At the end of World War II, large parts of Germany, especially the cities, lay in ruins. It was mostly due to what Germans call the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) that in surprisingly little time in the West everything was back to normal - or maybe more accurately to a new normal. Cities got rebuild, as did factories. While East Germany ended up being stuck in yet another dictatorship, this one Communist, for forty more years, West Germany developed into a stable democracy. Along with the Wirtschaftswunder came the happy and carefree days of the 1950s, which, as it turns out, were pretty similar to the Eisenhower years in the US. As long as you didn’t ask any questions, you were golden, and who wanted to ask questions anyway, what with the Communist menace next door. (more)
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To a very large extent, the value of a portrait is determined by its emotional contents: A photo of a person that moves us - in whatever way - has much more of an impact on us than one that leaves us cold. This aspect of portraiture is especially important for images of a photographer’s immediate family, where the artist’s task is to produce photographs that take the emotional qualities s/he knows very (often too) well and to share them with the viewers: The artist has to detach her/himself to some extent to avoid falling into the trap of sentimentality (or outright kitsch), while s/he can’t allow her/himself to become too detached. (more)
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The other day, I went to a new second-hand book store in New York City, and I looked through its impressive photo-book section. Since I had a lot of time at my disposal I had a peek at each book I was unfamiliar with, and I ended up buying a few. Venetia Dearden’s Somerset Stories: Fivepenny Dreams was one of them. I remember when I first saw the book and some of its images, I was blown away. How could I have possibly missed this book? Why had I never heard about it? (more)
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It is fair to say that digital technologies have changed photography. What is less obvious - and much more interesting to explore - is what exactly these changes are or, even more interesting, which of these changes will have lasting impact and which ones will make us cringe - or maybe smile - in ten or twenty years. Sylvia Wolf’s The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age concerns itself with the former: Trying to survey the use of digital technologies in the contemporary fine-art context. (more)
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Whatever it is that can happen between a photographer and another person whose portrait is being taken might be undefinable (though one can try), but when it’s there you can see it in the picture: It is as if somehow the viewer is becoming an accomplice of sorts, someone who is entering a very intimate space to which access usually is denied. And you can’t pull back the curtain - so to speak - to reveal how it’s done, because the levers and smoke and noise are not the essential parts needed to get that good portrait (even though pretending you need all that bits makes for a colourful narrative). Marco van Duyvendijk’s Eastward Bound (which you can order via the artist’s website), a retrospective of ten years of his work, beginning in 1999, offers a few cases in point. (more)
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“Beginning in 1997 and continuing for twelve years, Mike and I, American and Turk, husband and wife, traveled to my home country in search of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose omnipresent image signals Turkey’s move toward Europe and the West that continues to this day. […] Mike is overwhelmed by his relentless presence in every public space. I easily recognize the stock iconic images - military hero, father of the country, visionary, and teacher.” These words by Chantal Zakari set the stage for The State of Ata, the book produced with her husband, Mike Mandel. (more)
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If you don’t know anything about Allison Davies, Outerland is not going to help you much. There is no text apart from the colophon, and even that you might miss. On page one… (well, is it one?, there are no page numbers), there is a photo of a young woman, in a stylish dress. The website informs us that “for more than a decade Allison Davies has been quietly making landscape photographs and ambiguous self-portraits of haunting beauty.” So the lone figure in the white overall in some of the photographs - the likes of which you’d expect in laboratories handling hazardous materials, that would be the artist. (more)
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In the early 1980s, German photographer Joachim Brohm managed to receive a Fulbright scholarship. He went to live in Ohio for a year, and he took photographs. This sounds like an interesting combination, doesn’t it? A German photographer, in the US, at about the time when colour photography was coming of age in the art world…
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Photojournalism is in crisis. Or maybe not. Who knows? But photojournalism is part of our modern media, and those media love nothing more than a crisis, so, almost by definition photojournalism is in crisis (as is photography, which, however, is not talked about as “in crisis”, instead it’s supposedly “over” or “dead”). It’s the end of the world as we know it. You gotta adapt to new realities. Embrace the new media and what they have to offer. Don’t embrace the new media and stick to what you can do best. Well, you’ve heard it all before, ad nauseam. But let’s assume for a minute that we’re all very tired of the way those debates are currently playing out. (more)
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I’ve lived in the US for about ten years now, so I’m now very familiar with many things that, when I first came here, surprised me or that I found unusual. But ten years are still a short period of time, compared with the thirty years I had lived in Germany before. What is more, those thirty years included the most formative periods of my life, which, I suppose, will mean that I will always see things if not exclusive from a German perspective, then at least with a German component. It’s not a bad position to be in actually, amazement (along with the occasional exasperation) is still a big part of my American life. Some things are just very familiar, yet still a bit alien to me. I should add that I have developed the same approach (if that’s the word) towards Germany now, which certainly makes for “interesting” visits back “home.”
