The history of colour photography in the art world is very well-known. There is no need repeating it here. But history is only useful if we treat it as living, evolving history - which means we have to re-evaluate it time and time again. And occasionally, new insights, new discoveries (or re-discoveries) might force us to re-consider history. A good case in point is provided by Saul Leiter’s photographs, in particular the colour work. These photographs have slowly made their way into the public’s consciousness, and a major retrospective in Hamburg (Germany) is now forcefully making the case for a re-write of the history of colour photography in the art world. For those who cannot travel to Hamburg, there is Saul Leiter, the book produced at the occasion of the exhibition. (In the following, I am going to differentiate between the book and the photographer through the use of italics for the book title) (more)
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Jeroen Hofman must feel like one of the luckiest photographers. Much like Gregory Crewdson, for Playground he got to photograph elaborately staged sets, with many actors, situations clearly out of this world and very much part of this world - and all he had to do was to point his camera (elevated high up on a crane). The staging, the production were taken care off by other people. Not for the purpose of the pictures, but still. You get firefighters scrambling to put out fires, people in hazmat suits looking for dubious substances, soldiers invading homes for whatever reason… It’s a different dystopia than Crewdson’s, the psychological suburban discomfort replaced with a much more threatening urbanized real violence. (more)
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There’s something quintessentially American about the road trip, and about a photographer doing one, but of course you don’t actually have to be an American to do it. Add to the growing canon of road-trip photobooks Venetia Dearden’s Eight Days (there is a micro site, which is really quite micro: all you can do is order the book). The first thing I want to note about the book is that what I’ve seen online doesn’t do it any justice. Of course, that’s a big problem for photobooks in general. The actual object often is much more impressive than what you see online. You might get a good idea of this book by watching my video presentation. (more)
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All photography is carefully constructed fiction, and this is especially true for family photography. I don’t know whether Robert Benjamin would agree with that. Having met the photographer last year and having had more than just one spirited conversation with him, I am not sure he would. But to say that photography is carefully constructed fiction takes nothing away from it. On the contrary, it is exactly this property of photography that allows it to elevate moments taken from life out of the ordinary: It is always the person behind the camera that makes the photograph and never whatever might be in front of it. (more)
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In Sochi, every “self-respecting restaurant has a singer,” The Sochi Project’s Sochi Singers notes (I’ll try to limit the use of the word “Sochi” in the following sentences, I promise; this and all following quotes are taken from their website). The city is a tourist resort (“The smell of sunscreen, sweat, alcohol and roasting meat pervades the air.”), and of course restaurants have to be competitive. The level of cheerfulness that is - presumably - the intended result of the singing escapes me: “Chansons are Russian ballads, but the comparison with French chansons is only partial. The songs have their origins in the age-old Russian tradition of labour camps and prisons.” And: “nowadays the term ‘chanson’ more often refers to the saccharine genre of Russian-language dance music. It is usually accompanied by a heavy disco beat and occasionally even a dash of techno.” Labour camps to a disco beat: I don’t want to know what that sounds like. (more)
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Well, well, well. A Swedish photographer, Gerry Johansson, might have made the most poignant book about the economic distress many American cities (and regions) find themselves in: Pontiac. The book operates in the same way the setting of the movie Ghost Dog works: It looks like an American city, but it could be almost any American city. Of course, Pontiac is a real town in Michigan. You get all the vital statistics right after the book’s title page. But Johansson photographs it so that it becomes any of those American cities whose unemployment rate has quadrupled from 2000 to 2010, any of those American cities that have about a quarter of their families living below poverty level. (more)
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A fair amount of photography from what one could think of as archives is now being released. Some of that work saw the light in a different - or even the same - form before. Some has never been published. Those books always raise certain questions for me. After all, I want to be looking at photobooks for the photographs and the stories they might tell me. (more)
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How do you write about a book like Dirk Braeckman? Ideally, I’d simply show you the book, in person (doing it online has its limits, after all; you can also go to the artist’s website). That’s how I came across this book. It was a recommendation by a friend, who happened to bring the book to a class we taught together. I was instantly hooked. The problem is going to be to explain why I was - and still am - hooked. (more)
