“In this book,” writes Tom Hunter in the introduction to The Way Home, “I have set out many of the bodies of work I have created over the last twenty-five years while making my journey through the streets of Hackney, trying to make sense of this urban maze and find my way home.” And: “While my subject has always been Hackney, the influences behind my art practice are found in the work of Johannes Vermeer, the Pre-Raphaelites and, latterly, a whole raft of art historical paintings.” These words set the scene for the photographs in the book, an impressive range of work.
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Photography derives its power not from what it shows, but from what we think it says. Seemingly very specific, photographs are anything but - which means that at least in photography, the idea of the death of the author is flawed: There never was an author in the first place. Instead, the photographer always is just the instigator, the person standing next to you who’ll whisper secrets into your ear to make you believe in certain things. With Elementary Calculus, J Carrier plays that role well, understanding what photographs do, and how they do that. Focusing on our (shared) desire to connect to one another, the book focuses on migrant workers living in Israel who have to rely on pay phones to talk to their loved ones back home.
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I’ll admit: I wanted to like Cary Markerink’s Memory Traces so much, especially after reading Hester Keijser’s (somewhat gushing) two-part review of it. But I just ended up being incredibly torn. It might seem slightly unfair to start a review this way, but the moment you hold the box, the object’s physicality muscles itself into the center of your attention. There are three books that come in a box, two smaller ones and a massive, oversized one. Marc Feustel, in his review, called the project “outrageously ambitious,” and if anything - that it is. But the crucial question, at least for me, is whether the content matches the size of both ambition and the main book. (more)
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I’m always wondering why the accordion/laparello format is so rarely used for photobooks. What at first might seem an awkward way to organize photography - one long, folded strip of images - after all has its advantages: You can look at an accordion book like a bound one, turning “pages,” and you can unfold parts (or the whole piece) and see more images. Peter Dekens’ Touch, the portrait of Stijn, a blind man, is a great example of how the format can be used well (order the book here). Photographed in Stijn’s apartment, during a short winter day, Touch has us enter a world filled with little light, with the book translating the photographer’s difficulties of finding his way around into a unique experience. (more)
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After the implosion of the Soviet Union, ethnic and religious tensions that had been held in check by Communist regimes and their ruthless application of power erupted along long-dormant fault lines. It was as if things had been frozen into place in the 1940s, and the post-Communist thaw allowed them to move again. The Balkans and Caucasus regions have since seen wars and mini-wars that most people had thought of as events of the past. The Caucasus, in particular, has proven to be a veritable mine field, with, seemingly, every village being if not at war then at least in some sort of conflict with its neighbouring village (if you think that’s hyperbole read The Sochi Project’s Empty land, Promised land, Forbidden land). Westerners for the most part have had a hard time understanding and/or following the various conflicts, and regardless, most of them seem far away and thus inconsequential (people will not easily admit this, of course).
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“Polish greyness has particular tones,” writes Michał Olszewski in one of the texts in Poland - In Search of Diamonds by Tomasz Wiech, “and there’s more madness in it than elsewhere, more energy, more rage and unresolved despair, so much of which has soaked into the ground that it scrambles out at every opportunity. Greyness lined with madness is an explosive mixture. Polish autumn depression is a state which doesn’t have much in common with Oblomov’s past indolence.” Elsewhere, the author writes of “smells of burning plastic, yet another of the new smells of Poland.” I have never been to Poland, but these sentences certainly seem like an apt description of the world Wiech has (re-(?))created in the book. (more)
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If there was one shortcoming I’d need to point out about Metsästä by Anne Golaz it’s the conversation with Nathalie Herschdorfer and Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger at the very end of the book: It’s pulling away the curtain. Once I realized this, I stopped reading straight away. If there is magic to be had - as there is - let there be magic. Don’t let the curators take it away. On her own website, the artist describes Metsästä as follows: “It is a work partly autobiographic, fictional and documentary, a story both chilling and amazing, where men are hunting missing preys, devoting themselves to magic and decadent rituals, while female carachters [sic!] become fascinating and timeless icons.” People want descriptions, people need descriptions, and this is a good one. The little essay by Golaz in the book is even better.
