Paul Kooiker is on a mission. I don’t know what kind of mission it is, but if you look at the books he has produced you realize he’s on a mission alright. After Crush or Room Service, there now is Sunday, a book of nudes, or maybe more accurately photographs of a nude woman, balancing precariously on a wooden table in a rather unattractive backyard of sorts. (more)
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Bruce Haley spent a few years (1994-2002) wandering around some of the backwaters of the former Soviet Union to take photographs. The Soviet Union is “long” gone. It is mostly remembered as a prop, as a cypher, as a stand-in for the other side in debates that rarely involve any actual information about what really happened. In that sense, talking about the Soviet Union is pointless. I don’t see Sunder, the newly released book that shows Haley’s work, as centering on the Soviet Union. Instead, it’s a book about us, about our human follies and dreams. (more)
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Over the past decade, we have witnessed considerable (and still growing) interest in found or vernacular photographs. The reasons for that seem complex. Some of those photographs are incredibly charming, while others are outright strange if not simply weird. Collecting such images is one thing, but making a good photobook out of them is quite a different story. The easiest solution, of course, is to produce a simple album or collection. But it’s easy to see why this idea, as tempting as it might be, has its shortcomings: There is only so much that one can get out of charm or weirdness (or charming weirdness or weird charm). To get beyond that requires a gifted editor, an artist who can make a selection and then create a story around the images, in whatever way. Of course, Erik Kessels immediately comes to mind here. The latest photobook produced out of found images (maybe more accurately an archive of images) was just released by Little Brown Mushroom: Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar. (more)
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There’s a curious photograph in Charles Brittin: West and South. It shows a dilapidated shack, with a sign next to the entrance that says “Exhibition Charles Brittin”. The index identifies it as a photograph of a “one-day exhibition at Wallace Berman’s Semina Gallery, Larkspur, 1961.” Photographers don’t show their work in semi-destroyed wooden shacks any longer. Pretty much everything depicted in the book, photography covering the period from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, has changed, too. Brittin died earlier this year, and from the essay he contributed to the book, I am not so sure what he made of our world now, a world that looks and feels to different from the one depicted in the book. (more)
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Contemporary photography often offers very little obvious solace. It is cold and unforgiving, at least at first sight. If there is beauty it has to be discovered. If there is a message or even some form of truth, it has to be found, discovered. Contemporary photography is thus a child of its, our, time. It reflects the world we’ve built for ourselves, whether we like it or not. (more)
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Here we are, in 2011, and most of the photography in 60 Fotos by László Moholy-Nagy will strike us as incredibly old-fashioned and/or dated. Over the course of the 80 years since the book’s original publication, photography has evolved a lot (our thinking about it a bit less so, of course). But there is something, actually a lot to be gained from going back to the book and from looking at photography with the eyes of and guided by this well-known Bauhaus artist. (more)
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On March 27th, Annalisa Durante, a fourteen year old teenager, was shot in the head during a Camorra related shoot-out. Two days later, she died from her wounds. Depending on where we live, we are used to these kinds of news. Murder just keeps happening. It becomes background noise, and it takes more than just some news report to alert us to what is going on. Putting a name and face to a death might help, but often, even that is not enough. In the media, there typically are two kinds of responses: The first focuses exclusively on the victim, while ignoring everything about the environment. The other response only focuses on the environment, treating victims in a statistical fashion. (more)
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The history of the photobook is filled with many absolutely amazing examples, many of which remain only known to experts - or those fortunate enough to have the means to acquire them. The main reason for this is mundane: It’s not because some elitists pick books and decide they are great. It’s because most of those books were printed once and then sold over the course of a few years. To make matters worse, there’s the Velvet-Underground effect: Many of those books didn’t even sell well, while inspiring what ultimately became a real movement. In fact, some books are so hard to get because they sold just a few copies, and the rest were then literally destroyed. The case of Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet is particularly heart-wrenching: According to the main essay in this reprint, the original print run was five hundred copies, which were not sold through any major bookstores. In 1956, a fire at the artist’s farmhouse destroyed the majority of the negatives, along with most of his library, plus a collection of signed lithographs by Picasso and Matisse. There was another fire, in the next home, too. (more)