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Peter Bialobrzeski has been traveling across Asia (and some other countries) for many years now, taking photographs of countries in transition. The first well-known book to emerge from these travels was Neon Tigers. This new book, The Raw and the Cooked is a follow-up of sorts, another book dealing with, in the photographer’s words, “today’s rapidly burgeoning, constantly changing cities” (quoted from the book’s epilogue). (more)
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There’s a wonderful, sad story in the essay that comes with 7 Rooms by Rafal Milach (you can see many of the images from the book here). A couple visits Moscow, at some early stage after the end of Communism. On Arbat Street, people are selling painted nesting dolls, samovars, and old icons, but they’re also selling Komsomol membership cards, war medals, and red banners. The wife, incredulous, calls a policeman over who “explains to us bumpkins: ‘Objects from the era of totalitarianism… may be sold… We only make arrests for narcotics and pornography…’” How do you react to that, as a bumpkin? Here’s how the wife reacts to it: “What? A Party membership card for five dollars? Isn’t that pornography?” Only about one page into this essay, I was already scrambling to find where that essay was from, given I had seen a reference in the book to something else. Written (compiled) by Svetlana Alexievich, it is from Zacharovannye smertiu (Enchanted with Death), published in Moscow in 1994, which hasn’t been translated into English (there’s a German translation entitled Im Banne des Tode). (more)
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The pleasure of a truly great photobook is not limited to seeing a set of photographs put together in a way that make the medium shine, that show how so many of the usual debates about photography and its supposed shortcomings are flawed. You also get a perceptive essay or two, to go along the photography. Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood comes with writing by Karen Irvine and Luc Sante. Sante’s essay had me dread writing a review of the book, given it so wonderfully talks about the book. What is there left to say? (more)
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What is there still left to say about consumerism? We all seem to agree that it is bad, that reckless consumption is the direct cause of many of our current problems, but we’re still very much engaged in it. Consumerism is what drives large parts of our economy: We don’t make things any longer, we buy them, ideally for very cheap. As such, consumerism is very abstract, though. We know what it feels like to consume, but we don’t really know what it looks like. And the images of some of the consequences of our consumerism - toxic wastelands here, or vast landfills there - are hard to connect with the shiny big-box stores where we buy our stuff. Brian Ulrich’s photographs, now published in Is This Place Great Or What, avoid tackling this gap. Instead, for the most part they focus on us, on people caught up in the act of consumption. (more)
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We live in what feels like the golden age of the photobook. There currently is enormous interest in the medium, and one can hope there will be for a long time. At the same time, the photobook has produced another industry: Books about photobooks. Things started off slowly, with The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 deservedly becoming seminal books. Much could be said about these books - the writing is superb, while one wishes there were better spreads of the books, say. There simply is no way anyone interested in photobooks can be without owning a copy each. A few years after their publication, many other such books have now been published, typically with a geographical focus. Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present is, as far as I can tell, the latest addition to the growing canon. (more)
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Much could be said about contemporary nude photography, provided we properly defined it first. The contemporary nude seems to be that sliver of work between soft- (or hard-) core pornography and whatever the kind of photography is called where a photographer (often, but not always a male) takes photographs of a naked person (a young woman) to explore the usual cliches of the nude. This is probably the lousiest definition of “contemporary nude photography” you might have come by in quite some time, but let it be good enough. Instead of worrying about definitions, it might simply be much more productive to talk about a specific artist. Let’s take Malerie Marder. (more)
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Sometimes, it’s good to go back to the classics to get reminded of how things can be done differently, and well. There is no shortage of contemporary photography of what we do with the land, to the land, much of it done pleasantly and occasionally decoratively. There’s nothing wrong with decorative (it helps selling prints). But of course there is the debate about whether or not we want to see ravaged landscapes photographed beautifully. We don’t (since it feels wrong, and we want the photographs to illustrate our opinions), and we do (since we love looking at beautiful landscapes). I’m tired of that debate, since however you look at it, it’s never about photography, but instead about what we expect to see: as I said, an illustration of our opinions. So it’s good to go back to the classics, and here I mean the more recent classics. (more)
