In physics, the term power describes the rate at which energy is used or work is done, and the average power is defined as energy divided by time. Dividing energy by time seems like a weird concept, but it makes perfect sense. For all meanings of the word power it is always helpful to think of some sort of energy (electrical, chemical, political, …) being consumed to achieve a desired outcome (blow-dry one’s hair, make the car go to the grocery store, bring about meaningful health-care reform, …). Or put simply, if you don’t have any power you won’t be able to move anything. While a negative definition often is not very useful, in this case it is: While we humans usually only have a somewhat fuzzy idea what it feels like or might mean to have power, everybody knows what it feels like to have no power, whatever the circumstances might be.
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Painting and photography exist in a very weird relationship; and I’m increasingly becoming convinced that it is photography - and not painting - which has the real trouble figuring out what to do, how to deal with what the other can do. Maybe this is because photography has become complacent: Still the new kid on the art block - easy if all the other art forms are hundreds of years old (or older) - photographers rarely, if ever, venture beyond their narrow confines. These days, for many photographers large prints seem like the most important essence of painting to adopt; and even over that photography critics are throwing hissy fits.
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The history of Latin and South America is filled with episodes of the United States meddling in the affairs of other countries - and “meddling” here includes a vast range of activities, most notably invasions and putsches (for a sobering account of this history see the book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, written by a respected US mainstream journalist). There are a lot of very unfortunate consequences of this history, one of them being that in Latin and South American countries, somewhat shady politicians can always run on a strictly anti-US basis, dismissing all criticism by simply pointing out that the US has very little moral authority in that part of the world whatsoever. Of course, the reaction to shady politicians then immediately becomes polarized, and, ultimately, you’re either supposed to be a supporter or an opponent; but regardless of what you are, discussions always become ugly.
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Beauty is most commonly associated with landscapes that have something obvious to offer: We want to be wowed. Everything else is “boring”. We don’t have time for that. Of course, whether we are doing ourselves a favour by constantly demanding to be entertained or at least tickled is not quite so clear: Aren’t we setting ourselves up like a bunch of junkies, always looking out for the next trip?
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As humanity’s technological abilities expanded over the course of the 20th Century, its willingness to slaughter large numbers of its own members remained the same. Developing new means of mass slaughter out of new technologies - where those new technologies were not in fact the sole purpose of such slaughter - has kept legions of scientists busy; and for almost every technology there has been a sinister application. For each and every one of those applications there have been enough people to find ways to justify their use so that what could potentially be used to killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in no time actually was employed for that very purpose. Artists have struggled to comprehend what was and still is actually happening - to give a voice to those who perished, to understand why humans have so eagerly embraced the technologies made possible by enlightenment, but so vigorously rejected the “categorical imperative” that was supposed to be part of enlightenment.
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Collections of portfolios that broadly center on Western Europe/The United States and Eastern Europe (with a bit of China in the mix), West and East, each edited/curated by Regina Maria Anzenberger, present broad views of what “West” and “East” might stand for. While East appears to contain only photographers from the Anzenberger Agency, West includes some non-agency members. I’ve had both books on my pile of books to review for a while, simply because I just did not and do not know what to make of them.
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There is a reason why Arnold Newman is one of the most renowned American portrait photographers. Newman died in 2006, at the age of 88, looking back to a career that spanned six decades. If the name does not ring a bell, you will certainly be familiar with at least some of his work, be it his portrait of composer Igor Stravinsky or his portrait of industrialist and convicted war criminal Alfried Krupp. Alfred Newman - Five Decades, originally published in 1986, contains over one hundred of his images, most of them environmental portraits, but also other work.
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Being familiar with Hans-Christian Schink’s wonderful Traffic Projects (see some of the images from the book here), finding LA was a bit of a surprise for me (even though I should have known from his most recent work - examples in the top row on this page that Schink is not a large-format one-trick pony). LA of course depicts Los Angeles, and it does it in two different ways. The first is similar to what Schink did with his German highway construction projects: Large-format photographs of deserted places against a grey, blank sky. I’m not that familiar with LA (but familiar enough to say that I could never live there), but I wouldn’t have expected to see photographs of that city without anybody (incl. only parked but no moving cars) around.