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It is an interesting exercise to take the work of British artist John Stezaker out of its usual context and to place it in the context within which pretty much all the images discussed on this blog live. In particular, I’d like to point out that what Stezaker is doing, namely taking two, occasionally just one, sometimes three, images and superimposing or combining them in ways that, superficially, look as if he hasn’t even done anything is certain to have the copyright police up in arms. The horror! The horror! But Stezaker’s case is a very good example of why simplistic thinking about copyright - all the talk of “stolen” images - has serious repercussions for artists. If you look at the collages, the artist is not just taking images and putting them together somehow (even though superficially, that’s exactly what he is doing). He is combining images in ways that most people would have never thought of, with the results in most cases being astounding. Minimalist as they might be, the transformations are huge. (more)
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At the time of this writing, the official unemployment rate in the US is 9%. This number excludes a large variety of people, incl., for example, those who gave up looking for work or those who’d prefer a full-time job over a part-time one. It’s a bit harder to come by the actual unemployment rate, in part because it depends on how you define it. If we take the US government’s U-6 rate, we get 16%. Very much related to this, the number of photographers, graphic designers and writers I have talked to recently who told me about severe problems getting jobs is mind-blowing. I am not active in the field of commercial or editorial photography, but from what I hear there is some severe howling and gnashing of the teeth going on. So even though it might just be a coincidence, it still seems entirely appropriate that Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring was just re-published by Errata Editions. (more)
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Photography is centered on light and time. Typically, they are not independent - the amount of light available tends to determine the amount of time needed for a photograph. Exposure usually needs to be done properly, because not doing so results in all kinds of unwanted effects, such as under- or overexposed images - or worse. Worse, of course, needn’t necessarily be worse. If you take black and white film and overexpose it, an object like the Sun will eventually show up not very white but the opposite: black. A well-known example of this is Minor White’s The Black Sun. (more)
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When I wrote my post about the unwillingness of post-war German photographers to confront their country’s most recent past (find the posts here and here) one of the books I had to think of was Zdenek Tmej’s The Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness, published in 1946 in what was then Czechoslovakia. During World War II, Tmej had been one of the many forced foreign laborers in Nazi Germany, and he had documented part of his life with a camera. The original book is hard to come by, but luckily, there now is an Errata Editions version. (more)
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Good critical writing about photography is rare. By “good” I don’t mean someone’s ability to conform to what is widely considered the standard of such writing, namely to reference ad nauseam the usual essays by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and/or Walter Benjamin - the Procrustean Bed of critical writing about photography. By “good” I mean first, to write in a way that makes the text enjoyable because of its elegance, and second, to provide insights that extend beyond that which we already take for granted. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield easily passes that bar. It is also a book that is long overdue. (more)
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One of the endearing properties of good photobooks is that they don’t get stale. You can pull an older photobook from your shelf, and it will have lost none of its original power. Geert van Kesteren’s Baghdad Calling: Reports from Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Iraq was published two and a half years ago, but I still want to review it here (there exists a microsite for the book). It has not lost its relevance, both in terms of what it deals with and in terms of how it deals with it. (more)
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The cheap stuff we love to buy has to be made somewhere. Cheap stuff means little costs, so its production has been on a tour around the world over the past decades. We like to think of this as “globalisation,” because that just sounds better; and we usually don’t have a problem with it - as long as we can be sure there are no sweat shops involved (we might be cheap, but we have noble principles!). You can trace the evolution of this movement if you go to a thrift shop and look at where the things from the different periods of time were made. While China of course is the most well-known production site for our cheap (and plenty of our not-so cheap) stuff, there are other countries, too, Vietnam being one of them. Tessa Bunney’s Home Work explores a particular aspect of that country’s production system, the small villages around and suburbs of Hanoi. (more)
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When I first saw How to Hunt by Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt, on the walls of their gallery in New York, I wasn’t very impressed at all. The fact that I have no respect whatsoever for hunters and their activities aside, I thought the prints were way too big. Of course, the standard narrative behind big prints is that there is a big negative, so you need a big print to showcase all the details. I don’t subscribe to that point of view. It creates a mindless fetish out of a big print, and it completely ignores the fact that some images don’t work when printed too big (all the details won’t save your photo in that case). (more)