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We don’t take photography by tourists seriously, because they’re not serious about photography. We don’t take photography by tourist information centers seriously, because they’re too serious about the photography looking a certain way. In other words, tourism and photography just don’t gel. Or so the story goes. But maybe that’s wrong. How would we find out? Well, we could simply look at a lot of tourist photographs and brochures produced for tourists. Or we could grab a bunch of serious (aka non-tourist) photographers and tell them to go to the same place to take photographs. The former is simple (and not all that original any longer), the latter is more fun. In a nutshell, that is the idea behind Sight-_Seeing, for which there also is a microsite. (more)
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It’s the photographer’s nightmare: You have your luggage run through one of the x-ray security scanners at an airport, and your film gets damaged. Of course, you can always try to get your film hand inspected - provided you’re using a US airport, say, but things aren’t as easy to control when you’re in parts of the world where x-ray scanners are everywhere, and where x-ray machines might or might not date from ye olden days. This is the situation Rob Hornstra of The Sochi Project found himself in in Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya: “In the Chechen capital, these scanners are not only placed at the entrance to the airport or government buildings, but also to shops, gyms, restaurants and outside on squares.” (more)
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A good photobook acts very much like a vortex. It sucks you in, twirling you around, mis- and then re-orienting you, leaving you dizzy, a bit bewildered, and excited (A bad photobook just sucks). Richard Rothman’s Redwood Saw is such a vortex. (more)
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South Africa’s recent history is one of those wonderful stories. Apartheid was finally dismantled in the 1990s, and a new country, with everybody having the same rights and the same freedom, was born. At least on paper. The reality is not quite as rosy. Here is the OECD reporting on the situation: “South Africa’s high aggregate level of income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racial groups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African and Coloured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements in non-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over the entire post-Apartheid period up to 2008.” There’s more: “In the third quarter of 2010, 29.80% of blacks were officially unemployed, compared with 22.30% of coloureds, 8.60 of Asians and 5.10% of whites.” (source, with further reference therein) (more)
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There’s something toxic about television once you want to write about it. It’s almost as if the medium’s shallowness immediately rubs off. You start writing about it, and you almost inevitably produce trite stereotypes or cliches, mirroring most of what you see on TV (pointing that out of course is a stereotype!). I’ve had Simone Lueck’s Cuba TV in my “to review” pile of books for months now, and every time I wanted to get to it the thought of writing about TV gave me the chills. Oh and Cuba, that photographic stereotype of a place. How do you even write about that? Escapes me! (more)
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We have become more aware of what we eat, as knowledge of the consequences of a bad diet (heart problems, diabetes, etc.) has become more widely known. Knowing what to eat - and what to avoid - often goes hand in hand with trying to find out where and how what we eat (or use to prepare our food) is being produced. Amazingly enough, I only know of very little photography about this aspect of our lives. Obesity and/or consumption are obvious targets for photographers, but many (most?) other aspects of our food chain are not very often to be found in photographs. (more)
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It’s an old question: How do images work with text? According to what we could call photobook orthodoxy, interestingly enough established after photobooks had been very lively affairs (see Parr/Badger - The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1), there has got to be no text alongside photographs other than a page number and (maybe) the title. When well done, such books work well, but it is also rather obvious that it is pressing many photographic bodies into a formalistic straight jacket that ultimately diminishes what could be had. (more)
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It is most curious to see the strange obsessiveness that shines through so much of Diane Arbus’ work reflected in so many of the books published about the photographer post mortem. It is almost as if we think that if we managed to get as close as possible to Arbus we would finally be able to understand the work she left behind. Or maybe it’s the same idea that one would employ when taking apart a mechanical clock, laying out all the pieces on the table: That surely is going to teach us how it ticks, isn’t it? Yet photographers are quite unlike mechanical clocks. Photographers are human beings like you and me. Some are more human than others, and the occasional one is all-too-human. (more)