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Photography is great for what used to be its original purpose for a long time, to essentially say “this is that.” You take a photograph of something, put it in the center of the frame, and then this is that. There already is that small step people make, namely to assume that a photograph of something is the same as the thing itself. All of that has worked wonderfully well for many years, and it still does, at least to some extent. Photojournalists, in particular, have relied on the “this is that” mechanism for such a long time that they didn’t realize that you can play this kind of game only for so long, until people stop looking. You see, people aren’t stupid, and they also need to protect themselves. I think it’s fair to say that the time for the this-is-that game is up in photojournalism now (while the business model is imploding itself), so there are all kinds of attempts to re-play that game, by trying to make it look cool (using Instagram, for example). That’s not going to work.
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“Is it possible,” asks Ben Krewinkel, “to document the life of an undocumented person who has been lived [sic!] in the Netherlands since 2001, without creating a manifesto that links its authors to certain political views?” Is it really necessary, this reviewer might ask back, to avoid taking a political stance? What is gained from that? But those are questions leading into a different direction. Let’s instead stick with A Possible Life. Conversations with Gualbert, the book that has resulted from the collaboration between Krewinkel and a man identified as Gualbert (not the real name). Illegal immigration of course is a hot topic all over the world. It constitutes a real issue - as much as a rather crude political tool used by the political right to whip up ugly sentiments. Americans will be as familiar with it as Europeans - in different ways, of course, than the people from the countries we love to refer to as “developing”. (more)
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Somebody once explained to me that writers who seem to be suffering from intellectual rabies (think Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck) live in a world that makes perfect sense to them. For someone on the outside the assumptions and beliefs that everything is based on appear to be almost completely insane. Inside that world, however, things make perfect sense. Of course, such cases are just extreme examples of how we all operate. But seeing this at work fascinates me. In the world of photography, I consider Nobuyoshi Araki to be such a case. Araki is the Mark E. Smith of photography: Both have released so many books (or albums in Smith’s case) that inevitably each article about them cites a mere guess. In Araki’s case, the latest numbers I’ve come across are 425 and 450. What is more, both have carefully cultivated an extremely unusual personality that is at odds with large parts of the world and that might or might not be authentic. (more)
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“The woods,” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote, “stand for a place where human custom and civilization have not yet found an abode.” This is not from the folk/fairy tales they collected, but from the muss less well-known German dictionary they compiled. It’s not hard to see the amount of mystery, if not outright myth, that is being projected onto (or maybe into) the woods, the Wald. Germans have long had a long and deep fascination for the forest. Thus it would only seem natural (Germans might prefer the word “logical”) that a photographer would venture to photograph in the woods. As you can easily guess from the title, this is what you get in Michael Lange’s Wald. (more)
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I had been aware of Donald Weber’s Interrogations for quite a while. But given what I had seen about it online I had developed absolutely no interest in looking at the book. The work - and the ensuing debates - just felt too obvious, too much along the lines of what one could expect. A few days ago, at a bookshop in Amsterdam a friend urged me to look at it anyway. Imagine the very pleasant surprise when the work turned out to have much more depth than I had expected - after having seen the mostly sensationalist brouhaha online. As a matter of fact, flipping through the book (before buying it) I thought that the images I had seen online were for the most part the weaker ones (of course, they were the more sensationalistic ones, too). Plus, I don’t think I had seen there actually is a prologue in the book (see the photographs of selected spreads).
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Hans van der Meer is the kind of person who will look at things - and photograph them - so that you don’t have to. I’m tempted to think that the artist thus performs a public service. But there is more. Van der Meer also not only shows us what he sees and finds, often scenes or things that are so incredibly mundane that most people wouldn’t look twice (assuming they’d even look once), he also talks about them, revealing relevance where we usually don’t expect to find any. Who would look at two women having a chat in one of those nondescript city centers that are common in so many small European cities? And who would then study their particular environment, taking in each and every detail, however mundane it might be? Well, Hans van der Meer did just that, with The Netherlands - Off the Shelf.