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Most photographers have a well-developed signature style, inside the boundaries of which they produce their work. But there are also photographers who experiment a lot and whose bodies of work look very different. Thomas Ruff is maybe the most obvious example I can think of. Ralf Peters is another one (his website is not being updated, to see his newer work go here). Of course, Peters isn’t nearly as well-known as Ruff, but for those curious about the photographer’s work, there now is Until Today, a compilation covering photography from 1995 until today. (more)
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Let me guess: You saw the title “Grain Elevators,” and you got your eyes lubricated for the rolling (“Give me a break, I can’t take any more typologies!”), only to be confused to see the name Lisa Mahar-Keplinger instead of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Another book about grain elevators? When I found Grain Elevators in a stack of books at Strand Books, I couldn’t believe it, either. But out of sheer curiosity I had a quick peek at the book, and I decided I had to get it - for a variety of reasons. (more)
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East Germany’s national anthem started out stating that “From the ruins risen newly, to the future turned, we stand.” For those visiting from West Germany (or any other Western country), this seemed like a bold claim, a very odd description of a place that looked, well, ruined. Mind you, some of the World War II ruins had indeed been replaced, but many had been left standing. When I visited Dresden in 1987, one of the main palaces in the city center was still a burned-out shell. It’s true, many of the ruins had been removed, and new buildings had been erected - just like in the West, early 1950s East German architecture was mostly an insulting, almost inhumane mess - but it was obvious that not much - if any - money was being spent on keeping things up. And you’d walk into some back alley by mistake maybe and see bullet marks on the walls. (more)
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It’s very tempting to see Sarah Pickering’s Explosions, Fires and Public Order as some sort of artistic commentary on our Age of Terror. I personally am not sure, however, whether connecting the work to “global terrorism matched with omnipresent anxiety” (quoted from the press release) is such a good thing to do. It strikes me as maybe a bit too sensationalist, while at the same time vastly reducing possible ways to approach the photographs. So it might be better to turn the volume a bit down. Explosions, Fires and Public Order is about just, well, explosions, fires, and public order. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. (more)
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First things first. No, this is not the former tennis player Boris Becker. This is the photographer Boris Becker. Of course, you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you used Google, because not only is there almost no way around the tennis player, there also is almost no information to be found about the photographer. In particular, I managed to find a single photo from the one series that, I think, is by far Becker’s best. In fact, the main reason why I got excited when I heard there was going to be a book about his work. (more, updated below)
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August Sander is one of the usual suspects. A discussion of portraiture will inevitably have the author mention Sander and his work. If you have ever seen any of his portraits, it will be obvious why: Many of them are in a league of their own, catching glimpses of people living in a world that was either disintegrating or at least massively changing - as Germany changed from a monarchy to a military dictatorship (a pro forma monarchy) to an increasingly unstable democracy to a fascist dictatorship, against the background of various economic crises, plus the Great Depression, plus at some stage hyperinflation, and against the background of scientific revolutions, which resulted in massive improvements of living conditions as well as industrialized mass slaughter. And as if this wasn’t crazy enough, when Sander was ready to have his massive body of portraits shown, the Nazis prevented him from doing it, because his portraits did not adhere to their idea of what Aryans were supposed to look like (never mind that apart from the foreign minister the whole Nazi elite did not even remotely look like such Aryans). (more)
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Some time ago, I spent a week looking for African photography. I asked a friend of mine, who had spent years photographing in Africa and who is friends with many artists from the continent, and he sent me a list with names. The majority of those artists I never managed to find online. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that there’s no other way to find them. But as someone who is relying on the internet as the medium to disseminate photography, it was an incredibly frustrating experience. (more)
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I’ve always thought that good images will still be good images, even if you printed them in a newspaper; but of course, art books are not printed like that. Except for Thomas Ruff - Surfaces, Depths. The book, a survey of the artist’s work over the years, is printed on, well, what looks like the kind of paper you’d use for newspapers - it looks and feels just like it. The printing itself is of higher quality than what you find in newspapers, though. I came across Thomas Ruff - Surfaces, Depths by chance - visiting Ruff’s show at Zwirner gallery; and they had a copy on display (albeit none for sale).