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There is a branch of portraiture that I want to call “conceptual portraiture”. In a nutshell - please don’t take this as some strict theoretical definition because it is not - its practitioners all seem to share some discomfort with the way standard portraiture is done, so they add something else to the process of taking a portrait to get closer to whatever it might be they want to show (feelings, or more spontaneity, or whatever else). The biggest problem with conceptual portraiture is that many of these projects fail to achieve their goals: It’s almost as if they decided to get rid off some straight-jacket, only to climb into a very narrow box which allows no movement.
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The other day, the current governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, criticizing President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan. The article contained the usual nonsense that Republican politicians have been peddling for quite a while now, and as John Kerry noted, the piece focused “on everything but the single grave challenge that forms the basis of all of our actions: the crisis of global climate change.” Of course, most Republicans either don’t believe that global climate change (aka global warming) exists at all or that it is the result of human industrial activity, and regardless they usually don’t bother dealing with actual facts. It would be rather straightforward for Governor Palin to see the effects of global warming in her home state of Alaska.
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The background: New Orleans, ca. 1912, the red-light district called “Storyville”. The “hero”: E.J. Bellocq, a photographer there, whose active period extends into the 1940s. The other “hero”: Lee Friedlander, whose interest in jazz and in the city brings him to New Orleans, where through a collector named Larry Borenstein he first comes across the (re-printed) photographs and then the original glass plates of some of Bellocq’s work, found in a desk after his death. In 1966, Friedlander acquires the plates - by now, some of them heavily damaged by years of abuse by the elements, neglect and acts of censorship (some of the faces are scratched out). Through a bit of trial and error Friedlander manages to produce a full set of prints, eighty-nine of them, thirty-four of which (there are thirty-three numbered plates plus one image in the front) are reproduced in Storyville Portraits, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 (using an edit by John Szarkowski).
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As I mentioned on this blog before, there is a little bit of soul searching going on in photojournalistic circles. What I find fascinating about the debates and commentaries I’ve seen is the implicit acknowledgment that fine-art photographers not only managed to expand the public’s idea of what photography can look like, but they can also produce work that challenges standard photojournalistic practice. Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain can be seen as a good example.
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Featuring photography by Elmar Haardt (on his website it’s the Nord project) and Bernd Kleinheisterkamp (his Siedlung project), Angesichts der Lage/In View of the Situation is a portrait of the same place, a part of the German city of Essen. Previously one of the most eminent industrial places in Germany, if not Europe (home of the Krupp family), Essen has undergone a lot of changes; and while it still is the home of a lot of corporations, it has also developed into a major arts center.
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You wouldn’t know this from their covers, but On the Human Being, International Photography, 1900-1950 and On the Human Being, International Photography, 1950-2000 are actually two pretty good books. I had wanted to mention these a while ago already, but I was unable to find them online - until this morning, when I was looking for something entirely different.
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Architecture forms one of the pillars of history, or at least of memory. Where there is no architecture, where there are no buildings, a sense of history is much harder - if not often impossible - to discern. History, of course, is not something (metaphorically) set in stone, whereas architecture usually is (remember, wooden buildings usually don’t last across the time scales history deals with). So when we change history - or maybe one would want to “write when we change the way we interpret and view the facts that form the foundation of history” - or when history itself changes, we often have to change our thinking about architecture as well. There are few places where this is more obvious than Berlin.
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The Higley portrayed by Andrew Phelps in his book Higley is everywhere. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. There are different ways of dealing with this change (unfortunately, the idea of “change” has recently been turned into a political cliché, where it can mean anything and nothing). It is tempting to use photography as a way to refuse to participate in change or, at least, to protest against it: You take some photographs, and then you hold them up and say “Here, look at this, this is all gone now!” Or you can simply document, neither looking back or forward, and you then let the images speak and the viewers decide. This latter approach is Phelps’: “it’s not my place to judge.”