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Berlin is a real place, but we might as well admit that it doesn’t exist. Or rather there is Berlin, the spot on the map, and there is Berlin, the place in our consciousness - two entirely different entities. You will move through the former, yet see the latter. Berlin - that would be the sticks and stones that make up the city. But the real Berlin - that would be whatever images, thoughts, and feelings we have in our heads, this odd mishmash of what we feel and see as individuals and what we feel and see as a group. Good artists are not interested in the sticks and stones. They might take photographs of the sticks and stones, but they point their cameras guided by their intuition. This is what makes discussions about what the “real XYZ” (Berlin, American South, whatever else) looks like so tedious: Who cares? There is no such thing as the “real” Berlin or American South. Why not admit that in almost all cases the “real” XYZ stands for the XYZ as you see it? And even if there were a “real” XYZ - why would we look at that when we can instead look at what artists have made of it?
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I noticed how the popularity of my photobook reviews roughly scales with the popularity of the photographers. That’s bad news, of course, for a lot of photographers, whether they are up-and-coming talent, simply not very well known for whatever other reason or, and this is another factor, well-known somewhere other than the internet. There are two filter bubbles, the one where we seek out that which we already know (which then confirms our beliefs and thus makes us feel good about ourselves), and the one where a lot of stuff simply is not available online. Mark Markov-Grinberg might provide a good example - try to find information online, and you come back with not much - other than, maybe, the occasional image on The Retronaut (where photography is mostly used as some sort of nostalgic novelty item, so that we might be amused by the fact that we’re ignorant of the past). Luckily, Soviet Era now offers a chance to discover the photographer’s work. (more)
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There’s something unrelenting in Michael Ackerman’s photographic world - something that the artist himself has been coyly denying in the few interviews I’ve read. That’s fine. It’s usually a mistake to listen too carefully to what artists have to say - the public persona is as much part of what they do as their images1. So let’s stick with the photographs, in particular with Half Life.
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I have been thinking about Found Photos in Detroit for a long time now, wondering whether or not to write a review. The book combines two tropes that have been very popular over the past few years, photography in Detroit and found/discarded photographs. Photography in Detroit, which for the most part has centered on photographs of abandoned buildings (“ruin porn”), usually does not show people. In contrast, projects around found photographs typically focus on people. And we’ve seen attempts like this one before, for example when found photographs from New Orleans or the areas hit by last year’s earthquake/tsunami in Japan were displayed. But still… I suppose my hesitation really comes down to the fact that I have no idea what Found Photos in Detroit is actually trying to tell me. (more)
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Photography ultimately is about time, to be precise about time stopped, time brought to a standstill. Mathematically thinking, this time is an accumulation, though: You expose your piece of film (or your digital chip) for a fraction of a second, which means that whatever happens in that short moment impresses itself onto the image. We tend not to think of it that way, because our own consciousness cannot comprehend very short moments in time, and our eyes can’t see them. We see 24 distinct images in a second, and we think something is moving. The only chance we have to see that photography captures periods in time is when the time gets so long that we can start to see the accumulation. Funky as it is, photography, however, doesn’t work that simply either, because if you require too long an exposure, photography will simply refuse to register the short moments (phrasing it this way makes it more interesting than saying “will be unable”). In one of Louis Daguerre’s earliest photographs, what would or rather should have been a busy street scene is transformed into an almost empty space, with only two humans visible (have a look).
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The title of the book Planet Lovigin is apt: Look through the artist’s blog, and it’s likely your head will be spinning. I don’t speak Russian (at least not yet), so I have no idea what that all means. But it’s fairly obvious that Lovigin is happy to create his own little photographic world, combining all kinds of photographic sensibilities that I’m usually used to seeing in different, separate contexts. (more)
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Before the fall of communism, In more ways than one Albania was the Switzerland of the communist bloc, a country separate from the rest, clinging to the ideology in even weirder ways than the rest, while wasting a lot of the already sparse resources on fortifying a place that nobody would possibly want to invade. Dictator Enver Hoxha had over 700,000 bunkers/pillboxes built, which, of course, still (literally) litter Albania. There is no limit to human folly, it seems, and if folly meets power the strangest, saddest, worst things can happen.