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I lived for five years in Pittsburgh, the city that used to be the steel capital of the US. If you go to Pittsburgh you wouldn’t necessarily notice the city’s past, since most of the steel mills are gone. They are not just abandoned shells, they are literally gone. In their old places you can see a few signs of their former presence - such as the few neatly cleaned items used to decorate “The Waterfront” shopping area. A little down the river from The Waterfront, there is a single steel mill still operating, but it’s not the kind of spectacle you’d expect from Ye Olde Tales where Pittsburgh was described as “hell with the lid off” (in contrast Pittsburgh, city politics still is hell with the lid on).
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Whether “Walker Evans is probably the single greatest American photographer ever to have worked in the twentieth century” as Walker Evans: Decade by Decade asserts I don’t know. It does sound like a bit of a bold statement, given the competition. Bold claims aside, Walker Evans definitely was one of the most important American photographers of the past Century. This new volume, an overview of his entire oevre, from the early late 1920s work until the Polaroids from the 1970s, take a few year before his death, shows why.
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I got an envelope in the mail, from “A.M.”, Brooklyn, and of course, I didn’t remember anything about it. I order a lot of books online and have them shipped to me via media-mail, which usually means a delay of at least a week. Occasionally, someone will email me and offer me a copy of a book, and I usually forget about that, too. I’m not senile (I think), I just remember other things (often things that are entirely useless, I wish I had this under control). In any case, the envelope contained a hand-made zine, with the cover made to look like a very old letter (see above); and the inside contains b/w photography.
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Let’s be bold! Compare Malick Sidibe’s photographs, especially the many ones taken at dances or social events, with Dash Snow’s party Polaroids. No, really, I mean it. You have to ignore the slightly different media (b/w versus colour, the film cameras versus the instant ones), you have to ignore the backgrounds of the subjects, and you’re off to the most amazing journey. But you might think it’s a weird comparison, isn’t it?
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Photography doesn’t have much of a history - compared with many other art forms or human inventions that we take for granted in our daily lives. What are not even two hundred years compared with cave paintings that date back thirty five thousand years (give or take a millennium or two)? But then, our world has changed much over the course of the last thirty five thousand years, and a large part of that change has happened over the past few hundred years - or maybe just one hundred years, if we look at all the various things we now take for granted: Synthetic antibiotics were invented after photography, as were air travel or computers. It is true, we could probably imagine a world without air travel or computers, but I’m not so sure we really would want to do without antibiotics any longer. Plus, there are societal changes we cannot imagine living without any longer: Universal suffrage, civil liberties, human rights. So despite its relative youth, photography has - literally - witnessed a lot of change in the way humans live. What makes photography unique, of course, is that it offers us visual testimony of that change, by showing us images taken in the past.
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To a large extent, contemporary photography looks the way it does because of two major revolutions. The first, originating in the US in the 1970s, not only made colour photography the dominant image mode, but also opened up new ways of seeing. The second, originating in Düsseldorf, Germany, very forcefully also made us see things in new ways. Thankfully, there are now two new books that talk about these two revolutions. The first, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980, I reviewed last week. The second, The Düsseldorf School of Photography is the subject of this review.
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It is a well-known fact that the 1970s witnessed the emergence of colour photography as an art form. But just like in the case of the Founding Fathers - where everybody can usually name the one on the $1 bill - there is more to the story than just that small number of names or bodies of work that everybody is so familiar with today. For those interested in this part of photography history, there now is Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980. The book chronicles the emergence of colour photography in the US in the cultural context of its time, smartly outlining the work - and individual evolution - of a large number of practitioners.
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The photography magazine market currently is experiencing some change as small, independently produced periodicals are breaking into a market that - let’s face it - had become rather stale. A wonderful example of such a new magazine is Publication, “a biannual periodical produced by street photographers for street photographers,” the brain child of Nick Turpin.
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I had been familiar with a lot of images by Bruce Davidson, but most of them never got me very excited. I know, people love the subway pictures, or the circus ones, or the gang ones, but I never had any connection with those images. Needless to say, a recent exhibition at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery provided a good opportunity to see many of the photographer’s images. Of course I went, because looking at something you still need to discover can be so much more rewarding than seeing something you already know. For the most part, the show did not change my impression of the work very much, though. But I noticed that there were some images, which really stood out for me, work that I was unfamiliar with.