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Yishay Garbasz’s mother was born in Berlin, Germany, four years before her family fled from the Nazis to Holland. During the war, she was deported first to Westerbork, then on to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Christianstadt, and finally - via a death march - to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated by British forces in 1945. “It has been over sixty years since these events happened to my mother,” writes Garbasz, “yet their emotional legacy has shaped our family in many painful ways.” And: “Her complex behaviors made it very difficult for me to love her, and I had to dig very deep in order to uncover my true feelings and the underlying reasons for her behavior.”
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Over the past few years, suburbia has been a frequent news source. When the price of gasoline hit the $4 mark, there was talk that the time of suburbia was finally past, as transportation costs made life there unaffordable. Gas prices have since come down, in part because of a deep recession, which was partly triggered by a collapse of the housing bubble - now suburbia is in the news since it spots so many empty houses, many of them abandoned or not even fully built. Of course, suburbia has always been based on an unsustainable life style, but it was fun (at least for those happy to live there) while it lasted.
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On July 1, 1990, a few months before re-unification, (then West) German Chancellor Helmut Kohl addressed West and East Germans on TV and said “No one will be worse off than before - but many will be better off. […] If we work together, we will be able to turn Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania and Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia into blooming landscapes again, places where living and working really pays off.” It was not to be. One of the dirty secrets of the re-unification of Germany is that it was not run efficiently and well planned. A lot of money was spent, and the many infrastructure projects did create a short-lived economic boom, but a lot of money was wasted, poured into projects that nobody needed or needs; and the dismantling of East Germany’s ancient industries created large waste lands: blooming landscapes yet again, but with few people to enjoy it and a staggering rise in the number of political extremists, both to the very left (neo-Communist) and the very left (neo-Nazi).
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You can certainly wonder whether blogs should really be called blogs, but they are here to stay. To a large extent, this is due to the efforts of a few truly outstanding individuals whose blogs have become beacons of quality. People like Josh Marshall come to mind, or Ed Winkleman, and, of course, there is Geoff Manaugh and his blog BLDGBLOG.
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Roger Ballen’s work is often deemed to be disturbing. I don’t think is actually is (my idea of “disturbing” might be different from yours), but we can probably easily agree on calling him one of the most creative photographers currently producing work. Boarding House contains his most recent images, and it shows the photographer following the directions laid out in his earlier Shadow Chamber.
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Just like Doug Dubois’ All the Days and Nights, Thekla Ehling’s Sommerherz is a portrait of family life. Unlike Doug, Thekla focused on her own children and on friends.
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Just a little while ago, Doug Dubois was maybe the archetypical photographers’ photographer: An artist well known and deeply admired by other practitioners, but without the wider recognition that so many of his colleagues felt he deserved. Thankfully, there now is All the Days and Nights, which comprises Doug’s photography from 1994 onwards. Fifteen years of photography of his own family.
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With a digital camera it is simple to take your own photo every day, for a few years (or however long you want to go for). Of course, there are many other ways to take your own photo. Ria van Dijk, a woman living in The Netherlands, found one: She shot her own portrait for the past seventy years. She used a rifle rigged to a camera at the various fairs she went to, getting a photo every time she hit bull’s eye. The only years she missed were those when the actual shooting happened: There is a gap from 1939 to 1948. But otherwise, she shot her photo, year after year, and she kept them all. Here they are, in In Almost Every Picture 7: Shooting Gallery.
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Thomas Ruff might be one of the most creative and certainly inventive photographers of our time. In fact, many people - especially adherents of photographic orthodoxy - will probably vehemently deny that most of Ruff’s recent work is actually photography. In general debates about whether something is photography or not, and if it’s not photography then what else, are not terribly exciting, and there is no need to get into them here. What is more interesting is to look at that work and to see what it does (call it photography, graphic design, visual art, whatever).