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Luis Barragán was a very well-known, influential architect, whose house was converted into a museum after his death. To get a quick, simple impression what the house looks like inside (especially if you’re unable to read Spanish - like yours truly), visit this page. Noritoshi Hirakawa is a contemporary Japanese artist, working in photography, film, dance, installation and performance. Speaking about his photography, the artist said “The camera can be a very good excuse to connect men’s and women’s desires.” (quoted from this page, which features some photographs). Now what happens when you - metaphorically speaking - throw the Casa Barragán and Noritoshi Hirakawa into one pot? (more)
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There is a new type of photography in town, which excites me as much as it exasperates me. Maybe it’s not even really new, maybe it’s a variant of something done earlier (not unlikely). Regardless, you have probably seen this type of photography: The simplest way to describe it is to say that it looks inwards, towards itself - and this is what excites and exasperates me at the same time. On the one hand, I enjoy seeing the playfulness, the forms, the subversion of the medium. On the other hand, the inherent navel-gazing bothers me. Needless to say, since this kind of photography seemingly offers so little to rub against1 this contradiction has me engage with it, and that I enjoy. Lodret Vandret just published Hired Hand, a wonderful selection for those interested in seeing more. Recommended. (more)
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In 1964, newly independent Zambia started competing with the US and the Soviet Union, to win the race to the moon. Mind you, this was not an official idea. Instead, Makuka Nkoloso, a school teacher, had retired from his job to start Zambia’s space agency, and to put an assortment of people (and a cat) into space. For reasons that are not very hard to understand things didn’t quite pan out. Nkoloso never got to launch his rocket. Photographer Cristina De Middel’s The Afronauts now visually re-created the program. (more)
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Like most forms of art, photography frustrates its practitioners because of its limitations. If only… But just look at what movies have turned into since computer technology enabled their makers to overcome limitations: Out went the imagination, and this means not just the makers’ but also ours. What there left to imagine, when a computer rendering can show it all? Limitations engender imagination. Photography is not exempt from this rule, even though it is by far the geekiest of all art forms (what other form of art would have so many of its practitioners obsess over completely irrelevant technicalities?). Without its many limitations photography would be a soulless endeavour. Actually, it’s even better than that: What makes photography truly unique is that it looks like it just does it all, shows it all, when in fact it doesn’t. That is where you can find or make your stories, when you’re a photographer, right there. (more)
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I had been looking forward to seeing Sergey Chilikov’s photography in book form, because most of it is so hard to come by. And it’s never quite clear how well photographs seen on the web hold up once being printed on paper. Chilikov’s work in particular had me slightly puzzled when I viewed it online: What is going on in these photographs? There clearly is an artistic vision at play that is different from most of contemporary photography. Selected Works 1978-, just published, now gives a wider audience the opportunity to experience the strange world created by Sergey Chilikov. (more)
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The main problem of nuclear power is that it essentially requires the companies that run the plants and the governments that oversee them to constantly lie to the general public. If the general public was being properly informed about what running a nuclear-power plant entails and what risks exist, there’d be no way the general public would approve. Nuclear power is probably the stupidest and most reckless form of generating energy ever invented: Take some of the most dangerous materials in the world, put them into a pressure cooker, have them turn into even more dangerous materials that you then have to store for tens of thousands of years, away from any living being, and hope that the whole thing doesn’t blow up at any given moment. Which, of course, it will, eventually and somewhere because that’s just the nature of the beast: Any man-made machine contains an inherent risk of failing, which is not zero and which never can be made zero, especially not since humans will have to run it, and humans tend to make mistakes. (more)
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There’s something visceral about Jerry Spagnoli’s American Dreaming that gets lost the moment the book gets translated into an electronic form. For the reviews on this site I photograph the photobooks so that readers get the chance to see selected spreads. Working on the images for this review, I noticed that looking at the images on the screen of my camera was very different than looking at them in the book. Even seeing the images on the screen (as you can when you click on the icons on the side) does not quite reproduce the feeling you get when looking at the book. There is more to this, though, than merely the difference between the object and the flat screen - it’s the images themselves, which lose all their power. (more)