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A little while ago, I read an article about Germany’s postwar reconstruction. I learned that the ruins of what had been the Third Reich had been literally piled up in many cities, to form artificial hills. Given the amount of destruction, many of them are impressive affairs: “In West Germany alone, some 400 million cubic meters (14 billion cubic feet) of rubble was piled up after the war.” (quoted from the article; just as an aside, it was up to German women to clean up the mess after the war, don’t miss this gallery of Trümmerfrauen) Only a few days later, I came across Teufelsberg by Marie Sommer, a book about one such hill in Berlin, called - you guessed it - Teufelsberg (devil’s mountain). (more)
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Occasionally, someone will ask me how I would define what makes a good portrait, and of course there is no good answers for that. But there’s one thing that helps: An interesting face. Needless to say, and interesting face will no guarantee a good portrait, but it really helps. This might sound slightly flippant, but once you look at all the portraits done by photographer X or by photographer Y you realize that X and Y pick a certain “kind” of people. It’s hard to say what it is, but typically, you will easily be able to say that some portrait looks like it was taken by X and not by Y, in part of because of the subject her/himself. Many portrait photographers are drawn towards certain types of characters, and often it does have something to do with the face. You could use Koos Breukel’s Fair Face as a good example (not because it has the word “face” in its title, though). (more)
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The story of oil (and gas) in Nigeria is long, ugly and relatively well ignored in the West. Just to give you an idea of what’s going on there, look at this article describing the fall-out from the recent Wikileaks release for oil company Shell. And there is more, much more in fact. This is the story told in Tropical Gift: The Business of Oil and Gas in Nigeria by Christian Lutz, a bold and masterful achievement. (more)
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I agree, reviewing my favourite photobook this year on the very last day, two weeks after listing it in the best of 2010 list - that’s somewhat odd. But sometimes, that’s how things go. I bought the book four weeks ago, was too busy to review it, but not busy enough to add it to my list, right on top. And photobooks aren’t like bread. They don’t go stale after a few days. They’re more like wine: They tend to get better with age. In the case of Quatorze Juillet by Johan van der Keuken the book is new, the photography is not. The images in the book were taken on 14 July, 1958, and apart from a single one, they have not been published before. (more)
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What do we know about Iran? Not much probably, apart from those stories about the current president and the country’s quest for nuclear weapons. How many people know that the country’s history dates back thousands of years? How many people know what the country really looks like? I’ll be honest, I know a little bit about the history, but I know more or less nothing else. Thankfully, there now is Recollection by Walter Niedermayr. (more)
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You’re probably aware of the fact that if you skip the essay(s) in most photobooks, you’re not missing much (if anything). In the case of Empty land, Promised land, Forbidden land by photographer Rob Hornstra and writer Arnold van Bruggen (see their joint site The Sochi Project), you would miss at least half of what makes this book what it is. This points to the fact that while you could treat Empty land as a photobook, in reality it’s something different. In a nutshell, it’s a documentary, transformed into book form. (more)
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I suppose strictly speaking John Stezaker’s Fumetti is not a photobook. It does contains photos, though. But the artist didn’t take them. It’s a book of collages. But purists might find reason to scoff at that, too, given that many of these collages were made from only two images, and there are some made from, well, one. But before we throw our arms up in despair, trying to find just the right box for the book, we might as well realize how little is to be gained from categorizing - especially since so much is to be gained from looking at the book. (more)
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This being the time of the internet and of quick, dismissive remarks, I should probably write that Sechsundzwanzig Wiener Tankstellen [Twenty Six Viennese Gas Stations] by Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Stefan Oláh is just a shameless rip off of Ed Ruscha’s famous work and be done with it. But I won’t, since such a verdict would not only be simplistic, it would be ill-informed and thus ultimately stupid. Art itself does not exist in a vacuum, and some art might inform and/or spawn some other art. In the case of Sechsundzwanzig Wiener Tankstellen (which I’ll abbreviate as SWT from now on), Ruscha’s famous work - the booklet etc. - served not only just as inspiration. The book is a commentary of sorts, or maybe an extension of the American artist’s body of work: This is what gas stations look like here in Vienna, and here is why this is interesting. (more)