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Produced in collaboration with Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography comes the second installment of the Midwest Photographers Publication Project (MP3), MP3 Volume II. MP3 Volume II showcases the work of three young photographers, Curtis Mann, John Opera and Stacia Yeapanis. Just like its first version, MP3 Volume II is a set of three separate books in a slipcase, so it seems best to discuss the individual books separately.
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Milton Rogovin is one of those underappreciated photographers. His work could maybe be termed the photographic equivalent of Studs Terkel’s radio shows: Rogovin took photos of people who worked hard for their money and who often were very poor. Originally an optometrist with an interest in photography, in 1957 he was summoned before one of the House Committees on Un-American Activities, named “Buffalo’s No. 1 Communist.” Rogovin refused to give anything but his name and occupation, later noting how “a few of our former ‘friends’ […] testified against us in closed sessions.” Subsequently, most of his business withered away, and the family survived on his wife Anne’s salary (who had had to take a teaching job in the suburbs following her own refusal to sign Buffalo’s ‘Loyalty Oath’ for their school system). With his business mostly gone, Rogovin started to focus on photography.
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Photographic portrait studios have been well established as treasure troves of photography. The sheer number of yet-to-be discovered photographers who have been (or were) taking people’s photos in their portrait studios is hard to estimate. For me, the value of most of those discoveries is two-fold: First, it is amazing how many unknown photographers are (or were) in fact true masters of portraiture, often deviating quite a bit from standard practice. Second, with a larger collection of photography, the studios’ archives become a mirror of the society they are (or were) embedded in.
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The history of photography is filled with attempts to find better ways to get images - taken in (or sometimes to be taken in) some form - onto a carrier, usually paper. The most commonly known cases are images in the form of either negatives (glass or plastic) or digital data, which are then printed using either analog or digital means. The discussions that over the past few years have ensued from this otherwise fairly mundane situation are comparable to those audiophiles used to have maybe twenty years ago (maybe they are still ongoing, who knows?): Do LPs or CDs sound better? Do you need a tube amplifier for “real” sound experience? In the audio case, the “differences” people used to argue about were/are often inaudible, which, of course, only made/makes those discussions more heated.
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There appears to be a category of publication that always ends up flying under most people’s radar, for reasons that I don’t find that obvious. If people buy the Sunday edition of the New York Times for the magazine, why is The New York Review of Books not more well known? Sure, they have less photography, but they easily give the Times’ magazine a run for the money as far as quality and scope of the articles is concerned. Likewise, there is Granta Magazine, which actually looks more like a little book, more literary in form, and whose magazines are each devoted to a single topic. And then there’s dispatches, which resembles Granta Magazine in form, but its design looks more modern, and it has more photography.
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In photography, it’s hard to define what an “outsider artist” would be. After all, we’re all photographers! Cameras are ubiquitous. Of course, not everybody is an artist. But still, what would a true “outsider photography artist” look like?
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“The phone had rung and I had been offered an artist’s residency. I had hastily answered yes, going to stay in a small town in the Arctic for two months was what I wanted to do.” Thus begins the 24 page introduction to The Place of No Roads, written by Ville Lenkkeri, the photographer. I will admit that with any photography book, I always skip the text to look at the images first, to then return to the text later. For once, I wish I had done it the other way around.
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Located about 50 miles south of Boston and just outside Rhode Island, Fall River is one of the countless American cities that is only a hollow shell of its former self. If you have ever driven from New York City to Cape Cod, it’s one of the towns that you pass through. It’s unlikely you’ve noticed it. Its motto is “We’ll Try.” (says Wikipedia).
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After more than twenty years of work, Paul Shambroom has assembled a large body of work, most of whose parts deal with aspects of power (for some details, see my conversation with Paul). In early 2008, Paul’s work became the subject of a retrospective, first shown at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; and thankfully, a companion book (the word “catalogue” doesn’t really do it full justice) was produced: Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power.