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After Joel Sternfeld and Justine Kurland (and possibly others) Lucas Foglia is the latest photographer to explore alternative lifestyles away from the grid, in the woods, being self-reliant. There is considerable romanticism in this idea that you can help cure the ills of the world by withdrawing from all that is bad for the planet and, we must presume, yourself; and therein lies the trap for photographers trying to portray this kind of lifestyle. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with romanticism, since romanticism is related to idealism. But in the arts, romanticism is also the handmaiden of kitsch. (more)
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Peter Puklus’ One and a Half Meter contains images that on the artist’s website for the most part are filed under “Intimacy.” Intimacy might just be too obvious a title, but I might find it preferable over One and a Half Meter, which seems to take the viewer away from what one is really dealing with here. But then again, those one and a half meters around oneself are exactly the zone where intimacy is taking place. Have someone enter that space, and things get comfortable or uncomfortable - depending on whether the other person is intended to be inside or not. (more)
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There are many different ways to tell a story in a photobook (think of “a story” as whatever it is the book wants to convey, regardless of whether there actually is a real story - “Mary had a little lamb” - or whether the aim is to transport the viewer into a particular state of mind). You can, for example, take the viewer by the hand and guide him from A to B to C, maybe like in those drawings for little children where there is a set of dots with numbers on the page, and if the child connects the dots in the correct order, a picture emerges. Or you can, as seems to have rapidly become the current hot trend, throw a bunch of dots onto the pages, to make something emerge if the viewer just looks carefully enough. In the latter case, the dots often happen to be clouds - it is, I would argue, better to think of photographs not as things that have a very clearly outlined meaning, with sharp edges. Make no mistake, one way to tell a story is not better than another one. But as I already indicated with my “trend” comment, there are periods of time when one method is en vogue. I’d be happy to argue that it’s not just about trends, it’s also about photographers learning how photographs can be used to tell stories in book form (the irony here is that the medium photobook seems much more alive right now than the medium it is derived from, photography itself). (more)
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World War 2 might be the last war any Western nation fought that came with a simple, obvious moral certitude. Fighting against Nazi Germany and Japan, both aggressors, amounted to fighting for the ideals that at the end of the war made it into universally agreed principles. You can’t easily say that about the various wars we have seen ever since. World War 2 also deeply transformed Europe, the continent. Europe started to unite into an often ill-defined, yet oddly effective superstructure that now, after the inevitable fall of the Soviet-Union, encompasses almost the entire continent. This might explain our ongoing fascination with World War 2, as the generation that fought the war (or what was left of it afterwards) is slowly and steadily dying. That generation is the only connection left to both the experience of the war and to the world before it. (more)
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I’m going to start a new feature on this website, providing brief reviews of photobooks. I can’t possibly write long reviews for each and every photobook I receive in the mail. Writing shorter pieces will hopefully allow me to cover more books, while adding a bit of a flexibility to the whole endeavour. Find the first three brief reviews below. (more)
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When I met Robert Knoth in early 2010, he showed me some of the photographs he had taken (I forgot where). He said he wanted to produce a book that would trace the heroin/drug trail from Afghanistan to places in Europe and Africa, rattling off more information than I was able to retain. It sounded like a good idea, but maybe just like a lot of the other stuff I was hearing at Fotofest a bit of a tall tale. But then what was a veteran photojournalist doing in that generic hotel banquet room, trying to get people interested in his work, while competing with all those fine-art people taking, let’s say, photographs of their grandmother’s possessions? After all, here was a photographer who had actually traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and Somalia and who knows where else, places that one can easily consider as solidly messed up. This must be child’s play, I thought. Showing your photographs to some blogger can’t even be remotely as scary as even the most harmless stuff he ran into in places I wouldn’t go to even if I got paid a lot of money. All that aside, I really did wish him well, because in these twenty minutes Knoth had convinced me that there was a real, complex story here, parts of which I was somewhat familiar with, having read all kinds of stories and books about this and that, without being able to connect the pieces. (more)