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“How has the Ruhr district changed over the years? How do artists see the Ruhr Metropolis now?” asks the introductory page of the Ruhr Views exhibitions. First of all, why is this interesting? As it turns out, the Ruhr District has undergone massive changes over the past decades. The largest urban center in Germany - composed of various cities, which, in effect, form a mega-city inhabited by 12 million people - the Ruhr District formerly was the home of large parts of the country’s heavy industry: Coal, steel. Essen, one of the main cities, housed the infamous Krupp empire. Most of this came down, the steel mills are gone, the region changed massively - just like its counterparts in, for example, the US or Britain. How did the Germans deal with this transformation? (more)
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In our Western world we have either lost or appropriated the pagan rituals that ruled Europe before Christianity took over. In fact, those rituals are so alien to us that we do not even realize that they still exist as relics in some of the “holidays” we celebrate (just look into the pagan roots of various aspects of Christmas to get an idea what I’m talking about). Where pagan rituals managed to survive, they usually strike us as well, weird. For example, most people will be somewhat familiar with an image like this (it conveniently fits into our general visual culture), whereas something like this (here is a page explaining the background) will probably cause different reactions. I’m writing this review a few days before Halloween, but I can’t imagine someone walking around with such a Perchta mask. (more)
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For some artists, posing for photographs comes with the business. We are used to seeing carefully staged and/or produced photographs of musicians on the covers of (or inside) magazines. For other artists, posing for photographs is not part of the business at all. You don’t get to see painters, sculptors or photographers that often on the covers of magazines. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that you do see some of those artists a lot, and most of them not at all. (more)
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“More people live along the Yangtze’s banks than in the whole of the United States,” writes Nadav Kander in the notes of his new book Yangtze, The Long River, “that is one in every eighteen people on the planet. […] This extraordinary and vast river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese. It is much more than a waterway. It contains their history and their folklore. It runs in the blood of the people.” And later: “China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past. Demolition and construction were everywhere on such a scale that I was unsure if what I was seeing was being built or destroyed, destroyed or built.” We are familiar with such narratives, and we have seen aspects of the imagery in the book before. What we have not seen, however, is a single artist trying to tie things together. (more)
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A while back, I tried to find photography from Africa on the web, and it was a pretty frustrating experience. There is some; but most artists whose names I came across somewhere - or who were mentioned to me by friends - were impossible to track down online. I still don’t know much about African photography. (more)
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What I’m really interested in when I look at photography is art. A photographer might take photographs of her children to talk about her family. An artist takes photographs of her children to talk about the human condition. A photographer might take photographs of a particular region to portray it, mostly for the sake of the people living there. An artist takes photographs of a particular region to ultimately produce images of no particular region other than the one that we all share, regardless where we live. A photographer might stick to that tried, old method and produce the same photographs, using the same style, for many years. An artist will not shy away from experimentation - and the potential of astounding success, at the risk of sometimes even more astounding failure. (more)
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As someone who loves photobooks, I couldn’t be happier about Errata Editions. As is probably widely known, Errata publish reproductions of photobooks that otherwise would not be accessible to a wider audience. A truly wonderful case in point is provided by Yutaka Takanashi’s Toshi-e (Towards the City), originally published in Japan in 1974. (more)
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It was probably inevitable that art fairs would become the subject matter of photography. Car fairs, or rather the young women who are used as props to showcase cars, already have (c.f. Jacqueline Hassink: Car Girls). In fact, it might tell us something that it is those two types of fairs we’re seeing in photobooks, a connection made explicit by Huub Mous in an essay for Dolph Kessler’s Art Fairs. (more)
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A little while ago, Dorothea Hahn, a German journalist whose blog I have been following, moved from Paris to Washington, DC. In her last post from Paris, she reflected upon her time in France, noting that the one thing that had always struck her was how there was basically no French debate whatsoever about the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. If that doesn’t strike you as particularly noteworthy, you have to realize that nuclear power is a highly contentious topic in Germany; in fact a few years back, the German government decided to phase out all nuclear power plants (the current government is trying to walk back from that decision, which has resulted in the Green Party currently polling at around 25%). Whether or not German concerns about nuclear power are justified is a matter of debate. What seems clear, though, is when you look at a nuclear power station, it feels different from looking at pretty much any other industrial site. (more)