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There is no doubt that the re-release of Charlie Parker self-titled album is marvelous - if you stick with the tracks that were on the original release, that is. Just like many jazz albums, “re-mastered” and re-packaged to appeal to those who might already possess an earlier incarnation (or even more than one, since a true fan might own a vinyl version and the first CD release, for example), it comes with a whole bunch of “bonus” tracks, including - but not limited to - aborted tracks. Does anybody really need to listen to 13 seconds of “Confirmation” (and those 13 seconds include studio chatter)? Actually, you can decide for yourself if you go to Amazon’s page for the album and click the little “play” button next to track 23: Since Amazon allows you to listen to 30 second excerpts, you can experience the whole thing.
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Oxbow Archive by Joel Sternfeld is a book that I had been looking forward to. It contains photographs taken in a small patch of land - the East Meadows - right outside the city of Northampton in Western Massachusetts. I live not ten minutes away from the East Meadows, and ever since moving here I have been thinking about landscape photography.
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The difference between a good photo book and a great one is often that in the latter case, somebody paid attention to detail. Sometimes, the smallest things can make a huge difference. Adam Bartos’ Yard Sale Photographs provides an excellent example. The book cover looks just like what you would find at an actual yard sale, including, and this is the detail, the round blue sticker with the price (“$1-“). The cover, of course, doesn’t make a book, but it usually dots the i.
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This is probably the shortest review I have ever written (and will ever write), so here we go: Reading Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety is a bit like going to a concert to experience Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and then hearing the finale (that’s a shockingly good interpretation btw) replaced by a rendering of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead! It’s a great book, but do yourself a favour and don’t read the “Conclusions”.
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The number of photography books published every year has witnessed a steady growth. Books themselves (at least some of them) have become collectible items. Since most photography books are published in rather small editions - a couple thousand or so - many photography books are sold out and are only available second hand, often for staggering sums of money. While this is good news for people interested in assembling a valuable collection, it’s bad news for people whose sole focus in on the photography and not so much on the value of a book. For example, I have been looking to get this book, but I clearly can’t afford to spend that kind of money.
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There is a lot of talk about digital photography making photography more democratic. However, if you’re really interested in a moment when photography became more democratic (and not just more convenient) you have to go back to just after the middle of the 19th Century, when the tintype process was invented. A cheap alternative to the daguerreotype and the albumen print, tintypes made photography very affordable and accessible, as a consequence of which especially in the United States photography literally entered the homes of huge numbers of people. As Steven Kasher writes in America and the Tintype, getting your own photograph taken cost you no more than what we pay today for a movie ticket (plus a small popcorn). And not only that - tintypes were/are images on a thin sheet of metal (not tin actually) and as such they were/are very durable.
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“Photographs capture a moment in time,” writes Jessica Backhaus in the afterword of her book What Still Remains. If anything, this sentence contains the essence of its photography: Moment in time. Or at least half of it, since the other, unspoken, half is occupied by a photographer who notices something about a moment and takes a photograph.
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There are many different way to approach the question what relevance photography has in the world of art. Of course, you could simply deny that photography is art. However, I yet have to hear a single argument advancing the idea that photography is not art that makes any kind of sense; and usually arguing with someone who denies that photography is art is a bit like arguing with someone who claims that Earth is constantly being visited by UFOs or that angels are real. However, talking about why photography is art, what photography does (or at least can do), and how it does it is actually very interesting.
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I could be entirely wrong, but I think that as the photography book market has expanded, so have photography books themselves. This, in part, reflects the fact that the photographs in those books typically tend to come in very large sizes.
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There is a remarkable quote in Albrecht Tübke’s Portraits: “I want to show people from a variety of different backgrounds, as I am interested in the range of ways in which people present their public face. Though constant exposure to the multitude of public personae with which we are presented, we have become anaesthetised to the range of individuals that surround us. In this project, I am attempting to distil out something of the essence of that individual.” If we needed a key to how to read his images, here it would be, in “the range of ways in which people present their public face”. Given how similar Tübke’s photographs are to those of The Sartorialist and Rineke Dijkstra, we are given a clue what to look for: It’s not what the people portrayed by Tübke are wearing (even though that is part of it), it goes way beyond that.