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Using the title of this publication, Unknown Quantities, as the jump-off point for all kinds of comments is tempting, especially given the brouhaha over a group of mostly older Magnum members descending on Rochester, NY, to produce more Postcards from America. I’ll try to resist that temptation, to instead focus on what these four young Magnum photographers have published. (more)
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When we think of photography and place, not all places are equal. Some places are culturally or politically loaded in ways that makes approaching them or their depictions tricky (by depiction I here mean any kind of depiction, incl. non-visual ones). I wrote about Appalachia, but you might as well take the American West, or Israel/Palestine. There are different things at play in these places that make dealing with them complex. So how do you go about photography in such places? (more)
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It seems safe to guess that many people will just hate the 2011 reissue of Karyudo (A Hunter) by Daido Moriyama. Instead of opting for the original layout the publisher, one of Japan’s largest and - as a Japanese student of mine told me - well known for its manga comics, produced a small book, with full-bleed images across the gutter (if its any consolation, the reissue of Japan: A Photo Theater even cuts up at least one image and produces two spreads out of it). I haven’t seen the original book (a quick Ebay search taught me I could either buy a copy or pay rent for half a year), but I’m absolutely loving this new version. (more)
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Germans aren’t so eager to go to war any longer. Here’s the irony: The very same countries that after World War 2 set out to exorcise German militarism are now complaining about the country’s unwillingness to fight wars. There are German soldiers (“troops”) in various locations, though. German warships are fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia, and there are German soldiers in Afghanistan. (more)
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When I come to New York City, I stay in the area that is being portrayed in Brian Rose’s Time and Space on the Lower East Side. As a matter of fact, I realized a little while ago that when I say “New York” I really only mean Manhattan. I noticed this when I talked to someone, and they told me they lived in Brooklyn. Of course, people will never tell you they live in Brooklyn, instead they live in Greenpoint or wherever else. I have no idea where any of those areas are. People usually are nice enough to then add “Brooklyn” when they realize they’ve run into someone not in the know (which, needless to say, is the mortal sin in NY). When I come to New York I pretty much never go to Brooklyn unless I have to. I also leave the Lower East Side/East Village only when I have to (for example to go to Chelsea). (more)
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I suspect that the reasons why I am not very interested in street photography at all and why Paul Graham worked on what has now been published as The Present might be not so dissimilar. Sure, it’s fun to see a photograph of the moment when the fat lady looked at the skinny statue (or the other way around). If you feel particularly frisky you can now look for those moments without even leaving the comfort of your home, using Google’s Street View. But at the end of the day, you’re reducing what can be an amazing experience - life in the street, the hustle and bustle of the world - to a bunch of snapshots. I suppose that’s fine, but I personally don’t need to see any more of it. If I want street photography, I take a walk, and I look. (more)
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From January to December 1979, Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima showed his photographs of Tokyo in a somewhat different way. Every month, there would be a new selection of photographs on display at a gallery, often with all kinds of innovative ways to show them (incl., but not limited to, creating prints onto photographic paper hanging on a wall). In addition to the show, every month there was a 16 page booklet, showcasing the work. These booklets have now been reissued, in facsimile, as Photo Express Tokyo. (more)
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A photobook is like a sentence, or a story. There is a beginning and an end. Whatever story you want to tell (provided there is one) you need to fit inside, between the covers. Per se, this format allows for an amazing range of options. But what if there is no story, or if you want images to relate to each other not as “this one comes after that one,” but as “this one relates to that one, but also to that one and that one”? You could, of course, group all of these images in a single spread, but then that spread becomes its own self-containing unit. What can you do if you want to escape from this restriction? (more)
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Produced at the occasion of a retrospective at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, Arbeit / Work by Chris Killip is of course that, a collection of the photographer’s work. But it is also more. It is a (timely?) reminder what a photographer working as a documentarian can do. We have tied ourselves into tight knots, arguing about truth and reality in photographs, about whether or now documentary photography has to be truthful or not. But we also have lost sight of what documentary photography can achieve when it is well done. (more)