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“The roots of Hallowe’en,” the historical note at the end of Haunted Air informs us, “lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, or ‘Summer’s End’, a feast to mark the gathering of the harvest, the death of the old year and the birth of the new. Ancestors were remembered, cattle, sheep and pigs were slaughtered and the carcasses burned on huge hillside bonfires (‘bone fires’) in rites of purification and appeasement.” That sounds like a jolly good time, but there was more: “It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. […] Spells of binding and protection were chanted, grotesque skull-faces were carved into turnips, lit with embers or candles and hung from trees or nailed over doorways to ward off malicious revenants.” (more)
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Given I published posts on What makes a great portrait? (part 2) and What makes a great photo? the next logical step would be to ask “What makes a great artist?” Maybe I’ll simply kick this off by giving my own answer. When I think about photographers (often when being prodded to name photographers I admire) I tend to come back to those who are less defined by that one masterly body of work and more by a living, complex set of bodies of work. This is not because I dislike great, masterly bodies of work - quite on the contrary. There are all kinds of problems associated with that: How do you follow up on something like that? And, inevitably, there’s always the comparison with that one famous book (let’s assume there’s a book), which, I assume, must be just crippling for an artist: How do you deal with that? (I’ve always wanted to ask that question, but I’ve always been too afraid of poking at exactly the sorest possible spot). But for me, there’s even more to the great artist than just that. (more)
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It doesn’t happen very often that the first and only thing that really bothers me about a photobook is its cover. But that’s the case with Riley and His Story: Me and My Outrage, You and Us by Monica Haller. You can visit the dedicated microsite and see/decide for yourself. It’s not even that I mind text on the cover. But not this text, on the cover of this book. It’s too bad since the rest of the book is so amazing. In fact, it’s a book that deserves to be seen more widely. (more)
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Hardly a day goes by without the concern being voiced that there are too many photographs in the world. Earlier this year, I wrote about 60 billion photos on Facebook alone (it must be more by now, but does the number really matter any longer?). I personally don’t think there are too many photos in the world. This is probably because I don’t even know what my benchmark would be. I know what happens when I drink too much coffee or alcohol or eat too much candy, but I yet have to notice any problems when looking at large numbers of photographs. But still. If we get back to the complaint about all those photographs, the first thing we might want to realize is that Joachim Schmid talked about too many photographs in the world before Facebook was born. In 1989, he said “No new photographs until the old ones have been used up!” (quoted from the book I’m going to review here) (more)
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Many (most?) touristic activities are cultural compulsions. You do certain thing because that’s what one does when going to wherever it might be you went, not necessarily because you want to. Or maybe you think you want to. After all, wouldn’t it be great to go to New York City and see Times Square? Actually, can you even go to New York and not go to Times Square? What will your friends and neighbours say if you tell them you didn’t go? Everybody goes to Times Square! Of course, part of the ritual is to take a photograph. After all, you need proof that you were there. Or maybe proof isn’t the right word. In any case, the activity of going to Time Square inevitably involves taking a photo - and the same is true for all other such locations, whether it’s the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin or whatever else. (more)
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If you have ever been to Berlin you know about the city’s strange allure: It is inevitable that you know many things about it, things that you wouldn’t know about any other city. So you travel there filled with excitement and some apprehension maybe. Once you’re there the contemporary city, a charming mix of buildings and people, seemingly thrown together at random, with no real planning behind it, will overwhelm your senses. (more)
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There are different approaches to Roman Bezjak’s Socialist Modernism. One can focus on the truly outrageous (here is an example) and then come to all kinds of conclusions about Socialism. Or one can focus on that which looks not quite so different from what you might find next door (many West German cities did - and still do - in fact look like this, and this building immediately reminded me a little bit of Boston City Hall) and wonder what is to be learned from that. (more)