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The first thing that struck me about From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America was the cover. That’s a great cover. You probably can’t see it very well, but it is filled with all this information (or maybe rather “information”) about the contents (for example, “[page] 177 - Learn how to repel women” or “[page] 137 - caves: Buy or rent?”). You don’t see such covers very often on photobooks, the majority of which, as I noted ad nauseam before, tend to be rather conservative affairs. Needless to say, to talk about the cover is a bad way to start a photobook review, but bear with me, hopefully we’ll be getting somewhere. (more)
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I’ve always thought that it was unfortunate that “Evidence,” produced by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, is considered to be so important. This is not because I think “Evidence” is a bad book - it’s because I feel that it casts too big a shadow on the work Sultan did afterwards: his own photography. It goes without saying that “Evidence” is great and influential and “a watershed in the history of art photography” (source). But I’m not going to remember Larry Sultan as the photographer who assembled “Evidence” - I’m going to remember Larry Sultan as the the photographer who produced truly amazing photography about life in California. (more)
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A little while ago, I wrote a post entitled We Need Better Critical Writing about Photography, in which I voiced my frustration about… well, I suppose I don’t need to spell it out again. I stand by what I wrote. But I am also happy to report that there is hope, and quite a bit of it, in the form of Gerry Badger’s The Pleasures of Good Photographs, released just a little while ago by Aperture. (more)
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First things first: That’s not the cover of Saskia Schüler’s Es hat sich alles einfach so ergeben [Things just happened that way]. Turns out finding the actual cover larger than postage-stamp size online is… errrr… impossible - as is finding a website for the artist other than this one, which in terms of making the work look terrible is a resounding success. Oh, and this isn’t even photography. Given I got that out of the way, I might as well talk about the book. (more)
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Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Almost 2,000 people lost their lives, with an estimated property damage of the order of 90 billion US$ (this is where I found these numbers - just so you have an idea how much money that is, it ‘s about ten billion US$ less than what is currently being spent every year in Afghanistan to prop up that country’s corrupt regime, see this news report). While most Americans were lucky enough to be outside of the hurricane’s zone of impact, it still managed to send powerful shock waves across the country. During the first days people watched in horror - on live TV - as New Orleans was flooded, people were fighting for their lives, and no help was in sight. Later, scores of books with images from the immediate aftermath were published, to try to reveal the extent of what had happened. (more)
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Maybe there is something new to be said about the lives of young people. For a while, I didn’t think anything worthwhile could still be added. After all, with our culture being centered on and catering to youth, what else is there to say? Of course, it would take just the right person to point out something new - or if we want to stay away from “new”, something different - and Tobias Zielony seems to be that person. Showcasing work shot between 2000 and 2010, Zielony’s Story, No Story tells what at first glance appears to be the familiar story of young people, “hanging out” at various places at night, in different countries. (more)
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“The first image I saw of the Terezin camp, formerly known as Theresienstadt, an hour’s drive away from Prague, was in a book by the German author W.G. Sebald.” This first sentence in Daniel Blaufuks’ Terezin sets the tone for what is to follow, in more ways than just one. If you are familiar with Sebald’s work, you realize that the book in question is Austerlitz, and you will also remember that author’s use of photographs and other images. The photograph in question (“It portrays a space that seems to be an office.” - D.B.) set off a process in Blaufuks’ mind, which had him research Terezin. (more)
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If I had to pick just one thing that is profoundly satisfying about Trevor Paglen’s Invisible it is this: Here is a book that is willing to look. That which is invisible in fact often is not invisible at all. Or phrased differently, things can be invisible because we agree to ignore them. Invisible is having none of that. Parts of the invisible world are being made visible. (more)
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It’s a simple assumption to believe that in photography everything has been done already. Of course, it’s not true. There are many things waiting for be discovered by a creative artist. But believing that everything has been done is easier than thinking about what hasn’t been done: It’s not like you can will your brain into coming up with a genius new idea. You can’t. What’s the point, though, of taking pictures if everything has been done already? The answer is simple and straightforward: Unless you want to view photography as part of the entertainment industry where all that matters are cheap new thrills, that which has been seen thousands of times deserves to be seen yet another time, in a different way. (more)