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In that ever (and rapidly) expanding industry of books devoted to photobooks, the one I had been really looking forward to was the one about Dutch photobooks. Ever since I discovered the amazing world of Dutch photobook making, I have been trying to make sure that that part of my own collection keeps growing as steadily (or maybe even more so) than the rest. So here it is now: The Dutch Photobook, edited by Frits Gierstberg and Rik Suermondt, with additional contributions by fourteen other authors. Now I don’t have to rummage through my book collection any longer to show people why I’m excited about Dutch photobooks. That’s a most welcome development. (more)
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We want our landscapes to be sublime. We want to be overwhelmed, lacking words. We want to be in awe, getting reminded of our own smallness and mortality. Unfortunately, most landscapes don’t work that way. Most landscapes do not overwhelm the senses. Mind you, there is beauty all around us, but to see that beauty we need to make a bit of a mental effort. Being Swiss, Yann Mingard might have simply aimed his camera at the Swiss Alps. But he chose not to do so. Instead, he aimed it at what places where most people wouldn’t even bother looking twice - the kind of nature that surrounds so many of us. Repaires, the book containing the results of this endeavour, shows what is to be gained from doing that. (more)
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It’s road-trip time yet again, this time involving photographer Rafal Milach and writer Huldar Breiðfjörð. Using Route 1, they traveled around Iceland in ten days. A photographer and a writer, a local and a guest - maybe the ideal mix for such a trip? In the Car With R, published a little while ago, contains the results of the trip. (more)
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I’m a bit over the idea of the road trip. You’re driving around, taking photographs. I get it. Not that there’s anything with a road trip per se. But to think you do a road trip to do a photo project - that’s just, let’s face it, cliche. Having said that, this doesn’t mean you can’t get something interesting out of a road trip. A good example is provided by Roberto Schena’s SP 67. It’s an unusual road trip: 13km of road, less than ten miles - how can you get something, well anything out of that? (more)
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Power is an abstract term that is hard to understand outside the world of physics. Why or how do some people have power, whereas others are powerless? And who really has power? When thinking of power, the first thing that comes to mind is the government. But in this day and age, the government appears to have much less power than we think - in part as a consequence of our demands. In contrast, corporations have managed to accumulate more and more power - power that feels even more abstract than our governments’. (more)
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Documenting domestic life has been a staple of contemporary photography for quite some time now. Often, but not always, the artist is related to, if not part, of the social group portrayed. A wonderful new addition to this genre is Eriko Koga’s Asakusa Zenzai. The book follows an elderly couple in their 80s, Hirata Hana and Nakamura Yoshiro, over the course of six years and portrays their daily life, a daily life where nothing much seems to happen. Life, in other words, as most people live it. (more)
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Witho Worms’ Cette Montagne C’est Moi is centered on carbon, in more ways than one. Photographing slag/coal heaps in various European countries, the photographer took actual material from each heap. He then converted what he took into his photographic materials to print the heap’s image on: “For this project I developed a variation on the carbon printing process, a photographic printing technique from the 19th century. I took a bit of coal from every mountain I photographed. I then ground this coal into a pigment that I used to make photographic paper. I used this paper to make a print of a mountain with the coal originating from that mountain. In other words, the object of the photo, the mountain, has become one with the subject of the photo, the print itself.” (quoted from the technical note of the book). How do you turn such photography into a book? (more)
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“Working alongside John [Gossage] was stressful, but it was also life changing. After learning so much from this master of the medium (and friend), I began the process of dismantling my career.” write Alec Soth about his contribution to The Auckland Project. The book, or rather set of books, was “a trip of departures. Gossage has been working in black and white for over 40 years, and this trip yielded one of the first bodies of work he had ever produced in color.” (quoted from the press blurb) Soth, in turn, left behind his 8x10 camera, to bring a digital one. Since I have been ignoring discussions of cameras on this blog for years now, I’ll continue doing that for this review. Instead, I want to talk about the two photographers’ approach to photography - I do believe the books offer an opportunity to do that. (more)
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