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What is the appeal of the Polaroid photograph? The more you think about it, the more it becomes obvious that its appeal derives from what you could call its aura: We treasure these photographs not for what they are, but for what we make of them. Polaroid photographs are one-of-a-kind (let’s ignore those processes where there is a negative), and they typically are not very good photographs in a strictly technical sense: The colours tend to be off, they’re often slightly hazy, and many of them suffer from the various artifacts that can happen when the image doesn’t develop properly. But all of these properties, which most of us would happily reject for other types of photography (excluding, perhaps, those few artists who work with artifacts), for a Polaroid are taken as genuine strengths. (more)
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There is an amusement park in Iraq called Dream City. There also is one in Rwanda, Bambino Super City. Turkmenistan has one, too: Turkmenbashi’s World of Fairy Tales. This is where being a photographer is considerably simpler than being a writer, because how do you, can you possibly react to all that in a world that loves nothing more than an unbiased view that, ideally, allows all possible readings? Well, good writers (not that I’m one) know what to do: They just ignore what people want and give their view no matter what. That is, after all, good writing. Bad writing, however, is starting a review of a book featuring amusement/theme parks all over the world by talking about good writing. So let’s talk about good photography instead, which, as it turns out, is easy since there’s quite a bit in Dream City by Anoek Steketee and Eefje Blankevoort (text). (more)
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Maybe I haven’t looked at enough of them, but photobooks that present a collection often are tedious (and, let’s face it, gratuitous) affairs. Someone or some group owns all these photographs, and that might or might not tell us something about the world of photography or about the ideas behind the collection. Much to my surprise - and delight - Street Life and Home Stories: Photographs from the Goetz Collection clearly sets itself apart from those kinds of books. (more)
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How do you portray places that you have no access to because they will not allow you in? When thinking about such places, most people would probably think of, let’s say, power plants or military installations. But there are other such places. I’m thinking of cafes or clubs for men only. I once came across one in Italy. I had heard of such cafes before, but I had never seen them in Germany. Actually, I thought they didn’t exist in Germany, but they do, in areas with, for example, a large Turkish population. Berlin features a lot of them, right in the neighbourhood Loredana Nemes lives in. Asks Nemes “Why did the men hide behind opaque glass or curtains, and who are they hiding from? And where were their wives?” Her solution to find out was simple: Get a large-format camera out and set it up right outside. Then see what happens. (more)
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It is no secret that I am very interested in artists who expand the medium “the photobook.” There is a lot of talk about “ebooks” now, but it seems way too early to tell where this is going. We’ve just made it past the wave of the first ephotobooks, and I’m not sure whether what we’re offered right now is what the ephotobook will eventually gel into. In retrospect, the video-game “Pong” offered a lot of promise, but I think we can all agree that while it’s still very cool to see, it doesn’t really tell us all that much where the genre “video game” went (it’s a curious - and sad - path from the geeky primitive paddle game to today’s ultra-violent “ego shooter” games). What is more, while I do appreciate the push towards the “e,” I do think that the photobook itself still can be developed further in all kinds of interesting ways. We’ve witnessed a lot of those over the past few years, as, to give just one obvious example, designers in the Netherlands have shown the world that a photobook can be quite a bit more than just a bunch of photos on paper. (more)
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I’m sometimes glad that I don’t have to make certain decisions. Jörn Vanhöfen’s Aftermath is a good example: Which image to put on the cover? Deciding about the cover image is always tricky, but I think it’s especially tricky in this case. The title is Aftermath, there are piles of old tires and a broken down truck on the cover - it’s gotta be, well, “ruin porn,” right? Wrong. (more)
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When I was seventeen years old, during my penultimate year of high school, I had to decide about which of the two trips organized by the school I wanted to pick. The tradition had been to offer either London or Paris. Much to my chagrin, when it was my turn - finally a chance to go abroad! - that tradition had been discontinued. Instead, I had the option to either go to Nuremberg or to Potsdam/Dresden. Nuremberg, I reckoned, would basically amount to a week of heavy drinking (the teacher in charge had a certain reputation). It’s not that I minded having a good time. But Potsdam/Dresden - that was basically abroad. Really abroad. OK, people there spoke the same language (give or take a few incredibly weird dialects), but it was beyond what people called the Iron Curtain. As a child, I had seen it with my own eyes: It didn’t look much like a curtain, but there certainly was a lot of iron - and explosives - involved. Potsdam/Dresden it was. (more)
