US, became imprinted with the X-ray “eye” of an airport scanner. In the finished images, the record of the machine’s probing rays appears as an abstracting layer of colored bands atop a succession of relatively “straight” documentary views of the derelict embassy to encode a timely aesthetic

The passage of time is a major leitmotif of Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. Indeed, one chapter of that bildungsroman, set in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, is even titled “Excursus on the Sense of Time.” Really an excursus on the procedure for properly wrapping oneself in a blanket, that section quickly develops into a dialogue about the relativity of time, as two characters grow ever more aware of it during their attempted recoveries from tuberculosis: “Emptiness and monotony,” writes Mann, “may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it ‘boring,’ but they can likewise abbreviate

Eduardo Consuegra’s Untitled (2%), 2011, is a tidy combine of two vintage magazines, each opened to an advertisement for food: The larger of the two offers a full spread for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes; the smaller single-page ad that overlays it advertises the Colombian chocolate bar Colombina Muuu. Though the ad copy for each is written in a different language, both campaigns depict a comparably wholesome, Anglo-looking boy roughly twelve years of age holding the product under the calligraphic type of each brand name. The juxtaposition is so effortless that to call the work a collage might be to