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I had Florian Göttke’s Toppled in my “to review” pile of books, when I came across Pete Brook’s post about it. Pete writes “The book is a concept. I understand the concept. And, the images are essentially props to the concept (illustrations of the new biographies of statues, of things).” That’s what I thought - until I read the text. Turns out Toppled is considerably more complex than that. (more)
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Remember the Cold War? Yeah, I thought so. We’re so busy with our so-called War on Terror that we don’t even think much about that one any longer. I lived in Germany back then, the - so the narrative went - future battleground of World War 3, where on both sides of the Iron Curtain (it looked more like a pretty massive fence to me) hundreds of thousands of soldiers were held in an almost constant state of readiness. Thinking back, it wasn’t all that different from today where we’re living with colour-coded “threat levels” (those we didn’t have). But we knew who were dealing with, the enemy was well-defined and very visible. In fact being visible was part of the Cold War. It was a bit like in the animal kingdom where part of the game was to prance around, looking as strong and determined as possible. Except, of course, that in the end, we were all gonna die anyway, because of the thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at us (and them). (more)
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The official description of Willem Popelier’s ____ And Willem talks of “identity,” “representation,” and “mankind’s image of himself,” and I suppose that’s how you can read this book. I’m not sure, though, whether such an almost academic approach might not limit its appeal. I think the book has a wider appeal than merely being interesting for those interested in “mankind’s image of himself.” So what is ____ And Willem all about anyway? (more)
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Alec Soth’s One Mississippi was published as part of Nazraeli Press’ ongoing series One Picture Books. Strictly speaking, the name isn’t quite correct. There isn’t just one picture in the book, there are twelve: eleven reproductions and one original photograph, all previously unpublished. So “one picture” refers to the one original print you get with each book, the idea behind the series being that “anybody should be able to buy an original artwork” (source). (more)
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You take a topic that’s more or less well defined, you unleash a group of accomplished, diverse photographers, and you assemble what you get back in a book. Not a bad idea for a book, albeit one we don’t get to see as often as you’d imagine. Of course, you’ll remember Magnum’s Georgian Spring, which involved some of photography’s heaviest hitters. Now there is Ostkreuz’s The City (the original title has the German version, Die Stadt, in its title, which I’ll omit in the following for reason of convenience), showcasing photography taken by the eighteen members of that German photography agency. (more)
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How do you review a book like Queen Ann P.S. Belly Cut Off? Maybe a good way to start is to note that, yes, that is indeed the title of the book: Queen Ann P.S. Belly Cut Off, and if you look at the publisher’s description, you will learn where/how to order the book, plus a whole lot more about the book itself: I was going to write that “the suggestive, intimate force of the ‘found’ photographic material and other personal documents, as well as the sequencing of the images as a whole, are both deliberately arranged with great precision,” but, alas!, the publisher beat me to it! (more)
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Given how popular many types of sport are, I’m always a bit surprised how little non-specialized photography is produced around it. Of course, there are all those photographers with their fancy cameras and huge zoom lenses that produce the images you get to see in newspapers or in dedicated publications. But those photographs typically are “action” shots that, at best, tell you a lot about some particular sports event - some game or competition - but very little, if anything, about the cultural value that is attached to the game or sport in general. Regardless of whatever you might think about any given sport, there usually is a large and often surprisingly complex cultural component to it, which is where interesting photography can be produced. Just to give an example, I really could not possibly sit through a curling match, but a photography project about the people who play curling might actually be interesting. (more)
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There is a divide between photography and, well, I suppose we might want to call it image making. Many photographers spend quite a bit of time explaining that their work still is photography even though it violates photographic orthodoxy. At least for a while, Chuck Close seems to have found himself on the other side of that divide, “risking” to be seen as crossing over into photography. It’s all about perception, of course. The divide is fairly useless unless you’re a lazy critic or an academic whose thinking has become as tenured as the career: Permanently stuck in a comfortable position. (more)
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