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There is the official story of German photography, which comprises the usual suspects (Sander, the Bechers, Gursky, …). No need to repeat it here. There are a few things that are very interesting about that story. First of all, it’s woefully incomplete. But that’s not so interesting (it’s actually more propaganda than anything). But second, there is the fact that most of those usual suspects might be German photographers, but their work is not necessarily quintessentially German. Maybe their approach to work is (here we are again in the not-so-interesting territory), but the work itself isn’t. Andreas Gursky basically has become the inofficial photographer of globalization (sans its ugly underbelly). The Bechers documented industrial structures in many different countries. August Sander aimed at producing a truthful portraits of the Germans. But I’m happy to argue that the reason why so many people love that work is because it actually is more about the human condition than anything. And as I’ve argued before, most German photographers after the war (excluding the younger generation which has not yet been canonized) have been extremely careful to avoid dealing with German history. Which brings me to Michael Schmidt (also see this page). (more)
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How many collaborations between a photography and a painter do you know? These days, it’s much easier to think of a painter and a photographer meeting in court, over some copyright infringement. But a photographer taking a painter’s work as inspiration, and the same painter taking the photographer’s work as inspiration - there’s not so much of that, sadly. But there is at least one such collaboration, between Joachim Brohm and Heribert Ottersbach. (more)
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How does one go about photographing, portraying a city? How does one go about photographing, portraying the city one was born in? How does one go about photographing, portraying the city one was born in but hasn’t lived in recently? With each new layer, things get more complex - as if photography wasn’t difficult enough! In the case of Dana Lixenberg, that city is Amsterdam, and we certainly know a thing or two about that place, don’t we? The canals, the red-light district, the relatively relaxed attitude about recreational drugs… In a nutshell, our view of Amsterdam is the postcard view. But what is the non-postcard view? (more)
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Twenty-five years ago, in what was then the Soviet Union (now: Ukraine) the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the environment and leaving large areas contaminated. At first, the news leaked rather slowly to the West where the nuclear industry, along with politicians, were quick to point out that an accident like that could not happen with their reactors. Earlier this year, as a consequence of a massive earthquake and the resulting tsunami, four Japanese power plants suffered from a catastrophic core meltdown. The full extent of the damage at the Japanese plants is still unknown. But the daily news updates indicate rather serious problems at at least one of the reactors whose containment vessel (which is intended to keep the highly radioactive material away from the environment) seems have ruptured. There are three chilling similarities between Chernobyl and Fukushima: First, the operators of the plants have been very unwilling to inform the public about the extent of the damage. Second, in both cases a large area of land now seems heavily contaminated with radioactivity. Third, the nuclear industry’s mantra is “It can’t happen here.” I’m writing this review less than forty miles (downstream) from the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, a reactor whose design matches the Fukushima ones. (more)
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Once you’ve left you can never go home again. Going back you’ll realize that what you think should feel like home doesn’t. What you think you should be familiar with feels vague, if not outright strange. Inevitably, once enough time has passed, there will be a new home, a new sense of familiarity, even though it might never match what you had, or rather: what you think you had. Which, if you’re honest, really means: What you wish you had. Because maybe what you see when you go to the place you used to call home is what was always there, as disappointing as it might be. (more)
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There’s an ongoing debate about how much text you need alongside photography, with the spectrum ranging from those who say that photography should speak for itself, whereas others prefer to see a statement. This is not necessarily the most exciting debate to begin with (it’s rather old, too - even though the age of a debate does not say anything per se about its actual merit). Occasionally I find myself asking that question when I find some work without any text, and I wish there was some. As far as I can tell, whether or not some photography needs text or not does not depend on one’s preferences, but for the most part on the photography itself. In the case of photobooks, there typically is less of a debate, since most photobooks come with the obligatory essay (which people then might or might not read). (more)