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After a few thousand years of human (ab)use, our planet isn’t in such a great shape any longer. Granted, over the course of its history it has seen worse, but in pretty much all of those abysmal phases there weren’t any humans around whose very survival depended on temperate living conditions. If scientific data are correct our home planet’s atmosphere is heating at a rate that will make large-scale climate change inevitable - unless we do something about it. Oh, and we better do it yesterday. Of course, there are those experts who disagree, but you only have to have a brief look at their scientific record and at who funds their research to get an idea how credible they really are: Not very much.
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Beauty is big business. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’s cosmetic surgery statistics, in 2008, 355,671 breast augmentations were done (compared with 101,176 in 1997), 341,144 cases of liposuction (1997: 176,863), and 147,392 cases of abdominoplasty (1997: 34,002). If one believes Plastic Surgery Prices, the average price of a breast augmentation (implant/enlargement) lies in the range of $5,500 - $7,000. If you take a number somewhere in that range, say $6000, and you multiply the number of breast augmentations with that price, you’ll end up with a total amount of money in excess of two billion dollars (2,134 million US$). Of course, there are various uncertainties - the number of procedures has a 3% error, and taking an average number for the procedure will only give you a ball-park number. But even if you assume that there are so many uncertainties that you got twice the amount of money actually spent, you’re still at one billion dollars. That’s a lot of money. And that’s only breast augmentations.
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The 20th Century was filled to the brim with atrocities, war, and genocide. So far, there is no indication whatsoever that we have learned anything from those - just notice, for example, that “the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since the conflict in Congo began in 1998, making it the world’s most lethal conflict since World War II.” (source) Maybe this is because we are still unable to understand what actually happened. The suffering of a single person is often beyond our comprehension - and what does it then mean to hear about ten thousand people killed, or one hundred thousand, or millions? If anything, we have learned how to displace that which might cause us distress. In the snippet I just cited, the war in Congo is merely a “conflict”; and it’s easy to find similar euphemisms in your newspaper.
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One of the photo festivals I wish I had attended was the third Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg one. How do I know I really missed something? They published a book (Images Recalled), which is not simply just a catalog of the photography on display, but which also contains abundant text. In essence, it’s the next best thing after going to the festival in person.
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When I grew up, which is not that long ago (or so I want to believe), Europe was cut in half by what people called the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was more like a fence, albeit one that featured automatic guns (plus an assortment of other gruesome stuff). With a few exceptions, the western half of Europe was part of what was called the European Community, a group of countries, whose sole purpose appeared to be to determine how much milk and butter its farmers could first produce and would then destroy (at least that was my impression - I was a young boy, what did I know of economic realities? Now, I’m a grown man, and from what I heard they’re still doing that. Looks like I never learned to understand economic realities). If you wanted to travel from one country to another one, you would cross a border, which featured border posts and people who would pretend as if there was something to inspect in your passport. I remember once my family went to Holland, and there was no control. I thought “Did that just happen? Did I just get into another country without somebody checking?”
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Over the past few years, there has been considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth going on about the funding of photojournalistic and/or documentary work. Needless to say, a democracy relies on its citizens receiving the information they need to be able to make smart decisions, so the implications of what at first sight looks like a mere business problem are considerable. When Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen decided they wanted to document the area around Sochi (Russia), where the 2014 Olympic Games will be held, their solution was quite simple: They created The Sochi Project, offering people to become supporters and to get unique and exclusive contents in return.
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It would seem odd to review Mark Steinmetz’s South East and Greater Atlanta at the same time, given that the former was already published last year, while the latter is a current release. But it is worthwhile to look at them together - and if I had a copy of South Central I’d include that, too. The photographer’s website informs us that South East covers the years 1994-2001, whereas Greater Atlanta was shot over a slightly longer period of time, until fairly recently (1992-2008). Whether or not that is an important detail I am undecided about (it might be a bit academic), but what unites these two books is that it is not very obvious when the work was produced. I’ve heard photographers say that they prefer to work in b/w because it gives more of a timeless look. How much sense that makes is not clear given that people’s clothes or cars or even advertizing in the background usually give away the time. That said, both South East and Greater Atlanta do not easily give away their time periods (while I looked at one of the books, my wife kept guessing, not very successfully).