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Just like any other aspect of our modern Western lives, health care has been turned into an industrialized business, with all its advantages and disadvantages (for a particularly noxious example, read this article). Their associations with illness and death aside, there is a reason why most people are very hesitant to go to a hospital (unless they have to): Hospitals are extremely unpleasant places. Thus most people probably prefer not to look too closely at the actual environment inside a hospital while being there. Enters Clinic. Clinic “explores the aesthetic of the medical world through contemporary photography” through the eyes of eleven photographers (Olivier Amsellem, Constant Anée, Eric Baudelaire, Geoffroy de Boismenu [who shot this reviewer’s favourite section of the book], Christophe Bourguedieu, Jacqueline Hassink, Albrecht Kunkel, Ville Lenkkeri, Matthew Monteith, Mario Palmieri, and Stefan Ruiz), with artistic director Rémi Faucheux.
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It is now not quite twenty years since the end of apartheid in South Africa, and things have not exactly played out as people had hoped. The country now has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the world, a staggering AIDS/HIV rate, and an enormous problem with crime (the reasons for all of this of course are too complex to discuss them here). Add to that what one could call “the usual problems” - those also known from other countries, such as migration from the countryside to big cities - and you end up with a volatile mix, which recently led to pogroms that left scores of migrants dead. Crime has been one of the main focus points Mikhael Subotzky (who in 2007 became a Magnum nominee) decided to look at. After working on prisons, in 2006, he decided to portray issues of incarceration and social marginalisation in a small town. He picked Beaufort West, a town of 37,000, where two-thirds of the adult population are out of work, and the homicide rate is ten times that of New York City. Most South Africans know Beaufort West only from driving through - one of the main highways cuts right through town. In fact, there’s a traffic circle, right in the center of town, in the center of which the prison is located. Most people don’t even notice while driving through.
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Who would possibly pay $12 million for an amateurishly preserved - or rather unpreserved and thus decaying - shark in a formaldehyde tank produced by one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists? If you know think “Yeah, right, who can be so dumb?” you might be surprised to learn that somebody actually did, a person as sane as you and me. But then what is it that makes people spend that much money on something that ridiculous by someone who many people seem to think of as an utter talentless hack? Don Thompson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art provides the answers for such conundrums, in a way that not only is highly informative but also extremely entertaining.
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We have recently witnessed a vastly increased interest in photography done in China by Westerners. At the same time, Chinese photography has gained a certain amount of exposure in the West - as part of Chinese art being the latest big trend in the art world. For the most part, though, finding Chinese photography (or art) in book form is still a challenge - a few notable exceptions, as always, proving the point. And it would seem that most Western (publishers’) attention is directed at the new and shiny and its repercussions. Photographs of the rapid growth of various Chinese cities and factories and of the growing ecological price being paid for them have now become almost another one of the many photographic clichés: Lots of shiny skyscrapers, young Chinese people with mobile phones in discos (or at car shows), factories mass-producing cheap products to be sold at Walmart - OK, we get the picture.
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After seeing Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density one of my thoughts was that the project should have been done in the United States. Granted, there is a lot of anonymous, hideous architecture, housing thousands and thousands of people, in many parts of the world. But the story of skyscrapers and huge apartment buildings, all together in small spaces, is tied to the United States - and even though I’m not an expert in the architecture of skyscrapers up until recently the list of the largest ones was mostly populated by buildings in the US.
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There is a period in your life when you’re not old enough to fully realize what’s going on, so that you’re still reduced to taking it all in, maybe wondering why things are so ajar. I’ve always thought this is a good explanation for the “Eighties” craze that we witnessed a little while ago - most of the people who really enjoyed the re-enactment hadn’t lived through the 1980s (if they had, they would have surely noticed that it was a hideous time). Since I was born in 1968, for me the 1970s are the period where things just kept happening, with me just noticing but not understanding. I remember driving in my dad’s car, listening to Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” being number one in the US and then walking on those same Autobahns, which were closed down for traffic because oil was too expensive. I thought that all was kind of neat, but then what six-year olds find neat, most adults might not enjoy all that much.
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