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Very crudely speaking, the zine often lives at the intersection of artist books and photobooks produced by commercial publishers: From the former the zine takes the fact that it’s put together by one person, the artist, from the latter it takes the mass production. There is one aspect that makes most zines differ from artist books or commercial photobooks: Zines tend to be lo-fi affairs in terms of their production. To produce a zine you care about the making in ways that, at least superficially, is the opposite of what you’d expect from artist or commercial books. Of course, this description is rather simplistic, but you get the idea. If you’ve ever visited The Independent Photobook Blog you will be familiar with photozines - those tend to be flying underneath the radar of the photobook publishing world. (more)
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Why would anyone walk around and take photographs in the streets of Vancouver? Here is Fred Herzog’s answer: “After about a year of shooting I increasingly felt, ‘somebody has to do this.’ Because otherwise people in the future would only be able to go to People magazine or Look or Time or Life or any of those to see how people looked at the time.” This is a remarkable statement, placing the photographer and his work into the documentary realm. What I most like about the statement is the photographer’s ambition, however. I personally don’t care so much whether I’m looking at street photography or documentary photography in Herzog’s images. What I do care about is the quality of the work and the ambition that shines through. (more)
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The things you see when traveling abroad can be rather strange, and often it takes a visitor (or a child) to point a finger and something to make us look. It’s also strange how sometimes things we take for granted, things we’d never expect to change, implode, collapse or disappear. Occasionally, all of this is even connected, as was the case when the last financial bubble burst, to destroy both companies such as Lehman Brothers as well as the homes of many who had financed them in ways that simply didn’t make any sense. The consequences of the implosion of the US housing market are still with us, years later, and one would imagine that such a huge event - just short of another Great Depression - would result in some changes. It has not. The financial sector has got away with proverbially burning down the house and literally getting thousands and thousands of people evicted out of their homes. Many houses are now empty, either never sold, or because their owners lost them. (more)
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What do you call a book filled with photographs? If you were to ask someone unaffiliated with the world of photography, the answer probably would not be “a photobook”. In all likelihood, it would be “a photo album”. Remember those? Photo albums? If you have a Facebook account, you’ll know that your photos are organized in albums. But if you’ve ever held an actual photo album, you probably know that it’s quite a different beast: The difference is not that it’s an object - versus a label for a way to organize digital images. The difference is that an album can be customized in any which way. You could just stick your prints into the folders, but you could also do all kinds of additional things. So many photo albums ended up being little pieces of art, mirroring their makers ideas and idiosyncrasies. That, in part, is why so many photography fans collect them, buying them up on flea markets or on Ebay. (more)
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Collage art has a long history, but is it really that interesting? Are people still doing it? What are people doing? There isn’t all that much literature about it, even though once you start poking around the net, you’ll run into quite a few artists working on collages. So in case the various examples of collage art I’ve featured on this blog have made you want to see much more, the recently released Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage provides a great overview of contemporary collage. (more)
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Andreas Gefeller has been well known for meticulously constructed images of the surfaces we walk on. For each of those images, he walks around with a digital cameras elevated with some contraption, taking the many source images that are then assembled on a computer. The results, visual surveys of small pieces of our world, often are startling and strange (see my review of a book filled with such images). Of course, I’ve been wondering where he would go from there, hoping he wouldn’t turn what has been very successful into something that would merely become a shtick (as the person not producing those images, of course, it’s easy for me to say that). (more)
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Our sheltered and rather comfortable Western life styles come at a price: We are stressed, overworked and - except for the lucky few - underpaid. And now we also have to worry about all those illegal immigrants who want to come and take our jobs. OK, I am not worried about that, but in this society a great many people are. In fact, people are so worried that they built a fence, hundreds of miles of it, along the Mexican border. Everybody is welcome to admire us for our freedoms and our life style, but please do not come and try to join us. (more)
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