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If something unites jazz and photography it is not just their fans’ and practitioners’ devotion to their respective art forms, but often the level of obsessiveness with which they are pursued. Long before I got interested in photography I noticed that about jazz: One of my best friends in high school used to frequently recite the names of the musicians on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue with a devotion that I had thought to be reserved for church services. And this was not because he was a weird kid (which he wasn’t) - switch on any radio station playing jazz, and you will inevitably hear the DJs give the full list of each and every musician for each and every song just played. As much as I enjoy listening to jazz, I’ve always found this somewhat perplexing - just as I’ve always found discussions about whether there really is a difference between Rolleiflex Zeiss and Schneider-Kreuznach lenses, for example. Sam Stephenson’s The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 sits right where jazz, photography, and this kind of obsessiveness intersect. The book is devoted to the photography and tapes taken over the course of eight years by W. Eugene Smith, while he was living in a run-down building (821 Sixth Avenue) in New York City.
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We might be experiencing a bit of a renaissance of Japanese photography books in the West, or rather a naissance - since outside of a small circle of dedicated collectors Japanese photo books are not widely known. Eikoh Hosoe’s Kamaitachi was originally published in 1969, and it is here re-released, in a slightly extended form, by Aperture.
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Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density was published a few years ago as part of Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door, a book whose rather bad production quality did not do the work any justice. Fortunately, there now is Hong Kong Inside Outside, consisting of two-volumes in a slip case, with one book dedicated to the Hong Kong architecture1.
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Having just finished reading Colin Thubron’s In Siberia I’m wondering whether there is an equivalent of travel writing in photography. A travel writer will usually not be willing (or able) to spend the time it might take to become familiar with a place. Instead, s/he will create the essence of the writing out of fleeting, chance moments and encounters - this is what makes travel writing such a hard thing to do, because even though we all can (and probably) will experience any number of special moments when we travel, it takes a master writer to distill more out of them than just a collection of such moments.
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It might come as no surprise to see that a Finnish photographer would produce a portrait of arctic landscapes that involves ice. More specifically: a portrait of the arctic landscape using ice itself to create images. Even more specifically - and actually accurately: a portrait of the arctic landscape that looks as if everything was frozen in ice. In reality, the images in Jorma Puranen’s Icy Prospects were produced by painting wooden boards with high-gloss acrylic paint and by then photographing the light reflected from their surfaces.
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Described as “one of the most significant movements in post-World War II architecture” (source), the Case Study House Program “included the building and design of 36 experimental modern prototypes single-family homes in Southern California.” The Program’s announcement stated that it was “important that the best material available be used in the best possible way in order to arrive at a ‘good’ solution of each problem, which in the over-all program will be general enough to be of practical assistance to the average American in search of a home in which he can afford to live.” (source) Case Study House No. 22, “L.A.’s original dream home”, was made famous by photographer Julius Shulman. The houses in Peter Bialobrzeski’s Case Study Homes are also “good solutions”, affordable to live in, but they lack the cool and glamour of Case Study House No. 22. They are ramshackle contraptions, erected in a place called Baseco, a squatter camp near Manila, home to maybe 70,000 people. Nobody knows, there is nobody to count them. It is hard to say whether these houses are dream homes for their occupants - I’m tempted to think they are not.
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Sally Mann’s Immediate Family is probably the most important portrait of a photographer’s children produced so far. It contains unbelievably strong and powerful images, and - crucially - it portrays the children in a way that goes way beyond the usual sentimentality that, unfortunately, is so common in this type of work. I have always been under the impression that because of its success (and despite the various utterly silly scandals around the nudity) Immediate Family must have been an immense burden for the photographer - maybe just a subconscious one: Where to go from there?
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I have always been under the impression that America has not given its female photographers the credit they deserve(d), and that it is maybe a bit too generous with its male ones. For example, Ansel Adams might have been very important for those who just love to toil away in the darkroom, but his photography strikes me as tremendously overrated (even though it’s just perfect for calendars). I have never understood why there are so many books about Adams and so few about Dorothea Lange. I know people love the moonrise photo - I’ve seen an actual print, and it’s an OK photo - but compared with Lange’s Migrant Mother it’s like stale Seltzer compared with freshly sparkling champagne. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the champagne any time. Luckily, there now is Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, a new biography, written by Linda Gordon.
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Turning the camera onto one’s own country poses many risks. In order for the work to have lasting artistic value there are many problems to deal with. The work can become too sentimental, too nationalistic, too propagandistic, too positive or too negative, it can end up containing too much navel-gazing, it can look to similar to the ground-breaking work by someone else (or not similar enough), and the list goes on and on and on. In a nutshell, turning the camera onto one’s own country is one of the hardest thing to do. So here we have We English, in which Simon Roberts presents his images of England and the English - effortlessly steering around all thosee aforementioned obstacles.
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Andreas Gefeller’s Supervisions have been the subject of two books, first Supervisions and now Andreas Gefeller: Photographs. Let’s assume that you think buying one is enough - which one, though, and why that one? To make what could be a long story short, you want to buy the newer one, Andreas Gefeller: Photographs. Here is why.
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Andrej Krementschouk was born in a city then known as Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Russia. His career include a completed apprenticeship as a restorer of icons and metal objets d’art, and a diploma degree as chorus director, work as a freelance jeweller and restorer of icons, a diploma degree in Communication Design, with a focus in photography, the latter in Germany: Here is a true wanderer between the worlds. No Direction Home takes him back to Russia, as a photographer, to create a very intimate study of the country, and that means his own roots.
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Is there a crisis in photojournalism? By “crisis” people either mean the business (“with the media in crisis how will photojournalism survive?”) or the photography itself. I am on record for criticizing a subset of photojournalism for its overly generous use of cliches; but I don’t think there is a crisis in photojournalism, at least as far as the photography side is concerned (In the following, I’ll ignore the business side, since I’m not an expert on it, and since it’s besides the scope of this article). Georgian Spring - A Magnum Journal is a wonderful book for many reasons, one of them being the fact that it can serve as a good starting point for discussions of the nature of the beast, photojournalism’s imagery. Of course, it is a little bit unfair to use the book in such a way - shouldn’t I be talking about the topic of the book? But in this case, talking about the book almost inevitably involves talking about photojournalism itself. (more)
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Photography books have become so popular that there is a steadily growing number of books about them. The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 and The Photobook: A History, Vol. 2 are probably the most well known examples, but there also is Bertolotti’s Books Of Nudes. Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 70s is the latest addition to the genre. But why Japanese photobooks? Why not American, English, or German?
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Just like almost every aspect of our modern life, child beauty pageants have become an industry that generates a lot of money for those behind them. In a nutshell, here is how this works: “There is a minimum cost of $545 to enter the [Universal Royalty] pageant, which covers basic entry fees. Another $395 is needed for the maximum options of this pageant. The average cost of the pageant is about $655 which includes the formal wear, sports wear and dance. The average cost does not include travel, hotel and food, which can be up to an extra two hundred dollars. According to several stage mothers participating in Universal Royalty, dresses for sports and formal wear can cost up to $12,000 with a minimum of $1500.” (source) The title to win is the “grand supreme”: “The grand supreme winner receives one thousand dollars in cash, ten-inch crystal crown, six-foot trophy, supreme entry paid in full to nationals, tote bag, satin rhinestone banner, teddy bear, bouquet of long stem red roses, gifts, video of the pageant, and photo on advertisement of beauty pageant.” (same source) So in a nutshell, the winner gets her/his [parents’] money back, some trophies, plus a title (which might or might not mean something). The rest also get trophies and titles, but no money.
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We are not unfamiliar with new countries emerging from the break-up of older ones, or from parts becoming independent. In fact, after the fall of Communism, a whole series of new countries emerged. But a country vanishing? As it does turn out, the country formerly known as the German Democratic Republic - aka East Germany - did disappear. Mind you, its people and cities remained where they were. But in the course of what Germans call “re-unification” its political and economical system, along with large parts of its social fabric, were made to disappear. A very good way for non-Germans to get an idea of what this meant is to watch the movie Good Bye, Lenin!.
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Despite the fact that the vast majority of people have long moved into the digital age - buying their music online - records are not only still be sold, but even made. Sold mostly in independent record shops, record shops are now frequented by aging vinyl enthusiasts (for whom CDs or - gasp!- mp3s are just the work of the devil) and young hipsters (for whom owning something as ancient as a record player has now become kind of “cool”). In a somewhat similar fashion, second-hand book shops are still around (even though it hasn’t become “hip” or “cool” again to read - and it probably never will).
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